Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  Wyszyński was usually portrayed in the West as the “hard-liner” and Wojtyła as the “moderate.” The truth of the matter is that, in the last several years of his tenure in Kraków, the communist regime hated and feared Cardinal Wojtyła more than it feared Primate Wyszyński. The Primate had not lost his edge, but the moves in that particular dance had become familiar to both partners, and familiarity bred a certain comfort, however strained. With Wojtyła, the regime never knew what was coming next.159 A man they had imagined to be a quiet intellectual had become a charismatic public personality. His defense of religious freedom was increasingly sharp-edged and struck the regime at its most vulnerable point, its claim to be the true representative of the Polish people. He was a magnet for young people and systematically interposed himself between the regime and youth. And he was ecumenical in his support for dissent, frequently inviting dissident intellectuals, Catholic and otherwise, to his drawing room at Franciszkańska, 3. Here, the regime must have feared, was the man who could realize dissident Adam Michnik’s call for a rapprochement between left-leaning anti-communist intellectuals and the Catholic Church.160

  Those who projected a political reading of Catholic affairs—Wyszyński the “conservative” and Wojtyła the “moderate”—onto Polish Church-state relations missed all of this. The true state of affairs was not lost on the SB, however, nor, one assumes, on its KGB masters. They were terrified that Wojtyła might succeed Wyszyński as Primate.161 That would turn out to be the least of their worries.

  Wojtyła and the Ostpolitik

  Karol Wojtyła did not believe in “convergence” between the two halves of a Yalta-divided Europe. To his way of thinking, Yalta was a moral catastrophe; thus the Yalta system had to go. There could be no compromise with basic injustice, and the Vatican sometimes had to be reminded of that fact.162

  Cardinal Wojtyła never doubted the good intentions of Paul VI in his Ostpolitik, and he certainly knew of the Pope’s personal torment, torn between his heart’s instinct to defend the persecuted Church and his mind’s judgment that he had to pursue the policy of salvare il salvabile—which, as he once put it to Archbishop Casaroli, wasn’t a “policy of glory.”163 The archbishop of Kraków also believed he had an obligation to maintain solidarity with a persecuted and deeply wounded neighbor, the Church in Czechoslovakia, where the situation had deteriorated during the years of the new Vatican Ostpolitik. So Cardinal Wojtyła and one of his auxiliary bishops, Juliusz Groblicki, clandestinely ordained priests for service in Czechoslovakia, in spite of (or perhaps because of) the fact that the Holy See had forbidden underground bishops in that country to perform such ordinations.

  The clandestine ordinations in Kraków were always conducted with the explicit permission of the candidate’s superior—his bishop or, in the case of members of religious orders, his provincial. Security systems had to be devised. In the case of the Salesian Fathers, a torn-card system was used. The certificate authorizing the ordination was torn in half. The candidate, who had to be smuggled across the border, brought one half with him to Kraków, while the other half was sent by underground courier to the Salesian superior in Kraków. The two halves were then matched, and the ordination could proceed in the archbishop’s chapel at Franciszkańska, 3. Cardinal Wojtyła did not inform the Holy See of these ordinations. He did not regard them as acts in defiance of Vatican policy, but as a duty to suffering fellow believers. And he presumably did not wish to raise an issue that could not be resolved without pain on all sides. He may also have believed that the Holy See and the Pope knew that such things were going on in Kraków, trusted his judgment and discretion, and may have welcomed a kind of safety valve in what was becoming an increasingly desperate situation.164

  As for Poland, it was, in the late 1970s, a curious, hard mixture of the unreal and the brutal. Workers could wryly joke that “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us,” but those police batons on which authority rested were all too real. Amid the “baffling unreality” of late-communist life and the failure of Gierek’s regime’s “practical materialism”—a desperate effort to improve access to consumer goods that, financed by massive foreign borrowing, was driving Poland ever closer to economic catastrophe—Cardinal Karol Wojtyła had developed an effective and broad-ranging armory of tools of resistance.165 In doing so, he had quietly led his fellow bishops into articulating a Christian personalist alternative to the false humanism of communism. As they wrote in a 1978 pastoral letter reflective of Wojtyła’s thinking, “the spirit of freedom is the proper climate for the full development of the person. Without freedom, a person is dwarfed, and all progress dies.”166 Wojtyła could help lead the bishops to such a statement, not simply by force of intellect, but because he shared his more traditionally minded colleagues’ Marian devotion and their dedication to Polish popular piety.

