Msgr. Dziwisz saw me out, thanked me again for the book and for “what you have done for Poland,” and then said, “Ma così giovane!” (But you are so young!) It was the first of many gentle tweaks to come from the gatekeeper; yet it was said in such a friendly way that I sensed the gate would be kept as open as circumstances permitted.
Later that week, sitting outside a coffee bar near the Piazza Venezia, I pondered a photo of John Paul II and me looking at The Final Revolution and asked myself why this man, with a lot of other things on his mind, was so taken by my book and its analysis. I knew from study and from conversation with his friends that he had no use for flattery or sycophancy. Moreover, hadn’t he told Cardinal Tomko that his responsibility was simply to do his job, like any other servant? That was how he thought of his role in the events of 1989: he was just doing his job.
What struck him, I decided, was that we had come by different routes to a common understanding of the inner dynamic of the overthrow of European communism. He had a well-developed theory of history: he thought that culture was the principal driver of history over the long haul, not politics and not economics. It was a deeply Slavic view of How Things Worked, and he had deployed it with analytic effect in Centesimus Annus. For my part, research in Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1991 had both confirmed and filled out my sense that much more was going on in the Revolution of 1989 than a rejection of communism’s political cruelties and economic idiocies. Something had stirred in the souls of the people who made the revolution, and that something had made for a different kind of revolution: a “final revolution.” It was not final in the sense of temporality (there would surely be other revolutions in the future), but it was final in the sense of “final causality” or destiny—the destiny of the human spirit liberated in the truth, be that the truth of revelation, the truth of reason, or both.
That was John Paul II’s view of things, too, and that agreement was the beginning of the bond between us. He was grateful, not because I had made him the hero of this episode of history, but because I had explained that episode in a way he thought important, not least because it might be an alternative to the false views of history that had made such a bloody mess of the twentieth century.
AFTER THE REVOLUTION
ROME AND POLAND, 1993–1994
THE FOLLOWING TWO YEARS TOOK ME TO POLAND AND ROME several times, deepening my exploration of those now not-so-new worlds.
Academic conferences in Warsaw and Kraków in June and October 1993, plus conversations held on the sidelines of the Centesimus Annus summer seminar (which moved to Kraków in 1994), taught me that Poland had become what the people of the Solidarity revolution had said they wanted: “a normal society.” And with normality came contention. The old Solidarity coalition fractured, and I found myself in the disconcerting position of knowing an increasing number of ex–prime ministers of postcommunist Poland, where holding together a governing coalition amidst the dislocations of economic “shock therapy” was proving a tricky business.
What was more disconcerting was the difficulty Poles of all sorts (including many Polish clergy) were having in making real John Paul II’s vision of public Catholicism. In one corner of the ring there were secular people (like Adam Michnik) and some progressive Catholics who wanted Poland to resemble France in its laïcité. In another corner were those Catholics (including not a few clergy) who imagined a return to the close Church-state cooperation of the 1920s and 1930s. In yet another corner were those who really got John Paul II’s idea of a culture-forming Church that shaped public life through an educated and engaged laity: a Church that was not identified with any political party but that taught a vision of the free and virtuous society that animated all of society. Yet the numbers in this third corner were smaller than one might have imagined—or hoped.
From all of this, I learned that a stringent interpretation of the idea of a wall of separation between Church and state was one of America’s least admirable exports to the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe. I tried to clarify what that phrase did and didn’t mean at a Warsaw conference in June 1993 and in an article in the August 27, 1993, issue of Tygodnik Powszechny, “Fourteen Theses on Church and State,” which reflected the idea of the public-but-not-partisan Church John Paul II outlined in Centesimus Annus. Two weeks later, a note from Msgr. Dziwisz assured me that the Pope had read my “valuable paper,” which was being put to “good use.”
