| 摘要 | As our great Pope is buried, I feel sorry for the Polish people most of all–sorry, and joyous with them. Today, my telephone correspondents in Poland tell me, they feel like orphans. Papa Wojtyla has been such a Protector to them, such a shelter, such a tower of strength at their side and at their rear and in their forefront. Someone told me during the week my father died that losing a father is like having a big tree on the edge of the forest come down, and feeling the wind upon one’s own face. The Poles feel like that today. So do we all.
Karol Wojtyla was born three or four hours by car from the villages across the border in Slovakia where all four of my grandparents were born. He told me once that he had gone skiing not far from those villages in the Tatra mountains that are shared by Poland and Slovakia. And, actually, I first met the Pope when he came to consecrate Saints Cyril and Methodius, the new Slovak cathedral in Toronto.
He once kidded me: You say you are Slovak, but you are really Polish. Coming from him, that was a high compliment. Still, I felt plain genetics obliged me to argue against him. “By the magisterium,” I said, “I may be Polish. But by genetics I am undoubtedly Slovak, from all four grandparents.” All four of whom were born within a few kilometers of one another in central Slovakia.
Then, that summer, visiting the family villages, I discovered a plaque on the nearby castle’s inner wall (the castle for whose noble owner my great-grandfather had been game warden in the nearby forest). It announced that the eleven counties of that district had belonged to Poland for nearly 300 years after about 1450 (as I now retain the date). Laughing aloud, I wrote to the Pope to apologize. That darn infallibility again!
To the best of my knowledge, we at Crisis magazine early on were the first to put the name “John Paul the Great” in print, and new editor Deal Hudson emblazoned it on the front cover in 1997. We had been reading about how Leo the Great (440-461) and Gregory the Great (590-604)–and only they–had won that sobriquet: in Leo’s case, by turning back the barbarians from Rome; in Gregory’s, by setting in motion gigantic reform movements in the Catholic Church that lasted hundreds of years–some of them still in effect. After undermining the Berlin Wall, and before anyone else encouraging the reunification of what had once been Christian Europe, Pope John Paul II clearly qualified. Besides, his fresh and invigorating interpretation of Vatican Council II, and his huge output of original, deep, and penetrating letters-to-the-world (encyclicals), maybe overqualified him. That is without even mentioning the huge new Catechism, the first in 450 years, his worldwide travels, his prayers with leaders of every other faith, his expressions of sorrow for the past sins of all Catholics as a body, and other visible signs of greatness of soul. Thus, it warmed my heart to hear of the words of the Vatican secretary of state, Angelo Cardinal Sodano, at the solemn Mass following the Pope’s death, referring to the Pope as John Paul the Great.
Friend of Freedom
Another link to the Pope was forged when a representative of the trade union Solidarity came to my office to ask permission to translate my 1982 book The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism into Polish. I said yes enthusiastically, then added: “But I will have to charge royalties.” The young man’s face fell, until I added: “You must promise to send one copy to the Pope, and one to me.” He broke into a grin. “The first will be easy,” he said. “The second will take longer.” By 1984 and 1985 the book was appearing in an illegal samizdat edition. Only years later did I learn that the four branches of Solidarity divided on whether they could afford the risk–a socialist labor union publishing an illegal book, with “capitalism” in the title. By one vote, the tie was broken, and the book came out. That explained how after 1989 the term “democratic capitalism” was voiced so often from Free Poland. My copy of the book–a miniature edition–is my most precious possession.
One night in the autumn of 1991 I was invited to have dinner with the Holy Father. It would be difficult to describe my excitement. I think I barely said a word at dinner, set for just five of us, as I recall: the Pope, his two secretaries, my Italian friend Rocco Buttiglione, and me. Rocco and I were planning a seminar on the free society, to help bring young Americans and Eastern Europeans together. He had been a friend of Karol Wojtyla for years, ever since their mutual philosophical work in Poland, well before the young bishop/philosopher was elected Pope. Rocco and the Pope did most of the talking–and joshing–that evening. The Pope did ask me what I would recommend as the best way to help the millions of poor whom he had just seen in Latin America. I don’t recall his being terribly convinced by my three points, telegraphically put forth. They had much to do with micro-enterprises, and changing education and the law to favor the starting of many small businesses. (Today I note with pleasure that, for instance, India and China between them have raised more than half a billion people out of poverty since 1980. So it can be done, where enterprise is permitted and rewarded.)
