Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  He could not have known, when he first wrote about it in Person and Act, that “solidarity” would become the banner under which the history of the twentieth century would be dramatically changed.

  THE CRISIS AND THE PROPOSAL

  Karol Wojtyła’s philosophical project will be assessed by professional philosophers for a long time to come. Those who are not professional philosophers but who admire intellectual courage will remain impressed by his effort to bridge the gap that had been opened in the seventeenth century between the world we want to grasp and the intellectual processes through which we wrestle with that world. Philosophy, however, was never an end in itself for Wojtyła. It was always in service to his apostolic, evangelical, and pastoral life as priest and bishop. Leaving the professional assessment of his philosophical accomplishment to his philosophical peers, it thus makes sense to assess the pastoral achievement of Wojtyła’s philosophical work.

  His first achievement was to demonstrate that a Law of the Gift was built into the human condition. What he would later call the “threshold of hope” was not so much ahead of us as above us, in the dramatic struggle to surrender the persons that we are to the persons we ought to be.86 That struggle can only be resolved by self-giving. Wojtyła’s demonstration of the Law of the Gift can be engaged by anyone patient enough to work through a philosophical argument, and in engaging it, they will meet a concept of goodness with traction, one that does not collapse into a mere “social construct.”87

  Wojtyła’s second achievement as a pastorally engaged intellectual was a function of his wide range of interests. His literary training and theatrical experience were joined to a rigorous philosophical analysis to produce a picture of human life as inherently, “structurally” dramatic. We are not accidents of biochemistry or history, adrift in the cosmos. We can, as moral actors, become the protagonists, not the objects (or victims), of the drama of life. It was a demonstration with appeal to those living under totalitarian repression and to those oppressed by a sense of powerlessness rooted in nihilism.

  Wojtyła also developed a profound critique of the utilitarianism that permeates modern culture—the temptation to measure others by their financial, social, political, or sexual utility to me—by demonstrating the moral fact that our relationship to truth, goodness, and beauty is the true stuff of our humanity. Finally, Wojtyła showed how accepting the moral truth involved in the Law of the Gift is not a limit on our freedom or our creativity. Truth makes us free and enables us to live our freedom toward its goal, which is happiness.

  The Italian philosopher Rocco Buttiglione, one of the most insightful commentators on Karol Wojtyła’s philosophical project, suggests that there is a “hidden theological tendency” in Wojtyła’s personalism.88 His method of analysis, in Person and Act, was strictly philosophical, but the inspiration was Christian. It is in God the Holy Trinity, a “community” of self-giving “persons” who lose nothing of their uniqueness in their radical self-giving, that we see confirmed the Law of the Gift and the truth about freedom as freedom-for-self-donation. Wojtyła’s philosophy, like every other aspect of his life, was touched by his ongoing dialogue with God in prayer. As his life unfolded, that “theological tendency” in his philosophical thought became more and more explicit.

  HOMECOMING

  On December 7, 1965, the day before the Second Vatican Council closed, Dignitatis Humanae and Gaudium et Spes were solemnly promulgated—a moment of great satisfaction for Archbishop Karol Wojtyła. That same day, the mutual excommunications leveled in the eleventh century by the Pope and the Patriarch of Constantinople were lifted by Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras and Pope Paul VI, a landmark in ecumenism between Western and Eastern Christianity. For Wojtyła and the Polish episcopate, though, the most dramatic episode at the end of the Council was the letter of forgiveness and reconciliation they sent to the German bishops.

