John Paul II: assessing his legacy.

The death of John Paul II, and the outpouring of affection and admiration it has brought forth from every corner of the globe, has reminded all of us what a remarkable individual he was and what a singular institution the papacy is. Commonweal asked six commentators, representing four faith traditions, to make a preliminary assessment of the significance of the late pope's life, thought, and ministry.

Nancy A. Dallavalle

Pope John Paul II will be remembered for his service as a public witness who, by the strength of his personality and intellect--and the scope of his office--was able to command the world's attention. Simply by traveling, as pope, he reinforced the concept that Catholicism is a church of the world, both in breadth and, increasingly, in orientation.

He worked tirelessly to proclaim the truth about human freedom, the common good, and the nature of the human person, and his genuine pastoral stature often carried the day, even when the specifics of this "truth" were questioned. While Vatican watchers will observe that his papacy was a "referendum" on Vatican II (and it was), for rank-and-file Catholics, the spotlight was less on the church in the modern world as a source of "joy and hope" than on John Paul II himself as a media celebrity. In the end, this actor-turned-pope didn't need to render a verdict on Vatican II--he simply upstaged it.

And his will be a hard act to follow: the footlights are bright with public attention, the script well known, and the chorus voices primed for their cue. What will endure, the extraordinary Catholic humanism that gave such integrity to his vision, or the dogmatic certainty, which too often gave a narrow and even sectarian cast to an otherwise generous catholicity?

The gift of this papacy has been its public face: the stadium Masses, the youth gatherings, and the worldwide attention for its message. Of course, popular acclaim did not automatically translate into popular conversion: it wasn't hard to find dissent from the church's moral teachings among the crowds shouting "John Paul II, we love you!" Yet the spiritual power of this man was undeniable, evidenced by a genuine engagement with papal teaching on the level of the person, a flowering of lay groups (generally conservative), and, in many quarters, a renewed appreciation of traditional forms of piety.

Notice, though, that this renewal often followed a wheel-and-spokes pattern, a structure that connects the individual believer to a powerful central individual, but one that does little to stabilize the structure in a three-dimensional way. The spokes have little relationship with each other.

Lost in this powerful image, particularly in the United States, is the "Catholic" story on the ground, the detail of parish and diocesan structures, the struggle of the parochial schools, the work of Catholic Charities and the outreach of Catholic Relief Services. The visual account consists on the macro level of the pope's public story as a moral leader, and on the micro level of those who respond (or don't). Yet the institution itself is not visible. (Functioning institutions, particularly those featuring elderly men in cassocks, don't make for good television.) Catholicism as devotion plays well in living color; Catholicism as institutional life badly needs another trip to make-up.

Yet it is precisely this institution as institution that needs to exemplify "catholic" integrity. Early in this pontificate, that institutional question was more clearly addressed in papal teaching on social justice and in diplomatic pressure in Eastern Europe. Intellectually, the extraordinary scope of this integrity was on ample display in papal teaching on relativism, on the relation of science and religion, and on the human person as a moral actor.

But "teaching" also happens in the structure of church life and community, and here John Paul's vision was not as successful. He could not translate his diplomatic gifts to his native Poland into the society he hoped would emerge, as liberated Poland increasingly adopted the secular mores of its neighbors to the West. He reached out to Judaism as Christianity's "elder brother in the faith," but his efforts with Orthodox Christianity met with mixed success, and the Anglican Communion drifted away. He could carefully select bishops--men of genuine character and holiness--but he could not teach them to trust one another, or to engage in real dialogue, or to structure their own deliberations. Neither are these skills passed from bishop to priest, and when words like "dialogue" and "deliberation" and "structure" are voiced by the laity, they are berated by the clergy for importing ideas foreign to "orthodox" Catholicism.