I spent a week in Rome in June 1994. In addition to extending the conversations I had begun with Cardinal Ratzinger, Cardinal Edward Cassidy of the Vatican’s ecumenical shop, and Joaquín Navarro-Valls, I began a multidecade conversation with Cardinal Francis Arinze, a native Nigerian then serving as President of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue. Arinze helped me understand John Paul II’s impact on, and fascination with, sub-Saharan Africa and opened for me a window into the fastest-growing part of the world Church.
I hoped to see John Paul and was encouraged to get in touch by Msgr. Dziwisz, but the broken hip the Pope had suffered a month earlier put a major crimp in his schedule. Dziwisz, unfailingly polite, called to explain the situation and went the extra mile by writing me a note, promising a get-together in September, when I would return to the city and, as he put it, “we should all feel stronger after a good vacation, which you surely deserve!”
The Pope’s limited schedule did include a meeting with President Bill Clinton while I was in Rome. That session, on June 2, coincided with the announcement that Msgr. Timothy Dolan of St. Louis would become the new rector of the North American College later that summer. Dolan and I were old friends and as he and I were both staying at the College, we decided to tag along for the meeting the president and first lady would have with the college’s students after Clinton met with the Pope.
The presidential motorcade, including special black vans (“HRC I” and “HRC II”) for Mrs. Clinton and her staff, pretty well filled the Cortile di San Damaso of the Apostolic Palace. The majority of the seminarians did not seem thrilled to be meeting a man they regarded as hopelessly offside on core Catholic concerns, but former Boston mayor Ray Flynn, Clinton’s ambassador to the Holy See, arranged the meeting and the college rector, Monsignor Edwin O’Brien, properly told the boys that if the President of the United States wanted to meet with them, they would meet with him, period. Flynn didn’t improve the atmosphere when he announced to the president, the first lady, and the students that the seminarians were “all Democrats.” (Paul Scalia, son of Justice Antonin Scalia, looked particularly unhappy with this bit of Bostonian blarney.) Then President Clinton described all the things that he and John Paul had discussed, while the first lady looked at him with a rapt smile, although without the black mantilla she wore to meet the Pope.
I was used to the Clinton spin machine, but this really took me aback. For I knew exactly what the Pope had talked about with the president, because I had discussed the matter with Vatican officials previously and developed, at their request, talking points for the meeting. And what the Pope had emphasized was the upcoming Cairo International Conference on Population and Development, where the Clinton administration was planning to get abortion on demand declared a fundamental human right. Yet POTUS 42 said not a single word about Cairo, the abortion issue, or any related matter in regaling the seminarians with tales of how he and John Paul agreed on just about everything they discussed.
Later that afternoon, I received a fax from Joaquín Navarro-Valls, who had quickly put out a statement challenging the administration’s spin on what POTUS and the Pope had discussed: “The most important part of the meeting,” the statement read, “was dedicated to the topic of the International Conference of the United Nations on Population and Development planned for Cairo in September and the serious ethical problems that are connected with it: defense and promotion of life, and defense and promotion of the family in particular. In this regard, the Holy Father made an appeal to the responsibility of a great nation such as America, whose
origins and historical development [have] always promoted ethical values that are basic to every culture.”
While the memory of Bill Clinton spinning the Pope remained with me, what was far more important for my work on John Paul II, and indeed for my learning the Vatican, was the friendship I began to form in those days with the head of the English section of the Vatican’s Secretariat of State, Monsignor James Harvey. Over the next five years, Harvey, a Milwaukee native two years my senior, would become my closest friend in Rome, my tutor and consigliere in matters of Vaticanology, and a canny source of insight into how to get things done (and how not to get things done) inside the Leonine Wall.
In late July 1994, I sent John Paul a longish letter on my three most recent experiences in Poland, which had taught me a lot about the difficulties he was having in getting his teaching on Church, state, and democracy understood and implemented there. Msgr. Dziwisz wrote back on the Pope’s behalf, thanking me and my colleagues for our “excellent work.” I looked forward to seeing John Paul and Dziwisz in September, when I would be in Rome on one leg of a three-city tour arranged by the Mondadori publishing firm and my friend Leonardo Mondadori. I would be promoting The Final Revolution’s Italian edition, which was just appearing; Richard Neuhaus’s book on Centesimus Annus had been published in Italian at about the same time, so he would be talking about that, with Mike Novak forming the third part of our team of Americans published by Mondadori and encouraged by Rocco Buttiglione. But as John Paul continued to have difficulties with his hip replacement, to the point where he was forced to postpone for a year a planned visit to the United States, it wasn’t clear that we would be able to meet during our time in Rome.