  Poland was planning to celebrate the millennium of its Christianity in 1966, an event to which Primate Wyszyński hoped to attract bishops and Catholic leaders from all over the world, including Pope Paul VI. In the closing weeks of the Council, the Polish episcopate dispatched fifty-six letters of invitation to the millennium celebrations to other national episcopates, most members of which were, of course, living in Rome at the time. The November 18 letter to the German hierarchy, which Karol Wojtyła helped draft (and which was discussed with German bishops before it was released), was devoted in large part to a detailed review of the difficult history of relations between the two countries. The Polish bishops recounted the immense sufferings of their own people at German hands, while acknowledging that Germans, too, had suffered from Poles. The letter ended, “We forgive, and we ask your forgiveness.”89

  The Polish bishops’ letter was intended to have specific, concrete consequences. By clearing the air between the two hierarchies before the millennium of Polish Christianity, it would help make it possible to regularize the situation of the Polish dioceses in the “Recovered Territories” of postwar western Poland, the permanence of which as Polish dioceses the Vatican had refused to acknowledge, given the lack of an international treaty finalizing the new German/Polish border. These practical considerations notwithstanding, though, the letter was a magnificent Christian gesture and a dramatic expression of the oft-cited “spirit of Vatican II.” The Church wanted to act as a reconciler in the world. The Church could not be that kind of reconciler without reconciliation in its own household. The Poles would take the lead in reconciling one of the great animosities in the second millennium of Christian history, applying John XXIII’s “medicine of mercy” to one of the Church’s deepest wounds.

  The Polish government, however, saw the letter as an opportunity to try to drive a wedge between the Church and the Polish people, refused to let it be printed in the Polish press, and launched a vicious campaign against the bishops under the rubric, “We do not forget and we will not forgive.” Many Catholics, not at all sympathetic to the regime, were shocked by the idea that Poles had any reason to ask Germans for forgiveness in light of the horrors of recent history. On his return from Rome, Archbishop Wojtyła held a meeting with members of his Środowisko, some of whom had taken serious exception to the letter.90 But a private session to sort out the issues among friends was one thing; a public attack was something else.

  As part of its anti-episcopate campaign, the regime concocted an “Open Letter from the Workers of the Soda Plant in Kraków to Archbishop Karol Wojtyła,” which was published in the December 22, 1965, issue of the daily paper, Gazeta Krakowska. It was an obvious, clumsy propaganda exercise. According to the letter that had doubtless been prepared for their (required) signatures, the Solvay plant workers professed themselves “deeply shocked” that the archbishop would talk matters over with German bishops and “make an authoritarian decision on matters of vital interest to our nation.” “No one gave a mandate to the Polish bishops to take a position on matters…belonging to the competence of other venues,” the letter declared. The only body “entitled to make pronouncements in the name of the Polish nation is the government of the Polish People’s Republic.” As if any further hints about its literary and ideological pedigree were needed, the letter asserted that “the Germans do not have anything to be forgiven for, since the direct guilt for bringing about the Second World War and its bestial course falls exclusively on German imperialism and fascism, and its successor, the Federal Republic of Germany.” The “workers” concluded by reiterating their “deep disappointment” at the “uncitizenlike behavior” of their archbishop, especially since he had been a “laborer at our plant during the Nazi Occupation.”91

  Never one to turn down a catechetical opportunity, Archbishop Wojtyła wrote back on Christmas Eve, in a letter that had to circulate as samizdat, since the regime refused to allow its publication.

  After noting that he had received a copy of the alleged “workers’ letter” only after having first read it in Krakowska Gazeta, the archbishop recalled his time at the
Zakrzówek quarry and the Borek Fałęcki chemical plant. These years had been a “priceless and vital experience” for him, “the best school of life,” and the “best preparation” possible for his present responsibilities. Men who had shared such an experience couldn’t have written the kind of letter and made the kind of accusations the archbishop had just read. “A careful reading” of their letter suggested that they couldn’t, in fact, have written it if they had been “honestly acquainted…with the actual text of the letter of the Polish bishops to the German bishops and with the German bishops’ response to this letter.”

  Any serious person who had actually read the two texts would have to acknowledge three things, he continued. First, these letters grew out of “the deepest principles of Christian ethics contained in the Gospel.” Second, the Polish bishops’ letter made plain the history of horrors that Poles had suffered at German hands. The German bishops’ letter, he pointed out, “accepted this accusation in its full extent, asking first God himself, and then us, to forgive the guilt of their nation.” In light of this, the Polish bishops’ request for forgiveness “maintains its proportions in accordance with the Gospel.” In so long and tangled a history as that of Germany and Poland, it was inconceivable that “people would not have something for which to ask mutual forgiveness.” Finally, the Polish bishops had defended the present Polish position in the Recovered Territories, and the Germans had acknowledged that the present generation of Poles living there “considers these lands to be their native region.”

