[
Editor's
Note:
This article was written shortly before the death
of John Paul II. It is still timely, as it discusses the issues
the cardinals will be considering as they meet to elect a new pope.]
It's obvious that we are much closer to the end of the extraordinary
pontificate of John Paul II than to its beginning. And as the
pope himself has talked about the impending completion of his
mission on several occasions in recent years, there is nothing
unseemly in deepening the conversation about what we might call
"the work John Paul II will leave for the rest of us."
"The rest of us," of course, includes the next pope -- whoever
the 265th Bishop of Rome may be, wherever he may have been born,
and whatever his previous experience has been.
All conclaves tend to confound the predictions of pre-conclave
prognosticators, but there is one thing of which we can be absolutely
certain in thinking about the conclave that will elect the next
pope: The legacy of John Paul II will loom very, very large. For,
thanks to the pope's historic achievements and his outreach to
people of every race, creed and condition, the papacy now matters
to virtually everyone. That makes the electors' task a complex
one, for the men who choose the next pope will, in an important
sense, be choosing a pope for the world as well as the Church.
The next pope will be elected by the College
of Cardinals, which has had the exclusive right to elect the Bishop
of Rome since the 12th century. The apostolic constitution governing
the conclave, which was issued by John Paul II in 1996, continues
the practice of limiting cardinal-electors to those members of
the college who have not reached their 80th birthday on the day
the pope dies. Thus we can anticipate an electorate of between
110 and 120 cardinals -- the largest in conclave history, an electorate
one-quarter larger than that which elected John Paul II in 1978.
The cardinal-electors will be the most diverse such group in
history. As of this spring, they range in age from 52-year-old
Peter Erdõ, the primate of Hungary, to 79-year-old Marco
Cé, the patriarch-emeritus of Venice. Their average age
is 66. Of the electorate, 50 percent will come from Europe (but
only 17 percent from Italy, the lowest percentage in modern conclave
history); 19 percent from Latin America; 11 percent from North
America; 11 percent from Asia and Oceania; 10 percent from Africa.
Almost 80 percent of the cardinal-electors are local pastors,
not figures in the Roman Curia. Eighteen percent are members of
religious orders, with the Franciscans boasting the largest number
of cardinal-electors (four), while the Salesians and the Jesuits
have three each. Two cardinal-electors are affiliated with Opus
Dei -- a number that will doubtless disappoint the more gullible
readers of The Da Vinci Code.
This unprecedented diversity will make the next conclave more
complex both logistically and linguistically. Because of the decline
of Latin as the Church's lingua franca, the cardinal-electors
don't share at least the rudiments of a common language -- and
the results of that, for the pre-conclave discussion of issues
and the conclave itself, remain to be seen. Then there is the
fact that these men don't really know each other; the last time
most of them were in the same place at the same time was when
John Paul II created new cardinals in October 2003, immediately
after his own silver jubilee.
Moreover, the diversity of the cardinal-electors will be magnified
in the pre-conclave discussions by the presence of some 65 cardinals
who, having turned 80, have lost their vote but who will be very
much part of the conversation about issues and the assessment
of possible candidates in the two or three weeks that will pass
between the death of John Paul II and the sealing of the conclave
to elect his successor.
Even when "immured" in the conclave, the cardinal-electors will
be living far more comfortably than in the past. Previously, curial
offices in the Apostolic Palace were divided into ramshackle cubicles
to house the electors, most of whom were unaccustomed to sleeping
on cots and using chamber pots. Now, thanks to a new Vatican guest
house built by John Paul II, the cardinal-electors will live in
three-room suites in what amounts to a quite decent hotel with
a more-than-adequate kitchen.
The actual election will take place in the Sistine Chapel, according
to a long-standing tradition. Unlike previous conclaves, however,
the cardinal-electors will be able to walk between the chapel
and the guest house, and even through a substantial part of the
Vatican grounds, before or after the day's electoral work is done.
In very human terms, the pressures felt in previous conclaves
to get the job done expeditiously will not be felt in the next
conclave; call it the absence of the "chamber pot factor."
