Pope John Paul II’s considerable effect on our times is conceded
by admirers and critics alike. The imprint of the shoes of this fisherman can
be found throughout the new democracies of east central Europe, Latin America,
and East Asia. His critique of “real existing democracy” has helped define the
key moral issues of public life in the developed democracies and in the complex
world of international institutions. Some sober analysts of papal history argue
that one must return to the early thirteenth century, to Pope Innocent III,
to find a pontificate with such a marked influence on contemporary public life.

Yet there is a paradox here: the “political” impact of this pontificate,
unlike that of Innocent III, has not come from deploying what political
realists recognize as the instruments of political power. Rather, the Pope’s
capacity to shape history has been exercised through a different set of levers.

As Bishop of Rome and sovereign of the Vatican City micro–state,
John Paul has no military or economic power at his disposal. The Holy See maintains
an extensive network of diplomatic relations and holds Permanent Observer status
at the United Nations. But whatever influence John Paul has had through these
channels simply underscores the fact that the power of his papacy lies in a
charism of moral persuasion capable of being translated into political effectiveness.

This paradox—political effectiveness achieved without the normal
instruments of political power—is interesting in itself. It also has heuristic
value. It tells us something about the nature of politics at the dawn of a new
millennium. Contrary to notions widely accepted since the late eighteenth century,
the public impact of John Paul II suggests that politics (understood as the
contest for power), or economics, or some combination of politics and economics,
is not the only, or perhaps even the primary, engine of history. The revolution
of conscience that John Paul ignited in June 1979 in Poland—the moral revolution
that made the Revolution of 1989 possible—is simply not explicable in conventional
political or economic categories. John Paul’s public accomplishment has provided
empirical ballast for intellectual and moral challenges to several potent modern
theories of politics, including French revolutionary Jacobinism, Marxism–Leninism,
and utilitarianism. The political world just doesn’t work the way the materialists
claim.

At the end of a century in which it was widely agreed that “power
comes out of the barrel of a gun,” the paradox in the public impact of John
Paul II also reminds us of five other truths: that the power of the human spirit
can ignite world–historical change; that tradition can be as potent a force
for social transformation as a self–consciously radical rupture with the past;
that moral conviction can be an Archimedean lever for moving the world; that
“public life” and “politics” are not synonymous; and that a genuinely humanistic
politics always depends upon a more fundamental constellation of free associations
and social institutions in which we learn the truth about ourselves as individuals
and as members of communities.

In sum, and precisely because it has not been mediated through
the “normal” instruments of political power, the “worldly accomplishment” of
John Paul II has helped free us from the tyranny of politics. By demonstrating
in action the linkage between profound moral conviction and effective political
power, this pontificate has helped restore politics to its true dignity while
keeping politics within its proper sphere.

The distinctive modus operandi of this politically potent
Pope also suggests something about the future of the papacy, the world’s oldest
institutional office, and about Catholicism in the third millennium of its history.

It is tempting to see John Paul’s public accomplishment as the expression
of his singular personal experience. His “culture–first” view of history and
his bold confidence in the political efficacy of moral truth have indeed been
deeply influenced by his curriculum vitae. His Slavic sensitivity to spiritual
power in history (prefigured in Soloviev and paralleled in Solzhenitsyn); his
Polish convictions about the cultural foundations of nationhood (shaped by a
lifelong immersion in the literary works of Mickiewicz, Norwid, and Slowacki);
his experience in the underground resistance during World War II and his leadership
in a culturally based resistance to communism from 1947–1978—all of these are,
if you will, distinctively “Wojtylan” experiences. History viewed from the Vistula
River basin does look different than history viewed from Berlin, Paris,
London, or Washington, D.C. This difference has certainly shaped the potent
public presence of the first Slavic and Polish pope.

But John Paul II would insist that he is not a “singularity,”
to adapt a term from astrophysics. Rather, he and his pontificate are the products
of the contemporary Catholic Church, as the Church has been shaped by the Second
Vatican Council—which Karol Wojtyla has always understood as a great, Spirit–led
effort to renew Catholicism as an evangelical movement in history. I would press
this farther. In the paradoxical public potency of John Paul II, we are seeing
played out, in dramatic form, trends that have been underway in Catholicism
for two centuries: trends that were waiting, so to speak, for a new kind of
pope to forge a new kind of interaction between the papacy and the world of
power.

