The Catholic Church’s situation in Canada in the last years of John Paul II’s life illustrated both the accomplishments and the ambiguities of his pontificate. World Youth Day 2002, held in Toronto in July of that year, was arguably the greatest public event in the pontificate in the years after the Great Jubilee of 2000. The world press fretted endlessly that the Pope wouldn’t be able to attend; after walking down the Jetway at Pearson International Airport on his arrival, John Paul pounded his cane onto the tarmac three times, as if to say, “I told you I’d come.” The week-long event saw a remarkable outpouring of faith. Securely secular Toronto was stunned by the sight of several hundred thousand young people, from all over the world, making the Way of the Cross up University Avenue from the business district to the provincial parliament buildings. More than half a million people braved torrential rains early Sunday morning to attend WYD-2002’s closing Mass, during which the Pope repeated his frequent challenge to the young—never settle for less than the spiritual and moral grandeur of which you’re capable, with the help of God’s grace.
Yet after what was almost certainly the most important week in Canada’s long Catholic history, the Canadian bishops did virtually nothing by way of serious strategic and pastoral follow-up. Thus another question was posed, sharply, for John Paul II’s successor: why did this most dynamic Bishop of Rome fail to inspire a similar confidence and dynamism in many of his brother bishops in the developed world? John Paul II was notably successful in inspiring young people to take the Catholic Church and its teachings seriously; he was successful in attracting young men to seminaries and young women to consecrated religious life, as he inspired young married couples to live fully and integrally Catholic lives. Tens of thousands of priests throughout the world found new heart and new hope from the Pope’s manifest love for his own priesthood. Engaged by John Paul II’s intellectually bracing affirmation of Catholic faith and Catholic moral teaching, many younger Catholic scholars seemed uninterested in pursuing the dissent that had characterized the previous generation of theologians. Why was it, then, that the bishops of the Church, especially in the “First World,” seemed the group least inspired and least reenergized by John Paul II, the bishop who had exuded episcopal dynamism from more than forty-five years?
The length of the pontificate made it inevitable that John Paul II would appoint the overwhelming majority of the cardinals who would elect his successor. But because John Paul appointed the most diverse group of cardinals in history, his choices insured that the next papal conclave would be, at one and the same time, the most open and the most complex of modern papal elections: the most open, because John Paul’s recasting of the papacy in a far more evangelical and pastoral style helped make nationality a less important issue, perhaps even a nonissue; the most complex, because the men who will face the Herculean task of electing a successor to one of the most influential popes of the second millennium don’t know each other that well, come from a wide disparity of backgrounds and experiences, don’t have a single common language—and will be living comfortably rather than miserably during the conclave, thanks to John Paul’s building the Domus Sanctae Marthae guesthouse in the Vatican.
Conclaves are almost always surprising: preconclave prognostications often look foolish, and, from a Catholic point of view, it’s not a good idea to discount in advance the work of the Holy Spirit on the cardinal-electors. Measured in human terms, however, the expectations that the world and the Church now have of the Pope, and the diversity and complexity of the electorate, suggested to some that the conclave to elect John Paul II’s successor would be unusually complicated, even as it would be refreshingly open in terms of issues (better, nonissues) like nationality and race.
Historians will be measuring the impact of Pope John Paul II for centuries. His extensive teaching, or magisterium, seems likely to shape Catholic thought and practice well into the third millennium. His transformation of the papacy from a managerial to an evangelical office created extraordinary new opportunities for the Church; it also raised questions with which his successor(s) must deal.
How does the prophetic witness of the papacy, which has now become in reality the global moral reference point it has long claimed to be, coexist with the diplomacy of the Holy See, which must play the game of world politics according to the established rules? Granted that John Paul returned the papacy to its New Testament origins and renovated it for the third millennium by making it once again an office of proclamation and witness; but what about the management of the Church’s central administrative structures? Are they as well designed as they might be? Is the information flow into the Vatican as impressive as is often suggested? Do the criteria and processes by which bishops are appointed need revision and reform? How should the Holy See operate in what has become a 24/7 real-time global news environment, such that its message is coordinated and clear? These are but some of the questions John Paul II left behind, questions with which the conclave to elect his successor must wrestle in assessing his papacy, questions with which that successor must wrestle if he is to build on the enormous accomplishment of John Paul II.