The Catholic witness to the value of human life--whether unborn, poor, reviled, or impaired--is an important cultural good and has been a central theme of this papacy. This witness does not primarily reside, though, in individuals. Rather it is supported and promoted by institutional structures: hospitals, relief organizations, charitable storefronts, and public agencies. These institutions include the web of relationships--not merely bricks-and-mortar--that make possible the "heroic" efforts of men and woman.

The late pope's long decline has been embraced in a further deepening of the cult of John Paul II, as his dogged willingness to place the term of his service in the hands of God has thrown the personal dimension of the papal office into high relief. One might argue, though, that his papacy is not served well by the end of the story. While there is an important message being conveyed about the absolute value of human life, it is somewhat compromised by a parallel message about the absolute value of papal power. The papal office rightly has the arc of a real human life, but a Catholic institution should bear the stamp of this arc, not be eclipsed by it.

Over and over again, Pope John Paul II returned to his opening line, "Be not afraid," the commission given by Christ to the ragtag group he called to carry on after his death. Let this be the Holy Father's epitaph as well. Let this moment be our commissioning, a call to listen to this extraordinary life, and then arise.

Nancy A. Dallavalle is associate professor of religious studies at Fairfield University.

Stanley Hauerwas

In the last chapter of my Gifford Lecturers (With the Grain of the Universe: The Church's Witness and Natural Theology), I suggested that the great Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder and John Paul II represent the theological politics necessary to sustain the work of theology in our time. I am sure many thought I was being disingenuous. Anabaptist and pope are surely strange bedfellows. But I had no devious intentions. I believe that John Paul II's reassertion of the Christological center for Roman Catholic theology has ecclesiological implications that are not unlike those represented by Yoder.

In his first encyclical, Redemptor hominis, John Paul II made Christ the center of the church's witness in a manner that shaped all his papacy. Those external to the Catholic world may think it odd to congratulate a pope for being "Christological." But John Paul II, schooled on the resources needed to oppose totalitarians, called Catholic theology back to its animating center with a renewed sense that Jesus matters. I think, moreover, it is no accident that John Paul II later issued Fides et ratio, for he rightly understood that any recovery of right reason requires an uncompromising recognition that the God who can be known through reason is the God who has made himself known in Christ.

John Paul II's effort to help Catholics understand that they are members of a world church was a correlative of his Christological convictions. Natural theology and natural-law ethics seemed to make sense when the popes viewed Europe as their pastoral backyard. It was John Paul II's great vision--a vision that Rahner rightly thought to be the result of Vatican II--to see that European Catholicism no longer defined what counts as Catholicism. John Paul II, like Yoder, began the exploration of what it might mean for the church to live in a situation in which we are not the "establishment."

That John Paul II sought to be a "non-Constantinian pope" does not mean he abandoned the church's pastoral responsibilities toward Europe and the West. But as his most recent book (Memory and Identity) made clear, he understood that the developments often associated with the Enlightenment created a new challenge for Christians in the cultures of the West. In particular, he was not impressed by the creation of wealth in societies like those of Europe and America. He seems to have understood, as Alasdair MacIntyre has suggested, that from the perspective of the gospel, capitalism is as bad for those who succeed by its standards as for those who fail by them. Without romanticizing poverty, John Paul II understood the significance that Catholicism remains the church of the poor.

John Paul II's travels, moreover, suggest that he had to go where the poor live. It is clear he understood that Rome could be a prison. He had to travel so that Catholics in the West might understand that they are not the church. Catholicism is a material faith and Christians rightly desire to see the pope in the flesh. John Paul's willingness to be present anywhere in the world was the attempt to resist any suggestion that the church is an invisible reality. If Christianity is connections, this was a pope who connected. He was able to make connections because people sensed he was a man of deep faith who resisted letting the responsibilities of his office compromise what truthfully needed to be said.

I particularly admired the last years of John Paul II's papacy. Frail and feeble, he carried on. Political leaders are generally required to be vigorous and manly. Over the last years of his life, John Paul was anything but. He seemed, in many ways, a broken man. Yet what a wonderful witness it is that the office of unity of the church of Jesus Christ would be found in one so broken.

