The End and the Beginning

by George Weigel

  Difficulties. That pattern had been evident throughout the pontificate. The Anglican-Roman Catholic dialogue foundered in the mid-1980s when it became increasingly evident that what had often been assumed to be the case—namely, that the two communities believed the same things about the Eucharist and the sacramental priesthood—could no longer be assumed. The Anglican Communion’s acceptance of the ordination of women and the explanations offered for it, which were primarily sociological rather than theological, also suggested that the two communities had moved in radically different directions in their understanding of the nature of the Church and its relationship to the authority of apostolic tradition (a chasm that was also widening between Anglicanism and Orthodoxy).36 The same split was evident in the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century on questions of biblical morality, especially the immorality of homosexual acts. Similar questions bedeviled the Lutheran-Catholic dialogue despite the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification. The precipitating issue of the Lutheran reformation might have been theologically resolved, but other church-dividing questions of ecclesiology, the sacraments, and Christian morality had emerged to create new and grave divisions, in the light of which discussions of a pan-Christian Petrine ministry were not likely to be very fruitful.

  John Paul’s initiatives with Orthodoxy ran into a different set of obstacles. One was psychological: over a millennium of division, the tacit affirmation that “I am not in communion with the Bishop of Rome” had come to seem an essential part of Orthodox self-identity for many Orthodox believers. In most cases, that default instinct was more likely a matter of ecclesial culture than of considered theological reflection. Yet something akin to that instinct seemed to have been suggested by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I’s 1998 statement at Georgetown University, in which the ecumenically attuned Bartholomew (who had studied for the doctorate in Rome) stated bluntly that the “divergence” between Rome and Constantinople, which he believed had increased over the centuries, was not simply “a problem of organizational structures [or] jurisdictional arrangements,” but involved “ontologically different” experiences of being the Church. But if Catholicism and Orthodoxy were “ontologically different”—meaning essentially different—then John Paul II’s proposal for a return to the status quo ante 1054 was a dead letter.

  The problem of closing the breach of 1054 was made immensely more complicated by the ecumenical obstreperousness of the Patriarchate of Moscow, which posed severe difficulties for both Rome and Constantinople. These difficulties were themselves exacerbated by the deep linkages between the Russian Orthodox leadership and Soviet—later, Russian—state power, which were in turn made more complex by the intersection of Russian imperial ambition and the Moscow Patriarchate’s conception of itself as the “third Rome,” in succession to the Rome of Peter and Paul and to the Constantinople of Andrew and John Chrysostom. Then there was the unhappy fact that many of the Russian Orthodox clergy who wanted to free their community from the corrupting embrace of the Russian state regarded “ecumenism” as a term of opprobrium, for the KGB had used Russian Orthodox agents and informants in its successful efforts to achieve influence at the World Council of Churches, which resulted in the WCC’s virtual abandonment of persecuted Christians within the Soviet Union.

  Thus history, and history’s effects on both theology and ecclesial psychology, conspired to frustrate many of John Paul II’s ecumenical initiatives in both the Christian East and the Christian West. Yet Ut Unum Sint remains part of the patrimony of the Catholic Church, an unavoidable reminder of the ecumenical imperative that ultimately derives from the will of Christ that his Church should be one. And despite John Paul’s ecumenical frustrations and failures, Methodist theologian Geoffrey Wainwright, who long cochaired the joint Methodist–Roman Catholic international dialogue, considered John Paul II a “great evangelist” and a “great ecumenist,” who had “offered Christ to millions … [who] heard him gladly … and countless numbers responded.” Then there was John Paul’s personal example of ecumenical commitment, which Wainwright thought was at least as important as his evangelical preaching, his ecumenical meetings, and his magisterium:

  The last time I saw Pope John Paul was in November 2004 … at a … symposium organized by the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity to mark the 40th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council’s decree on ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio. The Pope presided over a special service of Vespers in St. Peter’s. When he was wheeled in, he looked radiant; and the thought struck me from the Apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 12.8–10: this was “strength perfected in weakness.”37

  Evangelical Appreciations. The greatest ecumenical surprise of the pontificate was the enthusiastic embrace of John Paul II by American evangelical Protestants, who saw in the man their grandfathers might have described as the “Whore of Babylon” a premier exponent of the truth of Christian faith and a stalwart defender of the right to life. That embrace led Billy Graham to describe John Paul II, at his death, as “the greatest Christian leader of our time,” and, in the United States at least, gave birth to a new, theologically sophisticated intellectual dialogue that operated under the title “Evangelicals and Catholics Together.”38 A key participant in those new conversations, Baptist scholar Timothy George, predicted an interesting future for these two traditions of Christian faith, whose relations had been characterized by a “tortuous history of conflict and mutual condemnation”:

  [Evangelicals and Catholics] will discover that we are comrades in a struggle, not a struggle against one another, and not really a struggle against those outside the Christian faith who reject the light of divine grace because they have fallen in love with the darkness which surrounds them. No, our conflict is with the evil that loiters in the noonday, and slithers through the midnight hour. Against such principalities and powers, John Paul II, our common teacher, [called] us to recognize the splendor of truth and the fullness of life, that luminous presence the New Testament calls the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.39

  Whether American evangelical appreciation of John Paul II and for a robust Catholic defense of classic Christian orthodoxy would shape ecumenical relations in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, where evangelical, fundamentalist, and pentecostalist Protestantism was growing exponentially at the turn into the third millennium, seemed likely to be a key question in twenty-first-century global religious life.40 The answer to that question was by no means certain at John Paul II’s death. What was certain, however, was that the question would not have been posed at all, absent the evangelical witness of John Paul II and its dramatic effects in reconfiguring the world ecumenical context.

