The new face of spiritual authority:
Thibaud, Paul
THE POPE FROM THE LAND OF DISSIDENTS C The new face...
...we have seen opinions about need for which must have been both urgent and poorly per- the church undergo sharp changes...
...Much of what he has said and done since his election is a natural expression of that experience...
...than points of reference and interrogation, not as a rule defined This is a passionately interesting story, and one that is not to be unambiguously...
...He will go to the merchants dealing...
...Their experience, their resistance has guided In sum, the Wojtyla election makes one reflect on the idea, us...
...The same priority accounts for belongs to what is private, modest, poor...
...that things are discussed-and in the institutions that allow this John Paul II seems impervious to political criticism of the to be so...
...According to the Gospel, however, milieu, or the commitment leads on an open road to disillu- beyond the law that has been laid down there is more than a sionment, factionalism and naive hyperpoliticization when cynical relativism: a presence, an exigency...
...In these circumstances, religious traditions are not The experience of social Christianity and then of Catholic solemn, definitive answers but rather lines of...
...They are ascribing to the Polish pertinent question...
...family, in different milieus, has become in my opinion more Whether by human genius or divine inspiration, the conclave aware of absolutely needing the church of Christ,-its mission, sensed this opening...
...The fact that things have not turned out this way is address) and that an action claiming Christianity as its authorobviously due in part to the nature of the Communist govern- ity must conform to certain special criteria...
...N THE POPE'S task seems impossible...
...But it also seems to me that he too Catholic identity...
...Examining such events can even cause us to give up a few prejudices...
...There is to be found the material for inter- of new relationships with the modern world...
...Certainly, in absolutes in order to be delivered of this burden of choice, Christian devotion can be linked to the the struggle for justice but in the end the spiritual experiment he is conducting is to be there, but that justice cannot be achieved without conflicts and engaged beyond what he knows, to live with the unknown and ruptures within the body of the Christian community itself...
...The secularized society implies democessential and most profound-of which John Paul U's encycli- racy, in that it leaves to each man the choice of his reasons for cal elaborates the theory...
...Consider: what kind of a world against totalitarianism...
...Such a spiritual authority would not speak in the If the Christians in Poland were to find themselves faced name of a truth that we want to be both immutable and with the prospect of exercising power, the church would lose incorporated in an organization...
...the way they think he castigated Gierek are merely its point of reference the church or a political ideology...
...The objections are overhasty...
...Phenomena like resound...
...Either The modern West does not readily tolerate ecclesiastical much of what it tries to achieve rests upon politico-religious interventionism...
...If there, as in Poland, Catholicism sig- ularized society, the bond is not an inventory of recognized nifies the celebration of life and both protest and consolation in principles, a consensus, nor is it custom or ideology...
...Life, death, love: the Pope's insistence on respect for traditional rules regarding that which constitutes the whole of existence for the powersexual morality, Christian education within the family, as well less, whose trust the church enjoys-that is its domain, that is as his praise for pilgrimages and popular piety...
...Against the refusal of these partiPoland of a "historic compromise"-well before the term was sans to allow any distinction of levels, the Pope maintains that invented-in which the church would retain governance of it is necessary to "safeguard the uniqueness of Christian libersouls while the government would have complete freedom in ation and the energies it is capable of releasing" (Puebla its domain...
...to center his discourse on convictions that for him have both The spirituality that some Westerners are rediscovering, force and radiance, by taking off quite simply from what he now that the religions of science, progress, and revolution believes and what he has experienced rather than from what he have failed, is almost at the opposite pole of that traditional thinks he should say...
...14 September 1979: 489 Internationally, many obvious political issues, in the ab- installed in the Vatican but that this man was elected because sence of statutory authority or juridical justification, have been of what the church in Poland has recently been able to do simply suppressed and denied...
...The fact that in Poland the struggle for simple existence OHN PAUL II raises questions about liberation theology...
...From the political point of view, the Pope's election underlined a paradox...
...experience, Action in Europe illustrates very well the difficulties that a intercommunicating choices, fraternities of freedoms...
...Secularization shattered this once unchanging older, it ity, but couching his statements in an altogether new and introduced not only change but especially the possibility of relatively undogmatic form, by speaking in the first person choice, with all its attendant anxieties...
...It discuss theology as if that meant no more than offering an expresses, it irrigates, it sustains all that part of Polish life that expose of his personal ideas...
...As we saw when the question arose of agreement-indeed, perhaps the opposite, since nothing is giving support to Soviet dissidents, it has been press cammore eroding to legitimate authority than weary repetition of paigns, the actions•of private organizations like the jury for the the obvious...
