The End and the Beginning

by George Weigel

  Moderation

  In early 1995, John Paul II replied to a letter in which a correspondent had suggested that the “hermeneutics of suspicion” informing so much contemporary biblical exegesis, history, biography, and theology—the methodological assumption that things can’t be what they seem to be, or have been thought to be—seemed to be receding a bit. While noting that this analysis struck him as “more optimistic than [what] one usually reads,” the Pope went on to observe that, in the currents of history (including the history of ideas), “it is the ‘turning point’ that is the most important, as when a train enters a switch where an inch decides its future direction.”48 It was the observation of a temperate man: a man who had mastered his passions, found a “balance in the use of created goods,” and kept “desires within the limits of what is honorable” (as the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it, explaining the cardinal virtue of temperance).49 John Paul II did not demand the impossible, but he was willing to test and stretch the limits of what others considered possible.

  In the more conventional meaning of the virtue of temperance or moderation, Karol Wojtyła was a man of temperate habits and lifestyle. He worked very hard, and his work was both steady and productive; even in his seventies, the hours he put into a day’s work would have staggered younger men. Yet he also knew how to pace himself, both when working and in taking breaks from work, and he had the good (and temperate) sense to take holidays in order to renew himself physically as well as spiritually. His asceticism was obvious, in that he cared nothing for material things, but it was never oppressive and it was never imposed on others. He lived a life of evangelical poverty, often gave away what was given to him as a priest and bishop, and conducted his papacy with as much material simplicity as circumstances permitted. He practiced various forms of spiritual discipline, including forms of physical mortification; in his later years, the constant rhythm of his prayer and meditation were the principle expressions of his balanced spiritual life.

  His temperance was also evident in his modesty and his obedience. He had absolutely no interest in ecclesiastical honors or preferment. By all accounts he was an obedient son, seminarian, and priest. He bent his own will to that of Archbishop Baziak in the matter of his habilitation thesis, as he bent his will to that of Cardinal Wyszyński and Pope Pius XII in accepting his nomination as auxiliary bishop of Kraków. He raised up other men of quality, such as Bishop Jan Pietraszko (one of his auxiliary bishops), whom a less temperate and less just superior might have regarded as a rival and thus a threat. As his challenging sermon on the death of John Paul I indicated, he had no desire to be pope, knowing as he did that the papacy demanded of a man an even more complete emptying of self; he accepted his election in obedience to what he believed to be the will of God, manifest through the decision of the College of Cardinals.50

  Karol Wojtyła’s moderation was also displayed in his manner of governance. He did not evade his own responsibilities, but throughout his years as archbishop of Kraków he led a genuinely collaborative effort, in which the opinions and concerns of priests and laity were regularly sought. To the aggravation of some of his Cracovian associates, he was exceptionally patient in building a consensus among the relevant leaders of the archdiocese before initiating a new pastoral initiative. He tried to apply the same model of collaborative discernment and governance to his responsibilities as pope, making extensive use of both the Synod of Bishops and the College of Cardinals for thrashing out problems and seeking collaborative solutions. It may be doubted whether the results of these collaborative efforts in Rome were as measurable as they had been in Kraków. But if the results were not what he might have wished, it was not for a lack of effort on the part of John Paul II—who was also prepared to take the lead when it became clear (as with the planning for the Great Jubilee of 2000) that others simply lacked the vision to see the possibilities he saw.

  THE CRUX OF THE DRAMA

  Gaudium et Spes, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, is thought to be the most positive of Vatican II’s analyses of the human condition, brimful of optimism about the possibilities that humanity’s coming of age have set before the world of politics, economics, science, and culture. Yet at the very beginning of the pastoral constitution’s discussion of the ways in which human creativity shapes the world and history, the Council saw fit to insert a striking caution:

  The whole of man’s history has been the story of arduous combat with the powers of evil, stretching, so our Lord tells us, from the very dawn of history until the last day. Finding himself in the midst of the battlefield, man has to struggle to do what is right, and it is at great cost to himself, and aided by God’s grace, that he succeeds in achieving his own inner integrity.51

