Lessons in Hope Read online

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  Copyright © 2017 by George Weigel

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  First Edition: September 2017

  Published by Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  Print book interior design by Jack Lenzo.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017948323

  ISBN: 978-0-465-09429-5 (hardcover)

  ISBN: 978-0-465-09430-1 (e-book)

  E3-20170802-JV-NF

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  A Dinner of Consequence

  COINCIDENCE AND PROVIDENCE

  Lent in the Third Grade: Baltimore, 1960

  First Steps in Philosophy: Baltimore, 1969–1973

  Contesting the Council: Toronto, 1973–1975

  Apprentice Wordsmith: Seattle, 1975–1984

  Front Row Seat: New York and Baltimore, October 1979

  In the Castle: Washington, 1984–1985

  Cold War Endgame: Washington, 1985–1989

  EPPC, Diplomacy, and Centesimus Annus: Washington and Copenhagen, 1989–1991

  NEW WORLDS

  In the Belly of the Beast: Moscow, October 1990

  Rookie Vaticanista: Rome, May 1991 and March–April 1992

  “Do You Have Some Polish Ancestors?”: Warsaw, Kraków, Gdańsk, and Tarnów, June 1991

  Pilsner on Tap and Martyr-Confessors: Prague and Bratislava, October 1991

  In the Alps: Liechtenstein, July 1992

  Così Giovane: Rome, November 1992

  After the Revolution: Rome and Poland, 1993–1994

  The Biography That Wasn’t: Washington and Rome, Spring 1995

  Parsing Freedom: New York and Baltimore, October 1995

  THE WITNESS, FROM INSIDE

  The Mandatum Scribendi: Washington, January 1996

  “That’s Obvious…”: Rome, March 1996

  Worse Than Solzhenitsyn: Kraków, July 1996

  “It Was Always ‘Them’ and ‘Us’”: Rome, September 1996

  The Indispensable Man: Rome, 1996–1999

  Spiral Staircase: Rome, December 1996

  Tutor, Translator, Librarian, Nun: Rome, February–October 1997

  “Humiliation at the Hands of Evil” and Crypto-Lenin: Rome, January 1997

  A Pride of Curialists: Rome, 1996–1999

  “Something Useful for the Universal Church”: Rome, March 1997

  Wojtyła’s Poland in Depth: Warsaw, Kraków, and Lublin, April 1997

  Inside the Holy See–Israel Negotiations: Austin, May 1997

  Back in Sync in Poland: Kraków, June 1997

  Camels for Daughters? Kraków and Paris, August 1997

  Polonia on the Potomac: Washington, 1997–1998

  Literary Architecture: Charleston, September 1997

  “Who Eez Bob DEE-Lahn?”: Rome, September 1997

  “Are You Proud to Be an American?”: Rome and Vienna, November–December 1997

  The Island Prison: Cuba, January 1998

  “What Are You Doing Here? You Are Not from Milwaukee…”: Rome, March 1998

  “Joan or Gwyneth?”: Rome, April 1998

  “He Is a Source of Light”: Rome, April 1998

  “You Are Getting Grey”: Poland and Rome, July–December 1998

  Impeachment Intervenes: Washington, July 1998–February 1999

  Last Lap: Washington and Rome, January–June 1999

  JUBILEE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS

  A Long Embrace: Rome, September 1999

  On the Road: The United States, Canada, and Europe, October 1999–January 2000

  Wisdom Personified: Jerusalem, March 2000

  Back Home in Poland: Warsaw, Gdańsk, Poznań, Wrocław, and Kraków, May 2000

  Lusitania and Oz: Portugal and Australia, June and October 2000

  Erasmus, the Ethereal Spanish Pyrenees, and a Report to the Pope: New York, Pamplona, and Rome, November–December 2000

  VIA CRUCIS

  Under the Golden Dome: Notre Dame, February 2001

  Abraham Lincoln in Full Pontificals: Rome, February–March 2001

  Chilled Guinness, Michael Jackson, Honorable Members, and Unhappy Tabletistas: Ireland, England, and Scotland, March 2001

