Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  It was not all earnest conversation about serious issues. Wujek had an extraordinary memory, and loved to sing songs to the end of the last verse, sometimes leaving others in the choral dust. Puns and situation-jokes were frequent.65 His memory could be a bit disarming. Trekking along a trail, Wujek would recite entire poems or long sections of prose and then demand, “Who’s that?” His knowledge of literature was formidable, and he did not hesitate to make critical judgments. When Danuta Rybicka was finally allowed to attend graduate school, one of her professors, Kazimierz Wyka, a pro-regime Catholic, once said that Wojciech Żukrowski, author of Stone Tablets, was a “Catholic author,” a comment Mrs. Rybicka reported to then-Bishop Wojtyła. “No, he’s a writer who’s a Catholic,” Wujek replied. Professors were not to be challenged in class, but the intrepid Mrs. Rybicka brought it up, at which point Professor Wyka asked, “Where’d you get that?” “From Bishop Wojtyła,” she replied. “That’s okay, then,” said the professor, “he knows literature and faith.”66

  Wojtyła’s pastoral strategy of “accompaniment” was an attempt to get beyond the pattern of sporadic encounters between priests and young people that frequently resulted in the priest being suspected of prying into the crevices of conscience. “Accompaniment” was a way of “walking with” young adults, of helping them unveil their humanity by living through their problems with them. As a colleague would later put it, Wojtyła “tried to accompany someone else in their problems; he was open to revealing the humanity of another.”67

  In Wojtyła’s view, this was the way a priest lived out his vocation to be an alter Christus, “another Christ.” It was also another expression of his commitment to the spirituality of the Cross. God himself had accompanied human beings into the most extreme situation resulting from bad human choices—death—through his own divine choice to be redeemer as well as creator. That is what happened on the cross of Christ.68 The cross was the final justification for a pastoral strategy of accompaniment.

  Father Karol Wojtyła’s distinctive priestly “style” came into sharpest focus in the confessional. Private confession to a priest is a difficult aspect of Catholic sacramental practice for the non-Catholic to understand. Other Christians will ask why personal confession to the living, risen Christ is insufficient. Nonbelievers wonder whether it is seemly to unburden oneself of one’s most intimate secrets to someone who might be a virtual stranger. Like other Catholics, Karol Wojtyła believed that confession (the sacrament of penance, or, as it is now known, the sacrament of reconciliation) had been mandated by Christ himself (see John 20.19–22). To be a confessor was, in his mind, another way of accompanying the drama of another life.

  He was, by the testimony of his penitents, a “fantastic confessor.”69 Confession with Father Wojtyła could last as long as an hour, sometimes even longer. Each confession was an exchange of ideas between two individuals, “not the mass production of Christians.”70 The individuality that Wojtyła fostered in the confessional was another reflection of his “openness to individual paths,” his capacity to “enter into others’ experiences.”71 Ultimately though, there was no ducking the responsibility of making a decision. “He didn’t impose,” one penitent recalled, “but he did demand”—that decisions be made as wisely as possible. He believed his penitents and friends had it within themselves to know the truth and live it.72

  The goal of confession, Wojtyła believed, was not psychic relief from stress or inappropriate guilt, although that could be a helpful by-product. The goal was the sanctification of all of life, which could not be divided neatly into containers labeled “religious” and “other.” Moreover, the sanctification received through the regular practice of confession and a lengthy, conversational review of one’s life in all its dimensions would lead to vocational clarity. The penitent would come to know what he or she ought to do, as well as who he or she was. A career was not the purpose of life. Life was vocational, and one of the confessor’s privileges was to help a penitent discern the vocation to which God had called him or her.73 As he once told Danuta Rybicka, whether one lived in a convent, in marriage, or as a single person in the world, “You have to live for a concrete purpose.”74

  Karol Wojtyła’s style as a confessor was another example of his creativity as a minister of the Gospel. The theological manuals from which he had been trained had a highly juridical view of the sacrament of penance. Though the sacrament was, fundamentally, a sacrament of God’s mercy, the stress was nevertheless on the confessor as judge.

