Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  Oasis camps and the Light and Life movement were two potent examples of a strategy of informal youth organizing that Wojtyła and his colleagues adopted to get around the regime’s ban on formal “Catholic organizations.” The catechetical sessions with altar boys and their families he had organized years before at St. Florian’s became a diocesan-wide phenomenon. Choirs were another “non-organization” that could easily become a venue for religious education. Cardinal Wojtyła urged students to care for abandoned or neglected Jewish cemeteries—a way of teaching youngsters about a great heritage that had been destroyed, and about what had destroyed it.36 There were “huge possibilities” for doing things informally, one of Wojtyła’s auxiliary bishops, Stanisław Smoleński, remembered. It simply required imagination and nerve.37 Wojtyła had both and appreciated these qualities in others—a trait that endeared him to his subordinates and set him apart in the episcopate. He was prepared to let all sorts of flowers, some of them quite exotic, bloom, as long as their gardeners were doctrinally orthodox and willing to accept the Church’s authority.

  Family Ministry

  Karol Wojtyła’s intense interest in marriage preparation and in ministry to families dated back to his days as a young curate at St. Florian’s. Jerzy Ciesielski and other young men and women whom he had helped prepare for marriage, along with friends from his Środowisko like Gabriel Turowski, had been involved in various pioneering efforts to create an archdiocesan-wide program of marriage preparation in the early 1960s. As archbishop, faced with the Polish regime’s relentless efforts to undermine family life, Wojtyła expanded this form of pastoral care so that it reached into every corner of the archdiocese through a network of lay activists he helped train.

  In 1967, Wojtyła organized an intensive, yearlong course on marriage preparation and family life issues in his residence, in which thirty priests and sixty laypeople participated. This multidimensional program explored issues in theology, philosophy, psychology, and medicine, with instructors recruited from all these disciplines and the cardinal himself as a regular lecturer. In 1969, this informal program was transformed into an archdiocesan Institute for Family Studies, which sponsored conferences on such family-related issues as the theology of marriage, human sexuality, child care, and healing postabortion stress. The institute became the intellectual and training center of the Division of Family Pastoral Care the archbishop had created in the Metropolitan Curia, or central administration, of the archdiocese in 1968.

  In the 1970s, the institute, now affiliated with the Pontifical Faculty of Theology, evolved into a two-year program training 250 students each biennium. These students were the seminarians, priests, and lay men and women who became instructors and facilitators in the parish-based marriage-preparation programs the archbishop encouraged every pastor to establish. Each graduate of the course was given a canonical “mission” to do family-care work in a parish by the cardinal himself. In 1974, when the custom of marriage preparation had become well-established throughout the archdiocese, Cardinal Wojtyła mandated a two-month marriage-preparation program prior to every wedding. A 1975 decision by the Polish episcopate lengthened that to a three-month preparation program. In 1974, the cardinal also started an archdiocesan fund to support unwed mothers who rejected abortion and wanted to raise their children themselves. Wojtyła personally encouraged convents to take these young women in and care for them until they had delivered their babies and prepared themselves to raise them as single mothers.38

  Dialogue with Intellectuals

  The Catholic intellectuals of Kraków were enthusiastic about the appointment of one of their own as archbishop. Cardinal Wojtyła, for his part, believed that a personal ministry to intellectuals and their families was an important part of his episcopate. These were the men and women who could develop, throughout the worlds of Polish culture, the Christian humanism he had worked hard to place at the center of the Second Vatican Council.39

  It was not an easy time to be a Catholic intellectual in Kraków. There were endless harassments over academic degrees. If one finally managed to complete one’s studies, few faculty positions were open to qualified scholars who were publicly identified as Catholics. The Church could help them find jobs (at Tygodnik Powszechny, for example). But there was the ongoing problem of the surrounding public culture, which constantly worked to “thresh intellectuals from the husk of religious conviction,” as one painter put it.40

  It didn’t work. One reason was that Tygodnik Powszechny and Znak became the focal points of an alternative intellectual community capable of mounting an effective resistance to the pressures of a communist cultural environment. Cardinal Wojtyła’s unstinting support for the newspaper, the journal, and their people was a crucial factor in sustaining that resistance.

  Unlike bishops who thought of intellectuals as threats, Karol Wojtyła thought of them as friends and allies. The tension in the intellect of this thoroughly modern and culturally literate man who was a completely convinced Christian had been one of the qualities that first attracted young intellectuals during his days at St. Florian’s.41 High ecclesiastical office didn’t loosen that tension and the electricity it generated. If anything, it sharpened it.

