Then there was the Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in September 1995, where the forces that had been defeated at Cairo attempted a comeback. John Paul II once again took to the world stage, using more than a dozen audience addresses and a Letter to Women to lay out a distinctive feminism that did not reduce women to simulacra of men. He also broke all precedent by naming Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon, an expert on comparative family law and international human rights law, as head of the Vatican delegation to the conference. The results at Beijing were mixed, but the population controllers’ effort to get abortion defined as a universal human right was thwarted, even as the Vatican delegation—whose most visible members were highly accomplished professional woman and mothers—proposed ways of supporting women’s struggle for equality and opportunity that addressed the concerns of most of the world’s women (and especially women in the developing world), rather than what was proposed in the ideological feminism of the conference’s UN sponsors.9 Once again in the pontificate of John Paul II, evangelical witness had trumped conventional diplomatic practice, and with notable results.
Vatican II: Keys to a New Pentecost
When John Paul II assumed the papacy in 1978, the Second Vatican Council, which had concluded less than thirteen years before, seemed almost a dead letter. One faction in the Church, appealing to a “spirit of Vatican II,” made little reference to the Council’s actual documents while arguing that the Council marked a deliberate rupture with a Catholic past too beholden to tradition. Yet another faction thought the Council a terrible mistake, best forgotten quickly in order to effect what some frankly called a “Catholic restoration.” The four years of Vatican II had been a decisive personal and theological experience for Karol Wojtyła; neither rupture, leading to revolution, nor retrenchment, leading to the restoration of a mythical Catholic golden age, struck him as an appropriate response to what had seemed, during the heady Council years of 1962–65, the most important Catholic event since the sixteenth-century Council of Trent. Thus Wojtyła came to the papacy determined to make the full implementation of Vatican II his program, a commitment he announced at the outset of his pontificate.
The Second Vatican Council was unique in that, unlike previous councils, it did not provide keys to its own interpretation—canons, creeds, anathemas, and so forth. Thus the crux of the problem of the full implementation of Vatican II lay in a basic question of interpretation: Was the Council indeed a moment of rupture, after which virtually any innovation was conceivable, or were its reforms to be understood in light of the Church’s two millennia of tradition? That question was given a decisive answer at the Extraordinary Assembly of the Synod of Bishops that John Paul II summoned in 1985: the Second Vatican Council was to be understood in terms of continuity—that is, reform through retrieval and renewal.10 To underscore that answer, the Extraordinary Synod commissioned the Catechism of the Catholic Church, in which the approach to Christian faith and practice outlined at Vatican II was located within the full theological and spiritual tradition of the Catholic Church. Published in 1992, the Catechism was also an important statement to make on the edge of the third millennium (a threshold never far from the Pope’s mind); for at the end of 2,000 years of Christian history, it was necessary for the Church to demonstrate that it could still give a coherent, comprehensive, compelling account of its faith, its hope, and its love. That was part of what it meant to be a Church that proposes, rather than imposes.
The Eastern Catholic Churches. The full implementation of Vatican II required addressing vexing questions of the relations among the various component parts of the Church. One of those questions involved the position of the Eastern Catholic Churches, Byzantine in liturgy and polity but in full communion with the Bishop of Rome. Curial officials tended to see the Catholic Churches of the East as exotic curiosities (and rather second-class curiosities at that); papal diplomats and ecumenists dealing with the Orthodox Churches found the Eastern Catholic Churches an embarrassment at best and a continuing source of conflict at worst. By sharp contrast, Karol Wojtyła brought to the papacy a deep respect for these distinctive Catholic communities, including the most turbulent of them, the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine. John Paul II’s steadfast support for the independence of the Greek Catholics of Ukraine throughout his pontificate was an expression of his respect for the courage shown for decades by a bitterly persecuted local church. It also reflected his determination to implement Vatican II fully, and thus treat the Eastern Catholic Churches in such a way as to make clear, to Catholics and Orthodox alike (but perhaps especially to Catholics), that these communities were fully members of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church, and that their liturgical and governmental traditions were fully a part of the global Catholic reality.
Africa. A similar, Council-driven vision of the breadth or catholicity of the Catholic Church was one source of John Paul II’s determination to keep Africa before the eyes of the Church and the world during his pontificate. After the Cold War, the world’s great powers lost interest in Africa, which itself suffered under corrupt and often despotic leadership. John Paul refused to let Africa be written out of the script of twenty-first-century history. He was convinced by his experience of the new churches of Africa that they had a freshness of evangelical fervor that could help revitalize the Church in parts of the world where Christianity had become stale from centuries of familiarity. And by his frequent travels to Africa, where he became a beloved figure—“Baba” [the old man]—he tried to refocus the world’s attention on a continent most of the rest of the world tried to ignore. And then there were his colleagues in the Vatican. The two regional synods for Africa that he held were efforts to get the center of the world Church in Rome to pay more attention to Africa and to senior African churchmen, and to take these new churches seriously as embodiments of the possibilities of Christian mission at the turn of the millennium.11
The Laity. John Paul II constantly lifted up the distinctive mission of lay Catholics in the world, which he understood to be another mandate of Vatican II. Here, too, confusions followed the Council, as Vatican II’s reaffirmation that all the baptized shared in various ways in the priestly mission of Christ had come to be understood by some as flattening out the differences between those who exercised the ministry of the ordained priesthood and those who shared in the common priesthood of the baptized. The net result, especially in the Western world, had been a drift toward a laicized clergy and a clericalized laity, with the Council’s primary intention—to empower the laity to be evangelists in the worlds of politics, economics, culture, the professions, and family life—being lost somewhere along the way.
