Each of these synods was completed by a post-synodal apostolic exhortation, in which John Paul took the proposals of the Synod fathers and synthesized them along with his own reflections on the distinct evangelical imperative in each region of the world. Ecclesia in America [The Church in America] was issued on January 22, 1999; the Pope went to Mexico City for the signing ceremony and concluded a whirlwind visit to the western hemisphere with a brief stop in St. Louis, Missouri (where he was given a St. Louis Blues ice hockey jersey with “John Paul II” on the back). John Paul signed Ecclesia in Asia [The Church in Asia] in New Delhi, the capital of India, on November 6, 1999; it was his last pastoral voyage outside Italy before the Great Jubilee, and he concluded it with a brief visit to the former Soviet republic of Georgia on his way back to Rome. Ecclesia in Oceania [The Church in Oceania] was not completed until after the jubilee year, and was issued on November 22, 2001. Ecclesia in Europa [The Church in Europe] was issued on June 28, 2003, and is discussed in detail in Chapter Eight.
15. John Paul II, Mysterium Incarnationis, 1, 6.
16. Ibid., 10. The theology of the indulgence tradition, which rests on the Church’s belief in a “communion of saints” that transcends time, is explained in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1471–79.
17. See ibid., 7–13.
18. Harvey had been named prefect of the papal household in 1998, with Dziwisz as his Aggiunto, or deputy, in order to coordinate the papal schedule during the Great Jubilee more efficiently. Harvey and Dziwisz were named bishops as part of this rearrangement of the management of the papal schedule. This led to complaints that the papal master of ceremonies, Piero Marini, was not being similarly promoted, so Marini, too, was named a bishop—which seemed to many a theological and liturgical oddity.
19. John Paul II, Tertio Millennio Adveniente, 33.
20. Bishop Marini, who had ordered the “cope of many colors” John Paul had worn to open the Holy Door, had ordered a similarly dramatic chasuble of the same color scheme for the Pope to wear at the Mass. The papal apartment wisely vetoed its use, substituting a more traditional white chasuble. The “cope of many colors” was also noticeably absent on Christmas Day (when John Paul II gave the traditional blessing Urbi et Orbi [To the City and the World] from the central loggia of St. Peter’s) and from the papal openings of the holy doors of the three other patriarchal basilicas in the weeks ahead.
21. John Paul II, Homily for the Opening of the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000, Midnight Mass, 24 December 1999.
22. John Paul II, Urbi et Orbi, 25 December 1999.
23. John Paul II, Homily at the Opening of the Holy Door at the Basilica of St. John Lateran, 25 December 1999.
24. John Paul II, Homily for the Celebration of First Vespers of the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, and “Te Deum” for the End of the Year, 31 December 1999.
25. Central Committee of the Great Jubilee of 2000, Il Grande Giubileo dell’Anno 2000: Diario di un evento di fede (Vatican City, 2001), p. 17 [hereinafter, Diario]; author’s translation.
26. John Paul II, Homily at the Celebration of Second Vespers of the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, 1 January 2000.
27. John Paul II, Message for the Celebration of the World Day of Peace, January 1, 2000, 5, 7, 9, 11, 17, 18.
28. Author’s conversation with Pope John Paul II, January 4, 2000.
29. The participants included representatives of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria, the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch, the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, the Patriarchate of Moscow, the Patriarchate of Serbia, the Orthodox Patriarchate of Romania, the Orthodox Church of Greece, the Orthodox Church of Poland, the Orthodox Church of Albania, the Orthodox Church of Finland, the Coptic Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria, the Syrian Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch, the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Catholicosate of Cilicia (Armenian Apostolic Church), the Assyrian Church of the East, the Anglican Communion, the Old Catholic Church (Union of Utrecht), the Lutheran World Federation, the World Methodist Council, the Disciples of Christ, the Pentecostal Church, and the Ecumenical Council of Churches. [Diario, p. 18.]
30. John Paul II, Homily for the Opening of the Holy Door at St. Paul Outside the Walls and the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, 18 January 2000.
