Wojtyła received his cardinal’s biretta from Paul VI in the Sistine Chapel on June 28. That afternoon, he and his secretary had fruitlessly searched around Rome for red socks, considered a proper part of the wardrobe of a prince of the Church.113 Returning to Kraków on July 9, he told the thousands waiting to greet him outside the cathedral that the honor bestowed on him was a gift from the Pope “for the Church of Christ in Poland, and particularly for the Church of Kraków.”114 That afternoon, at a celebratory luncheon, Professor Adam Vetulani offered a toast to the new cardinal and, repeating his performance nine years before, reminded him that he was still a professor whom the historian hoped would “reap the richest harvest from your academic activity.”115
Cardinals are members of the clergy of the Diocese of Rome and are given the titular pastorates of Roman churches. Wojtyła’s “title” was S. Cesareo in Palatio, a small church just off the Via Porta Latina. Cardinals are also members of “congregations” or “councils” of the Roman Curia, the equivalent of cabinet departments in the world of government.116 Meetings of these congregations brought him to Rome frequently in the 1970s. But it was his service on the international Synod of Bishops that really introduced Karol Wojtyła to the post–Vatican II world episcopate.
Wojtyła and the Synod of Bishops
The Synod of Bishops was established by Paul VI to give one concrete expression to the theological fact, described by Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, that the Catholic bishops of the world constituted a “college” with, and under the headship of, the Bishop of Rome. Wojtyła did not attend the Synod’s first meeting in 1967, to which he had been elected by the Polish episcopate. The government, in one of its fits of pique, had denied Cardinal Wyszyński permission to attend, and Wojtyła refused to leave the country without the leader of the Polish Church.117 In 1969, Cardinal Wojtyła was appointed by Paul VI as a member of the first “extraordinary” or special meeting of the Synod, called to discuss the Holy See’s relationship to national conferences of bishops, and relations among the conferences themselves. In one intervention, Wojtyła stressed that the “community” among bishops had to be rooted in a genuine sacramental communio, or “communion,” and not simply in the sociological fact of their common membership in a rather exclusive club. He was also concerned that commentators in the Catholic and secular press were treating the Synod as a political exercise, a power struggle between Rome and the bishops’ conferences. This, he thought, rather missed the essential nature of the Synod, which was an ecclesial reality.118
The next meeting of the Synod, in 1971, discussed two topics, the priesthood and social justice. In the discussion on justice, the cardinal emphasized that religious freedom was as much a justice issue as poverty. He also said that justice within the Church demanded that local Churches other than those of Western Europe and Latin America have a say in these debates. During the Synod, on October 17, Pope Paul VI beatified Maximilian Kolbe, the self-sacrificing Franciscan of the Auschwitz starvation bunker. Cardinal Wojtyła gave a French-language press conference on October 13, in which he said that Kolbe’s priestly self-sacrifice had consisted not only in offering his life for another, but in the fact that he helped the nine other men condemned with him to die with a measure of dignity. Father Kolbe’s spirit of forgiveness, the cardinal concluded, “broke the infernal cycle of hatred.”119 At the end of the 1971 Synod, Wojtyła was elected to the Synod Council, the international committee that prepared the agenda for future meetings. It was a first indication of how high he stood in his brother bishops’ esteem.