  Karol Wojtyła was a combatant on that battlefield for decades, and his experiences in spiritual warfare undoubtedly shaped his interior life—even as the richness of that interior life helped him cope with challenges from the powers of evil that could be as great as the other challenges of the office to which he ultimately rose. For as John Paul II wrote in the 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae [The Gospel of Life], “life is always at the center of a great struggle between good and evil, light and darkness” in which “the powers of evil” conduct an ongoing and “insidious opposition” to all that is good, true, and beautiful.52

  In reckoning with this dimension of Karol Wojtyła’s interior life, it is important to grasp that, for him, “powers of evil” was not a metaphor drawn from the allegedly primitive world of biblical religion to express what would now be analyzed in scientific or psychiatric terms. He did not understand the evil he experienced, and rejected, in the anti-Semitism of the late 1930s as merely a matter of the accumulated prejudices of centuries; it was a work of the Evil One, determined to undermine the covenant and to distort the history of salvation.53 The same was true of the evil at work in a man like Hans Frank, the thuggish bureaucrat who ruled the Nazi-occupied rump of Poland from Wawel Castle, or the evil at work in Polish communism that led to the murder of heroes such as Witold Pilecki and Jerzy Popiełuszko. To miss the dimension of spiritual warfare in the human struggle with good and evil, he was convinced, was to miss the depth of the drama being played out.

  During the Great Jubilee of 2000, the power of the Evil One displayed itself before the Pope and a shocked Stanisław Dziwisz during the September 6 papal general audience. Dziwisz, as he later recounted, had once thought that what tradition referred to as demonic possession was really a psychiatric matter; but his experiences with John Paul II convinced him otherwise, and none more so than the Pope’s encounter with a nineteen-year-old Italian girl who began shouting uncontrollably after John Paul had given his blessing at the end of the September 6, 2000, general audience. The police were unable to control the young woman, who also screamed curses at Bishop Gianni Danzi, then an official of the government of Vatican City. Danzi informed Dziwisz, who arranged for the Pope to see the girl in a private area after John Paul had completed his Popemobile giro, or drive around St. Peter’s Square. John Paul II prayed with her for a half hour and promised that he would offer his Mass for her the following day so that she would be freed of her possession. Dziwisz later said he was convinced that “Satan was at work” in the young woman, whose demeanor “changed completely” at the Pope’s promise of a Mass offered for her healing; before that, Dziwisz recalled, “you could see Hell destroying someone.”54

  News sources at the time referred to at least two other exorcisms attributed to John Paul II. One, at the beginning of the pontificate, was performed at the request of Father Candido Amantini, a Roman exorcist. The other, in March 1982, was witnessed by the prefect of the papal household, Bishop Jacques Martin, and involved a young woman named Francesca who later returned to the Vatican to thank John Paul.55 However one judges the various factors at work in these cases—and it is striking that some who were once skeptical of the very idea of demonic possession changed their minds after witnessing these dramatic
encounters with the “powers of evil”—it seems clear that Karol Wojtyła, the man who had sworn to follow the Curé of Ars, St. John Vianney, and make himself as a priest into a “prisoner of the confessional,” was a man through whom the divine grace of spiritual healing worked for decades, both sacramentally (in his administration of absolution) and in sometimes more dramatic circumstances.