31. Jonathan Luxmoore, “Pope Weeps as He Watches Polish Film,” The Universe, January 30, 2000.
32. John Paul also addressed here a problem that would preoccupy him throughout the remaining years of his pontificate: the attempt to erect secularism as the official creed of the world’s democracies, thus driving religiously informed moral argument out of public life:
Life takes shape in our daily choices. And political leaders, since they have the role of administering the res publica, can by their personal choices and their programs of action guide whole societies either towards life or towards death. For this reason believers, and the faithful of the Catholic Church in particular, consider it their duty to take an active part in the public life of the societies to which they belong. Their faith, their hope and their charity represent additional and irreplaceable energies to ensure that not only will there be unfailing concern for others, a sense of responsibility and the defense of fundamental rights, but also to ensure that there is a perception that our world and our personal and collective history are invested with a Presence. I therefore insist that believers be granted a place in public life because I am convinced that their faith and their witness can reassure our contemporaries, who are often anxious and disoriented, and can ensure that despite failures, violence and fear, neither evil nor death will have the last word. [John Paul II, Address at the Exchange of Greetings with the Diplomatic Corps, 10 January 2000.]
33. Diario, pp. 26–44.
34. John Paul II, Letter Concerning Pilgrimage to the Places Linked to the History of Salvation, 5.
35. The day after Navarro’s announcement, Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran, the papal “foreign minister,” said that the visit had been “indefinitely postponed” rather than “canceled”: a nice diplomatic technicality (in that no formal invitation had ever been extended by the Iraqi government) that held open the possibility of something happening in the future. Yet the fact remained that it was the Iraqi regime that was responsible for the “indefinite postponement.”
In March 2000, the Italian newspaper Avvenire, which had good Vatican sources, ran a story stating that the Baghdad government’s position had “compromised” the “spiritual nature” of the Pope’s pilgrimage, thus making it impossible for the Pope to come to Ur. Two days later, the Iraqi ambassador to the Holy See wrote a stiff letter to Avvenire, blaming the Pope’s inability to come to Ur on British and American violations of Iraqi sovereignty. Few were persuaded. [ZENIT News Service, March 3, 2000; March 6, 2000.]
36. For John Paul’s homily, see L’Osservatore Romano [English Weekly Edition], March 1, 2000, p. 11.
37. See ibid., p. 5.
38. See ibid., pp. 6–7.
39. Ibid., pp. 1–2 [emphasis in original].
40. For an appreciative evaluation of John Paul’s pre-2000 acts of contrition for the sins of the Church’s children, see Mary Ann Glendon, “Contrition in the Age of Spin Control,” First Things, November 1997, pp. 10–12.
41. John Paul II, TertioMillennio Adveniente, 33 [emphases in original].
42. The task of preparing a study on the various questions involved was given to a subcommission of the ITC, chaired by Msgr. Bruno Forte and including Rev. Christopher Begg, Rev. Sebastian Karotemprel, S.D.B., Msgr. Roland Minnerath, Rev. Thomas Norris, Rev. Rafael Salazar Cardenas, M.Sp.S., and Msgr. Anton Strukelj. The ITC discussed the work of the subcommission in its 1998 and 1999 plenary sessions, then voted its approval of Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past. Cardinal Ratzinger then approved the document for publication.
43. International Theological Commission, Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faul
ts of the Past, p. 27.
44. The Pope’s homily may be found in L’Osservatore Romano [English Weekly Edition], March 15, 2000, pp. 1–2 [emphases in original].
45. “The Pope’s Apology,” New York Times, March 14, 2000. In addition to confusing the Pope’s request for God’s forgiveness with the kind of “apologies” then being offered by U.S. president Bill Clinton (for slavery) and British prime minister Tony Blair (for colonialism), the Times’ editorial smacked of hypocrisy (or, at the very least, a remarkable lack of self-awareness), as the paper had never seen fit to ask God’s forgiveness, or its readers’, for its grotesque misrepresentations of Stalin’s regime in the 1930s, or its romanticized rendering of the Castro revolution in Cuba in the 1960s.
46. Cited in http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/173182?eng=y.
47. Author’s conversation with Pope John Paul II, January 16, 1997.
48. For an account of the negotiations resulting in the Fundamental Agreement between the Holy See and the State of Israel, and John Paul II’s crucial role in them, see Weigel, Witness to Hope, pp. 697–713.
