In the Closet of the Vatican

by Frédéric Martel

  Casaroli’s diplomacy was still based on ‘patience’, according to the title of his posthumous memoirs. A ‘classic’ diplomat, if the word has any meaning in the Vatican, he was a pragmatist who favoured realpolitik over morality and the long term over immediate effects. Human rights are important, but the Church has its traditions, which should also be respected. This supposed realism does not rule out mediation or parallel diplomacy as practised by organizations like the Sant’Egidio community or ‘flying ambassadors’ like Cardinal Roger Etchegaray on secret missions for John Paul II to Iran, China or Cuba.

  According to Etchegaray, whom I interviewed, Agostino Casaroli ‘was a great intellectual’ who read a great deal, particularly the French writers Jacques Maritain and his friend Jean Guitton (who would write the preface to one of his books). Even more importantly: Casaroli was a brave, hands-on diplomat; he sometimes travelled incognito on the other side of the Iron Curtain, and was able to set up a network of local informers who proved precious after the changes in the USSR and its satellite countries.

  Cardinal Paul Poupard, who worked with him, told me: ‘He was a man of great nuance. He expressed disagreements in clear and courteous terms. He was the quintessence of the Vatican diplomat. And he was Italian! The previous secretary of state, Jean Villot, a Frenchman, had worked well with Paul VI, who was Italian. But with a Polish pope, Villot recommended that John Paul II take an Italian. He told him: “You need an Italian.” In the end Casaroli ticked all the boxes.’

  When he became the pope’s ‘prime minister’ and was created cardinal, Casaroli’s talent was deployed on the communist question. Following John Paul II, who made anti-communism his priority in speeches and travels, the secretary of state carried out subtle or secret actions which are quite well known today. Massive sums were paid, quite opaquely, to the Polish trade union Solidarność; private offices were set up in Eastern Europe; the Vatican Bank, run by the famous archbishop Paul Marcinkus, organized counter-propaganda. (When I questioned Cardinals Giovanni Battista Re and Jean-Louis Tauran, they denied that the holy see ever directly financed Solidarność.)

  This battle was the personal choice of John Paul II. The pope devised his strategy on his own, and only a very small number of collaborators were able to decrypt it as it was deployed (principally Stanisław Dziwisz, his private secretary, the cardinal secretaries of state Casaroli and then Sodano, and, at the beginning of the pontificate, the Cardinal Archbishop of Warsaw, Stefan Wyszynski).

  The role of Stanisław Dziwisz, in particular, was crucial, and here it is necessary to go into details – it is of great importance for our subject. This Polish prelate knew the communist world from inside: he was John Paul II’s principal collaborator in Warsaw and then in Rome. Witnesses confirm that he was the key man in all the secret anti-communist missions; he knew all the sensitive files and the parallel financing. We know that Dziwisz’s relations with Cardinal Ratzinger were execrable, but Ratzinger, once elected pope, perhaps in response to a promise made to the dying John Paul II, and whatever the cost to himself, appointed him Archbishop of Kraków and then created him cardinal.

  ‘Mgr Dziwisz was a very great private secretary, very loyal, a great servant. He was constantly with saint John Paul II and told the holy father everything,’ Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re tells me, summing up the situation.

  John Paul II’s former head of protocol, who often accompanied the pope on his travels, Renato Boccardo, confirmed the equally crucial influence of Dziwisz, during a conversation in Spoleto, 130 kilometres from Rome, where he is now archbishop. ‘There was no way of avoiding private secretary Dziwisz. He was very active on all the pope’s travels and, of course, when they were going to Poland, he took things even more in hand. Then it was the “gang of Poles” who managed the trip: Cardinal Grocholewski, Cardinal Deskur and Dziwisz. I remember the 2002 trip and we all guessed that it would be the pope’s last trip to the country of his birth. Dziwisz, who had come with us, knew everybody. We were extraordinarily well received.’

  Without saying as much, Renato Boccardo is giving us to understand that Dziwisz, who stayed in the shadows for a long time, was revealed at the end of the pontificate to be the true master of the Vatican.

  ‘There has been a lot of talk about a Polish “mafia” around Cardinals Stanisław Dziwisz, Andrzej Deskur, Zenon Grocholewski, Stefan Wyszynski or indeed the primate of Poland, Mgr Józef Glemp. There was even talk of a gang! I think that was largely a myth. The only one who was truly influential where John Paul II was concerned was his private secretary: Stanisław Dziwisz,’ the Polish Vaticanologist Jacek Moskwa says, putting things into perspective, when I interview him in Warsaw.

