The End and the Beginning

by George Weigel

  51. John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, pp. 92–93 [emphases in original].

  52. For an overview of the range of issues John Paul II engaged in these fields, see Live the Truth: The Moral Legacy of John Paul II in Catholic Health Care, ed. Edward J. Furton (Philadelphia: National Catholic Bioethics Center, 2006).

  53. These charges were frequently leveled before the 1994 Cairo International Conference on Population and Development; see Weigel, Witness to Hope, pp. 718–19.

  54. That the developing human being in the womb was, in fact, a human being was scientifically indisputable, as many leading embryology texts made clear. See, for example, Keith L. Moore and T. V. N. Persaud, The Developing Human, 7th ed. (New York: W. B. Saunders, 2003), p. 16.

  55. John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, 20 [emphases in original].

  56. See ibid., 18–19.

  57. See ibid., 28.

  58. See Leon Kass, “L’Chaim and Its Limits: Why Not Immortality?” First Things (May 2001).

  59. On this point, see Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., “Can Philosophy Be Christian? The New State of the Question,” in Dulles, Church and Society, pp. 291–305.

  60. Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., “The Rebirth of Apologetics,” in ibid., p. 430.

  61. Dulles, “Can Philosophy Be Christian?” p. 296.

  62. For a fuller treatment of Veritatis Splendor and the reactions to it, see Weigel, Witness to Hope, pp. 686–95, and notes.

  63. On this point, see Servais Pinckaers, O.P., The Sources of Christian Ethics, trans. from the 3rd ed. by Sr. Mary Thomas Noble, O.P. (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1995).

  64. For a brief synopsis of the Theology of the Body, see ibid., pp. 333–43. For a reliable and scholarly one-volume translation with extensive notes and an informative introduction, see John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body, trans. and ed. Michael Waldstein (Boston: Pauline Books and Media, 2006).

  65. On John Paul II’s feminism, see Weigel, Witness to Hope, pp. 578–81; on the controversy over the possibility of ordaining women to the ministerial priesthood, see ibid., 727–34.

  66. John Paul II, “Annual Address to the Roman Curia,” L’Osservatore Romano [English Weekly Edition], January 11, 1988, pp. 6–8. See also Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Office of Peter and the Structure of the Church (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986); and two essays by Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., “Priesthood and Gender” and “Mary at the Dawn of the New Millennium,” in Dulles, Church and Society.

  67. John Paul II, Spes Aedificandi (Apostolic Letter Issued Motu Proprio Proclaiming Saint Bridget of Sweden, Saint Catherine of Siena, and Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross Co-Patronesses of Europe).

  68. Cited in Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., “University Theology as a Service to the Church,” in Dulles, Church and Society, p. 11.

  69. On these points, and for the relevant citations, see Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., “John Paul II and the Mystery of the Human Person,” in Dulles, Church and Society, pp. 414–29.

  70. The American cardinal’s summary judgment of John Paul II’s distinctive Christian personalism and his attempt to read the corpus of Christian doctrine through that prism is worth a reflection:

  Personalism has its clearest application in the realm of privacy and one-to-one relations. It is crucial in individual self-realization and in marriage and family life—themes on which John Paul II [wrote] luminously. More remarkably, he … found ways of extending personalism to deal with political and economic issues, drawing on his conceptions of human action, personal participation, and free initiative. Although personalism cannot be an adequate tool for handling the larger issues of law and order, war and peace, John Paul II … injected important new considerations into the fields of business, jurisprudence, political science, and international relations.

  Theologically, likewise, the Pope [was] a personalist. He [wrote] movingly of the desire for God inscribed in the human heart. He [dwelt] joyfully on the one-to-one relation between the individual and Jesus Christ, mediated through the Scriptures, the sacraments, and the Church. His concentration on God’s amazing love and mercy [was] a welcome antidote to pessimistic preachers who have portrayed God as a demanding master and a rigorous judge. But, as John Paul … surely [recognized], God’s love cannot be played off against his justice. The Pope [knew] well that the love of God cannot exist without his call to obedience to God’s commandments and that persons who reject God’s love must reckon with his justice. [Ibid., p. 427.]