It must always be remembered, however, that that accomplishment was, at bottom, a spiritual one. Pope John Paul II was the great Christian witness of the last quarter of the twentieth century and the opening years of the twenty-first. He brought to the papacy a striking set of personal talents. But the talents really don’t explain the man or his impact. That only comes into clear focus when we remember that Karol Józef Wojtyła was a thoroughly, indeed radically, convinced Christian disciple. It was the passion of his discipleship that made him the most influential man of his time. That passion will continue in the lives of countless others, with untold consequences far into the future.
A Brief Note on Pronunciation
Polish pronunciation can seem daunting, but it is, in fact, more regular than English. As one introduction to Polish puts it, the English speaker learning to pronounce Bydgoszcz, Szczecin, and Śląsk,, having learned the invariable rules of Polish pronunciation, will have an easier time of it than the native Polish speaker—or even the native “American” speaker!—trying to figure out Gloucester, Leicester, and Slough.
There is no need for a comprehensive treatise on Polish pronunciation here. The following rules and examples should be helpful.
The letters ą and ę are pronounced as a nasal aw and en in English.
C is pronounced as ts in English.
Ch is pronounced as a hard h in the Scottish “loch.”
Cz is pronounced as ch in “church.”
Dz is pronounced as j in “jeans.”
I is pronounced as ee in English.
J is always pronounced as y in English.
ą and ę are pronounced as w in English.
Ó is pronounced as oo as in the English “cool.”
Ś is pronounced as s in “sure.”
Sz is pronounced as the English sh.
W is pronounced as v in English.
Y is pronounced as a y in the English “myth.”
The accent in Polish is almost always on the second-to-last syllable.
Thus…
Częstochowa is pronounced Chens-toe-HOE-vah.
Dziwisz is pronounced JEE-vish.
Kraków is pronounced KRA-koov.
Malecki is pronounced Mah-LETS-kee.
Rybicki is pronounced Rih-BEETS-kee.
Stanisław is pronounced Stah-NEES-wahv.
Środowisko is pronounced Shroe-doe-VEES-koe.
Wałęsa is pronounced Vah-WHEN-sah.
Wawel is pronounced VAH-vel.
Wojtyła is pronounced Voy-TEE-wah.
Wujek is pronounced VOO-yek.
Wyszyński is pronounced Vih-SHIN-skee.
The surnames of married men and women are masculine and feminine, thus “Stanisław Rybicki” and “Danuta Rybicka.” These have been retained, but for the sake of simplicity, the masculine plural form is used when referring to couples together rather than
the Polish plural, which in this instance would be “the Rybiccy.”
WITNESS
TO HOPE
PROLOGUE
The Disciple
Stealing quietly through Kraków’s blacked-out streets, the audience and the actors who would perform for them arrived at an apartment in the city’s Dębniki district, across the frozen Vistula River from ancient Wawel Castle. It was the 1,181st evening in the long, dark night of the Polish soul, and they took great care to avoid the armed patrols that enforced the Nazi Occupation’s curfew. For what they were doing was an act of defiance that, detected, would have sent everyone involved to the death camps. This particular night, November 28, 1942, the Rhapsodic Theater, an avant-garde troupe committed to a “theater of the living word” without props or elaborate costumes, was performing an adaptation of Adam Mickiewicz’s epic poem Pan Tadeusz, a classic of the Polish Romantic tradition.
The apartment blinds were drawn; the lights were lowered; a clandestine act of cultural resistance began. It did not go unchallenged. During the performance, Nazi megaphones outside began blaring the news of another victory by the invincible Wehrmacht. To some in the audience, that rasping, intrusive propaganda, interrupting a brief respite from the terrors of life in occupied Poland, seemed an apt metaphor for the hopelessness of their situation.