I do recall praising the Pope for the good words he had put into his recent letter-to-the-world, Centesimus Annus. As we were leaving, he told me he liked very much the article of mine that had been translated in the Polish Catholic paper Tygodnik Powszechny just that week. It had been translated from my lecture in London, on the theme of the shift in the Pope’s understanding of “capital” from Laborem Exercens (1981) and the 1991 letter ten years later. You understand my thought very well, he said generously–words that have warmed my hear ever since, in many a cold and difficult season.
In Laborem Exercens, he linked capital solely to things, to matter. In Centesimus Annus he pointed to the capital fostered within the human subject: human capital, in the form of knowledge, know-how, invention, and other fruitful economic habits. The virtues he listed are not unlike the habits Max Weber had pointed out in The Protestant Ethic, but with a new, original emphasis upon the creativity of the human person, made in the image of the Creator. A neat emphasis for a Pope living so near the Michelangelo ceiling of the Sistine chapel.
From many more meetings with the Pope, I have the impression that he was skeptical about my hopes for a creativity-informed and law-abiding capitalism, but interested. He and his secretaries used to press me quite hard, and test me and my friends, on this and other issues. We used to have lunch or dinner with him, not every year, maybe an extra time or two in a given blessed year, and nearly always on his days off, when there was a little more time and he had on his calendar no one more important or long-ago-scheduled.
One learned always to come with a good joke or funny story to share with him. Once someone brought one about Pope John XXIII’s being asked how many people work in the Vatican. John XXIII reputedly answered, “About half.” On hearing this, one of John Paul II’s secretaries pointed to the other as the non-worker, and the other pointed to him. The Pope laughed with everybody else.
Another time one of the Americans asked him whether he knew what people in Poland were saying was his favorite joke. His eyes were quizzical. “You were asked, they say, What is the solution to the Polish crisis? There were 39 parties in the next month’s election, including ‘the Beer Drinkers party,’ and cynicism was rising, so you are said to have replied: ‘There are only two solutions to the Polish crisis, the realistic solution and the miraculous solution.’ Then you added: ‘The realistic solution is: if the Lady of Czestochowa should suddenly appear, with Jesus and all the saints, and solve the Polish crisis. The miraculous solution is: if the Poles learn to cooperate.’” It is fair to say that the Pope enjoyed quips and ironies of many sorts, including this one.
Healing the Breaches
We learned some important things from him, as well–for instance, of his eagerness to end religious divisions of many sorts. Long before we heard any Western leader mention it, we learned from him and Jozef Tomko–the Slovak cardinal who was in the early days always at his side, and served as prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples (Propagation of the Faith)–of the alarming tide of Muslim violence in Africa, directed at missionary outposts and Christian churches. Tomko was quietly cynical about the failure of the Western press to cover this “war” and its dreadful toll of innocent victims. The Pope was concerned to get Muslim and Christian relations on a new footing.
He also very much wanted to heal the millennium-long breach between the Eastern Church–Constantinople and Moscow–and the Roman Catholic Church. He did everything he could think of to arrange travels to meet with every Eastern Patriarch who would see him. He especially longed to go to Moscow, and hoped Putin would help arrange it; alas, it never happened. Having seen the urgency the Pope felt about his duty to do this–a thousand years of separation is enough, someone at the table said–I have imagined a disappointed Pope telling St. Peter the other day how miffed he was not to have been given a little more time to accomplish it. (Of course, the Pope would have trusted God to accomplish what needs to be done in His own time.)
