I celebrated Mass on Boston Common with Pope John-Paul II (and 400,000 other people including my wife, father, brother, and sister-in-law) in October 1979. Eight years later, in September 1987, I saw him again at a special (and much smaller) gathering of lay leaders in San Francisco’s Saint Mary’s Cathedral. On that occasion, I actually met the pope, shook his hand, and exchanged a few words with him.
This charismatic man’s papacy shaped an important part of my adult life and a good deal of my professional ministry in the Church.
By contrast I never either saw or met John XXIII. Yet this simple shepherd touched my life even more deeply than John-Paul II. His papacy made my career possible--a career previous generations could never have imagined. Absent John XXIII, I would no doubt have led an entirely different life.
As John and John-Paul became saints this week, it feels as if they are the first saints I can call my own--that is, saints whose lives changed mine during their own lifetimes.
The conventional wisdom is that canonizing these two men simultaneously is a shrewd political move by Pope Francis. His aim, it is said, is to end the polarization over the legacy of Vatican Council II (1962-1965) by uniting the author of the council, John XXIII, with the man some blame for attempting to restore the Church to its pre-conciliar state, John-Paul II.
On the level of public relations, this makes perfect sense. It is undoubtedly true that liberal Catholics lionize John XXIII while conservatives champion John-Paul II. It is also obvious that they were dramatically different men who had highly contrasting papacies. So the PR message is clear: if the Church’s “Hall of Fame” is big enough to embrace them both, then the Church itself is big enough to embrace both liberals and conservatives.
On the level of the debate rhetoric, this also makes sense. The long-standing debate over Vatican II’s legacy has often pitted those claiming the Council brought “renewal and change” against those saying it offered “continuity rather than rupture.” It has pitted those claiming the Council’s agenda was really “ressourcement” (the retrieval of ancient, lost elements of Catholic tradition) against those claiming the Council was really about “aggiornamento” (updating or modernizing the Church). It has pitted “reform” against “restoration,” and even lead to paradoxical proposals about “the reform of the reform.” Making John XXIII and John-Paul II partners in sainthood sends the clear message: they are not pitted against one another, and neither should we.
But on the level of facts, the decision by Pope Francis to schedule both canonizations together is not really about saying “it is time to get past the polarization over Vatican II.” It is about saying “such polarization was mistaken all along.”
As I’ve written often before: John-Paul II was himself a product of the vast changes that John’s Council unleashed. He chose the name John-Paul (imitating John-Paul I) to confirm his intention to follow the conciliar path laid out by John XXIII and Paul VI. He was himself a council father, instrumental in some of its major documents. He vigorously implemented the “changes” from the Council in his native Poland. He became the first non-Italian pope in 400 years thanks to the Council’s new openness. He took up his three predecessors’ efforts to transform the papacy itself and turned it into the highly visible global office that it is today.
In short, had there been no Vatican II there could never have been a Pope John-Paul II. Which means, without John XXIII: there would be no John-Paul II. Their destinies were linked all along. These two popes were not opposite poles. Only John-Paul II was a Pole!
Moreover, there is absolutely no doubt that John-Paul II understood John’s vision for Vatican II, as well as its impact. In 2000 he announced the beatification of John XXIII in a homily that included this comment:
Everyone remembers the image of Pope John's smiling face and two outstretched arms embracing the whole world. How many people were won over by his simplicity of heart, combined with a broad experience of people and things! The breath of newness he brought certainly did not concern doctrine, but rather the way to explain it; his style of speaking and acting was new, as was his friendly approach to ordinary people and to the powerful of the world. It was in this spirit that he called the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, thereby turning a new page in the Church's history: Christians heard themselves called to proclaim the Gospel with renewed courage and greater attentiveness to the "signs" of the times. The Council was a truly prophetic insight of this elderly Pontiff who, even amid many difficulties, opened a season of hope for Christians and for humanity.
If we unpacked this dense paragraph we notice several important points about John-Paul II’s perspective:
1. John’s impact came from his unique personality and character.
2. John’s vision was both conservative and dynamic: he did not change doctrine, but he did communicate it in a new way. He brought Catholicism a new, modern style.
