ABRAHAM LINCOLN IN FULL PONTIFICALS
ROME, FEBRUARY–MARCH 2001
RICHARD NEUHAUS WAS IN WASHINGTON IN LATE JANUARY 2001, so Joan and I invited him, and Mike and Karen Novak, to dinner on January 21. Earlier that day, John Paul II announced a February consistory for the creation of new cardinals, one of whom was Fr. Avery Dulles—a friend of us all. So we toasted Avery’s red hat, and then, just as we were sitting down at the table, the phone rang in my study. I went to answer it and there was the cardinal-designate. He absorbed the first barrage of my congratulations and then, referring to the canon that required cardinals to be bishops, said, “Thanks a lot but look, I don’t have to be a bishop, do I?” A bit surprised, I said, “No. I think you just write the Pope asking for a dispensation; he’ll certainly grant it, as he did for Congar and Grillmeier” (Yves Congar, OP, and Aloys Grillmeir, SJ, two elderly theologians whom the Pope had previously honored with the cardinalate). “But why are you worried about this, Avery?” I asked. “Because I’m too old to be running around New York doing confirmations!” answered John Foster Dulles’s son.
At the consistory on February 21, Avery was last on the list of forty-four new cardinals, and thus all eyes were on him when he knelt before the Pope to receive the red biretta. John Paul placed the biretta on Avery’s head, Avery bowed while taking John Paul’s hand to kiss his ring—and the biretta fell into the Pope’s lap. The Pope reimposed the biretta; Avery bowed again; the recalcitrant headgear fell into John Paul’s lap again—all this being easily visible on the jumbotrons installed in St. Peter’s Square for the Great Jubilee of 2000. The Pope, smiling as much as his Parkinson’s allowed, handed Avery the biretta and Avery jammed it onto his head, kissed the papal ring, and got a good round of applause.
Immediately after the consistory, there was a reception for the new American cardinals in the cortile of the North American College, a large open space dotted with orange trees. Avery, feeling the effects of the post-polio syndrome that would kill him in 2008, asked for a chair to sit in while receiving those who wanted to greet him. I watched from a distance and was struck by the eerie resemblance between the new Cardinal Dulles and one of his intellectual heroes, Cardinal John Henry Newman, as painted by Emmeline Deane in London’s National Portrait Gallery.
At the Mass with John Paul the next day, during which the new cardinals received their rings, Avery got the loudest applause in the cardinalatial class of 2001. His traveling party was then hosted to lunch in the atrium of the Pontifical Gregorian University, Avery’s Roman alma mater. One of the toasts was a bit trying. The rector of the university began by saying how much he had learned from Cardinal Dulles, especially from his book Models of the Church. “I have learned from him,” the rector said, “that the Church is an institution,” which thought he developed for several minutes. “And I have learned from him that the Church is a mystical communion.…”—at which point I turned to Father Joseph O’Hare, SJ, the president of Fordham, and Fr. Neuhaus, and whispered, “Oh no, he’s going to do all five of them.” So Joe, Richard, and I quietly slipped outside for a postluncheon smoke, while Father Rector completed his reflection on all of Avery’s models of the Church.
At 5:30 p.m. on Friday, February 23, Cardinal Avery Dulles, SJ, “took possession” of the Roman church of which he was now the titular pastor, Holy Names of Jesus and Mary on the Via del Corso. It was only the second time the church had been a cardinalatial “title” and it was an appropriate one for Avery: one of his heroes, the Jesuit saint Robert Bellarmine, preached there during the Counter-Reformation. The church was in the care of the Discalced Augustinians, and on meeting several of the fathers I got the impression that they imagined themselves to have won the red hat jackpot—surely the eminent son of a famous American family was wealthy enough to spend some of his riches on their church? Alas, their freshly minted cardinal-titular patched his shoes with duct tape, wore his clothes until they fell apart, and gave his substantial book royalties to his religious order.
The lean, craggy-faced new cardinal processed into his title wearing the miter and pectoral cross and carrying the crozier that befitted his new rank, even though he had not (to his great relief) been ordained a bishop. As congregations do, we all turned toward the aisle as the procession approached the altar—at which point Jody Bottum whispered to me, “Now we know what Abraham Lincoln would have looked like in full pontificals.”