The Holy Father also wanted to put relations between Catholics and Jews on a better plane than they have ever been before, and–through many, many initiatives–he did. And he certainly made it a point on every one of his travels to meet with all other religious leaders of a country or region, not simply Catholic leaders and the Catholic people.
It is not so widely known that hardly any of the bishops of the world were eager to take responsibility for World Youth Days, one of the favorite inventions of the Pope. They all said, in effect, that the youth of their country were too jaded to turn out for anything “churchy.” For rock stars, maybe, but for a Pope? Not in their nation. The Pope kept insisting. The bishops warned of failure and embarrassment. The Pope kept saying, “Be not afraid.” They kept being afraid. In the event, more than half a million, sometimes over a million, young people turned up in every pre-selected city, prayed, slept under the sky, laughed with the Pope, showed their love for him, and received his love, and his challenge. They then policed and cleaned up their own meeting grounds before the local ground crews even showed up, and made citizens who had dreaded and feared the whole event marvel at the exemplary behavior that is coming over young people today.
The main way in which modern liberals differ from the Pope is this: When they find moral standards onerous or often not lived up to, their instinct is to dumb the standards down, to lower the bars, or even to remove the standards altogether. Their tendency is also to indulge in the bigotry of low expectations. Some of them follow Oscar Wilde’s maxim, that the best way to get rid of temptation is simply to give in to it. They then call formerly immoral acts high signs of a new and superior morality. (The only sin some recognize seems to be being on the right.) In contrast, John Paul II, who knew the young, knew also that the old standards are hard to meet, and that the bars are still as high as they always have been. But he told young people and the rest of us: Be not afraid. Take a run at them. You can clear them. Ask the Lord for help.
It is no wonder that those who experienced his faith in them, his confidence in them, his love for them, desired to try hard to take a run at those high bars. Young people loved the confidence he had in them. Almost no one else today shows that same confidence in them.
John Paul II expected the best of the entire West. He roused us from our slumbers. He showed how much a few brave and determined souls could do–Walesa and his friends in Poland, Havel and Father Halík in the Czech lands, Sharansky and the other dissidents in Russia–in order to achieve the “impossible.” And he brought tens of millions of new recruits for freedom and responsibility to their side.
Some critics say that the Pope “failed” to bring the Catholic Church into “modernity” on such matters as easy divorce, homosexual acts and homosexual marriages, contraceptive love, free sex, and other sexual and gender tics of the wealthier, less Christian, increasingly pagan, and even Christophobic lands. The Washington Post published an especially stupid version of this charge on the day after his death. But such critics confuse “modernity” with the least noble practices of the ironically named “progressives” of Europe and America. The truth is that such people are a diminishing breed, committing demographic suicide, and exhibiting ever more passionate self-hatred regarding their own civilization. Such practices do not point to the future, but to terminal decadence.
Besides, there are already Christian churches (all of them losing members rapidly) who are willing to surrender to modernity. Why on earth would a self-confident Catholic Church, even in its own recognized sinfulness, wish to do so? The Catholic Church has grown by about 45 percent since John Paul II became Pope, growing 160 percent in Africa, and nearly doubling in size in Asia. Moreover, the Catholic groups, religious orders, and individual dioceses that model themselves most closely on his vision of a confident, unafraid Christian humanism of the future are growing rapidly in numbers and high morale.
The most important thing John Paul II gave both to the world (including, but not limited to, the political world) and also to the Church is new confidence in our own capacities, especially our capacities for self-government, for liberty and responsibility, and for making human life better and more worthy of human possibilities and higher standards. It is not a small thing, to teach people: “Be not afraid.”
Pope John Paul II pointed the way to a new civilization of love. Real, serious, self-sacrificing, other-centered, unselfish love. The kind he showed, right to his final day. Adieu, our dear, dear friend! Our greatest inspiration in a very long time. “Praised be Jesus Christ!” as you would have said yourself.
Michael Novak is George Frederick Jewett Scholar n Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at AEI. He is most recently the author of The Universal Hunger for Liberty: Why the Clash of Civilizations Is Not Inevitable. |