  On John Paul II’s personalism and questions of jurisprudence, see George Weigel, “John Paul II and the Law: Some Preliminary Reflections,” Ave Maria Law Review 5:2 (2007), pp. 361–66, and the articles following.

  71. Ibid.

  John Paul II’s successor as pope, Joseph Ratzinger, once offered an interesting reflection on Karol Wojtyła’s intellectual method in a conversation with the author:

  The principal theme of the Holy Father, when he was professor and also when he was pope, has been anthropology.

  In the confrontation with Marxism the main problem was not so much physics—demonstrating God from physics, or from the natural sciences—the real problem was the problem of man: the human being. Because the question really is [the question of] our vocation: what are we to do to build history? The problem of Marxism did not come from natural sciences but from an anthropological/historical vision of what man is, and how man will be redeemed. [How one thinks about] the philosophy of history also [determines one’s] philosophy of redemption. With a materialistic idea of history, liberation … will be realized in a natural redemption of human beings, once oppressed by economic powers, but [now] freed by a correct understanding and application of the mechanisms of history.

  The Holy Father had seen [that] the [real] problem, consequently, is “What is man and how does he function in history? What is the Christian answer about human existence?” [And he believed that] the Christian vision of history was a better response than that given by Marxism. But even before the Marxist reality after the war, his study of philosophy was always centered on and guided by this anthropological interest. [And] it is clear that in his vision of man and history—and the parallel of man and history—the question of God is the decisive question. For liberal thinking, in a quite different way from Marxism, development as such is governing history and is decisive for man. For the Holy Father, the absence of God is decisive, and the only true anthropology is the anthropology of God and man.

  And so Christology is the center of his anthropology. But I would underline that this is not a positivistic Christology, [the kind of] theological positivism … we have in so many theologians. Rather, Christology finds its centrality [against] the background of the philosophical question “What is man?” The Holy Father’s open personal dialogue with all his friends (beginning in the war and continuing when he was a priest) was perhaps the personal background of his philosophical and theological thinking. He is a person very interested in his own existence—who am I, myself?—but [also] a person substantially interested in all human beings, in man. It was for him a very priestly vocation to help persons to be [truly] human.… His personal charism, his love for man, implies his philosophical interest. The philosophical interest in him is not purely academic or intellectual. His philosophical work is a concretization of his personal charism as priest, his personal passion for human beings. He simply likes dialogue, he likes young people: but all of this is a passion for man. So his philosophical reflection is a necessary consequence of what he is in his deepest heart.

  His study of mystics was a study of man, a study of human existence. And human existence in St. John of the Cross can be understood as a theological reality in the [human] openness to God.

  For me, his first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis, is really a synthesis of his thinking. Here we can meet this passion for anthropology as not [merely] intellectual, but as a total passion for man—and also the perfect identification between phi
losophical and rational interests [on the one hand] with faith and the work of a priest and of a theologian [on the other]. This is a key text for understanding the Holy Father as a spiritual and intellectual figure. But [the] spirituality and intellectuality are [really] one thing, as in John of the Cross mystical contemplation and anthropological/philosophical reflection are not two things but essentially one thing.

  After his study of the New Scholasticism, it was interesting for him to find the phenomenological philosophy of the Twenties. Because here, even if he is in a critical distance from Scheler, he found the possibility of a synthesis between metaphysics and anthropology and between phenomenology (what is appearing) and a metaphysical concept of man. Also this synthesis of anthropology as metaphysical anthropology [coupled with] the phenomenological taking account of what is really the concrete realization of human existence is very significant for him.

  We could say that all this is more concretely developed in his different teachings. It was perhaps not foreseen, but what finally [happened] is that Redemptor Hominis became the first part of a Trinitarian presentation. And even if that was not his first intention in writing Redemptor Hominis, it was a natural development. To [move] to a Trinitarian vision of God, history, and man is an expression of his way of thinking: beginning with anthropology and searching for an answer to what is human existence, he comes to God—to the Trinitarian God of love (in Dives in Misericordia and Dominum et Vivificantem)—and returns from this to man, because his Trinitarian vision is not purely speculative but makes us understand how God is God-in-history. In the deepest mystery of the Trinitarian existence, we are also [encountering] the concrete possibilities that God, who is himself relation and dialogue, can create history, can be present in history. [Author’s interview with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, September 12, 1996.]

