Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (169 page)

In parallel, but in opposition, the theological stock of Hans Urs von Balthasar rose considerably during the Wojtyla papacy. Von Balthasar was an interestingly creative philosophical theologian, deeply sensitive to music, art and literature, a Swiss prepared to confront the prevailing liberalism of Swiss Catholicism just as much as he confronted the theological stance of his fellow Swiss Karl Barth. In fact he had much in common with Barth: a deep hostility to Nazism and an uncompromisingly Augustinian outlook - as a student, von Balthasar is said to have sat through the scholastic expositions of his Jesuit lectures with his ears blocked, steadily reading through the works of Augustine of Hippo. Von Balthasar found both the Jesuit and Benedictine life uncongenial, and he never held a teaching post; his close affinity with the twice-divorced visionary Adrienne von Speyr raised some clerical eyebrows, and his wide sympathies aroused the unfriendly attention of Pius XII's Curia. Yet what became a long-term asset was his coldness towards Vatican II, to which he had not been invited as a theological consultant (probably not for theological reasons). Von Balthasar's writings could openly present opinions about the council and its leading theological voice, Karl Rahner - a
bete noire
for him like Schleiermacher for Barth - which neither John Paul nor Ratzinger was prepared to express. John Paul II made von Balthasar the first recipient of the Pope Paul VI International Prize in 1984, and in his presentation speech, the Pope used the phrase 'the splendour of the truth', which later became the title of one of the most important statements of his absolutist views on moral truth, his encyclical
Veritatis Splendor
(1993). Von Balthasar died three days before he was to receive a cardinal's hat; a slew of his devotees have subsequently worn it in his stead.
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Pope John Paul had no time for Vatican II's discussion of collegiality in the episcopate. He sought to centralize appointments of bishops with a thoroughness which has no parallel in Catholic history, and which was often explicitly designed to override the wishes of the local diocese. Occasionally he met his match, notably in Switzerland. In the years after 1988 the quiet Swiss valleys of the Grisons, long since pioneers of religious toleration amid Reformation conflicts (see pp. 639-40), witnessed an extraordinary ecclesiastical drama over a new bishop for the diocese of Chur. Centuries of tradition gave the right of election to Chur's cathedral clergy, but the Pope did not trust the Swiss to elect a sound Catholic; he sent his own combative and ultra-conservative nominee, Wolfgang Haas, to 'assist' the old bishop in preparation to replace him on his retirement. The people of Chur were not having it. The new assistant bishop arrived at his consecration to find crowds of the faithful lying down full-length, blocking the cathedral entrance. Haas and his distinguished guests, even the Prince of Liechtenstein, had to clamber as best they could over prone parishioners for what must have been a rather muted celebration. Matters did not end there. Mothers refused to send their children to be confirmed by the Pope's bishop. Church bells tolled in protest when Bishop Haas succeeded the old bishop and appointed his own officials, and the city council even withheld the keys to his palace. Eventually the Pope grudgingly gave way and replaced his unwanted prelate, who got a newly invented archbishopric of tiny Liechtenstein as a face-saver. Haas was not much more appreciated by the good folk of the principality.
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The aspect of the cultural revolution of the 1960s which remained most troublesome for the Pope was the new openness in sexual mores and questioning of traditional gender roles. He gave the whole package of attitudes the striking blanket label 'a culture of death'; and he was much more consistent than most American Evangelicals in his passionate commitment to the protection of human life. Alongside his hatred of abortion, a hatred which Evangelicals shared, he bitterly opposed the death penalty for criminals, so frequently exercised in the United States, and he also discountenanced President George W. Bush by his fierce condemnation of the renewed American invasion of Iraq in the Second Gulf War. Prominent in the culture of death for the Pope was artificial contraception. There was no question of revising Paul VI's ban, even when it became apparent that the use of condoms was one of the most effective ways of curbing the worldwide spread of AIDS.
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John Paul's consistency (for good or ill) in all this nevertheless fatally deserted the Vatican over one of the most painful issues in sexuality, the sexual abuse of children and young people by clergy. For the world to discover how widespread this had been over the span of living memory was bad enough; what was much worse was the exposure of the Church's history of cover-up and callous treatment of those who complained, and the fact that this attitude was not effectively reversed during the 1990s. The problem sprang not simply from the defensiveness which is common to all monumental institutions. It was an inheritance from centuries of building an image of priesthood in which the priest by virtue of ordination became an objectively different being from other humans. It was easy to slide from that into an attitude which suggested that different moral rules applied to such a separate being.
