The End and the Beginning

by George Weigel

  He had inherited a heroic concept of the bishop’s office from the unbroken prince, Adam Stefan Sapieha. He came to Rome after twenty years of experience as a successful diocesan bishop in Kraków, where he had led the kind of imaginative and unifying implementation of Vatican II that had eluded so many of his brother bishops around the world. He had a well-honed intelligence, firmly grounded in the realism of Aristotle and Aquinas, and was thus convinced that human beings could grasp the truth of things, including the moral truth of things; he had also engaged for a quarter century in an open, robust dialogue with some of the most adventurous intellectual currents in contemporary culture. He had shown himself a formidable foe of communism, but not in defense of the old European social order; rather, he preached a different and challenging form of human liberation. He insisted on maintaining close contact with lay friends during his episcopate and thus knew the lives of the men and women of modernity from the inside. He had developed into a compelling public personality, bringing to his defense of human rights some of the skills he had learned from two of his early masters in the arts of the theater, Mieczysław Kotlarczyk and Juliusz Osterwa; yet even as he was testing Kotlarczyk’s convictions about the power of the “living word” of truth to cut through the static of communist lies, he was refining his public rhetoric so that it touched the hearts and minds of ordinary men and women.

  Perhaps most important, he brought to his pontificate a profound conviction that the trajectory of his life was being guided by divine providence: that, as he often put it, if the Holy Spirit had seen fit to call the archbishop of Kraków to be the Bishop of Rome, then that must mean that there had been something in the experience of Kraków—and the experience of Karol Wojtyła as its archbishop—that would be of use to the universal Church.

  He came to the papacy an outsider. And despite the warmth with which he would be adopted by the people of Rome and the people of Italy, he remained something of an outsider to the end, at least in terms of the ways of the Vatican and the traditional managers of popes. He died in a glow of virtually universal admiration and affection, and his death was felt keenly by many of those, from Italy and around the world, with whom he had worked closely. Yet almost all those at his deathbed were Poles, fellow exiles, keeping vigil with the man who had come from a far country and who would be buried in his adopted land, rather than at home.

  For all that difference of career path and culture, Karol Wojtyła, Pope John Paul II, created the most consequential pontificate in centuries—one whose impress will be felt on both the Church and the world for centuries to come. It was not a pontificate without flaws, for no pontificate ever is and none ever could be. But that John Paul’s was a pontificate of exceptional consequence, not even his harshest critics can deny.

  THE RECORD

  The accomplishments of Pope John Paul II—as well as those accomplishments that eluded him—cannot be properly assessed statistically. Nonetheless the statistics do convey something of the magnitude of his effort and the breadth of his reach into the worlds-within-worlds of humanity.

  The pontificate unfolded over 9,665 days, making John Paul the second-longest-serving pope in recorded history after Pius IX (and the third-longest-serving pope after Peter, whose tenure is remembered by tradition as encompassing either thirty-four or thirty-seven years).

  In the course of fulfilling the Petrine mandate to “strengthen your brethren,” Pope John Paul II went on pilgrimage to 129 different countries on 104 apostolic voyages, traveling 1,247,613 kilometers (approximately 750,000 miles), the equivalent of circumnavigating the globe more than thirty times or traveling more than three times between the Earth and the Moon. The Pope was outside of Rome for 822 days (or 8.7 percent) of the pontificate, during which he visited 1,022 cities and delivered 3,288 prepared discourses. In addition, John Paul made 146 visits within Italy itself, not counting 748 visits within the Diocese of Rome or to Castel Gandolfo, in the course of which he met with all but 16 of Rome’s 336 parishes.

  Determined to remain a priest and bishop, John Paul baptized 1,501 new Christians during his pontificate and personally ordained hundreds of new priests and bishops.

  His magisterium, collected in the Insegnamenti di Giovanni Paolo II, fills 56 large folio volumes and covers almost a dozen linear feet of library shelf space: 14 encyclicals, 15 apostolic exhortations, 12 apostolic constitutions, 45 apostolic letters, and thousands of other letters, messages, speeches, homilies, audience addresses, and addresses at the weekly Angelus or Regina Coeli. John Paul held 1,164 general audiences, attended by 17,665,800 people from around the world, in addition to some 1,600 meetings with heads of state, heads of government, and other political figures.

