Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  The people of Wadowice were small businessmen, lawyers, tradesmen, farmers, and officials of the local provincial administration. They worked in the town’s factories, producing biscuits and steel parts. A steam-powered sawmill, two brickyards, and a factory where fertilizer was made from animal bones treated with sulphuric acid completed the town’s light industry.20 After Poland regained its independence, the Austrian barracks was taken over by the 12th Infantry Regiment of the new Polish army, and the regiment’s senior officers became important figures in local society. The soberly dressed townspeople were in regular contact with the more colorfully clad farmers of the region. Some of the local poetry, memorized by Wadowice’s schoolchildren, described the hard lives of those who were trying to wrest a living from the rocky soil of the region. The countryside, the people’s Catholicism, and the world of culture met in the person of “Wawro,” a local peasant-philosophersculptor, whose popular primitives—birds, sorrowful Christ-figures, wayside shrines—were expressions of a simple soul who impressed the better-educated townspeople because he thought seriously about his art.21 The contempt with which modern artists and intellectuals often regard popular piety was not prominent in Wadowice.

  The Second Polish Republic was a heterogeneous affair in which ethnic Poles were sixty-five percent of the total population.22 In Wadowice, this pluralism was primarily reflected in the town’s large Jewish population, some 2,000 strong. According to Karol Wojtyła’s boyhood friend, Jerzy Kluger, the Jews of Wadowice thought of themselves quite naturally as Poles. More than seventy years after they first met, Pope John Paul II remembered Kluger’s father, a lawyer and the leader of the Wadowice Jewish community, as a “great Polish patriot.”23 The Jews of Wadowice were originally German-speaking and had been largely inculturated into local society; they dressed and spoke like the other people of the town. Wadowice was not without its ethnic and religious tensions, but it was also a place where the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz’s description of Jews as the “elder brothers” of Christians was taken seriously by many local Catholics. Karol Wojtyła would later write that he “vividly [remembered] the Jews who gathered every Saturday at the synagogue behind our school. Both religious groups, Catholics and Jews, were united…by the awareness that they prayed to the same God.”24 Wadowice’s Jews, for their part, had recent and good reason to regard themselves as being thoroughly Polish. Some had fought with Piłsudski’s Polish Legion, in which Kluger’s father had been an officer, and others were serving as officers in the new Polish army.

  The military garrison helped contribute to the town’s atmosphere of tolerance. At the annual regimental ball, the colonel in command would always dance the first mazurka with Jerzy Kluger’s mother.25 The local priests were also committed to religious toleration. Father Leonard Prochownik, who had served in Wadowice since 1915 and who officially became the town’s pastor in 1929, is still remembered as someone whose promotion of interreligious tolerance was responsible for the town’s relative lack of anti-Semitism.26 Kluger’s grandmother Huppert was friendly with the parish clergy, and the local policeman would shoo eavesdroppers away when the Jewish matron and the Polish pastor, both a little deaf, walked amid the birches and firs of the town square, carrying on a voluble conversation.27

  Physically and culturally, the focal point of Wadowice was St. Mary’s Church (more formally, the Church of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary), located at one end of the long axis of the rectangular town square. The parish had been part of the town’s life for more than 650 years. Every Sunday, both townspeople and those who lived in the countryside packed its Masses, dressed in their best clothes. Inside the main body of the oniondomed church, whose decoration was primarily baroque, worshipers found an elaborate high altar recessed in a chancel and six small altar-shrines, each dedicated to a particular devotion. The baptistry chapel, in which thousands of children were christened over the centuries, displayed a copy of Poland’s greatest national icon, the “Black Madonna,” which tradition held to have been painted by St. Luke on a table belonging to the holy family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Dark wooden pews that could seat perhaps 200 congregants rested on the church’s tiled floor. There was ample standing room, and it was used.

