George Weigel, evangelizzare l'Europa - di Maria Claudia Ferragni

In NBQ

George Weigel, già docente di teologia, Distinguished senior fellow del prestigioso Ethics and Public Policy Center di Washigton, autorevole giornalista e scrittore cattolico, insignito di numerosi Dottorati Honoris Causa, è considerato il più importante biografo del Beato Papa Giovanni Paolo II. Dando seguito a una promessa fatta al Pontefice stesso solo quattro mesi prima della sua morte, ha di recente pubblicato il libroThe End and the Beginning: Pope John Paul II - The Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy.

Lo abbiamo incontrato a Roma, in occasione della storica canonizzazione congiunta dei due più amati Papi del Ventesimo Secolo e gli abbiamo chiesto di parlarci della crisi di fede e politica europea.

Professor Weigel, che fine ha fatto il desiderio di Papa Giovanni Paolo II della riscoperta delle radici cristiane dell'Europa, soprattutto di fronte alla crisi ucraina che riapre scenari di conflitto che ricordano la Guerra Fredda?

Il fatto che oggi l'Europa sia sempre più chiusa su se stessa, incapace di prendere importanti e serie decisioni dal punto di vista politico, è proprio indice del fatto che si è creato un enorme vuoto spirituale e morale, quello di cui parlava con lungimiranza il Beato Papa Giovanni Paolo II. Questo ci dice anche dell'attuale incapacità europea di sostenere il popolo ucraino che desidera essere libero e vivere in una società aperta e giusta. Il movimento del Maidan avrebbe dovuto, infatti, dare una profonda ispirazione a tutta l'Europa a recuperare i suoi valori costituivi, quelli cristiani, ma questo finora purtroppo non è successo.

Quale può essere il ruolo della Chiesa Cattolica oggi, adesso in Europa?

Prima di tutto deve predicare il Vangelo. Questo é il suo compito. Dobbiamo infatti smetterla di dire che bisogna "ricristianizzare" l'Europa, perché va invece "cristianizzata": infatti l'Europa ha completamente dimenticato la fede. Ciò significa quindi che la Chiesa deve assumere un vigoroso atteggiamento missionario e deve assolutamente cominciare a farlo là dove si trova il suo centro: cioè in Europa. Però la Chiesa, proprio come diceva Giovanni Paolo II, deve proporre qualcosa di nuovo. Papa Wojtyla ha infatti letteralmente chiamato e spinto la Chiesa ad abbandonare le "acque basse" e la superficialità rappresentate dalla semplice conservazione del cattolicesimo istituzionale, a favore della ricerca della profondità data dalla nuova evangelizzazione. E ciò deve accadere in primo luogo e prioritariamente in Europa.

Quale può essere il ruolo della Chiesa statunitense anche verso l'Europa?

Sicuramente la Chiesa cattolica americana ha molti problemi, ma può assumere un ruolo estremamente importante perché é nella forma migliore fra tutti paesi occidentali. Sta vivendo un momento di grande vitalità evangelica: ci sono stati centinaia di migliaia di nuovi Battesimi nella Chiesa cattolica durante le recenti festività Pasquali e questa è una grande notizia.

Quindi la Chiesa in America ha imboccato la strada della nuova evangelizzazione e può essere di esempio per la Chiesa in Europa, in Occidente e in tutto il mondo su come si deve muovere la Chiesa nel mondo moderno.

Interview: A Tale of Two Saints - by George Weigel

In EPPC 
National Review Online | Published on April 24, 2014

On Divine Mercy Sunday this weekend in Rome — one week after Easter — Pope Francis will celebrate the canonizations of two recent predecessors in the Chair of Peter, Popes John Paul II and John XXIII. John Paul II’s biographer, George Weigel, distinguished senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, discusses the significance of the event with National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez.

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: Why are John Paul II and John XXIII being canonized? Is it a big deal that this is a “doubleheader”?

GEORGE WEIGEL: It’s probably useful to get one thing straight at the outset: The Church doesn’t “make saints,” and neither does the pope. God makes saints, and the Church (through the pope and his collaborators) recognizes the saints God has made. In the first millennium of Christian history, the Church “recognized” saints through popular acclamation. From the mid 17th century on, the Church used a rather complex (and frankly adversarial) legal process to test whether popular reputations for heroic virtue — the definition of “sanctity” the Church uses in assessing these things — were warranted. That process was reformed by John Paul II in 1983, so that the current process more closely resembles a doctoral seminar in history than a trial.

Multiple canonizations are not all that rare. What gives the “doubleheader” of John XXIII and John Paul II its particular resonance is that both men were beloved, both were controversial, and both were deeply involved with the Second Vatican Council. A lot of the contemporary history of the Catholic Church is summed up in these two lives.

I think Pope Francis’s decision to waive the normal requirement for a second, post-beatification miracle for John XXIII and to celebrate his canonization together with that of John Paul II (after a post-beatification miracle due to his intercession had been confirmed) was inspired and bold. What Pope Francis may be saying is that here are the two bookends of the Second Vatican Council: the pope who had the courage and wisdom to summon the most important Catholic event in 500 years, and the pope who had the courage and wisdom to give that council an authoritative interpretation. I’d also suggest that John Paul II completed the work of John XXIII, by giving post-conciliar Catholicism a new vision of its evangelical, missionary potential — which happens to be the reason John XXIII called Vatican II, as we learn from rereading his magnificent opening address to the Council on October 11, 1962.

LOPEZ: What makes each of them saints?

WEIGEL: As always, it’s a case of “heroic virtue.” Both men had a widespread reputation for sanctity during their lives; indeed, in both cases, there were calls immediately after their deaths for them to be proclaimed saints. The dignity with which both of them bore their final suffering was a great priestly example, as was the calm courage with which both conducted the Office of Peter. And they could “pope” as well as they did because they were both men who had displayed, in their pre-papal lives and ministries, a radical conversion to Christ.

LOPEZ: What is canonization anyway? Does the Vatican have a window into who is in Heaven and who is in Hell? Could this be presumptuous on the part of the Catholic Church?

WEIGEL: “The Vatican” is, depending on the context, a micro-state or a set of buildings, and in either instance, “the Vatican” doesn’t have any privileged insight into human souls. What the Catholic Church does have is the promise of the Lord Jesus Christ that, by the Holy Spirit, she will be preserved in the truth Christ left her as a patrimony. And part of the Holy Spirit’s ongoing preservation of the Church in the truth is the Holy Spirit’s lifting up saintly men and women throughout the ages — and enabling the Church to recognize the sanctity of its sons and daughters, even when that sanctity comes in surprising or unexpected ways. The formal process of “canonization” is intended to weigh claims that X or Y lived the virtues in an exceptional way, a claim that is also weighed against the expectation that God will provide his own signal in the case of X or Y, through the medically inexplicable cures that are attributed to the intercession of candidates for beatification and canonization.

​John Paul II was convinced that God is profligate in “making saints,” and that the divine delight in doing so had not slackened over the centuries. Thus his many beatifications and canonizations were an effort to get the Church of the third millennium to recognize the many saints who surround us, that “great cloud of witnesses” of which the Letter to the Hebrews speaks so eloquently.

