One focal point for this strategy was Nowa Huta, the model workers’ town-without-a-church built by the communists on the outskirts of Kraków. The new town was filled with enormous apartment blocks, some of which contained as many as 450 flats, yet there was no way to pass laterally from one apartment to another down the long axis of a building. If you wanted to visit a neighbor outside the two- or three-apartment module in which you lived, you went down the stairs or elevator, left the building, reentered through another door, and then climbed the stairs or took the elevator up to your neighbor’s module. Nowa Huta’s apartment blocks were aptly described as human filing cabinets, and the cabinets were deliberately designed to keep the files separated. Churches, places for communities independent of the regime, had no place in Nowa Huta.
The great symbol of the struggle for Nowa Huta’s soul was the building of what became known as the “Ark Church,” which arose from the field in the Bienczyce neighborhood where Wojtyła had celebrated Christmas midnight Mass since 1959. Permission for building this assertively modern structure—its architecture suggesting the Church as the “ark” in which Mary, Queen of Poland, was saving her people—was finally obtained on October 13, 1967, after years of agitation. The very next day, October 14, Cardinal Karol Wojtyła led a groundbreaking ceremony, swinging a pickaxe and helping dig the first section of the trench for the church’s foundation, in which the stone from St. Peter’s tomb donated by Pope Paul VI would be imbedded. Ten years of volunteer labor from all over Poland and throughout Europe went into completing the Ark Church. Its exterior was decorated by 2 million small polished stones from the riverbeds of Poland. The interior was dominated by a great steel figure of the crucified Christ forged by the workers at Nowa Huta’s Lenin Steelworks. The tabernacle was a gift from the diocese of Sankt Pölten in Austria, and was shaped like a model of the solar system; its decoration included a piece of moon rock, given to Paul VI by an American astronaut. The Dutch had donated the church’s bells. The Ark Church was dedicated by Cardinal Wojtyła on May 15, 1977. His sermon at the dedication Mass, attended by pilgrims from Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Germany, Holland, Portugal, Italy, Canada, the United States, England, Finland, and France, put a new definition on the model workers’ town. “This is not a city of people who belong to no one,” the cardinal insisted, “of people to whom one may do whatever one wants, who may be manipulated according to the laws or rules of production and consumption. This is a city of the children of God…. This temple was necessary so that this could be expressed, that it could be emphasized….”11
While the Ark Church was the most famous symbol of the war for Nowa Huta, the harshest battle in that war was fought in another Nowa Huta neighborhood, Miestrzejowice.
Father Józef Kurzeja came to see Cardinal Wojtyła in 1970 and, as John Paul II remembered, made a straightforward proposal: “We need a church in Miestrzejowice. Maybe they’ll put me in prison, but I’m ready to begin.”12 The cardinal agreed, and Father Kurzeja went to work. He wasn’t a terribly good preacher, his assistant remembered, nor could he sing very well, but he was a big, honest man in his mid-thirties whom people wanted to be around.13 Kurzeja bought a small piece of unoccupied property in Miestrzejowice and built a tiny wooden house, more like a toolshed than a home. There was an altar on the side, and the priest began to attract a congregation by going door-to-door in the neighborhood. With the battle for the Ark Church largely won, the Nowa Huta front line moved to Miestrzejowice, where, in support of Father Kurzeja’s effort, Cardinal Wojtyła began saying Christmas midnight Mass in another open field. On Christmas Eve, 1971, he preached on the text from the Gospel of Luke, “And there was no room for them at the inn…” Before thousands of people at an open-air Mass, the cardinal vigorously defended Father Kurzeja: “The priest who shepherds your flock here under the bare sky, who has nothing except your good will and your solidarity, is not seeking any personal goals, any personal gain. What does he want? He wants to teach the Gospel, God’s truth, but at the same time humanity’s deepest truth. He wants to teach the principles of morality, of God’s commandments. Does that not lie within the interests of this new city, Nowa Huta? That people observe the moral law?…Does this not lie within the interests of the nation, the state? For that, surely the priest does not deserve punishment. Surely he deserves only praise….”14
The authorities didn’t agree. Constantly harassed on the street, in his apartment, and at the wooden chapel by State Security, the Słuzba Bezpieczeństwa, and subjected to constant SB interrogations, Father Józef Kurzeja collapsed and died of heart failure at age thirty-nine on August 15, 1976.15 It was the day after the thirty-fifth anniversary of another martyrdom, Maximilian Kolbe’s in the starvation bunker at Auschwitz. Father Kurzeja’s vindication, the church in Miestrzejowice, was named St. Maximilian Kolbe and dedicated by Pope John Paul II in 1983.16
