Rome Diary

April 11: Remembering John Paul II

There, on the catafalque only a few feet away, was what remained. Kneeling at the prie-dieu, I had only a few minutes, certainly no more than ten, to think what I wanted to think and pray what I wanted to pray in this moment I had so long anticipated and so irrationally hoped would never come. Odd thoughts came to mind. His back was straight again, after all those years of being so pitiably hunched and trembling from the Parkinson’s disease. He seemed much smaller. Perhaps there was not much that could have been done by those who prepared the body. He was emaciated, beaten, and bruised. The purple spots on the hands revealed the efforts, toward the very end, to find one more vein for the intravenous feeding tube. Lying there before the altar, under Bernini’s magnificent baldachino, his head was tilted just slightly toward the right. Looking north, I thought—toward Poland.

He has fought the good fight, he has kept the faith. Well done, good and faithful servant. These and other passages came unbidden. Through my tears, I tried to see again the years of his vitality, his charm, his challenge, his triumphs; the historic moments when I admired from a distance and the personal encounters when I was surprised by the gift of an older brother who was the Holy Father.

I had seen him on October 22, 1978, in his first homily as pope, admonishing and encouraging the whole of humanity to be not afraid. I saw him again in Central Park, with hand on cheek in a Jack Benny gesture, mischievously complimenting the crowd’s appreciation of his singing a Polish Christmas song. “And you don’t even know Polish,” he said. I mentioned this when I ate with the pope months later and had to explain to him who Jack Benny was. In such conversations we discussed Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and the ideas that had shaped and misshaped the century, and whether the end of history was at hand. (He thought not.)

Kneeling there, I smiled through my tears. Then the time came to leave. Cardinals, bishops, heads of state, and other dignitaries were waiting their turn. And all the thoughts I wanted to think and all the prayers I wanted to pray were distilled in a half-sobbed, half-whispered, “Thank you, Holy Father.”

Walking out of the basilica into the sunlight, a shaken friend said, “That wasn’t him, he is isn’t there.” No, I said, he is there. These are the remains, what is left behind of a life such as we are not likely to see again, waiting with all of us for the resurrection of the dead, the final vindication of the hope he proclaimed.

This morning, three days later, I walked over to St. Peter’s Square where thousands and thousands were lined up to see the place where they had put the body. Many were disappointed in their hope of seeing the body when, in the early hours of Friday morning, the basilica had to be closed for the funeral. The crypt, I am told, will not be open to the public until Monday. There he lies in the place previously occupied by John XXIII, who has been moved up into the main church.

Of the 264 popes, 148 are buried in St. Peter’s. In his last will and testament, revealed after his death, John Paul indicated that he would like to be buried in Poland, but he said the wishes of the cardinals should be followed. They decided on St. Peter’s. There was a rumor that Poles were asking that at least his heart should be buried in Poland, a very Polish thing to do. But he is intact in St. Peter’s, the 149th.

These have been days that tax superlatives, with events that beggar words. It is reported that four to five million have journeyed to Rome to say goodbye, more than twice the population of the city. Yet everything has gone so smoothly. It seems, in fact, that the city is more peaceful than usual. Huge crowds of mourners packed the square and the Via della Conciliazione, stretching across the Tiber and into the side streets, waiting as long as twenty-six hours to get into the basilica and then, on Friday, to get near the funeral. One hesitates to say that anything is historically unprecedented, but it seems certain that never in human history have so many from so many places in the world gathered to say farewell. He went to the world, and the world came to him. The Poles were especially prominent, waving their flag and singing hymns and national songs. After a thousand years over which their existence was denied and despised by powerful neighbors, John Paul restored their nation to a place of honor in the world.

At the funeral, more than a hundred nations were represented. Despite all the presidents, monarchs, prime ministers, and other dignitaries, security was not conspicuous, which probably means it was very competent. Anyone familiar with the complex history of Catholicism and the American experiment could not help being struck by the presence of an American president, along with two former presidents, at the funeral of a pope. In the media and in conversations, however, nobody has remarked on this remarkable turn of events—but, then, his pontificate always turned the unprecedented into the taken-for-granted. It was unthinkable that President Bush would not be here. What was remarked was the large Jewish delegation and, even more remarked, the many representatives from Islamic nations. Among the titles of the pope is “Pontifex Maximus,” the great builder of bridges.