  He was a vessel of healing power in other ways, too. Without presuming to make the judgment, which only the Church can make, that John Paul II was the occasion of miraculous cures during his life, one can only note that there were, as Stanisław Dziwisz once put it, “lots of these things,” in the sense of reported cures and healings.56 After John Paul’s second pilgrimage to Mexico in May 1990, Javier Lozano Barragán, the bishop of Zacatecas, sent the Vatican documentation on the cure of a young man during the Pope’s visit. The same could happen after papal audiences: a pastor from Trent came once with his sister, who had cervical cancer, and returned weeks later to report that the cancer had disappeared; a man walking with crutches and wearing the icon of divine mercy was blessed by the Pope and returned two weeks later without the crutches, walking quite normally. Childless couples would write the Pope, asking for his prayer that they might conceive a child; pregnancies would follow. When approached directly by a sick person asking his help, Dziwisz recalled, John Paul II would always draw the petitioner into the orbit of his own interior life, saying, “We will pray together for this intention.”57

  As the Catholic Church understands these things, these two delicate matters—reported exorcisms and reported cures by John Paul II during his lifetime—were related. The power of the Evil One, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, teaches, “is … not infinite. [Satan] is only a creature, powerful from the fact that he is pure spirit, but still a creature. He cannot prevent the building up of God’s reign.”58 Karol Wojtyła believed that. He also believed that the problem of evil, which has vexed believers and unbelievers alike for millennia, comes into clear focus only by contemplating the face of Christ, the conqueror of evil who reveals the superabundance of God’s grace, a grace that can thwart the designs of the Evil One and shake his grip on fragile human souls.59 That grace often works through secondary human instruments; the mature believer opens himself or herself to the workings of that grace so that it might touch the lives of others, gently or dramatically. Whether becoming such a vessel of grace involves what tradition calls extraordinary spiritual gifts is a judgment for the Church, not the individual, to make. What is important in life is to hold oneself open to the effects of the redemption working through the earthen vessels of our humanity.

  In its discussion of the “scandal” of evil, the Catechism issued by John Paul II notes, with emphasis, that “there is not a single aspect of the Christian message that is not in part an answer to the question of evil.”60 A man of Christian joy and hope, convinced that humanity had the capacity, under grace, to construct a better future, Karol Wojtyła nonetheless spent more than eighty years wrestling with the problem of evil, and with the Evil One. Perhaps the densest theological reflection in his voluminous magisterium, the 1986 encyclical on the Holy Spirit, Dominum et Vivificantem [Lord and Giver of Life], discusses at some length what the Gospel of John describes as “the sin of the world” (John 1.29)—the fact that the human condition, marked by original sin and by the effects of millennia of human sinfulness, is always shaped by falsehood and by “the rejection of the gift and the love” by which God created the world and the human family.61 The Holy Spirit “convicts” the world of this sin, John Paul writes; the Church, which is born from the outpouring of the Spirit’s spiritual gifts, must constantly point the world and humanity toward the “Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world,” as John the Baptist put it.

  Thus the interior life of Karol Wojtyła, Pope John Paul II, once again displays itself as cruciform. That interior life was built on the foundation of the conviction that it is on the cross, where the Lamb of God takes upon himself the sin of the world, that the world’s redemption is achieved and the answer to the problem of evil is given: for the cross is the necessary passover toward the resurrection, which is God’s final and definitive answer to the scandal of evil. The young boy who had walked the trails of Kalwaria Zebrzydowska with his father grew into the priest and bishop who, on the last Good Friday of his life, embraced the crucified Christ as his own life was ebbing away. It was all of a piece. Karol Wojtyła was a man of Easter, who fully understood that Easter comes after Good Friday, that eternal life is promised to those who make their lives into a gift to others here and now, and that such radical self-giving—such metanoia—is only possible through the grace of God in Christ.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Measure of a Pontificate

  When Karol Józef Wojtyła was elected to the Chair of Peter on October 16, 1978, there were serious questions as to whether any man could successfully carry out the Petrine ministry under the conditions of late modernity.

  At his election to the papacy fifteen years before, Giovanni Battista Montini seemed perfectly prepared to be a successful pope: he was an Italian of deep piety and a good family, learned and gifted in languages, with broad cultural interests and the appropriate political contacts and sensibilities, a man who had enjoyed a successful career in both the Roman Curia and a major Italian diocese. Yet it hadn’t worked out that way; not at all. The contentiousness of post–Vatican II Catholicism turned the papacy into a decade-and-a-half-long crucifixion for Paul VI; the Church suffered accordingly from what struck many as a deficit of evangelical energy and vigorous leadership in the Holy See. No one doubted Pope Paul’s personal holiness, his integrity, or his deep love for the Church. But in the mid-1970s things seemed adrift and the question inevitably arose among thoughtful Catholics: Can anyone do this anymore?