3. This was precisely the “spirit” that inspired the Council.
4. Vatican II “turned a new page in the Church’s history”
5. Vatican II linked the gospel message to the signs of the times.
6. Vatican II was John’s “prophetic insight” bringing hope “for Christians and for humanity.”
Notice that none of the familiar, polarizing debate rhetoric is found here. Rather, John-Paul II clearly saw John and his Council taking a “middle way” between two poles--between those expecting substantial revisions of church teaching, and those asserting that Vatican II brought nothing new.
In fact, both men were theological conservatives who saw a little
In this sense, much of the debate about Vatican II has falsified both the Council and the vision that inspired both these popes. Liberals have too often expected doctrinal changes that the Council neither proclaimed nor implied. Conservatives clung to “traditions” that the Council wanted to replace with more effective ways of communicating the gospel message.
On the pastoral level, the wisdom of this “middle way” has always been obvious to me. For more than 40 years I have been responsible for communicating the gospel message to others. In my 20s I worked mainly with catechists and parents. In my 30s, I worked with pastors, sisters, their lay colleagues, and with parish volunteers. Turning 40, I edited a newspaper for Catholic readers. Since then I have worked with parish staffs, clergy, religious communities, parish lay leaders, and done a lot of adult faith formation for ordinary laypeople.
In nearly all these settings, my goal has been to communicate the core of Catholic tradition in a new way, and apply it to the practical needs of Catholic life on the local level. Almost nothing I communicated was actually new “teaching”--it was our tradition in modern dress. In short, I have spent 40 years doing the work of Vatican II.
Yet over and over, people would react by saying, “Really? That’s really what the Church teaches? That’s really our tradition? That’s really our faith? That’s really what it means to be a Catholic?”
Such reactions came from ordinary laypeople, from Catholic school graduates, Catholic college graduates, and even the seminary graduates. As a pastoral minister, my answer to all those questions was, “Yes, really!”
As an educator, their questions always made me wonder: Why are people so surprised? Why do they think they’re hearing something new?
The answer to both these questions is, I believe, both obvious and instructive. People are surprised by their own tradition, and they think they are hearing something new, because the previous explanations they got were so bad. In short, Catholics everywhere were living with the legacy of generations of mis-education about their faith.
This practical experience over 40 years is instructive in two ways. First, it tells us that John XXIII was right: we did need a new way to explain the faith, because the old ways had lost their ability to communicate the truth of our tradition. Second, it explains why the debates over Vatican II have occupied such extreme positions and missed the middle ground occupied by John, John-Paul, and Francis: Namely, people on both sides were so embedded in outmoded and distorting explanations of Catholic tradition that they ended up fighting over the wrong things. Conservatives fought to protect positions that were no longer communicating Catholic truth, and liberals fought to change teachings based on misconceptions of what those teachings were.
And so this double canonization, in my view, merely confirms what has been true all along: that once John’s Council “turned the page of history,” there could be no going back under Paul VI, John-Paul I, John Paul II, even Benedict XVI. They are all products of Vatican II, they all embody a transformed papacy in a transformed Church. And now Francis appears on the stage of history--the first pope since John who was not a Council participant--to lead us on the middle way that so many have needed for so long.
Still, I acknowledge one difficulty (albeit unintended) caused by John-Paul II’s papacy. For many Catholics too young to remember Vatican II, his very charisma tended to overshadow the memory of the Council.
Some, like George Weigel, argue that John-Paul II supplied the “interpretive key” to the Council’s meaning. But my experience is that, on the practical level, John-Paul II made reference to Vatican II superfluous. Many younger Catholics simply could not see past the towering figure of “John-Paul II, Superstar.” The effect eclipsed both Vatican II and John XXIII himself.
But now “Saint John-Paul II” will be forever linked to “Saint John XXIII,” whose Council made John-Paul’s papacy possible.
I pray that this double canonization thus makes John-Paul’s shadow newly transparent, so that all Catholics see his place properly: as one of a series of great figures beginning with John XXIII, whose courage and vision opened that new page of history which Vatican II turned for us all.
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| Abbey Robes |
© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2014
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