The End and the Beginning

by George Weigel

  Then there was John Paul’s respect for other cultures and his commitment to honor those cultures as he could—aspects of his personalist approach to the exercise of the papacy that shaped papal liturgies throughout the world and in Rome, sometimes in ways that seemed to critics to push the boundaries of inculturation beyond the appropriate. A more subtle, and perhaps more telling, critique of the use of local customs in pontifical liturgies came from those who argued that, while it may have been appropriate (and effective, in terms of the munus sanctificandi) to incorporate local rituals into the Pope’s Mass while he was visiting other countries, it was inappropriate to do so during pontifical liturgies in Rome, which ought to embody the Roman rite as a common heritage of the entire world Church.

  Throughout the more than twenty-six years of his pontificate, Pope John Paul II exercised a kind of universal priesthood, which enlivened the papal mission to sanctify in an unprecedentedly global way. Cardinal John O’Connor’s observation that, with John Paul II, the world knew it had a pope could be amplified in this respect: the world knew it had a pope who was a priest, a mediator between God and humanity, and an instrument of God’s grace. The critics’ charge that John Paul II was inattentive to restoring discipline in Catholic liturgical life will be debated for decades, and perhaps centuries; it was not without interest that John Paul’s papal successor, Benedict XVI, took a similar tack in terms of pastoral discipline in the first years of his pontificate, while concurrently displaying in his papal liturgies a more classic approach than that of Piero Marini. What cannot be gainsaid is the world’s appreciation of John Paul II as a man of sanctity who poured out his life offering the possibility and the means of sanctification to others—which is surely at the heart of the papal munus sanctificandi.

  Munus Regendi: The Mission to Govern

  According to Catholic doctrine and canon law, the plenitude of legislative, executive, and judicial authority in the Church resides in the Office of Peter. Nonetheless, popes are not absolute monarchs. Their authority to teach is bounded by Scripture and the Church’s authoritative tradition; their authority to sanctify is governed by the Church’s sacramental system, itself one of the stable and unchangeable elements of Catholic life and practice.118 As for the exercise of the papal munus regendi—the mission to govern—the last pope whose mode of leadership resembled what authors of fiction (and some reporters) imagine to be typical papal authoritarianism was Pope Pius XI. And it is certainly true that Achille Ratti, who came to the Office of Peter in 1922 after a few brief months as a cardinal, was not a man to be crossed, being the last pope to compel a cardinal—the Frenchman, Louis Billot—to renounce the red hat. Yet Pius XI leaned heavily on his cardinal secretaries of state, Pietro Gasparri and Eugenio Pacelli, in his diplomacy, and on Catholic intellectuals such as the German Jesuit Oswald von Nell-Breuning and the American Jesuit John LaFarge in the formulation of his magisterium.119

  As these examples suggest, the exercise of the papal munus regendi is determined by a complex of factors: a given pope’s personal gifts and dispositions; the quality of the counselors he chooses and the subordinates he appoints to implement his decisions; the breadth, depth, and timeliness of the flow of information; and the insightfulness of the analysis that reaches the papal apartment from papal nuncios, from the Curia, and from informal sources of information. The munus regendi is also shaped by a pope’s sense of deference to the authority of local bishops and superiors of religious communities, by his willingness to risk division, and by his capacity to absorb criticism for unpopular decisions. In several of these respects, the pontificate of John Paul II set new standards of excellence in the exercise of the munus regendi.

