Ten years ago I was in Denver for World Youth Day. Catholic Answers had a booth in the plaza that served as the main congregating area for the hundreds of thousands of teenagers and young adults who had converged upon the city. For hours on end my colleagues and I stood in front of our booth, ambidextrously distributing copies of our newly published booklet Pillar of Fire, Pillar of Truth. I was struck by the omnipresence of smiles on the faces of the young Catholics. If anyone in that throng looked forlorn, he did not pass our way.
To some extent, the evident happiness was probably a function of being away from parents and in a faraway city with plenty of people of one’s own age. But it was more than that. There was a palpable anticipation, an expectation, even a sense of relief. These kids, most of them still in school, were not theologically sophisticated. I overheard some of them arguing with anti-Catholic proselytizers, none of whom was being swept away by keenly crafted syllogisms. The young Catholics may have been less well educated in their faith than their grandparents had been at a comparable age.
No matter. They were in Denver because, at sixteen or eighteen or twenty, they willed to be Catholic. Their Catholicism was immature, even ragged, and their sensibilities were the sensibilities of youth a bit too much indulged. But there they were, being as Catholic as they could be and quite obviously (sometimes deliriously) in love with their faith, however imperfectly they understood it. They were not Catholic out of mere habit—that was for sure.
They were in Denver mainly because they were drawn to a man more than half a century their senior, a man none of them had met, a man whose accent sometimes was difficult to follow, a man who did not sing their songs or speak their patois, a man who did not watch their television or listen to their radio, a man who smiled at them, yes, but who never catered to them, a man who challenged them as they never had been challenged before.
What was it about John Paul II that brought so many to Denver and to subsequent World Youth Days? What was it about this man that brought millions of people shoulder to shoulder at one moment, in his homeland of Poland, in Manila, in Mexico City, in so many places? Certainly not his philosophical writings or his encyclicals. Those millions had not been sitting on their stoops discussing personalism or reading Redemptoris Hominis. They responded to the Pope on a simpler level. They knew him by reputation and by what he stood for, not by immersion in his writings. They realized he represented something other than himself, something much larger than any of them. It was not so much that he represented theological truth, though he did. The teens in Denver or the poor in Manila and Mexico City were not much interested in theology. What they were interested in was hope, and John Paul II offered it. He was offering it because, in a tired world, hope may be the most precious of all commodities.
We live at the end of an age—really, at the end of a civilization. What will follow is at best indistinct. What is not indistinct is the fact that millions throughout the world sense that things are collapsing rapidly and that something quite different is just over the horizon.
The twentieth century saw progressive political decline; it was the century of the failed isms. The new century is seeing progressive moral decline. The political decline began long before the twentieth century, of course, but that was the century in which political failure won out nearly everywhere. So many promises, so much disillusionment! (Even our own country, politically, is only a shadow of what it once was. One no longer can imagine our having leaders of the caliber of the Founding Fathers or even of the men who led us as recently as a century ago.) To the astute, the moral decline was evident decades ago, but it was not until recent years that immorality came to be gloried in, as though it were a positive good.
Similarly for culture in general—what little we have left of culture. The “best and the brightest”? Spare us the saccharine, please. We live in the most technologically advanced society of all time and are told how well educated our offspring are—they must be, since we spend so much on what passes for education. But the fact is that our children, on average, are more poorly educated than were their nineteenth-century counterparts, and they are more culturally obtuse. Back then, American sixth-graders who used the most popular schoolbook series, McGuffey’s Readers, were reading Shakespeare and Milton. Today most high school students have read neither, and probably the same can be said of most college students. They can manipulate computers but cannot recite a sonnet—not an advantageous tradeoff.
So we live at the end of an age, and the end is marked, as the end of a life is marked, by relentless and often precipitous decline. One social organ after another shuts down: politics, morals, culture, education. It is all of one piece, and, in an inchoate way, many people, including many young people, sense what is happening to them and to the world they live in. If nothing else, they sense they are in a great and often terrifying transition.
That makes John Paul II the pope of the transition, or at least of its early stages, since even the swiftest of such transitions takes many years. Some have speculated that his whole pontificate has been geared toward trying to save what is salvageable while trying to instill hope in the future. He has spoken of a new springtime for the Church. Such a thing is difficult for many to envision as winter sets in. But there are plenty of reasons for hope, as the Pope knows.
Consider women’s religious orders. On the whole, their membership continues to dwindle. Young women who think they might have a vocation to the religious life investigate the communities that come to their attention and conclude that joining them is not worth the bother. Who, suspecting its fate, would row out to the Titantic and ask to be taken aboard? Better to stay on shore. Better to forget the religious life and to seek another vocation, if religious life is in such a parlous state.