The funeral was exactly as it should have been. Solemn, pulling all the stops of sacred pomp, joining grief and gratitude in a grace-filled exultation of resurrection hope. Exactly right, too, was the homily by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, dean of the College of Cardinals. He made room for the frequent outbursts of sustained applause and shouts of the crowd that John Paul be declared a saint, and be declared so right now.

There was a time in the ancient Church, long before procedures for canonization were codified in the sixteenth century, when saints were declared by popular acclamation, and it almost looked yesterday as though that might happen again. And the shout went up, “Magnus! Magnus!”

For many years I had written that he would be called John Paul the Great, and I do believe it is happening. Of the millions who came to say goodbye, the clear majority were young people in their teens or twenties. Among those impressed by this astonishing response are the cardinals who will elect the next pope, and some of them are saying today that the better part of wisdom is to stay the course of John Paul’s pontificate. If continuity is what they are looking for, that may speak well for Cardinal Ratzinger who is so closely identified with the major initiatives of John Paul. Even before yesterday, he was on everybody’s list of leading papabili.

It takes determination not to discern a providential hand in the convergence of events from the beginning of Holy Week through the funeral of the pope. All in all, the major media made an effort to rise to the occasion. There were notable exceptions, of course. On the Lehrer News Hour, I was pitted against the egregious Alan Wolfe of Boston College who railed against Republicans for politicizing the death of Terri Schiavo, thereby politicizing the judiciously countenanced crime in a manner most base. A few days later, the death of John Paul commanded the front page and a large special section of recycled conventional wisdom in the New York Times, along with an editorial drawing the moral that his rigid teaching about the sanctity of life denied Terri Schiavo the death with dignity that he himself enjoyed. When will they ever learn?

But, for the most part, the media coverage of the pope’s death has been intelligent, respectful, and even reverential. Although there is no way to measure the effect, this has been an extraordinary moment of evangelization. There was the small distraction of the death of Prince Rainier of Monaco, and the much larger distraction of the tawdry “royal wedding” of Prince Charles to his mistress of many years, a wedding postponed for one day so Charles could attend the papal funeral. It appears the monarchy will survive as a national embarrassment, along with a national church that continues, almost five hundred years later, to cater to the unbridled royal appetites to which it owes it existence.

I came to Rome to co-host with Raymond Arroyo the daily broadcasts of EWTN, the international television network founded by the formidable Mother Angelica, whose biography Raymond has just completed. (It is a remarkable story and should be out from Doubleday this fall.) My agreement with EWTN was not exclusive, so I also worked with other print and broadcast media.

George Weigel, author of the definitive biography of John Paul, Witness to Hope, came to Rome under exclusive contract with NBC and has been largely responsible for that network’s generally excellent coverage. Rome in my experience is endless conversations over lunch and dinner, mainly with media types and with friends and acquaintances in the worlds within worlds of the universal Church variously connected to the nerve center that is the Eternal City.

Of course most of the talk is about the next pope, with regular references to “the legacy of John Paul II.” It seems most every interview begins with, “What do you think is the chief legacy of John Paul II?” I have by now refined in response a dozen riffs on his “prophetic humanism,” his proposing and not imposing a more promising future for the human project, and other themes familiar to the readers of these pages. There are only so many things one can say in five or seven minutes, and one easily wearies of saying them.

Many years ago, when I was a young Lutheran pastor, I complained to my older friend Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel about the tedium of the lecture circuit. “The worst thing,” I said, “is that you get tired of hearing yourself saying the same things. Last week I was in Kansas City talking about Christianity and racial justice, and this Saturday I will be in Chicago talking about Christianity and racial justice.” Heschel listened patiently as I went on in this vein and then said, “Nuh, Richard, so you think in Chicago they know what you said in Kansas City? Go to Chicago, Richard. Go to Chicago.” When on airplanes going I know not where or why, I have over the years often heard the voice of Heschel, “Go to Chicago, Richard. Go to Chicago.” And so I once again manage to perk up and respond to the question “What is the chief legacy of John Paul II?” and “Who will be the next pope?”