As for Hell, the Catholic Church has never declared that X, Y, or Z is certainly in Hell, although the Church continues to believe that Hell exists. The question of Hell’s population is for God to determine. The greatest of poets, Dante, was, of course, less restrained in his census of Hell than the teaching authority of the Catholic Church.

​​LOPEZ: “Vatican Under John Paul II Knew About Sex Abuse In Legion Of Christ For Decades, Documents Reveal,” one headline this week reads. Did Pope John Paul not want to know the truth about Marcial Maciel? Did he know and not care?

WEIGEL: I discussed the Maciel case in The End and the Beginning, the second volume of my biography of John Paul II, and my conclusion today remains the same as it was when that book was published in 2010: John Paul II was deceived by MarcialMaciel, a master-deceiver who deceived many, many people. That, I think, is clear. But that John Paul II knew about Maciel’s perfidies and “didn’t care” is inconceivable.

​LOPEZ: An AP story Monday was headlined “John Paul’s legacy stained by sex abuse scandal.” As his biographer, would you agree? What is his legacy on this front?

WEIGEL: This is another matter I discussed at length in both The End and the Beginning and in my 2002 book on the abuse scandal, The Courage To Be Catholic. There are a number of things to be said, things that don’t fit neatly into wire-service sound bites.

First, John Paul II was a great reformer of the priesthood. The Catholic priesthood in 1978 was in arguably its worst shape since the Reformation: thousands of men had abandoned the ministry, and we now know that others — a small minority, but one was one too many — were behaving horribly in betraying the trust of the young. The crisis of the priesthood was addressed by John Paul II comprehensively, by his teaching, his example, his reform of seminaries, and his reform of the world episcopate. The first thing to be said in fairness about John Paul II and the priesthood is that he is one of the great papal reformers of the priesthood.

Second, it’s clear that the Holy See and the pope were not living the abuse crisis in “real time” with the Church in the United States in 2002, an information lag that led to a misimpression of inattention or refusal to face facts.

Third, when John Paul II was fully informed of what had been revealed in the first four months of 2002, he acted decisively, summoning the American cardinals to the Vatican and initiating a process that led to a major and further reform of U.S. seminaries.

Fourth, the rigorous way the Catholic Church has dealt with what is a societal plague — the sexual abuse of the young — should be taken as a model for other institutions. The plague is real, but a one-eyed obsession with the plague’s impact on the Catholic Church makes it more difficult to address the far more widespread crisis of sexual abuse: within families (where the majority of the abuse of the young takes place) or in government-run schools. One does no good service to the young, and to the protection of the young, by using this horrible problem and these wicked acts to attack the credibility of the Church’s moral teaching on matters that cut against the grain of contemporary lifestyle libertinism.

LOPEZ: Shouldn’t both John Paul II and John XXIII be held responsible for what happened on their watch? Which certainly doesn’t scream “heroic virtue”?

WEIGEL: Local bishops and religious superiors are the ones to be held “primarily responsible” for failures to address, rigorously and decisively, the sin and crime of the sexual abuse of the young.

LOPEZ: Some have accused Pope Francis of being all talk on the topic of sex abuse. Would you agree? Or is there a story being missed?

WEIGEL: I really don’t understand what this accusation means. Is someone seriously proposing that Pope Francis does not care about the victims of abuse? That he is giving a wink-and-nod to these issues, where they remain? He’s just established a commission to oversee the Church’s response to the societal abuse crisis, and it includes both laity and an abuse victim.

The pope’s brief criticism of a U.N. report on the Church and the sexual abuse of the young rightly reminded the world that this is a global crisis, not some uniquely Catholic crisis. If Pope Francis were a less charitable man, he would also have remarked on the U.N.’s dismal record in addressing the rampant sexual abuse committed by U.N. “peacekeeping forces.”

​LOPEZ: The Holy See is about to go in front of a U.N. torture committee. Is there really cause for celebration in the Church about anything this weekend? At some point does Pope Francis have to not just reform but change tradition and teachings from another time?

WEIGEL: The pope is the servant of an authoritative tradition, not its master. One of his tasks is to preserve the integrity of that tradition in its fullness; note that, in his opening address, that’s what John XXIII said was the primary purpose of Vatican II!

​The millions of people who will flood Rome this weekend to celebrate two great modern Catholic leaders and their lives of heroic virtue know that there’s a lot to celebrate in the Catholic Church — including its steady refusal to cave in to what the New York Times editorial board and certain Times op-ed columnists think it should be. Hundreds of thousands of men and women, presumably neither deluded nor insane, were baptized or entered into full communion with the Catholic Church at Easter. The Catholic Church is the world’s premier institutional defender of religious freedom for all. Amidst the confusions of post-modernism, the Catholic Church is the world’s most important institutional defender of the prerogatives of reason to get at the truth of things — including the moral truth of things. The Catholic Church is the largest educator of women and the largest provider of health care to women and children in the Third World. The Church’s best seminaries in the United States are fuller than they have been in 40 years. Young Catholics are giving years of their lives as FOCUS missionaries on college and university campuses across the United States. The Church offers empowerment to the poor through its extensive social-service networks and compassionate support to women in crisis pregnancies.

So, yes, there’s a lot to celebrate, and a lot for which to be grateful.

LOPEZ: There’s a synod on the family coming up in the fall, convened by Pope Francis. What do you expect come of it? Again, Church teaching seems to be from another reality on marriage and family and women.

WEIGEL: Pope Francis understands that there is a crisis of marriage culture throughout the world. And he wants the Church to address that crisis more effectively. That will happen, I think, by lifting up the beauty of Christian marriage as an alternative to the anorexic notion of marriage as a legal contract for mutual convenience; Christian marriage is a covenant of love and self-giving, and the world needs to hear about that. And the Western world needs to come to grips with the fact that a contraceptive culture is leading to demographic oblivion.

We’ve got a lot of resources to address these issues today, resources that weren’t available in the cultural maelstrom of the Sixties and the furor over Paul VI’s encyclical on the morally appropriate means of family planning, Humanae Vitae. We have John Paul II’s magnificent 1981 apostolic exhortation, Familiaris Consortio. We have John Paul’s Theology of the Body. We have brilliant books like Mary Eberstadt’s Adam and Eve After the Pill. Those resources should all be in play in the special meeting of the Synod of Bishops in October, and in the ordinary meeting of the Synod in 2015, which will also address the crisis of family life throughout the world.

Above all, we have the example of couples and families who are the living answer to the global crisis of marriage culture. The Synod fathers should hear from them, early and often, as these discussions unfold over the next year and a half.

LOPEZ: What will you most appreciate or enjoy about the canonizations this weekend?

WEIGEL: I’m looking forward to another global gathering of the great Catholic family from all over the world. It’s likely to be a bit chaotic, but then so, I expect, was the first Christian Pentecost.

LOPEZ: Is there anything about John Paul II you wish people realized?

WEIGEL: I suppose I wish that people would recognize his extraordinary courage in facing down a crippling illness and reminding us that there are no disposable human beings. More importantly, I wish that people would realize that he could do that, and be that, because of his embrace of the Cross as the truth of life.

LOPEZ: Is there anything about John XXIII you wish people realized?