  THE MINISTRY OF PRESENCE

  By some lights, Karol Wojtyła was not a terribly good manager as archbishop of Kraków. He was, some charged, too interested in dialogue with those who made problems for his plans. He was not a detail-oriented administrator. He didn’t fire recalcitrants and replace them with his own people. His respect for older people and his distaste for making a spectacle of anyone led him to leave some men in office whom others would have removed, and caused him to promote priests whom others would have preferred to have seen sidetracked in their careers. He never exacted retribution when others crossed him. Some, taking this as weakness, continued to put obstacles in the way of his efforts.167 His willingness to take a long-range view of virtually every issue was both a blessing and a cause of problems—he was hard to follow sometimes, his mind and imagination being too many moves ahead of the game as his associates looked over the board.168

  Yet, in the words of Father Józef Tischner, he was a man of the “big picture whose ideas turned into institutions.”169 Though he paid not the slightest attention to management theory, he was the embodiment of what management experts regard as effectiveness: he had certain well-defined goals, and he accomplished them. Moreover, he accomplished them while drawing intense loyalty and affection from his associates, his subordinates, and his people.

  He was a tremendous presence in Kraków. At all levels of society, his people knew they had a bishop who had remained a priest and pastor amid increasing responsibilities and international obligations. Like his namesake, St. Charles Borromeo, he made significant contributions to an ecumenical council and then effectively implemented them in his own diocese. There is every reason to believe that Karol Wojtyła would have wanted to spend the rest of his life in service to his “beloved Kraków.”

  It was precisely because he had done that so well that he would not be the archbishop of Kraków forever.

  A Pope from a Far Country

  The Election of John Paul II

  APRIL 17–24, 1974

  Cardinal Karol Wojtyła participates in an International Thomistic Congress in Rome, Naples, and Fossanuova.

  JUNE 27, 1977

  Giovanni Benelli of Florence, Bernardin Gantin of Benin, and Joseph Ratzinger of Munich are created cardinals by Pope Paul VI.

  AUGUST 6, 1978

  Paul VI dies at Castel Gandolfo and is buried in St. Peter’s Basilica on August 12.

  AUGUST 25, 1978

  The College of Cardinals elects Albino Luciani as pope; Luciani takes the unprecedented double-name, “John Paul I,” and declines the papal tiara at his installation Mass on September 3.

  SEPTEMBER 28, 1978

  Cardinal Karol Wojtyła celebrates his twentieth anniversary as a bishop with the lay friends of his Środowisko.

  SEPTEMBER 28–29, 1978

  Pope John Paul I dies during the night.

  SEPTEMBER 30–OCTOBER 2, 1978

  Karol Wojtyła writes his last poem, “Stanisław.”

  OCTOBER 8, 1978

  Cardinal Wojtyła preaches on love for Christ as the prime requisite of a pope at a memorial Mass for John Paul I in Rome.

  OCTOBER 13, 1
978

  Wojtyła’s closest friend in Rome, Bishop Andrzej Deskur, suffers a stroke.

  OCTOBER 14, 1978

  Conclave II opens.

  OCTOBER 16, 1978

  Karol Wojtyła is elected pope, takes the name “John Paul II,” and breaks precedent by addressing the crowd in St. Peter’s Square in “our Italian language.”

  Professor Stefan Swiezawski, the Lublin historian of philosophy, was not an impulsive man. But he felt a solemn obligation to tell his friend, Cardinal Karol Wojtyła, something that had come to him during Mass, unbidden and unwilled, as if it were a kind of revelation. His wife thought her husband temporarily bereft of his senses: “If you insist on telling him this stupidity,” she said, “I refuse to accompany you.” So Swiezawski, the man of reason who had dedicated his scholarly life to the history of reasoning, went alone to tell his friend a truth that had not occurred to him by any logical process of deduction.