I am aware that many will find my admiration for John Paul II too cheap. I am, after all, a Protestant. I have not had to suffer from or struggle with some of his more "conservative" sides. I cannot mount a defense against such criticism, but I hope the reasons for my sense of his significance are nonetheless good ones. John Paul II longed for Christian unity. It was a loving longing that those of us who remain outside the Roman Catholic Church could not help but respond to with love for him and the church he led.

Stanley Hauerwas is professor of theology at Duke Divinity School.

Richard P. McBrien

From the outset, John Paul II had a two-fold mission as pope: to bring the insights and values of the suffering church of the East (especially Poland) to the comfortable churches of the West, and to bring an end to what conservative cardinals and bishops at the time of his election regarded as the postconciliar drift of the church--an implied, if not a pointed, criticism of Pope Paul VI.

John Paul II believed that his election in 1978 was fraught with immense historical and providential significance. He recalled what his fellow Pole, Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, had told him: "If the Lord has called you, you must lead the church into the third millennium." And so it happened.

A key part of John Paul II's grand pastoral design was to unite the spiritual forces of the world's three monotheistic faiths--Christianity, Judaism, and Islam--against the common enemies of materialism and secularism. With regard to Islam, he (unsuccessfully) sought cooperation rather than confrontation. He even inserted criticism of the ongoing Persian Gulf War into his 1991 encyclical Centesimus annus (n. 52).

John Paul II boldly reached out to Jews. He was the first pope to visit the chief synagogue in Rome and was also the first to open formal diplomatic relations with the State of Israel. In a dramatic ceremony in St. Peter's Basilica in March 2000, he publicly asked forgiveness "in the name of the church" for the sins of Catholics against Jews throughout history and particularly at the time of the Holocaust. His subsequent visit to Jerusalem's Western Wall and Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial, served to italicize this commitment.

The obvious strengths of John Paul's pontificate were in his "foreign policy," that is, in his dealings with forces, events, and communities outside the Catholic Church. He became for many in today's world a lone, powerful voice for spiritual values and integrity, and for moral consistency and courage. I would add to the list of John Paul's strengths his prophetic denunciations of poverty and of governmental favoring of the rich and powerful over the poor and powerless in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, and his three major social encyclicals, Laborem exercens (1981), Sollicitudo rei socialis (1988), and Centesimus annus (1991), in which he reaffirmed the church's "preferential option for the poor." John Paul II was an unyielding defender of life at every point on the human spectrum, from conception to death. While he was a steadfast opponent of abortion and of euthanasia, he also condemned capital punishment and the use of military force, except under the rarest of circumstances.

John Paul II had a decisive hand in accelerating the implosion of the Soviet Union, particularly through his persistent and stalwart support for the Solidarity labor movement in Poland. Mikhail Gorbachev acknowledged as much. The pope himself was far more modest about his achievement than were some of his most partisan supporters. He did not single-handedly cut down the Soviet tree, he insisted. He simply shook it so that its already rotting fruit fell more quickly to the ground. Even for that, he deserves full marks as an agent of global justice, peace, and freedom.

The pope was also fully committed to ecumenism and interreligious dialogue. He was privately criticized by some for organizing and personally participating in the Assisi conference for world peace in 1986, where he conversed and prayed with leaders and representatives of the world's great religions. Undoubtedly, some eyebrows were raised when he invited the archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, and a representative of the Orthodox Churches to assist him in the opening of the Holy Door of St. Paul's Outside the Walls to inaugurate the Jubilee Year 2000. Those eyebrows must have been raised even higher in 1996, when, at a vesper service held on the occasion of the fourteen-hundredth anniversary of Gregory the Great's sending Augustine and his fellow monks to re-Christianize Briton, the pope invited Archbishop Carey to walk in procession with him, in cope and miter. Archbishop Carey was accompanied by his wife, Eileen. On the same occasion, the pope gave Archbishop Carey a gold episcopal pectoral cross. These papal actions may not have been so much in contradiction to, as they were ahead of, official policies and pronouncements laid down in the past by his own Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF).

