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Pope meets new US President
Stern words on stem cells
Pope John Paul II greeted US President
George W. Bush at his summer residence at Castelgandolfo on July 23, and urged him to defend human life, religious freedom, and the dignity of the poor.
In an unmistakable reference to one decision that Bush faced—the looming question of federal support for embryonic stem-cell research, on which the President’s decision was already overdue—the Pope condemned “proposals for the creation for research purposes of human embryos, destined to destruction in the process.” He said such proposals show a “coarsening of consciences.”
That clear message from the Pope appeared to catch the White House staff by surprise; presidential aides had told reporters that they did not anticipate any explicit public statement on the stem-cell issue, although they did expect the Pope to bring up the topic in private talks with the American leader. The papal message also complicated the political situation facing President Bush—who nonetheless did back limited federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research when he made his policy announcement two weeks later.
President Bush, prior to their private conversation, paid homage to the Holy Father as a man who had demonstrated not only the “splendor of truth,” but also “the power of truth to overcome evil and to correct the course of history.”
Pope John Paul told his guest, “The world continues to look to America with hope,” and argued that because of the nation’s unique traditions and resources, the US bears a special burden of responsibility in world affairs. Without making any reference to the years of the Clinton presidency—during which relations between the White House and the Vatican were cool—the Pope offered his “heartfelt good wishes” to the new American leader, and his hopes that the Bush presidency “will strengthen your country in its commitment to the principles which inspired American democracy from the beginning.”
American moral leadership is imperative today, the Pope continued, because the future of Western society is “ever more insecure in the face of the ethical decisions indispensable for humanity’s future course.” Among the moral crises that must be faced, he mentioned: the “tragic fault line” between those who can benefit from new economic opportunities and those who are cut off from them; the decline in respect for human dignity; and assaults on religious freedom.
The Pontiff concluded his remarks with an emphatic defense of the right to life, arguing: “A free and virtuous society, which America aspires to be, must reject practices that devalue and violate human life at any stage from conception until natural death.”
Mormon baptism not recognized
Vatican finds sect’s practice is not Christian
The baptism conferred by the Mormon sect is not valid in the eyes of the Catholic Church. That announcement—which represents a change from past assumptions—came from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
In the July 17 issue of L’Osservatore Romano, a Jesuit theologian, Father Luis Ladaria, explained the decision from the Congregation. The decision came in the form of a negative answer to a question, or dubium, about Mormon baptism. As Father Ladaria points out, it is “a change from the past practice” of accepting the validity of the Mormon rite.
Church doctrine on the sacrament of baptism, tracing back to St. Augustine, makes it clear that the validity of the sacrament does not depend on the sanctity of the minister. The Council of Trent taught that even heretics could confer valid baptism, provided that they baptized “in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” and intended to baptize the individual into the Christian faith. The current Code of Canon Law stipulates that an individual baptized in any Christian community should not be “re-baptized” upon entering the Catholic Church.
However, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith determined that the faith of Mormons is sufficiently different from Christian doctrine so that the baptism conferred by that sect has a different significance. The Congregation notes that the Mormons believe that “God the father had a wife, the Celestial Mother, with whom he procreated Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.” The Vatican concluded, therefore, that “this is not the Baptism that Christ instituted.”
The Mormons—formally known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints—were founded in the United States in 1830 by Joseph Smith. The sect now has headquarters in Utah, and claims 8 million adherents, about half of them living in the United States. Members of the faith carry out an energetic missionary outreach all over the world.
Jewish-Catholic research shelved
Vatican historians angered by accusations
A group of Catholic and Jewish researchers have ended their inquiry into the role of the Catholic Church during the Holocaust and World War Two, with Jewish scholars charging that the Vatican has refused to grant access to confidential archives, while Vatican sources complain that the scholars are more interested in polemics than in historical research.
The committee was jointly established by the Vatican and Jewish groups in 1999, to probe accusations that Pope Pius XII did not do enough to save Jews from the Holocaust. While many Jewish groups and the State of Israel honored the Pope in the years after the war, crediting him with saving 700,000 Jews, more recent critics contend Pius did not do enough.
