John Paul II and the Way of the Cross, 1998
On Good Friday, 10 April 1998, the meditations for the papal Way of the Cross at the Colosseum in Rome were written by an Orthodox layman. John Paul II had entrusted the text to Olivier Clément. The meditations were published the same year as Le Chemin de Croix à Rome. It was the most public act of Clément’s ecumenical life, and the one that most exposed him.
Tradition: Orthodox (Western Europe)
The Via Crucis at the Colosseum
The Way of the Cross led by the Pope at the Colosseum on the evening of Good Friday is among the most visible liturgical events of the Roman year, televised internationally. From 1991 onward the practice developed of commissioning the meditations for the fourteen stations from a different author each year, and the choice of author became itself a public statement. In 1997 the meditations were written by Karekin I, Supreme Patriarch and Catholicos of All Armenians — a hierarch of the Armenian Apostolic Church, one of the Oriental Orthodox Churches.
For Good Friday, 10 April 1998, John Paul II entrusted the text to Olivier Clément (Italian liturgical and press accounts of the 1998 Via Crucis; the meditations circulate in Italian under the file name viacrucis_colosseo_1998_olivier_clement, e.g. at clarissesantagata.it; French Wikipedia, “Olivier Clément,” records that “in 1998, John Paul II commissioned him to write meditations for the Good Friday Stations of the Cross at the Colosseum”). The Vatican’s own record of the day includes John Paul II’s address at the conclusion of the Stations of the Cross of 10 April 1998 and a Presentazione of the Via Crucis text (vatican.va, John Paul II, speeches and homilies, April 1998).
The Italian accounts stress two firsts. The author was an Orthodox Christian — described in the Italian notice as the first time in the history of the papal Via Crucis that the text had been written by an Orthodox — and he was a layman, a married man with children, not a bishop or a priest (SERMIG, “Olivier Clément”; Italian liturgical archive material on the 1998 Via Crucis). [Disputed: the precise form of the "first." Karekin I of the Armenian Apostolic Church had written the 1997 meditations, so the claim is most defensible as "the first Eastern Orthodox author," and separately as "the first layman." Italian accounts state it as "the first Orthodox." This guide reports the sources' formulation with the qualification.]
The book
Le Chemin de Croix à Rome: “via crucis,” 1998 (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1998), 93 pp. (French Wikipedia, “Olivier Clément,” bibliography; English Wikipedia lists the same title under his French works). The meditations themselves are also available in Italian in the Vatican and liturgical archives.
The texts are what one would expect of Clément: patristic in substance, lyrical in register, centred on the descent of Christ into death and on the transfiguration of suffering rather than on satisfaction or expiation. The Eastern accent is unmistakable and was clearly intended — the point of asking an Orthodox to write for the Roman Good Friday was that Rome would pray, that night, in an Eastern key.
The friendship
Clément’s relation to Karol Wojtyła was personal as well as official. Both English and French notices describe him plainly as a friend of the Pope (English Wikipedia, “Olivier Clément,” which lists John Paul II among the figures he engaged with and describes him as “a friend”; Orthodox Church in America, “In Memoriam: Olivier Clément,” which lists John Paul II alongside Athenagoras and Brother Roger of Taizé among those with whom Clément was in dialogue; French OrthodoxWiki names John Paul II among his interlocutors).
The convergence is not hard to explain. Both men had been formed in the twentieth-century European catastrophe; both were personalists, drawing on a philosophical vocabulary of the person and of freedom; both read the collapse of the atheist ideologies as a spiritual event and not merely a political one; both were unusually literary. And John Paul II had made the reunion of Christian East and West a stated priority — the image of the Church breathing “with her two lungs” is his, and Ut Unum Sint (1995) was its most concrete expression (see Rome, autrement and You Are Peter).