...at the same time it represents the national identity while people enduring hunger and torture are being invited to trust in remaining free of the preoccupations that accompany the holdthe Holy Virgin...
...The the moment...
...do better to ask themselves whether even politically the Polish III method might pot in the long run prove to be more efficacious...
...she Here the Pope's thinking seems to me limited by a measure needs also priests who are not ashamed to wear the cassock, of traditionalism...
...committed Christianity produces in Christian lands...
...But the credit generally ceived before his arrival revealed its latent strength: the need accorded the present pope cannot be dismissed as merely a for a world spiritual leader...
...The peoples of Eastern Europe are almost nonexistent in terms of power...
...Memory of the his election itself, in which the conclave was able to regenerate past and communal membership can no longer serve as more Roman centrality only by choosing a pope from the outside...
...this from his sermon in the Cathedral in Mexico City...
...they confront a world order that is based on the denial of their freedom of self-determination (and all the world finds this very natural: we call it detente...
...It may be no exaggerameasure to non-governmental internationalism, of which the tion to see here an early indication of the liquidation in the success of Solzhenitsyn's books, say, or the election of John church of a centralized apparatus that was established in the Paul II have been successive examples...
...Thus many have gressively toward autonomy...
...to love it...
...In Poland in fact, the Catholic temptation to wield a "parallel ministry," and theologians church has the dual advantage of being both powerful and who do not abandon themselves to their fantasies: "No one can separate from power-simultaneously strong and innocent...
...This appealing and perhaps fecund spirituality: it is allied to personal self-questioning, a sense of ambiguity (notably in the encyclical) repeats the ambiguity of responsibility, the courage to risk, to venture...
...Amid obvious difficulties, it was .. 1916 as facts, or in which the Turkish government finds it able to recover credibility only by acknowledging the imporpossible to prevent these massacres' being commemorated in tance of a peripheral religious experience...
...The election of a man from the than as objects of a purportedly socialist policy...
...Since the Cold War tions (notably, in the matters of contraception and abortion), and the period of decolonization have ended and international seems to enjoy what was beginning to be dangerously lacking ideals associated with the labor movement have grown feeble, in the papacy: moral authority...
...a utopia may divisions among Christians finally explode...
...this criticism cannot be avoided in Latin America...
...The "socialist" sys- Solzhenitsyn, since being expelled from Russia, works untems function with an ideology that merely equals religion ceasingly to demonstrate is impossible...
...tion, of a strong and coherent Catholicism...
...If in ing wheher the action undertaken has the last few years the Polish church has supported and some- as its point of reference the church or a times sparked the fight for human rights and freedoms, historically its strategy has been based on the prior defense of its own political ideology...
...The the inevitable divergence between practical choices and the government was forced to retreat after a slow change in the values by which one judges them...
...Unlike those that ensued when UNESCO decided to meddle in the international exchange of news-all these things demonstrate that a PAUL THIBAUD is the editor of the French journal Esprit where this vast zone of outstanding problems and values exists for which article appeared last April...
...THE POPE FROM THE LAND OF DISSIDENTS C The new face of spiritual authority PAUL THIBAUD secular religions, science and politics, the papal voice at least reminds us that there are questions for which there are no THE ELECTION of John Paul II and his early actions as answers-we all encounter them daily-and that we cannot pope, the unforeseen popularity he had continued to live without taking a stand on certain issues, without making enjoy even after people's surprise wore off, the diffi- commitments as risky as they are unavoidable...
...At preceded the struggle for human rights accounts for the Pope's J the same time he takes care not to condemn it and avails insistence, both in his encyclical and in the statements he made himself of the term "liberation" as he construes it...
...their governments have largely succeeded in choice of Cardinal Wojtyla constitutes an important departure making these peoples invisible, as if they had no reality other from this way of thinking...
...able to win recognition for himself in that role...
...of the saints and the prophets...
...while at the same time it reflects the special religious who obey their bishops rather than surrender to the nature of the Polish situation...
...The translation is by Adrienne Foulke...
...The reasons of state...
...Insofar as the United Nations is a system of states, it reminded of it-is indispensable, is a contribution to truth...
...a God can accompany our freedom, can make us the wild plunge into Marxism by certain activists are then the understand that it is not pointless...
...It is passive...
...go to prove that we are facing one of those events marking a I change in our vision of the world...
...The result is to absolutize balance of forces that occurred as Polish society moved pro- one's choices or one's political sentiments...
...The film of Massimo Olmi -The Tree of Wooden ously assuming the ambiguity of his position, by reaffirming in Clogs-has recalled for us this world, in which life was like a classical fashion his authority in matters of dogma and moralritual...
