Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  Catholicism does not consider the priesthood a career but a vocation, a calling or invitation from God to “put on Jesus Christ” in a singular way. A priestly vocation is thus a complex work of the Holy Spirit whose inner dynamics cannot be reduced to psychological categories. Being orphaned before his twenty-first birthday certainly had its effect on Karol Wojtyła’s discernment of a call to the priesthood. That it took almost a year and a half for the decision to mature suggests that considerable interior wrestling went on before the final step was taken. Later in life, when describing these years to friends and colleagues, he would speak of an evolutionary process of gradual clarification or “interior illumination.”99 During 1941 and the first half of 1942, Karol Wojtyła, moved by the humiliation of totalitarian occupation and by the heroism he had witnessed in the face of it, began to sense in himself a “progressive detachment from my earlier plans.”100 The priesthood began to loom larger as a way to live in resistance to the degradation of human dignity by brutal ideology.

  There were other influences at work, and a pattern began to emerge from what might otherwise seem a random series of acquaintances. The captain and Lolek had never discussed a possible vocation to the priesthood, but the son would later recall the father’s life of prayer and self-sacrifice as “a kind of domestic seminary.”101 The same might be said of the workers at the quarry and the Solvay chemical plant, the heroic Salesians of the Dębniki parish, the Kraków Carmelites with whom he once made a wartime retreat, the Living Rosary and Jan Tyranowski, and the continuing guidance of Father Figlewicz.

  Teachers and contemporaries in Wadowice and Kraków had told him that he was bound for the altar. He had always resisted the notion. Now, an idea that would eventually become one of his deepest convictions began to take shape: that in the sometimes baffling designs of Providence, there is no such thing as a mere coincidence. An orphan before his majority; his intellectual gifts and his longstanding bent toward a life of prayer; the hardships he had endured during the Occupation; his passion for the theater—like the people who had touched his life most profoundly, these were not fragmentary incidents in a life, but signposts along a path pointing in the direction of the priesthood. It was not so much a question of his choosing this vocation against others. Throughout the spring and summer of 1942 the conviction grew in him that he had been chosen. And to that election there could be only one response.102

  In the autumn of 1942, Karol Wojtyła walked to the seventeenth-century residence of the archbishops of Kraków at Franciszkańska, 3, a few blocks from the Old Town market square, and asked to be received as a candidate for the priesthood. The rector of the seminary, Father Jan Piwowarczyk, accepted him, and Karol began to lead a new, double life.

  In the first days of the Occupation, the Gestapo had tried to control the seminary, intending to downgrade it to a kind of clerical trade school with no instruction by university-level professors. The seminary, with the agreement of Archbishop Sapieha, simply ignored these instructions. The Gestapo’s next move was to ban the reception of new seminarians. The archbishop’s response was to hire the young aspirants as “parish secretaries,” place them in local parishes, and have them attend classes clandestinely at the Kraków seminary. Raids were frequent. On one occasion five students were arrested, immediately executed by firing squad or dispatched to Auschwitz.

  The archbishop then decided to take the seminary fully underground. Candidates would be accepted secretly. They would continue their work, telling no one of their new position. They would study in their free time, occasionally presenting themselves to professors for examination. And in due course, it was hoped, they would complete their studies and be ordained, having managed to avoid the Gestapo in the interim.

  Karol Wojtyła was among the first ten seminarians chosen for this extraordinary process of clandestine priestly formation. He continued to work at Borek Fałęcki. Always a reader, he studied during the overnight shift without drawing special attention. He also continued to perform with the Rhapsodic Theater, but Mieczysław Kotlarczyk eventually had to be told that his young protégé’s time could no longer be poured so readily into preparing scripts, rehearsing, and performing.103