Richard and I had useful meetings with Cardinals Ratzinger and Cassidy about our ecumenical work with evangelical Protestants. Ratzinger also encouraged me to get the book of commentaries on Centesimus Annus I had edited for the Ethics and Public Policy Center published in Central and Eastern Europe. Italian press coverage of the Mondadori-sponsored book presentation in Rome, held at the Collegio Teutonico inside the Vatican on September 27, taught me more important lessons about the porous border between fact and fantasy in Italian journalism: Italy’s newspaper of record, the Corriere della Sera, described our press conferences and book presentations in Rome, Naples, and Milan as a nefarious plot to bolster Silvio Berlusconi.
On Saturday, September 24, Richard and I got a call inviting us to Castel Gandolfo for lunch with John Paul II the following day. So off we went to the Castelli Romani late Sunday morning, as our pranzo papale would take place immediately after the noontime Sunday Angelus with the Pope (which, during the summer, took place at Castel Gandolfo rather than in St. Peter’s Square). Fr. Maciej Zięba was helpful in getting things organized and told us to meet him in the inner courtyard of the papal villa after the Angelus, after which the three of us would be taken upstairs to the Pope’s quarters. It wasn’t entirely clear how we were going to find Maciej in the mob scene at Castel Gandolfo, but once the crowds thinned out we spotted his white Dominican habit, exchanged greetings, and went inside the papal villa. There, a bit of opera buffa ensued.
Evidently, Ambassador Ray Flynn had shown up at Castel Gandolfo and was demanding to see the Pope. We only found out about this when the Prefect of the Papal Household, Archbishop Dino Monduzzi, chased Ambassador Flynn out of the villa through the parlor in which Richard, Maciej, and I had been parked before lunch. Ray would become a friend before his term in Rome expired, but that bizarre scene seemed at the time an apt metaphor for the Clinton administration’s relations with the Holy See, two weeks after the showdown at the Cairo population conference.
Calm having been restored to Castel Gandolfo, we were brought into the dining room where John Paul II greeted us, dressed in papal summer casual: white cassock, no Roman collar, no sash, and no cuffed shirt beneath the cassock. He was obviously comfortable with us and didn’t see any need to look pontifical. Still recovering from the hip-replacement operation, he was nonetheless full of robust conversation and striking comments over a ninety-minute pranzo.
Asked about his role in Central and Eastern Europe, he was crisp and shrewd: “Before 1989 they found the Pope useful; we shall see if they find him useful now.” Pre-1989, he remarked, his had been a pontificate “facing East”; now it was “facing West.” In that regard, he thanked us for our work in promoting Centesimus Annus and urged us not to back off in pushing the encyclical’s teaching on the relationship between truth and freedom, virtue and democracy. He also said that he understood that, for some in Poland, he was a “dangerous radical.”
His mind was already on what he would call the Great Jubilee of 2000, and he told the story of Cardinal Wyszyński saying to him, immediately after his election, “You should lead the Church into the third millennium.” The recent Cairo conference, he said, had “vindicated” the Church’s public role; after we talked about that for a bit, he said he knew that the radicalism of the Clinton administration’s proposals at Cairo did not reflect public opinion in the United States. It was clear that he invested a lot of hope in America and spoke forcefully about the previous year’s World Youth Day in Denver, which had been a “great consolation” to him—even as he smiled and cracked that it was a “big surprise” for the American bishops, who had insisted that a pope-centered youth festival built around the sacraments wouldn’t work in the United States.