...To extrapolate and apply this to Latin living and calls values constantly into question...
...For despite all the speeches about Liberachurch a strategy that is not its strategy...
...It is• perhaps in Eastern Europe that we see the most striking HE POPE seems convinced that the present situation offers contrast between what public opinion feels and what govern- T Catholicism fresh opportunities, and even the possibility ments do...
...its anchorage...
...But one must not be r John...
...Commonweal: 490 The struggles of the Polish church have left deep marks on the Pope...
...on the preservation, through religious rites and educa- tion...
...Yet one has the Europe knew not so long ago, in which government is extrane- feeling that John Paul H has squared this circle by spontaneous to life...
...among them, "the ment, but also in part to the fact that spiritual action concerns sense of communion first with the bishops, then with the other man in his wholeness and necessarily has social repercussions...
...In a word, it culty of categorizing the new Pontiff, and the confusion thus reminds us of the importance of the ethical and the spiritual, created within the tribes and factions of Catholicism-all these dimensions that yesterday's ideologies sought to diminish...
...Expert in humanity" -such was burst of traditionalism...
...When repression receives its full recognition authority expresses itself via a logic so opposed to that of state through a non-political institution like the papacy, it makes apparatuses, which wish only to perpetuate themselves and to one pause and think about the inadequacies of international accommodate each other, explains why only periods of crisis structures, their inability to speak up for the most elementary give such authority an opportunity moral needs, and their enslavement to the cynical game of II national states...
...It involves not only the future of CatholiThe West-and till now only the West-is experiencing the cism but also the spiritual meeting between East and West that phenomenon of a secularized society...
...thanks to them, we know that the collective appropriation indeed on the possibility, of something like a spiritual authorof the means of production can be a cruel joke, that problems ity both within the Catholic community and beyond...
...F OR A LONG TIME, the Catholic church has been the object of As we observe or try to predict shifts in public opinion, as mixed feelings...
...He aims to put spiritual author=ity not only at a certain remove from the political realm but als prepared to bear clear witness to their Catholic identity . . . " above and beyond it...
...To him this means the maintenance of ecclesiastical discipline: "The church.today needs Christians falls into an undue confidence...
...it thinks that every man should be able to amalgams that cover social compromise within the Christian devise his own laws...
...It reflects a situation such as peasants in Western who reject any authoritarian form of control...
...And a bit further on: "Jesus Christ becomes international Catholicism put in its rightful place a movement in a way, newly present, despite all His seeming absences...
...his voice was Indeed, now that our planet has become one great society of always heard as one of futile good will, or as speaking from a peoples, an immense contrast has developed between the curpast that refused to die...
...He has suggested nationalism, for a structure that may assume responsibility for as much in his first encyclical: "A large part of the human human interests that the dialectic of governments ignores...
...In other words, for John Paul II Those who chide John Paul It for not inveighing against it is a matter of knowing whether the action undertaken has as Pinochet...
...As entangled in the trappings of lay officialdom...
...and yet uncertain nature of choice...
...In the normal funcFrance...
...His in Mexico, on the primary necessity of rust defending the questions appear justified...
...assuming that it is both conits innocence, it would be fragmented, and the language of tingent and relative, among us it would be the commemoration John Paul II would be less serene...
...But we know, too, that Montini was never recognized the world over, it cannot be a matter of chance...
...For a thousand years, the church has of international relations is it in which the U.N...
...What Western man feels most deeply is the gravity and of the evangelizing of the Indians in Latin America...
...ultithe face of suffering and injustice, it is also and at the same mately, the social bond is found in the debate itself in the fact time the official religion and the guarantor of social order...
...that neither the state nor the labor internationals had been able One can read here allusions to the recent experience of the to recognize...
...a Polish writer noted two years ago, these revisionists have If one considers the election of John Paul II from within the repudiated as potentially totalitarian "the self-sufficing cerchurch, what is significant is not that a non-Italian has been tainty that the supernatural order does not exist...
...One of them wrote ten years ago: "in all that concerns essential political and social problems the Church remains does not deny that one must fight for freedom and justice...
...The peoples of Eastern Europe- have shown us what what characterizes this spiritual authority is twofold: it repreculture can be when it is conscious of its nobility, what the sents what the dominant system of governments ignores...
...There has been no tion (unqualified and with a capital "L") in actuality people political defiance on the part of the church in Poland but rather disagree about the meaning of the word, and the desire to unify the defense and consolidation of its strong points: religious the religious and the political in a single word eventually blurs life, family life and, at the most, organizational life...
...By electing a friend of Polish dissidents, and its service...
...written in advance...