49. See L’Osservatore Romano [English Weekly Edition], March 29, 2000, p. 5.
50. John Paul II, Speech at Yad Vashem, 23 March 2000.
51. John Paul II, General Audience Address, 29 March 2000.
Chapter Six
1. John Paul II, Homily at the Mass for the Canonization of Sister Mary Faustyna Kowalska, 30 April 2000 [emphasis in original].
2. Paul VI, ever the cautious diplomat, did not want beatifications or canonizations of the Mexican and Spanish civil war martyrs to exacerbate the Church’s situation in officially secularist Mexico or to suggest some sort of benediction on the government of Francisco Franco. John Paul II took a more evangelical approach to these questions, believing that the beatifications and canonizations of the twentieth-century martyrs of Mexico and Spain were essential elements of the new evangelization in those two historically Catholic countries.
3. The revised “Roman Martyrology” was published in October 2001. A second edition of the revision, including information on those canonized and beatified between 2001 and June 2004, was published in December 2004.
4. See Robert Royal, The Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century: A Comprehensive World History (New York: Crossroad, 2000).
5. John Paul II, Homily for the Ecumenical Commemoration of the Witnesses to the Faith in the Twentieth Century, 7 May 2000.
6. See Diario, pp. 150–53.
7. For an overview and analysis of these phenomena, see Sandra L. Zimdars-Swartz, Encountering Mary: Visions of Mary from La Salette to Medjugorje (New York: Avon Books, 1991). In Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age (New York: Penguin, 2008), Ruth Harris locates the cult of Lourdes within the spiritual yearnings of a society governed by an anticlerical and exclusively male elite.
8. Tad Szulc was particularly flat-footed on this; see Szulc, Pope John Paul II: The Biography (New York: Scribner, 1995), pp. 66, 77.
9. John Paul II, Gift and Mystery, pp. 27–31. On Jan Tyranowski’s enduring influence on Wojtyła, see Weigel, Witness to Hope, pp. 58–62.
10. See Weigel, Witness to Hope, pp. 576–78.
11. André Frossard and Pope John Paul II, Be Not Afraid! (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), p. 251.
12. “Announcement made by Cardinal Angelo Sodano, Secretary of State,” in Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, The Message of Fatima [emphasis in original].
13. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, “Theological Commentary,” in ibid.
The CDF statement also noted that the “solemn and universal act of consecration” by which John Paul II had entrusted the world to Mary on March 25, 1984, had been “personally confirmed” by Sister Lúcia as corresponding to what the Virgin of Fátima had requested, and thus “any further discussion or request is without basis”—a conclusion denied by some Fátima devotees, who continued throughout the pontificate to insist, against Sister Lúcia’s own testimony, that John Paul II had not done what Mary had asked.
14. John Paul II, Homily at the Closing of the 20th International Marian-Mariological Congress, 24 September 2000 [emphases in original].
15. John Paul II, Gift and Mystery, p. 100.
16. John Paul II, Pastores Dabo Vobis, 12, 23 [emphasis in original].
17. Ibid., 21.
18. On these four points, see “Editor’s Introduction” to Pastores Dabo Vobis, in The Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortations of John Paul II, ed. J. Michael Miller, C.S.B. (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor Publishing Division, 1998).
19. John Paul II, Homily for the Jubilee of Priests, 18 May 2000.
20. Czesław Miłosz, “Ode for the Eightieth Birthday of Pope John Paul II,” in Miłosz, New and Collected Poems, 1931–2001 (New York: Ecco/HarperCollins, 2003), pp. 709–10.
21. John Paul II, Address to the Jubilee of Scientists, 25 May 2000.
22. John Paul II, “Lessons of the Galileo Case,” Origins 22:22 (November 12, 1992), pp. 369–74.
23. John Paul II, Address to the Jubilee of Scientists, 25 May 2000.
24. For John Paul, the release of Agca from Italian imprisonment completed the forgiveness he had freely offered Agca the day after he was shot. It was not clear to some observers, however, that trading the relative comforts of an Italian prison for a Turkish lockup made for an improvement in Agca’s situation.
