The End and the Beginning

by George Weigel

  The Hard Road of Interreligious Dialogue. Controversy also dogged several of John Paul II’s efforts at interreligious dialogue. The October 27, 1986, World Day of Prayer for Peace, which the Pope hosted in Assisi, was criticized within the Curia and throughout some parts of the world Church from the moment John Paul II announced the initiative on January 25, 1986.49 Some feared sending a signal of religious indifferentism by having leaders from dozens of world religions appearing together on the same platform. Others charged that the event hinted (and perhaps more than hinted) at religious syncretism; how, they asked, could the Pope pray with men and women who prayed to a different deity, or to many deities? John Paul’s patient explanation that this was not a matter of praying together but of being together to pray did not satisfy the critics, so the Pope devoted virtually his entire Christmas address to the Roman Curia in December 1986 to a defense of the Assisi initiative, which he portrayed as a “visible illustration, a factual lesson, a catechesis intelligible to all of what the duty of ecumenism and the duty of interreligious dialogue recommended and promoted by the Second Vatican Council presupposed and signified.”50

  Similar criticism followed John Paul’s kiss of a Qur’an during his visit to the Omayyad Grand Mosque in Damascus in 2001; the critics could not seem to grasp that this was a gesture of respect for Muslims, not a papal endorsement of the Qur’an as divine revelation. John Paul II had a very clear view of the gulf in theological sensibility between Christianity and Islam, and what that gulf meant in terms of the two religions’ views of the just society. His analysis of the essential difference between the two, in Crossing the Threshold of Hope, was rather more stringent than what his successor, Pope Benedict XVI, would say in his famous Regensburg Lecture of September 2006. In John Paul’s view,

  Whoever knows the Old and New Testaments, and then reads the Qur’an, clearly sees the process by which it completely reduces Divine Revelation. It is impossible not to note the movement away from what God said about Himself, first in the Old Testament through the Prophets, and then finally in the New Testament through His Son. In Islam all the richness of God’s self-revelation, which constitutes the heritage of the Old and New Testaments, has definitely been set aside.

  Some of the most beautiful names in the human language are given to the God of the Qur’an, but He is ultimately a God outside of the world, a God who is only Majesty, never Emmanuel, God-with-us. Islam is not a religion of redemption. There is no room for the Cross and the Resurrection. Jesus is mentioned, but only as a prophet who prepares for the last prophet, Muhammad. There is also mention of Mary, His Virgin Mother, but the tragedy of redemption is completely absent. For this reason not only the theology but also the anthropology of Islam is very distant from Christianity.51

  John Paul II’s approach to interreligious dialogue reflected both his personality and his convictions. He reached out to those of different religious beliefs from the font of his profound respect for persons. That outreach was shaped, however, by three convictions: that there is only one truth; that all truths, from whatever source, tend toward the Truth, who is God; and that the God who is Truth revealed himself in a definitive way in his Son, Jesus Christ. The third conviction did not preclude, but in fact demanded, forms of dialogue based on the first two convictions. The same personality characteristics and the same convictions undergirded the Pope’s dialogue with science, with secular philosophy, and with the arts. He could engage differences civilly, and he was prepared to build out from the points of tangency that existed between different philosophical positions or different religious traditions—as when, in 1985, he addressed a stadium full of Muslim young people in Casablanca, at the invitation of King Hassan II, acknowledging the facts of difference but appealing for cooperation on the basis of faith in the one God of Abraham and submission to the one universal moral law.

  Solidarity Extended: The Life Issues

  In the aftermath of the Revolution of 1989 and the Soviet crack-up of 1991, others may have believed, at least temporarily, that the end of history—the definitive and final form of human social, political, and economic organization—had been realized with the triumph of democratic politics and market economics over communism. John Paul II quickly and presciently scouted the terrain of the postcommunist contest for the human future where, as he knew and the world soon discovered, new challenges to freedom rightly understood quickly emerged. Some of the most urgent challenges involved the life issues of abortion and euthanasia, and related questions of the management of the biotechnological revolution ignited by humanity’s new genetic knowledge.52

  In the face of widespread efforts to portray the Catholic Church’s defense of the right to life of the unborn as yet another example of Catholicism’s impossible sexual ethic, or Catholic misogyny, or both, John Paul II insisted for more than a quarter century that abortion was a matter of the fifth commandment’s injunction not to kill the innocent, not the sixth commandment’s admonition to chastity.53 Abortion, in other words, was a justice issue, not an issue of sexual morality. Moreover, abortion was a social justice issue, for states that claimed the right to declare entire classes of human beings outside the boundaries of legal protection were states in which no one’s right to life was secure. If the state could declare the unborn, whom embryology texts recognized as members of the human family, susceptible to unpenalized lethal violence, then why not the inconvenient or burdensome elderly, or the radically handicapped, or indeed any other class of human beings whose fundamental right to life the majority did not wish to endorse?54