When I got back home, I mailed some souvenirs from the consistory to one of Cardinal Dulles’s friends at Fordham, Father Joseph Lienhard, SJ, a distinguished patristics scholar. Joe wrote back, “Thanks for… sending the mementos of Avery’s elevation. He looks great in a faded navy windbreaker and a pectoral cross.”
Ash Wednesday fell on February 28 in 2001, so with the entire North American College community I walked up the Aventine Hill to receive ashes at Santa Sabina, the crown jewel of paleo-Christian basilica architecture and the first of the Lenten station churches. The following day Bishop Harvey called with an invitation to lunch from Bishop Dziwisz for Friday, March 2. Harvey and I went up to the papal apartment together and while we were waiting for John Paul, Dziwisz came in, apologized for the Pope’s being late, and said, “We’ve got a problem.” “What’s that?” we asked. “I just went into the kitchen and discovered that there’s no dessert. The sisters said, ‘But it’s Lent.’ I said, ‘Yes, but we have guests.’” “What was the resolution of this dilemma?” I inquired. “We decided to give up penance for Friday lunch,” answered the papal secretary.
Both John Paul and Dziwisz asked for a rundown on sales of Witness to Hope, translations, and reactions. They seemed particularly interested in getting a German edition published and I promised to push harder on this front, mentioning that I had asked Cardinal Ratzinger for help the previous week. We talked a bit about the new George W. Bush administration in Washington, with the inaugural address and the president’s reinstatement of the ban on US foreign aid to international abortion providers getting good marks. When John Paul asked about reactions to the new American cardinals, I said something bland about Edward Egan of New York and Theodore McCarrick of Washington before thanking the Pope heartily for giving the red hat to Avery Dulles—a possibility raised at that table during previous meals. Honoring Avery was an important encouragement for American theology, I said, and it would give the new cardinal an even more prestigious platform from which to continue his important work.
When I tried to draw John Paul out on his upcoming pilgrimage “in the footsteps of St. Paul” to Greece, Syria, and Malta, the Pope tended to deflect the questions rather than answer them directly. It was something of a sore subject, and he would have been less than human if he weren’t severely disappointed by the bitter reaction in some Orthodox quarters to this effort to extend the jubilee’s Holy Land pilgrimage while urging Christians both East and West to recapture St. Paul’s missionary fervor.
On the way out, Dziwisz gave Harvey, Bishop Ryłko, and me copies of a large, beautifully illustrated book on the Great Jubilee of 2000, edited by another newly created cardinal, Crescenzio Sepe, who had run the jubilee. The book included the Pope’s remarks at each of the sixty-four unique jubilee celebrations, and John Paul signed it for each of us. I was struck that, in this attempt to create a permanent record of the jubilee, all of the papal texts were in Italian—yet another indication that the insular locals still imagined they were working in a world language, which in fact was spoken by 0.8 percent of the world’s population.
CHILLED GUINNESS, MICHAEL JACKSON, HONORABLE MEMBERS, AND UNHAPPY TABLETISTAS
IRELAND, ENGLAND, AND SCOTLAND, MARCH 2001
AS I HADN’T DONE ANY PRESENTATIONS OF WITNESS TO HOPE IN Ireland or the UK and was curious to learn more about how the Pope was perceived there, I was grateful for invitations of to do lectures-and-signings in early March 2001. Flying to Dublin the day after lunch with John Paul, I landed at the beginning of a national panic over bovine foot-and-mouth disease and walked through
several disinfectant stations before passing Irish immigration. But a greater trial awaited: having given myself a temporary pass from Lenten disciplines, I had to try seven pubs on and around St. Stephen’s Green before finding one that hadn’t chilled the Guinness stout to accommodate tourists. Globalization, it seemed, had its downsides.
Cardinal Desmond Connell, whom I’d met in Rome during the recent consistory, kindly invited me to the Mass of Thanksgiving he was celebrating in his cathedral on Sunday afternoon, March 4. We had a good talk the following morning, and when I asked Connell whether the Irish Church had “hit the bottom yet,” he said, no, he didn’t think so, but at least they could now see where the bottom was. Alas, that turned out to be too optimistic a forecast.