The annual Corpus Christi procession, a late springtime tradition the communists were determined to eradicate and Wojtyła was determined to preserve, was another focal point in the struggle for religious freedom in Kraków during Wojtyła’s episcopate. Prior to the war, this great public procession honoring the Eucharistic Body and Blood of Christ went from Wawel Cathedral through the streets of the Old Town to the Rynek Głowny, the market square, around the circumference of which the archbishop of Kraków processed, carrying the Blessed Sacrament in an ancient gold monstrance. Stational altars were erected along the periphery of the Rynek, at which the procession would stop temporarily and the archbishop would preach. Hans Frank had, of course, banned the procession during the Occupation. The communists permitted a truncated procession to leave Wawel Cathedral and process around the courtyard of the royal palace, but the procession was forbidden to enter the city.
After numerous protests from the archdiocese, the restrictions were eased slightly so that the Corpus Christi procession was permitted to come down from Wawel Hill and walk two blocks up Grodzka Street, turning left at Poselska Street for a block before continuing back to Wawel along two blocks of Straszewski Street.17 Stational altars were set up along this drastically shortened route. Preaching at these stational altars before tens of thousands of Cracovians, on what had become a major patriotic as well as religious event, Karol Wojtyła emerged in the 1970s as a charismatic public personality—and did so just as Poland was becoming more openly restive after the regime shot down strikers at the Gdańsk shipyard in 1970.18
Wojtyła had always been seen as an interesting, if demanding, preacher. In these Corpus Christi processions, he began to develop the kind of charisma that can move great crowds. His language became more simple and direct, as he employed some of the lessons he had learned from Mieczysław Kotlarczyk during these annual acts of cultural resistance. But the message was constant even as the medium was refined. This procession in honor of the Eucharistic Christ was a means to give back to the people of Kraków their authentic culture and their rights as citizens.
On June 10, 1971, the first time since the war that the procession had been able to leave Wawel, Wojtyła preached at the fourth stational altar on the impossibility of separating the Polish people from their religious tradition: “We are the citizens of our country, the citizens of our city, but we are also a people of God which has its own Christian sensibility…. We will continue to demand our rights. They are obvious, just as our presence here is obvious. We will demand!…”19
In 1972, his sermon at the first stational altar on Wawel Hill described the annual procession as “a procession…of our city, of our whole history” and bluntly told the authorities, “We are waiting… ”20 In 1974, before tens of thousands packed into the streets, the cardinal insisted that “We are not from the periphery!” As for the endless delays over building churches, was it part of “the program of the socialist system that people stand for years on end under the open sky” to exercise the rights guaranteed them in their constitution? “What program is that part of?”21 In 1975, with the procession still for
bidden to enter the market square, the cardinal’s sermon at the first stational altar included a rare instance of public sarcasm: “I am inclined to think that such actions do not favor the processes of normalization between the Church and the State.”22 His sermon at the first station during the 1977 procession warned the government that “awareness of human rights keeps growing” throughout society and throughout the world: and “these rights are undeniable!” He concluded the 1977 procession with a confession at the fourth station: “I ask forgiveness from Our Lord that—at least seemingly—I did not speak of Him. But it only seems that way. I spoke of our matters…so that we might all understand that He, living in the Sacrament of the Eucharist, lives our human life….”23
Karol Wojtyła’s struggle for new churches and for the restoration of the Corpus Christi procession was about place, not in the sense of geography, but of belonging. Buildings and processions were important. The people had a right to worship according to their traditions and convictions, and as Wojtyła put it during the May 25, 1978, Corpus Christi procession, “a nation…has a right to the truth about itself.”24 The struggle over place transcended questions of buildings and processions, however. The issue was whether the Polish people would have the freedom to be themselves as Christians in what claimed to be a “People’s Republic.” The Polish communist strategy was to reduce Polish Catholicism to a folk memory. Cardinal Wojtyła’s struggle for religious freedom was a struggle to secure room for a living Church, proclaiming the truth about human life and human destiny and living that truth through service to all of society. If that could be secured, totalitarianism would, by definition, have failed.25