The twenty-two-year-old actor then speaking, an underground seminary student named Karol Wojtyła, paid no attention whatsoever to the racket outside. Unfazed, he continued his recitation as if the harsh static of the principalities and powers of the age simply did not exist…
Almost thirty-seven years later, on June 2, 1979, Karol Wojtyła addressed another audience: the largest gathering to that point in the history of Poland. The former actor no longer spoke in a darkened apartment. Rather, he said what he had to say before 1 million of his countrymen gathered in and around Warsaw’s massive Victory Square. In some respects, though, things were curiously similar. Once again, Karol Wojtyła, now Pope John Paul II, was confronting a brutal attempt to crush human freedom: the communism that had replaced Nazism as the usurper of Poland’s liberties. Once again, he was doing so not with what the world recognized as “power,” but with what he understood to be the truth that could set his people free in the deepest sense of freedom: the truth about the dignity, vocation, and destiny of human beings, which he believed had been revealed in Jesus Christ.
And once again, as he spoke, he was interrupted, not by the crudities of Nazi megaphones, but by the spontaneous, rhythmic chant of his people—“We want God! We want God…”
THE DRAMA OF A LIFE
The sheer drama of Karol Wojtyła’s life would defy the imagination of the most fanciful screenwriter.
Brief months after his country regains its independence, a son is born to Polish parents in a small, provincial town. His mother dies before he is ten. Raised by his father, a pious, retired military officer and a gentleman of the old school, the youngster is the best student in town, an enthusiastic athlete, and an amateur actor. One of his closest friends is the son of the leader of the local Jewish community.
Moving to Kraków with his pensioner father, he enters the ancient Jagiellonian University, but his promising academic and theatrical careers are cut short by World War II. During the Occupation, he is a quarryman, blaster, and manual laborer, walking to work in freezing winter clad only in denims and clogs. Defying the ruthlessness of his country’s Nazi occupiers, he joins an underground cultural resistance movement and helps create a covert theater. After the local parish priests have been shipped off to Dachau, he takes his first steps in classic spirituality under the tutelage of a lay mystic who forms young men into “Living Rosary” groups.
His father dies and the young man’s vocational struggle intensifies. Is his destiny the stage or the altar? He eventually enrolls in the clandestine seminary run by the heroic archbishop of Kraków, an aristocrat who serves Hans Frank the people’s diet of stale bread and ersatz coffee when the haughty Nazi governor-general insists on being invited to dine at the episcopal manse. Surreptitiously studying philosophy and theology at the chemical factory where he still works, the seminarian lives from day to day in a world where yesterday’s classmate and fellow altar server becomes tomorrow’s martyr to the firing squads.
In the aftermath of the Warsaw Uprising, the Nazis try to forestall a similar eruption of overt resistance by arresting all the young men in Kraków. Our protagonist dodges the Gestapo manhunts, works his way across town, and enters the bishop’s residence, where the clandestine seminary is re-formed underground. After his country’s “liberation” by the Red Army, he is ordained a priest and sent to Rome for graduate studies in theology. Returning home after a look at the worker-priests of France and Belgium, he begins a ministry to university students that involves innovative worship, intense conversation, thousands of hours in the confessional, and a sharp break from the typical pattern of interaction between Polish priests and their people.
After completing a second doctoral degree, he joins the faculty of the only Catholic university behind the iron curtain, commuting to his classes by overnight train. His lectures are packed by standing-room-only crowds. His first book, on the ethics of married life, raises more than one clerical eyebrow by its celebration of human sexuality as a gift of God for the sanctification of husband and wife. Consecrated a bishop at age thirty-eight, he is elected administrator of the Kraków archdiocese when the incumbent dies and the government and Church deadlock on a new appointment. Attending all four sessions of the Second Vatican Council from 1962 through 1965, he becomes a leader in crafting a new Catholic openness to the modern world and a mainstay in the great conciliar battle to define religious freedom as a basic human right.