25. John Paul II, Homily for the Solemnity of Corpus Christi, 22 June 2000.
26. See ZENIT News Service, August 22, 2000.
27. See L’Osservatore Romano [English Weekly Edition], August 23, 2000, pp. 1–3 [emphases in original].
28. John Paul II, Homily at Mass with the Bishops and Priests of the Diocese of Aosta, 22 July 2000.
29. John Paul II, Address to the 18th International Congress of the Transplantation Society, 29 August 2000.
In the course of defending the “dead donor rule” in organ transplantation, John Paul discussed the “neurological criterion” as the means of “ascertaining death” and concluded that “the criterion adopted in more recent times for ascertaining the fact of death, namely the complete and irreversible cessation of all brain activity, if rigorously applied, does not seem to conflict with the essential elements of a sound anthropology” [ibid., 5]. This conclusion intersected with, and in some respects intensified, a debate already under way in international scientific and philosophical circles. For critiques of the “neurological criterion” from various perspectives, see Finis Vitae: Is Brain Death Still Life?, ed. Roberto de Mattei (Rome: Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, 2006). In the United States, the President’s Council on Bioethics addressed the subject in a December 2008 white paper, “Controversies in the Determination of Death,” the conclusions of which were parallel to those of John Paul II. The “personal statements” appended to the white paper by Gilbert Meilaender and Edmund Pellegrino offer a convenient summary of the state of the debate as of late 2009.
30. These two conciliar statements are found in Lumen Gentium [The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church], 8. The Latin formulation subsistit in [subsists in] had been substituted in Lumen Gentium for the flat statement that the one Church of Christ “is” [est] the Catholic Church. An ocean of ink had been expended in the three and a half decades since the Council on parsing the meaning of subsistit and its difference, if any, from est.
31. Jerry Filteau, “U.S. Dialogue Partners Are Troubled by New Vatican Text,” Catholic Review, October 5, 2000, p. 12.
32. The canonization of the Chinese martyrs was bitterly criticized by the communist government in Beijing, which claimed that the martyrs had been Western imperialist agents (since some had come to China from Spain, France, Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands) or had “bullied” the Chinese people. Papal spokesman Navarro-Valls replied that the Holy See was “profoundly saddened” by such incomprehension on the part of the Chinese government, for the canonization had “no political motivation” and John Paul II’s respect for Chinese civil
ization was well known. [Sarah Delaney, “China Scolds Vatican Over Sainthoods,” Washington Post, September 27, 2000; “Beijing Steps Up Accusations Against Vatican Over Martyrs,” ZENIT News Service, September 26, 2000.]
33. John Paul II, Angelus, 1 October 2000.
34. John Paul II, Homily for the Beatification of Pius IX, John XXIII, Tommaso Reggio, William Chaminade, and Columba Marmion, 3 September 2000 [emphases in original]. Abbot Marmion, a native of Ireland who spent most of his religious life in France at the Abbey of Maredsous, had a marked influence on Karol Wojtyła’s theology and spirituality of the priesthood. Chaminade was the founder of the Marianists. Reggio was a priest-journalist who became Archbishop of Genoa in the late nineteenth century.
35. “Pope Calls for Worldwide Abolition of Death Penalty,” ZENIT News Service, December 12, 2000.
36. John Paul II, Homily at Midnight Mass, 24 December 2000 [emphasis in original].
37. John Paul II, Homily for the Solemnity of the Epiphany and the Closing of the Holy Door, 6 January 2001.
Prior to the Holy Door of St. Peter’s being completely sealed on the inside with masonry, a bronze urn was placed with it, containing twenty-three silver coins from each year of the pontificate of John Paul II and seventeen bronze coins corresponding to the years since the jubilee of 1983; a parchment scroll attesting to the opening and closing of the Holy Door in the Great Jubilee of 2000; and the keys of the Holy Door. The holy doors of the other patriarchal basilicas were solemnly closed over the next three weeks. [Diario, p. 344.]
38. John Paul II, Novo Millennio Ineunte, 2.
39. Ibid., 3 [emphasis in original].
40. Ibid., 4, 15.
41. Ibid., 8 [emphasis in original].
42. Ibid., 15.
43. Ibid., 29.
44. Ibid., 31.
45. Ibid., 37 [emphasis in original].
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