  The Polish Christmas custom of the Opłatek, a party or reception in which friends share a Christmas wafer similar to the host consecrated at Mass, gave Cardinal Wojtyła occasions to bring the Kraków intelligentsia into his home for the kind of conversation that was difficult in other circumstances. Each Christmas season, the cardinal sponsored Opłatek celebrations for various lawyers, doctors, nurses, writers, and artists. After a brief prayer, rather like a family grace-before-meals, the Opłatek wafer would be broken and shared, and a freewheeling conversation began. Personal contact with a cardinal was unusual enough to give these parties a certain tang for the visitors; from the host’s point of view, these were occasions when people could speak freely in ways that were simply impossible elsewhere. The cardinal’s Opłatek celebrations weren’t catechetical exercises, but his evident willingness to meet non-Catholics and troubled Catholics at the point to which their own lives had led them had its own evangelical effect, and refuted the regime’s repeated claim that Christian faith was alienating and anti-intellectual. No one could take that seriously after talking late into the night with the cardinal archbishop of Kraków in the drawing room of his home.42

  In 1976 and 1977, Wojtyła’s outreach to intellectuals expanded to include the dissident intellectuals of KOR, the “Workers’ Defense Committee.” Wojtyła and KOR leader Jacek Kuroń, who had been expelled from the Communist Party in 1964, were first introduced in Kraków by Bohdan Cywiński, a Catholic activist with contacts in the more secular world of KOR. A lengthier conversation at Cywiński’s Warsaw apartment was, Cywiński remembered, a “typical meeting for the time: the police were outside.” The cardinal discussed the general social and political situation with Kuroń and other KOR leaders, whose general view was that the situation was bad but, as Cywiński put it, “stable bad.” The workers did seem more willing to challenge their difficult conditions. But there was no intuition among the KOR intellectuals that the political and economic status quo could be changed dramatically, or soon. From Wojtyła’s point of view, his contacts with secular dissidents like Kuroń were another facet of his pastoral program—in this instance, an outreach to left-leaning intellectuals who had broken with communism because of their human rights convictions. In addition to the personal contacts, though, these conversations were another link in the chain of cultural resistance.43

  The Ministry of Charity

  Sociologist Rodney Stark argues that one of the reasons the marginal “Jesus Sect” triumphed in the Roman Empire was its religious commitment to care for the sick, the elderly, the blind, the handicapped, and the orphaned. In obeying Christ’s command to take care of the least of his brethren, Christianity became a movement that could attract and retain large numbers of converts by offering a more humane way of life.44 Ever since, Christian
communities have sponsored an enormous number of charitable activities and maintained a vast network of charitable institutions: hospitals, nursing homes, homes for orphans and unwed mothers, clinics, institutions for the handicapped and the mentally ill.

  None of this was permitted to exist formally in communist Poland, where Catholic charitable institutions and organizations were banned from 1950 on. If the communists would not allow the Church to operate its own charitable institutions, agencies, and programs, then the Church, Wojtyła decided, would make this ban the opportunity to renew parish life in the spirit of the Gospel. Beginning in 1963, each parish established a “Parochial Charity Team” that included permanent members, called “parish guardians,” and volunteers. Their task was to identify and care for the sick and needy in the parish’s geographic territory, irrespective of religious affiliation; non-Catholics and non-believers were, Wojtyła urged, part of the parish’s responsibility. The teams provided food, medicine, and clothing to the needy, nursed shut-ins in their homes, and carried out an extensive home visitation program. To help in this work, the Parochial Charity Team recruited members of other parish organizations—the parish council, the choir, the altar boys, the Living Rosary, Oasis movement families—and cooperated with other parishes and with public agencies like the Polish Red Cross.

  In 1965, Archbishop Wojtyła created the Pastoral Ministry of Charity Division in the Metropolitan Curia. In addition to supervising the archdiocesan ministries to the deaf and the blind, this central archdiocesan office coordinated spiritual retreats for the sick and for handicapped children. During the summer, the archdiocese worked with the parishes to sponsor two-week-long retreats for the sick, the handicapped, and the elderly in the countryside (during the communist period, Kraków was notorious for colossal air pollution, a by-product of unfiltered emissions from the Nowa Huta steel mills). The archdiocesan deaneries—clusters of ten or more parishes in a given geographic area—sponsored pilgrimages of the sick to Kalwaria Zebrzydowska and local Marian shrines. College students, seminarians, and nuns were recruited to help mount such pilgrimages. An archdiocesan newsletter, “Helpful Love” (later, “Apostolate of Love”), informed members of the Parochial Charity Teams about new initiatives and methods of care.

  Wojtyła urged each parish to develop an educational program that would deepen the spiritual lives of those already committed to charity work and help prepare others for such activity. Participants in such courses took part in retreats organized on a deanery basis; the cardinal regularly visited these retreats and said Mass for the retreatants. His parish visitations always included visits to the homes of the sick and a Mass or other religious service for the local sick in the parish church and a meeting with the Parochial Charity Team. On the occasion of the “Charity Week” observed in Polish parishes since the interwar period, the cardinal issued an annual proclamation to mobilize action on a specific issue during the coming year (thus 1968 was dedicated to the elderly, 1969 to working mothers, 1970 to endangered children, and so forth).