  Now living in retirement in Kraków, Cardinal Dziwisz has nonetheless left an ambiguous reputation in Rome. His loyalty to the pope is admired, but his hypocrisy is criticized. It is difficult to decipher his self-referential codes, his mood swings and extravagances, which came to the surface in those times he used to spend on his own near the Villa Medici, as if saying, like the Poet, ‘I am hidden and I’m not.’ And since his departure from the Curia, tongues have loosened.

  One of the most secretive men in the recent history of the Vatican (Dziwisz has hardly ever given interviews in almost thirty years beside Karol Wojtyła) is gradually emerging into the light. So, for example, a colleague of Casaroli’s who still works at the Vatican indicated to me that Dziwisz’s multiple lives are one of the great secrets of Roman Catholicism.

  ‘Dziwisz was given a nickname: “The Pope Has Said”. He was John Paul II’s secretary, there was no getting around him, and everything had to go through him. Obviously he often “screened” information, which is to say that he passed on to the pope what he wanted to pass on. Gradually, and as John Paul II’s illness got worse, he began speaking for the pope, and it was far from clear who, the pope or Dziwisz, was giving the orders. This applied to the files on paedophilia or financial scandals: it was on these issues that tensions arose with Cardinal Ratzinger. Dziwisz was very tough. He is said to have made Ratzinger cry on several occasions.’

  A Curia priest confirms this information: ‘Dziwisz was very unpredictable, very aggressive. He was very enterprising, and got on with his affairs all the more serenely for being the holy father’s close collaborator. He knew he was protected and out of range.’

  ‘Wdowa’. The Polish nickname of Mgr Stanisław Dziwisz, literally ‘the widow’, is now one of the most recurring jokes in Poland – and it’s not a very happy one. During my investigation in Warsaw and Kraków I heard this pet name so often, whether used out of irony or malice, that it is difficult to ignore it.

  ‘I wouldn’t use the expression myself. People who call him “the widow” are being slanderous. What is true, on the other hand, is that Dziwisz speaks only about John Paul II. He’s the only thing that matters in his life. His only goal is John Paul II; his story and his memory. He has always been very much in the shadow of the great man. He is now the executor of his will,’ I am told by the Polish Vaticanologist Jacek Moskwa, who was for a long time a correspondent in Rome, and who is the author of a four-volume biography of the pope.

  I questioned dozens of priests, bishops and cardinals about the career of Stanisław Dziwisz, and a very contrasting image emerges from these conversations. In Warsaw, at the headquarters of the Polish bishops’ conference, where I am received, they emphasize his ‘major’ and ‘determining’ role at the side of John Paul II. I hear the same kind of praise when I visit the pontifical Papieskie Dzieła Misyjne foundation, which is also based in the Polish capital.

  ‘Here we are all orphans of Wojtyła,’ I am told by Pawel Bielinski, a journalist with the Catholic information agency KAI.

  The Pole Wlodzimierz Redzioch, who knows Dziwisz well, and worked with the Osservatore Romano in Rome for 32 years, paints a laudatory picture of John Paul II’s assistant when I meet him. If he is to be believed, ‘His Eminence the venerable Dziwisz’ is ‘one of the most honest and virtuous men of o
ur times’, ‘his great heart’, his ‘purity’ and his ‘piety’ are said to have been extraordinary, very close to those of a ‘saint’ …

  A poor child, born in a small village in Poland, Stanisław Dziwisz effectively owed his career to a single man: Karol Wojtyła. It was he who ordained the young seminarian as a priest in 1963, and who also had him elected bishop in 1998. They would be inseparable for several decades: Dziwisz would be the private secretary of the Archbishop of Kraków, then of Pope John Paul II in Rome. He was by his side, and shielded him with his body, it is said, in the attempt on his life in 1981. He knew all of the pope’s secrets; and he kept his private notebooks. After the pope’s long illness and painful death, a universal symbol of human suffering, Dziwisz also kept as a relic a sample of the holy father’s blood, a strange fluid memorial that prompted countless macabre comments.