  Wojtyła was, by all accounts, a demanding confessor but in a very different way. The confessor’s role in the drama of the human condition was to accompany a fellow Christian and a fellow human being in order to promote the penitent’s spiritual discernment. The goal was to deepen one’s Christian conviction and insight, not simply to internalize a checklist of moral prohibitions. The rules were there; they were real; they were to be obeyed. But the rules were not arbitrary. They defined the drama because they illuminated the dramatic tension of life, the tension between the person-I-am and the person-I-ought-to-be. The confessor was to be a counselor in the practice of the virtues. The idea, as it happens, was classic Thomas Aquinas. It was given a distinctively contemporary expression in Karol Wojtyła, whose theology and pastoral practice was informed by his experience of the theater and his explorations in the psychological sciences.75

  THE RICHNESS OF FRIENDSHIP

  Środowisko, its people, and their lives were Wujek’s bridge to the world where his people were actually living, and trying to do so as mature Catholics. What had begun in the quarry at Zakrzówek and the Solvay plant at Borek Fałęcki was deepened and broadened through the people of Środowisko: “He lived our problems,” Stanisław Rybicki recalls. “He knew life from this side—the side of people who really have to work for their living.”76

  The networks that eventually became Środowisko came into being at the same time Wojtyła’s intellectual life was accelerating through his postdoctoral studies and the teaching he began at the Catholic University of Lublin in 1954. The two experiences were mutually reinforcing. Środowisko was, in a sense, the empirical tether for Wojtyła’s increasing skill at philosophical reflection. “We were an experimental field for his ideas,” said Danuta Ciesielska. “We were growing into our lives as families and [into] our professional lives, and he learned from us. But we don’t feel proud that we taught him something; it was a mutual exchange.”77

  The ideas that Wujek tested with his Środowisko are suggested by five themes from his student retreat in 1954:

  There was no dividing life up into the serious and the frivolous, the true and the unimportant. The contemporary tendency to fragment life, or to reduce the question of truth to a secondary issue, had to be resisted. “The method of the Kingdom of God is the method of truth.” Because of that “man must be prepared to agree with reality in its totality.”

  Christianity was not for the sacristy and the sanctuary alone, nor was it an abstraction. “The Kingdom of God proclaimed by Christ is not merely theory…but a call to action.”

  Jesus Christ was not God pretending to be man; Jesus Christ was the incarnation of God entered fully into the drama of the human condition. “One man experienced the might of the holiness of God: Jesus Christ. He bore the weight of man’s guilt and stood bearing this ballast before God. The awareness of sin on the one hand and of the holiness of God on the other drew Him to sacrifice Himself and to union with God. This explains the mystery of the garden of Gethsemane and of Golgotha….”

  Love is not “fulfilling” oneself through the use of another. Love is giving oneself to another, for the good of the other, and receiving the other as a gift.78

  The lethal paradox of the age was that, for all its alleged humanism, it had ended up devaluing the human person into an economic unit, an ideological category, an expression of a class or race or ethnicity.

  You are great, Wujek told his young people, because you are God’s creation. Anyone who tries
to pull you below that standard is demeaning you.79 Asked why Father Wojtyła was so attractive to young people, Teresa Malecka answered, simply, “He is a good man.”80 His capacity to convince others of their capacity for goodness was a part of that magnetism.

  THE NOVICE ESSAYIST

  In early 1949, Jerzy Turowicz, the elfin editor of Kraków’s Catholic newspaper, Tygodnik Powszechny [Universal Weekly], had a visitor, a young priest back from graduate studies in Rome. The priest, Father Karol Wojtyła, whom Turowicz remembered having seen perform in the clandestine Rhapsodic Theater during the war, had an article he had written on the Mission de France and the worker-priest movement in that country. Turowicz received him politely but noncommittally. The paper received many submissions from the local clergy and rejected more than a few of them. Turowicz had learned not to expect too much. As he read Wojtyła’s manuscript, he got interested, then excited. “Mission de France” appeared on the front page of Tygodnik Powszechny on March 6, 1949, a prestigious debut for a novice essayist.