  Ben-Hur and the Pope: Rome, May 2001

  New World Disorder: Rome, October–November 2001

  The Long Lent: Rome, Portugal, Toronto, and Germany, 2002

  The Iraq Crisis: Washington and Rome, January–April 2003

  Dark Night and Silver Jubilee: Rome, October 2003

  T. S. Eliot and a Good Story Ruined: Rome, December 2003

  “I Proved Them Wrong!”: Rome, December 2004

  Fourteenth Station: Rome, March–April 2005

  MISSION CONTINUED

  A Gold Mine of Secrets: Poland and Rome, 2007–2008

  Beatification and a Life Reconsidered: Rome, 2006–2008

  A Promise Kept: Washington and Poland, 2010–2012

  Lessons in Hope

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Index

  For

  Joan

  William, Claire, and Lucy

  A Dinner of Consequence

  IN EARLY DECEMBER 1995, I FLEW FROM WASHINGTON TO ROME TO give the keynote address at an international conference on secularism and religious freedom. One of the oddities of European academic conferences is that the “keynote address” is sometimes the finale of the proceedings, so my paper was slotted at the end of a three-day meeting. This curiosity of scheduling set the table for something even stranger, however. For the chairman of the conference’s closing session, Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, former secretary of state of the Holy See, devoted his remarks to a refutation of me and of the analysis of the Church’s role in the collapse of European communism I made in a 1992 book, The Final Revolution.

  The cardinal’s suggestion—that I didn’t quite understand Pope John Paul II and ought not be taken quite so seriously as an interpreter of the Pope’s thoughts and actions—was more than a little ironic. And the irony turned on a dinner conversation in the Vatican the night before, of which Cardinal Casaroli, the Pope’s “first collaborator” for more than a decade, was completely unaware.

  The previous day, as the conference’s postlunch session was about to begin, I had slipped into the back row of a large auditorium and sat down beside my friend Father Richard John Neuhaus. As was often the case, we were thinking the same thing: the moment called for a nice winter’s nap, our heads enclosed in earphones as if we were paying close attention to the simultaneous translation while several colleagues droned on. There would be no napping that day, however. For no sooner had I muted the earphones than a seminarian, somewhat excited, began tapping me vigorously on the shoulder. I looked around, removed the headset, and heard
him say several times, “Don Stanislao is on the telephone for you.” He spoke in slightly awed tones, for my caller was Monsignor Stanisław Dziwisz, John Paul II’s highly competent secretary and the man to whom few people in Rome wanted to say no.

  I took the call and Dziwisz, as usual, got straight to the point: “Come over for dinner tonight and bring Father Neuhaus with you.” I returned to the auditorium, where Richard was fast asleep, and gave him a gentle nudge. When he came to, I leaned over and said, “If your calendar permits, we’re dining with the Holy Father tonight.” Richard allowed as how that might be fitted into his social schedule.

  So at 7:15 that evening we presented ourselves at the Portone di Bronzo, the Bronze Doors of the Apostolic Palace, and were duly led to the Terza Loggia, the third floor, and the papal apartment. We waited a bit in one of the apartment’s small parlors, which, like the rest of the apartment, conjured up “middle-class Italian family,” not “Borgia decadence.” Then, without any ceremony, John Paul II and Msgr. Dziwisz came in, greeted us, and led us into the dining room, where Fr. Neuhaus and I were seated across from the Pope. John Paul said his usual rapid-fire Latin grace before meals and we tucked into an antipasto followed by roast chicken with a local red wine.

  Conversations at John Paul II’s table typically covered a lot of territory. The Pope was insatiably curious and used his mealtimes to keep himself abreast of new arguments, new books, trends in the world Church, and people his guests thought he should meet. But the table talk seemed disjointed this time, as if the Pope’s mind were elsewhere. At one point, Fr. Neuhaus raised the issue of whether a thorough biography of the Pope wouldn’t be a good idea and whether I should do it—an idea I had broached with John Paul’s press secretary, Joaquín Navarro-Valls, seven months before and had talked over with Richard more recently. The Pope immediately changed the subject, as if this were something he didn’t want to discuss. So the conversation drifted into other matters, with John Paul looking into the distance from time to time as if pondering how to say something.