  Then there was the question of what had (and had not) been learned from modern history, and the question of freedom’s debasement into sheer willfulness. Hadn’t the late twentieth century learned anything from the experience of immediate predecessor generations, in which the notion of “life unworthy of life” [Lebensunwertes Leben] had contributed to the self-destruction of democracy and to mass slaughter? As John Paul wrote in Evangelium Vitae, “To claim the right to abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia, and to recognize that right in law, means to attribute to human freedom a perverse and evil significance: that of an absolute power over others and against others.”55

  Democracy could only sustain itself over time, the Pope argued, if the machinery of self-governance rested on the foundation of a “culture of life,” for only a culture that cherished life as a radical gift could sustain a “culture of human rights.” The individualism and subjectivism underwriting the pro-abortion movement (and its analogue, the euthanasia movement) were incompatible with democratic self-governance, John Paul insisted, for individualism and subjectivism run amok would inevitably erode the experience of social solidarity that is crucial to democracy. Moreover, a radical ideology of “choice” violated the rationally knowable moral norm according to which no human being is to be instrumentalized, used for the convenience of another, or disposed of.56

  If the great public contest of the mid-twentieth century had been between freedom and totalitarian political power, the great public issue of the late twentieth century and the early twenty-first for John Paul II was the clash between the “culture of life” and the “culture of death,” as he described the contending forces in Evangelium Vitae.57 In addition to the ongoing debates over abortion and euthanasia, that clash also shaped the debate over the future of biotechnology. In 1987, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued Donum Vitae [The Gift of Life], an instruction approved by John Paul II, which warned against deploying humanity’s new genetic knowledge and biotechnological skills to turn human begetting into human manufacture. Those issues were of concern to the Pope throughout the pontificate, even as the public debate expanded to include questions of “perfecting” humanity in what some scientists unblushingly called the “immortality project.”58

  John Paul II’s vigorous pro-life teaching and activism were extensions of his commitment to the principle of solidarity as a building block of the free and virtuous society. Having lived in an environment
where human beings were murdered with impunity behind a facade of legality, Karol Wojtyła knew the dangers of taking the first step down the slippery slope of allowing the state to determine which members of the human community deserve the protection of the laws. The moral resources that had given birth to Solidarity against overwhelming odds could, he was convinced, build a culture of life that took cross-generational solidarity as a hallmark of respect for the dignity of the human person and built strong barriers against abortion and euthanasia. His critics and opponents, from the Italians who voted in favor of permissive abortion laws shortly after Mehmet Ali Agca’s assassination attempt to Catholic members of the United States Congress who supported the pro-abortion agenda, could not seem to grasp the link between Solidarity and the pro-life cause—between the quest for freedom against the communist culture of the lie, and the defense of life against the culture of death. For John Paul II, it was all one contest—a struggle for the defense of human dignity, a struggle to grasp and live the true meaning of freedom as self-gift. The Pope had at least as many defeats as victories on the life issues. His pro-life witness, however, was consistent, persistent, thoughtful, and passionate, and it helped keep alive a set of questions that many in the world of power wished would disappear.

  A Legacy of Ideas

  That John Paul II remained a working intellectual throughout more than a quarter century as Bishop of Rome reflected both his unique personality and his conception of the papal office. From the time he began an active episcopal ministry as auxiliary bishop of Kraków in 1958, this man of ideas and arguments had had few opportunities to lead an orderly intellectual life; his poetry, his philosophical essays, and books such as Love and Responsibility, Sources of Renewal, Sign of Contradiction, and Person and Act were all written in the interstices of his pastoral work. Yet, as a diocesan bishop, he liked to have a significant intellectual project in hand, not least as a way to bring some order into the fragmentation of his busy program as a bishop. That pattern continued throughout his even more demanding pontificate, during which he produced several book-length collections of audience addresses (including the catecheses that were eventually gathered together into his Theology of the Body), an international bestseller in Crossing the Threshold of Hope, two books of memoirs, and Memory and Identity, the extended philosophical reflection published shortly before his death. Thinking and writing—and thinking through writing—had been essential parts of Karol Wojtyła, the man, since the Second World War; thinking and writing—and thinking through writing—remained an essential facet of the life of Karol Wojtyła the pope.

  The intellectual legacy of the pontificate of John Paul II will shape the pastoral life and mission of the Catholic Church for centuries. At the same time, the Pope’s intellectual legacy belongs to the world, for John Paul addressed some of the most pressing questions of world culture at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first: the nature, goals, and limits of freedom; the structural and moral requirements of the free society; the meaning of human sexuality; the relationships between religious conviction and scientific knowledge, and between faith and reason; the very capacity of the human person to know anything with certainty.

  In Defense of Reason. The Pope’s address to this last issue may well be his most enduring contribution to world culture—and, from a certain point of view, the most unexpected. It would have been a great surprise to Voltaire and other proponents of Enlightenment rationalism to learn that, two centuries after they had sworn to rid the world of the bewitchments of priestcraft in the name of reason, the Catholic Church was the world’s premier institutional defender of the prerogatives of reason—and that the defense was being led by a Polish priest, himself a philosopher of international repute. Yet that is one major part of the intellectual legacy of John Paul II, who throughout his pontificate insisted that human reason could get to the truth of things as they are—and in doing so, could teach us what is right and what is wrong, what is noble and what is base, what is snare and delusion and what is truly liberating.