To restore that sense of the distinctive lay apostolate as a mission to sanctify the modern Mars Hills where the hierarchical Church was invisible or ineffective, John Paul summoned an international Synod of Bishops in 1987; that synod led to the post-synodal apostolic exhortation of December 30, 1988, Christifideles Laici [Christ’s Faithful Lay People], and the Pope’s dynamic vision of the laity as the principal agents of the new evangelization in family, business, professional, political, and cultural life.12 That same intent to implement the Council’s teaching that the laity are the Church in “the world” undergirded John Paul II’s steady and strong support for Opus Dei, his beatification and canonization of Opus Dei’s founder, Josemaría Escrivá and his friendship with Escrivá’s successor, Alvaro del Portillo, at whose bier the Pope came to pray on the day after Portillo’s death in 1994.13 For John Paul, Escrivá and Opus Dei had anticipated the Council’s theology of the laity by decades, and thus deserved support as one effective means of promoting the lay vocation in the world.
Consecrated Life. The full implementation of Vatican II was also one of the motive forces at work in John Paul II’s efforts to reform and revitalize consecrated life in the Church—the life of radical witness to Christ through perpetual vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Communities of consecrated life (often called “rel
igious communities”) had been in crisis ever since the Council; both men’s and women’s communities had suffered steep losses from resignations while concurrently finding it difficult to recruit new members.14 Like the leaders of those religious communities that were not dying, the Pope believed that this distress had much to do with the abandonment of a distinctive manner of life; it was to revitalize the Church’s sense of the adventure of consecrated life and its distinctive character that John Paul dedicated the 1994 international Synod of Bishops, which he completed with the 1996 apostolic exhortation, Vita Consecrata [The Consecrated Life]. Years later, the effects of these initiatives could be seen in the theological work of American religious women who blended the teaching of Vita Consecrata with other facets of the magisterium of John Paul II (including his theology of the body) to propose a dramatically reformed vision of consecrated life—and whose thought emerged from communities that were growing, rather than dying.15
The Priesthood. Many Council commentators (and not a few priests) believed that the priesthood had been given short shrift at Vatican II.16 However one assessed that criticism, the blunt fact in 1978 was that the Catholic priesthood was in crisis: it had suffered the greatest number of defections since the Reformation; once full seminaries were virtually empty; priests were confused and demoralized. John Paul II’s love for the priesthood and for priests, and his determination to implement Vatican II, led to a number of initiatives aimed at strengthening the world presbyterate, including his annual Holy Thursday letter to all the priests of the world and his regular meetings with priests and seminarians during his travels, which culminated in his inviting the priests of the world to share his eightieth birthday with him during the Great Jubilee of 2000. The alleged “gap” in the Council’s teaching was filled by the post-synodal apostolic exhortation Pastores Dabo Vobis [I Will Give You Shepherds], which the Pope issued in 1992 to complete the work of the 1990 international Synod of Bishops. While aimed at a practical reform of the Church’s seminaries, Pastores Dabo Vobis also included a rich theology of the priesthood, stressing that the ordained priesthood was a continuation of the mediating priesthood of Jesus Christ himself.17
John Paul’s efforts to revitalize the priesthood produced measurable results during the pontificate. By the early 1990s, it was a rare seminary in which the majority of students did not say that a primary inspiration for their priestly vocation was John Paul II; as Cardinal William Baum once put it, John Paul had become “the greatest vocation director the Church has ever had.”18 Throughout the developed world, men once again saw the priesthood as a compelling vocation amidst a plethora of opportunities for personal fulfillment. In the developing world, men saw in John Paul II a priestly agent of genuine human liberation and a bold evangelist, and responded by giving their lives to the Church. In both instances, the Pope’s witness had at least as great an impact as his teaching. The man who wrote on his golden jubilee about the “gift and mystery” of the priesthood had demonstrated with his own life that a celibate under a vow of obedience to his ecclesiastical superiors could lead an immensely rich human life, one worth the sacrifice of a family and the loss of personal independence that the Catholic priesthood entails.