In addition to a book presentation and signing, I did radio and television interviews on RTE, the national network; friends later told me that it was the first time in over twenty years that someone had been allowed to say positive things about John Paul II and the Church. That was doubtless an exaggeration, but perhaps not all that much of one: the media environment was intensely hostile and anticlerical, and the most prominent Catholic voices were uniformly purveyors of Catholic Lite. Why the Irish, of all people, wanted to effect a Catholic imitation of Anglicanism and its meltdown was a puzzle I didn’t solve during those days in Dublin, and haven’t since.
The Catholic chaplaincy at Oxford and my friends at Orme Court and Netherhall House in London worked hard to arrange a book presentation at the venerable Oxford Union for the evening of March 6. Alas, another group invited pop star Michael Jackson for the same day at the same venue, and my somewhat embarrassed hosts were left to explain that Michael Jackson trumped John Paul II at the Oxford Union. On the way to the Catholic chaplaincy’s auditorium, to which our event was moved, we passed Mr. Jackson and his posse in the High Street, but there was no chance for dialogue.
The lecture drew several hundred people and I was much impressed with the chaplain, Father Peter Newby. At dinner afterwards, I pressed Fr. Newby on the challenges of Catholic university work in a traditionally anti-Catholic and now increasingly secular, postmodern Britain. The impression I formed from his answers and others’ confirmed what I’d experienced a few months earlier at Notre Dame: all-in Catholicism as preached by John Paul II was a viable proposition, while Catholic Lite was of little interest in university circles, save among the tenured.
Two friends in Parliament, Lord Alton of Liverpool and Tory MP Edward Leigh, arranged for me to address an informal meeting of members of the Lords and the Commons in the Palace of Westminster on John Paul II’s social doctrine and the future of democracy. My presentation was listed on the March 7 parliamentary schedule; shortly before David Alton was to introduce me, I looked up from the dais and saw Ian Paisley, the veteran anti-Catholic bigot, poking his head in the door to see what popish tomfoolery was afoot. But Paisley, evidently satisfied that another Gunpowder Plot wasn’t in the offing, took off for other mischief before I could invite him in.
That evening was the high point of my visit to the British Isles: a lecture attended by over a thousand at Westminster Cathedral, the great brick and stone Byzantine pile built after the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in Great Britain. I’d never much liked the cathedral architecturally, but it certainly came alive that night. I spoke on the achievements of the pontificate; the questions afterwards were thoughtful (with one or two lurches into the eccentricity that is one hallmark of English Catholicism); and I got to chat briefly with Bolesław Taborski, the translator of Karol Wojtyła’s plays, from whom I’d learned a great deal.
I’d done some writing over the years for the London-based Catholic weekly The Tablet and had engaged in a friendly correspondence with its longtime editor, John Wilkins. Learning that I was coming to London, John invited me to address the “Tablet Table”: a monthly dinner meeting of the magazine’s editors and regular contributors, held in a local parish hall after a Mass. I accepted, not knowing quite what to expect. It was a most instructive evening.
As we were going through the buffet line, I sensed some tension, but Wilkins was affably determined to get things off to a good start, so after we ate, he gave me a friendly introduction and asked me to say a few words about John Paul II’s social doctrine as a prelude to the discussion. As the latter was what everyone was obviously interested in, I spoke briefly on the Pope’s insistence that a robust public moral culture was the key to the success of democracy and the free economy. Then I invited questions.
And they came. And came. Not so much questions but harsh, bitter indictments, one after another, as if the Tabletistas had been waiting for over two decades to have a shot at John Paul II and decided that I was the next best thing: sloppy seconds, American version. The tone varied from supercilious to snarky to bitter to offensively aggressive to passive-aggressive, but the common denominator was anger, erupting after years of repression. At one point there was a pause in the venting and I turned to John Gummer, a former cabinet minister and said, quite seriously, “I think I’m beginning to understand this. You all want to be Anglicans with valid sacraments.” He didn’t seem to find the formulation outlandish. John Wilkins was embarrassed, wrote me afterwards saying that I had been “the soul of courtesy throughout,” and penned a puff piece on my London visit for the magazine’s “Notebook” section the following week.