That popes have been “players” in the world of power since at least
the fifth–century pontificate of Pope Leo the Great is a well–known fact of
Western history (if there are “well–known facts of Western history” these
days). So is the fact that, from 756 until 1870, the popes were temporal rulers
of a large part of central Italy, the Papal States. The details of that millennium–long
history of temporal power are beyond the scope of this discussion. Suffice it
to say that it is a tale in which the student of history will find goodness
and wickedness, justice and injustice, civility and incivility, ecclesiastical
interference in civil affairs and political interference in internal Church
affairs. But from this vastly complex story, in which the popes were civilizers
as well as temporal rulers, and political leaders on more than one occasion
because of the default of those who ought to have taken political responsibility,
three key points may be drawn.

The first involves the pope’s unique position as universal pastor
of a global Church. From at least the late fifth century, when Pope Gelasius
I distinguished between “the consecrated authority of the priesthood” and the
“royal power” as two distinct modes of authority “by which this world is ruled,”
it has been understood that the pope cannot be the subject of any other sovereignty.
He must himself be a sovereign, in the specific, technical sense that
in the free exercise of his universal Christian ministry he cannot be subject
to any earthly power. Indeed, as Father Robert Graham, S.J., wrote forty–some
years ago, “The papacy was exercising a form of sovereignty long before that
word took on the clear–cut political and juridical meaning it was later to have.”
That is why papal diplomacy is conducted by the pope not as head of Vatican
City State, but as an expression of the sovereignty of the “Holy See”—the juridical
embodiment of the universal pastoral ministry of the Bishop of Rome. The recognition
of this papal sovereignty in the exchange of ambassadors between the Holy See
and sovereign states, and in the Holy See’s representation in international
organizations, tells us something about the world as well as about the papacy:
it is a tacit recognition that moral norms are relevant in international public
life and that there are actors in the drama of world politics other than states.

The second lesson to be drawn from the papacy’s entanglement
with temporal power involves the Church’s role in the creation of civil society.
The libertas ecclesiae, the “freedom of the Church,” has been a check
on the pretensions of state power for centuries, whether that be the power of
feudal lords, absolutist monarchs, or the modern secular state. Where the Church
retains the capacity to order its life and ministry according to its own criteria,
to preach the gospel, and to offer various ministries of charity to the wider
society, that very fact constitutes an antitotalitarian or, to put it positively,
a pluralist principle in society. According to that principle, there
are spheres of conviction and action where state power does not, or ought not
try to, reach.

However confusedly the various popes may have sought to assert this
principle theologically or to secure it practically, the fact remains that the
libertas ecclesiae was a crucial factor in creating the social space
in which other free institutions could form over the centuries; the controversy
with Gregory VII that brought Henry IV to Canossa was about more than the relative
positions of these men in the society of their time. No matter how tyrannically
some popes behaved on occasion, the papacy as an institutional reality
has been a barrier to the tyranny of the political for a millennium and a half
or more. And if the institutions of “civil society” are schools for learning
the proper exercise of political freedom, then the papacy’s defense of the libertas
ecclesiae helped lay the foundations of modern democracy.

In many instances, however, the papacy’s involvement with temporal
power involved a tacit commitment to play the political game by the accepted
“realist” conventions. And therein lies the third lesson for today: that this
kind of entanglement, the agreement to play by others’ rules, can lead to
difficulties and betrayals. The worst of these were in the realm of the human
spirit and involved attempts to coerce consciences (as Pope John Paul II acknowledged
on the First Sunday of Lent last year, when he asked God’s forgiveness for the
times in which the Church had used coercive state power to enforce its truth
claims). But there was another, perhaps less familiar, dimension to this aspect
of the problematic of entanglement: the fact of the Papal States and the pope’s
position as a temporal sovereign could lead the papacy into alliance politics
that set the universal pastor against part of the flock. In 1830–31, for example,
Pope Gregory XVI, because of the complex web of European alliance politics and
then–regnant Catholic theories of the rights of constituted sovereigns, sided
with Czarist Russia as it suppressed a rebellion of independence–minded Poles.