WEIGEL: I wish we could get beyond the stereotypes here. Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli was steeped in quite conventional Catholic piety, as is clear from his spiritual diary, Journal of a Soul. What made him the bold leader he eventually became as Pope John XXIII were his lifelong study of history — which taught him that the Church must adapt its presentation of perennial truths to the demands of a given cultural moment, so that the truth can be heard and engaged — and his life outside what I would call the “Catholic bubble.” He spent decades as a Vatican diplomatic representative in Orthodox and Islamic countries. He was a Holocaust rescuer. He understood that Catholicism had to rediscover its originating evangelical dynamism if it was going to be the force it should be for the healing of the world.

LOPEZ: Is it right to say one is a right-wing and one is a left-wing pope?

WEIGEL: No, it’s quite ridiculous to say that. Which doesn’t mean it won’t be said, alas.

LOPEZ: Is this some sort of reset in the life of the Church?

WEIGEL: If by “this” you mean the canonization doubleheader, it’s the best kind of reset: a reminder that the Church is, at the bottom of the bottom line, in the business of facilitating holiness, which comes through friendship with Jesus Christ.

LOPEZ: Is there an approach to foreign policy and human freedom and flourishing that is consistent and important about the two?

WEIGEL: Both men understood that, at the root of the sorrows of the 20th century, there was a profound anthropological crisis — a crisis in the very idea of the human person. Roncalli understood this experientially and historically, and responded to it in a deeply personal way that exuded pastoral charity. Wojtyla got it experientially, analyzed it philosophically, and put the Christian view of the inalienable dignity of the human person at the center of his teaching and witness.

LOPEZ: What’s Divine Mercy Sunday and what’s significant about it as the doubleheader date? What does it say about Francis?

WEIGEL: “Easter,” as Catholics understand it liturgically, lasts eight days: every day of Easter week is Easter, and so is the Octave of Easter, the Second Sunday of Easter, which John Paul II designated as Divine Mercy Sunday — the day the Church celebrates the capacity of the divine compassion to heal the most broken of lives. That is what the Resurrection of Jesus confirms. And it’s entirely appropriate that two popes through whom the world “saw” divine compassion and pastoral charity in an exceptional way should be canonized on that day. Pope Francis understands this, and that’s why the doubleheader is what it is and when it is.

LOPEZ: With Elizabeth Lev and your son, Stephen, you recently wrote a book called Roman Pilgrimage on the station churches of Rome. Are there any spots you will not miss when in Rome?

WEIGEL: I’ve got to get back to Sts. Cosmas and Damian and St. Praxedes.

LOPEZ: Christians are still celebrating Easter. How is Easter relevant in the world today with all its challenges and possibilities?

WEIGEL: Easter tells Christians that the end of the world’s story has been made manifest in the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead, and his being constituted as Lord and Savior. That changes everything. So, despite the awfulness that we too often see around us, Christians know through Easter that God’s creative and redeeming purposes are going to be vindicated at the end of the drama of history and creation. So we can get about witnessing to the divine mercy we have experienced in our own lives, through friendship with the Risen Christ, in ways that offer the possibility of that friendship to others. And we can do that knowing that, in the end, it’s all a divine comedy, not a cosmic tragedy.

A Soul for All Seasons - by George Weigel

In EPPC

In a March 1996 conversation, Pope John Paul II told me, almost wistfully, “They try to understand me from the outside, but I can only be understood from inside.” His tone that evening was less critical than it was bemused, even resigned. But whether his regrets involved biographers who treated him as a globe-trotting politician or journalists who parsed his every word and deed in conventional left-right categories, the view from outside, he knew, was not going to get anyone close to the essence of Karol Wojtyła.

I agreed with him then; and now, nine years after his death, in the days before his April 27 canonization, I agree with him even more. John Paul II, who embodied the human drama of the second half of the 20th century in a singular way, and whose witness to the truth of humanity’s noblest aspirations bent the curve of history toward freedom, can only be understood from inside out. Or, if you prefer, soul first.

His was a many-textured soul. Some of its multiple facets help explain his extraordinary accomplishments in the Catholic Church and on the world stage.

He had a Polish soul, formed by a distinctive experience of history. Vivisected in the Third Polish Partition of 1795, his country was not restored to the map of Europe until 1918. But during those 123 years of political humiliation, the Polish nation survived the demise of the Polish state through its language, its literature and its faith, with the Catholic Church acting as the safe-deposit box of national identity.

Learning about that hard experience as a boy, Karol Wojtyła was permanently inoculated against the twin heresies that had beset the West for centuries: the Jacobin heresy that the political quest for power runs history, and the Marxist heresy that history is simply the exhaust fumes of economic processes. Knowing in his Polish soul that culture, not politics or economics, drives history over the long haul, John Paul II could ignite a revolution of conscience during his first papal visit to Poland in 1979. He summoned his people to live the truth about themselves, to reject the communist culture of the lie, and to find in that restored national identity irresistible tools of resistance to oppression.

This son of Poland was, at the same time, a man of global vision with a deeply humanistic soul, forged by what he regarded as the crisis of modernity: a crisis in the very idea of the human person. That crisis, he believed, was not confined to communism’s materialist reduction of the human condition, which he tenaciously fought as a university chaplain, a professor of ethics, a charismatic priest and a dynamic bishop. The crisis could also be found in those Western systems that were tempted to measure men and women by their commercial utility rather than by the innate and inalienable dignity that was their birthright.

John Paul II’s conviction, biblically rooted and philosophically refined, was that every human life is of infinite value, at every stage and in every condition. This was the basis of his priestly ministry for almost six decades; it was the conviction that forged his unique moral analysis of world politics; and it was the ground from which he could inspire men and women from a staggering variety of cultures.

He could also touch those lives because of his dramatic soul. As a young man, he confessed in a memoir later in life, he was “obsessed” with the theater. And while he took some useful skills from those experiences on stage— John Gielgud once commented on John Paul II’s “perfect” sense of timing, as Alec Guinness marveled at the resonance of his voice—he also developed a dramatic view of the human condition. We all live, he believed, in a quotidian, yet deeply consequential, moral drama. Every day of our lives is lived in the dramatic tension between who we are and who we should be.

John Paul II intuited this on stage; he refined that intuition as a philosopher. And it was deepened by his Christian conviction that the drama of every human life is playing within a cosmic drama in which the God of the Bible is producer, director, scriptwriter and protagonist. That Christian conviction, in turn, was what allowed him to say, a year after he was shot in St. Peter’s Square in 1981, “In the designs of Providence there are no mere coincidences.”

A man whose soul is formed by the conviction that “coincidence” is merely a facet of providence that he has not yet grasped is a man impervious to the tyranny of the possible. And here, too, the soul of John Paul II helps explain his accomplishment.

When he was elected pope in 1978, some observers, fixated on what they imagined to be possible, saw in the Catholic Church only contention and possible ruin. He saw seeds of reform and renewal, leading to what he would call a “New Evangelization,” a new missionary dynamic in Catholicism that would offer the divine mercy to a broken and wounded humanity. Others, fixated on what seemed settled in world affairs, believed that the Yalta division of Europe after World War II was permanent. But after June 1979 and the rise of the Solidarity movement in Poland, he saw possibilities for dramatic cultural, social and eventually political change in Eastern Europe—and then helped effect them.