  72. Cardinal Winning made his remarks at the conclusion of the author’s lecture on the achievement of Pope John Paul II, St. Andrew’s Cathedral, Glasgow, March 9, 2001.

  73. Author’s interview with Cardinal John J. O’Connor, November 8, 1996.

  74. Author’s interview with Massimo D’Alema, December 10, 1997.

  75. E-mail to the author from Francis J. Beckwith, January 8, 2009. See also Francis J. Beckwith, “Vatican Bible School: What John Paul II Can Teach Evangelicals,” Touchstone, June 2005 (also available at http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=18–05–019v).

  76. Author’s interview with Nina Sophie Heereman, November 21, 2008. See also Nina Heereman, “We Loved Him!” Inside the Vatican, August–September 2005.

  77. Letter to the author from Sister Mary Karol Widomska, O.P.

  78. “Father Finest,” New York Post, November 13, 2008, cited in catholic eye 274 (November 25, 2008), p. 4.

  79. E-mail to the author from Cary Elwes, September 7, 2009; “Loren Wants Pope John Paul II Beatified: Report,” Agence France Presse, April 1, 2009.

  80. Author’s interview with Joaquín Navarro-Valls, December 16, 1998.

  81. On this point, see Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., “John Paul II and the New Evangelization,” in Dulles, Church and Society, pp. 87–90.

  82. John Paul II created Father Congar a cardinal in 1994, the year before the French theologian’s death.

  83. On the Küng affair, see Weigel, Witness to Hope, pp. 356–57.

  84. While international in scope, this interpretation of the Council received its most extensive scholarly treatment from the “Bologna School” of Catholic historians; its principal work was the five-volume study History of Vatican II, eds. Giuseppe Alberigo and Joseph A. Komonchak (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1995–2006).

  See also Sandro Magister, “The Council of Bologna: The Rise and Fall of a Dream of Church Reform,” available at http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo.38108?eng=y.

  85. For an American example, see John R. Quinn, “Considering the Papacy,” Origins 26 (July 18, 1996), pp. 119–27. A more politically deft, but essentially similar, critique came from Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, in his essay launching the Catholic Common Ground Project; see “Called to Be Catholic: Church in a Time of Peril,” Origins 26 (August 29, 1996), pp. 165–70. For a critique of the Quinn and Bernardin critiques, see Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., “The Travails of Dialogue,” in Dulles, Church and Society, pp. 221–33.

  86. On John Paul II’s handling of the Lefebvrists and the schism that resulted from Archbishop Lefebvre’s defiance of the Pope, see Weigel, Witness to Hope, pp. 562–64. The Lefebvrist schism would continue to bedevil Pope Benedict XVI, who, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, was John Paul’s principal agent in attempting to reconcile to the teaching of Vatican II the ultimately unreconcilable French prelate. The key issue in all this, it should be stressed, was not the Council’s liturgical reforms (which the Lefebvrists intensely disliked) but the Council’s teaching on religious freedom (which many Lefebvrists, including Marcel Lefebvre himself, regarded as inauthentically Catholic).

  87. For a more complete discussion of both the progressive and restorationist critiques of the first twenty years of the pontificate of John Paul II, see Weigel, Witness to Hope, pp. 850–58.

  88. On this point, see Hans Urs von Balthasar, In the Fullness of Faith: On the Centrality of the Distinctively Catholic (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), p. 105.

  89. Author’s interview with Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran, November 14, 1997.

  90. Author’s interview with Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran, March 18, 1997; author’s interview with Cardinal Antonio María Rouco Varela, October 20, 2001.

  91. The roots of German skepticism about John Paul II, including its ethnic dimension, were analyzed for the author by two German-speaking prelates, Cardinal Walter Kasper (in an interview on February 19, 2002) and Cardinal Joachim Meisner (in an interview on October 17, 2001).