  Catholicism and Judaism: Covenants in Conversation

  As a papal diplomat, Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli worked clandestinely to save Jews from the Holocaust; as pope, John XXIII (who greeted one Jewish delegation with the exclamation, “I am Joseph, your brother!”) had his car stopped so that he could bless the Jews of Rome as they left their synagogue after Sabbath worship. As a young man, Karol Wojtyła, who joined a resistance movement whose components included a section dedicated to Jewish rescue, lost friends to the Holocaust; as pope, John Paul II visited and spoke in the Great Synagogue of Rome, met Jewish delegations on virtually all of his papal pilgrimages, established diplomatic relations with the State of Israel, and oversaw the publication of several documents crucial for the future of Jewish-Catholic dialogue. John XXIII’s human warmth created a new sense of possibility in an ancient and often painful relationship. John Paul II created an entirely new era in Jewish-Catholic relations, making possible the reconvening of a conversation that had broken down more than nineteen centuries before.

  Wojtyła’s palpable respect for Judaism and its role in the world gave him a unique capacity to accelerate the pace of the Jewish-Catholic dialogue into previously uncharted territory—a journey paved by several crucial gestures rich in both symbolism and impact.

  The first was his visit to the
Great Synagogue of Rome on April 13, 1986, which was the Pope’s personal initiative.41 There, he reiterated the Church’s condemnation of the sin of anti-Semitism, the Second Vatican Council’s rejection of the collective charge of deicide against the Jews, and the Catholic Church’s determination to contest the notion that there was theological justification for discrimination against Jews and Judaism. The Jewish people, he affirmed, had been called by God “with an irrevocable calling.” And despite the pain of history, Catholics now understood (as they should have understood all along) that Catholicism and Judaism were inextricably entangled, locked into a unique relationship by the will of God: as John Paul put it, “the Jewish religion is not ‘extrinsic’ to us, but in a certain sense is ‘intrinsic’ to our own religion,” so that, “with Judaism … we have a relationship which we do not have with any other religion.” Jews were, for Catholics, “elder brothers.”42

  To have come to those understandings after centuries of strife was remarkable; to some, it was enough. But it was not enough for John Paul II, the first Bishop of Rome to enter the Great Synagogue of Rome. The people who shared a “common heritage drawn from the Law and the Prophets,” he continued, had to deepen their “collaboration in favor of man,” bearing witness together to the moral truths about the human person inscribed both on human hearts and on the tablets of the Mosaic covenant. Beyond that, however, Jews and Catholics ought to ponder the mystery of divine election, which they both experienced. It was time to reconvene the theological conversation that had been abruptly adjourned during the First Jewish War in approximately A.D. 70, at the “parting of the ways” between what became Christianity and what became rabbinic Judaism.43

  The second initiative of John Paul II that set the foundations for a dramatically reconfigured Jewish-Catholic dialogue was the establishment of diplomatic relations between the Holy See and the State of Israel. As the negotiating record makes clear, the 1993 Fundamental Agreement between the two parties that made possible diplomatic exchange at the ambassadorial level would not have happened absent John Paul’s insistence that it happen, given the diplomatic caution prevailing in the Vatican Secretariat of State and the resistance of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem.44 The Pope insisted on seeing the agreement through for several reasons. It was an important diplomatic analogue to the turning of the page he had described at the Great Synagogue of Rome; absent the Holy See’s formal diplomatic recognition of the Jewish state, John Paul knew, many Jews, however mistakenly, would continue to believe that the existence of the State of Israel constituted a theological problem for the Catholic Church.45 It was important in clearing the political path for a papal pilgrimage to the Holy Land. It might give the Holy See a greater purchase in discussions about peace in the Middle East. But beyond all such prudential calculations, the Fundamental Agreement was, for John Paul, simply the right thing to do: right for the Catholic Church, right for Catholic-Jewish relations, right for the State of Israel, and right for the pursuit of peace in the Middle East. Despite the slow pace of follow-on negotiations between the Holy See and Israel, few could doubt at the time of John Paul’s death that he had been right about what was right.