  Wojtyła concluded with an example of the Christian humanism he had proposed to the Council’s Ante-Preparatory Commission in 1959, that he had just helped define at Vatican II, and whose foundations he was trying to secure in Person and Act: “When we worked together during the Occupation, a lot of things united us, foremost [among them] a respect for the human being, for conscience, individuality, and social dignity. That is what I learned in large measure from the workers of ‘Solvay’ but I am unable to find this fundamental principle in your open letter….”92

  As had become his custom, Archbishop Karol Wojtyła celebrated midnight Mass on Christmas Eve in the open fields at Nowa Huta. On Christmas morning, he said a private Mass in the chapel at the archbishop’s residence for former Solvay colleagues and their families.93 At a sermon on New Year’s Eve at the Mariacki Church in the Old Town market square, he spoke of Vatican II as an encounter with the mysteries of modern history. He then told the congregation that history could not be turned back, no matter what the authorities were trying to do by keeping Nowa Huta officially church-free. And he announced that he had brought back with him, on the highway between the tomb of St. Stanisław and the tomb of St. Peter on which he had first set out in 1962, a stone from Peter’s grave, donated and blessed by Pope Paul VI. It would be the cornerstone of the church to be built at Nowa Huta, some day.

  The new battle lines in the struggle for religious freedom had been drawn. Although the struggle would intensify over the next thirteen years, the battle would now be fought by Polish Catholics supported by the full weight of a solemn conciliar pronouncement on religious freedom as the first of human rights.

  On this front, and on many others, Archbishop Karol Wojtyła now proposed to put the Council he had helped shape into practice.

  Successor to St. Stanislaw

  Living the Council in Kraków

  MARCH 8, 1964

  Karol Wojtyła installed as Archbishop of Kraków.

  MAY 1964

  Wojtyła’s essay, “Reflections on Fatherhood,” published pseudonymously in Znak.

  MAY 7, 1965

  Archbishop Wojtyła establishes annual archdiocesan Day of the Sick.

  1966

  Poland celebrates the millennium of its Christianity.

  APRIL 1966

  Wojtyła’s millennium poem, “Easter Vigil,” published pseudonymously in Znak.

  JUNE 28, 1967

  Karol Wojtyła is created a cardinal by Pope Paul VI.

  AUGUST 31, 1967

  Poland’s communist regime shuts down the Rhapsodic Theater.

  OCTOBER 14, 1967

  Cardinal Wojtyła breaks ground for the Ark Church in Nowa Huta.

  FEBRUARY 1968

  A commission of Kraków theologians submits its memorandum, “The Foundations of the Church’s Doctrine on the Principles of Conjugal Life,” to Pope Paul VI.

  AUGUST–SEPTEMBER 1969

  Cardinal Wojtyła travels through Canada and the United States.

  FALL 1969

  Wojtyła establishes the archdiocesan Institute of Family Studies.

  SEPTEMBER 11–OCTOBER 28, 1969

  Cardinal Wojtyła participates in the international Synod of Bishops in Rome.

  1970

  Wojtyła writes Sources of Renewal, a guided tour of Vatican II’s documents.

  DECEMBER 16–17, 1970

  Wojtyła’s Person and Act is debated at the Catholic University of Lublin.

  SEPTEMBER 30–NOVEMBER 6, 1971

  Wojtyła participates in the Synod of Bishops on the ministerial priesthood and justice in the world.

  DECEMBER 24, 1971

  Cardinal Wojtyła celebrates his first Christmas midnight Mass in an open field in Miestrzejowice.

  MAY 8, 1972

  The Synod of Kraków opens.

  AUGUST 16, 1972

  Cardinal Wojtyła celebrates Mass at a campsite on Błyszcz mountain, the Oasis movement’s “Mt. Tabor.”

