Lessons in Hope

by George Weigel

  At our first meeting in his offices at the Congregation for Catholic Education he rushed in late, said he could only give me a half hour, and then proceeded to talk for forty minutes, virtually nonstop, about the Pope, the pontificate, and, of course, himself. It was the old modus operandi I remembered from our Washington encounters, and the only thing to do was sit back and let the tide roll on. He had some interesting things to say about the Pope’s role in settling the Beagle Channel dispute between Argentina and Chile shortly after his election, praised the Theology of the Body (“a lasting and original contribution”), and made some pointed comments about the weaknesses in the American hierarchy that led to his Washington appointment and his mandate to try setting a different course.

  Our second meeting two months later largely dealt with the Central America controversies of the 1980s. The suggestion bruited by some—that the Pope had been tough on Catholic revolutionaries in Central America as part of a deal with the Reagan administration, which in turn would be tough on Poland’s communist regime after the martial law declaration—was rubbish, Laghi insisted. Then he described crisply John Paul’s analysis of the Church’s troubles in Latin America in the 1980s. There were three interlocking problems, the Pope had said. There was an ideological problem, in that certain forms of liberation theology were off the doctrinal reservation. There was an ecclesiological problem, in that the “popular Church” movement wanted to marry the Church to revolutionary regimes, or, in Laghi’s words, “put a rifle in the hands of the crucified Lord.” And then there was a persecution problem, with the Castro regime trying to strangle the Church on the island prison while exporting its political doctrine throughout the continent. None of this had anything to do with Poland or Solidarity, obviously.

  In this context, Laghi told me a good story about his attempts to explain Latin American theological controversies to President Ronald Reagan. In the mid-1980s, Reagan asked Laghi, “What is this damned ‘theology of liberation’?” Laghi, knowing that the president had been at an Italian-American function the night before, said, “The spaghetti is good but the sauce is poisoned”—the spaghetti being the Church’s work with the poor and the sauce being a Marxist analysis that led to revolutionary violence in the name of the Gospel. It was a deft response, reflecting Laghi’s instinct to find the fifty-yard line in any controversy—although “poisoned” was a bit sharper than one might have expected from a quintessential Vatican diplomat.

  The conversation at our third meeting turned to Mother Teresa, who had died the month before, and Laghi made an intriguing observation: she had been to John Paul, Laghi suggested, what Catherine of Siena was to the papacy of the fourteenth century. I wasn’t entirely sure the analogy worked—Catherine was known for reading Pope Gregory XI the riot act, which was not exactly Mother Teresa’s m.o. with John Paul II—but it was a striking indication of the respect in which the tiny Albanian-born nun was held at the highest altitudes of the Roman Curia.

  Archbishop Jorge Mejía, with whom I had done some serious head-butting in 1988, proved to be a friendly source of insight into the pre-papal Karol Wojtyła. The Argentine biblical scholar and the Polish philosopher had lived together in the Belgian College during the immediate postwar years in Rome, and Mejía was full of interesting detail about those days—the poverty of the Belgian College, the ease of getting around on bicycles in a Rome not choked by cars and motorini. He also gave me some insight into the atmosphere of the pontifical universities in the late 1940s (and into his own feisty personality). Decades later, John Paul said that he remembered the Argentine for several reasons, including the fact that “you used to raise your hand and interrupt the professors.” Cardinal Ratzinger, who was present at this banter, “just looked at me in horror,” Mejia recalled, “and said, ‘You know, in Germany you had to send a message to the professor to ask a question.’”

  As the Sostituto of the Secretariat of State, Archbishop Giovanni Battista Re was the switchboard through which all papal business flowed. His personality reminded some of an overstimulated child; he charged around Rome in a small Fiat he drove himself; his signature patter—“Bene, bene, bene, bene, bene…”—was a standing joke in the Curia. But he had a rare reputation for efficiency and the curial machinery worked reasonably well on his watch. I don’t think he saw much purpose in my biographical work, for shortly after we met he told Jorge Mejía, “I’ve seen him once and that’s enough.”