All of this adds up to a complex and probably lengthy conclave
-- one I could imagine going on for three, four, even five days
of voting. John Paul II's apostolic constitution governing the
next conclave permits the electors to move to a simple majority
vote from the two-thirds majority requirement after almost two
weeks and some 30-plus ballots. But I regard this as a remote
possibility. For after five days the world media would begin reporting
the story of a "Church in Crisis," and I cannot imagine the cardinal-electors
wanting that storyline to set the stage for a man who
is already going to have a next-to-impossible job -- filling the
exceedingly large shoes worn by John Paul II.
Clarifying the Issues
The most urgent questions facing the Church will be addressed
at some length before the conclave, in the formal "general
congregations" of cardinals that will begin meeting the day after
the pope's death, and in those informal discussions known in Italian
as the prattiche (which roughly translates as "exercises").
How those conversations unfold will have a great deal to do with
who becomes the 264th successor to Saint Peter and the 265th Bishop
of Rome. To borrow from Morris West's famous image: The way in
which the cardinals design and measure the shoes of the fisherman
will have a lot to do with their choice of a man with the particular
qualities needed to fit those particular shoes.
It may help, at the outset, to clarify what the issues are not.
Neither the next conclave nor the next pope is going to change
the Catholic Church's teaching on the morally appropriate way
to regulate births, although the cardinals may well discuss how
to present that teaching with greater pastoral effectiveness.
Neither the next conclave nor the next pope is going to endorse
abortion or euthanasia; the inviolability of innocent life is
a bedrock principle of both natural and revealed law.
Similarly, while the pre-conclave prattiche and the
conclave itself may involve some discussion of the effects of
the revolution in women's lives (and the concurrent revolution
in men's lives) on the Church and the world, the Church's practice
of calling only men to the ministerial priesthood is not going
to change. As John Paul II stated 11 years ago, the Church is
not authorized to change that practice.
There will likely be some discussion of the advisability of
ordaining proven and tested older married men to the ministerial
priesthood in situations where the shortage of priests is drastically
impeding the Church's sacramental life. Yet the cardinals well
know that this solution, if it is that, will create some problems
as well as address others; thus we need not expect a full-scale
retreat from the ancient linkage of celibacy and ordained ministry
in the Catholic Church.
Which is to say that virtually all of what The New York
Times imagines are "the issues" for the Catholic Church aren't,
in fact, the issues, and aren't going to play a significant role
in shaping the next conclave and the next pontificate.
The Great Issues
Three large-scale issues are already under discussion within
the College of Cardinals and among other senior churchmen. These
mega-issues will certainly weigh heavily in the conclave's deliberations,
in the next pontificate and in the Catholic Church's interface
with the 21st century world. The first is the virtual collapse
of Christianity in its historic heartland -- Western Europe. The
second great issue is the Church's response to the challenge posed
by the rise of militant Islam. And the third involves the questions
posed by the biotech revolution.
Questions of the Church's intellectual discipline also will
be discussed in the next conclave. A fifth large issue may or
may not come up but should, in my judgment, be addressed, and
that is the question of the Church's diplomacy -- the set of ideas
that have guided the "foreign policy" of the Holy See for two
generations.
Europe. Europe is dying, its below-replacement-level
birthrates shrinking its population in the most drastic and sustained
reduction since the Black Death. Why is this happening? Might
it have something to do with the effects of what the French theologian
Henri du Lubac called "atheistic humanism" -- a way of thinking
that rejected the God of the Bible in the name of human liberation
and that deeply shaped modern European culture? Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
the great Russian writer, would likely agree, for he argued 20
years ago that Europe's disastrous 20th century took place because
men had "forgotten God" and had imagined the possibility, indeed
the imperative, of politics-without-God.