  The parish of Wadowice was fortunate in its clergy, men of piety and learning. Father Prochownik’s assistant, Father Edward Zacher, was ordained in 1927 and was sent to Rome for graduate studies in theology. After returning to Poland in 1929 and spending two years at Zakopane in the Tatra Mountains, he was assigned to Wadowice as catechist or religion teacher in the two local high schools. Just outside the town, within easy walking distance, was a Carmelite monastery, home to one of the Church’s most rigorous religious orders. Its most notable friar had been Rafał Kalinowski. Condemned to death but ultimately dispatched to eight years of Siberian exile for his role in the 1863 Polish Uprising against the czarist empire, Kalinowski entered the Discalced Carmelites at age forty after a period of self-imposed exile in Paris, and died in the “monastery on the hill,” as the people of Wadowice called it, in 1907. He would be canonized by John Paul II in 1991.28

  About six miles farther along the road toward Kraków was one of the great pilgrimage sites in Poland, Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, which would play a large role in Karol Wojtyła’s spiritual life as long as he lived in Poland. A vast outdoor shrine, Kalwaria was originally built by the regional governor of Kraków, Mikołaj Zebrzydowski, who in 1600 commissioned a Church of the Holy Cross on the mountain of Żarek—according to one tradition, after his wife had experienced a vision of Christ. When the new church was dedicated in October 1601, Zebrzydowski decided to build another chapel nearby, modeled on the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, and invited the Franciscan fathers and brothers to look after the shrines. Having been to the Holy Land and sensing a resemblance between its topography and that of his property, the pious nobleman then decided to erect a whole series of chapels on his land, similar to those he had seen in Jerusalem commemorating various scenes from the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ. By 1617, some twenty-four chapels, comprising an extended outdoor version of the traditional Lenten devotion known as the “way of the cross,” extended along many kilometers of footpaths through the rolling countryside.

  “Zebrzydowski’s Calvary” soon became a place of pilgrimage for Catholics from all over Poland, especially during a great outdoor passion play performed each Holy Week. The passion play often drew a hundred thousand pilgrims to Kalwaria Zebrzydowska. The movement of the play from shrine to shrine and the emotional intensity of the event were such that the pilgrims became virtual participants in the drama of Christ’s suffering and death. Lasting several days, the passion play included both local actors and volunteer professionals from distant cities and towns, eager to take part in what became a major national ritual.* The site was further expanded by Michołaj Zebrzydowski’s son Jan, who, after his father’s death in 1620, began a second series of chapels dedicated to scenes from the life of Mary, the mother of Christ. The feast of Mary’s assumption into heaven on August 15 soon became the occasion for another great annual pilgrimage to Kalwaria from all over southern Poland.

  In the early twentieth century, Kalwaria Zebrzydowska included forty-five chapels, twenty-four constituting the “Path of Our Lord” and twenty-one marking the “Path of Our Lady.” Ten chapels common to both “paths” symbolized the intertwined lives of Jesus and Mary. The chapels were imaginatively constructed to convey the meaning of the biblical scene they commemorate. The chapel commemorating Jesus taking up his cross is cruciform in shape, and the chapel in remembrance of Jesus’ meeting with his mother en route to his crucifixion is heart-shaped, a reminder to pilgrims that the dying Christ, by giving his mother into the care of the beloved disciple, John, gave her to all his disciples, who would always find a home in the heart of Mary. The Christcentered character of Kalwaria’s Marian piety is most powerfully symbolized by the crossing of the two paths at one of the shrine’s largest churches,
the chapel of Mary’s assumption into heaven. Its location and design anticipated the Second Vatican Council’s teaching that Mary, the first of believers, is the first fruit of the redeeming work of Christ.

  ROOTS

  Neither the elder Karol Wojtyła, a noncommissioned officer in the 56th Infantry Regiment of the Austro-Hungarian army, nor his wife, Emilia, had family ties to Wadowice, the town in which they raised their family after their marriage in 1904.30

  Karol Wojtyła’s family traced its ancestry to the village of Czaniec, which has since disappeared into a suburb of today’s Bielsko-Biała, some forty miles southwest of Kraków. Baptismal and marriage records often identify the Wojtyłas as hortulani, small farmers, although the parish records of Biała list some Wojtyłas as merchants and include such characters as “Wojtyła the vagabond” and “Wojtyła the beggar” whose relationship to Pope John Paul II’s family cannot be established. Maciej Wojtyła, the Pope’s grandfather, left Czaniec and moved to the village of Lipnik, where he worked as a guildmaster tailor and farmer. Karol Wojtyła, the Pope’s father, was born in Lipnik on August 18, 1879, to Maciej and his wife Anna (née Przeczek), the daughter of a baker. Anna died when young Karol was a boy. Karol’s stepsister, Stefania, was born in 1891 of Maciej’s second marriage to Maria Zalewska, the daughter of a tailor. Maciej Wojtyła died in Lipnik on September 23, 1923, when his grandson, the future pope, was not yet three and a half.