There are multiple ambiguities surrounding the term “Constantinian,”
but neither “Carolingian” nor “Gregorian” quite captures the phenomenon I am
trying to describe here. So permit me to call the deep entanglement of the Church
and the papacy with state power, and the papacy’s tacit acceptance of criteria
for political judgment that were sometimes incompatible with the Church’s evangelical
mission and the papacy’s evangelical function, the “Constantinian arrangement”—and
to note that this state of affairs was the product of both a distinctive history
and a strategic judgment: that the Church’s truth claims and public position
required the buttressing of something like “Christendom.” This “Constantinian
arrangement” had numerous theological and practical tensions built into it from
the outset. With the Second Vatican Council and the pontificate of John Paul
II, a renewed ecclesial self–understanding and different historical circumstances
have created a new model of engagement between the papacy and power. With Vatican
II and John Paul II, what I am calling (for want of a better term) the “Constantinian
arrangement” has been quietly buried.

The beginnings of a new form of papal engagement with the world
of power date to the mid–nineteenth century. At that point, the Papal States
had been under continuous pressure for forty years, first from revolutionary
France and Napoleon, later from Italian nationalism. The popes resisted the
loss of their temporal sovereignty to the bitter end. Yet as the old edifice
of papal temporal power was crumbling, the first probes toward a papacy of witness
and moral suasion could be detected.

Cambridge historian Owen Chadwick locates the first of these probes
in 1839, when Pope Gregory XVI condemned the slave trade. It was a condemnation
he had no capacity to enforce; Gregory XVI couldn’t even get the Portuguese
government, the chief offender on this score, to pay him any attention. But
he issued the condemnation anyway, in an effort at moral persuasion. A new method
of papal engagement with the world of power could also be detected in the mid–nineteenth–century
popes’ struggles with European governments, defending local bishops and local
churches on contested questions such as local episcopal authority and marriage
law. Here, for the first time, the popes brought into play the levers of international
public opinion and the international press. During this period, the popes gained
more effective control over local churches; but this trend, often deplored as
“centralization,” also meant that the popes could help local churches against
various governmental pressures. Because of this, Chadwick concludes, Catholics
in Germany, France, the United Kingdom (and even Spain and Austria) came to
think of papal power as “indispensable to their freedoms.”

In 1854, 1862, 1867, and 1869–70, large numbers of bishops came
to Rome from all over the world for, respectively, the doctrinal definition
of Mary’s immaculate conception, a protest against encroachments on the temporal
power, a celebration of the jubilee of the martyrdoms of Peter and Paul, and
the First Vatican Council. These bishops’ presence in Rome demonstrated to the
European powers that the Church had a life of its own, independent of the assertive
modern state and its tendency to occupy every nook and cranny of social space.

The largest of these gatherings, Vatican I, was, among many other
things, a pivotal moment in the emergence of a new form of papal engagement
with the world of power. The Council’s declaration that the pope enjoyed a universal
pastoral jurisdiction denied, as a matter of principle, that the modern state
had any role in the Church’s internal governance; this in turn began a process
in which the authority of local bishops (over 80 percent of whom were appointed
by governments in the early nineteenth century) was once again tied to their
communion with the Bishop of Rome, rather than to their “communion” with their
temporal rulers. The large representation of Catholic bishops from outside Europe
at the Council demonstrated, against European secularists, that the Catholic
Church was not simply a department of the ancien régime. And the immense personal
popularity of Pope Pius IX, widely perceived throughout the Catholic world as
a victim of unscrupulous men of power after the loss of the Papal States in
1870, bound individual Catholics to the papacy while creating the modern model
of the pope as a charismatic public personality.

The demise of the Papal States was, in fact, the crucial change
creating the conditions for the possibility of a papacy that engaged world politics
with its own evangelical instruments. This first became evident in the pontificate
of Leo XIII, who was, as Chadwick notes, “the first pope since Charlemagne not
to inherit a state to govern.” Leo’s 1879 encyclical on the reform of Thomism,
Aeterni Patris, suggested that the Church had a distinctive way of engaging
the intellectual life, as well as a spiritual life independent of modern state
politics. Rerum Novarum, Leo’s 1891 encyclical “on the condition of the
working class” and the Magna Carta of Catholic social doctrine, became a powerful
instrument in the hands of a papacy seeking to teach the nations, not rule them—a
papacy exerting its influence by argument. (Could such a statement of
social doctrine have been issued if the popes had remained temporal rulers of
the Papal States, burdened with the notion that they possessed plenipotentiary
power in social, economic, and political life? It seems unlikely, perhaps even
impossible.)