The Seminary and the Faculty of Theology
Strengthening the priesthood in the Archdiocese of Kraków by reforms in the academic training of seminarians and the continuing education of young priests was the second of Cardinal Wojtyła’s pastoral priorities.26
As the last man to be granted a doctoral degree by the Jagiellonian University Faculty of Theology, Wojtyła keenly felt the injustice the regime had done when it shut down the faculty in 1954. But this was hardly an issue to be reduced to the offended sensibilities of an alumnus. Closing the faculty was an attempt to rewrite Polish history and a clumsy effort to lobotomize Polish culture. For in addition to being deprived of its legal status, the Faculty of Theology had lost its library and lecture halls, its professors were pressured by the regime, and the government removed all references to the Faculty of Theology from newspapers, periodicals, and guidebooks.27
No theology would have meant no education of future priests. Shortly after the shutdown, the expelled professors formed a Faculty of Theology within the Kraków archdiocesan seminary. The governmental expulsion was treated as an arbitrary act rescinding the authority to grant degrees in the name of the state. The faculty retained its authority to grant pontifical degrees under the authority of the Holy See and continued on this academic basis.
That solved the immediate problem of providing for the education of seminarians, but the situation was unjust and Wojtyła frequently criticized the government for committing an act of cultural vandalism. Time and again he pressed the regime to restore the Faculty of Theology to its ancient rights within the Jagiellonian University. Concurrently, he worked in Rome to support the Faculty of Theology, which was granted the status of a pontifical faculty in 1974. On the home front, the cardinal found funds for the Faculty of Theology, defended its facilities against expropriation by the authorities, and planned the creation of its department of philosophy, which he launched in 1976. He also reformed the seminarians’ curriculum, bringing them, for example, into the training courses for marriage preparation he established with doctors, psychiatrists, and married couples.28
Cardinal Wojtyła was not only interested in the intellectual formation of his future priests, important as that was, but in the formation of real pastors. The secret of pastoral success, he believed, was a priest’s holiness and his commitment to the care of souls.29 In his years as archbishop, Wojtyła met regularly with his seminarians, getting to know each future priest personally. He continued to meet with each class of newly ordained priests throughout the early years of their ministry, sometimes on the ski slopes. In whatever setting, he constantly urged the necessity of a life of deep personal prayer as a good in itself and the essential foundation for pastoral work.
Wojtyła disciplined young priests in a distinctive way. He once had to call in an assistant pastor who had committed what the priest later recalled as a “serious misdemeanor.” In a lengthy session in his office, Wojtyła told the curate in no uncertain terms about the gravity of the offense and reprimanded him severely. The cardinal then led the young priest into his chapel so they could pray. The older man knelt so long that the curate became nervous. His train was scheduled to leave shortly to take him back to his parish. Finally, Cardinal Wojtyła stood up, looked at the young man he had just chastised, and said, “Would you please hear my confession now?” Stunned, the assistant pastor went to the confessional, where Wojtyła confessed before him.30
Cardinal Wojtyła was also a successful recruiter for the seminary. The number of seminarians studying for the archdiocese increased from 191 in 1962 to 250 in 1978; the number of diocesan priests increased from 771 to 956 in the same period. These were years when vocation recruitment was plummeting in the West and men were leaving the active ministry in great numbers. It is true that, in communist Poland, the priesthood was a stable profession in a small zone of relative freedom, and a passage into the middle class for many sons of working-class people or peasants. It is also likely that recruitment was easier when a bishop, pastor, or diocesan vocation director could appeal to the youthful instinct to be countercultural and defiant. By the same token, the Polish priesthood, lived seriously, was a vocation requiring real courage under communism—the life and death of Father Józef Kurzeja in Miestrzejowice proved that. The government also did its bit to make things difficult, drafting seminarians into the army in the middle of their training to weaken their sense of vocation, and continuing to put pressure on the seminary and the Faculty of Theology. For Cardinal Wojtyła to have increased the quantity and quality of Kraków’s priests under these circumstances was a considerable accomplishment. It was not his alone, but he was invaluable to it.