In one of his most important encyclicals, Ut unum sint (1995), John Paul II acknowledged that, while the Petrine office belongs to the essential structure of the church, the manner in which the papal office is exercised is always subject to criticism and improvement. He invited pastoral leaders and theologians of other Christian churches to enter into dialogue with him about the manner in which his office is exercised and to recommend ways in which its exercise might conform more faithfully to the gospel.

Finally, I would single out for special praise John Paul II's efforts, following in the footsteps of John XXIII, to take seriously his primary pastoral role as bishop of the diocese of Rome. He did so by regular visitations to parishes for Sunday liturgy and other sacramental and ministerial activities, as well as to other institutions, such as hospitals, where his presence brought comfort and hope.

In order to pursue his overarching pastoral design, however, the pope believed from the beginning of his pontificate that the church itself had to be placed under greater discipline. He amended the Code of Canon Law to include dissent against official church teaching, whether infallibly rendered or not, among those transgressions that are "to be punished with a just penalty" (can. 1371).

The censuring of theologians Hans Kung, Charles Curran, and Leonardo Boff, and the excommunication in 1997 of a seventy-one-year-old Sri Lankan theologian, Tissa Balasuriya (who was restored to full communion a year later), at least temporarily damaged the close relationships that had been forged between theologians and the bishops at Vatican II. More recent CDF investigations of Jacques Dupuis, SJ, and Roger Haight, SJ, have been equally damaging. Punitive actions taken against Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen of Seattle and Bishop Walter Sullivan of Richmond, and the deposition of Bishop Jacques Gaillot of France without any meaningful prior involvement of the national conferences of Catholic bishops of their respective countries were disturbing even to many bishops whom the media would otherwise label as "conservative."

In embarking on a hard-line course of enforcement of doctrinal and canonical discipline, John Paul II had, by implication, rendered a negative judgment about Paul VI. Following the Second Vatican Council, many Catholics had expected that the papacy would become more collegial in its governing style, that is, more like that of the first Christian millennium than the second, more like the pontificate of John XXIII than of Pius XII. But under John Paul II the governmental operations of the Catholic Church became more centralized, not less. Pastoral decisions that one would have expected to be left to the local bishops or to national conferences of bishops (for example, regarding the translation of liturgical texts) were reserved to the Vatican.

Many bishops complained that new bishops were often appointed without prior consultation or even in the teeth of their direct opposition, and that the agenda of the various world and regional synods of bishops were too strongly controlled by the Roman curia. Even the final statements issued by those synods were sometimes modified and reshaped to fit the curia's perception of issues.

The pope also disturbed many Catholics, including members of the hierarchy, with the kind of movements and religious communities he clearly favored, for example, Opus Dei (whose founder was canonized in such rapid fashion that even some cardinals were dismayed by the process), and the Legionaries of Christ, whose founder and leader was appointed by the Vatican as a delegate to the Synod of the Americas in spite of accusations of sexual abuse.

On any list of deficiencies, the appointment of bishops stands at or near the top. Nowhere was John Paul II's apparent determination to purify the church of critical and independent thought more evident than in the types of men he promoted to and within the hierarchy. In his pontificate, it seemed that only those priests could be made bishops who opposed the ordination of women, who regarded the use of every means of birth control--apart from natural family planning--as a mortal sin, and who opposed married priests--unless, of course, they were former Episcopal or Anglican priests who had come over to the Roman Catholic Church in protest against their own church's ordaining of women.

In the end, my assessment of John Paul II's pontificate stands somewhere between those to my left who concede no achievements, only deficiencies, and for whom John Paul II had been, as some of them liked to put it, "a disaster," and those to my right who can see only perfection and heroic virtue and who dismiss any and all criticism as if born of elitist disaffection or even disloyalty to the church.

Rev. Richard P. McBrien is the Crowley-O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.