  The earliest extant records of Emilia Kaczorowska Wojtyła’s family are also located in the Bielsko-Biała area. Emilia’s father, Feliks Kaczorowski, was born in Biała on June 26, 1849, and worked as a saddler. In 1875, he married Maria Scholz, the third daughter of a cobbler. Emilia, their fifth child, was born on March 26, 1884. A year later the family moved to Kraków, where four more children (one of whom died in infancy) were born. Maria Scholz Kaczorowska died in 1897; Feliks remarried and died in 1908 after fathering four more children by his second wife, Joanna. The Kaczorowskis lived at 15 Smoleńska Street in Kraków, where Feliks operated a saddlery that specialized in upholstering horse-drawn carriages. Emilia is thought to have completed eight grades at a school run by the Sisters of Mercy. Always of somewhat delicate health, she helped manage the household and raise her smaller siblings until her marriage to Karol Wojtyła.31

  Karol and Emilia’s son Edmund, known in the family as “Mundek,” was born on August 27, 1906. A handsome young man, he became a fine student and active athlete, remembered for his exceptional personal charm. From 1924 through 1929, Edmund Wojtyła studied at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, where on May 28, 1930, he was awarded the degree doctor of medical science. He then went to practice his profession at the hospital in Bielsko.32

  Emilia gave birth to a daughter some years after Edmund. There are no records of her birth, baptism, or death in infancy. Local recollections in Wadowice have it that she lived for several weeks before succumbing. She was presumably baptized privately at home, perhaps by her parents as the Church permits in emergencies, and was likely buried in the local cemetery, although without a headstone, as the custom of the time dictated.33

  From 1919 on, Karol and Emilia lived with Edmund in an apartment on the second floor of the house owned by Chaim Blamuth at Rynek, 2 (now Koscielna, 7), across the street from St. Mary’s Church.34 There, the couple’s third child and second son was born on May 18, 1920. Lolek, as family and friends would call him, was baptized by a military chaplain, Father Franciszek Zak, at St. Mary’s Church on June 20, 1920, and formally given the names Karol Józef, which were reminiscent of the Habsburg monarchy his father had served.*

  Lolek’s baby photos suggest a chubby youngster with a broad Slavic face. One picture taken with his mother displays a marked resemblance between the two. Endless stories about young Karol Wojtyła’s childhood now abound, and it is virtually impossible to separate truth from pious fantasy or creative memory in these matters. The story that Emilia walked him in a pram through Wadowice and told her neighbors, “You’ll see, my Lolek will be a great man someday,” has been testified to so often that it should perhaps be given the benefit of the doubt.

  The elder Karol Wojtyła continued his career as a lieutenant in the Polish army until he was retired on pension with the rank of captain circa 1927.36 While Lolek was growing up, Emilia, who was skilled in embroidery, took in sewing to help supplement the family’s income. The Wojtyła apartment was modest but certainly middle-class, housed in a solid brick structure covered by stucco, and built around a central courtyard, where Emilia would sit and talk with her neighbors while Lolek played. The apartment had several rooms and a kitchen. The extant furniture, china, cutlery, and decorations suggest solidity, piety, and a simple, but hardly impoverished, standard of living. Until Edmund left for Kraków and the university in 1924, it must have been a bit crowded. Personal tragedy would soon reduce the family further.