  Then, completely out of the blue, the 263rd Successor of St. Peter abruptly and forcefully said to Fr. Neuhaus, while glancing at me, “You must force him to do it! You must force him to do it!” “It,” of course, was the biography, and “him” was me. Richard said that he didn’t think that any force was going to be required. I simply exhaled. John Paul II smiled.

  Later that night, after we had shared a scotch or two with Monsignor Timothy Dolan, the rector of the Pontifical North American College and our host during this Roman excursion, Richard said, “You know, this is going to change your entire life.” I told him I didn’t think so; I’d do the biography over the next few years and then return to the life I was leading at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the Washington think tank that had been my professional home since 1989. “No,” Richard insisted, “this is going to change everything.”

  He was right, if in that slightly exaggerated way that was one of his trademarks and one of his charms.

  Becoming John Paul II’s biographer didn’t change everything. But it did become the pivot of my life. I began to see a lot of what had gone before in a new perspective, and I gradually came to understand that I had taken on a responsibility that would define me in the future, in ways I could not have anticipated that December afternoon in Rome when a nap seemed in order.

  This album of memories is one unanticipated consequence of that dinner and what flowed from it.

  When the second volume of my John Paul II biography, The End and the Beginning, was published in 2010 and I was promoting the book in its various language editions, I discovered that what my audiences most wanted to hear were stories: stories about the man who had gone home to the Father’s house in 2005, stories that would make him present again by rekindling memories or illuminating previously unknown aspects of his rich personality. That yearning to get to know more personally a saint who bent the course of history in a humane direction, and to know him in ways that didn’t quite fit the genre of serious biography, struck me as the impulse that inspired the informal “lives of the saints” over the centuries. Responding to that curiosity seemed another way to honor the pledge I made to John Paul II at the end of his life: that I would complete the task I accepted at his dinner table on December 6, 1995.

  Doing so, however, requires widening the anecdotal lens and exploring how it was that someone who never expected to become a papal biographer became just that. When I finished The End and the Beginning, I had devoted two large volumes, totaling some sixteen hundred pages, to chronicling the life of the emblematic figure of the second half of the twentieth century—and I thought there was no more to be said. My readers and my audiences taught me I was wrong about that, just as I was wrong in dismissing Fr. Neuhaus’s prediction that writing the Pope’s biography would change everything.

  John Paul II thought he was finished with poetry when he wrote his valedictory to Kraków, the poem “Stanisław,” en route to Rome for the conclave that elected him pope. But toward the end of his life, he discovered there were things he wanted to say that could only be said in poetry, and the result was Roman Triptych. I thought I was finished with the making of John Paul books in 2010. But like the Successor of St. Peter who unexpectedly became a friend and the defining personality in my life’s work, I now find that there are other things to be said and other stories to be told.

  So, like him, I now look back on a remarkable journey by making a triptych: in this case, a third panel to flesh out the portrait of John Paul II, and of many of the notable people around him, that I offered in Witness to Hope and The End and the Beginning.

  COINCIDENCE AND PROVIDENCE

  Arriving at the Marian shrine of Fátima on May 12, 1982, on a pilgrimage of thanksgiving for his life having been spared when he was shot a year before, John Paul II said, “In the designs of Providence, there are no mere coincidences.” That brief remark summed up his view of God’s ways with the world and with history.

  Much of what happens to us over the course of a lifetime can seem mere happenstance or coincidence. Some might view the fact that Mehmet Ali Agca’s bullets tore into the Pope on the liturgical feast of Our Lady of Fátima as coincidence. It didn’t seem that way to John Paul II, for whom salvation history was world history read in its fullest dimension. In salvation history—that inner core of world history in which God’s purposes are worked out through the action of divine grace on individual lives—there are neither happenstances nor coincidences. Rather, what appears to be sheer happenstance or coincidence is an aspect of Providence we don’t yet grasp.

