Under the leadership of Fathers Smoleński and Kusak, Sapieha’s underground seminary was organized on a full daily schedule. The students got up at 6 A.M. for an hour of private prayer. Mass was celebrated at 7 A.M., with breakfast following. Classes were then held from 8:15 until noon, in another of Sapieha’s drawing rooms. At 12 noon, students and faculty stopped to recite the Angelus and an act of contrition. Lunch and recreation in the archbishop’s garden followed. In mid-afternoon, the students went to the chapel for fifteen minutes of adoration before the Blessed Sacrament; this was followed by private study. At 6:30 P.M., either Father Smoleński or Archbishop Sapieha would give a conference on a spiritual topic. Dinner was at 7 P.M., with evening prayer and personal devotions at 8:15. Confessions were heard once a week; the students were free to choose their own confessors, among the faculty or from priests brought into the seminary from outside. The academic year began with a three-day retreat, an intensified period of prayer without academic classes, usually led by Father Smoleński. Another major retreat was held in Lent, and briefer retreats took place throughout the year. Guest speakers were invited to enrich the academic curriculum. Juliusz Osterwa came to give the underground seminarians elocution lessons and explain how a sermon should be preached—which, given the typical pattern of clergy/lay relations in the Poland of that era, must have ranked as a considerable innovation.127
Later in life, Pope John Paul II remarked somewhat wistfully that he had never had a real experience of the seminary, given the war and its immediate aftermath, but young Karol Wojtyła seemed to have little trouble adjusting to life during his months of “house arrest” at Franciszkańska, 3.128 His intellectual capabilities were soon apparent to his classmates, as was his piety. The Prince Archbishop himself quickly came to appreciate the talents of the young man from Wadowice who, to Sapieha’s way of thinking, was finally where he belonged.
LOSING TWICE: THE COMMUNIST OCCUPATION OF POLAND
As the Red Army’s 1st Ukrainian Front drove westward past Dębica and Tarnów, the Occupation prepared to abandon Kraków. Explosive charges were set, and on the night of January 17–18, 1945, the Germans quit the city, blowing up the Dębniki Bridge and breaking the windows in the archbishop’s residence.129 The students set to work the next day cleaning things up at Franciszkańska, 3. Shortly afterward they moved to reclaim the old seminary building near Wawel Castle, which had been occupied by the SS. The seminary was a catastrophe. Its windows had been shattered, the tiled roof had collapsed, the central heating had failed, and the SS’s prisoners had kept from freezing by lighting open fires in the rooms. Worst of all were the lavatories, where piles of frozen excrement had to be chopped up and carted away. Karol Wojtyła and Mieczysław Maliński volunteered for this odious task, after which carrying tiles to the roof was a relief.130
The young seminarians, having survived the Occupation, might have imagined that a return to normality in a free and independent Poland was at hand. If they did, they were quickly disabused of the notion. For the second time during the Second World War, Poland was about to be sacrificed to a totalitarian power.
The Polish Government-in-Exile in London was denied a significant voice in shaping its country’s future. In July 1944, the Moscow-controlled Polish Committee for National Liberation, known in the West as the “Lublin Committee,” signed an agreement with the USSR giving the Soviets complete control over law and order in the rear of the advancing Red Army. This set the stage for a reprise of the first days of the Nazi Occupation, as local officials were replaced (often under bogus charges of collaboration), resistance units were broken up or incorporated into Soviet-friendly groups, and anyone disinclined to obey was shot.131
What unfolded in the wake of this new occupation took place within new frontiers. At the Tehran and Yalta Conferences, the Western Allies had agreed to move “Poland” some 150 miles west on the map of Europe. Wilno and Lwów would now be in the Soviet Union, albeit in the pseudo-“republics” of Lithuania and Ukraine. Breslau, Stettin, and Danzig were “recovered” from Germany and henceforth known as Wrocław, Szczecin, and Gdańsk. A little more than half the territory of interwar Poland was included in the new Polish People’s Republic, and the territory the new Poland lost (approximately 108,000 square miles) was far more than what it gained (some 61,000 square miles).132 Poland’s transplantation westward would cause problems between Polish Catholicism and the Vatican for almost a quarter-century, and helped set the stage for two of the most brutal persecutions of Catholicism in the USSR, in the Lithuanian and Ukrainian Soviet Socialist “Republics.”
