Cardinal-electors swear a solemn oath to protect the conclave’s secrecy. Some believe themselves sworn to say nothing about what happened between the time they were locked into conclave and the time they were released. Others believe that their oath of secrecy binds them not to reveal anything about the actual balloting, but that they may discuss other things that happened in the conclave itself. Paul VI was adamant about conclave secrecy, in part because of a concern that a government might attempt to manipulate the electors. The new circumstances he created in Ingravescentam Aetatem helped produce leaks about the election of his successor, though. Cardinals eligible to vote, sensing the discomfort of those excluded by the eighty-year age limit, discussed conclave matters with them. These elderly cardinals, not bound by the oath of secrecy, talked to friends and journalists. The conclaves of 1978 were the most heavily reported in history, and sifting through the stories while weighing the credibility of various sources is a daunting business. Nonetheless, the broad outlines of what happened during the conclave of 1978, confirmed by some who participated in the election, seem reasonably clear.
On this account, the Great Elector of the conclave of August 1978—the man who put together the decisive coalition of votes—was Cardinal Giovanni Benelli of Florence. Although Benelli had been a cardinal only since June 1977, he had been Paul VI’s principal assistant and virtual chief-of-staff for ten years, wielding great power as Sostituto [deputy head] of the redesigned Secretariat of State. Resentments over that, coupled with his relative youth (he was fifty-seven when Pope Paul died), precluded his election as Paul’s immediate successor, but he was a man of great self-confidence and formidable persuasive skills. By the time the cardinals entered the Sistine Chapel, at 4:30 P.M. on August 25, and locked the doors of the conclave behind them, Benelli, who shared the consensus view of the qualities required in the new pope, had persuaded many electors to support Cardinal Albino Luciani of Venice, a man barely mentioned in the feverish pre-conclave media speculation.30
Cardinal Luciani was elected on the fourth ballot taken on the first day of voting, August 26. It was the fastest conclave since 1939, when Eugenio Pacelli had been elected as Pius XII on the first day of voting. The cardinals had done their work efficiently, but confusion reigned supreme outside. The venerable system of announcing the election through a smoke signal from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel—white for a new pope, black for an inconclusive ballot—failed. Four different signals, of indeterminate color, appeared between 6:22 P.M. and 6:51 P.M. Finally, a loudspeaker announced that the puzzled thousands in St. Peter’s Square should look toward the central loggia of the basilica, which opens off the Hall of Benedictions above the vestibule or narthex of St. Peter’s. At 7:17 P.M., Cardinal Pericle Felici, the senior cardinal-deacon, appeared on the loggia and made the announcement in Latin according to the prescribed formula: “Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum: habemus Papam—Eminentissimum ac Reverendissimum Dominum Albinum, Sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae Cardinalem, Luciani, qui sibi nomen imposuit Ioannem Paulum Primum.”31 Fathers Dziwisz and Ryłko, hearing the news on the radio, left the beach and hurried back to Rome.
Albino Luciani was the son of a Socialist Party organizer, a priest in the reformist northern Italian tradition of Antonio Rosmini, a successful preacher and catechist, and an author whose book on religious education, Catechism Crumbs, had gone through six editions. While Cardinal Patriarch of Venice, Luciani had published Illustrissimi, a charming and insightful book of letters he would have written to famous historical figures, including Mark Twain (a favorite of the new pope’s), Charles Dickens, G. K. Chesterton, Pinocchio, the Empress Maria Teresa of Austria, and Jesus.32 Luciani was a popular bishop who had canceled the gaudy procession of gondolas and other watercraft that typically marked the ingress of a new Patriarch of Venice to his see, avoided the haut monde of Venetian society, and sold the pectoral cross given him by John XXIII to kick off a fund-raising drive for a center for the retarded. He certainly didn’t think of himself as papabile (a “man with the makings of a pope”). To anyone who suggested otherwise, he quoted a Venetian proverb about dumplings: “You don’t make gnocchi out of this dough.”33
Yet this man of simple tastes, deep goodness, considerable catechetical skills, and a winsome shyness elicited a powerfully sympathetic public response in thirty-three days. He used the personal “I” instead of the papal and royal “we” in his audiences. He refused a coronation, began his pontificate with a simple ceremony of installation, and kept as the motto on his papal coat-of-arms the single word that had adorned his arms as a bishop: Humilitas. He joked with reporters at his first press conference and had children come up to him in the audience hall during his addresses so that he could quiz them and illustrate his points. Quoting Pope Gregory the Great, he asked the people of Rome to “toss me a life preserver of prayer, lest I drown.” At first he declined to use the sedia gestatoria, until the crowds that flocked to the public appearances of the five-foot, five-inch-tall Pope complained that they couldn’t see him. A pope who radiated hope and Christian confidence was, it seemed, precisely what the world was looking for.