  Karol Wojtyła, the man who became John Paul II, thought about coincidence and Providence for a long time. In his vocational memoir, Gift and Mystery, he remembered a fellow underground seminarian, Jerzy Zachuta, with whom he used to serve Mass for Archbishop Adam Stefan Sapieha during the Nazi occupation of Kraków in World War II. One day Zachuta didn’t show up. Wojtyła went to his friend’s home after the early morning Mass and discovered what had happened: the Gestapo had come the night before and arrested Jerzy Zachuta, who was later shot. As John Paul wrote more than a half century later, “Sometimes I would ask myself: so many young people of my own age are losing their lives, why not me? Today I know it was not mere chance.”

  That same conviction—that nothing is mere chance—explains why John Paul II came to Fátima a year after he was shot in his front yard, St. Peter’s Square. Some might have thought it mere coincidence that a professional assassin, shooting at point-blank range on May 13, 1981, the day the Church’s liturgy commemorated Our Lady of Fátima, failed to kill his target. But John Paul had come to a different understanding of his life and of history. As he put it more than once, “One hand fired, and another guided, the bullet.” Providence acting through Our Lady, not ballistics, guided the bullet that missed his abdominal aorta by a few millimeters. He was spared, and for a reason. There was a mission to complete, and the Lord of history would see that he was given the oppor
tunity to complete it.

  The experience of learning John Paul II and his life taught me a new way of looking at events in my own life that might once have seemed happenstance or mere coincidence but that I came to see as remote preparation for being the Pope’s biographer. The first of these non-happenstances came early, when I was a little short of nine years old. Others unfolded over the next three decades. Each is a piece of the puzzle of how I came to know Pope St. John Paul II and became his biographer.

  LENT IN THE THIRD GRADE

  BALTIMORE, 1960

  IN SEPTEMBER 1957, I ENTERED THE CATHEDRAL SCHOOL IN downtown Baltimore. The granite-faced redbrick building at 7 West Mulberry Street was built in 1830, and the school was an adjunct to the Cathedral of the Assumption, a Federal-period masterpiece designed by the great Benjamin Latrobe, one of the first architects of the US Capitol.

  The cathedral’s eight-grade elementary school was conducted by the School Sisters of Notre Dame, a religious community founded in Bavaria that had flourished in the United States since the mid-nineteenth century. When I arrived, the oldest of these black-gowned and white-wimpled ladies was Sister Mary Grace, thought to be the resident Methuselah because she had been at the Cathedral School since the days of Cardinal James Gibbons, who had died in 1921—meaning that her temporal relationship to the great cardinal was the same as mine, today, to Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. In any event, and despite the thrashing religious sisters frequently take in popular culture, my memories of the sisters at the Cathedral School are happy ones. My first-grade teacher, Sister Mary Moira, was a gentle soul who could teach a rock to read, and I maintained contact with my second-and third-grade teachers for decades.

  It is none of these fine religious women, though, whom I remember when thinking about the remote anticipations of my life with John Paul II. It’s the school’s principal, Sister Mary Euphemia.

  Ash Wednesday in 1960 fell on March 2, and a few days prior to our being marched into Latrobe’s cathedral for penitential ashes, Sister Euphemia announced that each grade would pray for the conversion of a communist dictator throughout the impending six weeks of Lent. We third graders hoped we would draw Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev as our designated prayee; he was the only communist dictator any of us had ever heard of. But Khrushchev must have been reserved for the lordly souls of the eighth grade. So there was disappointment, quickly giving way to puzzlement, when, on Ash Wednesday, Sister Florence wrote the name of our guy on the blackboard in block letters, absent the proper Polish orthography: W-L-A-D-Y-S-L-A-W G-O-M-U-L-K-A. I doubt that even my classmates of Polish extraction knew of this miscreant. And while I can’t remember how we pronounced his name during the next month and a half of prayer for his conversion, I’m sure we pronounced it incorrectly.