If John Paul II seemed able to discern possibilities where others saw only barriers; if he saw (as he put it at the United Nations in 1995), a “springtime of the human spirit” after a winter of murderous discontent embodied in two world wars, the gulag and Auschwitz—well, one could look to his keen mind for an explanation. But the deeper explanation lies in his soul, and in the human character formed by that soul.

It was John Paul’s soul in which hundreds of millions of human beings found an exemplar of decency and an icon of hope. It was the character formed by that soul that made him a champion of resistance against the tyranny of diminished expectations, personal and political.

George Weigel in WSJ on Pope Francis the Revolutionary

Nine months into his papacy, the pontiff has made clear his aim to restore the church's original evangelical passion. 

by George Weigel
November 29, 2013

The first nine months of the pontificate of Pope Francis have often resembled a gigantic Rorschach test in which various commentators inside and outside the Catholic Church have "seen" their dreams and fears realized. Alas, what has been "seen" has often had little to do with the record of Jorge Mario Bergoglio as priest and bishop or with his most consequential decisions as pope. 

Those projections reached fever pitch with the publication on Tuesday of Francis' first apostolic exhortation, "Evangelii Gaudium" (The Joy of the Gospel), which was celebrated, or lamented, as if it were an Occupy Whatever position paper for a G-8 summit. Instead, the papal document should be read and appreciated for what it manifestly is: a clarion call for a decisive shift in the Catholic Church's self-understanding, in full continuity with the teaching of the Second Vatican Council, Paul VI, John Paul II and Benedict XVI. 

Given the fantasies that the pope and his pontificate have inspired on both left and right, it might be useful, at the three-quarter pole of Francis' first year in the Chair of Peter, to describe with more precision the man with whom I shared a wide-ranging conversation about the global state of the Catholic Church in May 2012. 

First and foremost, Jorge Mario Bergoglio is a radically converted Christian disciple who has known the mercy of God in his own life and who wants to enable others to share that experience—and the healing and joy that come from friendship with the Lord Jesus Christ. 

As he declared in a widely publicized interview in September with an Italian Jesuit magazine, Pope Francis is a "son of the church" who believes and teaches what the Catholic Church believes and teaches, and who wants others to hear and be moved to conversion by the symphony of Catholic truth, which he thinks is too often drowned out by ecclesiastical cacophony. 

Pope Francis is completely dedicated to what John Paul II called the "New Evangelization," by which he means a dramatic re-centering of the church on its evangelical mission and a life-changing rediscovery by each of the world's 1.2 billion Catholics of the missionary vocation into which he or she was baptized. 

He is a pastor who is deeply concerned for the flock, draws spiritual strength from the flock, challenges the flock to make good decisions, and respects popular piety. 

The pope "from the ends of the Earth," as he described himself from the central loggia of St. Peter's on the evening of his election on March 13, is a reformer who, as he made clear in "Evangelii Gaudium," will measure authentic Catholic reform by the criterion of mission-effectiveness. Thus the Franciscan reform of the Roman Curia will not be undertaken for whatever modest satisfactions may be derived from moving slots around on an organizational flowchart, but to ensure that the Catholic Church's central administration serves the evangelical mission of all the members of the church. 

As described by José María Poirier, director of the Argentine Catholic magazine Criterio, the pope is a man who "wants a holy church, or at least one with a great striving for virtue," because he knows that Christian example is at least as important as logical argument in the church's evangelization work—a conviction that explains his recent (and welcome) criticism of Catholic "sourpusses." 

He is, by the testimony of many who have worked with him, an efficient executive who consults widely, ponders his options, and then acts decisively. He is not afraid of making decisions, but he makes his decisions carefully, having learned (as he once put it) to be skeptical of his initial impressions and instincts in facing difficult situations. He is not afraid of criticism, he learns from his mistakes, and he wants his collaborators to challenge him when they think he's wrong. 

He is a man of broad culture, well-read theologically but more given to literary references and illustrations than to scholarly theological citations in his preaching and catechesis. Thus one of his recent daily Mass sermons praised Robert Hugh Benson's early 20th-century apocalyptic novel, "Lord of the World," for raising important cautions against dictatorial utopianism, or what the pope called "adolescent progressivism." 

Pope Francis also grasps the nature of the great cultural crisis of post-modernity: the rise of a new Gnosticism, in which everything in the human condition is plastic, malleable and subject to human willfulness, nothing is simply given, and human beings are reduced, by self-delusion, legal definition or judicial dictums to mere bundles of desires. 

The pope is passionately concerned about the poor, and he knows that poverty in the 21st century takes many forms. It can be found in the grinding material poverty of his native Buenos Aires, caused by decades of corruption, indifference, and the church's failures to catechize Argentina's economic and political leaders. But poverty can also be found in the soul-withering spiritual desert of those who measure their humanity by what they have rather than who they are, and who judge others by the same materialist yardstick. Then there is the ethical impoverishment of moral relativism, which dumbs down human aspiration, impedes common work for the common good in society, and inevitably leads to social fragmentation and personal unhappiness. 

As he wrote in "Evangelii Gaudium," Pope Francis is not a man of "political ideology." He knows that "business is a vocation and a noble vocation," if ordered to the common good and the empowerment of the poor. When he criticizes the social, economic or political status quo, he does so as a pastor who is "interested only in helping all those who are in thrall to an individualistic, indifferent and self-centered mentality to be freed from those unworthy chains and to attain a way of living and thinking that is more humane, noble, and fruitful." 

Pope Francis is a revolutionary. The revolution he proposes, however, is not a matter of economic or political prescription, but a revolution in the self-understanding of the Catholic Church: a re-energizing return to the pentecostal fervor and evangelical passion from which the church was born two millennia ago, and a summons to mission that accelerates the great historical transition from institutional-maintenance Catholicism to the Church of the New Evangelization.

Michael Novak: Papa Francesco «Non si rende conto dei danni che sta facendo»

In VI 

L'intervista al filosofo cattolico americano Michael Novak

Paolo Mastrolilli
New York

«Un amico mi ha chiesto se il Papa si rende conto dei danni che fa, con questi commenti estemporanei. Di certo usare la parola ossessione nei confronti di chi lavora da sempre per la difesa della vita è una cosa che ferisce».

In oltre venti anni che lo conosciamo, non era mai capitato prima di sentire parole così dubbiose verso il Papa da Michael Novak, forse il più noto filosofo cattolico americano, molto legato a Giovanni Paolo II e Benedetto XVI.

Cosa pensa dell’intervista rilasciata da Francesco a Civiltà Cattolica?

«Ho visto due tipi di reazioni: quella del mio amico, che vi ho descritto; e quella di George Weigel, secondo cui dobbiamo abituarci ai comportamenti di un pontefice evangelico, che non si rivolge a noi come accademico, ma come predicatore. Weigel ha ragione, però, usare parole come “ossessione” ferisce fedeli che hanno rischiato anche la vita, per proteggerla».

Francesco vuole cambiare la dottrina o il tono della Chiesa?

«Il tono. Però l’effetto rischia comunque di essere dannoso».

Perché?

«Mette molti cristiani sulla difensiva, proprio quando sono attaccati. Nello stesso tempo incoraggia le critiche contro la Chiesa, da parte dei suoi avversari dichiarati, che non aspettavano altro».