  92. Author’s interview with Cardinal Walter Kasper, February 19, 2002.

  93. Perhaps the most dramatic instance of this rejection came in the wake of Veritatis Splendor. See the essay by Josef Fuchs, S.J., in Understanding “Veritatis Splendor,” ed. John Wilkins (London: SPCK, 1994); and the essays in Moraltheologie im Abseits? Antwort auf die Enzyklika “Veritatis Splendor,” ed. Dieter Mieth (Freiburg/Basel/Vienna: Herder, 1994).

  See also the author’s introduction to Zeuge der Hofnung: Johannes Paul II—Eine Biographie (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2002), pp. xiii–xx.

  94. Author’s interview with Cardinal Joachim Meisner, October 17, 2001.

  95. Author’s interview with Cardinal Karl Lehmann, October 24, 2001.

  96. Whether this new approach would long survive the retirement of Cardinal Camillo Ruini as Vicar of Rome and president of the Italian Bishops Conference [CEI] was an open question, five years after the John Paul II’s death. Ruini was John Paul’s indispensable deputy for Italian affairs, and created the Progetto culturale [Cultural Project] at the CEI as a means for engaging the wider Italian society and culture with the truths of reason and faith. The Progetto culturale (with Ruini as its head) remained in place after Ruini’s retirement from the Vicariate of Rome and the presidency of the CEI in 2008, and with the support of Benedict XVI. But other forces in Italian Catholic life, including those more comfortable with the pre-John Paul II/pre–Ruini status quo, were asserting themselves in late 2009. See Sandro Magister, “Make or Break: The Italian Bishops at the Final Tally,” at http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/1340096?eng=y.

  97. Author’s interview with Cardinal Antonio María Rouco Varela, October 20, 2001.

  98. Author’s interview with Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, October 24, 1996.

  99. The story of Lustiger’s appointment, arguably the boldest of John Paul II’s pontificate, is told in Weigel, Witness to Hope, pp. 388–90.

  100. Author’s interview with Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, March 8, 2001.

  101. The revelations of clergy sexual abuse in Ireland were seized upon by the Irish media as evidence for their charge that the Catholic Church had lon
g been awash in hypocrisy in its teaching on sexual morality.

  102. See Tess Livingstone, George Pell: Defender of the Faith Down Under (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005).

  103. On this point, see Amy L. Sherman, The Soul of Development: Biblical Christianity and Economic Transformation in Guatemala (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

  104. On this point, see Richard John Neuhaus, Appointment in Rome: The Church in America Awakening (New York: Crossroad, 1999), pp. 123–26.

  105. Author’s interview with Cardinal Camillo Ruini, March 17, 2008.

  106. Author’s interview with Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, M.Afr., April 9, 2002.

  107. On this point, see George Weigel, Tranquillitas Ordinis: The Present Failure and Future Promise of American Catholic Thought on War and Peace (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), “Part One: The Heritage.”

  108. For a review of the centuries-long development of classic Catholic International Relations Theory, see John Eppstein, The Catholic Tradition of the Law of Nations (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1935).

  109. On the default positions in the “foreign ministry” of the Secretariat of State, see George Weigel, “Thinking World Politics—a Catholic Optic,” in Weigel, Against the Grain: Christianity and Democracy, War and Peace, pp. 176–99.

  110. On John Paul II’s intervention during the Beagle Channel crisis of 1978–79, see Weigel, Witness to Hope, pp. 272–73, 378.

  111. The Italian philosopher and politician Rocco Buttiglione was a longtime interlocutor of John Paul II, and remembered that, in 1990–91, the Pope had asked in private conversation about the applicability of the lessons of “1989” to the Iraqi invasion and occupation of Kuwait. Was Saddam Hussein more powerful than communism? the Pope wondered. [Author’s conversation with Rocco Buttiglione, October 31, 2008.] One reply might have been that Saddam wasn’t more powerful, in military terms or in his capacity to wreak havoc in the world; but he was more irrational, and more ruthless, than the communist leaders who eventually gave way in 1989. Saddam Hussein’s ruthlessness and taste for mass murder far more resembled Stalin’s than any communist leader with whom the forces of freedom in “1989” had to contend.