  No pope in modern papal history ever sought such a wide-ranging flow of information and opinion as did John Paul II. His determination to speak the truth as he had come to understand it was a striking facet of his papal personality, as were his courage and his equanimity in the face of uncomprehending or simply mean-spirited criticism. He grasped the importance of the world media in communicating his message and hired a papal spokesman of singular competence in the annals of that position; yet unlike most public figures of his time, John Paul II refused to craft his message to satisfy either his ecclesiastical critics or his journalistic critics (who were often aided and abetted by his ecclesiastical critics). He was willing to follow his instincts when it came to men and positions, making such bold episcopal appointments as Jean-Marie Lustiger to Paris, John J. O’Connor to New York, Francis E. George, O.M.I., to Chicago, Norberto Rivera Carrera to Mexico City, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, S.J., to Buenos Aires, Marc Ouellet, P.S.S., to Québec, George Pell to Melbourne and later Sydney, and Camillo Ruini to the Vicariate of Rome and the presidency of the Italian bishops’ conference. Joseph Ratzinger’s immediate predecessors as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith—a post he held under John Paul II for more than twenty-three years—were able men, but they were hardly world-class theologians, as Ratzinger was; would other popes have been as comfortable with a prefect who was not only a more accomplished theologian than the Pope but who spoke his mind in a series of books that were debated throughout the Catholic world? Further, at the border between the munus regendi and the munus docendi, John Paul was willing to seek the counsel of others in the formulation of his magisterium and to entertain suggested corrections and changes, as he did in formulating Centesimus Annus, Veritatis Splendor, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, Tertio Millennio Adveniente, Evangelium Vitae, and Fides et Ratio.

  Karol Wojtyła was not a man who naturally savored the roles of administrator and manager. Yet as archbishop of Kraków and Bishop of Rome he invested considerable energies in the administration of large institutions, sacrificing no small part of his intellectual life to what he understood to be responsibilities laid on him by the Church and, ultimately, by God. And if the mark of the successful administrator of large enterprises is the ability to set and achieve large goals, then Wojtyła’s was, in the main, an effective exercise of the papal munus regendi.120 Those who argued during the latter years of the pontificate that John Paul should be given “ ‘A’ for ‘prophet,’ ‘A’ for ‘priest,’ and ‘D’ for ‘king’ ” (as the saying often went) seemed to imagine the possibility of a new Pius XI. But that was not going to happen during the papacy of John Paul II: for (good) reasons of character and personality; because of the constraints on the exercise of the munus regendi inherent in the post-conciliar Church and in the Vatican itself; and because of John Paul II’s sense of priorities, which reflected both his prayer and his knowledge of his own strengths and weaknesses.

  Nonetheless, John Paul’s mission of governance experienced its share of flaws, frustrations, and failures.

  The Curia. Acutely aware of the trauma his election had caused in a still Italianate Curia, John Paul II tried to assuage curial anxieties during his pontificate while nudging the Curia toward a more evangelical concept of its functions. His respect for Paul VI was likely a factor in his unwillingness to wrestle with what some considered the deepest flaw in Pope Paul’s post-conciliar curial reform: the substitution of the Secretariat of State for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith as the supreme office of the Roman Curia—a momentous change that gave a bureaucracy staffed largely by diplomats operational precedence, not only over the Church’s chief doctrinal and theological agency, but over every other curial office, for under Pope Paul’s system all business of whatever sort was filtered through to the pope by the Secretariat of State. Further difficulties were caused by many of the “pontifical councils” Paul VI had created to give a place in the Church’s central administration to some of Vatican II’s key concerns—ecumenism, interreligious dialogue, international justice and peace; these councils had long ceased to be the in-house research centers they were originally intended to be and had become mini-Vaticans in their own right, churning out numerous documents and statements and creating confusion over who, in fact, spoke for the Holy See and the Catholic Church. Bot
h of these issues went unaddressed by John Paul II. Their resolution, and the more general question of strengthening the competence of the Roman Curia (including its ability to absorb the vastly increased information flows created by the Internet), was of significant concern to some of the most influential cardinals during the conclave of 2005, who expected John Paul II’s successor to address them decisively.

  The latter years of the pontificate also saw something of a reversal of John Paul’s prior practice of internationalizing the Roman Curia. That process had been begun by Paul VI, but it was accelerated by John Paul II, who appointed Beninese and Brazilian prefects of the Congregation for Bishops, a German prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a Slovak prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, American and Polish prefects of the Congregation for Catholic Education, Chilean and Nigerian prefects of the Congregation for Divine Worship, a Belgian head of the Synod of Bishops, an American prefect of the papal household, and a Spanish papal spokesman, among many other examples. By the end of the pontificate, though, this pattern seemed to have been, if not reversed, then at least modifed, under the influence of John Paul’s cardinal secretary of state from 1991 through 2005, Angelo Sodano. And in the latter years of John Paul II, the work process in the Curia often reverted to its pre-1978 habits and pace, which, among other things, did the Pope no good service during the Long Lent of 2002.