  FEBRUARY 1973

  Wojtyła represents the Polish Church at the International Eucharistic Congress in Melbourne, Australia.

  APRIL 16, 1974

  Cardinal Wojtyła defies the Czechoslovak communist regime by speaking at the funeral of Cardinal Stefan Trochta in Litom??ice.

  SEPTEMBER 27–OCTOBER 26, 1974

  Wojtyła serves as relator of the Synod of Bishops on evangelization.

  MAY 1975

  Wojtyła’s poem-cycle, “Meditation on Death,” published pseudonymously in Znak.

  MARCH 7–13, 1976

  Cardinal Wojtyła preaches the Lenten retreat to Pope Paul VI and the Roman Curia.

  JULY 13–SEPTEMBER 11, 1976

  Wojtyła travels to the United States for the International Eucharistic Congress in Philadelphia.

  MAY 15, 1977

  Cardinal Wojtyła dedicates the Ark Church in Nowa Huta.

  SEPTEMBER 30–OCTOBER 29, 1977

  Wojtyła participates in the Synod of Bishops on religious education.

  MAY 25, 1978

  Cardinal Wojtyła defends the basic human rights of all Poles before tens of thousands of pilgrims during Kraków’s annual Corpus Christi procession.

  At t 9:45 A.M. on March 8, 1964, the head sacristan of Wawel Cathedral ceremonially processed through the great stone structure to the cathedral’s west door, carrying a small silver casket with the relics of the martyred St. Stanisław. Outside, in the courtyard, the archbishop-elect was waiting. Karol Józef Wojtyła, vested in cappa magna and ermine mozzetta, kissed the reliquary containing the mortal remains of his predecessor, the first bishop of Kraków, and walked up the steps to be installed as archbishop. He was met at the door by the cathedral chapter, a group of senior priests resplendent in medieval fur collars. One of the canons welcomed him with a speech recounting the history of the archdiocese, and the dean of the chapter handed over the keys of the church. As the archbishop-elect walked through his cathedral, stopping to pray at the shrine of St. Stanisław, at the great black cross of Blessed Queen Jadwiga, and in the Blessed Sacrament chapel, he retraced his path of a quarter-century ago, just before Luftwaffe bombs had begun falling on Poland’s ancient capital.

  Entering the sanctuary, the archbishop-elect sat on a temporary throne as the chancellor of the archdiocese read aloud the Papal Bull naming Karol Wojtyła metropolitan archbishop of Kraków, first in Latin, then in Polish. The archbishop rose, kissed the altar, and was installed on the cathedra, the throne or bishop’s chair, of Wawe
l Cathedral, where he sat and received the homage of his auxiliary bishops, the cathedral chapter, the priests of the archdiocese, the seminary professors, the superiors of religious communities, and, finally, the young seminarians, whom he greeted with obvious affection.

  Forty-three-year-old Archbishop Karol Wojtyła, the seventy-sixth bishop in an episcopal line reaching back to Poland’s origins in the kingdom of the Piasts, then preached to his people about what was happening that day—to him and to them.

  It was impossible to enter Wawel Cathedral, he said, “without fear and awe.” Here was gathered the “whole of our nation’s past,” the only foundation on which a truly Polish future could be built. Whenever he entered the cathedral, he said, he felt “something being born.” Thus he wished “now to humble myself before the highest and deepest mystery of birth which is in God Himself. I wish to pay the deepest worship of which man is capable…to the Eternal Word, the Son born eternally of the Father….”

  He was, he said, a son of the Church of Kraków, “which has borne me as a mother bears a son.” But if he remained a son, he was also, now, their father, born as their archbishop on this day of installation: “Peter, in the person of Pope Paul VI, has said to me, ‘Feed my sheep’…These words have tremendous authority; they draw strength from the words of Christ Himself—when He said ‘Feed my sheep’ to St. Peter, Pope Paul’s predecessor. So, my dear ones, I now stand on the threshold of that great reality which is expressed by the word ‘Pastor.’ And I know that I stand there as of right, that I am not entering by any other way than through the door of the sheepfold whom Christ has appointed, that is to say, through Peter….”