  The Prince Cardinal, Adam Sapieha, understanding that the future of the Polish Church required Catholicism to have a strong, intelligent voice in the national culture, had begun making plans for Tygodnik Powszechny while the Occupation still held Kraków in its iron grip. The cardinal appointed Father Jan Piwowarczyk, the former seminary rector and one of the outstanding priests of the archdiocese, as “ecclesiastical assistant” to the paper, with responsibility for theological and moral issues and a general oversight of the weekly. Tygodnik Powszechny may even have been Piwowarczyk’s idea. He had been editor-in-chief of Głos Narodu [The Voice of the People], an afternoon daily in Kraków that the archdiocese had taken over from the Christian Democratic Party when the latter fell apart prior to World War II. Piwowarczyk’s assistant at Głos Narodu was a young journalist named Turowicz, who became editor-in-chief when Piwowarczyk was transferred to a parish in the spring of 1939. Turowicz’s editorial tenure was a mere two months. Hans Frank had no intention of permitting a Catholic newspaper in his fief. Now, with the cardinal’s enthusiastic support for the project, Turowicz was hired to run the new paper.81

  The Catholic press’s situation in communist-run Poland was not a happy one. There were three groups. The first was the official Church press, sponsored, controlled, edited, and published by diocesan chancery offices or religious orders. The quality was not striking. Then there was what Turowicz dismissed as a “press of Catholics,” the papers and magazines published by “Pax” and similar regime-sympathetic groups. The Church refused to recognize these journals as authentically Catholic and discouraged serious Catholics from writing for them. Finally, there was the genuine Catholic press, edited primarily by lay people and recognized as authentically Catholic by the bishops, who would assign them “ecclesiastical assistants.” These assistants were working members of the staff, and final editorial responsibility rested with the lay editor.82

  By reason of its literary quality and intellectual dynamism, Tygodnik Powszechny was communist-run Poland’s best newspaper, the most reliable source of unfiltered information, and the most open, interesting forum for social commentary. Its seriousness of purpose and its impact within the Polish literary class, Catholic and non-Catholic, was acknowledged by the regime—Tygodnik Powszechny was constantly harassed by the state, its content censored and its circulation manipulated by the government’s monopoly on newsprint. The communists were also unhappy that Tygodnik Powszechny, benefiting immensely from the regime’s clumsiness with intellectuals, had on its editorial staff such men as art historian Jacek Woźniakowski and Stanisław Rodziński, a brilliant modern painter (and later rector of the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts), whose religious and political convictions made them unemployable in the state-run universities.

  Tygodnik Powszechny had a readership “multiplier” that would have been the envy of any Western magazine from the 1950s through the 1980s. Passed hand-to-hand through a wide network of intellectuals, the paper played a crucial role over the years in linking dissident Catholic intellectuals to their non-Catholic counterparts. With its sister monthly, Znak [Sign], it was also Polish Catholicism’s link to the intellectual ferment under way in Western European Catholicism. In its pages and Znak’s, Karol Wojtyła and others first read in translation the work of Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar, Karl Rahner, and other theologians who would shape the Second Vatican Council. Tygodnik Powszechny was, in Turowicz’s recollection, the only Catholic paper in the communist world that took theology seriously.83

  More than a few Polish bishops regarded Tygodnik Powszechny as dangerously independent and “liberal,” and the paper caused occasional headaches for the Primate, Cardinal Wyszyński. These tensions notwithstanding, Tygodnik Powszechny was a refuge of honesty in a swamp of communist and acquiescent-Catholic journalistic mendacity. That it took cultural and intellectual life as seriously as questions of the Church and public affairs marked it as a precious rarity in Catholic publishing for its time and place, or any other, for that matter.

  “Mission de France,” Father Karol Wojtyła’s inaugural essay for the paper, was a critically sympathetic look at the worker-priest movement as an innovative pastoral response to the desperate circumstances of postwar French Catholicism, always a magnet of interest for Polish Catholic intellectuals.