  It was April 1974. The Swiezawskis and Wojtyła were in the Abbey of Fossanuova, the oldest Cistercian foundation in Italy, southeast of Rome. Settled in 1133 by monks from the famous French Abbey of Citeaux, Fossanuova was now hosting several sessions of an international congress marking the 700th anniversary of the death of St. Thomas Aquinas, who had died in the abbey’s guest house in 1274. Cardinal Wojtyła had prepared a paper on “The Personal Structure of Self-Determination,” which had made a considerable impression on his scholarly colleagues. His fellow philosophers were also charmed by his personality. He wandered through a restaurant during a lunch break, talking with the different language groups that had formed, sitting on the arms of chairs, asking questions, cracking jokes, clapping friends on the back. Beneath the groined vaulting in the abbey church, built in the Burgundian style and consecrated in 1208, the philosophers now met Karol Wojtyła, priest and bishop, as he celebrated one of the Congress Masses.

  It was Eastertime and the cardinal chose to preach on the “two Thomases.” The first was Thomas the Apostle, “Doubting Thomas,” who refused to believe the other apostles that first Easter night when they told him that they had “seen the Lord.” When Jesus appeared again to his friends in the Upper Room, he had fallen to his knees with the exclamation, “My Lord and my God”( John 20.24–29). The second Thomas was the man in whose memory the congress was meeting. Thomas Aquinas was a thinker whose enormous work of scholarship reflected a life lived at the crossroads of faith and reason. Yet confronted by the reality of the living Christ in a vision toward the end of his life, he had come to see the magnificent corpus he had written as so much straw compared to what he now knew by the grace of an intense personal encounter with the risen Lord. That flash of mystical insight, the preacher suggested, was the beginning of the beatific vision for St. Thomas, the beginning of his experience of seeing God “face to face,” in the glorious light of which everything else was as nothing.

  As Cardinal Wojtyła, preaching in Italian without notes, wove a rich tapestry of reflection, his old friend Stefan Swiezawski had a thought. Or, perhaps more accurately, a thought came to him. He had known the cardinal for a quarter-century, since the young curate of St. Florian’s had become his daughters’ catechist and confessor. Swiezawski had been one of the readers of Wojtyła’s habilitation thesis and had persuaded the young philosopher to join the Lublin faculty. The two had worked together at the Second Vatican Council. Now, he felt himself “absolutely obliged” to tell his friend what had come into his mind, unexpectedly, during Wojtyła’s sermon.

  Professor Swiezawski found Cardinal Wojtyła walking amid the small columns in the Romanesque cloister of Fossanuova, outside the sacristy where he had removed his vestments after Mass. There was no one else around. Swiezawski went up to the younger man and told him, “You will become Pope.”

  Karol Wojtyła did not inquire from whence this remarkable information had come. He simply looked gravely into Stefan Swiezawski’s eyes, said nothing, and slowly walked away, absorbed in prayer.

  Four and a half years later, an envelope bearing a Vatican postmark arrived at the Swiezawski apartment in Warsaw. The letter inside was handwritten on plain, uncrested paper, dated October 21, 1978, and read in part:

  …Well, dear Stefan, your letter reminded me of your words in Fossanuova during a congress in honor of St. Thomas. Deus mirabilis! Thank you for your constant help and your presence which have accompanied me for years, including my habilitation at the university. I count on your presence accompanying me in the future. I am aware that in the near future there will be more challenges for me—like exams to pass! I need your prayers and I entrust everything to the hands of Jesus. Totus tuus! My greetings to your wife, daughters, and grandchildren.

  The signature, in a familiar script, bore the name by which the world would come to know the man Professor Swiezawski had felt obliged to tell of his destiny: “John Paul II.”1

  THE INCREASING BURDEN OF AGE

  Pope Paul VI’s 1970 apostolic letter, Ingravescentem Aetatem, revamped the College of Cardinals and the rules for the election of a pope by setting the maximum number of electors at 120 and decreeing that cardinals lost their right to vote in conclave when they turned eighty. The document’s title, “The Increasing Burden of Age,” was an apt metaphor for the last years of the fifteen-year pontificate of Paul VI.