A cosa si riferisce?

«Le sue parole lo espongono alla strumentalizzazione da parte di chi vuole colpire la Chiesa. Basta guardare come le ha usate il New York Times».

C’è il rischio che una parte dei fedeli americani lasci la Chiesa?

«Non credo. Forse i più fragili estremisti, ma sarà un fenomeno molto limitato. La sinistra, però, si sentirà incoraggiata a spingere per modifiche della dottrina».

Non esiste anche la possibilità inversa, quella che un «Papa evangelico» riavvicini i fedeli?

«Cristo ha portato anche elementi di contraddizione, forse non è possibile farne a meno. Forse è un bene che questo Papa, riconducendo la Chiesa alle radici della sua missione, ci spinga a riflettere».

On Pope Francis's interview: The Christ-Centered Pope - by George Weigel

In EPPC 

Perhaps the most revealing detail in Pope Francis’s lengthy interview, conducted by the Italian Jesuit Antonio Spadaro and published yesterday in English translation in the Jesuit journal America, is the pontiff’s reflection on one of his favorite Roman walks, prior to his election:

When I had to come to to Rome, I always stayed in [the neighborhood of the] Via della Scrofa. From there I often visited the Church of St. Louis of France, and I went there to contemplate the painting of “The Calling of St. Matthew” by Caravaggio. That finger of Jesus, pointing at Matthew. That’s me. I feel like him. Like Matthew. . . . This is me, a sinner on whom the Lord has turned his gaze.

The Calling of St. Matthew is an extraordinary painting in many ways, including Caravaggio’s signature use of light and darkness to heighten the spiritual tension of a scene. In this case, though, the chiaroscuro setting is further intensified by a profoundly theological artistic device: The finger of Jesus, pointing at Matthew, seems deliberately to invoke the finger of God as rendered by Michelangelo on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Thus Caravaggio, in depicting the summons of the tax collector, unites creation and redemption, God the Father and the incarnate Son, personal call and apostolic mission.

That is who Jorge Mario Bergoglio is: a radically converted Christian disciple who has felt the mercy of God in his own life and who describes himself, without intending any dramatic effect, as “a sinner whom the Lord has looked upon.” Having heard the call to conversion and responded to it, Bergoglio wants to facilitate others’ hearing of that call, which never ceases to come from God through Christ and the Church.

And that, Bergoglio insists, is what the Church is for: The Church is for evangelization and conversion. Those who have found the new pope’s criticism of a “self-referential Church” puzzling, and those who will find something shockingly new in his critical comments, in his recent interview, about a Church reduced “to a nest protecting our mediocrity,” haven’t been paying sufficient attention. Six years ago, when the Catholic bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean met at the Brazilian shrine of Aparecida to consider the future, the archbishop of Buenos Aires, Bergoglio, was one of the principal intellectual architects of the bishops’ call to put evangelization at the center of Catholic life, and to put Jesus Christ at the center of evangelization. The Latin American Church, long used to being “kept,” once by legal establishment and then by cultural tradition, had to rediscover missionary zeal by rediscovering the Lord Jesus Christ. And so the Latin American bishops, led by Bergoglio, made in their final report a dramatic proposal that amounted to a stinging challenge to decades, if not centuries, of ecclesiastical complacency:

The Church is called to a deep and profound rethinking of its mission. . . . It cannot retreat in response to those who see only confusion, dangers, and threats. . . . What is required is confirming, renewing, and revitalizing the newness of the Gospel . . . out of a personal and community encounter with Jesus Christ that raises up disciples and missionaries. . . .

A Catholic faith reduced to mere baggage, to a collection of rules and prohibitions, to fragmented devotional practices, to selective and partial adherence to the truths of faith, to occasional participation in some sacraments, to the repetition of doctrinal principles, to bland or nervous moralizing, that does not convert the life of the baptized would not withstand the trials of time. . . . We must all start again from Christ, recognizing [with Pope Benedict XVI] that “being Christian is . . . the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.”

The 21st-century proclamation of Christ must take place in a deeply wounded and not infrequently hostile world. In another revealing personal note, Francis spoke of his fondness for Marc Chagall’s White Crucifixion, one of the most striking religious paintings of the 20th century. Chagall’s Jesus is unmistakably Jewish, the traditional blue and white tallis or prayer-shawl replacing the loincloth on the Crucified One. But Chagall’s Christ is also a very contemporary figure, for around the Cross swirl the death-dealing political madnesses and hatreds of the 20th century. And so the pope’s regard for Chagall’s work is of a piece with his description of the Catholic Church of the 21st century as a kind of field hospital on a battlefield strewn with the human wreckage caused by false ideas of the human person and false claims of what makes for happiness. Thus Francis in his interview on the nature of the Church:

I see clearly that the thing the Church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity. I see the Church as a field hospital after battle. It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars! You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else. Heal the wounds, heal the wounds.

And how are the wounds of late-modern and postmodern humanity to be healed? Through an encounter with Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God. “The most important thing, “ Francis insisted in his interview, “is the first proclamation: Jesus Christ has saved you.” The Church of the 21st century must offer Jesus Christ as the answer to the question that is every human life (as John Paul II liked to put it). The moral law is important, and there should be no doubt that Francis believes and professes all that the Catholic Church believes and professes to be true about the moral life, the life that leads to happiness and beatitude. But he also understands that men and women are far more likely to embrace those moral truths — about the inalienable right to life from conception until natural death; about human sexuality and how it should be lived — when they have first embraced Jesus Christ as Lord. That, it seems to me, is what the pope was saying when he told Antonio Spadaro that “proclamation in a missionary style focuses on the essentials, on the necessary things.” These are what make “the heart burn: as it did for the disciples at Emmaus. . . . The proposal of the Gospel must be more simple, profound, radiant. It is from this proposition that the moral consequences then flow.”

Francis underscores that “the teaching of the Church is clear” on issues like abortion, euthanasia, the nature of marriage, and chastity and that he is “a son of the Church” who accepts those teachings as true. But he also knows that “when we speak about these issues, we have to talk about them in a context.” That “context” is Jesus Christ and his revelation of the truth about the human person. For as the Second Vatican Council taught inGaudium et Spes, its Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, “It is only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of man truly comes clear. For Adam, the first man, was the type of him who was to come. Christ the Lord, Christ the new Adam, in the very revelation of the mystery of the Father and of his love, fully reveals man to himself and brings to light his most high calling.”

Thus Pope Francis, the pastor who is urging a new pastoral style on his fellow bishops and fellow priests, insists that every time the Church says “no,” it does so on the basis of a higher and more compelling “yes”: yes to the dignity and value of every human life, which the Church affirms because it has embraced Jesus as Lord and proclaims him to a world increasingly tempted to measure human beings by their utility rather than their dignity.

Francis’s radical Christocentricity — his insistence that everything in the Church begins with Jesus Christ and must lead men and women to Jesus Christ — also sheds light on his statement that there is a hierarchy of truths in Catholicism or, as he put it, that “the dogmatic and moral teachings of the Church are not all equivalent.” That does not mean, of course, that some of those those teachings are not really, well, true; but it does mean that some truths help us make sense of other truths. The Second Vatican Council reclaimed this notion of a “hierarchy of truths” in Unitatis Redintegratio, its Decree on Ecumenism, and it’s an important idea, the pope understands, for the Church’s evangelical mission.