  It was an unexpected question. For in one of the great surprises of modern history, the papacy inherited by Paul VI in 1963 had made a dramatic recovery from its historic nadir, at least insofar as the second millennium of Christian history goes. In 1799, Pius VI, kidnapped by the armies of revolutionary France the year before, died far from Rome, a prisoner in the citadel at Valence; at his death, historian J. N. D. Kelly notes, “many assumed that the destruction of the Holy See had at last been accomplished.”1 Seventy years later, that verdict seemed decisively confirmed when the new Kingdom of Italy conquered Rome, put an end to the Papal States (which the popes had governed since the mid-eighth century), and reduced the pope to being il prigioniero del Vaticano [the prisoner of the Vatican], as Pius IX described himself.

  Yet in the paradoxes of history the loss of the Papal States liberated Pius IX’s successors for a new role: the pope as universal moral teacher and witness. The outlines of this evangelical form of papacy were defined by Pius IX’s immediate successor, Leo XIII, who initiated an internal intellectual reform of the Church while engaging the new politics and economics of modernity through the novelty of what came to be called Catholic social doctrine. The path to a revival of papal influence was neither straight nor easy: Leo’s second successor, Benedict XV, who virtually bankrupted the Holy See providing aid to refugees and prisoners of war during World War I, was denied a role in the postwar deliberations at Versailles by the victorious Great Powers. But Benedict’s successor, Pius XI, was a fierce foe of both fascist and communist totalitarianism and a man to be reckoned with in the politics of Europe. So was his successor, Pius XII. In his brief pontificate, Pius XII’s successor, John XXIII, became a kind of universal paterfamilias, beloved by millions for his pastoral charity, ecumenical goodwill, and interreligious openness. The papacy, it seemed, had made a remarkable comeback. And if popes no longer ruled substantial territories as sovereigns among the sovereigns of Europe, the popes of the mid-twentieth century had nonetheless carved out a new territory within which to exercise considerable sway—the consciences of men and women, where the power of argument and persuasion was key.

  Then came the pontificate o
f Paul VI, during which the Catholic Church seemed to tear itself apart in a bitter theological and disciplinary civil war—the last thing John XXIII, who believed that Vatican II could ignite a new Pentecost, expected from his Council. Curiously, though, the future Pope Paul VI worried that an ecclesiastical implosion was possible and perhaps even likely, given the amount of dry tinder at hand: on the night of January 25, 1959, hours after John XXIII had stunned the Church and the world by announcing his intention to summon history’s twenty-first ecumenical council, Montini telephoned a friend and said, of John XXIII and his plans, “This holy old boy doesn’t know what a hornet’s nest he’s stirring up.”2 The instinct was prescient; no doubt Paul VI had many occasions to remember it as he strove to bring the Council to a successful end after John XXIII’s death in 1963, and then see to its proper implementation. Yet while Paul VI steered the sometimes balky Council to its conclusion, his efforts to implement Vatican II while maintaining the integrity of doctrine and the unity of the Church were frequently frustrated. Thus by 1978, the Catholic Church was fractious and embittered, adrift in Rome and in turmoil throughout the world.

  At a moment, then, when the papacy seemed to be in its deepest crisis since Pius VI’s death in exile, the College of Cardinals, shocked by the wholly unanticipated death of Pope John Paul I after a thirty-three-day pontificate, turned to a man who had not followed a conventional pre-papal career path but who came to the Office of Peter as one called from a far country—not unlike Peter himself. Yet for all the surprise registered at the election of the first non-Italian pope in 455 years and the first Slavic pope ever, Karol Wojtyła brought to the papacy certain qualities that ought to have suggested the possibility of a pontificate of great consequence.