In Rome and in circles closely connected to Rome, the chatter about the next pope begins the day a new pope is installed. It has understandably been more intense in the last several years of John Paul’s undeniable decline. Most of it is idle speculation, as idle as it is inevitable. For the record, this is the state of the chatter shortly after the funeral of John Paul:

• First in alphabetical order and the sentimental favorite of many is Cardinal Arinze of Nigeria. With long years of experience in the Curia, Arinze has many friends in the United States. First Things hosted him in New York last year for an ecumenical theological conference. As usual, he was disarmingly charming and candid in response to even the most difficult questions. Many of us think it would be a great thing to have a black African pope, but we don’t have a vote. The consensus is that Arinze, while greatly admired, has slight chance of election. “The Church is not ready for an African pope,” it is said. That can be read in many ways, some less edifying than others.

• Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires is high on every list. Known as an incisive thinker and intensely holy man living an austere life, it is held against him that he is a Jesuit, although he has suffered the slings and arrows of fellow Jesuits of a more “progressive” bent. No member of a religious order has been elected pope since 1831.

• If the Italians recapture the office, their man could be Tarcisio Bertone of Genoa, a close associate of Ratzinger.

• Dario Castrillion Hoyos of Colombia, Claudio Hummes of São Paulo, and Oscar Rodriguez Maradiago of Honduras are Latin Americans mentioned. The last is young and eager—some think too young and too eager.

• Ivan Dias of Bombay is an astute theologian who has shown the way in protecting Catholic integrity in the engagement with religious pluralism.

• Among other Italians is Giovanni Battista Re, long in curial experience but without a pastoral track record. Camillo Ruini, vicar of Rome, is greatly respected and was very close to John Paul. Dionigi Tettamanzi of Milan is something of a populist in his appeal and an expert in bioethics, a field of growing interest in moral theology. My impression is that Angelo Scola of Venice may be the leading Italian candidate, but that is perhaps because I have been listening to my friends who are also his friends and are greatly impressed by his intellectual and pastoral skills combined with a deep spirituality.

• Christoph Schönborn of Vienna is often mentioned, but it is deemed a liability that he is young (for a pope) and has shown no marked progress in revitalizing the Church in Austria.

• The only plausible English-speaking papabile is the formidable George Pell of Sydney, Australia. He is a friend and I confess I would rejoice in his election, but that seems an unlikely prospect. (The same is true of Francis George of Chicago, but it is thought to be a certainty that no American could be elected, and I tend to agree with the reasons for this.)

It would, I think, be a very good thing to have a pope from Africa, Latin America, or Asia, but the odds at this point favor an Italian. The real alternative is Ratzinger. His election would spark a firestorm of negative reaction from “progressives” in Western Europe and the United States. There is little love for Germans, and his long and thankless work as the chief doctrinal officer under John Paul has earned him a reputation as the “enforcer” of orthodoxy. Ratzinger is, in fact, a man of great personal charm and profound holiness. Some years ago he gave First Things’ annual Erasmus Lecture, and at the ecumenical conference following the lecture he most impressively won the respect and affection of the participating theologians. His homily at John Paul’s funeral winsomely displayed a pastoral dimension of the man that many had not suspected. While guaranteed to be labeled “controversial,” the election of Joseph Ratzinger would, I believe, be reassuring to many and would provide the Church with leadership in secure continuity with John Paul II.

But again, this is all speculation. The new pope will be chosen in the next month, and faithful Catholics will have no doubt that he is the choice of the Holy Spirit. He may be chosen to advance the great springtime of renewal of which John Paul so often spoke, or to test our faith. In either case, he will be the 265th successor of Peter, and we will, with full assent of heart and mind, acknowledge him as the shepherd of Christ’s pilgrim Church on earth.

But now, in the immediate aftermath of the funeral, we are keenly aware that he will not be, nobody could be, another John Paul II. That would be too much to expect. As we had no right to expect the inestimable gift of the man to whom and for whom we now, in grief and gratitude, offer our thanks.