As with any historical process involving a venerable institution,
though, the evolution of a “post–Constantinian” papacy from Pius IX to John
Paul II was complex and uneven. At the same time as the popes were exploring
new modes of engagement with politics and the world of power, the Holy See sought
to restore itself as a player in international affairs after the loss of the
Papal States. The Lateran Treaty of 1929 settled one problem: as sovereign of
Vatican City State (all 108.7 acres of it), the pope was not subject to any
higher temporal authority. Throughout the turbulent middle years of the twentieth
century, the Holy See tenaciously sought to rebuild its diplomatic relations,
to secure the Church’s legal standing in modern states, and to give the Church
a place at the table in international forums. The table was not always welcoming.
In 1919, the Holy See had diplomatic relations with only twenty–six states,
principally from Latin America, and Pope Benedict XV was blocked from participating
in the Versailles peace conference by Clause 15 of the secret accord that bound
Italy to the Allies in 1915.

Conventional ways of thinking about international affairs could
lead to myopia at the Vatican at times when clarity of evangelical and moral
insight would have been welcome. No serious student of these matters believes
that Pope Pius XII was an anti–Semite or that he welcomed the prospect of a
Nazi–dominated Europe. Indeed, serious students of this period know that Pius
XII took heroic actions on behalf of European Jews and other victims of Nazism,
to the point of acting as a middleman in a plot to overthrow Hitler by force.
At the same time, senior diplomatic figures in the Holy See may have been so
conditioned by realist modes of analysis that they missed the totalitarian difference
in German National Socialism, thinking it rather a particularly ugly form of
classic German nationalism. If this is true, it must be noted that the Holy
See’s diplomats were not alone in this misreading. But it must also must be
said that one expects more in terms of moral clarity from the Holy See than
from Number 10 Downing Street or the Quai d’Orsay.

In any event, by the mid–1960s the Holy See’s quest for a place
at the table of international political life had been vindicated. The Holy See
had full diplomatic relations with fifty–two countries by 1965 and a settled
place as a Permanent Observer at the United Nations after 1964. While these
developments were unfolding in the aftermath of World War II, Pius XII and John
XXIII developed the model of the pope as a charismatic public figure with international
moral authority. Then came the crucial moment: the Second Vatican Council, whose
teaching accelerated the transformation of Catholicism into a “post–Constantinian”
Church and made possible the reconstitution of the papacy as a primarily evangelical
institution.

Rather than conceiving the Church by analogy to the state, as both
theology and canon law had done for centuries, Lumen Gentium, the Council’s
Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, described the Church as an evangelical
movement with a global mission, a movement in which the purpose of office (including
the Office of Peter) is to facilitate the response of all the baptized to the
universal call to holiness. According to Lumen Gentium, every other function
of the Church, including its relationship to the world of power, must serve
these primary purposes of evangelization and sanctification.

Dignitatis Humanae, the Council’s Declaration on Religious
Freedom, taught that the state was incompetent in theological questions and
declared that the Church would no longer put coercive state power behind its
truth claims. In doing so, Dignitatis Humanae made possible the emergence
of the Catholic Church as an assertive, effective proponent of basic human rights.

Gaudium et Spes, Vatican II’s Pastoral Constitution on the
Church in the Modern World, portrayed the free and virtuous society in pluralistic
terms, as created by the interaction of a political system, an economic system,
and a cultural system. In doing so, Gaudium et Spes suggested an image
of the Church as the teacher and evangelist of culture, rather than a political
player in the conventional sense.

And Christus Dominus, the Council’s Declaration on the Pastoral
Office of Bishops in the Church, drew a bright line between the Church and the
world of power by teaching that, in the future, governments would not be allowed
“rights or privileges” in the nomination of bishops.

On the other hand, as if to underline the unevenness of evolutionary
change in large institutions and the complexity of the issues involved in the
encounter between the Office of Peter and the world of power, the immediate
post–Vatican II period witnessed what may have been the last significant initiative
in the 1,650–year history of the “Constantinian” papacy: the Ostpolitik
of Pope Paul VI (the former Giovanni Battista Montini) and his chief diplomatic
agent, Archbishop Agostino Casaroli.