  Karol Wojtyła’s boyhood friend Jerzy Kluger remembers the two youngsters playing on the town square, a block from the Wojtyła flat. When they were “about six or seven,” Lolek and Jurek Kluger somehow became convinced that the town policeman, Ćwięk, had a wooden sword. One day, when Ćwięk was taking a nap on the square, the boys decided to test their theory by easing the sword out of its scabbard. They lost their balance, tripped, and fell over the startled custodian of law and order—who was presumably more disturbed by the interruption of his nap than by the attempted requisition of one of the symbols of his office.37 When they weren’t playing in town or at home, the boys could swim in the Skawa during summer months or skate and play a primitive game of ice hockey on its frozen surface in the winter. Hiking, for most of the year, was another youthful recreation. Soccer was their favorite team sport. Pilgrims to Wadowice today can see the field on which “Lolek the Goalie” honed his skills, often playing on a team primarily made up of the town’s Jewish boys.

  On September 15, 1926, Karol Wojtyła began the first grade at the local elementary school, located on the second floor of the town administration building on the market square, a minute’s walk from the family apartment. Classes were large, ranging upward of sixty students per classroom. The curriculum included Polish, religion, arithmetic, drawing, singing, and, according to his report cards, “games and exercise” and “handicrafts.” Lolek was a gifted student from the start.38 The carefree innocence usually associated with early grammar school days was not destined to last very long, though. On April 13, 1929, while Lolek was completing the third grade, his mother, who had often been ill, died of kidney failure and congenital heart disease.39 Emilia Kaczorowska Wojtyła, aged forty-five, was buried from the parish church on April 16 after a funeral Mass celebrated by the pastor, Father Prochownik.

  Much has been written about the long-term impact of his mother’s early death on Karol Wojtyła. It is frequently suggested, for example, that Wojtyła’s Marian piety is displaced maternal affection. Others have gone so far as to argue that his papal teaching on women and Holy Orders reflects a problem relating to women that began with Emilia’s death.40 Such speculations, frequently based on amateur psychoanalysis conducted from afar, are of no use to serious students of Wojtyła’s life. Moreover, John Paul’s recent autobiographical writings are virtually silent on the subject of his mother, noting only that he “does not have a clear awareness of her contribution” to his religious training, “which must have been great.”41

  While his silence about his mother’s death no doubt reflects his sense of privacy, it may also suggest that Karol Wojtyła, as an adult, retained few memories of the woman who died when he was nine years old. In a post-Freudian world, simple explanations can seem like evasions. But one explanation of why the Virgin in Michelangelo’s Pietà does not look at her dead son is that the sculptor, whose mother died when he was six, did not remember what a mother’s gaze looked like. John Paul II’s silence about his mother may well indicate nothing other than a relative paucity of memories about her, as one of his closest aides once observed.42 On a table in his bedroom
, in both the papal apartment in the Vatican and at his summer residence at Castel Gandolfo, Pope John Paul II keeps a small photographic portrait of his parents, taken some time after their wedding. That is how he remembers his mother.

  Karol Wojtyła had many mentors in his youth and adolescence. The most influential of them was his father.

  The elder Karol Wojtyła, universally referred to in Wadowice as “the captain,” was a gentleman of the old school and a man of granite integrity whose army career, in the judgment of his superior officers, was based on a combination of intelligence, diligence, dependability, and, above all, honesty.43 His outstanding characteristic, according to Jerzy Kluger, was that he was a “just man,” and he believed he had a responsibility to transmit that commitment to living justly to his son.44

  Having worked previously as a tailor, Wojtyła served for twenty-seven years in one of the most remarkable creations of the Habsburg Empire, an army that was perhaps the modern world’s first great multinational institution. Leading the troops of a polyglot empire, its officers were expected to be multilingual and to speak fluently the language of the men whom they led.45 Once an aristocratic caste, the Habsburg officer corps was composed of a majority of commoners by the time of Karol Wojtyła’s service. And in the European world of the Dreyfus Affair, an environment in which anti-Semitism flourished, the officer corps of the Dual Monarchy included a large number of Jews. It was not without its faults, but judging from the reports filed by Karol Wojtyła’s superiors and by Wojtyła’s advancement in rank, the army of the Dual Monarchy was an organization in which the character, responsibility, and personal decency for which the young Polish soldier was praised were valued and rewarded.46