  Still, the forty-five minutes we spent together on December 16, 1996, gave me two insights into John Paul’s routine. The first was that the Pope’s daily life was punctuated by many moments of prayer: in addition to the hour of private prayer before his daily Mass, he ducked into the chapel of the papal apartment for prayer before and after audiences, before lunch, after lunch, and “throughout the afternoon.” The second thing Re noted was that John Paul was frequently doing two or three things at once: “During one trip he’s thinking about what should happen on the next trip. During a working lunch he is always talking about the future: the next week, the next month…” Multitasking was a characteristic of Karol Wojtyła as Archbishop of Kraków, and while he didn’t bring to Rome his Cracovian habit of working on correspondence while attending meetings with his collaborators, he was, it seemed, always thinking several moves down the board.

  For a man whose position with the Pope was quite secure, Cardinal Jan Schotte was exceptionally reticent about saying anything on the record. So the most useful material I got from the Belgian General Secretary of the Synod of Bishops, when we met for ninety minutes in March 1997, had to do with Karol Wojtyła’s work in implementing the Second Vatican Council in Kraków, which Schotte had obviously studied with some care. It was, the cardinal said, the “most intense and holistic” such effort in the world: two years of preparatory prayer, in which six hundred prayer groups organized throughout the diocese met regularly to pray for the help of the Holy Spirit in receiving the Council and its documents; then a two-year study of the conciliar documents, aided by Sources of Renewal, the vademecum that Wojtyła wrote on the texts of Vatican II. Only then, after four years of preparation, did the discussion turn to programs for implementing the Council. It was, in effect, a re-catechesis of the entire archdiocese in the form of an archdiocesan Synod. Schotte’s description of this remarkable program, plus conversations I had in Kraków during these months, convinced me that one reason John Paul II was a successful pope was that he had been an exceptionally good diocesan bishop.

  The cautious Schotte did give me one good story, involving the contentious 1980 special Synod for the Netherlands, where Schotte served as translator. It was a linguistic nightmare: none of the seven Dutch bishops had an international language in common; none of the curial officials present spoke Dutch, and one of them, the Australian Cardinal James Knox, didn’t even speak Italian. So Schotte had to translate everything. And at one point, John Paul, who not infrequently used humor to temper tedium, leaned over to the Belgian and whispered, “Sometimes your translations are clearer than what the guy said.”

  After what I expect was a prod from Msgr. Dziwisz, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the papal secretary of state, agreed to speak with me over lunch on December 13, 1996, in his apartment on the second loggia of the Apostolic Palace—much fancier digs than the papal apartment a floor above. It was Sodano who had said that the stranieri, the foreigners, don’t really fit in well “here,” and that was the approach he took with me, greeting me de haut en bas, as if he were a Nobel laureate virologist and I was a mildly interesting new pathogen. The conversation was, in a word, a monologue: I think I got five sentences in over the course of ninety minutes.

  In the course of his lecture, though, Cardinal Sodano helpfully filled in the details of the drama to which Cardinal Laghi had referred: John Paul II’s intervention in late 1978 and early 1979 to forestall a war between Chile and Argentina over the border between them in the Beagle Channel—a strait in the Tierra del Fuego archipelago at the bottom of the world. It was the kind
of dispute between military dictatorships drunk on machismo that could have blown up into something very nasty. And it was the newly elected John Paul II, Sodano said, who insisted on an offer of mediation by the Holy See—something that hadn’t been done since Pope Leo XIII successfully mediated a dispute between Spain and Germany over the Caroline Islands in 1885. Sodano was nuncio in Chile at the time (Pio Laghi was on the other side, as it were, in Argentina), and from both his recollections and Laghi’s, it seemed that the Pope’s insistence on the two parties coming to agreement, and his sending a veteran Vatican diplomat, Cardinal Antonio Samorè, to knock heads in Buenos Aires and Santiago, made a diplomatic solution to this rather ridiculous fracas possible.