The Montini/Casaroli Ostpolitik was a fourteen–year–long
attempt to achieve, through classic bilateral diplomacy, a modus non moriendi
(a “way of not dying”) with the Communist states of Central and Eastern Europe.
The Ostpolitik included both a tacit papal commitment to avoid a public
moral critique of Marxist–Leninist systems, and efforts by the Holy See to curb
the activities of clandestinely ordained underground priests and bishops in
Warsaw Pact countries. This diplomatic strategy of salvare il salvabili
(“saving what could be saved,” as Casaroli often described it) was informed
by two “realist” political assumptions: that the Yalta division of Europe was
a fact of international life for the foreseeable future, and that the breach
marked by the Iron Curtain would only be closed by a gradual “convergence,”
in which a slowly liberalizing East eventually met an increasingly social–democratic
West. During that glacial process, Montini and Casaroli agreed, the Church had
to make provision for the appointment of bishops and the continuity of the Church’s
sacramental life by reaching agreements with existing governments, even if such
agreements were deplored (as they usually were) by the local underground Church.

In electing a Polish pope in 1978, the College of Cardinals did
not consciously reject this strategy of accommodation (which Paul VI, who was
deeply ambivalent about it, described privately as “not a policy of glory”).
Some of those who promoted Cardinal Karol Wojtyla’s candidacy were advocates
(and, in one instance, an architect) of the Ostpolitik. But in the first
year of his pontificate, John Paul II made clear that he intended to pursue,
personally, a different tack—a “post–Constantinian” strategy of resistance through
moral revolution.

Three times in the first four days of his pontificate, John Paul
vigorously defended religious freedom as the first of human rights and the nonnegotiable
litmus test of a just society; it was a theme that had been muted under the
Ostpolitik of Paul VI and Archbishop Casaroli. Then, during his epic
first pilgrimage to Poland in June 1979, John Paul comprehensively unveiled
his strategy of political change through moral revolution. By returning to his
people their authentic history and culture, and thus giving them a form of power
that the regime’s truncheons could not reach, the Pope demonstrated that the
Communist emperor had far fewer clothes than “realist” analysts (including both
Western political leaders and Vatican diplomats) suspected. In doing so, he
opened the path to the emergence of Solidarity. And the rest, as they say, is
history.

In his recent, posthumously published memoirs, Il martirio
della pazienza [The Martyrdom of Patience], the late Cardinal Casaroli,
whom John Paul II appointed his Secretary of State in April 1979, suggests that
there was no substantive difference between his Ostpolitik and the “eastern
politics” of John Paul, only a difference of “phases.” This is not a claim that
will withstand close scrutiny, as two examples will illustrate. Just before
John Paul’s address to the United Nations in October 1979, Cardinal Casaroli,
the cautious diplomat, systematically went through the draft text of the speech,
eliminating references to religious freedom and other human rights issues the
Soviet Union and its satellites might find offensive; John Paul, the evangelical
witness, just as systematically restored the cuts. Then, on a trip to Poland
in 1983, shortly after the Pope had had what diplomats refer to as a “frank
exchange of views” with General Wojciech Jaruzelski over martial law (those
outside the door heard fists being pounded on desks inside), John Paul, standing
at the window of the dining room of the archbishop’s residence in Kraków, engaged
in some banter with students clamoring outside while several guests, including
Cardinal Casaroli, tried to continue their dinner. Finally, according to another
eminent guest who was present, Cardinal Casaroli exploded, saying to the startled
dinner table, “What does he want? Does he want bloodshed? Does he want war?
Does he want to overthrow the government? Every day I have to explain to the
authorities that there is nothing to this!” That does not sound like the reaction
of a man whose differences with his superior were merely matters of tactics
or timing.

The more plausible explanation of the relationship between Pope
John Paul II and Cardinal Casaroli—an explanation that illustrates the complex
dynamics of the relationship of the papacy to power at this transitional moment
in papal history—is that, in appointing this loyal and skilled churchman, the
architect of Paul VI’s Ostpolitik, as his own Secretary of State, John
Paul was deliberately adopting a dual strategy. Remnants of a “Constantinian”
approach to playing by the rules of the game would be deployed for whatever
they might achieve; the diplomatic dialogues initiated by Casaroli over the
previous fourteen years would continue, and the Communist regimes in question
could not charge the Vatican with “reversing course” or reneging on formal agreements.
Meanwhile, the Pope himself would pursue a “post–Constantinian” strategy of
appealing directly to peoples who could be aroused to new, nonviolent forms
of resistance—and thence to self–liberation—through a call to moral arms and
a revival of Christian humanism.

