Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  The text of St. John’s Gospel continues. Christ speaks enigmatic words, He says them to Peter: “When you were younger, you girded yourself and went where you wanted. But when you grow old, someone else will gird you and lead you where you do not want to go.” Mysterious, enigmatic words…

  And so in this summons, directed to Peter by Christ after His Resurrection, Christ’s command, “Come, follow me,” has a double meaning. It is a summons to service, and a summons to die….48

  Five days later, on October 13, personal tragedy struck. Bishop Andrzej Deskur was felled by a massive stroke and rushed to the Policlinico Gemelli, where it seemed at first as if he might not live. Deskur and Karol Wojtyła had been friends since the mid-1940s. They were in the seminary together and, after the war, had many Kraków acquaintances in common; Deskur’s brother, Joseph, married one of Stefan and Maria Swiezawski’s daughters. Andrzej Deskur had lived in Rome for years and was then serving as President of the Pontifical Commission for Social Communications. Ever since Vatican II, Deskur, one of the few Poles in Rome, had been Wojtyła’s guide through the Vatican labyrinth. When he became a senior curial official, his home was the place where, over lunches and dinners, Wojtyła met members of the Curia or could talk with other visiting members of the hierarchy in informal surroundings. Wojtyła went immediately to see his friend, and concelebrated Mass for him the next morning, October 14, at the Polish College. That afternoon, he went back to the Gemelli to visit Deskur, who was badly paralyzed and hardly able to speak. The guide was gone.

  Karol Wojtyła left his friend’s bedside and went straight to the Vatican, where, after singing the “Veni, Creator Spiritus” with his brother cardinals, he was locked into the conclave.

  Meanwhile, Marek Skwarnicki had returned to Kraków and told his colleagues that he was going to Wadowice. He was certain Wojtyła was going to be elected pope, and somebody had to get started on the background story. His colleagues thought he had gone a little crazy.49

  WHO?

  Cardinal Jean Villot, the Camerlengo responsible for guiding yet another papal interregnum, was not happy with the leaks from Conclave I in August. He remonstrated with the cardinals before Conclave II, reminding them of the oath of secrecy they had sworn. Thus fewer details about the extraordinary process that produced the first non-Italian Pope in 455 years (and the first Slavic Pope ever) have become public. It is known that Wojtyła occupied Cell 91 in the Apostolic Palace, and that he took a Marxist philosophical journal into the Sistine Chapel to read during the lengthy process of ballot counting; when asked by a chaffing colleague whether that wasn’t a bit scandalous, he smiled and replied that his conscience was clear. Pope John Paul II himself has provided one small detail about the conclave. At a certain point in the proceedings, his old rector at the Belgian College, Cardinal Maximilian De Fürstenburg, approached him and asked, in words reminiscent of John 11:28, “Deus adest et vocat te? ” [God is here, and calling you?].50

  According to the consensus view that has formed over the years, De Fürstenburg’s question became a plausible one because, on the first day of voting, October 15, there was a deadlock between the two principal Italian candidates, Cardinal Giuseppe Siri of Genoa and the Great Elector of Conclave I, Cardinal Giovanni Benelli. Unable to find an alternative Italian, the conclave then moved quickly to elect Karol Wojtyła, who had, according to Cardinal Carlo Confalonieri, received some votes at Conclave I, and who was chosen on the eighth ballot at the end of the second day of Conclave II, October 16. No more plausible political explanation of the election of Pope John Paul II has been proposed. Sifting through rumors and hints of conclave politics does not, however, get to the more interesting, and indeed prior, question—why were the cardinals willing to break with centuries of tradition, and in such a dramatic way?