The three surprises of his life, he mused, were his election, the assassination attempt in 1981, and the fact that the communist crack-up had happened nonviolently. But what really struck Richard, Maciej, and me was the intensity of John Paul’s insistence on ecumenical outreach. Ecumenism, he insisted, was “the great question of the third millennium”; he then said, flatly, that unity was “more important than jurisdiction” when it came to healing the breach between Rome and Eastern Orthodoxy, although he also noted that the Christian East had not disentangled itself from state power, as the Church in the West had done.
His sense of humor, always a bit wry, was evident throughout the meal. When Richard told him that he was “running ahead of history,” he quickly shot back, “So maybe that’s why I broke my leg?” He also laughed when musing on what Voltaire would have said about a pope as the world’s premier advocate of human rights. He smiled at the irony of Americans explaining the importance of a Polish pope and his teaching to Poles, but shrugged and said, in a phrase he would use on other occasions when something struck him as amusingly strange or curious, “Ale co zrobić?” (What can you do?). At the end, seeing us out, he said, “Come back and visit me; I have lunch with the Pope every day.”
Immediately after returning to Washington I flew to Grand Rapids to speak at Calvin College. The audience was composed of evangelical Protestants of one theological disposition or another. When word began to circulate that I had seen John Paul II five days earlier, everyone asked, “How is he?” The postponement of the US trip had set off the usual round of lurid media speculations; here was a cross section of the intellectual leadership of evangelical Protestantism in the US, deeply worried that the man they considered a premier Christian witness might be in distress, perhaps even on his way off the stage. I was happy to reassure them that the Pope was in good form and that ecumenism remained high on his agenda.
As for John Paul II, he dealt with his infirmity, which had caused him to start using a cane, with the medicine of humor. A week or so after our lunch, he noticed the bishops at a meeting watching him closely as he walked slowly to the dais. Turning toward them, he wisecracked in Italian, “Eppur’ si muove” (And yet it moves)—the words Galileo muttered to his inquisitors on his way out of his trial, still insisting, sotto voce, that the Earth was not stationary but revolved around the sun.
THE BIOGRAPHY THAT WASN’T
WASHINGTON AND ROME, SPRING 1995
ON OCTOBER 19, 1994, JOHN PAUL II PUBLISHED Crossing the Threshold of Hope, a long-form interview with the Italian writer Vittorio Messori. The book was an instan
t bestseller in dozen of languages, and its searching exploration of some of the most profound questions of the human condition began to reconfigure the standard media stereotype of John Paul as a charming reactionary. Threshold was also the occasion for me to put into print for the first time the phrase “John Paul the Great,” in an op-ed piece for the Los Angeles Times.
The first days of Lent 1995 found me in Rome to speak at a conference on “Development and Population in the Perspective of a New Humanism,” in which Joaquín Navarro-Valls had urged me to participate. The conference was organized by some of his friends at the higher intellectual altitudes of Opus Dei, and the objective was to get clarified what the Vatican had done, and why, at the Cairo population conference the previous October. I spoke on the “New Cultural Imperialism,” drawing on the article I wrote about the Cairo conference for First Things, the ecumenical journal of the Institute on Religion and Public Life, which had drawn a positive response from the papal apartment. So did my conference paper, for which Msgr. Dziwisz thanked me warmly in a letter of March 29; the letter suggested that he’d read the paper closely, for he ticked off all of its main points as if writing an exam.
Dziwisz also invited me to the Pope’s morning Mass on Saturday, March 4. With his agreement, I brought along Mike Novak, in town for the same conference to build a bridge between Centesimus Annus and new approaches to economic development. After Mass, we spent a few minutes with John Paul in the formal library, where Dziwisz was effusive about these American “amici veri” (true friends). The Pope seemed more bemused than honored by being named Time’s Man of the Year, and most of our conversation was spent filling him in on our families and our mutual friends.
Crossing the Threshold of Hope was the far more important book, but it was Tad Szulc’s Pope John Paul II: The Biography that took my relationship with John Paul to a new and unexpected level.
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