The 1974 Synod, to which Wojtyła was elected by the Polish episcopate, discussed evangelization in the modern world. Cardinal Wojtyła was appointed its relator, the man who drafted the final report on which the Synod Fathers would vote. During the Synod, the question of evangelization in communist countries and Marxist-influenced societies was discussed. Wojtyła thought the conversation was marred by the naïveté of Western Europeans and Latin Americans for whom Marxism was a “fascinating abstraction” rather than an “everyday reality.”120 The Synod of 1974 ended in a kind of ecclesiastical gridlock. Wojtyła’s attempt to write a relatio that would satisfy the contending parties at the Synod failed. The Synod fathers, unable to agree on a text of their own, handed the whole business over to a post-synodal commission, which in turn handed all the material generated by the Synod to Paul VI, suggesting that he do something with it. The result was one of the finest documents of Paul VI’s pontificate, the apostolic exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi.121
The failure of his relatio notwithstanding, Karol Wojtyła was reelected to the Synod Council, and thus came to Rome in 1977 for the Synod meeting on catechetics, or religious education. In one intervention, Cardinal Wojtyła said that the regime in Poland was promoting “an atmosphere of anti-catechesis,” in which atheism “was imposed as a new state religion” in violation of the principle of religious freedom. In a second intervention, the cardinal noted that “the saints were the best catechists,” because effective religious education took place not simply through the transmission of ideas, but through the example of heroic virtue.122
The 1977 Synod, which took place under the lengthening shadow of Paul VI’s age (the Pope was seventy-nine) and ill health, was an opportunity for senior churchmen to discuss the Church’s future. During the four weeks of the Synod and the following two weeks of meetings with the Curia during his ad limina visit (the pilgrimage every bishop makes, every five years, “to the threshold of the apostles”), Cardinal Wojtyła met informally with many future papal electors, including cardinals from France, Germany, England, Australia, Italy, the United States, and the Roman Curia. At the end of the Synod, Cardinal Wojtyła was elected to the Synod Council for the third consecutive time. Ten years after receiving the red hat and after extensive contact with his peers, he was one of the most respected bishops in the Church.123
Learning the World
Karol Wojtyła became familiar with new parts of the world in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. In August and September 1969, he traveled for the first time to Canada and the United States, visiting primarily with Polish communities. Arriving in Montreal on August 28, he followed a relentless schedule. In a packed month, the cardinal visited and preached in Québec City, Ottawa, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Toronto, Hamilton, London, and Saint Catharines, before crossing the U.S./Canadian border at Niagara Falls and beginning his exploration of the United States in Buffalo, New York—from which, in fifteen days, he went to Hartford and New Britain, Connecticut; Cleveland; Pittsburgh; Detroit; the Polish-American seminary at Orchard Lake, Michigan; Boston; Washington; Baltimore; St. Louis; Chicago; Philadelphia; Doylestown, Pennsylvania (the “American Częstochowa”); and New York City, before flying to Rome for a meeting of the Council on the Laity on October 2.
In Philadelphia, he was the guest of Cardinal John Krol, a Polish-American for whom he had done a kindness two years before. According to Polish custom, a new cardinal makes a solemn reentry into his hometown after receiving the red hat. Cardinal Krol, who had been elected to the College of Cardinals in 1967 along with Wojtyła, was denied a visa to go to his father’s home, so Wojtyła went for him, entering the small village of Siekierczyna in a horse-drawn sleigh.124 Staying at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in Philadelphia in 1969, the archbishop of Kraków wanted especially to talk with the African-American students about their experience in the United States, the situation of the black Church, and how they had come to the seminary.125
In February 1973, Wojtyła represented the Polish Church at the International Eucharistic Congress in Melbourne, Australia. En route to Australia he stopped in Manila, where his predecessor, Adam Stefan Sapieha, had participated in the 1937 Eucharistic Congress. Wojtyła was struck by the depth of Filipino piety, which reminded him, he wrote in a diary he later published, of Poles at Częstochowa. The cardinal then spent three days in New Guinea, visiting Polish missionaries. The Melanesians, he noted, “have a so
mewhat different outlook on clothing than we do.” It was Wojtyła’s first exposure to Pidgin English, a language the polyglot archbishop had never encountered before. After Mass and a meal on February 9, “the natives honored us with their dancing and a kind of pantomime depicting the arrival and killing of the first white missionary on the island.” In Australia, in addition to the activities of the Eucharistic Congress in Melbourne, Wojtyła visited Polish communities in Brisbane, Sydney, Adelaide, Perth, Canberra, and Hobart. He also flew to New Zealand for three days to meet the Polish community in Wellington. In each city, there would be a Mass and sermon for the local Poles, in addition to meetings with civic officials, veterans’ groups, and Polish cultural associations, and visits to nursing homes, schools, and convents. During a meeting with Polish military veterans in Canberra, the cardinal was presented with a steel statue for the church then being built in Nowa Huta; some of the steel was shrapnel the veterans had kept after it had been extracted from their wartime wounds. Wojtyła liked the freshness, openness, and multicultural diversity of Australia, a completely new world to him. But he confessed in his diary that he thought there had been a bit too much stress on the Church discovering itself in the Eucharist, rather than on the Church discovering Christ.126
