Where?s the red hat?

As Paul VI?s diplomat in Washington, Archbishop Jean Jadot had a great effect on the American Catholic Church. But he has never been made a cardinal. Why not? The Tablet?s Rome correspondent went to see him in his retirement in Brussels.

WHEN Jean Jadot left his native Belgium to become a papal diplomat in 1968, he took his instructions from Pope Paul VI, who saw an evolving role for his nuncios after Vatican II ? ?not to be the Pope?s eyes and ears, but his heart?. Nuncios should travel, Paul VI said, not so much as the representatives of Rome to secular governments, or even as legates between Rome and the world?s bishops. They should ?show the Pope?s concern for the poor, the forgotten, the ignored?.

Paul VI, of course, was still on a conciliar high. He had seen the Church through three stormy sessions of the council launched by his predecessor, John XXIII, to a glorious end with the promulgation of the council?s crowning charter-document, Gaudium et Spes, which was designed to set the Church on a new course ? caring less about itself as an institution, caring more about working for justice and peace. Jadot sought to run that course ? first in the Far East, then in Africa, then, from 1973 to 1980, in the United States, where he identified episcopal candidates among the American priests who were in line with the ideas of Paul VI. Soon after the Pope?s death, however, he was yanked from his post, brought back to the Vatican, told not to concern himself any longer with anything American, and put in charge of an ill-defined bureau, the Pontifical Council for Non-Christians. Jean Jadot?s predecessor received a red hat; so did Jadot?s successor. Jadot never did. In fact, he is the only Vatican diplomat assigned to the United States who was never made a cardinal.

What harm had he done?

In the United States today, that all depends on one?s point of view. An American priest who is second in command of his ancient religious order in Rome says Jadot was ?the best man we ever had?. The reason: ?For seven years, Jadot helped pick our very best bishops.? He instanced Ted McCarrick, now the Cardinal-Archbishop of Washington DC, and Roger Mahony, the Cardinal-Archbishop of Los Angeles, two of a very small group inside the College of Cardinals who could be called progressives. (Jadot also plucked a priest out of the diocese of Jacksonville, Mississippi, and had him made Bishop of Springfield, Missouri. He is now the embattled Cardinal Archbishop of Boston, Massachusetts, Bernard Law. But that?s another story.)

If, however, you were to ask a conservative like Cardinal Edward Egan, Archbishop of New York, he would say Jadot hurt the Church in the United States by picking the ?very worst? bishops. This is because John Paul II had changed the criteria. It was part of his plan to bring a runaway, post-conciliar Church back to its senses. John Paul II, who has never used the most popular word at Vatican II, aggiornamento (which means ?updating?), made it clear that he wanted bishops who agreed with him on three issues: birth control, priestly celibacy and the ordination of women.

Critical Catholics ? in the United States, at least ? are not in love with a process that has been giving them ?ordinaries? who are very ordinary indeed. Two-thirds of the American bishops were revealed at Dallas to have been covering up for priests who were known to them as sexual abusers. As a result, reformers say the Church would be better off if the people in a diocese elected their own bishop by popular vote.

I recently discussed this (and a good many other things) with Archbishop Jean Jadot, now retired in Brussels, but still living an active life ? in cyberspace. He said he had been lamenting the scandal in the United States for months (getting the latest news three times a day on the internet). But he doesn?t think popular elections are a good idea. ?The people haven?t been electing their own bishops since the sixth century.? Before 1830, he said, the bishops were chosen by elite little groups, ?like a cathedral chapter, or the local nobility?. And they often came up with the worst kind of lackeys, beholden to no one but to the men who had them on a short tether.

So what does Jadot recommend to the Church in the United States (and by extension to others around the world)? The terna system can work, he said. (When a see is vacant, the usual process is for a diocese to come up with the names of three good priests, and send the list, called a terna, to Rome through the Pope?s legate, who can indicate which of the three he likes the most. The protocol has been in place since 1830; before then, bishops were selected locally, and Rome rubber-stamped the result.) The trouble is that the Pope himself can throw a wooden shoe into the works. John Paul II ignored the ternas coming out of Vienna when the time came to select a new archbishop there in 1986. He picked his own man, Hans Hermann Groer, a Benedictine abbot, because he had met the man at a Marian conference and was impressed for one reason alone: his obvious devotion to Our Lady. (Cardinal Franz K?nig got the news about Groer?s appointment on television.) A few years later, Groer had to retire after allegations that he had been seducing the young men at his monastery.