If you don’t believe in Jesus Christ as Lord — if you’ve never heard the Gospel — then you aren’t going to be very interested in what the Catholic Church has to say in Jesus’s name about what makes for human happiness and what makes for decadence and unhappiness; indeed, you’re quite likely to be hostile to what the Church says about how we ought to live. By redirecting the Church’s attention and pastoral action to the Church’s most basic responsibility — the proclamation of the Gospel and the invitation to friendship with Jesus Christ — Pope Francis is underscoring that a very badly disoriented 21st century will be more likely to pay attention to evangelists than to scolds: “We need to proclaim the Gospel on every street corner, preaching the good news of the kingdom and healing, even with our preaching, every kind of disease and wound. . . . The proclamation of the saving love of God comes before moral and religious imperatives.” The Church says “yes” before the Church says “no,” and there isn’t any “no” the Church pronounces that isn’t ultimately a reflection of the Church’s “yes” to Jesus Christ, to the Gospel, and to what Christ and the Gospel affirm about human dignity.

It’s going to take some time for both the Church and the world to grow accustomed to an evangelical papacy with distinctive priorities. Those who imagine the Catholic Church as an essentially political agency in which “policy” can change the way it changes when a new governor moves into an American statehouse will continue — as they did within minutes of the release of the America interview — to misrepresent Pope Francis as an advocate of doctrinal and moral change, of the sort that would be approved by the editorial board of the New York Times. This is nonsense. Perhaps more urgently, it is a distraction.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio is determined to redirect the Church’s attention, and the world’s attention, to Jesus Christ. In this, his papacy will be in continuity with those of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Pope Francis is going to be radically Christ-centered in his own way, though, and some may find that way jarring. Those willing to take him in full, however, rather than excising 17 words from a 12,000-word interview, will find the context in which those 17 words make classic Catholic sense. “We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage, and the use of contraceptive methods,” the pope told his interviewer. Why? Because it is by insisting on conversion to Jesus Christ, on lifelong deepening of the believer’s friendship with him, and on the Church’s ministry as an instrument of the divine mercy that the Church will help others make sense of its teaching on those matters — with which the New York Times, not the Catholic Church, is obsessed — and will begin to transform a deeply wounded culture.

George Weigel on Pope Francis as a true man of God - By George Weigel

In NRO 

Rome — The swift election of Jorge Mario Cardinal Bergoglio, S.J., as bishop of Rome is replete with good news — and not a little irony. To reverse the postmodern batting order, let’s begin with the good news.

A true man of God. The wheelchair-bound beggar at the corner of Via della Conciliazione and Via dell’Erba this morning had a keen insight into his new bishop: “Sono molto contento; e un profeta” (“I’m very happy; he’s a prophet”). That was certainly the overwhelming impression I took away from the hour I spent with the archbishop of Buenos Aires and future pope last May — here was a genuine man of God, who lives “out” from the richness and depth of his interior life; a bishop who approaches his responsibilities as a churchman and his decisions as the leader of a complex organization from a Gospel-centered perspective, in a spirit of discernment and prayer. The intensity with which Cardinal Bergoglio asked me to pray for him, at the end of an hour of conversation about a broad range of local and global Catholic issues, was mirrored last night in his unprecedented request to the vast crowd spilling out of St. Peter’s Square and down toward the Tiber to pray for him before he blessed them. Gregory the Great, in the sixth century, was the first bishop of Rome to adopt the title Servus servorum Dei (Servant of the servants of God). That ancient description of the supreme pontiff of the Catholic Church will be embodied in a particularly winsome way in Pope Francis, who named himself for the Poverello of Assisi, the most popular saint in history.

A pope for the New Evangelization. The election of Pope Francis completes the Church’s turn from the Counter-Reformation Catholicism that brought the Gospel to America — and eventually produced Catholicism’s first American pope — to the Evangelical Catholicism that must replant the Gospel in those parts of the world that have grown spiritually bored, while planting it afresh in new fields of mission around the globe. In our May 2012 conversation, the man who would become pope discussed at some length the importance of the Latin American bishops’ 2007 “Aparecida Document,” the fruit of the Fifth General Conference of the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean. The essential message of that revolutionary statement (in which there was not the least bit of whining about Protestant “sheep-stealing” but rather a clear acknowledgment of Catholicism’s own evangelical deficiencies in Latin America) can be gleaned from this brief passage, which I adopted as one of the epigraphs for my book, Evangelical Catholicism: Deep Reform in the 21st-Century Church:

The Church is called to a deep and profound rethinking of its mission. . . . It cannot retreat in response to those who see only confusion, dangers, and threats. . . . What is required is confirming, renewing, and revitalizing the newness of the Gospel . . . out of a personal and community encounter with Jesus Christ that raises up disciples and missionaries. . . . 

A Catholic faith reduced to mere baggage, to a collection of rules and prohibitions, to fragmented devotional practices, to selective and partial adherence to the truths of faith, to occasional participation in some sacraments, to the repetition of doctrinal principles, to bland or nervous moralizing, that does not convert the life of the baptized would not withstand the trials of time. . . . We must all start again from Christ, recognizing [with Pope Benedict XVI] that “being Christian is . . . the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.”

Here, in a statement that then-cardinal Bergoglio had a significant hand in drafting, is what John Paul II and Benedict XVI have called the “New Evangelization” in synthetic microcosm:

The Church of the 21st century cannot rely on the ambient public culture, or on folk memories of traditional Catholic culture, to transmit the Gospel in a way that transforms individual lives, cultures, and societies. Something more, something deeper, is needed.

That “something” is radical personal conversion to the Lord Jesus Christ and an embrace of the friendship he offers every human being: a friendship in which we both see the face of the Father of Mercies (who calls us out of our prodigality into the full dignity of our humanity) and learn the deep truth about our humanity (that it is in making our lives into a gift for others, as life itself is to each of us, that we come into human fulfillment).

* This conversion of minds and hearts builds a community that is unlike any other: a “communion” of disciples in mission, who understand that faith is increased as it is offered and given away to others.

That communion-community best embodies the truth of the human condition if each individual member of it, and the Church itself, fully embraces the entire symphony of Catholic truth, and in doing so, lives the moral life as a life of growth in beatitude, in compassion for others, and in evangelical charity.

Finally, this communion-community lives “ahead of time,” because it knows, through the Easter faith the Church will celebrate in a few weeks, the truth about how the human adventure will end: God’s purposes in creation and redemption will be vindicated, as history and the cosmos are fulfilled in the New Jerusalem, in the Wedding Feast of the Lamb, where death will be no more and every tear will be wiped away (Rev. 21:2–4).

That is the message that Pope Francis will take to the world: Gospel-centered Catholicism, which challenges the post-mod cynics, the metaphysically bored, and the spiritually dry to discover (or rediscover) the tremendous human adventure of living “inside” the Biblical narrative of history. 