April 21: Habemus Papam

Within hours of the announcement Habemus Papam from the loggia of St. Peter’s, those who have for years viewed Joseph Ratzinger as the embodiment of all they think is wrong with the Church were publicly exhibiting (to paraphrase Churchill) magnanimity in defeat. Led by Hans Küng, Ratzinger’s self-anointed nemesis, they proposed that Ratzinger should be given a grace period, perhaps a hundred days, to demonstrate that he has repented of his reactionary ways.

The responsibilities of his old work, as a prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and the responsibilities of his new work, as pope, are significantly different. The pope, it is rightly said, must strive to be the father (as in “pope”) of all the faithful—which is a challenge for him but a greater challenge to those who are dubiously faithful.

With the election of Pope Benedict XVI, the curtain has fallen on the long-running drama of the myth of “the spirit of Vatican II,” in which the revolution mandated by the Council was supposedly delayed by the timidity of Paul VI and temporarily derailed for twenty-six years by the regressive John Paul II, as the Church inexorably moved toward the happy denouement of “the next pope” who would resume the course of progressive accommodation to the wisdom of the modern world. The curtain has fallen and the audience has long since left, except for a few diehards who say they are giving the new management a hundred days to revive the show. Some of them are perhaps thinking of going to another theater. There are worse things than not being a Catholic, when it is made unmistakably clear that being a Catholic is not what one is.

I very much doubt that Pope Benedict is going to engage in wholesale excommunications, but I have no doubt he will encourage people to ponder anew what is entailed in being in communion with the Church. He has over the years made evident that he believes we are engaged in a great battle for the soul of Western Civilization and, indeed, the soul of the world. The choice of the name is important. He is not John Paul III. That might have invited invidious comparisons with his illustrious and inimitable predecessor, John Paul the Great, now entombed close by St. Peter. It might also have suggested that the curtain has not fallen on the dramatization of the mythology of “the spirit of Vatican II.” The first round of commentaries proposed that the choice of a name is an allusion is Benedict XV, an early twentieth-century pope of limited distinction apart from his failed effort to stop World War I. I am rather confident, however, that the proper allusion is to the original St. Benedict, the father of Western monasticism. In a time of deep shadows, the Benedictine movement sparked the spiritual, cultural, and moral rejuvenation of Europe.

Much has been made of the supposed contrast between John Paul II’s confident expectation of a “springtime of evangelization” and Joseph Ratzinger’s frequent references to a smaller but more faithful Church which has internalized the words of Jesus that the seed must fall into the ground and die before it can bear much fruit. In this account, John Paul the ebullient is to be contrasted with Ratzinger the dour.

There is a measure of truth in that contrast. Some of it is related to differences in personality, some of it to differences in intellectual formation. Avery Cardinal Dulles summarized the witness of John Paul in the phrase “prophetic humanism.” The Ratzinger of the past gave—and the Benedict of the future, will, I expect, continue to give—voice to a more explicit and insistent Christocentric humanism.

This is not to say that John Paul was not Christocentric. There were few passages from the Council that he quoted more often than the declaration from Gaudium et Spes that Jesus Christ is not only the revelation of God to man but the revelation of man to himself. The suggested contrast between John Paul and Benedict is not a disagreement, but Ratzinger’s accent has been more explicitly on the crucified Christ and the necessarily cruciform experience of the Church through time.

It has been suggested that the different accents may reflect the fact that Ratzinger is more Augustinian in his theology while John Paul was more of a Thomist. Both accents issue in the bold admonition, “Be not afraid.” That signature phrase of John Paul has been emphatically repeated by Benedict XVI. The crucified Christ is the risen and victorious Christ who, in a favorite passage of Ratzinger’s, tells the disciples, “Fear not little flock, it is the Father’s good pleasure to give to you the kingdom.” With an emphasis on the little in the little flock.

On the basis of his copious writings as Ratzinger, we know that Benedict is robustly skeptical of sociological depictions and analyses of the Church. The general media, as well as many scholars, are obsessed with statistical assessments of the Church’s fortunes and misfortunes in history. For Pope Benedict these assessments are almost beside the point. The media will have a hard time adjusting to this. They do not want to talk about revealed truth or the redemption worked by Jesus Christ. Benedict insists that to speak of the Church is to speak of Christ. Which may result in the secular elites in control of the commanding heights of culture declining to talk about either.