  John Paul II beatified 1,338 Servants of God (including 1,032 martyrs) in 147 beatification ceremonies, while canonizing 482 new saints (of whom 402 were martyrs) in 51 canonization Masses; previous popes had canonized 302 saints since Pope Sixtus V regularized the process in 1588.

  He had far more extensive and regular contact with his brother bishops than did any of his papal predecessors. He received thousands of bishops individually during their quinquennial ad limina visits to Rome and for years devoted as much as 40 percent of his public schedule to these meetings. He presided over six ordinary general assemblies, one extraordinary general assembly, and seven special assemblies of the Synod of Bishops, in addition to a “particular synod” to address the challenges facing the Church in the Netherlands—thus devoting, in the aggregate, at least a year of his pontificate to the world’s bishops gathered in synod. He held nine ordinary consistories during which he created 231 new cardinals, and summoned six plenary assemblies (or extraordinary consistories) of the College of Cardinals to seek advice and make pastoral plans for the future.

  Keenly aware of the rhythms of time and the importance of anniversaries in the Church’s life, John Paul II led nine “dedicated years” during the twenty-six and a half years of his pontificate: the Holy Year of the Redemption in 1983–84, the Marian Year in 1987–88, the Year of the Family in 1993–94, the three Trinitarian years of preparation for the Great Jubilee of 2000, the Great Jubilee itself, the Year of the Rosary in 2002–3, and the Year of the Eucharist, which began on October 17, 2004, and concluded six months after the Pope’s death.

  And then there were the international World Youth Days. John Paul II presided over nine of them: in Rome (1985 and 2000), Buenos Aires (1987), Santiago de Compostela (1989), Częstochowa (1991), Denver (1993), Manila (1995), Paris (1997), and Toronto (2002). Total attendance at these signature events of the pontificate was in the tens of millions, with the closing Mass in Manila in 1995 drawing what was then reported to be the largest crowd in history, some five million people—a record Mexico City claimed to have topped during the papal visit of 2002.3

  Whatever the precise numbers, it seems beyond dispute that Karol Wojtyła was seen in person by more human beings than any man in history; given the multiplier effects of the world communications revolution, it was a very remote and isolated part of the world that had not encountered Pope John Paul II, in person or through the media, between 1978 and 2005. That the most visible man in the history of the world should have been a man living in late modernity was not a surprise. That the most visible man in history was one who understood himself primarily as a Christian disciple and evangelist—that was one of the great surprises of late modernity, and suggested that more was going on in the modern world and the postmodern world than those worlds typically imagined.

  ENDURING ACCOMPLISHMENT

  The full measure of a pontificate and its achievements can come only with the passage of centuries. At the death of Pius V in 1572, no one knew whether his efforts to implement the Council of Trent would succeed, such that he would be remembered as a great reforming pope rather than another would-be reformer who failed. As things turned out, his work left an impress on the Church for centuries. In that respect, the full measure of the accomplishments of Pope John Paul II—and of the things
he failed to accomplish—can only be taken in centuries to come. Yet the universal outpouring of sympathy and gratitude at his death suggested that large parts of the world had already rendered a verdict: this was a great man and a great pope, whose greatness came from his ability to summon men and women to a nobler vision of their own possibilities, under the grace of God. Years after his death, people around the world talked of having met him, having seen him, having been touched by him physically or spiritually. His place was secure in the hearts of perhaps billions of human beings; his memory would be cherished for generations.

  But what of his achievement as pope? Even conceding the impenetrability of the future, it seemed in the aftermath of his death that he had indeed left a considerable legacy of accomplishment.

  The Evangelical Papacy

  John Paul II recast the Office of Peter for the twenty-first century and the third millennium of Christian history by sharpening its evangelical edge and giving the papal munus docendi, or teaching office, a genuinely global reach.