In April 1974, Cardinal Wojtyła traveled to Litom??ice in Czechoslovakia for the funeral of Cardinal Stefan Trochta, who had spent ten years in communist prisons and eight years as a manual laborer. The Czechoslovak secret police surrounded the church where the funeral was held and the local communists refused permission for Wojtyła, Cardinal Franz König of Vienna, and Cardinal Alfred Bengsch of Berlin to concelebrate the funeral Mass. Wojtyła sat in the pews with the rest of the congregation, came up to communion with the laity, and then defied the authorities by speaking over Trochta’s casket at the end of the service. That night, en route to Rome, he stopped in Vienna and said his Mass at 10 P.M. in the Vatican embassy.127
In addition to his own travels, the cardinal of Kraków was also becoming a magnet for Church dignitaries who wanted to visit Poland and to meet him. In October 1973, he hosted Cardinal Julius Döpfner, chairman of the German Bishops’ Conference, with whom he prayed at Auschwitz and Birkenau.128 The following year, Wojtyła received visits in Kraków from French and Italian cardinals and bishops from Belgium and Burundi.
In 1976, the international pace of his life quickened. In a striking gesture of confidence in the young Polish cardinal, Pope Paul VI invited Karol Wojtyła to give the annual Lenten retreat to the Pope and the Roman Curia, traditionally held during the first week of Lent. Wojtyła had only a brief time to prepare the twenty-two sermons or conferences he was expected to give in Italian during the retreat. He went to Zakopane, the ski resort in the Tatras, from February 9 to 15, where he was joined from the 12th on by Father Tadeusz Styczeń. From February 20 to 25, he devoted his morning writing time in his chapel to developing the texts he had sketched in Zakopane while taking occasional ski breaks. Wojtyła left for Rome on March 1 and spent four days at the Polish College, finalizing and polishing his sermons.
The retreat began on the evening of March 7, in the St. Mathilda chapel of the Apostolic Palace. Wojtyła addressed the retreatants—the senior leaders of the Roman Curia—from the front of the chapel. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Paul VI, seated by himself in a small room just outside the sanctuary. As had become his custom during Lent, the seventy-eight-year-old Pope was wearing a hair shirt underneath his white cassock. The archbishop of Kraków began the retreat by reminding his listeners that he came from a persecuted Church where the privilege of going on retreat was sought by far more men and women than the Church could accommodate. He described the atmosphere of an Oasis retreat for teenagers, and gently suggested that these aging (and, in some instances, hardened) veterans of the Church’s central bureaucracy try to put themselves in the place of youngsters on an Oasis, who found in their retreat a way “of rediscovering God and themselves, an experience that brings with it a fresh discovery of the meaning of life.”129
The curial retreat bore a striking resemblance to themes that were being developed in the Synod of Kraków. Its pivot was Gaudium et Spes 22, the text that Wojtyła regarded as the theological centerpiece of Vatican II: “it is only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of man truly becomes clear.” In exploring this Christian humanism with the curial retreatants, Wojtyła, like the Kraków Synod, made extensive use of the “threefold office” of Christ—the prophetic, priestly, and regal “offices” that also belonged to Christ’s people in the Church. He examined these aspects of the Christian life through a variety of literary prisms: the Old and New Testaments, Christian classics, contemporary philosophy and theology, and literature. Irenaeus, Augustine and Aquinas, Martin Heidegger and Paul Ricoeur, Henri de Lubac and Karl Rahner, Hans Küng and Walter Kasper, Saint-Exupéry’s Night Flight and Milton’s Paradise Lost—all were drawn into Wojtyła’s meditations on the glory of man redeemed by Christ. In addition, he made extensive use of his personal and pastoral experience to illustrate his points, speaking movingly about what he had learned of human dignity and the “royal” office of the Christian as a confessor: “When a man goes down on his knees in the confessional because he has sinned, at that very moment he adds to his own dignity as a man. No matter how heavily his sins weigh on his conscience, no matter how seriously they have diminished his dignity, the very act of turning again to God is a manifestation of the special dignity of man, his spiritual grandeur…the grandeur of the personal meeting between man and God in the inner truth of conscience.”130
When Wojtyła’s sermons were published by Znak, they made a profound impression on his friends among the Kraków intellectuals. The painter Stanisław Rodziński, for example, found in them a theological confirmation of what he had been wrestling with in his own art: the tragedy and madness of a modern world whose definitions of humanism excluded the truth about the spiritual hungers of the human person.131 Certain men of the Curia may have had a different, if related, reaction. Here was an intellectually astute and articulate pastor who could speak Christian truth to modernity in a dialogue that really would be a two-way street. A sensible world, some of them may have thought, would want to see this man pope. But that, of course, was impossible.