  In human terms, the election of a non-Italian, Polish Pope was possible because many members of the College of Cardinals were in a state of spiritual shock after the death of John Paul I. To have felt, as so many evidently did, that Cardinal Luciani was “God’s candidate” (Cardinal Basil Hume’s phrase after Conclave I), and then to have him removed abruptly from the scene, could only raise the question, “What is God saying to us here?” John Paul I’s death, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger remembered, led the College of Cardinals to an examination of conscience: “What is God’s will for us at this moment? We were convinced that the election [of Luciani] was made in correspondence with the will of God, not simply in a human way…and if one month after being elected in accordance with the will of God, he died, God had something to say to us.”51 Cardinal William Baum remembers the death of John Paul I as “a message from the Lord, quite out of the ordinary…This was an intervention from the Lord to teach us something.” That sense of shock led to a conclave experience that Baum thought was “intensely prayerful” and even “more profoundly spiritual” than Conclave I in August, when there was so much talk about sensing the will of God in the quick and painless election of Albino Luciani.52 The shock of the September Papacy, so abruptly and unexpectedly ended, created the human conditions for “the possibility of doing something new,” Cardinal Ratzinger believed.53

  The deadlock among Italian candidates was the immediate occasion for doing the hitherto unthinkable. The crucial fact that helps explain the eventual outcome was that Conclave II in 1978 took place in the wake of what the College of Cardinals had to regard as an unambiguous signal that something else, something different, something bold was required of them.

  The next question, then, is, why Karol Wojtyła?

  Cardinal Franz König had come to Conclave II more determined that ever to press for a non-Italian pope. The day before the conclave began he spoke with his old friend, Cardinal Wyszyński, and said, “The conclave will open tomorrow; who is a candidate for you?” The Primate replied that he didn’t have a candidate. König replied, “Well, perhaps Poland could present a candidate?” Wyszyński said, “My goodness, you feel I should go to Rome? That would be a triumph for the communists.” König answered, “No, not you, but there is a second….” To which the Primate replied, “No, he’s too young, he’s unknown, he could never be pope….”54

  König was unpersuaded. Wyszyński had not, evidently, fully measured the degree to which Wojtyła had become a major international Catholic figure. König believed that a pope from behind the iron curtain would help break the “mentality of division” that had set in since World War II, so he set out to persuade others. Their initial response was cool, but the novelty of the proposal began to seem less threatening after the Italian deadlock. The Primate’s initial reaction notwithstanding, Wojtyła, as we have seen, was far from unknown. Several cardinals had read his 1976 papal retreat meditations, Sign of Contradiction, and had been impressed. The Africans, concerned about doctrinal clarity, knew him to be deeply evangelical man and a man of the Council. He was not a curial cardinal, which was attractive to those who thought a break with traditional patterns of Church governance was essential. Wojtyła was a powerful public personality, which was important in light of the positive public response to the brief pontificate of John Paul I. Then there was the Ostpolitik of Paul VI. Its diplomatic achievements were very thin, and the archbishop of Kraków had doubts about the strategy it embodied. But by disentangling the Holy See from its post–World War II alignment with the West, the Ostpolitik had made the election of a pope from behind the iron curtain thinkable.55

  The most compelling thing about Wojtyła’s candidacy, though, was his record as a diocesan bishop. Once the psychological break with the presumed inevitability of an Italian papacy had been made, this must have been a crucial factor, and perhaps the crucial factor, in the rapid emergence of Karol Wojtyła as a candidate in Conclave II. He had shown that leadership was still possible amid the post-conciliar tension and confusion and against external pressures. According to Cardinal König, that Wojtyła had “had real pastoral experience,” that he had shown how to be a bishop in the post–Vatican II Church—that was
what made him papabile.56

  The “break” having been made because of the Italian deadlock, things moved very rapidly. As they did, Primate Wyszyński, now fully convinced, reminded his younger colleague of Christ’s challenge to Peter fleeing Rome in Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis, and told Wojtyła, simply, “Accept it.”57 Wojtyła’s candidacy became irresistible on the fourth and final ballot on October 16. At approximately 5:15 P.M., the cardinals, who had been keeping their own tallies, were formally told what they already knew—Cardinal Karol Wojtyła had received the votes necessary to be elected pope. At a certain point in the tally, Wojtyła had put his head in his hands. Cardinal Hume remembered feeling “desperately sad for the man.”58 Jerzy Turowicz later wrote that, at the moment of his election, Karol Wojtyła was as alone as a man can be. For to be elected Pope meant “a clear cut off from one’s previous life, with no possible return.”59 Cardinal König, who was as responsible as anyone for advancing Wojtyła’s candidacy, was “very anxious about whether he would accept.”60