  ‘Cardinal Stanisław Dziwisz is a highly respected figure in the Polish Church. Bear in mind: he was the right-hand man of Pope John Paul II,’ I am told during an interview in Warsaw by Krzysztof Olendski, an ambassador who now runs the Polish Institute, a state cultural agency close to the ultra-conservative right and the Catholic Church.

  Other witnesses are less generous. Some speak to me about Dziwisz as an ‘unimpressive hayseed’ or a ‘simple man who became complicated’. Some deliver harsh judgements: ‘idiot’, ‘John Paul II’s evil genius’. I am told that in Kraków they had to keep a watchful eye on the cardinal, so that he didn’t commit any indiscretions or go off the rails in an interview.

  ‘He certainly isn’t an intellectual, but he made considerable progress over the years,’ says the journalist Adam Szostkiewicz, an influential specialist in Catholicism in Polityka who knows him well.

  To grasp this atypical relationship between the pope and his private secretary, some put forward another explanation: loyalty.

  ‘It’s true, he isn’t a big personality; he has lived essentially in the shadow of John Paul II,’ the Vaticanologist Jacek Moskwa, who was a member of Solidarność, concedes.

  And he immediately adds: ‘But he was the ideal secretary. I knew him when he was a young priest beside John Paul II at the Vatican. He was reliable and faithful: those are great qualities. For a long time Dziwisz was quite reserved, quite discreet. He never received journalists, even though he often talked to them on the telephone, off the record. In the end, for a priest of his origins, he had a magnificent career in the Church. The key to his relationship with the pope was loyalty.’

  Sent to Kraków as an archbishop by Benedict XVI, and then created cardinal, Dziwisz lives today in an old town house on Kanonicza Street, where he grants me an audience.

  ‘The cardinal,’ I am told by his Italian assistant Andrea Nardotto, ‘barely gives interviews to journalists, but he is willing to see you.’

  I wait on the sunlit patio, amid the pink oleanders and the young dwarf conifers, waiting for ‘the widow’. In the hall: the papal coat of arms of John Paul II in bronze, an unsettling brown; on the patio: a chalk-coloured statue of John Paul II. In the distance, I hear the nuns gargling. I see home-delivery men bringing in ready-made dishes.

  Suddenly Stanisław Dziwisz wrenches open the massive wooden door of his office, and stands stiffly in the doorway, staring at me, surrounded by handsome young men in dog-collars and wimpled old women. His assistant Nardotto introduces me as a French writer and journalist; without any further formalities, Stanisław Dziwisz ushers me into his lair.

  It’s an enormous room with three wooden tables. A small rectangular desk covered with papers; a square, blank dining table seems to be where he is holding his meeting; a wooden desk that looks like something from a school classroom, framed by big scarlet armchairs. Having collected himself, Mgr Dziwisz gestures to me to sit down.

  The cardinal asks me about the ‘eldest daughter of the Church’ (France) without really listening to my answers. It’s my turn to question him, but he doesn’t listen to my questions either. We talk about French Catholic intellectuals, about Jacques Maritain, Jean Guitton, François Mauriac …

  ‘And André Frossard and Jean Daniélou!’ the cardinal insists, citing the names of intellectuals that he has read, or at least met.

  This exchange, this list, this name-dropping, is like a confession: I am not in the presence of an intellectual. This emeritus cardinal seems to be barely interested in ideas.

  I receive confirmation of this over breakfast with Olga Brzezinska, a renowned academic who runs several cultural foundations and a major literary festival in Kraków: ‘Dziwisz is well known here, and somewhat controversial, but he isn’t considered as a major intellectual figure in the city. Most of his legitimacy derives from the fact that he was close to John Paul II. He keeps his notebooks, his secrets and even his blood! It’s rather sinister …’

  On the wall of Dziwisz’s office, I see three paintings showing John Paul II and a fine portrait of Dziwisz himself in his cardinal’s robes. On one of the three tables, the cardinal’s skullcap lies inside out with no regard for protocol. A grandfather clock, its pendulum still, has stopped telling the time. The frighteningly cheerful cardinal hails me.

  ‘I find you very likeable,’ the cardinal says to me suddenly, marking a pause, jovial and chummy. A man from the south of Poland, he is very likeable himself.

  Mgr Dziwisz apologizes for not being able to talk to me for longer. He has to see a representative of the Order of Malta, a little crumpled man who is already waiting in the vestibule. ‘What a bore,’ he says to me almost confidentially. But he suggests coming back to see him the next day.