For all the vitality of his public presence, though, John Paul I was a sick man when he was elected. He had had a long history of serious circulatory problems (about which the electors did not inquire during the conclave, and for which he had had no medical treatment since becoming pope). He felt the pressures of the papacy acutely. His unfamiliarity with the workings of the Church’s central bureaucracy weighed heavily on him—and on some accounts, he was given little help from the permanent staff in adjusting to his new situation. He had accepted the papacy as an act of obedience to what he believed was the will of God working through his brother cardinals. When the fourth “scrutiny,” or ballot, had shown him elected and the Camerlengo, the Frenchman Jean Villot, asked him whether he would accept election, he startled his eminent colleagues by saying, “May God forgive you for what you have done.” It was, he later explained, a sudden “school memory” that had “popped into my head”—a quotation from St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who had criticized the College of Cardinals for electing a shy, retiring Cistercian monk as Pope Eugene III in 1145.34 He had not meant to offend the cardinals, but it was, in retrospect, an eerily prophetic statement. Neither Luciani, nor the electors who thought they had found the answer to the Church’s post-conciliar crisis by choosing him, could have known that the formal document certifying the Pope’s election was a death warrant with a very short due date.35
Early on the morning of September 29, 1978, one of the household sisters found Pope John Paul I dead in his bed, where he had been stricken the night before by a massive heart attack. The “September Papacy” was over and the Church was once again plunged into crisis.36
ANOTHER INTERREGNUM
On September 28, 1978, Cardinal Karol Wojtyła completed a visitation at the parish of St. Joseph in the Złote ?any [Golden Wheatfield] area of Biała and returned to Kraków, where at 6 P.M. he celebrated Mass at the altar of the Holy Cross of Blessed Queen Jadwiga in Wawel Cathedral. It was the feast of St. Wenceslaus, the twentieth anniversary of his consecration as a bishop, and Wojtyła preached on martyrdom. After Mass, he went to the home of his friends Gabriel and Bozena Turowski for an anniversary party with his Środowisko. A big display of vacation photographs from a quarter-century of kayaking and skiing had been prepared. Over it hung a banner reading, “Wujek will remain Wujek.” His friends kidded him about how many votes he had gotten at the recent conclave. He wanted to talk about the most recent kayak trip. His friends also thought he was a bit subdued and remembered later that he had made an effort to thank everyone for his or her friendship over the years.37
The next morning, September 29, the cardinal was at breakfast at the Metropolitan Curia when the telephone rang. One of the staff took the call and returned, shaken, with the news that Pope John Paul I had died during the night. Wojtyła left the table and went straight to his chapel. Later that morning, he attended a mee
ting of the governing council of the Faculty of Theology. When the dean, his old friend Father Marian Jaworski, offered condolences on the Pope’s death, Wojtyła replied that life’s surprises had to be accepted, like everything else, “in a spirit of deep faith.”38 Yet he was clearly shaken himself.
On October 1 he preached at a memorial Mass for the deceased pope at the Mariacki Church in the market square, remembering John Paul I’s “freshness and originality” and the fact that he had been elected on the feast of Our Lady of Częstochowa. But Wojtyła was a “different person” that day, Father Stanisław Małysiak remembered. Małysiak had worked with the cardinal for a long time and thought he knew how to read his emotions.39 This was not simply a eulogy for a deceased pope. This was a man wrestling with himself.