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Particularly damaging was Pope John Paul's consistent support for an ultra-conservative Catholic activist organization, the Legion of Christ, founded in mid-twentieth-century Mexico. Persistent accusations of sexual abuse against its founder, Marcial Maciel Degollado, a participant in the
Cristero
war in his youth, were ignored in Rome to the very end of John Paul's pontificate. Not so under his successor Josef Ratzinger, Benedict XVI. In May 2006 a statement about Maciel was issued on behalf of Pope Benedict's own successor as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, that 'considering his advanced age and his frail health, the Holy See has decided not to begin a canonical process but to "invite him to a reserved life of prayer and penance, renouncing all public ministry".'
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At last the Vatican was taking seriously the scale of what was going on, which John Paul, with his own austere sexual integrity, seemed incapable of imaginatively appreciating. It was too late to prevent the decimation of congregations throughout the anglophone world and in Europe: an unprecedented blow to the authority of the Church in which ridicule, exemplified in the deceptively farcical Irish-made television sitcom
Father Ted
, was mixed with real fury. Whether the effects will spread into the rest of the Catholic world remains to be seen.
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FREEDOM: PROSPECTS AND FEARS

As John Paul's capacity to exercise his pontificate was progressively destroyed by Parkinson's disease, the consequences of his greatest achievement, hastening the collapse of repressive and unrepresentative Communist governments, continued to transform Christian fortunes in Eastern Europe and Russia. A renaissance of life in the Orthodox Churches was first borne along on the massive recovery of morale and self-confidence in the Catholic Church behind the Iron Curtain. During the years in which the will to survive drained away from the self-styled 'People's Democracies', Catholicism had the advantage of looking to the power and international prestige of the Vatican beyond the reach of the Communists. Given the precarious position of the Oecumenical Patriarch, not to mention ongoing tensions between the Phanar and the Moscow Patriarchate, the Orthodox enjoyed no comparable ally.

The impact of John Paul II's first papal visit to Poland was repeated in parallel occasions elsewhere. In Communist-run Czechoslovakia, it is instructive to compare successive celebrations of anniversaries connected with the pioneers of Slav Christianity, Cyril/Constantine and Methodios (see pp. 460-64). The first came in the regimented atmosphere of 1963-4, marking eleven hundred years since the brothers' arrival in Great Moravia. Carefully organized by the Communist state authorities, it was all very academic and low key, with public exhibitions emphasizing the pair's role as teachers and cultural ambassadors rather than bringers of Christianity. The second in 1985 commemorated eleven centuries since the death of Methodios, and this time the celebrations were firmly in the hands of the Roman Catholic Church, which presided triumphantly over a concourse of around a quarter of a million of the faithful at Methodios's tomb-shrine in the former Moravian capital, Velehrad.
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No mass gathering like it had been seen in Czechoslovakia since the aborted hopes of a popular reformed Communist regime in the 1968 'Prague Spring' - and there was little that the government could do about it apart from feebly restricting the official guest list. The next such outpouring of popular enthusiasm would be Czechoslovakia's 'Velvet Revolution' four years later.

When that swift and bloodless overthrow of Czechoslovakia's Communist regime was complete at the end of 1989, a remarkable festivity took place in St Vitus Cathedral in Prague on 29 December, the day that the still-Communist Federal Assembly elected the dissident Vaclav Havel as president. Late victims of police brutality and imprisonment, parliamentary deputies and a jubilant crowd were all swept into a packed cathedral to hear Antonin Dvorak's Mass and
Te Deum
. Dvorak's adaptation of the Western Church's ancient Latin hymn of praise, performed by the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, was staged with all the sumptuousness of nineteenth-century romantic nationalism. Sitting side by side on ornate chairs, in still-bewildered delight at the sudden eruption of freedom, were the ninety-year-old Cardinal Frantisek Tomasek, Archbishop of Prague, born under the Catholic Habsburg emperor, priest since the early days of the first Czech Republic, survivor of Nazi and Communist terror - together with the agnostic playwright President, symbol of all that 1960s culture had brought to Europe, wearing an ill-fitting suit. Behind them were the ranks of parliamentarians who a few weeks before had still been voting through the drab business of a one-party state. They were all happily aware that it was the reversal of a dishonestly conceived ceremony in 1948, when the same work had been staged in the cathedral at the behest of the new Communist leader, Klement Gottwald, to allay the fears of liberal democrats and Catholics about the new People's Republic. Perhaps only the Czechs could have so stylishly staged this solemn celebration, which was also a light-hearted juxtaposition of historical eras, reminiscences and cultural styles; yet equally, only the centuries of Western Latin ecclesiastical tradition were able to encompass the contradictions. Such happy confusions are worth enjoying and treasuring in memory before the gloomier complications of history crowd back.