Four months after the curial retreat, Cardinal Wojtyła spent another six weeks in the United States while attending the International Eucharistic Congress held in Philadelphia during the U.S. Bicentennial. His American journey began in Boston, where it had been arranged for him to deliver a lecture in the Harvard Summer School’s annual series. After several days in seclusion at the St. Sebastian Country Day School in suburban Boston, practicing his English, Wojtyła delivered a lecture on “Participation or Alienation” to a large audience in Emerson Hall. The Summer School’s director, Thomas Crooks, was much taken with Wojtyła, a “dazzlingly impressive man.” After the lecture, Crooks hosted a reception for Wojtyła in Lehman Hall, in Harvard Yard. Standing on the steps of the building, Crooks turned to the cardinal and said that, given his position as a prince of the Church in a communist country, something was bound to happen. The cardinal, perhaps thinking of the escalating tensions with the regime in Poland, simply said, “I know.”132 Zbigniew Brzeziński, who “hadn’t been in the habit of attending social functions for visiting Polish bishops,” was vacationing in Maine. But “for some reason” he could never understand, the Columbia University political scientist and future national security adviser to the President of the United States accepted an invitation to Cambridge to have tea with Cardinal Wojtyła, and came away struck by his combination of “intelligence and calm strength.”133
After three days in Washington, including a lecture at the Catholic University of America School of Philosophy, Wojtyła arrived in Philadelphia. During the Eucharistic Congress, he stayed at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary again, where, in happy indifference to ecclesiastical protocol, he wandered the corridors at night and dropped into faculty member
s’ rooms to talk about the Church’s situation in the United States.134 The Congress had been organized around the theme, “The Eucharist and the Hungers of the Human Family,” and Wojtyła had been chosen to preach at the August 3 Mass dedicated to “The Eucharist and Man’s Hunger for Freedom.” Acknowledging the bicentennial of American independence and the role of Polish patriots like Tadeusz Kościuszko and Kazimierz Pulaski in securing it, he suggested that freedom was a “test of maturity,” a gift and a task that found its fulfillment in goodness, in “loving what is truly good.” It would not be the last time he was misunderstood by some Americans as a scold.
The cardinal was, however, concerned about the United States, after a whirlwind tour that touched Chicago; Stevens Point, Wisconsin; Baltimore; Detroit; Orchard Lake, Michigan; Great Falls and Geyser, Montana; Los Angeles; and San Francisco. His friends at Tygodnik Powszechny remember him as being “disappointed” by American culture and its tendency to dissipate freedom into shallow license.135 He may also have been disturbed by what appeared to be a certain flaccidity or insouciance in post-Vietnam American public life about the world situation, and the threats to the human “hunger for freedom” that were still being mounted by an aggressive atheistic ideology. Did America and its leaders understand that the world was facing “the greatest historical confrontation humanity has gone through…the final confrontation between the Church and the anti-Church, of the Gospel versus the anti-Gospel”? Wojtyła would never have narrowed this “confrontation,” which he insisted “lies within the plans of Divine Providence,” to the clash between democracy and communism. There were elements of the confrontation between true and false humanism present within the democracies.136 Still, communism was one particularly threatening expression of the crisis of world civilization in the late twentieth century. He knew that in his bones. He was going back home to face it.
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