  France, he wrote, seemed an anomaly. The Church’s intellectual culture was highly developed and the country was sinking into post-Christian paganism. What, he asked, was the “meeting point” between these two phenomena? He found it in the recently devised Mission de France, the inspiration of the Abbé Godin, whose book, France: A Mission Country?, had brought the archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Emmanuel Suhard, to tears. Godin had moved out of his rectory into typical worker housing in the Paris suburbs, where he had made himself like his parishioners and lived “a full and personal assimilation of the Gospel.” The key to the renewal of the French Church, Godin believed, would only come when the French Church’s “conceptual riches” were transformed “into values of the apostolate.”

  What Godin had found in the cities and others had found in rural areas was an “absolutely de-Christianized terrain,” where life “no longer has any tie with the Christian religious tradition…These are the environments in which the children, seeing the body upon the crucifix, ask: ‘Who is that?’” This was, of course, the end result that Poland’s new communist masters had in mind for their country.

  The most innovative and courageous French Church leaders had “looked reality in the face” and decided the Church must “transform itself into a community which demonstrated to the unbelievers who surrounded them what the Gospel is in relation to life.” Priests and committed laity alike had to live out a “spirit of poverty and unselfishness” in the new Mission de France worker-priest parishes, and the priests had to engage in manual labor. This was not only a return to the traditions of St. Paul, Wojtyła argued, but a recovery of the idea of the priest as “the man who offers with and through Christ each fragment of the pain of men, of their work, to the Father in heaven.”

  Wojtyła was also taken with the communal life of the worker-priests (“a great help for the personal experience of the priesthood in all its fullness”) and by their commitment to a method of persuasion. The new apostles in France could not presume anything, nor could they impose convictions. Their “endeavor [was] to convince.” He also applauded the liturgical reforms, including dialogue Masses, which, by encouraging the people’s active participation, made the Mass an instrument of “Christian initiation.” Finally, Wojtyła was greatly impressed by the emphasis on a converted (or reconverted) laity in the Mission de France. The laity, he insisted, were “responsible for the social realization and continuation of the mystery of the Incarnation.” And in doing so, they were not conducting a “resistance, an opposition.” Rather, this was a “positive activity,” an exercise in the construction of “a new type of Christian culture.”84

  Father Wojtyła’s second essay in Tygodnik Powszechn
y was his tribute to Jan Tyranowski, entitled “Apostle.” In the years that followed he would contribute essays on Christian anthropology, marital chastity, and other issues to both Tygodnik Powszechny and Znak. In 1957–1958, he wrote, at Turowicz’s request, a twenty-part series entitled “ABCs of Ethics,” perhaps his most extended pre-papal effort at presenting serious philosophical and theological issues to a nonspecialist audience in a way that would satisfy the intellectually curious and the philosophically trained. In laying out the basics of a Christian philosophical and theological approach to the moral life, Wojtyła took up some of the more controverted questions between Christians and nonbelievers. Was there a common moral border between the two camps? (Yes, the natural moral law.) Was the moral law a merely human construct? (No, the Nuremberg trials had demonstrated that a transcendent moral law existed.) Was a religiously informed ethics a barrier to human maturity? (No, because holding oneself responsible to God’s judgment is an impetus to moral seriousness.)85

  Tygodnik Powszechny was not only a literary outlet for the young priest-essayist; its people became part of his social and intellectual milieu. Here he could talk about theological and ecclesiastical issues with fellow intellectuals who had also given their lives to the Church, although the great majority had done so as laity. He became friends with the Turowicz family, but over decades of friendship and collaboration, they never addressed each other familiarly. The editor always called him “Father” (never “Karol”) and Wojtyła always called Turowicz, in the (virtually untranslatable, but certainly formal) Polish fashion “Pan Jerzy” or “Pan Doctor Jerzy.”86 Father Wojtyła attended the occasional Tygodnik Powszechny office party, and his relationship with the staff was secure enough that there could be real arguments when there were disagreements.87 It was, in both directions, a happy and productive relationship.