  The balance of the lunch was spent on Sodano explaining to me that the Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet was a misunderstood and maligned character, while providing a few interesting details about John Paul’s 1987 visit to Chile. Pinochet at one point asked the Pope why the Church was making such a fuss about democracy: “One system of government is as good as another,” the dictator claimed. John Paul replied that, no, “the people have a right to their liberties, even if they make mistakes in exercising them”—which, Sodano claimed, had a positive effect on Pinochet’s subsequent agreement to a referendum on his continued rule (which he lost).

  Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran was the Holy See’s “foreign minister” while I was preparing Witness to Hope, and in addition to discussing the conceptual premises of Vatican diplomacy, he and I enjoyed exploring the just war tradition and the Catholic theory of international relations during our conversations. The mild-mannered Tauran was the perfectly trained diplomat, never venturing beyond his brief and keeping his personal views on close hold. But on several occasions he came through with telling stories crucial to developing the detailed portrait I intended to paint.

  It was Tauran, for example, who confirmed that John Paul II had called President George H. W. Bush the night before the ultimatum to Saddam Hussein requiring him to evacuate Kuwait or face allied military action expired: the Pope said that if diplomacy couldn’t resolve a violation of international law that must not stand, he hoped the allies would win, Saddam would be ejected from Kuwait, and there would be as few casualties as possible.

  In our discussion of this and other international crises (and in my conversations with the Pope), I came to understand how John Paul conceived his role in these situations. He was not a pacifist; he believed that the just war tradition remained the normative Catholic moral tradition for evaluating a situation like the invasion and annexation of Kuwait or the crack-up of Yugoslavia and the subsequent genocide in Bosnia. He also thought, as did Tauran, that that tradition needed to be stretched to deal with situations that fell under the rubric of “humanitarian intervention,” that is, military action to prevent or halt the mass slaughter of innocents. But John Paul II did not see the papal role as that of an international moral referee who would, at a certain point, declare that the just war criteria had been satisfied and thus the lid was off. Rather, John Paul’s view was that the pope should press until the last possible moment for reason and diplomacy to work, even as he understood that the just war criterion of “last resort” was not infinitely elastic but a judgment of prudence.

  Tauran, a Frenchman, also had some pithy things to say about the moral state of Europe. When we were discussing the continent’s birth dearth, he said, with some sharpness, that late-twentieth-century Europe wanted “happiness without constraint”—including the constraints imposed by raising children or caring for elderly parents. But he was also aware of decadence on the other side of the Atlantic, not least because of an appalling interaction he had with Clinton administration Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs Timothy Wirth. Wirth, a fanatical population controller, kept his famous “condom tree” on his desk when meeting with Tauran and gave the Vatican official a banal lecture on sex education (which Wirth seemed to imagine as a subdiscipline of plumbing) as the sovereign cure for “children having children,” as he put it.

  My greatest debt to Jean-Louis Tauran, however, involved his breaking the bureaucratic logjam I encountered in accessing certain key papal documents I was promised but that Cardinal Sodano and Archbishop Re were not producing: the Pope’s letter to Leonid Brezhnev warning against a possible Soviet invasion of Poland in late 1980, the Pope’s exchange of letters with Mikhail Gorbachev, and the Pope’s letter to Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping suggesting a new conversation between the Holy See and China. I tried to crack the problem for the better part of a year and a half before Msgr. James Harvey came up with a solution.

  The kind of archival material I was looking for, Harvey explained, was not in the Secret Archives (and thus under a time-lock); rather, the materials were kept in the Secretariat of State, where they could be easily accessed for reference as needed. So the papers I was looking for were in Tauran’s keeping, and as he and I seemed to have hit it off, why not approach him with a very specific set of requests, the mandatum scribendi, and a description of the problems I had encountered from Sodano (Tauran’s boss) and Re (technically Tauran’s peer, but in actuality another boss)? This I did, and Harvey told me on December 12, 1997, that I would have a “productive meeting” with the Frenchman that night.