Irving Greenberg

One of the more remarkable expressions of the openness and the atmosphere of universal communication in Western society is that religious figures are judged by their impact on other religious communities as well as their own.

The legacy of Pope John Paul II that had the greatest impact on Jewry may well be one that he left to all of humanity--his role in inspiring and sustaining the Solidarity movement. Poland's breakaway was a major factor in bringing down the Soviet system. For one shining movement, thanks to the deep personal connection between Karol Wojtyla and the Polish people, obedience to God became resistance to tyranny. With his powerful, gentle goading, national identity became the vehicle of human dignity and freedom while religious devotion reinforced moral conviction and conscience to defy imperialist oppression. Upheld by John Paul's spiritual force, Solidarity--despite relentless pressure--refused to stoop to anti-Semitism to protect its popularity with the masses.

In enabling the downfall of the Soviet Empire, John Paul II helped overthrow the most consistent postwar enemy of the Jews. Since the 1940s, the Communist system in its totalitarian insistence on uniformity had been the implacable enemy of Soviet Jews and their right to be themselves, religiously and culturally. Similarly, Stalinism was the most powerful antagonist of the Jewish right to statehood and self-determination. Time and again, after military defeat had brought the Arabs to the brink of acknowledging and settling with Israel, the Soviet Union restored their military capacity and revived their genocidal fantasies. Given the continuing power of evil in the world, John Paul II's model that human spiritual solidarity can ultimately win out over force and repression to attain political freedom and cultural dignity without violence is not yet proved. Still, the witness of his life continues to deepen and extend such a vision within human consciousness.

The direct extraordinary gift John Paul II gave to Jewry was his historically unprecedented affirmation of the validity of the Jewish covenant, that is, of Judaism. Up to his reign, there was a direct connection between theological liberalism (and the desire to extend the innovations of Vatican II) and the will to renew the relationship of Catholic Christianity and Judaism. John Paul II was conservative. Yet he continued and extended the recasting of attitudes toward Judaism.

On November 17, 1980, in Mainz, Germany, he spoke of the dialogue as "a meeting of the people of God of the Old Covenant, never revoked by God," and that of the New Covenant. In the first-ever papal visit to any synagogue (Rome, 1986) he reiterated that "the Jews are beloved of God, who has called them with an irrevocable calling." He spoke of going beyond "a mere co-existence," and affirmed that Jewish-Christian relations were predicated on recognition and respect for each religion "in its own identity beyond any syncretism or any ambiguous appropriation." These revolutionary declarations definitively undercut the supersessionism which dominated Christian attitudes toward Jews and their religion for almost two millennia. The policy was further extended by the document We Remember: Reflections on the Shoah, in which the Vatican acknowledged both past Christian failures and the theological weight of the Shoah as a new lodestar for future theological attitudes. If this were not amazing enough, John Paul's Vatican worked out an agreement establishing diplomatic relations with the State of Israel. This pact constituted a repudiation of the tradition that Jews were condemned to be permanently in exile as long as they did not accept Christ. John Paul II climaxed his lifelong message with his visit to Israel in 2000. His prayers at the Wall and his qvittel (written request) for forgiveness for the past were the coda of his remarkable outreach to the Jews.

The third great legacy of John Paul's life for Jewry is still the most controversial. His unyielding opposition to abortion and to feminist calls for equality and access to the priesthood resonated with Orthodox views but not with liberal streams in Judaism. His continuing ban on most forms of medical interventions in fertility, his reluctance to remove misbehaving church leaders, his resistance to admissions that the church (as against individual Christians) has failed morally, his strengthening of Marian veneration, and his support for the beatification of questionable popes (Pius IX and Pius XII) have not been well received.