The residues of atheistic humanism in Europe are now expressed
in a form of secularism that is determined to keep all transcendent
moral referents out of public life. The effects of this narrow-gauged
secularism are much in evidence today. They were at work when
the new European constitution signed this past October willfully
denied that 1,500 years of Christian history had anything to do
with contemporary Europe's commitments to human rights, democracy
and the rule of law. They were at work when the Italian philosopher
Rocco Buttiglione was denied an opportunity to serve as European
Minister of Justice, not because of his public commitments and
record but because of his personal convictions (informed by both
natural law and Catholic moral theology) about the morality of
homosexual acts and the nature of marriage. They have been evident
in the recent British controversy over Ruth Kelly's service as
education secretary in the Blair Cabinet, with critics charging
that Kelly's robust Catholicism will "cloud" her judgment on such
matters as embryo-destructive stem-cell research.
Apostasy, the renunciation of religious faith, is not the only
story of 19th and 20th century Europe. Modern European history
is also the story of Christian renewal movements, of tremendous
Christian missionary energy and of Christian martyrdom. But, for
the moment, the apostates dominate Europe's public culture. They
do so in part because of the failure of Europe's Christian communities
to be effective transmitters of the faith and effective advocates
for religiously informed moral reason.
No pope in history has invested more time, intellectual energy
and personal struggle in calling Europe back to the promises of
its baptism than John Paul II. While the seeds that John Paul
has planted may flower in the future, especially among today's
young Catholics, the critical moment for Europe is likely to come
in the next 20 or 30 years. Will a depopulating Europe, incapable
of making the hard political decisions that would prevent fiscal
chaos and social catastrophe, and increasingly beset from within
by an assertive Islamic minority, become, as some scholars have
warned, "Eurabia" -- an extension of the culture and politics
of the Arab Islamic world?
"Eurabia" would pose enormous strategic and economic problems
for the United States and the rest of the democratic world. But
even absent such a draconian finish to the story, Europe's current
antipathy toward biblical religion is already hurting the United
States. The import into America of European legal ideas is already
making a mark in our federal courts. That was most notable in
Lawrence v. Texas, which cited European precedents to
sharpen the Supreme Court's identification of freedom with personal
willfulness -- a notion that strips the family and the political
community of any thick moral texture.
Americans and indeed all free people have a stake in whether
Europe's current, sad decline can be reversed. That means they
have a stake in whether the only plausible candidate for leading
such a reversal emerges in the next 20 years: an evangelically
revived and culturally formative Christianity. Finding ways to
make that happen is one of the great issues for the Catholic
Church that John Paul II will leave behind. A capacity to jump-start
the re-evangelization of Europe will be one of the qualities the
cardinal-electors will seek in the next pope. Whether they find
such a man will have a lot to do with the rest of 21st century
history, for all of us.
Islam. If one looks at the Catholic Church
in global terms, as the cardinal-electors must, one cannot help
but notice a jagged arc of conflict that runs from the west coast
of Africa to Southeast Asia, ending at East Timor. The regions
south and north of that dividing line are like two enormous tectonic
plates, grating on each other -- with the occasional, bloody upheavals
that such geologic collisions sometimes produce. North of the
arc are societies and cultures increasingly swayed by militant
forms of Islam; south of it are Christian communities that, from
Nigeria through Sudan to Pakistan and on into the Philippines
and Indonesia, are often under assault from their Muslim neighbors,
and/or the governments those neighbors accept.
The Catholic Church's religious and theological dialogue with
the worlds-within-worlds of Islam was shaped in the mid-1960s
at the end of the Second Vatican Council, a time of perhaps excessively
buoyant optimism in the Church and of relative calm in the Islamic
world. The latter has now changed dramatically, in no small part
because of strains of Islam influenced by the Islamic Brotherhood,
the Wahhabi sect and other proponents of cultural aggression,
civic intolerance and, too often, violence in the name of the
one God and his one Prophet. The conflicts engendered by these
changes have been evident along the fault-line running from Senegal
to East Timor for more than a decade. Now, after 9/11 and the
Bali, Istanbul and Madrid bombings, it should be clear that this
conflict is global in scope. Thus the dialogue between Catholicism
and the multifaceted Islamic world must also change, dramatically.
From the Catholic point of view, the Catholic-Islamic dialogue
of the immediate future must be framed in frankly strategic terms.
To put the case for strategy most simply: Can the Catholic Church
be of some modest assistance to those Islamic scholars, lawyers
and religious leaders who are working -- often at great risk --
to develop a genuinely Islamic case for religious toleration in
something approximating what we in the West call "civil society"?