Youth Ministry
As archbishop of Kraków, Karol Wojtyła showed an unusual ease with independent-minded individuals who believed they had a special call from God to undertake a work beyond the Church’s normal institutional boundaries. Charismatic personalities tend to make many bishops nervous. Cardinal Wojtyła was willing to tolerate the tension between charismatic individuals and their movements, on the one hand, and the Church’s “structure,” on the other.
One such individual was Father Franciszek Blachnicki, who had first come to national attention as a temperance crusader. Blachnicki was now the central figure in a youth movement called “Light and Life,” which had evolved out of another Blachnicki-led movement, the “Oasis” summer camps for families and young people. Wojtyła had first met Blachnicki at the Catholic University of Lublin in the mid-1950s, where Blachnicki was involved with liturgical renewal efforts at the university chapel. As archbishop of Kraków, Wojtyła extended a mantle of protection over Blachnicki’s work with young people, a direct challenge to the regime’s attempt to split youngsters from their families.
Like other charismatic personalities, Father Blachnicki had his rough edges. But Wojtyła admired the man who, he later recalled, “in some measure saved Polish youth.”31 And Blachnicki did so not only by creating summer “Oases” that were less morally threatening than the communist youth camps. He did so in the Light and Life movement by sketching a Polish theology of liberation, proposing that Poles overcome their fearful complacency and challenge the regime by “living in the truth:” if enough Poles “plucked up their courage to live by the truth and unmask lies,” Blachnicki insisted, “we would already be a free society.”32
Though Franciszek Blachnicki might have been imprudent at times, Wojtyła shared his analysis of Poland’s situation and his pastoral strategy: resistance through the education of young people determined to live a “full-time Christian commitment.”33 Blachnicki’s Oasis summer camps and Light and Life meetings were constantly harassed by the authorities, who would swoop down on a campground and decide that the campers’ permits were of the wrong sort or had somehow expired. Levying heavy fines against landowners who rented space to Oasis camps was another favorite tactic. In the face of this, the presence of an alternative authority was one form of protection, so Wojtyła spent time during the summers visiting Oasis camps, celebrating Mass, giving talks—and subtly suggesting to the authorities that, if they didn’t leave Blachnicki’s people alone, they might provoke an embarrassing incident by invading a campsite one day when the archbishop was there.34
On August 16, 1972, Cardinal Wojtyła visited an Oasis campsite on Błyszcz Mountain in the Beskid Sądecki range south of Kraków, where some 700 Oasis people were staying. The plan was for the cardinal and his secretary to hike up to the campsite from an adjoining valley, accompanied by Oasis guides. On the way up, the cardinal noticed the darkening skies, heard thunder in the distance, and joked to the guides, “I know three madmen: the first is myself, the second is my secretary, and the third is waiting for us at the summit.” When the cardinal asked the third “madman,” Father Blachnicki, whether they shouldn’t move Mass down to the church in the valley, the charismatic priest insisted that the storm would pass by. It didn’t, and the only two umbrellas available were barely sufficient to cover the center of the altar, which had been built out of a rockpile. After Mass they moved down to the valley church for an hour of sharing witness, at which young people told how a Light and Life retreat had changed their lives, and Cardinal Wojtyła thanked them for bringing Vatican II alive in Poland.35
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