A reforming pope. One of the principal dynamics of Conclave 2013 was a settled determination among a clear majority of the cardinal electors to see that the next pontificate addresses, in a root-and-branch way, the incompetence and corruption that has made too much of the Roman Curia an impediment to the New Evangelization, rather than an instrument of it — and in doing so, to empower the good people of the Curia to give the world Church the benefit of their remarkable talents. Pope Francis is not going to have a happy time reading the 300-page report on Vatileaks and related Roman messes that is waiting for him in the papal apartment. But he will read it with a reformer’s eye, with the aid of some very shrewd and reform-minded veterans of the Curia, and with a clear understanding from his own experience (as related to me last May) of what went wrong in the management of the Church’s central administrative machinery under the leadership of Benedict XVI’s cardinal secretary of state, Tarcisio Bertone, S.D.B. It may be reasonably expected that real reform, in both curial culture and curial personnel, will follow in due course. The sooner the better, many would say.

A pope in defense of human rights and democracy. Pope Francis has left behind an Argentina in which he was a stern critic of the Cristina Kirchner government’s deepening of that beautiful country’s democracy deficit, and of Madam President’s commitment to a public policy of bread and circuses wedded to legally enforced lifestyle libertinism — what Benedict XVI aptly called the “dictatorship of relativism.” At a moment when the momentum of the democratic project in Latin America is flagging (while new opportunities are opening up in places like post-Chávez Venezuela and the inevitable post-Castro-brothers Cuba), the new pope should be able to rally Catholic forces in defense of religious freedom and other civil liberties in a continent where they are now under assault. And if he can do that at home, he can do it throughout the world.

Pope Francis is also deeply committed to the Church’s service to and empowerment of the poor, as he made unmistakably clear in his ministry in Buenos Aires. But those Gospel-based commitments should not lead anyone to think that he will be Paul Krugman in a white cassock. That seems very unlikely.

And now for the ironies.

The 2005 runner-up takes the checkered flag in 2013? Well, not really. Cardinal Bergoglio was used in 2005; he knows precisely who used him and why; and while he is a man of the Gospel who is not looking to settle scores, he is also a man of prudence who knows who his friends, and who his enemies, are. Here’s the story:

In April 2005, the progressive party (which was a real party then) came to Rome after the death of John Paul II thinking it had the wind at its back and clear sailing ahead — only to find that the Ratzinger-for-pope party was well-organized; that Ratzinger had made a very positive impression by the way he had run the General Congregations of cardinals after John Paul II’s death; that he had deep support from throughout the Third World because of the courtesy with which he had treated visiting Third World bishops on their quinquennial visits to Rome over the past 20 years; and that, after his brilliant homily at John Paul’s funeral Mass, he was indisputably the frontrunner for the papacy.

Confronted with this reality, the progressives panicked. Their first blocking move against Ratzinger was to try to run the aged Carlo Maria Cardinal Martini, S.J., emeritus archbishop of Milan, who was already ill with Parkinson’s disease and had retired to the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Jerusalem. The idea was not to elect Martini pope; it was to stop the Ratzinger surge. Then, when Ratzinger blew past Martini with almost 50 percent of the vote on what was assumed to be the “courtesy” first ballot (where some votes are cast as gestures of friendship, esteem, etc.), and subsequently went over 50 percent the following morning, the panic intensified. Martini was summarily abandoned (or may have told his supporters to forget it). The progressives then tried to advance Cardinal Bergoglio — who was very much part of the pro-Ratzinger coalition; who embodied “dynamic orthodoxy,” just like John Paul II and Joseph Ratzinger; who had been persecuted by his more theologically and politically left-leaning Jesuit brethren after his term as Jesuit provincial in Argentina (they exiled him to northern Argentina, where he taught high-school chemistry until rescued by John Paul II and eventually made archbishop of Buenos Aires); and who was doubtless appalled by the whole exercise on his putative behalf.

It was a last-ditch blocking move, perhaps constructed around the idea that a Third World candidate like Bergoglio would peel off votes from Ratzinger. In any event, it was a complete misreading of the 2005 conclave’s dynamics and a cynical use of Bergoglio, who would almost certainly have been abandoned had the stratagem worked — and it failed miserably.

Thus it may be safely assumed that the coalition that quickly solidified and swiftly elected Jorge Mario Bergoglio as pope in 2013 had little or nothing to do with the eminent cabal that tried to use him in 2005. Pope Francis was elected for who he is, not for taking the silver medal eight years ago. 

The first Jesuit pope? Well, yes, in a manner of speaking. Bergoglio is an old-school Jesuit, formed by classic Ignatian spirituality and deeply committed to an intelligent, sophisticated appropriation and proclamation of the full symphony of Catholic truth — qualities not notable for their prevalence among members of the Society of Jesus in the early 21st century. I suspect there were not all that many champagne corks flying last night in those Jesuit residences throughout the world where the Catholic Revolution That Never Was is still regarded as the ecclesiastical holy grail. For the shrewder of the new pope’s Jesuit brothers know full well that that dream was just dealt another severe blow. And they perhaps fear that this pope, knowing the Society of Jesus and its contemporary confusions and corruptions as he does, just might take in hand the reform of the Jesuits that was one of the signal failures of the pontificate of John Paul II.

There will be endless readings of the tea leaves in the days ahead as the new pope, by word and gesture, offers certain signals as to his intentions and his program. But the essentials are already known. This is a keenly intelligent, deeply holy, humble, and shrewd man of the Gospel. He knows that he has been elected as a reformer, and the reforms he will implement are the reforms that will advance the New Evangelization. The rest is detail: important detail, to be sure, but still detail. The course is set, and the Church’s drive into the Evangelical Catholicism of the future has been accelerated by the pope who introduced himself to his diocese, and to the world, by bowing deeply as he asked for our prayers.

Il Papa che combatté il comunismo, soprattutto quello infiltrato tra i suoi - di Roberto de Mattei

In CR 

George Weigel è un noto teologo e storico americano, autore del bestseller “Testimone dalla speranza. La vita di Giovanni
Paolo II”. Sorprende che Mondadori, che lo ha pubblicato in Italia (Milano 1999, 2001 e 2005), si sia lasciato sfuggire il secondo volume della biografia, stampato dall’editore Davide Cantagalli, con un’ottima traduzione di Giovanna Ossola (“La fine e l’inizio. Giovanni Paolo II, la vittoria della libertà, gli ultimi anni, l’eredità”, Siena 2012, 621 pp., 29 euro). 

Eppure questo libro è per molti aspetti più importante del precedente, di cui rappresenta il seguito e il compimento. Weigel ha avuto il privilegio di trascorrere decine di ore accanto a Giovanni Paolo II, raccogliendo molte testimonianze dalla sua viva voce. Ma l’autore ha anche consultato fonti di straordinario interesse, come gli archivi del Kgb, dello Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa (Sb) polacco e della Stasi della Germania dell’est, traendone documenti che confermano come i governi comunisti e i servizi segreti dei paesi orientali siano penetrati in Vaticano per favorire i loro interessi e infiltrarsi nei ranghi più alti della gerarchia cattolica.

