The three challenges of Wojtyla

Now Prefect Emeritus of the Congregation for the Oriental Churches, Achille Silvestrini is one of the best known faces in the Roman Curia. He, too, joins in with all his heart in the celebrations in honor of Pope Wojtyla this October.

After twenty-five years of pontificate, who for you is Pope John Paul II?
ACHILLE SILVESTRINI: This pontificate, the more time passes and the more one stops to dwell on it, has taken on a grandiose scale, not imagined earlier. It is a pontificate that has a great force of religious offering and at the same time an ability to face events with courage and prophetic insight. John Paul II started, as soon as he was elected, with the challenge to Communism, which was not a political challenge, however, but a moral and religious challenge. The Redemptor hominis is the pivotal point. It is the development of that proem of Gaudium et spes, the relationship between Christ and man, on which Karol Wojtyla had worked a lot as member of Vatican Council II. Wojtyla made his own this principle whereby, with the incarnation, Christ in some way unites himself to every man, and reveals to man the meaning of himself. Humanism is entirely founded on Christology, so that man is the obligatory path for the Church, which cannot but dedicate itself to serving the good of man. From these principles derive the rights of the human person, which is the value on which the legitimacy or illegitimacy of all political and social systems is measured. So that on the basis of these reasons Communist regimes were accused of the fundamental “anthropological error” of Marxism: that of imagining man in a single dimension, the economic one, materialistically interpreted, that above all was regulated with authority from above, preventing man from expressing himself fully.
The opposition of the Pope was not political opposition, but was based on values of faith - the relation between Christ and man - and philosophical criteria – the condemnation of anthropological error mentioned above. That was Wojtyla’s starting point. And we have seen it put into effect.
On his first trip to Poland he stirred the great Solidarnosc movement into challenging the government on the basis of these values of mankind. But in 1981, with Jaruzelski’s martial law, everything seemed squashed. I can witness that the Pope - but it’s in the historical record - was one of few that has never abandoned the possibility that Solidarnosc would grow strong again. And even when in Poland itself they believed that the “dream” was over, he didn’t, and said so clearly when he met Jaruzelski: “General, I challenge what you are proposing to the Polish people because it is the negation of the good of man”.
It’s interesting that Pope Wojtyla, in the face of Marxism, was able to distinguish between its origins - «the needs from which real socialism had taken its impetus, that is the exploitation to which an inhuman capitalism had subjected the proletariat», as the Pope himself said in Riga, in Latvia, 9 September 1993 – and its realization, based on a mistaken anthropological choice that did not take account of the reality of man, who lives also by faith, art and poetry… And that already gave one insight into the second phase of the pontificate.
How?
SILVESTRINI: That way of facing up to the regimes of the East is consistent with the challenge that Pope John Paul II afterwards launched against consumer society. He said in fact in Laborem exercens and in Centesimus annus that the market is an instrument that reveals the health of business, and market freedom is essential. However it doesn’t solve the needs of man, because there are values that escape it, that are not satisfied by economic freedom. Here again the category of consumerism is filtered anthropologically: an economy that produces does not match up per se with the theme of the family, of the relation between the rich and the poor. It should be noted that economic liberalism is seen as a more insidious danger than Communism because it is not the atheist negation of every transcendent dimension, but is born precisely out of a civilization that has historically Christian roots. But the Pope has never abandoned the new challenge.
There has been a logic at work throughout his pontificate, and it is daughter of the vision of Pope Wojtyla expressed in Redemptor hominis. That is the origin. Certainly, Sollicitudo rei socialis is also in line, but it is an element, like other encyclicals by this Pope, in a constellation around Redemptor hominis.
But there is also, let’s call it so, a third phase in the pontificate…
Which is?
SILVESTRINI: That of peace, after 11 September. Whereby war can never be accepted and the sole licit use of arms is legitimate self-defense. John Paul II took up John XXIII in Pacem in terris here, in the affirmation that, in the present situation of military technology, war as tool to resolve international conflicts is inconceivable, or better, alienum a ratione. Pope John Paul II repeated it, also, among other things, in his year’s message on peace and he developed it strongly in all his pronouncements on the war against Iraq. Without any indulgence towards Saddam Hussein’s regime, the Pope was concerned that the international community would turn away from a solution based on the UN Charter, that is on principles, and accept a unilateral solution, as unfortunately turned out to be the case.