  He did this through a classic Catholic method of reform: knowing that all true reform in the Church is a return to the form, or essential constitution, given to the Church by Christ, John Paul retrieved elements of the Office of Peter that had become muted over time and made those elements the materials for a renewal of the papal mission. The retrieval looked back to the New Testament, where Peter is a witness to the resurrection, the Church’s first great preacher, the apostle who makes the initial outreach to the Gentiles, and a focal point of the Church’s unity; the renewal involved bringing these elements of the Petrine office to the world through a deliberate and disciplined exploitation of the possibilities created by modern communications and transportation.4 As Peter had gone from his native Capernaum to Jerusalem, and thence to Antioch and Rome, Karol Wojtyła, called from Kraków to Rome, went from Rome quite literally to the ends of the earth, witnessing to God’s love for humanity displayed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ—and revitalizing the papacy as an office of evangelical consequence in the process.

  The Young. Some of the most dramatic effects of this evangelical form of papacy were evident in John Paul II’s impact on the young. In 1978, very few senior churchmen believed that Catholicism could reach the restless and affluent young adults of the developed world. On the basis of thirty years of pastoral experience with young people, Karol Wojtyła believed that, notwithstanding obvious cultural differences, there was a universality to the human experience of adolescence and young adulthood—a universality summed up, as he often put it, in the quest for a pure love. Put the challenge of that quest before the youth of the world, he was convinced, and they would respond.

  The response he drew (which confounded all expectations, except perhaps his own) was often misunderstood as a matter of celebrity fever among impressionable youngsters. There was no doubt an element of that involved, but there was much more. In a world that pandered to the young in advertising, modes of dress and language, and lifestyle, John Paul II did not pander. His challenge to live a life of heroic virtue stirred young hearts and minds in a way that few of his associates anticipated. The challenge was credible, however, because of the life of the man who issued it. The young have very good instincts for hypocrisy and respond accordingly; and it was manifestly clear at World Youth Days and in other venues that John Paul II did not ask of his young followers anything that he had not asked of himself. The integrity of his own life—particularly his ability to live through suffering without becoming embittered and cynical—was immensely attractive across the spectrum of the world’s youth. In a world often bereft of paternity, he lived the strong love and challenge of genuine fatherhood, and the youth of the world responded.

  Divine Mercy. One of the Pope’s favorite metaphors for the Church’s situation at the turn into the third millennium of its history was the apostle Paul’s attempt to catechize the cynics of ancient Athens on the Areopagus, by appealing to the Athenians’ putative reverence for “an unknown god” (see Acts 17.16–34). And on the Areopagus of the late modern world, as the Pope put it in the 1990 encyclical, Redemptoris Missio [The Mission of the Redeemer], “the Church proposes; she imposes nothing.”5 Over the course of twenty-six and a half years of papal teaching, John Paul II proposed many truths to the world. One of the foremost among them, in his view, was the message of divine mercy.

  This emphasis was sometimes thought an idiosyncracy of Karol Wojtyła’s Polish, and specifically Cracovian, roots. In fact, here was another example of Wojtyła’s conviction that the Church’s experience in Kraków had something to offer the universal Church. For Wojtyła brought to the papacy a profound understanding of the guilt and anxiety that lay over the late twentieth century like a thick fog: the psychic and spiritual by-products of the slaughters of World Wars I and II, the mass murders of the Gulag, the Holocaust, the Ukrainian terror famine, Mao’s Great Leap Forward, and so on. To whom could that guilt be confessed, and thus expiated? Who could relieve the anxiety of a world cracking under the pressure of the knowledge that it had the capacity to destroy itself—and just might be wicked enough to do so?