E’ questo un punto in cui il lo storico americano è realmente innovativo. Weigel spiega come dal 1962, in Polonia, il controllo della chiesa si concentrava nel IV dipartimento del ministero dell’Interno, meglio conosciuto come la quarta divisione dell’Sb, con il fine di rafforzare il controllo sulla chiesa e intensificare l’infiltrazione dei servizi segreti nelle istituzioni cattoliche. La nascita di questo dipartimento e l’inasprimento degli sforzi per infiltrare il cattolicesimo polacco coincidevano con la feroce campagna antireligiosa promossa in Unione sovietica da Nikita Kruscev che in occidente veniva presentato, in contrapposizione a Stalin, come un comunista dal “volto umano”.

Erano gli anni della distensione, e Kruscev, con il presidente americano Kennedy e Papa Giovanni XXIII, era un’icona del “buonismo” internazionale. Ma, come sottolinea Weigel, “per ironia della sorte la ripresa della persecuzione delle chiese e delle comunità cristiane in Unione sovietica nei primi anni 60 avvenne proprio quando Giovanni XXIII e la diplomazia della curia di Roma decisero un nuovo corso rispetto al problema del comunismo, quello che prese il nome di Ostpolitik” (p. 74).

Il principale rappresentante del nuovo corso di Giovanni XXIII e poi di Paolo VI, fu mons. Agostino Casaroli (1914-1998). Egli era convinto che le persecuzioni dei cattolici nei paesi comunisti fossero dovute anche alla politica “aggressiva” di Pio XII e salutò con soddisfazione l’elezione di Giovanni XXIII, che gli affidò importanti missioni nell’est europeo. Casaroli e i suoi collaboratori, a cominciare da mons. Achille Silvestrini, erano uomini di grande abilità, ma troppo fiduciosi nelle armi della diplomazia.

Di fronte alla poderosamacchina sovietica, la Santa Sede era priva di ogni forma di controspionaggio con cui poter resistere alla disinformazione e alla destabilizzazione che l’Ostpolitik rendeva possibile. A Roma negli anni del Concilio e del postconcilio il Collegio Ungherese divenne una filiale dei servizi segreti di Budapest. “Tutti i rettori del Collegio dal 1965 al 1987 dovevano essere agenti addestrati e capaci, con competenza sia nelle operazioni di disinformazione sia nell’installazione di microspie. Più della metà degli studenti e degli studiosi del Collegio erano agenti segreti; le autorità del Collegio avevano accesso diretto all’arcivescovo Casaroli, all’arcivescovo Giovanni Cheli (l’uomo di punta di Casaroli per l’Ungheria) e ad altri responsabili dell’Ostpolitik, e diventarono così importanti strumenti della politica del governo comunista ungherese contro il Vaticano” (p. 79).

L’Sb polacco, da parte sua, aveva un collaboratore ecclesiastico ben inserito dal nome in codice di Jankowski, ossia don Michele Czajkowski, uno studioso biblico impegnato nel dialogo tra ebrei e cattolici. L’Sb, secondo Weigel, cercò persino di falsare la discussione del Concilio sui punti più peculiari della teologia cattolica come il ruolo di Maria nella storia della salvezza. Il direttore delIV dipartimento, il colonnello Stanislaw Morawski, lavorò con una dozzina di collaboratori, tutti esperti in mariologia, per preparare un promemoria per i vescovi del Concilio, in cui si criticava la concezione “massimalista” della Beata Maria Vergine del cardinale Wyszynski e di altri presuli (p. 80).

Durante il Vaticano II, ricorda Weigel, l’attività dell’Sb, compresa la campagna denigratoria contro il cardinale Wyszynski, veniva organizzata presso l’ambasciata polacca di Roma, dove agenti del I dipartimento (Servizi segreti esteri) utilizzavano incarichi diplomatici per coprire le loro attività e la sezione del consolato che gestiva i passaporti era un’altra sede per operazioni segrete (p. 81). Fu durante il Concilio che l’8 marzo 1964 Karol Wojtyla si insediò solennemente come arcivescovo metropolita di Cracovia. Nel 1967 Paolo VI lo creò cardinale e quello stesso anno, il 4 agosto, Agostino Casaroli venne nominato “ministro degli Esteri” del Vaticano. Da quel momento Casaroli divenne il protagonista ufficiale della Ostpolitik.

La Ostpolitik di Agostino Casaroli e Paolo VI fu una strategia di impegno e di dialogo con il comunismo che prometteva molto e otteneva poco, osserva Weigel, anche perché il presunto partner non era interessato aldialogo. Eletto Papa il 16 ottobre 1978, Giovanni Paolo II, pochi mesi dopo, nominò inaspettatamente Casaroli cardinale e suo segretario di stato, carica che mantenne fino al 1° dicembre 1990. La strategia del Pontefice non coincideva però con quella del suo principale collaboratore e la Santa Sede sembrò giocare su due registri paralleli.

La linea politica seguita dal Papa nel periodo tra la sua elezione e la fine della rivoluzione di Solidarnosc nel 1989 non fu gestita infatti nella segreteria di stato vaticana, ma negli appartamenti papali. Una linea, quella di Giovanni Paolo II, che non era quella intransigente del cardinale Mindszenty, ma neppure quella “collaborazionista” del cardinale Casaroli. “Per Casaroli – osservò Zbigniew Brzezinski – il comunismo era una forma di potere con cui si doveva convivere.  Per Giovanni Paolo II il comunismo era un male che non si poteva evitare, ma che si poteva indebolire” (p. 165).

“Stabilità” era la parola d’ordine dell’Ostpolitik, e sia il cardinale Casaroli che l’arcivescovo Silvestrini diffidavano di Solidarnosc, che consideravano una forza profondamente destabilizzante per tutta l’Europa centrale e orientale. Essi volevano puntellare lo status quo dell’Europa, fondato sul sistema di Yalta, verso il quale Giovanni Paolo II era invece fortemente critico. Significativo è il lungo colloquio che si ebbe il 15 dicembre 1981, alla Casa Bianca, subito dopo il colpo di stato del generale Jaruzelski, tra il presidente Reagan e il cardinale Casaroli. “Durante i novanta minuti del colloquio fu Reagan quello che parlò di testimonianza morale e del potere della convinzione morale, e fu invece Casaroli che parlò di realpolitik” (p. 162).

Casaroli continuava a difendere il principio di stabilità, contro l’interventismo del presidente americano. “Gli sforzi sovrumani compiuti dai servizi segreti sovietici e del Patto di Varsavia per infiltrarsi in Vaticano, per corrompere e reclutare i funzionari vaticani, e in tal modo ostacolare le iniziative della chiesa, coincise proprio con l’acme della Ostpolitik di Casaroli; di questo non ci può essere alcun dubbio. Più la Santa Sede era accomodante, più aggressivi si facevano il Kgb, l’Sb, la Stasi, i servizi segreti ungheresi, quelli bulgari e tutto il loro squallido apparato” (p. 210).

Si potrebbeaggiungere che in quegli stessi anni oltre 2.500 vescovi si riunirono a Roma per discutere sui problemi del mondo contemporaneo, ma il Concilio Vaticano II, malgrado la richiesta di 454 Padri conciliari di 86 paesi diversi, non disse una parola sul Leviatano comunista che estendeva la sua ombra sul mondo. Gli artefici dell’Ostpolitik erano convinti che con il comunismo si sarebbe dovuto convivere almeno un secolo. Invece, nel 1989, si sgretolò il Muro di Berlino. Giovanni Paolo II vi aveva dato il suo contributo.