The circumstance was nicely summed up by a comment of Ted Koppel on Nightline the night of the election. The subject turned to interreligious dialogue, and I had referred to the radical Christocentrism of the new pope. “So which is it, Father,” Koppel asked, “Christ or interreligious dialogue?”

But, of course, it is interreligious dialogue because of, and upon the premise of, Jesus Christ as the redeemer of the whole world, including the world’s religions in which, as Catholic teaching holds, elements of truth and grace are to be discovered. The same confusion arises with respect to Dominus Iesus, a document issued by Ratzinger’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith a few years ago, which is regularly cited as claiming that “Catholicism is more true than other religions and even other Christian churches.” But of course. There is but one Christ and therefore, at the deep level of theological understanding, there can be only one Church, and the Catholic Church claims to be that Church most fully and rightly ordered through time. That is not in tension with ecumenism; it is the foundation of the ecumenical quest for full communion among all Christians.

The argument that Ratzinger has tried to make through these many years, and the argument that Benedict will undoubtedly be making, is that there is no tension, never mind conflict, between truth and love. The caricature is that liberals are big on love while conservatives are big on truth. As Ratzinger said in his homily before the conclave, love without truth is blind and truth without love is empty. Without truth, love is mere sentimentality and, without love, truth is sterile.

This is, of course, in perfect continuity with John Paul’s favored passage from Gaudium et Spes that Christ—who is the way, the truth, and the life—is the revelation of man to himself. If Christ is the truth about everyone and everything, then the way forward is by following the way of Christ. This is the genuine progressivism proposed to the Church and the world by John Paul and by Benedict. The Church does not seek to be countercultural, but it is unavoidably counter to the modern mindset in proposing that fidelity and continuity, not autonomy and novelty, are the paths toward a more promising future.

The chatter goes on as to whether Benedict will change this or that “policy” of John Paul, as though each new pope reinvents Catholicism. There is, beyond doubt, development in the life of the Church, but on questions of great theological and moral moment there is not change. The office of the papacy is very limited. The pope’s job is to defend, preserve, and transmit the “faith once delivered to the saints,” as that faith is received in Scripture and Spirit-guided tradition. A pope who acts as though doctrine is no more than a policy option is a very bad pope.

Within the continuing tradition, the Second Vatican Council is an extraordinary moment of development and refinement. Among the many achievements of the pontificate of John Paul II, some would say the most important achievement, was to secure the hermeneutic for the interpretation of that great council. Joseph Ratzinger was an invaluable partner in that achievement, and the partner has now become the heir who will build upon that achievement.

The day of his election was, in the calendar of the Church, the day of Leo IX, the last great German pope. Ratzinger is more a Bavarian than a German, Bavaria having a distinct identity that goes back long before the Prussian invention of modern Germany in the nineteenth century. But I am sure he sees some striking parallels between the eleventh-century reign of Leo and the needs of our time. Which is, once again, to recognize the bond with the first Benedict who set out to reconstruct, beginning with the Church, a civilization that had fallen into ruins. The new pope’s most determined opponents will be those who, in the words of St. Paul, boast of their shame and demand that the Church not only acquiesce in, but give her blessing to, the devastation conventionally called progress. The achievements of modernity, which are considerable, are fragile and prone to self-destruction unless grounded in the truth, and the truth, ultimately, is the Son of God who, as St. John puts it, was sent not to condemn the world but to save the world.

Pope Benedict XVI is seventy-eight years old, and some speak of a brief transitional pontificate. I do not expect it will be brief, and I am sure it will not be transitional, if transitional means a holding action until the next pontificate. He has very definite views on what needs to be reformed in the Church, including much that in recent decades was called reform, and he will in his self-effacing but determined way press for changes in the service of a continuity that has too often been recklessly violated.

In this respect, he will be carrying forward the work of John Paul the Great in bringing together again the great themes of the Second Vatican Council: ressourcement and aggiornamento. The reappropriation of the tradition and the conversation with the contemporary world are not two agendas, one dubbed conservative and the other liberal, but the two essential dimensions of the renewal of the Church.

And, if the Council is right in saying that the Church is the sacrament of the world, renewal of the Church is the way toward the renewal of the world, as the first Benedict believed and so powerfully demonstrated.