Last year, as part of its study, the committee asked the Vatican for full access to its wartime archives, explaining that the 12 volumes of information already published were not sufficient. That request was denied, because the documents had not been properly catalogued to prevent disclosure of unrelated private matters. Boxes of documents after 1923 simply have not been catalogued and bound for release, said Eugene Fisher, a liaison to the committee from the US bishops. The Vatican, he said, only has two archivists cataloguing the documents, and has been releasing them slowly as they become ready. “It’s not a question of whether,” the documents will be released, he said. “It’s all a matter of time.”
However, the committee was not willing to wait. “Without some positive response to our respectful case for material in the archives that has not been published, we could not maintain our credibility with the many voices, Catholic, Jewish, and others, who have called for greater availability of archival material,” said a July 20 letter by two Catholic and three Jewish historians to Cardinal Walter Kasper, the Vatican official overseeing the project. “We therefore cannot see a way forward at present to the final report that you request, and believe that we must suspend our work.”
In the US, where the collapse of the joint research effort received heavy press coverage, Cardinal William Keeler of Baltimore issued a public statement criticizing Jewish leaders who had engaged in acerbic public criticism of the Vatican. Cardinal Keeler, who is the US bishops’ moderator for Catholic-Jewish relations, said that statements by Jewish leaders “misrepresent” the situation.
Contrary to widely circulated reports, the Baltimore prelate continued, the Vatican has made thousands of archival documents available to scholars. But Jewish scholars have declined invitations to review the available documents, he pointed out. He expressed regrets that “although a significant number of documents from the Holocaust years have been published by the Holy See at the direction of Pope Paul VI, scholars had not seriously studied them.”
The work of the joint Jewish-Catholic scholarly committee had been undermined, the cardinal continued, when “a European member of the group, Dr. Bernard Suchecky, caused serious damage to the group’s credibility by leaking its preliminary report.” A second problem arose when “another member, Professor Robert Wistrish, troubled the trust level further when, in an interview with the Jerusalem Report, he imputed bad faith to the Holy See.” The public criticism of the Holy See, Cardinal Keeler charged, points to “a politically driven agenda that poisons the atmosphere and makes true progress unattainable.”
Giving vent to his own frustrations, a Vatican historian who has done extensive research on the life of Pope Pius XII accused some members of the joint Catholic-Jewish commission of mounting a “slanderous campaign” against the Catholic Church. Father Peter Gumpel, a German Jesuit working for the cause for the beatification of the wartime pope, said material available to the committee showed that Pope Pius “made every possible effort to save as many lives as possible, without any distinction.”
Father Gumpel said he had met with the group and answered some of their questions and offered to answer the rest at another session, but that this offer was ignored. It was therefore disconcerting, he said, that in the following months “some Jewish members in the group had systematically affirmed that they never received answers to their questions.”
Finally, in a somewhat more conciliatory tone, a top Vatican official said that the work of the joint committee was suspended because of “feelings of mistrust” and “divergences of interpretation.” Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Pontifical Commission for Relations with Judaism, said in a statement issued by the Vatican that the study group, which had announced the suspension of its work on July 24, was not ready to begin again.
“You have to note the impossibility of overcoming the divergences of interpretations regarding the duties and objectives of the study group,” said Cardinal Kasper. He specified moreover that “indiscretions and polemical writings on behalf of the Jewish members contributed to cause a feeling of mistrust, making it practically impossible to continue joint research.”
1,000 audiences
Weekly talks on catechetical themes
On Wednesday, August 1, Pope John Paul II held the 1,000th general public audience of his pontificate.
Since his election in October 1978, Pope John Paul has used his general audiences to deliver meditations on several different themes. His first Wednesday talks were on the cardinal virtues; subsequent themes have included Creation, the beauties of human love, the Creed, and most recently the Psalms. These catechetical talks have been collected and published in several volumes, organized around those subjects.
John Paul has interrupted the sequence of these catechetical reflections only occasionally. For instance, after returning from an apostolic voyage, he has made it his usual practice to offer some observations on the countries that he has visited, and the life of the Church there.