The Jadot I found in Brussels did not strike me as a man who was nursing any grievances. He knew he had done a fine job ? for Paul VI and for the Church. He refused to speculate about why he did or did not become a cardinal, and had good words, moreover, for some in the Roman Curia. He said he liked Cardinal Gianbattista Re. ?I trust him very much. He?s in the category of honest people.?

I asked him how many cardinals he put in that category.

Jadot hesitated, then laughed. ?I don?t know all the cardinals?, he said.

When I asked Jadot what qualities he would like to see in the next Pope, he said: ?I would like to see a Pope who is ready to listen.? He recalled an audience with John Paul II in 1979. The Pope told him that he didn?t think the American bishops had a pastoral sense, that they were all administrators. ?I said: ?Holy Father, may someone disagree with you?? He stopped and exclaimed: ?That is why you are here!??

I asked him if the Pope meant it. Instead of answering, Jadot told another story about John Paul II. A cardinal attending one of the Pope?s monthly meetings with the heads of all the Vatican bureaus was ?angry, almost venomous? with the Pope. The Pope was complaining about some piece of unfinished business. Cardinal Silvio Oddi interrupted him. ?The finished document, Your Holiness, has been on your desk for six months.? The Pope was stung. There?s a principle everyone in the Vatican tries to follow, said Jadot, that ?the Pope is never wrong?. But the Pope ended that meeting by telling the cardinals: ?I am thankful to you for the openness with which you spoke.?

Jadot was defending an often imperious Pope because, I thought, this was part of being a good diplomat ? especially a Vatican diplomat.

In 1974, Jadot ran into a nun who took him aside to tell him how much she had resonated with his performance on a national show she had seen the week before on ABC Television. She had even taped the show and replayed it for her students. Jadot wanted to know what was so remarkable about it. ?You didn?t know everything?, she said. ?You were a bishop who did not know everything.?

Jadot laughs as he tells the story, one he has told more than once, because it seems to sum up his long and very active life, a life of listening and learning. He will be 93 in November, but he is still a world traveller ? on the internet. He has a wide circle of correspondents on e-mail. He reads The New York Times on the Web, and wishes he could read The Tablet that way too, complaining because it is often delivered ?two weeks late?. He does not play tennis any longer, but he takes long walks, and when asked if he says Mass for the Catholics who live in his complex, he says: ?Of course! Every day!?

Jean Jadot was born on 23 November 1909, the only son of a noted Belgian engineer, Lambert Jadot, who built the electrical system and streetcar network in Tientsin, China, the harbour city for Peking, and later managed the building of a railroad through the Congo. Young Jean attended the Catholic University of Louvain and did graduate studies in Louvain at the Institut Sup?rieur de Philosophie and at the Institut Catholique de Paris (where he gave one of his teachers, Etienne Gilson, an A++, and another, Jacques Maritain, an F?). He took his doctorate in philosophy at Louvain, entered the seminary of the archdiocese of Mechelen-Brussels, and then, after ordination as a priest in 1930, he was one of only four members of his graduating class of 86 ? such were the numbers in those days ? who won immediate assignment to a parish. He was 24.

At the time, the Young Christian Workers movement was still unproven, even somewhat distrusted for its liberal stance. But Jadot, from a wealthy family beyond suspicion, fell in with the JOCists (as they were called) and was working with them when the Nazis invaded Belgium in 1940. He fled for a time, then returned to work with the Resistance in Brussels and with university student groups, who taught him ?a new kind of pedagogy, listening more, lecturing less?. Jadot remembers Yves Congar telling a group of theologians, ?There is no community without communion?, and his own response, ?There is no communion without communication?. That ought to be his epitaph.

From 1952 to 1960, Jadot was chief chaplain to the colonial forces in the Belgian Congo, and found himself engaged for the most part in trying to conciliate the Belgian colonialists and the Congolese. Though his family had helped develop the area (the largest mining centre in the country, one that produced more than half of the Congo?s income, was called Jadotville), Jean Jadot was then advocating a progressive handover of administration and government to the African community. He helped the local Church adapt to history by freeing itself of colonial influences over its catechesis and its liturgy.