Named archbishop of Kraków with the enthusiastic support of the communist government, he causes consternation among the commissars who promoted his nomination by becoming a relentless, sophisticated advocate for the religious and other civil rights of his people. While conducting one of the most extensive implementations of Vatican II in the world, the archbishop, who is named cardinal at age forty-seven, refuses to behave the way senior prelates are supposed to behave: he skis, he vacations with lay people, he kayaks. He also remains a working intellectual, leading doctoral seminars in his residence and delivering scholarly papers at international conferences.
At fifty-eight, he is elected the 264th Bishop of Rome, the first non-Italian pope in 455 years and the first Slavic pope ever. KGB leader Yuri Andropov warns the Soviet Politburo of danger ahead, and his judgment is vindicated when the Polish Pope returns to his homeland in June 1979 and triggers the revolution of conscience that eventually produces the nonviolent collapse of the Soviet empire in east central Europe. The Slav Pope dramatically revitalizes the world’s oldest institution, the papacy, through pastoral pilgrimages to every corner of the globe, through an aggressive exploitation of every modern means of communication, and through an endless stream of teaching documents that touch virtually every aspect of Catholic life as well as the most crucial questions on the world’s agenda.
He survives an assassination attempt, redefines the Catholic Church’s relationship with Judaism, invites Orthodox and Protestant Christians to help imagine a papacy that could serve the needs of all Christians, preaches to Muslim teenagers in a packed stadium in Casablanca, and describes marital intimacy as an icon of the interior life of the triune God. After he faces a series of medical difficulties, the world media pronounce him a dying, if heroic, has-been. Within the next six months he publishes an international bestseller translated into forty languages, gathers the largest crowd in human history on the least Christian continent in the world, urges the Church to cleanse its conscience on the edge of a new millennium, and almost single-handedly changes the course of a major international meeting on population issues. Addressing the United Nations in 1995, he defends the universality of human rights and describes himself as a “witness to hope” at the end of a century of unprecedented
wickedness. Two days later, the irrepressible pontiff does a credible imitation of Jack Benny during Mass in Central Park, and the cynical New York press loves it.
As fiction, the story would be too sensational for all but the most romantic tastes. What, then, are we to make of the story as fact? And how can we understand this thoroughly modern man who insists that “in the designs of Providence there are no mere coincidences”?
PARADOX
The pontificate of Pope John Paul II has been one of the most important in centuries, for the Church and the world. Some would argue that John Paul II has been the most consequential pope since the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in the sixteenth century. As that period defined the Catholic Church’s relationship to an emerging modern world, so the Second Vatican Council and the pontificate of John Paul II have laid down a set of markers that will likely determine the course of world Catholicism well beyond “modernity” and into the third millennium of Christian history.
John Paul II has also been, indisputably, the most visible pope in history. In fact, a case can be made that he has been the most visible human being in history. He has almost certainly been seen live by more people than any man who ever lived. When one adds the multiplying impact of television to the equation, the breadth of his reach into the worlds-within-worlds of humanity becomes almost impossible to grasp.
Yet there is a paradox here: this most visible of men may also be the least understood major figure of the twentieth century. Certainly the judgments about the man and his accomplishment have been, to put it gently, contradictory.
To tens of millions of people, many of whom are not Roman Catholics, he is the great figure of our time, the defender and principal embodiment of a moral force that has led humanity safely through this bloodiest of centuries. In this view, John Paul II is the paladin, the champion, of the cause of human freedom. To others, including many in his own Church, John Paul II is an unyielding authoritarian, out of touch with the aspirations of those he claims to lead and dares to teach, a throwback to a period the Church had putatively put behind it at the Second Vatican Council. Still others, within and without the Church, admire his defense of human rights, his outreach to Judaism, and his dedication to peace while deploring his theology and his moral judgments.
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