  We take a selfie. Dziwisz, engagingly, seems to be in no hurry, and with a feminine gesture that doesn’t detract from the dominance of his presence, he takes me by the arm so that we can look properly into the lens. A ‘sentinel soul’, reining in his follies, his impulses, his idylls, he employs guile with me and I play with him. Proudly, he steps back and I think of the Poet saying, ‘Do you want to see the meteors gleam?’ But at eighty years old, happiness is in flight.

  I have studied this character in such depth that, now confronted by my subject, standing in front of me in priestly garb and with a whiff of sulphur, I am amazed. I would never have presumed to admire this creature of heaven and candles for his ‘harsh freedom’, his goodness, his enchantments. I love the side of him that is – in Rimbaud’s words – ‘tumbler, beggar, artist, bandit – priest!’ A juggler, a tightrope-walker, a nomad of travels untold. While my last doubts fade I admire, fascinated, the ‘ardent patience’ of this great prince of the Church sitting in front of me. Out of reach. Unconstrained. He hasn’t changed. Incurable. What a life! What a man!

  In Kraków, the cardinal’s way of life provokes considerable astonishment. I am told of his acts of generosity; his sometimes excessive indulgence; his repeated philanthropic gifts to the village of Mszana Dolna, where he was born. Paunchy and fond of his creature comforts, our man enjoys good food and surprises – that’s only human. On the evening of our first meeting, when I am in the city, I see him dining at Fiorentina, a starred restaurant where he spends almost three hours, and about which Iga, the manager, will later tell me: ‘We’re one of the best restaurants in the city. Cardinal Dziwisz is a friend of the manager.’

  Where do his funds come from? How does this prelate, with his priest’s pension, lead such a worldly life? That’s one of the mysteries of this book.

  Another mystery lies in the unfailing support that Stanisław Dziwisz showed when he was personal secretary to Pope John Paul II towards some of the darker figures in the Church. When I was pursuing my inquiry in Poland, I worked with my ‘researcher’ Jerzy Sczesny, as well as a team of investigative journalists from the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza (particularly Mirosław Wlekły, Marcin Kacki and Marcin Wójci). Some harsh aspects of the dark side of John Paul II’s private secretary came to light and more dizzying revelations would shortly follow. (The huge success, in autumn 2018, of the film Kler, about the paedophilia of priests in Poland
, confirms that the debate about the hypocrisy of the Church has begun in the most Catholic country in Europe.)

  The name of Stanisław Dziwisz recurs in the dozens of books and articles about cases of sexual abuse; not that he himself is accused of such acts, but because he is suspected of covering up for corrupt priests from within the Vatican. His connections with the Mexican Marcial Maciel, the Chilean Fernando Karadima, the Colombian Alfonso López Trujillo, and the Americans Bernard Law and Theodore McCarrick are well established. His name also appears in connection with several sexual scandals in Poland, notably in the famous Juliusz Paetz affair: this bishop wooed seminarians by giving them ‘ROMA’ underwear, which could be read backwards, he told them, as ‘AMOR’ (he had to resign). Similarly, Dziwisz was personally acquainted with the priest Józef Wesolowski, ordained in Kraków: appointed nuncio to the Dominican Republic, this archbishop was at the heart of a vast scandal of homosexual abuse before being arrested in Rome, by the Vatican police, at the request of Pope Francis. What precisely did Stanisław Dziwisz know about what was in all these files? Did he pass on adequate information to Pope John Paul II, or did he ‘filter’ them and keep them from him? Was he, with Cardinal Angelo Sodano, guilty of failing to take appropriate action in some of these cases?

  Some Polish Catholic prelates I have questioned suggest that Dziwisz could not have been connected to any of these scandals, because he knew nothing about them. Others, on the contrary, think that he ‘should be in prison today’ for his complicity. Apart from these diametrically opposite opinions, some even go so far as to claim, without any proof, that Dziwisz might have been ‘recruited’ by the Polish, Bulgarian or East German secret services because of his ‘vulnerabilities’ – but there isn’t a shred of evidence for this Vatican ‘infiltration’.

  When I interview him in Warsaw, the Polish Vaticanologist Jacek Moskwa gives me a plausible explanation for this: he suggests that if John Paul II and Dziwisz committed an error of judgement about several priests suspected of sexual abuse, it wasn’t deliberate, and was the result of communist propaganda: