Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  It was not all work. The new bishop kept up his kayaking during two-week excursions with Środowisko friends in late July and early August of each year. He also skied whenever possible. Karol Wojtyła always loved Christmas and took advantage of the Polish custom of extending the holiday through January to participate in many Opłatek celebrations, at which groups of Polish friends break and share a Christmas wafer while singing traditional carols, most of which the bishop knew by heart. He also kept in touch with the Rhapsodic Theater, celebrating a twentieth-anniversary Mass for the troupe at Wawel Cathedral on September 19, 1961, and pseudonymously publishing an essay on “Forefathers’ Eve and the Twentieth Anniversary” in Tygodnik Powszechny.

  THE VICAR CAPITULAR

  Archbishop Eugeniusz Baziak died on the night of June 14–15, 1962. Bishop Wojtyła substituted for the deceased archbishop at the ordination of new priests for the archdiocese on June 15. On June 19, he welcomed those who had come for the archbishop’s funeral with a richly biblical homily, drawing out a gentler aspect of Baziak’s character that those who had seen only his severity might have missed. The late archbishop was like the Gospel figure of the good shepherd, who not only watches, guards, and defends, but who searches for the lost sheep, “and, having found it, returns it to the flock, and rejoices, and is glad….”13

  The priests and people of Kraków buried Archbishop Eugeniusz Baziak, the exile, in the Bishop Zebrzydowski chapel of Wawel Cathedral, near the great black cross where Queen Jadwiga had prayed. On his tombstone, they gave him in death the title the communists had denied him in life: “Archbishop of Kraków.”

  A week later, Bishop Wojtyła, en route to a reunion of his former students, stopped at a parish north of Kraków to celebrate Mass. The local priest had just been arrested for saying Mass “illegally” in a temporary building outside the parish church, and Wojtyła wanted to show solidarity with the parish and its imprisoned pastor. He soon had a more formal responsibility in the face of persecution. On July 16, the Metropolitan Chapter, a group of senior priests, elected Bishop Wojtyła “vicar capitular,” or temporary administrator, of the Archdiocese of Kraków until a successor to Archbishop Baziak (and, technically speaking, to Cardinal Sapieha) could be appointed and installed. It was a striking vote of confidence in the younger of Kraków’s auxiliary bishops—who, two weeks later, honored the principle that “Wujek will remain Wujek” by taking his annual fortnightly kayaking trip with his young couples and their families. During the trip they discussed the significance of the forthcoming Second Vatican Council, which Pope John XXIII had announced in 1959. Wujek insisted that it would be a watershed in the life of the Church.14

  After years of preparation, the Council was set to open in Rome on October 11, 1962, but Wojtyła had urgent local business to attend to first. The city’s communist authorities were trying to claim the Kraków seminary’s building on July Manifesto Street for the Higher School of Pedagogy. Informed of this by the Metropolitan Chapter while he was on a parish visitation in the countryside, the vicar capitular came straight back to Kraków and, to everyone’s amazement, asked to see the secretary of the local Communist Party. It was the first such meeting ever and it paid a handsome return. The Higher School of Pedagogy was permitted to use the third floor of the building, but the seminary remained on the first two floors and thus kept control of the building until the nascent pedagogues vacated the premises in the summer of 1979.15

  There was also a personal matter of grave concern. Dr. Wanda Połtawska, a psychiatrist who had been a great help in preparing Love and Responsibility, was stricken with what the doctors diagnosed as terminal cancer. Wojtyła wrote the Italian Capuchin stigmatic, Padre Pio, asking for his prayers. When Dr. Połtawska was X-rayed prior to her scheduled surgery, the cancerous mass had disappeared. It was, Wojtyła believed, a miracle wrought by Padre Pio’s intercession, another example of the extraordinary that lay just on the other side of the ordinary.16

  Now he was ready for Vatican II. Bishop Karol Wojtyła departed for Rome on the evening of October 5, 1962, taking leave of his priests and people, gathered for Mass at Wawel Cathedral, with “great personal emotion” and “great trembling of heart” as he set out on a “great highway from the tomb of St. Stanisław to the tomb of St. Peter.”17 Although he had told his friends that Vatican II would be something rare and important, he could not have foreseen in detail just how crucial the forthcoming Council would be for the self-understanding of the Roman Catholic Church, for its struggle to survive in communist-dominated east central Europe, for the Church’s encounter with the modern world—and for the future of the Titular Bishop of Ombi and Vicar Capitular of the Archdiocese of Kraków.

  THE GAMBLE OF VATICAN II

  There have been only twenty-one general or “ecumenical” councils in the history of the Catholic Church. These gatherings of all the world’s bishops in communion with the Bishop of Rome have been held in Asia Minor, northern Italy, France, Germany, and Rome, lasting as briefly as a few months and as long as eighteen years.18 Ecumenical councils have defined dogma, written creeds, condemned heresy, laid down guidelines for sacramental practice, deposed emperors, fought schisms, and proposed schemes for the reunification of Christianity. No matter where they took place, what they did, or how long they took to do their work, virtually every one of them was steeped in conflict and followed by controversy.19

  When Pope John XXIII stunned the Church and the world on January 25, 1959, by announcing his intention to call an ecumenical council, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini—who would succeed him as pope, bring the Council to a successful conclusion, and suffer through thirteen years of conflict over its implementation—called a friend and said, “This holy old boy doesn’t realize what a hornet’s nest he’s stirring up.”20 Montini was, by nature, a man who worried an issue. In this instance he was prescient.

  Pope John planned an ecumenical council unprecedented in the history of the Church. Previous councils had completed their work by issuing creeds, canons, condemnations, or other formal doctrinal decrees, which provided interpretive “keys” to a Council’s work. John wanted his Council to be pastoral and evangelical rather than juridical and dogmatic. He envisioned an open conversation in which the world’s bishops would relive the experience of Christ’s apostles at Pentecost. The Second Vatican Council, in the Pope’s mind, would renew Christian faith as a vibrant way of life; it would engage modernity in dialogue; it would issue no condemnations; it would try to give voice again to the pure message of the Gospel. It would, in the now-famous phrase, open the Church’s windows to the modern world.

  To do all of this without providing authoritative interpretive “keys” to its work was an enormous risk. In many of its leading intellectual and scientific centers, the modern world to which the Church proposed to open itself was closing its own windows on any idea of transcendence. Catholicism had been largely cut off from the pan-Christian ecumenical movement. Its theological life was still shadowed by the Modernist crisis of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. An aggressively atheistic opponent with its own ultra-mundane theory of redemption controlled the destinies of billions of human beings. The Church itself was deeply divided about the possibility of a serious dialogue with modernity. Some senior churchmen believed that any conversation with the political forces let loose in the French Revolution would inevitably lead to Christianity’s collapse. Others believed, just as passionately, that the Church’s vision of human dignity and human destiny could help direct the modern quest for freedom into productive rather than destructive channels. To take an ancient religious institution into an open-ended conversation about its nature, its worship, its mission, and its relationship to the world under these circumstances was a tremendous act of faith in the power of the Holy Spirit to guide the Church in truth.

  There is a familiar telling of the story of how Pope John’s great gamble worked out in which the conciliar lines of battle are clearly drawn between good “liberals” and ba
d “conservatives,” the former winning in the end despite the intransigence of the latter. This “Whig” interpretation of the history of Vatican II has important elements of truth in it. The Roman Curia, the Church’s central bureaucracy, had become intellectually ossified and too often identified its own concerns with the needs of the universal Church. Catholicism, as Pope John famously put it in his opening address to the Council, had used too much of the medicine of condemnation and too little of the medicine of mercy in its approach to modernity. The Church’s theology, its study of Scripture, its worship, and its approach to modern politics all needed development. It is also true that these necessary developments were resisted, sometimes bitterly and with some throwing of sharp elbows, by churchmen who can accurately be described as anti-modern. Politicking certainly had a lot to do with how the Council played itself out, and there were surely identifiable “camps” or parties involved in this. The Council was composed of men, and large gatherings of human beings make decisions through political processes and factions.

  All that can be conceded to the Whig or “progressive” interpretation of Vatican II—and yet, Pope John Paul II would insist, that telling of the story still misses the essential experience, the crucial point, of the Council.21

  Karol Wojtyła attended every session of the Second Vatican Council. He has often spoken about the great “debt” he owes to Vatican II, which had a “unique and unrepeatable meaning for all who took part in it.” It was a time of “great spiritual enrichment,” shaped by “the experience of a worldwide community.”22 The Council was a “great gift to the Church, to all those who took part in it, to the entire human family….”23 It was “the seminary of the Holy Spirit,”24 a time in which Christ’s promise to his apostles, “I am with you always” (Matthew 28.20), “took on a special freshness.”25 In payment of his personal debt to the Council and in fulfillment of his commitment to its teaching, Karol Wojtyła initiated one of the most extensive implementations of the Council of any diocese in the world.

  Given that experience and that testimony, he must be taken seriously when, as archbishop of Kraków and as Bishop of Rome, he has insisted that any interpretation of the Council that does not treat Vatican II as, first and foremost, a profound spiritual experience—an “act of love” amid the hatreds of the age, an effort to “enrich” the faith of the Church so that Christians might live an “increasingly full participation in divine truth”26—is simply going to miss what was central to the experience of the Council itself. Karol Wojtyła was not, and is not, a naïf. As an active participant in the four sessions (or “periods”) of Vatican II and in working groups that refined draft documents between the Council’s formal meetings in Rome, he knew a lot about the backstage politics of Vaticanum Secundum, as he and fellow Poles called it. Knowing all that, he still insisted (and insists) that Vatican II can only be understood fully and truthfully if one understands it as a religious event, not a political contest, in which the Holy Spirit, not ecclesiastical factions, was the chief protagonist. Anyone interested in understanding Wojtyła as bishop and as Pope must make the effort to “get inside” Vatican II as he experienced it.

  A SON OF THE COUNCIL

  The Second Vatican Council gave Karol Wojtyła, who had not been outside Poland since returning from his Roman graduate studies in 1948, a new and very concrete sense of the Church’s universality. He came from a country preparing to celebrate the millennium of its baptism. Now, traveling to Rome every fall for the two-month-long Council sessions, he met bishops from churches barely a century old who were debating the future of Catholicism with vigor and insight. It was, he said, “an inspiration” to him, an experience he tried to grasp poetically in verses scribbled on the sides of official Council working documents and mailed off to Tygodnik Powszechny.27 He was deeply moved, for example, by his first extensive contacts with Africans, and by the discovery that they were living the same truth in quite different ways:

  It’s exactly You, My Dear Brother, I feel in you an enormous land, in which rivers rapidly disappear…as sun burns the body like a foundry burns iron

  —I feel in you a similar thought:

  If the thought does not run in a similar way, it separates with the same balance

  truth and error.

  There is joy of weighing these thoughts on one balance,

  thoughts which glitter in your eyes and mine in a different way, although they

  have the same content.28

  In addition to meeting and working with the world’s leading churchmen, Karol Wojtyła also had the opportunity at Vatican II to rediscover old friends and get caught up on more than two decades of their lives. Jerzy Kluger, working in Rome as an engineer, hadn’t seen his classmate from Wadowice since World War II had broken out. One day he read in a Roman paper about a speech at the Council by an Archbishop Karol Wojtyła of Kraków. Kluger called the Polish Institute in Rome, where Wojtyła stayed during the Council sessions, and asked to speak to him. Wojtyła was out, but called back on his return and asked his classmate to come over immediately. Kluger worked his way through the purgatorial Roman traffic and entered the Polish Institute. When Wojtyła came downstairs, the two didn’t say anything, but simply looked at each other in silence. Then they embraced. When Kluger tried to address the archbishop as “Your Excellency,” Wojtyła said, “What do you mean, Excellency? Call me Lolek….”29

  There were also ancient places to be reencountered or discovered. Wojtyła not only became reacquainted with Rome during the Council, but took Pope Paul’s suggestion that bishops try to visit the Holy Land prior to the Pope’s own pilgrimage there in 1964. For ten days in December 1963, Wojtyła walked the paths where Jesus had trod, sat on hillsides where Jesus had preached, prayed at the spot when Jesus had died. He went with “several score” of other bishops, who began in Egypt and thus relived the “exodus to the Promised Land which the Chosen People traveled in the Old Testament.” In Bethlehem, he wrote the priests of Kraków, “the Polish bishops sang a few Polish Christmas carols” at the grotto of the Nativity, at the request of an aged Polish Franciscan who had worked in Jerusalem for years. The bishops walked on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, a “holy spot for Christians” because it was the site of “the Temple of the true God, which Our Lord plainly called ‘the house of my Father,’” and because “our Redeemer visited this temple many times in his lifetime.” The mystic starkness of the Judean wilderness left a lasting impression on Wojtyła, as on so many others. Here he was powerfully struck by the fact that God, in order to redeem the world, had entered history at one time and one place. As he put it in a poem, “You seek out people everywhere/But to seek everywhere/You had to stop in some place./This one is chosen by You.”30

  To walk along the Galilean shoreline from which the apostle Peter had set out to fish for men made one kind of impression. The experience of the Council itself deepened Karol Wojtyła’s understanding of the Office of Peter—the papal ministry—in the Church. He had seen Pius XII as a young priest-student, but the pope who had nominated him a bishop was a remote figure. Now, working with Popes John XXIII and Paul VI and spending hours every day inside St. Peter’s Basilica, just a few hundred yards from the apostle’s tomb, he was profoundly struck by what the Office of Peter meant for the Church—and what that office exacted from the man who held it. Once again, poetry was the best way to express what he was learning:

  In this place our feet meet the ground, on which were raised

  so many walls and colonnades…if you don’t get lost in them but

  go on finding

  unity and sense—

  it is because She is leading you. She connects not only the spaces of a

  renaissance building, but also spaces In Us,

  who go ahead so very conscious of our weakness and disaster.

  It is You, Peter. You want to be the Stone Floor, so that they will

  pass over you

  (going ahead, not knowing where), that they should go where you
>
  lead their feet,

  so that they should connect into one the spaces which through

  sight help the

  thought to be born.

  You want to be Him who serves the feet—like rock the hooves of sheep:

  The rock is also the stone floor of the gigantic temple. The Pasture is the cross.31

  Even as the Council deepened his sense of Rome’s meaning as the center of unity for an increasingly diverse universal Church, Karol Wojtyła, according to those who know him best, kept a critical distance from the temptation to regard “Rome” as the Church—what some call the virus of Romanità. His primary responsibility was in Kraków, and he made use of his regular presence in Rome during the four autumns of the Council to do some business for the home front. In May 1963, between the first and second sessions of the Council, he had unveiled a memorial at Wawel Cathedral to Rafał Kalinowski and Adam (Brother Albert) Chmielowski, making some pointed comments about these two “Polish rebels” whose participation in the 1863 Uprising was “a stage on the road to sanctity.” During the second session itself, he convinced all the Polish bishops to sign a petition, or “postulation,” supporting the beatification of Brother Albert. Together with the Roman promoter of Chmielowski’s cause, he called on Cardinal Arcadio Larraona, Prefect of the Sacred Congregation of Rites, to press the cause of Brother Albert in person.