A billion Muslims are not about to become secular liberals.
Thus a crucial question for the Islamic future is whether Islam
can find within its own sacred texts and legal traditions the
internal resources to ground an Islamic case for important
facets of the free and virtuous society, including religious toleration
and a commitment to the method of persuasion in politics. What
might Catholicism bring to this discussion?
It can bring its own recent history -- for it took the Catholic
Church until 1965 to develop and articulate a thoroughly Catholic
concept of religious freedom and its implications for the organization
of public life. Vatican II's Declaration on Religious Freedom
[Dignitatis Humanae] taught that religious freedom is
a fundamental human right and insisted that governments, which
are incompetent in theological questions, must protect the civil
rights of all citizens to seek and adhere to religious truth.
This dramatic development in Catholic social doctrine could and
should be brought into the Church's global dialogue with the multifaceted
worlds of Islam.
Because of its concern for imperiled Christian communities in
Islamic-dominated lands, on the one hand, and a soothing rather
anodyne approach to interreligious dialogue, on the other, the
Vatican has been reluctant to press its Islamic liaisons to condemn
terrorism forthrightly and publicly. But surely the cardinal-electors,
well-aware of the threat that militant forms of Islam pose to
the world Church, will want to consider whether a more forthright
approach to aggression is in order, not least because militant
Islam seems to be most aggressive where it perceives weakness.
The point, it would seem, is not so much to be in dialogue with
everyone as to be in dialogue with those Islamic partners best
positioned to leverage needed change in their co-religionists'
self-understanding of Islam's role in public life.
There are, of course, no guarantees that a new, strategic approach
to the Catholic-Islamic dialogue will have the desired effects
within the Islamic world, given the multiple other pressures at
play. Nor am I suggesting that new forms of interreligious dialogue
are, in and of themselves, "the answer" to the worldwide threat
of militant Islam. They may well be part of the answer, however.
Putting them into play is an urgent task for the Church and for
the world, a task not only for the next pontificate but for those
that follow it in this century and beyond.
The Biotech Revolution. Many cardinal-electors
have the sense that the world has, at best, a 10- to 20-year window
in which to build the legal and regulatory structures necessary
to channel humanity's new genetic knowledge, and its marriage
to technology, in directions that will lead to healing and genuine
human flourishing, rather than to the nightmare of Aldous Huxley's
Brave New World. The cardinal-electors are also aware
that the dominant public approach to the biotech revolution is
simply to ask, "Will it work?" This low-brow utilitarianism is
reinforced by misplaced notions of compassion (as when the personal
tragedies of a Christopher Reeve or a Michael J. Fox become political
arguments for embryo-destructive stem-cell research) and by scientific
hubris.
Changing the terms of the biotech debate is thus an urgent issue
for both the Church and the world in the next generation. How
could the next pontificate address that issue?
Perhaps the greatest contribution the Catholic Church can make
to this debate is to demonstrate how careful moral reasoning on
the biotech issues is not an imposition of sectarian values on
a pluralistic society, but in fact contributes to a morally serious
theory and practice of democracy. In the 1991 encyclical Centesimus
Annus, John Paul II alerted the world to the dangers inherent
in a purely mechanical or instrumental view of democratic governance,
arguing that a democracy without values, a democracy in which
process trumps moral truth, risks decaying into a "thinly disguised
totalitarianism." In the 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor,
he suggested that a robust public moral culture, clear on the
moral principles that can be known by reason, is essential in
defending such bedrock democratic principles as equality-before-the-law,
as well as in managing passions and interests, fighting corruption,
and maintaining democratic inclusiveness. In the 1995 encyclical
Evangelium Vitae, the pope demonstrated how legalized
abortion and euthanasia, which put certain classes of human beings
outside the protection of the law, threaten the very moral structure
of the democratic project. Can the Church develop these insights
into a public moral language capable of challenging the utilitarianism
that dominates debate on the "culture of life" questions today?