The sequence of the years is worth setting out, because it shows a relationship developing in public:
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1995 | John Paul II issues Ut Unum Sint, inviting help on the exercise of the primacy |
| 1996 | Clément publishes his conversations with Patriarch Bartholomew I |
| 1997 | Rome, autrement — Clément’s answer to the encyclical |
| 1998 | Clément writes the meditations for the papal Way of the Cross at the Colosseum |
| 2003 | The English You Are Peter |
What the gesture meant — and the two readings of it
The reading Clément and his friends gave it. A Pope had asked an Orthodox layman to put words in the mouth of the Roman Church on the night of the Lord’s Passion, and the Orthodox layman had accepted. Nothing was conceded doctrinally by either party; no communion was implied; no jurisdiction was acknowledged. What was enacted was the “dialogue of charity” — the conviction, inherited from Athenagoras, that the healing of a thousand-year estrangement begins with acts of ordinary Christian recognition and not with the surrender of positions (see Dialogues with Patriarch Athenagoras). On this reading the 1998 Via Crucis is the high-water mark of Clément’s vocation: the Fathers of the undivided Church, in a French Orthodox layman’s prose, prayed in Latin and Italian at the Colosseum before a global audience.
The reading his Orthodox critics gave it. That an Orthodox theologian composing the devotions of a papal liturgy is not a neutral act; that liturgical participation is precisely where Orthodox canonical discipline has historically been strictest, because prayer expresses communion and communion presupposes unity of faith; that gestures of this kind, whatever their authors intend, are received by ordinary Christians on both sides as evidence that the divisions no longer matter; and that the accumulation of such gestures across the later twentieth century did more to blur the doctrinal situation than any theological text.
[Disputed: the canonical status of the act itself. Clément wrote a text; he did not concelebrate, and no sacramental act was involved — which is the distinction his defenders press. His critics answer that the composition of a liturgical devotional text for another communion's public worship is not obviously on the safe side of the line, and that the distinction between "praying with" and "writing what is prayed" is thinner than it looks. This guide states both positions and adjudicates neither; the general question of common prayer is treated at the repository's ecumenism hub.] See The Ecumenism Debate.
On the sourcing of the criticism. The reaction against Clément’s ecumenical acts is real but, in the sources available for this guide, largely diffuse rather than documentary: it belongs to Athonite and traditionalist opinion, to Greek and Russian commentary, and to the general anti-ecumenist current in Orthodoxy, rather than to a named refutation of the 1998 Via Crucis by an identifiable theologian. This guide names no opponents it cannot source, and says plainly that it has not located a specific published Orthodox response to the Colosseum meditations. See The Papal-Primacy Question for the criticism that can be documented, and for the general shape of the anti-ecumenist case.
A note on proportion
It is easy, at this distance, to let the papal material dominate the picture of Clément, because it is the part of his life that made news. It should be kept in proportion: Rome, autrement is a hundred-page essay and the Colosseum meditations are ninety pages of devotional prose, out of a corpus of some thirty books. The book that shaped the most readers by a wide margin is a patristic anthology in which the papacy is barely mentioned (see Sources (1982)).
See Also
- Rome, autrement and You Are Peter — the argument
- The Papal-Primacy Question — the criticism
- Dialogues with Patriarch Athenagoras — the tradition of the “dialogue of charity”
- The Ecumenism Debate
- The Great Schism
References
- Clément, Olivier. Le Chemin de Croix à Rome: “via crucis,” 1998. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1998. 93 pp.
- John Paul II. Address at the conclusion of the “Stations of the Cross,” 10 April 1998 (vatican.va); and Presentazione Via Crucis, April 1998 (vatican.va).
- John Paul II. Ut Unum Sint. Encyclical letter, 25 May 1995.
- Italian liturgical archive text of the 1998 Colosseum Via Crucis meditations by Olivier Clément (circulated as viacrucis_colosseo_1998_olivier_clement, e.g. at clarissesantagata.it).
- SERMIG. “Olivier Clément” (en.sermig.org). (In 1998, for the first time, the text of the papal Via Crucis at the Colosseum was written by an Orthodox — a married layman with children; Clément as a profound student of the Eastern Fathers.)
- “Olivier Clément.” French Wikipedia (fr.wikipedia.org). (John Paul II’s 1998 commission; Le Chemin de Croix à Rome.)
- “Olivier Clément.” English Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org). (John Paul II described as a friend.)
- “Olivier Clément.” French OrthodoxWiki (fr.orthodoxwiki.org). (Dialogue with John Paul II among others.)
- Orthodox Church in America. “In Memoriam: Olivier Clément.” oca.org, January 2009.