The war had also drastically altered Polish demographics, and no social class had been spared. The intelligentsia, including the Church leadership, had been gravely weakened. Polish Jewry had been almost completely destroyed in the Holocaust. Combined with the loss of its old eastern lands and the expulsion of Germans from the “Recovered Territories” in what was now western Poland, the net result was the most Polish (and Catholic) Poland in Polish history.133
The new rulers brought with them a checkered history. The interwar Communist Party of Poland (KPP) had been a political embarrassment and an ideological concern to Moscow; its incapacity to make headway politically was compounded by its tendency toward ideological deviations. In 1938, during his own Great Purge in the Soviet Union, Stalin liquidated some 5,000 KPP members; others would eventually die in the Gulag.134 After the German invasion of the USSR in June 1941, however, Stalin saw that a resurrected Poland under communist auspices would suit his purposes and the Polish Workers’ Party was born. Władysław Gomułka, who had escaped Stalin’s purge of the KPP because he had been jailed at the time by his own government, emerged as First Secretary.135 While every inch a hard-line communist, Gomułka was also, in his way, a Polish patriot nervous about the impact of Soviet imperialism on the “Polish road to socialism.” So he was forced aside in 1948 in favor of Bolesław Bierut, an unreconstructed Stalinist who would cause no migraines in the Kremlin. By mid-1948, reconstituted Poland was thoroughly enmeshed in the Soviet external empire, its defense minister a senior Red Army officer intent on protecting the land bridge to the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany. The new Poland, a putative expression of an ideology that had never gained a foothold among the Polish people, and a state whose geopolitical raison d’être was the security of the Soviet Union, was a product of the Red Army and of pusillanimous Western policy. Poland’s “liberation” in 1945 was a euphemism.
All of which made an enduring impression on Karol Wojtyła. Yalta, for him, became something more than the cruel truth that Poland, presumably one of World War II’s victors, was in fact a double loser. Yalta was the triumph of a false and inhuman power realism over the moral pledges that the Western allies had made to Poland before and during the war. Yalta was where those who imagined themselves the forces of freedom blinked a second time when confronted by another totalitarian power. World War II had ended not with the reestablishment of freedom and the restoration of the rights of nations, but with communist totalitarianism spread over more than half of Europe and over other parts of the world. Yalta was a grave injustice, and no enduring peace could be built on that kind of foundation. Politics, even world politics, was not a matter of power alone. Moral issues were engaged.
Meanwhile, as Poland was being reshackled by communism—a process Stalin once described as akin to “fitting a cow with a saddle”136—Prince Archbishop Sapieha visited the archdiocesan soup kitchen, disguised in a battered old overcoat and hat, to make sure that the soup being served to the destitute doctors, lawyers, professors, and other professionals of “liberated” Kraków was up to his standards. It was.137
Ad Altare Dei
Amid the ironies and tragedies of Poland’s “liberation,” life gradually returned to something approaching normality in the Kraków seminary. The Jagiellonian University reemerged from underground, and Karol Wojtyła completed his third year of theological studies as World War II wound down in the West. He was elec
ted a vice president of the Students’ Fraternal Aid Society of the university, an organization that helped distribute Western aid to the impoverished student body. His personal commitment to living in poverty continued to make an impression on his seminary classmates. Sent a new sweater by Mieczysław Kotlarczyk, he gave it away to a beggar who came and asked for him by name.138
After a summer vacation on the outskirts of Kraków at the parish in Raciborowice, Karol began his fourth and final year of preordination theology in the fall of 1945, while working as a teaching assistant in undergraduate theology courses. Among his professors was the formidable Father Ignacy Rózycki. The demanding theologian noticed that his prize pupil put a small inscription—“To Jesus through Mary,” or “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph”—at the top of every page of every paper he submitted. It was a habit Karol had formed years before, and it would continue throughout his writing life. Rózycki encouraged Wojtyła’s interest in St. John of the Cross. Karol, for his part, continued to teach himself Spanish, a project he had begun the year before using a German-Spanish dictionary as his guide; his goal was to read the Carmelite mystic in the original.139