To take one important example: Catholicism challenges certain
biotechnological procedures, including cloning, on the moral ground
that they violate the innate human dignity of persons. What, precisely,
is the content of that "human dignity"? How is it violated by
certain practices? What are the consequences for democracy of
these violations? John Paul II has given us a strong framework
of principles for reflection on these questions. It is imperative
that the Church, in conversation with all those who recognize
the dangers in a purely utilitarian approach to devising the human
future, begin to fill in that framework in order to shift the
terms of the public moral debate.
With the biotechnology challenge compounding the grave problem
of culturally acceptable and legal abortion and euthanasia, the
social doctrine of the next pontificate must demonstrate ever
more persuasively how the protection of innocent life is a first
principle of justice without which democracy will self-destruct.
The next pontificate must, in other words, make clear that the
life issues are public issues with immense public
consequences, and not simply matters of individual "choice." If
he does that, the next pope will advance the cause of a nobler
theory of democracy -- which is also crucial in facing the challenge
of militant Islam.
The Church's Intellectual Life. John
Paul II has been the "first modern pope," if by that term we mean
a pope with a thoroughly contemporary intellectual formation.
Thus the charge that this has been a pontificate "against" modernity
is, frankly, absurd. Rather, this has been a pontificate advancing
an alternative modern reading of the modern quest for human freedom,
one which challenges the West's skepticism about the human capacity
to know the truth of anything (including the truth about human
freedom). "Faith and reason." John Paul II wrote in 1998, "are
like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation
of truth." This quest for truth, the pope proposed, is innate
in us. To deny it is to deny an essential characteristic of our
humanity, and the result of that stubborn denial is a stunted
humanism eventually trapped in the prison of solipsism.
Alone among major
Western cultural-forming institutions, the Catholic Church still
believes that human beings can know what is true, what is good
and what is beautiful, even if our knowledge is never exhaustive.
Thanks to the intellectual initiatives of John Paul II, the Church
can, if it has the will for it, defend those claims and explain
their importance for living freedom with dignity and generosity,
in thoroughly modern terms.
"If it has the will for it" is, of course, the crux of the matter.
Critics (and, in some cases, diehard opponents) of John Paul II's
intellectual project -- critics who cannot seem to grasp that
this is not a pontificate against modernity but a pontificate
with an alternative modern reading of the modern quest for freedom
-- remain firmly in control of Catholic intellectual centers throughout
much of Western Europe and North America (which, among other things,
suggests that the notion of this being a "repressive" pontificate
is overwrought).
Younger scholars
on both sides of the Atlantic seem more eager to take up the challenge
posed by John Paul II than their elders, many of whom seem stuck
in intellectual grooves forged in the late 1960s. Will the next
pontificate and the next pope actively encourage these younger
scholars and their commitment to extending the John Paul II project?
Will the next pope and the next pontificate move more assertively
to ensure that Catholic institutions of higher education develop
the alternative to a crabbed, narrow, secularist humanism, which
is Christian humanism?
If militant Islam
is a serious threat to the future of free societies throughout
the world, so is militant irrationality. The renewal of Western
culture, which is essential to the defense of the democratic project,
requires a new confidence in reason -- a new confidence that we
can know and defend certain truths about the dignity of man, and
about a free and just society. Whether the next pope and the next
generation of Catholic intellectuals successfully build on the
legacy of John Paul II in challenging modernity to a higher concept
of itself thus has important consequences for all of us, and for
the course of history.
The Vatican
and the World. These four large-scale issues will certainly
be among the questions shaping the deliberations that produce
the next pope. In my judgment, a further large question should
be added to the mix: the question of the Vatican's address to
world politics.
Is it not time, for example, to revisit the terms of the Holy
See's embrace of international and regional organizations, such
as the United Nations and the European Union? During the debate
prior to the second Iraq War, senior officials of the Holy See
made the argument that the U.N. Security Council was the sole
agency capable of morally legitimating the resort to armed force
in world politics. Thanks to the Duelfer Report and congressional
investigations, we now know that, at precisely the time this claim
was being made, members of the Security Council were blindly (or
willfully) oblivious to (or complicit in) one of history's largest
financial scandals, the Iraq Oil-for-Food program -- a program
that worked to corrupt the Security Council's deliberations on
Iraq. Surely the time has come to raise the question of whether
this and a host of other problems at the United Nations are systemic,
not accidental.