  John Paul II knew that his strengths lay in teaching, witnessing, and exercising the munus sanctificandi throughout the world; it would have been out of character for him to attempt a wholesale reform (much less a radical redesign) of the Roman Curia. Whether he might have deputed someone to do that for him is an interesting question, although it seems unlikely, given John Paul’s sense of himself as a Polish outsider in the Vatican. The structural problems of the central administration of the Catholic Church—which, in the main, John Paul II successfully bent to his purposes for more than two decades—were not ones he was prepared to tackle. Some future pope would surely have to do so.

  The Theologians and the Universities. Despite the intellectual creativity John Paul II exhibited throughout his pontificate, the charge that he was repressive and authoritarian in matters of speculative Catholic theology followed him for a quarter century. The charge first took hold in the press and in progressivist Catholic circles after the 1979 Vatican decision to withdraw Hans Küng’s license as a professor of Catholic theology at the University of Tübingen; it achieved the status of an unchallengeable truism in certain circles when, in 1986, the American moral theologian Charles Curran lost his ecclesiastical license as a teacher of Catholic theology at the Catholic University of America, from whose faculty he was subsequently dismissed. Neither man’s priestly faculties were suspended; Küng continued to teach at Tübingen as a professor of ecumenical theology and Curran quickly found a senior faculty position at Southern Methodist University in Dallas; both men continued to publish and were widely quoted for years in the global press; Küng even became an occasional counselor to the annual gathering of the global business and political elite at Davos, Switzerland.

  If this was repression, it was of a very mild sort. Moreover, both Küng and Curran candidly admitted that they did not believe to be true, and would not teach as true, what the Catholic Church believed and taught to be true. In Küng’s case, the issue was the doctrine of papal infallibility, even as defined in quite narrow terms by the First Vatican Council.121 Curran argued that the Church’s teaching on sexual morality was in error across a wide range of issues.122 That John Paul II should be accused of an abuse of the munus regendi by withdrawing the license to teach Catholic theology of men who had made clear their dissent from settled Catholic doctrine seemed to many, including Catholic thinkers on the port side of the Church, an unwarranted charge.

  Yet it stuck, and it persisted. Six weeks before John Paul II’s death, the National Catholic Reporter, a progressivist U.S. weekly, published a roster of some twenty-three “theologians and others disciplined by the Vatican during the papacy of John Paul II.” The disciplinary actions varied across the cases cited. As for the issues at stake, they included, in addition to the infallibility doctrine and the Church’s sexual ethic, the truth of Christ’s resurrection; the virgin birth, Christ’s work as redeemer, and other central questions of Christology; the structure of the Church; the nature of salvation and its relationship to political struggle; original sin; pantheistic interpretations of God’s presence in creation; abortion; refusal to accept the legitimate orders of ecclesiastical superiors to leave political office; and malfeasance in episcopal governance.123 Some of those disciplined left the priesthood, their religious orders, and, in a few cases, the Catholic Church. One, the French archbishop Marcel Lefebvre (who incurred excommunication by his illicit ordination of four bishops in 1988) came from outside the orbit of progressivist Catholicism, which was itself instructive: the only formal schism after Vatican II came from the extreme right (to use the conventional taxonomy), which suggested that most dissidents at the other end of the Catholic spectrum understood that their relevance to the future of the Catholic debate required them to remain formally inside the Catholic Church. This undoubtedly reflected a sincere love for the Church on the part of some dissenters; it also reflected a shrewd judgment that the world press would lose interest in Catholic dissidents who were no longer Catholic (as several of those on the National Catholic Reporter list, including the Brazilian Leonardo Boff and the American Matthew Fox, discovered).