Karol had in fact been wrestling for some time with the question of whether he should enter the Discalced Carmelite monastery at Czerna to pursue a contemplative life in complete withdrawal from the world. At one point in 1945 he finally put the question to the Prince Archbishop, who responded tersely: “First you have to finish what you have begun.” Sapieha’s brisk conclusion resolved the matter. Over a half-century later, John Paul II would reminisce that, despite his intense interest in John of the Cross, “I don’t think I had a very strong vocation to the Carmelites.”140
Shortly after the war, Karol became aware of the self-sacrifice of Father Maximilian Mary Kolbe in the Auschwitz starvation bunker. The martyred Franciscan, who had given up his life to save a fellow prisoner, a married man with children, became a model of the priest as a man who lives his sacramental condition as an alter Christus, “another Christ,” by complete self-emptying in service to his people. It was an ideal that was inculcated at the Kraków seminary through communal recitation of the “Litany of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Priest and Victim,” a staple of the seminary’s piety based on the New Testament’s Letter to the Hebrews. The Kraków litany, which includes eight invocations of Jesus Christ as the victim of a redeeming sacrifice, drove home to the seminarians that dying-to-self—self-gift or self-immolation—was the crux of any Christian vocation seriously lived, and most especially the vocation of the priesthood.141 The idea of self-gift would reemerge time and again in Wojtyła’s life-work, and would become one of the crucial concepts in his philosophy of the human person and of human moral agency.
THE PRIEST
On February 18, 1946, Adam Stefan Sapieha was created a cardinal by Pope Pius XII. When he returned to Kraków in March, his train was met at the station by a group of students who honored this great hero of the Occupation by lifting his car and carrying it and the new Prince of the Church to St. Mary’s Church in the Old Town market square.142 At a seminary celebration of Sapieha’s cardinalate, Karol Wojtyła declaimed a homily by Father Kajsiewicz, a nineteenth-century Polish hero, on the religious meaning of patriotism—hardly a random choice of topic.143
In late June and early July 1946, Wojtyła successfully passed examinations in Scripture, dogmatic theology, moral theology, canon law, and catechetics to complete his preordination theology course.144
Cardinal Sapieha, who wanted his most talented priests to have an experience of Rome, had decided that Karol should begin doctoral studies in theology at Rome’s Pontifical Athenaeum of St. Thomas Aquinas (universally known as “the Angelicum”), in the fall 1946 semester.145 First, the cardinal would ordain him a priest on an accelerated schedule.
The entire month of October 1946 was an intense month of preparation for priestly ordination. After a six-day retreat led by Father Smoleński, the seminary spiritual director, Karol, having solemnly bound himself to a life of celibacy and to praying daily the Liturgy of the Hours (the Divine Office, or breviary), was ordained a subdeacon by the Prince Cardinal on October 13.146 A week later, after a three-day retreat made privately, he was ordained deacon by the archbishop on October 20. He then made another six-day retreat in preparation for his ordination to the priesthood, which was scheduled for November 1: the great solemnity of All Saints and the fifth anniversary of the Rhapsodic Theater’s premiere performance of King-Spirit. While these preordination preparations were taking place, Stanisław Starowieyski, a younger seminarian not yet ordained, whom Sapieha was sending to Rome for his entire course of theological studies, arranged their tickets and passports so that his friend Wojtyła could focus completely on his retreats.
On the morning of November 1, 1946, Karol Wojtyła, the only candidate for ordination that day, processed into the archbishop’s private chapel in the episcopal residence at Franciszkańska, 3.147 The archbishop had already made an indelible impression on Karol’s thinking by his example. According to the Church’s theology, he would now make an indelible impression on Karol’s soul through the act of ordination. The priesthood, as both ordaining prelate and ordinand understood it, was not simply a matter of what one did; it was a matter of who one is. His baptism in Wadowice had marked Karol Wojtyła as a Christian. What was about to transpire in the archbishop’s chapel would mark him as a priest of Christ.