This pope has done much to foster new religious communities. Catholic news organs regularly report his meeting with representatives of orders that did not even exist when I was a boy. Although these orders are growing, they remain outnumbered by old-line, decaying orders, the leaders of which retain the positions of power within religious life.
The Pope, who is an old man, knows that not only do men grow old but that organizations grow old (except for the Church herself, ever young). The flaccid religious orders are aging rapidly, and in ten or twenty or thirty years they will be gone, every last one of them, because they are receiving no fresh recruits. When they are gone, the Holy Father knows (and he knows he will not live to see that day), gone too will be their death grip on the sources of power. Organized religious life will consist almost exclusively of orders that today are in the background but then will have the whole field. At that point comes the explosion. Young people who sense in themselves a vocation will find only good, faithful orders to choose from. Those orders will go from strength to strength. There will be a flowering of religious life as we have not seen in centuries.
That is my reading of the situation, and my reading is largely a consequence of what the Pope has said and done, often unobtrusively, over two and a half decades. He seems to have given up trying to reform most of the troubled older orders and is letting them go their own ways. Some of them will reform and will live; others will persist in their present ways and will disappear. Que sera, sera.
In the meantime, John Paul II inculcates hope. Some attribute his skill in this to his theatrical background, others to his persistence under Nazism and Communism, others to a divine impulse. It makes little difference. The fact is that he has been successful in instilling hope in so many who felt hopeless or who might have veered into hopelessness.
There are three theological virtues: faith, hope, and charity. In heaven there is no need for faith, because we will know God and his truth with absolute certitude, or for hope, because we will have God himself, which is to say we will have everything. Only charity will persist. But here below we need those first two virtues. If some popes have been known primarily for fostering the virtue of faith, especially in the broader sense of the term that permits us to talk about “the faith” and its propositional contents, other popes have been known more for fostering hope.
I would put the first pope in the latter category; perhaps most of the early popes belong there. This is not to say that Peter and his immediate successors did not pass along the full content of the apostolic deposit. I mean that in those times, when the Church was just starting, when it was persecuted and, later, when the Roman world began to collapse and Christianity first emerged from the catacombs, what men sought in particular was an assurance that answers were possible, that decent lives were possible, that the horrors attendant to the social, political, and cultural convulsions need not be all that man could expect in this life.
Historians have noted that the Christian world has gone through a change about every five hundred years: the Incarnation coming in the “fullness of time” the Roman Empire ending in the barbarian invasions; the split between Eastern and Western Christendom; the Protestant revolt; and now our own time, the trailing end of the Enlightenment.
Political philosopher Eric Voegelin remarked that civilizations advance and decline at the same time, and he was right. There never is a uniform advance or decline. Some things get better while others get worse. We marvel at how medicine has improved over the last century. We take for granted cures that were not even wished for by our grandparents. Such wonderful advances—and we see them only by peering past disconcerting declines that are evidenced in every popular magazine and on the luminous screens in our living rooms.
John Paul II has served for a quarter of a century in what objectively is the most important position in the world. This statement would be true even if he had kept himself sequestered in the Apostolic Palace, since the papacy remains the keystone no matter who happens to occupy it. But this pope has been the most unsequestered pope of all time. Partly this has been a fortuitous consequence of technology that was unavailable to earlier popes (I wonder what Peter might have been able to do with television and the jet plane?), but partly it has been a function of the sort of man that John Paul II is.
In Romans 8:24 Paul tells us that “hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes in what he sees?” Who hopes for what he certainly will receive? In such a situation the virtue at work is patience, not hope. We hope when we are not entirely sure that what we wish for will come to pass. In his many journeys, John Paul II has talked of a springtime for the Church. Even he cannot know when such a springtime might come. One must admit that we could be entering into a seemingly interminable winter for the Church and for the whole world, one that could last for untold centuries. In theory this is possible, but it is not likely, given human history so far and given God’s superintending mercy toward man.
Far more likely is a transition to a new culture, a new society, a new ethos, as difficult as that may be for us to imagine today. This pope imagines it, and he has been preparing for it. His way is not the only conceivable way. Since all roads lead to Rome, it might be that one of the other roads might have been chosen more opportunely. Still, the road of hope is not a bad choice, and it is a road that many are grateful to be invited to travel, especially those who, dispirited by what they see around them, might have worried that God had withdrawn his favor from this world.
John Paul II, instiller of hope, will not be around to see the Church’s new springtime when it comes to pass, but he will deserve much credit for it.