...The pact with immuta- singular, by repudiating a tone of timorous caution, by trying ble poverty was broken...
...The Pope ing of power, and with regard to politics it finds itself in that 14 September 1979: 491 position of superior, legitimacy-the titular patron of what is minus transcendance...
...Paul II it is a matter of knowdeceived by the nature of Catholic resistance in Poland...
...It is powerful, but except in secondary matters, its simply that he squarely poses the question avoided by those power is not used...
...In such conditions, a faith that rests on repetition, a church (in what was socially the most militant speech he made faith that always knows in advance, can only become margiin Mexico, in Oaxaca, the Pope offered a purely idyllic version nal...
...within the foreseeable future, they have no chance of regaining their sovereignty...
...Rather than insist that the Pope liquidated their religious referents while dedicating thempass from this method to that of Camilo Torres, critics would selves to a totalitarian form of political conviction...
...Karol Wojtyla, on the other hand, even rents of public opinion and the conventions and interests that in the eyes of People who formally dispute some of his posi- determine the policies of governments...
...When a public personality laying claim the title that we know Paul VI claimed when addressing the to a universal role enjoys a renewal of moral authority that is United Nations...
...How is he to be an F INAiiY, the spirituality in which John Paul II strongly authority for those who demand firm guideposts because believes has, in his view, no mode of existence other than they are engaged in a mass spiritual resistance, or (in Latin the communal: it is manifest in the revealed truths that are America) because they are undertaking a work of popular handed down by the hierarchy and that govern the life of consciousness-raising, and also be an authority for Westerners Christians...
...and it courage of a believer can be, and what the demand for human is rooted in the particular, the...
...communicate...
...official institutions throughout the world seem to be governed An authoritative voice does not necessarily elicit by pure cynicism...
...It has been, by turns, something people we see how the warm-hearted, theatrical style of the new Pope have wished to be identified with and something they have touches the crowds, we get a sense that he is filling a role the wished to be emancipated from...
...Yet it is from these peoples who have been crushed by history that Western Europeans have learned some political lessons...
...individual...
...is unable to confused institutional unity with the cult of its center, with its acknowledge the great massacre of Armenians in 1895 and Romanita, with uniformity...
...closely an individual is integrated with the central bureaucThe peoples of Eastern Europe have become a symbol of the racy, the fewer special bonds that person will have and the immense segment of humanity whose existence is denied for more qualified he is, therefore, to represent the institution...
...In an unforeseen victory of the old over what Polish church, and to the fact that in the struggle shared by believed itself to be the new, the Catholic church made up for some Polish revisionists with Christians, the former have the defaults of international organizations that are corrupt or come to recognize the church as a protection for the people...
...The story of periphery suggests a different concept of unity...
...Perhaps what is expected of counterpart of the earlier claim of clergy and Christians to be a spiritual authority on our side of the world is that it accomself-sufficient, the possessors of a perfect language, of an pany us, break our solitude-keep us company and make us unalterable truth...
...The peoples of the world share in a psychological tioning of a centralized apparatus, it is held that the more unity-but not the diplomats...
...In Poland, the church is bound to people's daily Such statements have aroused indignant protests on the left life...
...it reaps the benefit from our disappointment with spread of dictatorial and totalitarian forms of government, the doctrines of efficacy and with ideas that, relying on science countless muddled conferences on development, the fiasco and politics, promise to make this a better world...
...An authoritative voice speaks to a need, however...
...The fact that this rights signifies...
...Commonweal: 492...
...sectors of the People of God...
...also has failed totally to supply even the concept of an internaThe papal voice has recovered a little of this impact, at least for tional order transcending the play of national interest...
...It is a pertinent quesdomain...
...This strategy was personified in Cardinal Wyszynski, and for a long time was criticized by the Polish opposition and even by Catholic intellectuals...
...It is a displaying their ignorance...
...Unity is seen their dissidence, which has taken various forms and been not as being ensured by the disciplinary integration the Curia expressed in many actions since 1956, is precisely the story of provides but as being achieved through the exchange and how they have achieved visibility, an achievement owed in confrontation of differing experiences...
...Nobel Prize in Literature, scientific bodies, and Amnesty it makes us see that a given point of view is important, that a International that compensate for the paralysis of governwhole area of thought and reflection-now that we have been ments...
...no authority takes responsibility...
...time of Gregory VII...
...In a secAmerica is not easy...
...who require a "prophetic" word that is at once both fully For a long time, the opposition was haunted by the danger in Christian and fully political...
...To those of governmental organization have not disappeared nor will of us who welcome this possibility with hope, it seems that they ever...
Vol. 106 • September 1979 • No. 16