The Holy See will
continue to insist, as it must, that the nation-state is not necessarily
the final or ultimate form of political organization. But unless
that insistence is coupled with a serious moral critique of the
current corruptions of the U.N. system -- a critique that must
hold open the question of whether some other form of international
organization is not desirable -- then the Holy See's voice will
cease to have any traction in these debates. That would be a loss
for the Church. It would also be a considerable loss for the world
of the 21st century, which is badly in need of a morally informed
set of ideas capable of structuring the global debate on international
security, human rights and development issues. The Holy See could
help facilitate the development of that set of ideas -- if
it is prepared to re-examine certain aspects of its position that
seem, to some minds, more reflective of conventional European
political sentiment than of what was once referred to as "Catholic
international relations theory."
A similar re-examination
of the Holy See's "default positions" might well take place in
regard to European integration. The current Vatican default position
on the European Union, which was set (like its positions on the
United Nations) some 40 years ago, is something like this: An
integrating Europe will be forced to ask the question of the sources
of its unity. That question can only be answered, ultimately,
by Christianity. Therefore, European Union expansion and the further
integration of the Union through a new constitutional treaty create
an evangelical opportunity -- the opportunity to reverse the centuries-long
process of European secularization.
It hasn't worked
out that way. Now, a soulless secularism threatens to become the
official ideology of the European Union. That secularism has Orwellian
overtones, as international legal scholar J.H.H. Weiler has observed,
because in the name of "tolerance" it is remarkably intolerant
of Christian conviction in the European public square. Ask Rocco
Buttiglione. Or, more to the point, ask why Buttiglione got such
tepid support from the Secretariat of State of the Holy See during
his October 2004 inquisition. If the Holy See fears that raising
its voice in defense of the right of Catholics to bring their
philosophically and religiously informed moral convictions into
public life will somehow jeopardize its "standing" in the European
Union, then one has to ask, at some point, whether the game is
worth the candle.
As with the Church's
approach to the interreligious dialogue with Islam, the default
positions in the "foreign policy" of the Holy See must be re-set
in the next pontificate -- not to align the Holy See more closely
with U.S. foreign policy but to retrieve and renew, at the levels
of policy, witness and diplomacy, the distinctive discipline of
Catholic international relations theory. Its revival, in turn,
would mark a significant step in the world's capacity to think
through the great moral questions posed by the agitated world
politics of the early 21st century.
In the Footsteps
of a Giant
Perhaps the wisest
line ever written about John Paul II was written at the beginning
of his pontificate by a French journalist, André Frossard,
a convert from the fashionable atheism of his intellectual class.
After John Paul's clarion call to fearlessness and faith rang
out across Saint Peter's Square at the inaugural Mass on October
22, 1978, Frossard wired back to his Paris newspaper, "This isn't
a pope from Poland; this is a pope from Galilee."
The cardinal-electors
know that they will be trying to find a worthy successor to a
giant -- to a man some knowledgeable scholars call the most significant
pope of the second millennium of Christian history. One cannot
envy the man who succeeds such a colossal figure. Yet for all
his personal initiative and boldness, John Paul II has always
understood that "the Church" is far, far more than the papacy
or the pope. Indeed, one way to sum up his heroic efforts is to
see him precisely as the "pope from Galilee," the successor of
Peter who summoned his brethren, in virtually every corner of
the world, to live out the meaning of their baptismal consecration
-- and in doing so, to "set the world ablaze" with the truth,
as he challenged 2 million young people to do at World Youth Day
2000 in Rome. John Paul II, in other words, has quite deliberately
left a lot of work for the rest of us to do.
And the "rest of
us" includes his successor, whose stewardship of the Church that
John Paul II leaves behind will shape the course of 21st century
history far beyond the institutional boundaries of Catholicism.
George Weigel,
the author of Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John
Paul II, is a senior
fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. This
essay is based on the fourth William E. Simon Lecture, which he
delivered at the Washington-based center in January 2005.
(April 2005)