  On his election in 1963, Pope Paul had dedicated his pontificate to completing Vatican II and implementing it without schism—no small goals, given the contentiousness that always surrounded ecumenical councils and their aftermath. In virtually any other age, Pope Paul’s achievement would have seemed monumental. In addition to steering the Council to a successful conclusion, he oversaw what lay Catholics around the world regarded as the primary effect of Vatican II, the most comprehensive revision of the Church’s liturgy since the Reformation. Latin was replaced by vernacular languages; new Eucharistic Prayers (the “Canon,” or central prayer of the Mass) were introduced; the revised rite of the “sacrament of the sick” made clear that what had been known for centuries as “Extreme Unction” should not be limited to the last hours of life; the ritual of the sacrament of penance (now referred to as the sacrament of reconciliation) was revised, and Catholics were presented with a variety of ways to go to confession; a comprehensive liturgical and catechetical program for the reception of adult converts, the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, restored ancient Christian practices that had lain fallow for centuries.

  Pope Paul also made major structural changes in the Church’s governance. He created the Synod of Bishops, a body without precedent in Catholic history. He dis-established the papal court, disbanding the Noble Guard, the Palatine Guards, and the Pontifical Gendarmes and stripping the papacy of most of the vestiges of Renaissance display that had long surrounded it. He reformed the Roman Curia, making the Secretariat of State the clearinghouse for all curial business, reconstituting the Holy Office as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and creating new agencies for the laity, for the promotion of justice and peace, for dialogue with Judaism and other world religions, and for dialogue with nonbelievers.2 Pope Paul also internationalized the Curia, taking a Frenchman, Cardinal Jean Villot, as his Secretary of State (the highest-ranking post in the Church’s new central administration) and appointing other non-Italians to key posts throughout the bureaucracy.

  Paul VI created dozens of new dioceses, particularly in the Third World, and vastly expanded the number of native-born bishops in Africa and Asia. He began to internationalize the practice of the papacy itself, traveling to the Holy Land and India (1964), the United Nations and New York City (1965), Portugal and the Marian shrine of Fatima (1967), Colombia (1968), the World Council of Churches in Geneva and Uganda (1969), and Hong Kong, the Philippines, and Australia (1970). His three meetings with Athenagoras, Ecumenical Patriarch of Orthodoxy, illustrated his ecumenical commitment. So did the Uganda pilgrimage. After praying at the shrines of twenty-two Catholic African martyrs he had canonized in 1964, the Pope also prayed at the shrin
e of twenty-three Protestants martyred in the same persecution. During the pontificate, considerable theological progress was made in “bilateral” ecumenical dialogues between Roman Catholics and Anglicans, and between Roman Catholics and Lutherans. The Pope’s social doctrine, embodied in the 1967 encyclical Populorum Progressio [The Development of Peoples] and the 1971 apostolic letter Octogesima Adveniens (marking the eightieth anniversary of Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum), was primarily concerned with Third World issues, including economic development and revolutionary violence.

  It was, and remains, an impressive record. Yet as the seventies wore on, the impression created by the pontificate was not one of dynamism and evangelical reinvigoration but of drift amid unaddressed and grave problems. The theological divisions in the Church evident at the Council hardened throughout the fifteen years of Paul VI. Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and his followers, still bitter at the Council’s adoption of the Declaration on Religious Freedom and convinced that liturgical reform was Protestantizing Catholicism, attacked Paul’s authority in the name of their own concept of authority. By 1976, the situation had deteriorated to the point where the Pope suspended Archbishop Lefebvre from his episcopal functions for ordaining priests without authorization at the seminary he had founded in Switzerland.3 Along the other end of the theological spectrum, a “progressive” party that had thought itself an irresistible force during the Council continued to press for what it considered a more authentic implementation of the “spirit” of Vatican II, particularly in response to the sexual revolution and the politics of the sixties. Biting criticism from these quarters followed Humanae Vitae’s critique of contraception, Paul’s 1967 encyclical defending priestly celibacy (Sacerdotalis Coelibatus), and the 1976 statement from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Inter Intersigniores, which confirmed that the Church could only ordain men to the ministerial priesthood. The Council had challenged the Church to deepen its faith, evangelize modernity, and renew its service to the world. Factions in the post-conciliar Church continued to battle over who was in charge.