But as I said over a beer later that night to my friend Jack Valero, who sat through the tantrums with head bowed, I wasn’t insulted, just depressed. Serious, well-informed challenge was one thing; ill-mannered Catholic Lite, smug in its certainties despite their obvious falsification over time, was something else. And these were the people running one of the most influential Catholic magazines in the world. As I wrote Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, an important journal like The Tablet ought to be able to find writers who understood that the Church had moved beyond 1968 and that the real challenge for the future in Great Britain was giving life to John Paul II’s New Evangelization.
The last laps of my first Witness to Hope tour in the UK took me to Glasgow and Edinburgh. I was given a tour of the magnificent Glasgow City Chambers before a session with Cardinal Thomas Winning in his office—over a decade and a half later, I remember him taking me to the window and quietly pointing across the River Clyde to a large new mosque. Even more memorable, though, was what Cardinal Winning said, with a tremor in his voice, while introducing me to some four hundred people in his cathedral on the evening of March 9: “I’m very grateful to the Pope. But it’s not because he made me a cardinal. I’m grateful to him because he’s made me a better Christian.”
BEN-HUR AND THE POPE
ROME, MAY 2001
WHILE WITNESS TO HOPE WAS BEING EDITED IN EARLY 1999, I met Catherine Wyler, a filmmaker, through a mutual friend, Declan Murphy, former assistant to Jim Billington at the Library of Congress. Declan thought that there should be a documentary film based on the book and that Catherine should make it. After some discussion I agreed to work with her, another unexpected friendship was born, and a window opened into yet another new world—Hollywood.
Catherine’s father was William Wyler, winner of three Academy Awards for Best Director and a legendary taskmaster who once asked Merle Oberon to get a few more tears out of one eye while she was dying in the arms of Laurence Olivier in Wuthering Heights. At our first planning meeting at Cathy’s home near Washington Cathedral, I noticed something on the coffee table in her living room. “What’s that?” I asked. That, it turned out, was Willie Wyler’s Oscar for Ben-Hur; Cathy’s brother had gotten Messala’s chariot wheels in the disposition of her father’s effects.
With Catherine as producer, we needed a director. Cathy suggested a friend, the Emmy Award–winning documentarian Judith Dwan Hallet, who eagerly joined the project. Cathy and Judy made a formidably charming—not to say daring—team when it came to dealing with sticky issues and prickly personalities. Although Cathy had spent part of her adolescence in Rome when her father was ma
king Roman Holiday and knew something of the city’s languid ways, she was new to the Vatican. Yet she and Judy, with some help from Bishop Harvey and me, got the interviews and background footage they wanted (including an hour with the Sistine Chapel to themselves), while converting several difficult personalities into friendly facilitators of the project. They also had nerve, unfolding a large Nazi banner from the ramparts of Wawel Castle at dawn one morning for what became a three-second shot in the film, setting up Karol Wojtyła’s experience of the occupation in Kraków.
The challenge was to telescope an extraordinarily dramatic, not to say busy, life into a film no longer than the 116-minute format of American public television. The rough cut was over four hours, so there was a lot of editing to do. With Catherine and me kibitzing over her shoulder, Judy did it with consummate skill. I began to understand the possibilities of digital film-editing when we were looking at the re-creation of young Wojtyła’s ordination to the priesthood, which Cardinal Macharski had allowed to be filmed where it had taken place, in the chapel at Francziskańska 3. But something wasn’t right, and I said, “Stop. The bishop’s ring is on the wrong hand.” Techno-illiterate that I was, I thought the scene would have to be cut. Wrong. A little digital magic on the console behind me, and voilà!—the ring was on the right, meaning “right,” hand. It was sheer magic, if a little nervous-making: here were capabilities beyond the wildest dreams of those airbrushing artists who would eliminate the suddenly disfavored from the top of Lenin’s Tomb at the May Day parade.
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