The Ostpolitik of John Paul II is the clearest example to
date of a “post–Constantinian” model of engagement between the papacy and the
world of power. It was unmistakably different from the Montini/Casaroli Ostpolitik,
ecclesiologically, strategically, and tactically. It marked a decisive break
with the “Constantinian” arrangement of the past.

What does all this mean for the future? Let me begin to attempt
an answer by telling a tale of two journalists.

One of them, a distinguished American columnist and a Jew who has
been known to say, “I don’t know whether I believe in God but I sure fear Him,”
asked me, on May 16, 2000, who the next pope would be. I said I hadn’t got the
faintest idea, to which he replied, “Well, will he be like John Paul?” Yes,
I replied, I thought the next pope would continue the evangelical style of John
Paul II, including the papal role as global defender of basic human rights.
Good, my friend said—and then laughed. When I asked what was so funny he said,
“You know, in 1978, I couldn’t have cared less who the next pope would be. Now
it’s something important to me.” My friend has no personal religious investment
in the papacy. But he recognized that there was something good for the world
in the fact of a universal moral reference point, embodied in an ancient office
whose occupant acted in world affairs according to the logic of the Church’s
truth claims, rather than according to the realist rules of the game.

Three days later, Vittorio Messori, a prominent Italian journalist
who had been John Paul II’s interlocutor in the international bestseller Crossing
the Threshold of Hope, wrote a column in Turin’s La Stampa arguing
that twenty–two years of Slavic exceptionalism and “agitation” had been enough
for the Church, and that a return to “normality” was called for—by which Messori
meant a return to the Italian papacy. Italians, Messori argued, had a native
disposition for the papal office and for maneuvering deftly through the rocks
and shoals of history.

The American Jewish agnostic, it seems to me, has a clearer insight
into what the papacy of John Paul II has meant for the Church and the world
than the Italian Catholic journalist. And while he would obviously not put it
in these terms, my agnostic friend also has a firmer grasp on the fact that
the Church, while a “resident alien” in the world, always exists for
the world, for the world’s salvation, than does the Catholic commentator for
whom the Church remains primarily an institution to be managed.

Be that as it may, the clash between these two readings of the
meaning of John Paul II will likely be the issue in the succession to
John Paul II: Quale Papa? What kind of pope? Popes, to be sure, have
both evangelical and institutional responsibilities. But quale Papa:
a pope who is primarily an institutional manager, or a pope who is primarily
an evangelical witness?

In the locks along the ship canal that divides Seattle north and
south, salmon swimming home to spawn pass through a series of “trapgates,” beyond
which there is no possibility of return. With the Second Vatican Council as
authoritatively interpreted and embodied by John Paul II, the Catholic Church
has passed through a trapgate in history from which there is no turning back.
The next pope, or the pope after that, or his fourth or fourteenth successor,
may not bring such exceptional gifts of spirit and intellect to the Office of
Peter. We don’t know. But Karol Wojtyla’s achievement in recasting the papacy
is not Wojtyla’s alone. There is a logic—a theo–logic, if you will—in
the evangelical/pastoral model of the papacy Wojtyla has so brilliantly embodied
that will be difficult to reverse.

There is no one image of Peter in the New Testament, but rather
a tapestry of images: Peter the fisherman–disciple, who “left everything” to
follow Jesus (Luke 5:10–11); Peter the witness to great moments in the ministry
of Jesus, including the raising of Jairus’ daughter (Mark 5:37) and the Transfiguration
(Mark 9:2); Peter the shepherd, entrusted with the keys to the kingdom of heaven
(Matthew 16:19) and enjoined to feed the Lord’s lambs (John 21:15–17); Peter
the first confessor of the faith, whose sermon on Pentecost after the outpouring
of the Spirit marks the beginning of Christian mission (Acts 2:14–41); Peter
the visionary who is given supernatural guidance as he baptizes the Gentile
centurion Cornelius and his family (Acts 10:9–16); Peter the Christian martyr,
whose ministry means being led, finally, “where you do not wish to go” (John
21:8). But the “figure in the tapestry,” to adapt an image from Henry James,
the thread that ties these multiple images together, is Peter’s distinctive
mission to “strengthen the brethren” (Luke 22:32)—the dominical injunction so
frequently cited by John Paul II.