After the Mass’s first Scripture reading, Cardinal Sapieha sat on a faldstool, a small portable throne, in front of the altar. Karol knelt before him, vested in amice, alb, cincture, stole, and maniple. A folded chasuble lay over his left arm, and he held a lighted white candle in his right hand. After the seminary authorities formally testified that he was worthy of Holy Orders, Karol was addressed by the cardinal, who charged him to be “perfect in faith and action…well-grounded in the virtue of the twofold love of God and of neighbor.” Karol then prostrated himself facedown on the floor, his arms extended as on a cross, while the Litany of the Saints was chanted over him—the Church on earth asking the Church in heaven to come to the aid of the man about to be ordained a priest.148
At the end of the litany, Karol rose and knelt before Cardinal Sapieha, who stood in silence and laid his hands on Karol’s head in the central act of the rite of ordination. After calling down upon the ordinand the power of the Holy Spirit, the cardinal sat again, took that part of the stole that was hanging behind Karol’s left shoulder, brought it over his right shoulder and crossed it over his breast, saying, “Take thou the yoke of the Lord, for His yoke is sweet and His burden light.” The cardinal vested Karol in the chasuble, the outermost vestment of the priest celebrating Mass, saying, “Take thou the priestly vestment whereby charity is signified; for God is well able to give thee an increase of charity and its perfect works.”
After the Church’s ancient hymn to the Holy Spirit, “Veni Creator Spiritus,” the cardinal sat again on the faldstool and Karol knelt before him for his priestly anointing. The cardinal anointed the palms of Karol’s hands, held open before him, first with the sign of the cross, and then all over, while praying, “Be pleased, O Lord, to consecrate and hallow these hands by this anointing, and our blessing.” The cardinal then brought Karol’s hands together and one of the assisting priests bound them with a white cloth. Sapieha took a chalice containing wine and water and a paten holding a host. While Karol held his bound hands before him, the cardinal placed the chalice and its covering paten between his fingers so that they touched both sacred vessels, and prayed, “Receive the power to offer Sacrifice to God, and to celebrate Mass, both for the living and the dead, in the name of the Lord.”
After Karol’s hands were cleansed, he presented his lighted candle to the cardinal as a votive offering. The Mass continued with Father Karol Wojtyła now celebrating the Church’s central act of worship with Cardinal Sapieha, exchanging with him the ancient kiss of peace, and joining him in receiving the Body and Blood of Christ in Holy Communion. After Communion,
and sitting once again on the faldstool before the altar, Cardinal Sapieha laid his hands on Karol, kneeling before him, while praying, “Receive the Holy Spirit: whose sins thou shalt forgive, they are forgiven them; and whose sins thou shalt retain, they are retained.” Unfolding the back half of the chasuble down Karol’s back, he then prayed, “The Lord clothe thee with the robe of innocence,” and then asked Karol to promise reverence and obedience to himself, as his bishop, and to his successors. After Karol had responded, “Promitto” [I promise], the cardinal exchanged with him again the kiss of peace. Then the cardinal, rising with his miter and his pastoral staff, blessed Karol thrice, saying, “The blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, descend upon you: that you may be blessed in the Priestly Order and may offer propitiatory sacrifices for the sins and offense of the people to Almighty God, to whom belongs glory and honor, world without end.”
At the end of the ordination Mass, the cardinal, seated on the faldstool for the last time, addressed the newest priest of the Archdiocese of Kraków in these words: “Dearly beloved son, consider attentively the Order you have taken and the burden laid on your shoulders. Endeavor to lead a holy and godly life, and to please almighty God, that you may obtain His grace, which may He of His mercy be pleased to grant you. Having been ordained a priest, you shall say, after your first Mass, three other Masses: one of the Holy Spirit, one of the blessed Mary ever-virgin, and a third for the faithful departed. And pray also to almighty God for me.” The cardinal concluded the rite by reciting the prologue to John’s Gospel, ending, “And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us; and we saw His glory, the glory as it were of the Only-Begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.”
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