Before leaving for Rome, the cardinal called Jerzy Janik to say that they’d have to postpone a seminar they had planned to hold at the Janik home for a couple of weeks. Janik wished him a safe trip, and couldn’t help remembering that, years before, when he and his wife had been out hiking with Wojtyła, Jasią had jokingly said, “Where shall we go when you become pope?” Wojtyła hadn’t laughed, but simply said, “We’ll go to the Alps or the Apennines.”40
Cardinal Wojtyła went to Warsaw October 2 for a meeting of the Main Council of the Polish episcopate, thus missing the American evangelist Billy Graham, whom he had given permission to preach in St. Anne’s Church. In Warsaw he stayed at the Ursuline convent, where the sisters remembered him as looking very serious.41 Wojtyła left for Rome at 7:30 A.M. the next morning, along with Cardinal Wyszyński. By 11 A.M. on October 3, the Primate of Poland and the archbishop of Kraków were in St. Peter’s Basilica praying at the bier of John Paul I.
In the hours after the death of John Paul I, Karol Wojtyła wrote his last poem.42 It was titled, simply, “Stanisław,” and he wrote it, he said later, to pay “my debt to Kraków.”43 It was about martyrdom as the source of Polish nationhood and unity, and the universal model of the Christian vocation.
The Church, Wojtyła wrote, had bound itself to the Polish land “so that everything the Church binds here should be bound in heaven” the Church was the root which he and so many other Poles had “let out together into the past and the future.” One of the fathers who had given birth to the Church in Poland, and indeed to Poland itself, was his predecessor in the See of Kraków, Bishop Stanisław, in whose martyrdom by the sword of King Bolesław “the nation again was baptized/by the baptism of blood,” so that it might “go many times through the baptism of other trials.” The word of truth and the blood of martyrs had both nurtured “the soil of human freedom” in Poland, which had first been tilled by the breath of the Holy Spirit. And it was the spirit who “will unite everything/the word…and the…blood,” so that if “the word did not convert, blood will convert.”
Poland was a “land of difficult unity,” a “land subjected to the freedom of everyone towards all,” and, just a century before, a “land…torn apart through almost six generations,/torn apart on the maps of the world! and how much more in the fate of its sons!” Yet through this national martyrdom, as in the martyrdom of Bishop Stanisław, Poland was “united in the hearts of Poles/as no other land.” The power of the spirit and of the Spirit, confirming the Law of the Gift written into the human heart, was the first truth about history.44
It was a poem charged with a sense of valedictory. While he was writing it, his pen broke.45
Marek Skwarnicki, a Kraków poet and member of the Tygodnik Powszechny staff, was in Rome for a meeting of the Pontifical Council for the Laity when John Paul I died. He attended the funeral, looked at Wojtyła sitting with the other cardinals in the rain outside St. Peter’s, and thought, “My God, what will happen if he’s elected?” This was not, Skwarnicki insists, a romantic Polish fantasy, but something that had been talked about rather freely in Rome.
In the aftermath of two papal deaths within less than two months, there was renewed discussion of a non-Italian pope. Skwarnicki’s own reasoning went something like this. A Western European was unlikely, because the Church there was divided into two post-conciliar factions and electing someone from one would cause trouble with the other. A pope from the Third World—Pironio of Argentina, for example, an Italian ethnic—was a possibility, but more likely in the future. So the question became, where and for whom to look in Europe? Wojtyła was a European “from another world.” The Polish Church, the Church of a “praying country,” was strong at a time when the universal Church was in crisis, and although Western intellectuals may not have been taken with its popular piety, Polish Catholicism was very much a Church of the “People of God.” Wojtyła was known throughout the world and in the Curia. He had been a broker between the Polish bishops and the German bishops, a delicate business deftly handled. König of Vienna knew him and admired him. He was an expert in communism, which was a danger in the Third World, where half of Catholicism lived. Therefore, Wojtyła was papabile.