John Paul II has revitalized the papacy for the twenty–first century
by retrieving and renewing its first–century roots, which lie in the New Testament’s
portrait of Peter’s unique role as the apostle who “strengthens the brethren.”
In doing so, John Paul has aligned the exercise of the Office of Peter with
the Second Vatican Council’s teaching on the nature of the episcopate, in which,
the Council Fathers write, “preaching the gospel has pride of place.” Bishops
are, first and foremost, evangelists, not managers. As John Paul has demonstrated
with effect, that is as true for the Bishop of Rome as it is for the bishop
of the smallest missionary diocese.

That this process of retrieval and renewal will continue beyond
John Paul II is also likely because the structure of expectations surrounding
the papacy has changed. Now more than ever, both the Church and the world expect
the Bishop of Rome to be a global witness to moral truths about the dignity
of the human person. Neither the Church nor the world should expect the next
conclave to produce a duplicate of Karol Wojtyla; no such carbon copy exists.
But the world and the Church are quite right to expect an evangelical/pastoral
papacy in the future, rather than a bureaucratic/managerial one. Those expectations
must bear on the deliberations of the cardinal–electors, who will know that
they are electing a pope not for the Catholic Church alone, and certainly not
for themselves, but for the world.

To argue that the pontificate of John Paul II constitutes a decisive
moment of development in the Office of Peter in the Church is not to say that
the “post–Constantinian” papacy will be without its own ambiguities and tensions,
however.

There are built–in ecumenical tensions in the exercise of a global
papal ministry of moral witness and persuasion. More than a few evangelical
Protestants find this the most compelling aspect of John Paul II’s papacy. But
the development of this model in the twenty–first century may cause further
difficulties with Orthodox Christians, some of whom will see in it a claim of
universal jurisdiction they cannot abide. I think they will be mistaken in this,
for, as John Paul II suggested in the 1995 encyclical Ut Unum Sint, the
papacy’s universal ministry of witness need not include a jurisdictional role
in the East of the sort the Bishop of Rome exercises in the West. But psychology
can be as determinative as theology in these matters, and Catholics must frankly
face the fact that the emergence of an evangelical/pastoral papacy with universal
“reach” has added another item to the list of problems to be sorted out with
Orthodoxy.

There are also tensions between the evangelical/ pastoral model
of the papacy and the current diplomatic position of the Holy See. Despite a
recent and bizarre effort to strip the Vatican of its Permanent Observer status
at the UN, the issue here is not whether the Holy See can act as a diplomatic
agent with international legal “personality”; that is a long–settled issue in
international law and diplomatic practice. The question is, should it?

At the moment, the Holy See enjoys full diplomatic exchange at
the ambassadorial level with 172 countries. In developed democracies in which
the Church’s legal position is secure, this diplomatic representation has little
to do with public affairs, and the papal nuncio functions almost exclusively
as the papal representative to the Catholic Church in a given country, a representation
that has to do primarily with the selection of bishops. In new democracies,
papal diplomacy has helped secure free space for the Church to function, through
concordats and other legal instruments. In places where Catholics are persecuted
or under pressure, the papal nuncio can function as a safeguard for local Catholics:
a lifeline to Rome, and to the capacity of popes to focus the spotlight of international
public attention on things that authoritarian regimes would rather keep hidden.
The fact that the Holy See is a recognized international diplomatic and legal
actor also gives the Church and the pope a means of engaging totalitarian regimes
with whom the Holy See does not have diplomatic relations, which are usually
countries in which the local Church is too weak to defend itself effectively.

In addition to its Permanent Observer status at the UN, the Holy
See is represented diplomatically at the European Union, the Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe, and the Organization of American States.
On this international plane, where issues of grave moral import are now regularly
being decided, the diplomatic quiddity, so to speak, of the Holy See can make
a significant difference. John Paul II’s defense of the universality of basic
human rights at the UN in 1979 was a factor in the collapse of communism, as
it was in 1995 in meeting the challenge of those who claimed that the very idea
of “human rights” was Western “cultural imperialism.” The Pope’s personal campaign
prior to the 1994 Cairo World Conference on Population and Development, and
adroit Holy See diplomacy in Cairo itself, frustrated the efforts of the Clinton
Administration and its European and NGO allies to have abortion–on–demand declared
a fundamental human right under international law. Holy See diplomacy since
1994 has been important in rallying opposition to the new totalitarianism of
lifestyle libertinism in regional and international forums, on issues of the
family, homosexuality, etc. There are undoubtedly ambiguities in aspects of
this kind of papal engagement with the world of power; in trying to accomplish
certain moral ends (e.g., to secure universal access to education and parental
rights in education) the Holy See may find itself acceding to declarations full
of other dubious matter (e.g., the International Convention on the Rights of
the Child). But it is also true that something important would have been lost
these past two decades had the Holy See and the papacy not been diplomatically
engaged on the international plane.