But John Paul raised his theological position to another level by developing a broad theme that his promagesterium, proauthority, profamily, prolife, antifeminist, antigay teaching was in fact the defense of a culture of life. He stood in the breach against a media-driven, escalating hedonism (turning into drugs and pornography), individualism (turning into narcissism), and liberalism (turning into relativism). The emerging postmodern culture, he argued, was growing beyond one of materialism and excess into a culture of death, despite the good intentions of those who paved its way. (John Paul also linked this stand to opposition to the death penalty and a tendency to critique the use of force in world affairs.)

It is too early to conclude what the full impact of John Paul's teachings about the culture of life will be. By creating some bulwarks in defense of traditional values, John Paul generated counterweight forces that operate to keep economic improvement, individualism, and egalitarianism healthy and restrained rather than allowing them to become overwhelming and destructive. Others would argue that women's access to religious leadership and public expression, and other believers' greater autonomy in expressing their personal, sexual, or familial identities will prove to be more crucial in raising the quality (and even quantity) of life.

Despite his outstanding contribution to the Jewish-Christian relationship, John Paul II gave too many mixed messages (embrace of Arafat, "Christianization" of the Holocaust, defense of Pius XII, secrecy of Vatican archives) to be the Jews' most beloved pope. That title goes to Pope John XXIII, who threw open the windows and refreshed the relationship between Catholicism and the Jews (even as he did the relationship between the church and the modern world). Yet, John Paul's gifts to Jewry go beyond John XXIII's. The Talmud teaches that "in death, the truly righteous become larger than [in] life." When the final assessment is made, the Jewish community worldwide will recognize this historic contribution and call him blessed.

Rabbi Irving Greenberg is president of Jewish Life Network/Steinhardt Foundation and the author of For the Sake of Heaven and Earth: The New Encounter between Judaism and Christianity.

Terrence W. Tilley

In life, John Paul II evoked powerful reactions. Books by George Weigel and John Cornwell represent sophisticated versions of those reactions. In Witness to Hope, Weigel was nearly hagiographical. His writing on John Paul II is adulatory in the extreme. With other neoconservatives, he enlisted the pope in his causes. For some of those causes, especially support of laissez-faire capitalism, the pope would resist the draft.

In Breaking Faith, Cornwell found John Paul II the emblem, if not the root, of what ails the Roman Church. With other liberals, he excoriated the pope for his seemingly restorationist approach to ecclesial issues in general and theological issues in particular. Yet neither is this view fully fair. Beyond the hype and the glitter, the bile and the frustration, what were John Paul's distinctive contributions?

Clearly, his support for the Solidarity labor union in Poland led to the end of Communist hegemony in Central Europe a decade into his reign. His media-soaked travels evoked real, but probably ephemeral, responses from many young folk. Whether he was scolding the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in 1983, praying with world religious leaders at Assisi in 1986, making a pilgrimage around the Mediteranean in 2001, or praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, he was an ecclesial activist. He tried to use his office to say and to show what it meant to be a Catholic Christian. His great encyclicals, from Redemptor hominis through Fides et ratio, form an important legacy.

As an old man worn down by Parkinson's disease, he seemed more a figurehead for Vatican dicasteries than an active leader. Not an unusual occurrence at the end of a long pontificate.

How to understand that pontificate? One key is the title of John Paul's controversial motu proprio (a unilateral act undertaken on his own initiative) revising canon law. The rather unusual title, Ad tuendam fidem, recalls the Latin collect for the feast of Pope St. Pius X, which begins Ad tuendam catholicam fidem (to preserve the Catholic faith). As Pius X was a defender of the faith against modern deviations, so was John Paul II.

As Pius X was the pope of the Eucharist, so was John Paul II. From his Holy Thursday letter of 1980, Dominicae cenae, to his final encyclical, Ecclesia de Eucharista, John Paul II intimately connected Christ, the institution of the Eucharist, the hierarchical priesthood, and the church. It is no wonder that a hierarchical form of "communion ecclesiology" flourished in his pontificate. One could put it this way: without the priest, no Eucharist; without the Eucharist, no church; without the church, no salvation. And no one "who is not baptized or ... who rejects the full truth of the faith regarding the eucharistic mystery" can receive the Eucharist (Ecclesia de Eucharista, 38), although some individuals not fully incorporated into the Roman Catholic Church may receive the Eucharist in some special circumstances. Maintaining eucharistic proprieties, supporting the vocation of the priest, and refusing to allow any "watered down" theology to sully the communion that is the church were major themes of his pontificate.