  Kotlarczyk passionately disagreed with Karol’s decision to become a priest and “tried for days to dissuade him.”104 It was not that Kotlarczyk was anti-clerical. On the contrary, he was a devout Catholic. In his visionary’s world, though, the most important thing was the theater, where one best served God and Poland. Halina Królikiewicz remembers that it was all a “complicated business because everybody thought [Wojtyła] would become an actor. But we also knew his piety and devotion, so we understood.”105 But it took a while. Wojtyła’s friends recruited Tadeusz Kudliński, whom Karol knew and respected from the Jagiellonian student theater group, for an all-night, curfew-breaking, one-on-one debate with Lolek. Kudliński reportedly tried to persuade Karol to remain “in the world” through the Gospel parable of the talents: God had given him abilities as an actor, and it would be burying his talents to refuse to develop them.106 That argument failing, Kudliński tried the young seminarian’s favorite poet, Norwid, himself borrowing from Scripture: “Light does not exist to be kept under a bushel.” Karol refused to budge.107 He had been chosen. He could not decline the gift.

  Wojtyła’s biggest problem in his early days as a clandestine seminarian was not with his Rhapsodic Theater colleagues, however, but with philosophy, and specifically with metaphysics. Then as now, the intellectual preparation of seminarians included courses in philosophy. One of the books Karol was assigned to read and digest for examination was Kazimierz Wais’s Metaphysics, a 1926 text written in the dry, dense, highly abstract formulas of early twentieth-century neo-scholasticism. Karol Wojtyła, a literary man, had never encountered anything like this before, and it floored him. But, as he later said, “after two months of hacking my way through this vegetation I came to a clearing, to the discovery of the deep reasons for what until then I had only lived and felt…. What intuition and sensibility had until then taught me about the world found solid confirmation.”108

  Put another way, Karol Wojtyła was inoculated against the infection of radical skepticism in the chemical factory at Borek Fałęcki, as watery lime splashed against the pages of Metaphysics. There he discovered a “new world of existence” built around the classic conviction, central to the philosophy of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, that the world was intelligible.109 That conviction was the foundation from which he would think philosophically in the future. The war had given him a direct, indeed harsh, experience of reality. Wais, for all the agonies he inflicted, put in place the first building blocks for a philosophical defense of realism—the intelligibility of the world—against radical skepticism and its cousin, moral relativism.

  Reality soon imposed itself on the worker-seminarian in other, direct ways. On February 29, 1944, Karol Wojtyła was walking home from a double shift at Borek Fałęcki when he was struck down by a German truck. Mrs. Józefa Florek, seeing the body in the road, jumped off the tram she was riding and found Karol lying unconscious. Shielding him from the traffic, she managed to flag down a car. A German officer got out and told her to fetch some muddy water from a nearby ditch. They cleaned the blood off Karol, and when the officer saw that he was still alive, he stopped a passing lumber truck and told them to take the semiconscious man to a local hospital. When Karol woke up at last he found his head wrapped in bandages and his arm in a cast. He had suffered a severe concussion, numerous cuts, and a shoulder injury. He spent the next two weeks in the hospital, recuperating and pondering the peculiar ways of Providence. That he had survived this incident seemed a confirmation of his priestly vocation.

  While living his double life, Karol often went to the archbishop’s residence to serve Archbishop Sapieha’s morning Mass, a practice he continued after recovering from his accident. One morning in April 1944, his fellow server and another clandestine student for the priesthood, Jerzy Zachuta, didn’t show up at F
ranciszkańska, 3. After Mass, Karol went to Zachuta’s home to see what had happened. In the middle of the previous night, the Gestapo had taken his classmate away. Immediately afterward, the name of Jerzy Zachuta appeared on a Gestapo poster listing Poles to be shot.110 One was taken, the other remained. In the designs of Providence, there are no mere coincidences.

  Four months later, on August 1, Poland’s capital exploded in the Warsaw Uprising, the desperate attempt by the underground Polish Home Army to rid the nation’s capital of the Germans and establish the legitimacy of an independent Polish government before the Soviet army arrived. After two months of indescribably fierce fighting, including pew-by-pew, hand-to-hand combat in St. John’s Cathedral, the city fell while the Soviet army sat just across the Vistula, doing nothing; better for the Germans to exterminate the Home Army than to have to do it themselves. Warsaw was then leveled on Hitler’s personal order. Nothing more than two feet high was to be left standing.

