The National Interest
Spring 2000 (No. 59)

The Pope's Divisions (Extracts)
(Review of George Weigel's Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II; Cliff Street Books, 1999.)

By James Billington

 

. . . Witness to Hope brings into focus for the modern reader the frontal, two-fold cultural challenge that the Pope seems to be extending to all his varied audiences: Will you really, after the horrors of this century, recognize fully the sanctity of all human life? And can you freely, and without disparaging others, center your own life on allegiance to God as revealed in Jesus Christ?

Modern man is generally reluctant to confront--let alone answer--such stark questions personally; and the mass media seem structurally disinclined even to discuss them. As a result, little attention has been paid in the so-called advanced nations to the central mission and message of this Pope. He has all too often been trivialized as just another People magazine celebrity, demonized as a traditionalist wolf in sheep's clothing, or condescendingly included in the category of benign but vestigial spiritual curiosities.

Among John Paul's many challenges to this contemporary culture, none has been as polemically confrontational as his teaching on sex, gender and the role of women. Weigel makes it clear that this has been a central concern of his papacy from his first gathering with his bishops and his early focus on "The Theology of the Body" in an astonishingly extended series of 130 general audiences.

The sacrament of marriage and "the community of the family" are, for the Pope, unique human institutions in which we "guard, reveal and communicate love", which is the "fundamental and ultimate vocation of every human being." God's original creation of humanity in the divine image involved "from the beginning" two distinct genders whose bodies are, however, battlefields between love and lust, self-giving and self-assertion. In some of his most arresting pages, Weigel paraphrases the Pope as suggesting to us all that "human sexuality is far greater than you imagine", and that "the self-giving love of sexual communion is an icon of the interior life of God" capable of becoming "an act of worship . . . a way to sanctify the world." Weigel sees this exalted view as "exorcising the . . . deprecation of human sexuality from Catholic moral theology" and launching a "theological time bomb" that will probably detonate in the twenty-first century.

Of course, there have already been explosions against the papal teachings that have flown out of this theology into current public debates over birth control (which the Pope prefers to call "fertility regulation"), abortion, chastity (even within marriage), homosexuality and many other related matters. Feminists have not taken kindly to the Pope's view that "the true advancement of women requires that clear recognition be given to the value of their maternal and family role by comparison with all other roles and all other professions." Nevertheless, Weigel's detailed analysis suggests that the Vatican has been more successful in advancing its core concerns on these matters in international forums than a mostly adversarial Western press has reported. Women play for this Pope a central role not only within the family ("the domestic church") but also within the Church itself, where many have felt that the Pope was moving toward pronouncing the Virgin Mary as "co-redemptor" with Christ.

The Pope's personal warmth, good humor and dramatic flair have enabled him to avoid seeming to be scolding or self-righteous as he speaks in tough, traditional terms to a generation that resists the message but cannot resist the messenger. He may--again, paradoxically--have been more successful in reaching the world as a whole with this general message than in advancing his deep desire for the reunification of Christendom. Weigel is persuasive in arguing that the Pope was decisively shaped by the modernization and outreach emphases of Vatican II, but seems to recognize that his papacy has not significantly advanced ecumenism despite the engagement of some of the Pope's most talented protégés in this enterprise. Weigel's recounting of the Vatican discussion of the possible ordination of women reveals a strong inclination to hold fast to an all-male clergy by wrapping that historic practice in the robes of papal infallibility, without either formally proclaiming it to be an obligatory article of faith or seriously arguing the case. This will seem more authoritarian than authoritative to many Christians interested in a deeper dialogue with Rome on what seem to be central matters.

For example, the traditionalist turn of the Anglican communion at the l998 Lambeth Congress reflects the same rising force of African Christianity that the Pope recognized and helped stimulate in Catholicism. Yet both of the Protestant communions that are probably closest to Catholicism, the Anglican and the Lutheran, seem to have made more progress coming together with each other than either has with Rome. Weigel blames the waning of ecumenical progress almost exclusively on the growth of permissiveness within these and other "mainline" Protestant denominations. Such criticism is also voiced by the more evangelical Christian groups, whose numbers are growing particularly among the poor. Yet there is little indication in the book that the Pope has taken much spiritual account of Pentacostalism and other less traditional denominations.

The most serious failure of Catholic ecumenism during this papacy has been with the Slavic Orthodox churches--the very linkage that the Pope allegedly most wanted to make and seemed uniquely equipped to pursue. Weigel places almost all of the blame on the leaders of the dominant Russian Orthodox Church. They made many compromises with their Soviet overlords, themselves crafted a prolonged persecution of Eastern-rite Catholics in Ukraine, and have never extended to the Pope the episcopal invitation that he normally requires to make a foreign visit.

But John Paul had a cordial relationship with Gorbachev, who invited him to come to Russia in a spontaneous public gesture to which this normally bold Pope unaccountably failed to respond. Even more inexplicable on the part of a Pope who believes that culture determines history was the cultural insensitivity of beginning his post-Soviet diplomacy by appointing Polish bishops for newly delineated dioceses in Russia. Weigel is at his least convincing in implying that an already bruised Russian sense of national identity might have been consoled by a little more advance notification, or by the technicality that these bishops were only called "administrators." . . .