No matter how the debate—quale Papa?—is resolved, it is extremely
unlikely that any pope in the foreseeable future will dismantle the Holy See’s
diplomatic network. In some instances, this would damage the position of hard–pressed
local churches. Internationally, it would mean abandoning a modest but real
leverage that, in itself, is arguably good for the international system: the
leverage of moral suasion, which reminds the world of power that the world of
power is not all there is.

But try, for a moment, a thought experiment: From the Church’s
distinctively evangelical point of view, would the abandonment of international
legal and diplomatic linkages between the Office of Peter and the world of power
be desirable? Is this engagement not in deep tension with the notion
of the Church as an evangelical movement in history? Can popes be moral witnesses
and “players” at the same time? Wouldn’t it be simpler, cleaner, purer if the
papacy abandoned all formal linkages to the structures of worldly power and
acted as an agency of moral witness alone?

It depends on what you mean by “Church” and by “politics.”

The Church, according to Vatican II, is an evangelical movement
in history. To be such a movement in history means to have a concrete
institutional form and to deal with other institutions through the best means
that human beings have developed for ordering our common life: law and politics.
The Church is not a state and must carefully avoid acting like a state. But
the Catholic Church is more than a voluntary association with a cause. It is
the institutional embodiment of truth claims, and according to its own self–understanding,
the basic forms of that institutionalization are of the will of God: the Church
as a communio of believers; the episcopate, the priesthood, and the Office
of Peter as servants of that communio and its service to the world.

However ambiguously—and the ambiguities will be lessened if the
Church of the third millennium further develops the “post–Constantinian” model
of engagement with power—the fact of the papacy’s formal entanglement with national
and international political structures is an expression of the Church’s reality
as a sovereign community: a community that fully possesses the means to achieve
its spiritual ends, and is therefore neither dependent on, nor subject to, other
sovereignties in the pursuit of those ends. That expression is important for
the Church to be what she is.

The reality of the papacy’s formal entanglement with politics is
also important for politics, however. If by “politics” we mean the will–to–power
and my capacity to impose my will on you, then it would be unseemly, even self–contradictory,
for an evangelical movement committed to the method of persuasion to be a “player”
in that game. But if we understand politics, even international politics, to
include mutual deliberation about the oughts of our common life—if in
politics, even the politics of nations, we understand ourselves to be engaged
in the sphere of ethics—then things look different. A global evangelical movement
constituted as a sovereign institution for its own spiritual ends has a place
at the table in the deliberation of those oughts. That “place” is both
a reminder of the ethical dimension of the exercise of power and a check on
the absolutist tendency built into all modern politics. By reminding the world
of power that it is not sovereign over all aspects of life, the papacy, engaged
diplomatically, performs an invaluable service to the world of power. It is
not the power to bring princes to confession on their knees, in the snow. It
is more important than that.

The Holy See today plays a central role in mounting one crucial
kind of moral argument—an argument rooted in the inalienable dignity of the
human person—in an international political environment in which multiple other
“moral” claims are in play: most particularly, at this moment in history, the
desperately defective morality of utilitarianism and its reduction of the human
person to an object fit for manipulation. For the papacy to withdraw from formal
involvement in international political life would be to concede, in practice,
a considerable part of the terrain of moral argument to the new Benthamites
and their plans for remaking the human condition by remanufacturing human beings.
The Holy See is not the only actor engaged in moral and political combat with
the new utilitarians. But as the Cairo population conference demonstrated, it
is the most potent and effective defender of the dignity of the human person
as the foundation of rightly ordered thinking about politics.

Thus, precisely for the world’s sake, the Church must continue to
run the risks of ambiguity in its engagement with worldly power, even as the
papacy of the twenty–first century is transformed in the image of John Paul
II, the heir and champion of the Second Vatican Council.

George Weigel is Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center
and author of Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II. This
essay is adapted from his Erasmus Lecture, delivered in New York in November
2000.