  The third and fourth symbolic moments at which John Paul II accelerated the Jewish-Catholic dialogue occurred during his Great Jubilee Holy Land pilgrimage. In his stunning and stark address at Yad Vashem, the head of the Catholic Church made unmistakably clear that he shared the ongoing pain inflicted on Jews and Judaism by the Holocaust. In his prayer at the Western Wall of the Temple, he asked God’s forgiveness for the sins committed against Jews by Christians over the centuries and recommitted the Church to resist any future attempts to harm the people who carried God’s covenant with Abraham through history.

  In his determination to reconvene the theological conversation between Catholicism and Judaism after nineteen centuries, John Paul II was, arguably, far ahead of his time—save in North America, where the secure position of the Jewish community made it possible for precisely such a new, in-depth theological encounter to take place. Those conversations produced one important result in September 2000, when 170 Jewish religious leaders and scholars in North America signed and issued Dabru Emet [Speak the Truth], which boldly tried to fit Christians and Christianity into an Orthodox Jewish understanding of God’s abiding covenant with the Jewish people. Picking up one of John Paul’s key points (and challenging many of their Jewish brethren), the signatories of Dabru Emet declared that “a new religious dialogue with Christians will not weaken Jewish practice or accelerate Jewish assimilation.” Dabru Emet had its Jewish critics, but the very fact of its existence suggested that John Paul II’s initiatives in the sphere of Jewish-Catholic relations had indeed broken new ground, despite the nervousness of some Jews and the reticence of some Catholics accustomed to the familiar grooves of the post-conciliar Jewish-Catholic dialogue.46

  Science and the World Religions: Dialogues in Truth

  As both philosopher and theologian, Karol Wojtyła was convinced that any genuine dialogue between religious communities, between believers and unbelievers, or between the Catholic Church and the worlds of science and philosophy, had to aim at the clarification of truth. In John Paul’s mind, tolerance did not mean ignoring differences in an effort to achieve a temporary bonhomie; rather, genuine tolerance meant engaging differences with a full recognition of the difference that differences can make, but also within a bond of civility and mutual respect. Contrary to the conventional wisdom of secular modernity and postmodernity, according to which a man’s doubts equip him for tolerance, civility, and dialogue, John Paul II was able to engage differences on the basis of his own profound Christian faith. For according to that faith, the Logos, the Word through whom God had created the world, had left the imprint of God’s own reason in the creation, such that all human beings are drawn toward the truth. Men and women needed the nourishment of truth as much as they needed the nourishment provided by food and water, John Paul was convinced; he also knew that that attraction to the truth was blunted by the facts of sin (including pride and fear) and by the accumulated prejudices of centuries and millennia. Yet the attraction to truth—including moral truth—remained, and it was on that basis that he sought to engage other world religions and the world of science.

  Getting Beyond Galileo. Karol Wojtyła brought to the papacy an acute sense of the difficulties the Church had had in engaging scientific modernity and an intuition that the materialist and positivist assumptions shaping the contemporary scientific worldview were fraying. A new dialogue was possible, as physics and astronomy encountered phenomena for which their own analytic methods could not account, and as some philosophically adventurous scientists began to speculate about the reasons that the universe seemed perfectly adapted to mathematical analysis and modeling. But before that new dialogue could be fully engaged, John Paul knew, the debris of the past had to be cleared away.

  That was why he established a study commission in 1981 to reexamine the entire Galileo case, which had become a powerful cultural myth underwriting hostile secularism’s conviction that biblical religion and science were simply incompatible. The commission’s 1992 report recognized that Galileo’s clerical judges had erred by identifying the truth of Catholic faith with an unsustainable cosmology. Accepting the report, John Paul II urged both scientists and theologians to move beyond “a tragic mutual incomprehension” based on the false notion of “a fundamental opposition between science and faith.” Truth could not contradict truth. If that seemed to be the case, then a mistake had been made somewhere along the analytic line. The Christian humanism the Catholic Church proposed to the world recognized that there were different modes of knowing the truth; respecting that diversity, the Church recognized science as a “realm of knowledge” with its own proper canons of inquiry. The question now was whether science was willing to make the same affirmation about theology. If so, then science and theology could mutually reinforce each other’s quest for the truth about the great mysteries
of the human condition, including the mystery of every individual human life.47

  The resolution of the Galileo affair caused little controversy; such was not the case with John Paul II’s October 22, 1996, message on evolution to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. The message described “the theory of evolution” as “more than a hypothesis,” even as it went on to note that “we should speak of several theories of evolution,” some of which were admittedly “materialist” and “reductionist.” Those “theories of evolution which, in accordance with the philosophies inspiring them, consider the [human] spirit as emerging from the forces of living matter or as a mere epiphenomenon of this matter” were, the message insisted, both “incompatible with the truth about man” and unable to “ground the dignity of the human person.” Yet the message did not go on to note that those were precisely the dominant theories of evolution among evolutionary scientists, nor were those defective theories examined critically in any depth. Those lacunae, plus the message’s lack of attention to what some scientists regarded as deep gaps in the evolutionary record, plus the affirmation that evolution is “more than a hypothesis,” raised questions that continued to be debated heatedly during the remainder of the pontificate and beyond.48