Like Pius X, John Paul II had skirmishes with theologians, challenged the modern world both intellectually and morally, and signed off on a syllabus of errors (Pius X's Lamentabili sane exitu against modernism; John Paul II's Dominus Iesus against theologies of religious pluralism). Both also had curial officials who cultivated networks of spies throughout the world who related deviations in theology or ritual to Rome.

Pius X did not have the instantaneous communications network that John Paul II had. Pius was a prisoner of the Vatican and John Paul was certainly not. Indeed, memories of his pilgrimages focus on the massive attendance at his celebrations of the Eucharist. And unlike Pius X, John Paul II did build upon Leo XIII's legacy of Catholic social teaching in his encyclicals Centesimus annus and Sollicitudo rei socialis. John Paul, a sometime philosophy professor, could also appreciate the contributions of the secular culture of his time in ways that Pius could not in his own era.

Both Pius X and John Paul II worked for the goal of preserving the faith, ad tuendam fidem, in analogous ways. Pius's legacy was theologically debilitating, but, devotionally a profound achievement. John Paul's pontificate was theologically stimulating and controversial, but given the profound level of defection from the practice of Catholicism--especially participation in the Eucharist--in Europe (and to a lesser extent in the United States) over the last century, the devotional center of this pontificate seems unlikely to endure.

In the end, as always, it will take an act of God to preserve the faith, no matter what popes do and say or fail to do and say.

Terrence W. Tilley is professor of religious studies at the University of Dayton.

Jim Forest

In April 1977, as general secretary of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation, I received an urgent phone call from Buenos Aires with the news that Adolfo Perez Esquivel, leader of Argentina's human-rights movement Servicio Paz y Justicia, had been kidnapped by the secret police. Argentina was then ruled by a military dictatorship, and those who "disappeared" were rarely heard from or seen again.

I quickly called Nobel Peace Prize recipient Mairead Corrigan in Belfast. She had met Perez Esquival and respected his work greatly. I suggested that she immediately nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize--a right given to each Nobel recipient. We knew that Perez Esquival was unlikely to be regarded as a serious candidate for such an honor, but our hope was that the nomination would make the Argentinean generals cautious about his life. Within an hour Corrigan had sent a letter to the Nobel Committee in Oslo proposing Perez Esquival's name. The next day, both his disappearance and the Nobel nomination were in the world press.

It took fourteen months, but our action was successful. In 1978, Perez Esquival was finally freed. Though repeatedly tortured, he was one of the few desaparecidos to return alive from Argentina's secret prisons. Following his release, we thought no more about his nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize. He had survived and resumed his work--this was all we had hoped for. But then, in the late summer of 1980, the phone rang--a call from Oslo--with news that Perez Esquival would be awarded the prize.

On December 10, I was with Perez Esquival and his family for the award ceremony in Oslo. Weeks before, he had phoned asking me to try to arrange a meeting with Pope John Paul II following the Nobel ceremony. I called the papal nuncio in The Hague. The nuncio assured me there would be no problem. I warned him that the Argentinean hierarchy, so compromised by its association with the military junta, was likely to do all it could to block such a meeting, but the nuncio was optimistic. He said the Holy Father would decide on the matter himself, and was confident of a positive response. A few days later, the nuncio called with news that the pope would receive us for a private audience. As I recall, the date was set for December 13.

Before the private audience took place, we were invited to attend the pope's weekly public audience in the Aula Paolo VI, a large hall close to St. Peter's Basilica. We were given places in the press gallery and observed the pope as he walked down the center of the aula, repeatedly stopping to listen to people desperately eager to say something to him or receive a blessing. It must have taken him half an hour to make his way to the front of the hall. As a journalist, I had often watched famous people encountering crowds, but never before had I seen someone respond with such patient care and inexhaustible energy.