  The pontificate of John Paul II stretched the boundaries of Catholic thought in several respects. Like every other pope, however, John Paul was bound to teach that certain boundaries existed, as he was obliged to enforce those boundaries when they were egregiously breached on core questions of doctrine. Yet for all the charges of repression leveled against John Paul II, the fact remained that, at the end of the pontificate, scholars deeply critical of his magisterium remained firmly in control of many theological faculties throughout the world, including theological faculties in Rome. In the always controversial field of moral theology, the influence of the critics of John Paul II may have been declining, as a younger generation of Catholic moral theologians, shaped by John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, took seriously the possibility denied by many of their theological elders—that the Church may in fact have been teaching the truth about sexual ethics. Five years after John Paul’s death, however, anyone interested in a tenured position on the theology faculty of any number of prestigious Catholic universities in the United States would have been ill advised to defend, during the hiring interview, John Paul II’s teaching on the intrinsically immoral nature of homosexual acts or the inadmissability of women to Holy Orders.

  As in other aspects of his exercise of the munus regendi, John Paul II chose a strategy of encouraging what was new, challenging, and vibrantly orthodox in Catholic intellectual life, rather than conducting a war of repression against dissent. In the case of the Roman pontifical institutions, John Paul encouraged the work of new foundations such as the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross and the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum—both of which quickly established themselves as first-class intellectual centers—rather than trying to compel the Pontifical Gregorian University to bring its teaching of fundamental moral theology into closer congruence with Veritatis Splendor, or trying to force the Pontifical Urban University (where many future leaders of the Third World Church study) to align its teaching on Christian mission and the new evangelization more closely to Redemptoris Missio.

  The long-term effects of this strategy will reveal themselves over the course of the twenty-first century, and beyond. It may have been mistaken. That the most intellectually consequential pontificate in centuries, led by a man with a deep reverence for university life, did not undertake a serious reform of the content and method of instruction at the older pontifical universities in Rome will strike some as a lost opportunity, and others as a failure in the munus regendi
. Yet however the strategy is judged, it closely paralleled the strategy John Paul chose in his exercise of the papal teaching office, or munus docendi: to make compelling arguments for the truth of Catholic faith, often deploying new methods of analysis, rather than issuing a string of condemnations.

  In any case, it seems far-fetched to conclude that John Paul’s exercise of the munus regendi in the face of theological dissent was repressive and authoritarian—unless one believes that those who make plain their disagreement with what the Catholic Church teaches to be true have some unchallengeable claim to be considered teachers of Catholic theology.

  The World Episcopate, Collegiality, and the Synod of Bishops. John Paul II appointed more Catholic bishops than any previous pope, and by a considerable degree. The seriousness with which he took this aspect of the papal munus regendi was evident in the quality of the men whom he appointed as prefects of the Congregation for Bishops, which vets candidates for the episcopate and presents them to the pope: the Beninese cardinal, Bernardin Gantin, the Brazilian Dominican, Lucas Moreira Neves, and Giovanni Battista Re, the Italian curialist who served for almost eleven years as Sostituto of the Secretariat of State, or papal chief of staff. At times, John Paul II displayed dissatisfaction with the way the appointment process functioned. In 1984, he rejected the terna, or list of three candidates, for archbishop of New York that had come to him from the Congregation for Bishops on the advice of the apostolic delegate in Washington; it seemed to him to reflect a self-satisfied approach to Catholic life in America, then dominant in the leadership of the U.S. bishops conference, that he was determined to change. So he took the advice of Moreira Neves (the second-ranking official of the Congregation for Bishops at the time), rejected the status quo–oriented terna for New York, and surprised the entire Catholic world by appointing John J. O’Connor, who had only been bishop of Scranton for some eight months, as what John Paul liked to call “archbishop of the capital of the world.” In the main, however, John Paul accepted the nomination process as it typically functioned, while trying to strengthen it by putting men in whom he reposed confidence in charge at the Congregation for Bishops.