On the other hand, Skwarnicki thought, election as pope would be an emotional earthquake for Wojtyła. The poet remembered how happy the cardinal had been after Luciani’s election. Wojtyła certainly didn’t want to leave his “beloved Kraków” or his country in a time of need. The Curia knew Wojtyła was a great pastor who did not pay a lot of attention to bureaucratic process; the Polish cardinal knew something about the Curia and found it difficult to imagine himself confronting its entrenched factions and ways of doing things. Wojtyła, who was aware of his own limitations, knew how much his strength drew on Polish high culture, and how much he would miss by being cut off from his intense conversation with poets, painters, scientists, and philosophers.
These thoughts were churning through Marek Skwarnicki’s mind when he went to lunch at the Polish College on October 5, nine days before the conclave would begin—on the earliest date possible under Church law.46 Among the other guests was Jerzy Turowicz, editor of Tygodnik Powszechny. Wojtyła seemed “distracted” during the table talk, and Skwarnicki’s intuition told him that something was going on. Wojtyła never acted this way.
After lunch, the cardinal invited Turowicz and Skwarnicki to a sitting room where they sat in comfortable armchairs and looked through the windows at the pines of Rome. The cardinal asked Skwarnicki about the recent meeting of the Council for the Laity, but the poet had the impression that Wojtyła, uncharacteristically, wasn’t listening to his answer. Then Skwarnicki mentioned that he was leaving for Kraków, but had to be back in Rome for a meeting of the European Council of the Laity on October 20. Wojtyła repeated the date, “October 20,” as if it were in some unimaginable future.
The conversation shifted to the subject on everyone’s mind, the death of John Paul I. Wojtyła began to describe what had happened to him the day the Pope died. He had been out on his parish visitation and a storm had exploded in the mountains during Mass. As he described the storm, he became unusually emotional. His friends listened in silence, not knowing what he was thinking. He then stopped, concerned that he had become too demonstrative. Shortly afterward, his secretary, Father Dziwisz, opened the door a bit and looked in to remind the cardinal that there was another appointment waiting. Skwarnicki and Turowicz quickly stood up, and the cardinal embraced both of them. This was standard practice with Turowicz, but a first for Skwarnicki. He embraced them so strongly, Skwarnicki remembered, that the two men left the room shaken. It was as if they were saying good-bye, not for a few weeks, but for a much longer time. As they left, Dziwisz said to Turowicz and Skwarnicki, “Pray for Cardinal Wojtyła; pray for his return to Kraków.”47
Sister Emilia Ehrlich was already doing just that. An Ursuline nun who had worked with Cardinal Wojtyła in Kraków on various projects, including tutoring him in English, she was then doing graduate studies in Scripture in Rome at the Pontifical Biblical Institute. One of the sisters in her convent, an Italian, was praying that Cardinal Benelli would be elected. Sister Emilia was praying that Cardinal Wojtyła wouldn’t be.
So, i
t seems, was Wojtyła. Echoes of that prayer can be heard in a remarkable sermon he preached on October 8, at the Church of St. Stanisław in Rome, at a concelebrated Mass for the repose of the soul of John Paul I led by Cardinal Wyszyński. His text was John 21, in which the risen Christ questions Peter along the lakeshore in Galilee:
When we think about this wondrous summoning of Pope John Paul, then we must return to that first summons, the summons directed to Simon, to whom Our Lord gave the name “Peter.” Especially of that definitive summons after the Resurrection, when Christ asked him three times, “Do you love me?” And Peter answered three times, “You know I do, Lord.” And Christ asked: “Do you love me more than do the others?”…
This question was so difficult, so very demanding. And possibly Simon Peter, of all the Apostles, best understood how this question exceeds the scope of a human being. That is why he trembled in answering. He was giving himself up to the love of Him who was asking, when he answered, “Lord, you know that I love you.”
…The succession of Peter, the summons to the office of the papacy, always contains within it a call to the highest love, to a very special love. And always, when Christ says to a man, “Come, follow me,” He asks him what He asked of Simon: “Do you love me more than do the others?” Then the heart of man must tremble. The heart of Simon trembled, and the heart of Albino Luciani, before he took the name John Paul I, trembled. A human heart must tremble, because in the question there is also a demand. You must love! You must love more than the others do, if the entire flock of sheep is to be entrusted to you, if the charge, “Feed my lambs, feed my sheep” is to reach the scope which it reaches in the calling and mission of Peter.
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