  The divine mercy, manifest in God the Father of mercies, was thus an element of the Christian kerygma, or proclamation, that was of consequence far beyond Kraków and Poland. To proclaim the compassion of the Father who welcomes home his prodigal children and restores to them the dignity they have squandered was to meet a universal human need, after a century in which humanity had turned its creations upon itself and turned the world into a slaughterhouse in the process. That was why John Paul II, the evangelical pope, made divine mercy one of the focal points of his teaching: in the 1980 encyclical, Dives in Misericordia [Rich in Mercy]; in lifting up the healing riches of sacramental confession and penitential practice in the 1984 post-synodal apostolic exhortation, Reconciliatio et Paenitentia [Reconciliation and Penance]; in beatifying Sister Faustyna in 1993 and making her the first saint of the new millennium in 2000; and by decreeing that the Octave of Easter should be celebrated throughout the Church as Divine Mercy Sunday. That the Divine Mercy devotion outlined by Saint Faustyna Kowalska became, during the pontificate of John Paul II, a means for the recovery of devotional life in Catholic parishes throughout the world suggested that John Paul II’s pastoral intuitions about the imperative of the Church’s preaching God’s mercy at the turn into a new millennium were squarely on target.

  Italy. The evangelical tenor of John Paul II’s papacy had a marked effect on the Church’s position in Italy. No pope in centuries put more time and effort into living out his titles as Bishop of Rome and Primate of Italy than the pope who had come to Rome from the Slav lands in central Europe. Those efforts bore fruit over time, as the Catholic Church in Italy got itself out of a defensive crouch, with its every initiative being defined “against” the political Left and secular culture, and engaged in a more robust, Gospel-centered proposal to Italian hearts and minds, and to Italian culture. At the same time, John Paul changed Italian high culture’s view of the Church, which had been reactively dismissive and anticlerical for decades.6

  These effects could not have been predicted on October 16, 1978; in fact, much of the Italian Church deeply resented the “loss” of the papacy, which remained Italy’s premier claim to some prominence in the world. Attitudes changed, however, as Italians saw their primate expend enormous energies in bringing what he would come to call “the new evangelization” directly and personally to them. One turning point came in 1985, when the Pope held a national meeting with the Church of Italy at the shrine of Loreto. There, John Paul challenged Italian Catholicism to recognize that it was no longer possible to transmit the faith by cultural osmosis. The Church had to reimagine itself as robustly evangelical and culturally assertive, engage modernity without surrendering to it, and confront the default secularism of Italian high culture with a nobler vision of the modern world and its possibilities.

  This culture-first approach to the Church’s public role
was difficult to grasp for many Italian bishops, who imagined that the drift toward secularism was inevitable, that the Church could not change the inexorable tides of history, and that political accommodation to an ascendant Italian Left was imperative. A pope from a “fighting Church” (as Cardinal Camillo Ruini once described Wojtyła’s background) was in a strong position to challenge such premature surrender, and to do so, not by evoking the alleged glories of the ancien régime (about which Karol Wojtyła was very skeptical), but by invoking the abiding power of the Gospel to change lives, and thus change cultures and societies. Over time, this approach showed itself capable of rallying Catholics (whose practice of their faith increased in Italy during John Paul’s pontificate) and attracting the interest of secular intellectuals such as Giuliano Ferrara and Marcello Pera: men who understood that the question of the dignity of the human person had moved to the center of the post–Cold War debate, and that the Catholic Church was the premier institutional barrier to the triumph of a soul-withering and dehumanizing utilitarianism.7

  Global Witness. John Paul’s culture-first approach to public affairs, which was rooted in both his understanding of the dynamics of history and his concept of the evangelical papacy, reshaped world politics on at least two occasions—beyond, of course, his impact on what became the Revolution of 1989 in central and eastern Europe.

  The first was in 1994, when the Pope almost singlehandedly derailed the plans of the Clinton administration and the U.S. government to have abortion on demand declared a universal human right, akin to religious freedom and freedom of the press, at the Cairo World Conference on Population and Development. John Paul went over the heads of the world’s leaders to make a direct appeal to the peoples of the world to resist any such declaration, using the megaphone of the papacy to bring to light what the Clinton administration and its allies in the United Nations population control bureaucracy preferred to keep hidden. That public witness, as well as some adroit Holy See diplomacy at Cairo, frustrated what seemed to be a certain victory for the pro-abortion forces.8