  At a moment in the history of civilization in which the claims of reason were under assault from sundry religious and/or political fanaticisms and from philosophy itself, the head of the Catholic Church stood at the rostrum of the General Assembly of the United Nations in October 1995 to defend the human capacity to know, through the exercise of reason, those moral truths of the human condition we call “human rights,” and to make that knowing the basis of a genuinely cross-cultural conversation. Three years later, in the encyclical Fides et Ratio [Faith and Reason], John Paul II reaffirmed philosophical reason’s capacity to grasp the truth, while simultaneously arguing that the human journey to the full truth of things can be completed only by faith—for just as faith seeks understanding (and thus theology needs philosophy), so our understanding of the human condition is enriched by faith, which grasps those truths that can be apprehended only in love.59

  As Avery Dulles put it a year before John Paul’s death, John Paul II, the pastor, patiently and persistently insisted that “faith, by sharpening the inner eye of the mind, enables reason to rise above itself and in no sense diminishes it”; thus faith, by “reinforcing reason,” enables reason to “transcend its normal limits.”60 Yet John Paul the philosopher would always insist that human beings can get to the moral truth of things and reach conclusions in which we can have real confidence by “arguing rigorously from rational criteria.”61 Fides et Ratio was thus a signal contribution to world culture at a moment in which the detachment of faith from reason had led to the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and lethal violence on a mass scale, while a loss of faith in reason had left the West intellectually paralyzed in the face of mortal threats to its core political commitments: civility, tolerance, human rights, democratic decision-making, and the rule of law.

  Giving an Account. Another enduring artifact embodying the intellectual legacy of John Paul II will be the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which the Pope understood as both a fruit of the Second Vatican Council and a proposal to the world of the third millennium. As the catechism commissioned by the Council of Trent had shaped Catholic thought, mission, and piety during the second half of the second millennium, so, John Paul believed, the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church could provide a sturdy intellectual framework for Catholic life in the third millennium, by drawing together in one comprehensive presentation of Catholic faith the Council’s twin theological commitments: to a recovery of the basic sources of Christian wisdom in the Bible and the Fathers of the Church (ressourcement, as the theologians of the mid-twentieth century put it), and to a fruitful encounter with contemporary intellectual culture (aggiornamento, or “updating,” in John XXIII’s famous description). At the same time, the Catechism was an extended offer to the world: here is what the Catholic Church believes; this is how the Catholic Church prays; this is how the Catholic Church thinks we should live in a truly humane way. In a season of skepticism about the capacity of religious believers to give an account of their beliefs and practices, the Catechism was a humble yet confident confession that the Catholic Church still believed itself capable of putting the pieces of the human drama together in a coherent and compelling way: the drama of every human life, and the drama of history. Giving that kind of comprehensive account of Christian faith and life was important in itself, and for the life of the Church. It was also, John Paul was convinced, a duty the Church owed the world—the duty to make the Christian proposal in a thorough way so that the world might have the opportunity to believe.

  Closely allied to the Catechism in the intellectual legacy of John Paul II was the 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor [The Splendor of Truth].62 It, too, was addressed to both the Church and the world. Within the Church, John Paul criticized forms of moral theology that, in his considered judgment, emptied the moral life of its drama by weakening our sense of the moral consequences of specific choices and acts. At the same time, Veritatis Splendor tried to restore to Catholic moral theology the cent
rality of virtue and the virtues, after centuries in which rules (either stringent or lax) had been the focal point of theological argument.63 In doing so, Veritatis Splendor built a bridge to those schools of contemporary moral philosophy intent on recovering virtue ethics as a guide through the brambles of moral choice. At the same time, the Pope’s insistence in the intra-Catholic discussion that certain acts were “intrinsically evil”—that is, always and everywhere wrong, no matter what combination of motivations and intended consequences is in play—was an important proposal to the postmodern West, where skepticism about the human capacity to know the moral truth of anything had eroded commitments to basic human rights, and had created a public moral culture in which the mantra of “choice” tended to drown out arguments about the rightness or wrongness of things.

  Body Language and Papal Feminism. Karol Wojtyła came to the papacy convinced that the classic Catholic sexual ethic was true—and that its presentation to the Church and the world in the post-conciliar period left much to be desired. The Church’s seeming incapacity to speak moral truth to the power of the sexual revolution was a serious pastoral problem, as he knew from extensive pastoral experience. That incapacity was also a grave defect in the Church’s response to contemporary culture, which badly needed moral ballasting amidst the storms of an upheaval that promised sexual fulfillment yet seemed to deliver a good measure of dissatisfaction and suffering. Wojtyła brought to the conclave that elected him pope in 1978 the first sketches of a new approach to sexual ethics on which he had been working in Kraków; those sketches were developed, amplified, and expanded in four clusters of general audience addresses between September 1979 and November 1984 that would come to be known as John Paul II’s Theology of the Body.64