  When he came into the parlor where we met, Tauran said that my request for documents had been “declined” by Sodano and Re for “fear of setting a precedent”—the usual Vatican bureaucratic excuse for refusing to do something the bureaucrats didn’t want to do. So Tauran, after consulting with Harvey, had proposed that he be authorized to read me the documents in summary form. Sodano and Re had agreed to this procedure, but I said it wasn’t acceptable or sufficient, that I had to see the texts in question, and that if I couldn’t take copies away with me he had to translate them with me, in full, on the spot. Tauran agreed to do this (which was likely stretching the boundaries of his deal with Sodano and Re), and we spent the next hour and a half working through John Paul II’s letters to Brezhnev and Gorbachev, which he had fetched from his section’s archives and brought with him.

  In examining the Brezhnev letter, the first thing I noticed was a light pencil notation at the top right-hand corner of the cream-colored official papal stationery: “12/80.” I asked what it was. Tauran replied that it was the filing code—December 1980. I was flabbergasted and asked, “Do you mean that everything is simply filed by date and month, no matter what it is?” “Yes,” he replied; and that was why it had taken him hours to dig out the letters in question, as they were in boxes with everything else saved from that particular month. At this point I began to understand why the Vatican didn’t let researchers dig into the archives of a pontificate until they had been properly culled, organized, and catalogued: something like the Brezhnev letter might be cheek by jowl with a highly delicate matter of conscience that had been referred to the Pope that same month. It was a window into the archaic bureaucratic practice of the Holy See, and walking back to the North American College that night, I remembered that, until President Franklin Roosevelt had sent some staff from the Library of Congress to Rome in the 1930s to help organize the Vatican Library, books there were shelved by size and color.

  The letters to Brezhnev and Gorbachev helped make Witness to Hope as authoritative as possible, and in discussing the second letter, Tauran let the diplomat’s mask down a bit and said that there was a good relationship between John Paul II and Mikhail Gorbachev, who was “much more intelligent than the other ones.” (And, I thought, hadn’t tried to have John Paul shot.)

  It took another year to get the Gorbachev response and the letter to Deng Xiaoping out of Archbishop Tauran, but he finally came through at the very last minute, in December 1998, after I sent a rather stiff letter and told his secretary that time was up, the manuscript of Witness to Hope was being finalized, and delivery was imperative. So we met, fourteen hours before my departure from Rome, and I got what I had asked for in the same manner as I had in December 1997.

>   It was aggravating to have to give Cardinal Sodano any credit for my access to these materials in Witness to Hope, because he was nothing but an impediment to my getting what the Pope wanted me to have. The real credit was all to Jean-Louis Tauran’s account, with a strong assist from Msgr. Harvey (who was Bishop Harvey by the time this little drama ended). But that was the formulation we agreed to—that I would indicate that the materials were shown to me with Sodano’s “authorization”—so I kept my end of the bargain. This untoward fracas taught me invaluable lessons about the traditional managers of popes and their capacity to gum up the works when they put their minds to it. And, as such, it gave me even more insight into John Paul II’s skill in getting so much done with such balky bureaucratic machinery around him.

  Cardinal Jozef Tomko, a Slovak, was one of the few Slavs in the Roman Curia when John Paul II arrived, a former official of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Congregation for Bishops who became General Secretary of the Synod of Bishops and then prefect of the Curia’s missionary dicastery, Propaganda Fide. Tomko gave me two lengthy interviews, in November 1996 and January 1997, which helped me understand John Paul II’s way of governing.

  The first insight Tomko gave me was into John Paul, decider. He was, the cardinal said, a man who trusted collaborators, who had a “power of synthesis,” a striking memory, and an acute perception of the essentials of a situation. Just as importantly, John Paul “is not afraid of making a decision, nor is he wanting to come to a decision if the whole situation is not mature.… He is patient, waiting with some situations until the [right] moment comes.” And here, I thought, was one advantage of a relatively young pope: elected at fifty-eight, John Paul II could take the long view, not forcing decisions or changes prematurely out of a concern that if he didn’t act now he might not have the opportunity later.