During the Sixties, Jadot was a cheerleader in Belgium for a number of his friends from Louvain University who helped run Vatican II. One was Dom Lambert Beauduin, the Benedictine from Chevetogne who, in 1945, planted the idea in the mind of a papal diplomat in Paris named Angelo Roncalli that the Church needed a council.

In 1960, Jadot was appointed national director of the Pontifical Society for the Propagation of the Faith as a public relations man and fundraiser for the missions. The job put him in close contact with a number of cardinals in Rome. One of them, Sergio Pignedoli, recruited him into the papal diplomatic corps. In 1968, he was made a titular bishop and sent as a papal legate to Bangkok.

On 3 December, 1968, attending a conference of Catholic and Buddhist monks, Jadot had an hour?s fascinating conversation with Thomas Merton, the Trappist poet and author who had become a peace activist. Two hours later, Rembert Weakland, the Abbot-Primate of the Benedictines (who was also attending the conference), rushed to Jadot?s room to tell him Merton had just been electrocuted in his bath. Together, Jadot and Weakland negotiated the release of Merton?s body with the Thai Government and arranged for its transfer to the United States.

When Jadot got the word on the internet in May of Weakland?s resignation in yet another sex scandal, he e-mailed him. ?I am your friend. I will always be your friend. Sed libera nos a malo.?

Jadot was reassigned to the Cameroons for three years. He suffered some culture shock, moving from the refined East to a ?noisy, expansive, expressive young African nation?. The move prepared him for another noisy, expansive, expressive nation, the United States of America. He took Pope Paul VI?s orders seriously, to get out among the people and to ?find some good bishops?.

He did. Roger Mahony is one example. Mahony was a young priest in Fresno when Jadot tapped him to become an auxiliary bishop there in 1975. Jadot applauded when he noted Mahony?s advocacy in the state capitol for the farm workers? union led by Cesar Chavez, and was equally pleased when he saw Mahony become an activist in the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, where he helped write the bishops? pastoral letters on war and peace and the economy. Mahony was a man of the people, who had grown up shovelling manure on his father?s chicken ranch in the San Fernando Valley. It was ?no surprise? to Jadot when Mahony was finally appointed Archbishop of Los Angeles in 1985.

Walter Sullivan, soon to retire as Bishop of Richmond, Virginia, was another of Jadot?s choices. He turned out to be a pastor who included everyone, even gay Catholics on the margin of the Church. Jadot recalls with a laugh that, on being installed in 1974, Sullivan vetoed the idea of a posh banquet for Richmond?s upper classes; he invited everyone, filled his cathedral square with the high, the middle and the low, and served them Coke and hot dogs. He naturally became the target of a whispering campaign for more than 20 years by some of those who think they can be more Catholic by being less catholic. The whispers went all the way to the Roman Curia, which sent an investigator to Richmond more than a dozen years ago to look into Sullivan?s heresies. Sullivan was exonerated.

In his last post at the Vatican, Jadot was still, for all his patrician bearing, a man of the people. He instituted a new policy at the Council for Non-Christians (now called the Council for Inter-religious Dialogue), one that was suggested to him by the Federation of Asian Bishops? Conferences. Catholics are a tiny minority in most Asian nations. Thomas Michel, a Jesuit from the Indonesian Province who served on Jadot?s staff, explained: ?Archbishop Jadot endorsed the notion that dialogue wasn?t only about words. He wanted to see the common people ? Catholics, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims ? mix with one another, sharing their lives together, working in a dialogue of action in favour of justice, human dignity, peace, religious freedom and civil rights, so they?d be involved not only in a dialogue of sharing, but in a dialogue of doing.?

Furthermore, said Michel, when Jadot and his council began writing a document outlining the theory and practice of inter-religious dialogue, they did not produce a standard from-the-top-down Roman decree. They did a draft, then sent it out to episcopal conferences, individual bishops, theologians, scholars and specialists in other religions, as well as to those involved in inter-faith relations. When the document, ?Mission and Dialogue?, appeared in 1984, it did not look much like the average document that comes out of Rome.

For starting something like that, the next Pope might even want to give Jadot a red hat.