Sanctity for All. The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church is generally regarded as the theological centerpiece of Vatican II’s teaching; one of its signature themes is the universal call to holiness.19 John Paul II worked to give effect to this teaching by two of the defining initiatives of the pontificate: his canonizations and beatifications, and his support for renewal movements and new Catholic communities. The 1983 reform of the beatification and canonization process that the Pope mandated with the apostolic constitution Divinus Perfectionis Magister [The Divine Teacher of Perfection] was intended to bring the tools of modern historical scholarship to bear on the Church’s assessment of candidates for beatification and canonization; it also accelerated the process, so that the Church could be inspired by more contemporary witnesses to the workings of grace in history. Sanctity, John Paul II believed, was in fact all around us, for God is not grudging in his gifts; the processes by which the Church recognizes sanctity should recognize that.20
Sanctity, moreover, was essential if the Second Vatican Council’s implementation was to be the occasion for a new Pentecost, a new burst of evangelical energy, in the world Church. Thus where other senior churchmen saw confusion and potential trouble in many of the renewal movements and new Catholic communities that came to prominence after Vatican II, John Paul II saw possibilities. If it was true theologically that all true reform in the Church had to refer back to the Church’s originating form, it was also true historically that reform in the Church usually came from outside the normal structures of parochial and diocesan life: as it had in the Counter-Reformation, and as it had in the face of the secularist assault in the nineteenth century. The task of ecclesiastical leadership was to discern true from false charisms in the Church; those responsible for such discernments, the Pope believed, should be open and generous, understanding that it took new movements and communities time to find their proper place within the unity of the Church’s communion. Here, as elsewhere, was compelling evidence that those who charged John Paul II with a penchant for authoritarianism and centralization were ill informed.
The New Evangelization. John Paul II’s authoritative interpretation of the Second Vatican Council was intended, as he understood the Council to have been intended, to prepare the Church for a springtime of evangelization at the beginning of the third millennium of its history. The notion of a “kerygmatic” Church, or Church of proclamation, had been developed by mid-twentieth-century European theologians, whose influence on the documents of Vatican II was decisive and measurable. As Avery Dulles pointed out, the First Vatican Council used the word “gospel” (in Latin, evangelium) only once, and then as a synonym for the four canonical Gospels of the New Testament; by sharp contrast, the Second Vatican Council spoke of “the gospel” 157 times, of the imperative to “evangelize” 18 times, and of “evangelization” 31 times. It was John Paul II, however, who put the “new evangelization” at the center of Catholic self-understanding in what Dulles described as a “remarkable shift” in Catholic life and thought:
For centuries, evangelization had been a poor stepchild. Even when the term was used, evangelization was treated as a secondary matter, the special vocation of a few priests and religious. And even these specialists were more concerned with gaining new adherents for the Church than with proclaiming the good news of Jesus Christ. Today we seem to be witnessing the birth of a new Catholicism that, without loss of its institutional, sacramental, and social dimensions, is authentically evangelical.21
John Paul II’s new evangelization was both Christocentric and mission oriented: all the baptized were called to the task of evangelization, which required every baptized Catholic to develop a personal relationship with Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and to commit themselves to being instruments by which others came to know Christ. Thus the new evangelization belonged to the entire Church, not just to religious professionals in the clergy and consecrated life. Moreover, the new evangelization was global in scope: it involved deepening the faith where the Church was strong; the re-evangelization of those parts of an older Christendom that had become lax in their belief, piety, and witness; the first evangelization of places where the Gospel had never been successfully planted, especially in Asia; and Christian witness in the worlds of economics, culture, politics, and the mass media.22
Thus the Church, to be true to the heritage of Vatican II, must put out into the deep of proclamation and witness: its “first and highest priority” must be to “proclaim the good news concerning Jesus Christ as a joyful message to all the world.”23 That proclamation is the precondition to everything else the Church does in the world, and for the world; that proclamation is what the Church is for. John Paul II’s understanding of the Council as the platform from which to launch a new evangelization on the model of the Acts of t
he Apostles seemed likely, at his death, to shape Catholic self-consciousness and Catholic practice for the foreseeable future—not least because the most vibrant parts of the world Church were those that took John Paul’s teaching on the new evangelization to heart.
Legislation. The new codes of canon law promulgated by John Paul II were efforts to translate the Council’s teaching on the Church into juridic norms. The 1983 Codex Iuris Canonici for the Latin-rite Church was explicitly structured to reflect the ecclesiology of Vatican II; it embodied John Paul’s idea of canon law as juridic theology, not legal positivism. The 1990 Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches was another facet of John Paul II’s effort to integrate the Church’s Eastern “lung” into the life and practice of the universal Church. Both codes helped provide legal keys to the proper interpretation of the Second Vatican Council while recasting the Catholic understanding of canon law as an instrument in service to the Church as a communion of disciples called to proclaim the Gospel.
The Centrality of Christ. The two most frequently cited Vatican II texts in John Paul II’s magisterium were from the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World: Gaudium et Spes 22 and Gaudium et Spes 24. According to the first, Christ, by revealing “the mystery of the Father and his love,” also “reveals man to himself and brings to light his most high calling”; the second teaches that “man can full discover his true self only in a sincere giving of himself.” Faithful to his December 1959 letter to the Council’s Ante-Preparatory Commission, Karol Wojtyła explicated the Second Vatican Council for forty years as the Council dedicated to unveiling a true humanism and a genuine human liberation: the liberating humanism that comes from conversion to Christ, who reveals both the truth about God and the truth about human beings.
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