  August 6, the liturgical feast of the Transfiguration, was “Black Sunday” in Kraków as the Gestapo swept the city, rounding up young men to forestall a reprise of the Warsaw Uprising. Archbishop Sapieha immediately called in his underground seminarians, intending to hide them in his residence. Mieczysław Maliński, by now another clandestine candidate for the priesthood, had taken a group of boys out for a hike that afternoon. On their way back they spotted the Gestapo roundup and hid. That evening Maliński, after making provision for his young charges, snuck through fields and neighbors’ gardens, working his way back to his home in Dębniki, where he found his family safe. In the early morning hours, there was an ominous knock on the door. The family froze, but it was a priest from the archdiocese, sent by Sapieha to order Maliński to report to the archbishop’s residence later that day. When he arrived there, Maliński’s first question was, “Is Karol Wojtyła here?”111

  He was, but it had been a close call. During the sweep the day before, the Gestapo had searched the first two floors of the house at Tyniecka, 10. Karol had remained behind a closed door in his basement apartment, praying for deliverance with heart pounding.112 Once the Germans departed empty-handed, Irena Szkocka volunteered to help Lolek get across town to the archbishop’s, walking a block ahead as a scout. Entering the residence, he was immediately given a cassock to wear; in the event of a raid, Archbishop Sapieha intended to inform the Gestapo that all these young men were his secretaries.

  Even asylum created problems. Hans Frank’s “Labor Office” began to make inquiries about the Borek Fałęcki worker who wasn’t showing up on the time sheets. At the archbishop’s request, Father Figlewicz met with the plant director to see what could be done to make Karol Wojtyła “disappear.” The director was hesitant to take such a chance, but he must have made arrangements. Inquiries about robotnik Wojtyła ceased. As Wojtyła himself would later put it, the authorities “were unable to find my trail.”113

  Father Stanisław Smoleński was the young seminarians’ spiritual director and Father Kazimierz Kusak was prefect of studies. With Father Piwowarczyk, who had accepted Wojtyła as a clandestine seminarian, now assigned to a parish, Archbishop Sapieha himself was the rector. Living in daily contact with the archbishop, Karol Wojtyła came to know the man who would be his model of Church leadership for more than half a century.

  “AN UNBROKEN PRINCE”

  Adam Stefan Sapieha was the scion of a noble Polish-Lithuanian family. His early ecclesiastical career was spent in Rome, where he served as a secretary to Pope Pius X, who personally consecrated him a bishop in the Sistine Chapel on December 17, 1911, giving him a plain gold pectoral cross.114 Sapieha was a “short man of iron will,” a leader with a great natural authority that reflected his innate dignity and strength of character.115 At his ceremonial ingress into his new see in 1912, he went straight from the railway station to visit a poor-house, keeping the gentry who had expected to host him for breakfast waiting and causing a flutter among his fellow nobles.116 In a line of bishops that traced its roots back to the martyred St. Stanisław, he would, in his old age, give new meaning to the tradition that the bishop of Kraków was the final defensor civitatis, the ultimate “defender of the city.”117

  The Prince Archbishop, as everyone called him, had not prospered during the reign of Pius XI. These two strong personalities had crossed swords when the future pope was papal nuncio in Poland in the immediate aftermath of World War I, and during Pius XI’s pontificate, Sapieha was denied the cardinal’s red hat worn by his two predecessors, Albin Dunajewski and Jan Puzyna.118 A week before Pius XI died in February 1939, Sapieha, pleading ill health and age (he was seventy-two at the time), wrote the pope asking permission to resign—a rarity among bishops in that era. His letter was never answered because of Pius’s death. When Sapieha renewed the request to the newly elected Pius XII on a visit to Rome in April of that year, he was refused. The political situation was deteriorating and things were too unstable to risk a change. Sapieha would have to stay in place.