At the time of the war against Iraq it was said that the Pope’s message of peace was universally shared because it didn’t represent an exclusive action of Christian faith, but of common religious feeling…
SILVESTRINI: And was therefore able to stir the collaboration of followers of other religions. It was based all on the concept that God cannot want hate and killing among human beings. God expresses a paternity that is the basis of peace and of the possibility that men discover ways of solidarity. Pope John Paul II eliminated any suggestion that religions as such, and to assert themselves, can justify intolerance and holy war. And so, that clarified, one sees that, on the contrary, it is faith in God, who is father of all, that makes his faithful all brothers. So peace springs from this religious vision of human life.
John Paul II has been a pope important in the world. And he has sometimes also stirred enthusiasm for his pronouncements and his stances. Have Catholics always followed him?
SILVESTRINI: Not always. And he has been in different ways. The Episcopal Conference of the United States, for example, said very similar things on peace to those affirmed by the Pope. However I remember… in Latin America, when he visited, there were different positions, we could say there was a slowness in following the Pope, I’m not saying resistance, but a certain gap. There was a Church that sometimes went too far, with Liberation Theology, and another that was reluctant to accept the proposals of the Pope for opposite reasons. It happened.
One debated theme of a distance between Pope John Paul II and the Church has been the mea culpa for the behavior of some churchmen in the past, for Jan Hus, the Saint Bartholomew day massacre, anti-semitism… The Pope did not aim to condemn people of the past but to purge the memory of the Church today from what does not fit its mission. So that the Church may free itself and not repeat the error. Some circles were worried that if the Church began to contradict its past there would be those tomorrow who would ask it to contradict what it is doing today.
On the mea culpa to the Jews, then, the Pope gave the impetus, he took the initiative and went ahead. Not only when he visited the synagogue in Rome, but also during the Jubilee of 2000, when he placed his plea for forgiveness in the Wailing Wall and visited the Yad Vashem. He has wanted to eliminate once and for all the mistaken feeling of distrust toward the Jews. It will, it will have to, disappear; it won’t happen, however, with the speed Pope John Paul II would have liked, but in time.
The acts of this Pope have one speed and those of the Church another.
SILVESTRINI: That’s clear, because after an act comes the delay of inculturation. The generation, though it has even witnessed the act, finds it hard to adapt at first, it has its history. We need to wait for a new generation to assess the effectiveness of the act. Even today we can say that Vatican II has problems of inculturation… And again, the Pope, after the gathering at Assisi in 1986, wanted to explain the event at the meeting with the Curia at Christmas. It was clear that he felt there were some who were not in agreement. There was fear that the impression might be created of encouraging a kind of religious syncretism. He instead explained that at Assisi each had prayed for the benefit of peace along with the others, but the forms of prayer had been quite distinct. So true is it that the real and proper ecumenical prayer at Assisi was recited only by the Christian denominations, not with the Buddhists or the Moslems… The Pope was determined to stress it.
His attitude has always been this: courageous, and convinced of what he felt inside as inspiration for his initiatives. He has shown he trusts that time would bring the hoped-for fruits. Personally I’ve always found the Pope very serene and calm about what he did.
What memory of this Pope most strikes you?
SILVESTRINI: Even on the political and diplomatic issues, after gathering all the possible information, after studying and checking all the possibilities together, the real question he asked all of us was this: «What would the Lord want? What does the Gospel suggest?» He didn’t ponder questions of political expediency or concrete diplomatic advantages. We were called upon to be faithful and to observe whether what we were about to do «corresponds to the good of man and to the mission of the Church, as the Gospel teaches us».
Permit me a truly personal question. When you pray for the Pope, at this time, what do you ask?
SILVESTRINI: That the Lord give him what is best for him and for the Church. And I ask that he may have health and strength: that’s the most natural request. But then, as it is with all prayers, “Thy will be done”. As, in Luke’s Gospel, Mary answers the angel: «I am the handmaid of the Lord. Be it done unto me according to your world.