  On May 7, 1965, Archbishop Wojtyła announced that the archdiocese would observe an annual “Day of the Sick.” These special commemorations and Wojtyła’s fifteen annual pastoral letters to the sick were efforts to bring the often marginalized ill and elderly into the life of the local Church. The cardinal also asked the sick to offer their sufferings for the special needs of the archdiocese, for the Church in Poland, and for the universal Church. In illness, he suggested, as in every other time of life, there was a Christian vocation to live out.45

  Parish Visitation

  Cardinal Karol Wojtyła was an intellectual with a deep sympathy for popular piety and a pastor who understood that the center of the Church’s life was the parish, not the archdiocesan bureaucracy.46 As archbishop, he devoted large blocks of time to making lengthy visitations of the parishes of the archdiocese, reminding his people that the parish was not an accidental aggregate of Catholics who happened to live within a certain set of boundaries, but a way to live, locally, Vatican II’s universal call to holiness.

  Wojtyła’s parish visitations lasted several days. In addition to a parish-wide Mass, they often included a celebration of the sacrament of confirmation for the parish youth. The cardinal always celebrated a special Mass for married couples and blessed each couple individually. In addition to talking with the parish clergy, Wojtyła met with the parish religion teachers and the local nuns. If there was a parish cemetery the cardinal visited it, prayed the rosary with parishioners for the souls of their dead, and blessed any new graves. The cardinal also met with different lay groups for discussions about their work, their study, or their charitable activity. The atmosphere he created was that of a retreat, in which conversations longer and deeper than the usual were the norm.47

  Parishioners appreciated the time and care the cardinal put into his parish visitations, sensing that these were much more than a requirement of church law for him.48 Cardinal Wojtyła saw them as opportunities to encapsulate in each parish the principal themes and pastoral priorities of his episcopate. Visitations were, in a singular way, what being a bishop was about. As he told the Roman Curia during a Lenten retreat he preached in 1976, each parish visitation was an opportunity to unveil, in a different locale, the seal of dignity that Christ had bestowed on every Christian at baptism.49

  A DIFFERENT KIND OF ARCHBISHOP

  The physical center of Karol Wojtyła’s episcopate was the archbishop’s palace at Franciszkańska, 3, in Kraków’s Old Town, two blocks from the great market square. The archdiocesan offices were on the ground floor. The archbishop’s personal quarters, chapel, office, and receiving rooms—which Wojtyła knew well from his days in the underground seminary—were a floor above. High ceilings and parquet floors, subdued pastel walls and sturdy wooden furniture, oil portraits of the bishops of Kraków and paintings of important scenes in Polish history, all gave the residence a feeling of solidity and understated grace.

  Karol Wojtyła used a modest, three-room suite for his personal quarters: a small entry hall, a moderately sized private office, and a bedroom barely large enough to hold a single bed, a small desk, three wardrobes, and an old easy chair. Over the door between the entry hall and the office was a portrait of Wojtyła’s patron saint, Charles Borromeo, the brilliant theologian-pastor who had implemented the Council of Trent in Milan in the sixteenth century. The bed featured a worn spread and a colorful folk-art pillow. A portrait of Wojtyła’s parents was the only photo in the suite.

  Archbishop Wojtyła renovated the second floor in 1964–1966, the first restoration in a century. The chapel, located at the top of the great stone stairway leading from the ground floor, was redecorated and a freestanding altar installed. The simple stations of the cross, which had been there since his days as an underground seminarian, remained.

  The archbishop rose at 5 or 5:30 every morning and spent the first hour of his day in private prayer. After Mass in the chapel with his secretary and personal staff (and, sometimes, invited guests), he had breakfast in the kitchen and then retired to the chapel, where he spent two hours every morning, between 9 and 11, writing. The period between 11 A.M. and 1 P.M. was reserved for visitors, and the rule was that anyone who wanted to see the cardinal could come. There were no appointments as such. Everyone would arrive at 11 and the cardinal would walk around the room, greeting visitors and fixing the sequence of meetings in his mind. He then invited the first person or group into his receiving office, and the others would wait their turn. Those seen last were often invited to lunch, which was supposed to begin at 1:30 but frequently didn’t start until 2 P.M. or 2:15 because the cardinal insisted on seeing everyone who had come to talk. The soup would be getting cold and the younger priests at table might have been getting worried, but Wojtyła would charge into the dining room saying, “The cardinal arrived for lunch at half past one; your watches are wrong.”50 He was not a man to care greatly about food, although he had a sweet tooth and the nuns who cooked for him were repute
d to make some of the best bigos, a classic Polish stew, in Kraków.51

  Afternoons and evenings were devoted to more meetings, to visitations around the city or the region, and to reading and study. He had no television, but listened to Radio Free Europe’s Polish service on a small radio while shaving in the morning.52 To make maximum use of his travel time, he had a desk and lamp rigged up in the backseat of his car so that he could read or write while being driven to an appointment.

  His energy may have seemed limitless to others.53 But he paced himself well, never giving any task more time than it needed before moving on to the next. His ability to do two things at once—run a seminar and work through his correspondence, for example—was another factor in his productivity. He also insisted on vacations, kayaking in the summer and skiing in the winter, which he believed were essential to recharging his stores of energy. But according to everyone who knew and worked with him, the mainspring of his daily energy was his constant prayer.

  The archbishop lived simply, by deliberate choice. He had neither a bank account nor personal funds, his needs being met by the archdiocese. If a priest or parishioner gave him a gift of money during a parish visitation, he wouldn’t even open the envelope, but gave it away the same day to someone in need.54