  He soon became the “uncrowned king of Poland,” or, in the words of John Paul II, an “unbroken prince” who was a “real pater patriae” to a nation facing extermination.*

  The primate, Cardinal Hlond, having fled in September 1939 with the Polish government, lived in southern France from the fall of 1940 through February 1944, when he was arrested by the Gestapo and taken to Wiedenbrück in Westphalia, where he was liberated by American troops on April 1, 1945.120 During the entire war, Adam Stefan Sapieha, growing stronger as he grew older, was the unshakable foundation of Catholic resistance to the Nazi Occupation. In ancient Polish custom, the Primate of Poland held the office of Interrex during the period between the death of one Polish king and the election of his successor. Archbishop Sapieha was the de facto Interrex of Poland for more than five years—the focal point of legitimate authority in a nation being run by gangsters. It was a role he assumed without hesitation.

  Hans Frank, evidently looking for some sliver of legitimation, hinted repeatedly that an invitation to dinner at the archbishop’s residence would be well-received. Sapieha finally issued the invitation and sat the master of Occupied Poland at the other end of his formal dinner table. The two men were alone. Dinner was then served: black bread, made in part from acorns; jam made from beets (sugar beets for sweetness, red beets for color); ersatz coffee. When Frank stared down the table at his host, the archbishop blandly explained that this was the ration available on the food coupons distributed by the Nazis, and he certainly couldn’t risk reprimand or the arrest of one of his servants by dealing on the black market.121 Hans Frank’s reply is lost to history. Presumably he did not press for a second invitation.

  Sapieha’s natural authority reflected his aristocratic lineage and bearing, but bloodlines alone could not sustain a man in these desperate circumstances. Every night at 9 P.M., the seminarians saw the Prince Archbishop go into his chapel alone, for an hour. It was understood that he was presenting his problems to his Lord, and that he was not to be disturbed.122

  The problems were grave in the last extreme. His priests were being arrested and shipped off to concentration camps or executed. Parishes had to be assisted in their efforts to help prisoners at the Nazi labor camps, by hiding food in the woods for them. A constant stream of prisoners into Gestapo headquarters across the street from the archbishop’s residence had to be defended. Families whose fathers had disappeared needed assistance. So did Kraków’s Jewish community, on whose behalf Sapieha made representations to Hans Frank at least twice. The archbishop also ordered baptismal certificates issued to Jews in order to help them escape the Holocaust. There were parents and spouses to be comforted. All of this Sapieha did on his own, cut off from contact with Rome. On two occasions the archbishop tried to warn the Vatican of Nazi plans to exterminate Jews and Polish nationals.123

  Yet in the midst of the Occupation, Adam Stefan Sapieha planned for the future. A member of the reformist wing of the Polish hierarchy, Sapieha had broken up huge old parishes before the
war and created new ones, bringing his priests closer to his people. He had also reformed the seminary, insisting on serious theological instruction. As the war wound down, he began to make plans for a new Catholic newspaper, Tygodnik Powszechny [Universal Weekly], to be edited by a young lay journalist, Jerzy Turowicz. The archbishop assigned one of the archdiocese’s leading priest-intellectuals, Father Jan Piwowarczyk, the former seminary rector, as “ecclesiastical adviser” to the paper.

  Above all, Sapieha was convinced that the revitalization of Polish Catholicism after the war required a well-educated and dynamic corps of priests. So he risked his life in creating the clandestine seminary program during the early years of the Occupation, and he quite literally turned his house over to the underground seminary in the aftermath of Black Sunday, 1944. Both students and faculty joked about being under “house arrest.”124 Life was spartan. Each student had his own bed or cot, but the only other furniture was a common table. What meager personal possessions they had brought with them were stored in suitcases under their beds, in what had once been one of the archbishop’s drawing rooms.125

  At his first meeting with the students the archbishop announced that he was not prepared to wait any longer for the Germans to reopen the seminary. He himself would be the rector. If they were discovered and the Nazis wanted to take reprisals against him, so be it. “We will trust in God’s Providence,” he concluded. “No harm will befall us.”126

  For a man of his background, and given the ecclesiastical protocol of the time, Sapieha was remarkably available to his young boarders. He would simply show up during recreation, visiting with the students; he tried to have a word with each of them during the course of the day. The students, for their part, came to know the man who would ordain them priests. They could see the depth of his piety, both in his solitary evening prayer and in the long thanksgiving meditations he made after saying his morning Mass.