In the winter of l997, Pope John Paul II was traveling to Brazil when one of the reporters aboard his plane questioned him as to when he would issue his long-awaited Vatican document on anti-Semitism. The pontiff’s answer was so curious and elliptical that many spoke of it wonderingly.
“It is interesting that it is always the pope and the Catholic Church who ask for forgiveness, while others remain silent,” the pope told the reporters that day, almost wistfully. “Shouldn’t others, too?” Then he added quickly, “But maybe that is as it should be!”
When I visited the Vatican some months later, the one subject that came up first and repeatedly in all my conversations was the pope’s crusade, then in the process of being developed theologically, to ask forgiveness of the world for the church’s “sins.” He was deliberately preparing, with systematic precision, for that moment in the new millennium when he would go back to the Gospels and “correct” the history of the past l,000 years.
On Sunday, he did just that in an unprecedented act. Recognizing the deviations of the past, he said in the liturgy of the mass in St. Peter’s Basilica, serves to awaken our consciences to “the compromises of the present.” He spoke of a “purification of memory” and of the need among believers of “constant purification.”
Catholic theologians were quick to clarify that men and women living today could not be held directly responsible for the sins their fathers committed–neither should we judge past generations by today’s moral or religious standards–but that nevertheless there is an “objective collective responsibility” for past errors that Catholics should acknowledge and repent.
The response to the pope’s historic act was curiously mixed. In particular, Jewish spokesmen tended to criticize the Vatican for not specifically mentioning the Holocaust–but the pope had already directly and unequivocally repented the Holocaust in 1997 conferences on anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism.
(Other Vatican conferences had dealt with the persecution of Protestants, the crimes of the Crusaders, the church’s repression of Galileo and even the Vatican’s silence on the Italian Mafia.)
Sunday’s apology dealt with generic intolerance against many groups, including women and indigenous peoples. Unfortunately, in a world where the competition for victimhood remains intense, had the pope been more specific at this moment, the entire message would have been in danger of being lost in the din of angry individualized accusations and demands.
Less noticed in the coverage was the fact that the pontiff also prayed for “reciprocal reconciliation” or for the repentance of others for sins committed against the Catholic Church. And this is where events are occurring in the world that parallel and complement the pope’s actions.
That same fall of l997, I met with professor Rocco Buttiglione, an Italian philosopher who is considered the pope’s closest associate. “The church asks forgiveness because it . . . must measure itself according to Christ,” he explained to me that day, “but secular culture never asks forgiveness. And have you ever seen leftists ask forgiveness for the sins of the community? They always want to accuse others.”
That was true at the time. But since then, there have been some events of note. This February, a decade after Lebanon’s civil war ended, Assad Shaftari, who commanded the right-wing Lebanese forces during the bloody l5-year civil war in the l970s and ’80s, stunned the country by publicly asking for forgiveness of his victims “both living and dead.” And in faraway Fiji in the South Pacific, something uncannily similar happened.
As related in the recent book “Forgiveness,” by Michael Henderson, one of the native Fijians who staged a nasty coup in l987 to expel the Indian minority, a politician named Ratu Meli Vesikula, came eventually to realize his faults, went through a “personal revolution” and an “awakening of my spirit,” and finally gave a public apology to both peoples, which in turn has led to a surprising reconciliation of the two races on the island. (Henderson’s thinking on reconciliation, interestingly enough, comes out of the Moral Rearmament movement, which was so instrumental after World War II in bringing Europe’s fractured soul back together.)
Indeed, across the world today–from Chile to El Salvador to South Africa to parts of formerly communist Eastern Europe–governments have been attempting to deal, however imperfectly, with the secular sins of the past through different vehicles. Twenty “truth commissions,” which outline what happened, however imperfectly, have taken the place of World War II-style trials.
As South Africa’s famed Bishop Tutu says of the truth commission in his country, “Some say, `Let bygones be bygone.’ No. Bygones would only be victimizing the victims a second time around; they will return inexorably to haunt you. What we have done is to open the wounds so that they don’t fester. You look the beast in the eye. The story is acknowledged. Something can be forgiven.”
All of these ideas and acts, of course, grow on treacherous bogs, if only because too many confessions about the past can work to exclude justice in the present.
Genuine (or, at least, ameliorative) acts of repentance such as the pope’s and these others are not for slick repenters. Nor are they for the cowardly play-actors in so many of today’s dramas who pretend that taking part in such limited operations as “peacekeeping” forces is a substitute for justice for the victims.
They most definitely do not mean: l) that all enemies are forgivable, or 2) that this relieves you of the responsibility of acting effectively in the face of new human depredations (Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Congo), or that 3) today’s very real and obvious oppressors should be theatrically forgiven pre-emptively so you do not have to bother yourself to make judgments.
But, at the same time that we face these new dangers, the pope has shone the light of his imposing position on a trend that is blossoming across the world. For that, perhaps we non-Catholics most of all owe him a great debt.
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E-mail: gigi-geyer@juno.com