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At the centre of the implosion of Soviet-era Communism, another religious anniversary provided the opportunity for the revival of Russian Orthodoxy. In 1988 there fell the putative millennium of Prince Vladimir of Kiev's conversion (see pp. 505-7). Mikhail Gorbachev, recently chosen General Secretary of the Communist Party, had lately been in charge of the harassment of Christianity in his capacity as head of the Soviet security service, the KGB; now he saw the anniversary as the chance to open up another front in his attempt to remould and diversify Russian Communism. The state enabled - even encouraged - celebrations of the anniversary; church buildings were reopened, religious education and religious publishing permitted once more. Not only the Orthodox benefited; for the time being all those religious groups which had survived in Russia, from Catholics to Baptists, found it possible to operate with steadily fewer restrictions.
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In 1990, as Gorbachev found his reforms creating freedoms which he had not envisaged, the former Metropolitan of Leningrad (St Petersburg) was elected as Patriarch Aleksii II. Born in the Baltic republic of Estonia but with a Russian mother, Aleksii brought a new energy to the patriarchate, yet his instincts in renewing the life of the Church were to return it to a selective vision of the past. He scorned the ecumenism which his Church had been tentatively exploring at the beginning of the twentieth century. It was a particular point of fury for Moscow that liberalization brought with it the re-emergence in 1989 of the Greek Catholic Church of the Ukraine from its enforced union with Moscow, and the continuing squabbles between the two Churches over property restitution and jurisdiction have mirrored the tense relationship between the newly independent Ukraine and the Russian Federation.
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It has been remarked that as the Soviet Union finally disintegrated in 1991, the Russian Orthodox Church was left as 'arguably the most "Soviet" of all institutions' remaining in Russia.
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One symbol of this is the remarkable circumstance that the FSB, the Russian intelligence service which has rather seamlessly succeeded the Soviet KGB, has lovingly restored a Moscow parish church for itself. In 2002 the Church of the Holy Wisdom was reconsecrated with full Orthodox pomp by no less a figure than Patriarch Aleksii, who, during the course of the day, presented the FSB's director, Nikolai Patrushev, with an icon of his name-saint, Nikolai. Stalin might have blanched - but, then again, perhaps not.
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The recovery of Orthodox tradition has its exhilarating stories. It is difficult not to admire the blossoming of one of Russia's most important and historic nunneries, Novodevichy, on the outskirts of Moscow, under the wise guidance of a quite exceptional personality, Mother Serafima. Born into the nobility as Varvara Vasilevna Chichagova, she had been inspired by her grandfather, a former tsarist general turned priest, who was secretly consecrated an archbishop during Stalin's purges, in which he was one of the hundreds of thousands to die. Chichagova managed to pursue a distinguished scientific career without joining the Communist Party. When the Soviet Union collapsed, now a widow and taking monastic vows, she was able to bring life back to the great semi-derelict monastic complex. Previously the brief concessions to the Church brought about by the Second World War had enabled only one chapel and a small publishing office to reopen in Novodevichy, a faint echo of all the centuries of worship, charity and education that had flourished there before 1917. Before Mother Serafima died in 1999, aged eighty-five, this tiny elderly lady had in five years galvanized an infant community with no resources. To begin with, its nuns had been forced to go on living in their old apartments round the city; now the monastery was a place of hope for women struggling with the miseries of post-Soviet life, sustaining craft shops and a farm, and at the centre of it were the refuges provided by its restored cathedrals and quiet holy places.
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