The Pope has held a general audience virtually every Wednesday, except when he has been traveling abroad, and on the several occasions when he has been hospitalized and/or recovering from injury or illness. The general audiences are held in St. Peter’s Square or in the Paul VI auditorium. During the course of his pontificate, the Holy Father is estimated to have greeted 16 million people at these audiences.
Admission to the general audiences is free, although tickets are required. After concluding his formal talk, the Pope sometimes adds impromptu remarks, including calls for special prayers on behalf of countries troubled by wars or natural disasters. The Pontiff ends the audience by greeting groups of pilgrims —often in their native language.
New call for Mideast peace
Arafat agrees in part
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat met with Pope John Paul II in Rome on August 2, and heard the Pontiff make a fresh appeal for an end to the violence in the Middle East. Arafat professed his own desire for a peaceful settlement to the region’s troubles, although his own public statement emphasized the injustice of Israeli actions while ignoring Palestinian attacks.
“I ask for a stop to all forms of violence, including bombardments,” said the Pope. He urged world leaders to “dispatch international observers immediately,” to facilitate a truce that could lead to resumption of peace talks. He mourned the “unheard-of violence” that scarred the region—including the Israeli missile attack that had killed several Palestinian civilians, along with two leaders of the Hamas terror group, just two days before Arafat’s visit.
Radio dispute resolved
Quiet agreement is anticlimatic
Although Italy’s former center-left government had threatened to pull the plug on Vatican Radio because of its radio emissions near a Rome suburb, the new center-right government has quietly forged a settlement with the Vatican that will not disrupt broadcasting and will bring the broadcaster into compliance with Italy’s electromagnetic emissions law, the strictest in Europe.
The dispute began when residents living near the radio transmitters complained they were a health hazard. Left-wing government ministers used the controversy to attack the Church, despite assertions of the Vatican’s rights of sovereignty and scientific reports that undermined the critics’ claims of health risks. The church-state conflict took on new life when it became one of the minor themes of the Italian national election campaign.
The basis for a negotiated settlement had been set in May, after Vatican Radio agreed to move its medium-wave transmission center, and the deal was cemented by the electoral win of the new center-right government led by Silvio Berlusconi. By late August, when journalists noted that the Vatican broadcaster was now in full compliance with the stiff Italian laws governing electromagnetic emissions, the story barely provoked a ripple of interest.
Papal vacation ends
Jokes of “three” papal residences
Pope John Paul II concluded his annual vacation in the Italian Alps on July 20, and returned to his summer residence in Castelgandolfo, where he would remain until leaving on September 22 for a trip to Kazakhstan and Armenia.
Despite some gloomy weather, the Pope said that his stay in the mountains had refreshed him, and he seemed noticeably more energetic in his few public appearances. In his last public remarks before leaving the Alps, the Pope thanked the security officers and household staff workers who had helped to make his vacation relaxing.
Arriving at Castelgandolfo, the Pope joked with well-wishers about his medical history, saying: “There is not only one Vatican, but three: first the one at St. Peter’s, then the second at Castelgandolfo, and third the Gemelli Hospital.” He indicated that he was happy to report that this year, he had not spent any appreciable time at the “third Vatican.”
Vatican world premiere
Film gives new life to a Polish classic
Pope John Paul II attended a world premiere of a new Polish film, Quo Vadis, at the Vatican on August 31.
The film, which was shown in the Paul VI auditorium, is the most expensive movie ever produced in Poland. It is based on the classic novel of the same name, by the venerated Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz.
At the conclusion of the screening, the Holy Father thanked the director, Jerzy Kawalerowicz, and the actors for “the care with which you have produced this new version” of the film classic. He said that he would leave further evaluation to film critics, but John Paul appeared visibly delighted by the movie, which recreated a classic tale with which he is extremely familiar. Henryk Sienkiewicz won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1905 for Quo Vadis, a novel about the love between a Roman citizen and a Christian slave during a time when the young Church was suffering persecution. The novel—which would later become a classic Hollywood epic—makes clear references to the suffering of Poland under Russian hegemony.
Back to Catholic World Report October 2001 Table of Contents