After the general audience, which consisted of a lecture followed by meetings with individual pilgrim groups, including the physically handicapped, we were escorted to another meeting room. We waited there another half hour. When the pope finally entered the room, he seemed not at all tired from his speech and meetings. We immediately got down to business. For Perez Esquival, this was not merely an opportunity to meet the pope and receive a blessing. He had an agenda.

First, he thanked John Paul for his efforts to prevent a war between Argentina and Chile, a real possibility at the time. He presented the pope with a letter signed by both young Argentineans and Chileans thanking the pope for his efforts and promising him that, in the event his efforts failed, they would refuse to fight in the war. John Paul looked carefully at the letter and the pages of signatures, and--speaking in Spanish--expressed his gratitude for the courage of those who had signed it.

Next, Perez Esquival gave John Paul a large album of photos, with explanatory text, of people who had been kidnapped in Argentina and never seen alive again. Not simply accepting this as something he might scan later, the pope looked through the album page by page. Meanwhile, the conversation continued in Spanish. Perez Equival told the pope about his own experience being kidnapped and tortured, and expressed his sadness that the Argentinean hierarchy had been silent about the crimes committed by the junta.

A third item on the agenda concerned the church in El Salvador. Earlier in the year, Archbishop Oscar Romero had been shot while celebrating Mass. Perez Esquival urged the pope to appoint the acting bishop in San Salvador, Arturo Rivera y Damas, as Romero's successor. The pope listened carefully, and a few days later, the appointment was announced.

Then the pope had gifts for us--we each received a silver rosary. We had a gift for him as well, a copy of my recent biography of Thomas Merton. Merton's writings had been an important influence on Perez Equival's life, and he thought the book would be the perfect gift for the pope. This was the one moment in the audience when I had a brief exchange with John Paul. Switching from Spanish to English, the pope asked if I had known Merton. Yes, I responded, he had been my spiritual father the last seven years of his life. John Paul said he too was a great admirer of Merton's writings. A close friend, the publisher of his own writings in Poland, was also the publisher of many of Merton's books in Polish. He had read them all, he said, and still had them in his library. He looked through the book, pausing over various photos.

At this point, a bishop who had been standing behind the pope throughout the audience reminded him that our audience had taken considerably longer than had been scheduled. The pope apologized, gave us a final blessing, and left for his next appointment. There is one other detail on the story worth including here.

In the weeks before the trip to Rome, I had tried but failed to arrange a meeting with the cardinal who headed the Pontifical Commission for Justice and Peace. The morning following our papal audience, Perez Esquival decided we should go, even without an appointment, and seek a meeting. After all, a picture of our meeting with the pope was on the front page of Rome's newspapers.

We had a good friend on the cardinal's staff, and once we arrived at the Commission office, we asked the receptionist to contact our friend. A few minutes later, he appeared in a panic. "Please leave immediately," he implored. "The cardinal refuses to see you and does not want you in the building." He said he would meet us in fifteen minutes at a nearby cafe. At the cafe, he explained that the Argentinean hierarchy had more influence in his department than the pope. It was a disappointing lesson in curial realities.

Still, what overshadows all other memories of those days in Rome was our meeting with Pope John Paul II. He turned out to be a very attentive listener.

Jim Forest heads the Orthodox Peace Fellowship from his home in Alkmaar, the Netherlands. His most recent book is The Wormwood File: E-Mail from Hell (Orbis).

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The world must heed the warning that comes to us from the victims of the
Holocaust and from the testimony of the survivors. Here at Yad Vashem
the memory lives on, and burns itself onto our souls. It makes us cry
out: "I hear the whispering of many--terror on every side!--But I trust
in you, O Lord; I say, 'You are my God'" (Ps 31:13-15).
JOHN PAUL II, March 23, 2000