  When Cardinal Jean Villot, who had told the cardinals in his sermon pro elegendo Pontifice that they “must elect a bridegroom of the Church,” stood in front of Wojtyła’s desk and asked, “Acceptasne electionem?” there was no hesitation.61 Karol Wojtyła knew the seriousness of the times and the weight of responsibility that was being laid upon him, but he saw in his brothers’ votes the will of God. And so, “In the obedience of faith before Christ my Lord, abandoning myself to the Mother of Christ and the Church, and conscious of the great difficulties, accepto.”62 Then, to the second, ritual question, as to what name he would be known, he answered that, because of his devotion to Paul VI and his affection for John Paul I, he would be known as John Paul II. The College of Cardinals burst into prolonged applause, and the new Pope was taken down a flight of stone steps and into the small dressing room off the Sistine Chapel where three white cassocks, large, medium, and small, had been prepared. The dressing room is sometime referred to as a “crying room,” because of the emotion that can overwhelm a newly elected pontiff. By this time, though, Pope John Paul II had shed whatever tears there were to be. He walked vigorously back to the Sistine Chapel to receive the homage of the cardinals and immediately broke his first precedent. When the papal master of ceremonies indicated that he should sit in front of the altar for the ceremony, John Paul II replied, “I receive my brothers standing….”63

  Outside, at the far end of the Via della Conciliazione, a red-orange full moon was visible from St. Peter’s Square, where thousands had gathered. Spotlights swept back and forth across the crowd. At 6:15 P.M., the smoke from the small chimney atop the Sistine Chapel started again and the crowd saw that it was white. A voice crackled over the sound system, “Prova, prova, prova” [Testing, testing, testing]; then a big, throat-clearing cough; and finally the announcement, “È bianco, il fumo è bianco, è veramente bianco!” [It’s white, the smoke is white, it’s really white!] Inside, Cardinal Wyszyński was telling the new Pope that God had chosen him to lead the Church into the third millennium, an admonition to which John Paul II would frequently allude in the years ahead. In the square, into which thousands more were pouring as news of an election was confirmed by a telephone call from the conclave to the Vatican press office, Sister Emilia Ehrlich was praying fervently that the man about to appear before the crowd wouldn’t be Cardinal Wojtyła: “Everybody else was praying for their cardinal; I was praying that they wouldn’t take ours.”

  Cardinal Felici, who would make the public announcement again, turned to Cardinal König on their way to the loggia overlooking the square and asked, “How do you spell his name?” Felici jotted down the answer, murmuring “What a terrible spelling…” He came out on the loggia and began as he had weeks before: “Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum: habemus Papam!” The crowd roared, and then waited. Felici continued: “Eminentissimum ac reverendissimum Dominum Carolum…”—and then paused to draw out the suspense. Someone in the crowd, thinking the cardinals had elected the eighty-five-year-old Carlo Confalonieri, cried, “They’ve gone mad!” Felici pressed on, checking his hastily scribbled notes, “… Sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae Cardinalem Wojtyła, qui sibi nomen imposuit Ioannem Paulum Secundum.”

  At the unfamiliar name, chaotic questioning started in the square. “Chi è?” [Who?] was the first thing tens of thousands of people asked. “È nero?” an Italian said to Jerzy Turowicz—“Is it a black?” “È Asiatico?” someone else asked. Sister Emilia Ehrlich didn’t have to ask. She turned very pale, and the man beside her said, “What’s the matter? Isn’t he good?” “No,” she answered, “he’s much too good.”

  It was nothing like August, when the crowd—largely Romans, of course—had been in a festive mood from the moment Felici announced Albino Luciani’s election. Now they were restive. Who was this straniero? What had the cardinals thrust upon them?

  John Paul II, who felt the drama and tension as much as any Roman, stepped to the microphone on the loggia, brushed a fussy papal master of ceremonies out of the way, and broke precedent again by addressing the crowd, rather than simply giving them the apostolic blessing in Latin as custom dictated. In a clear, sonorous Italian, he introduced himself to his new diocese:

  Praised be Jesus Christ!

  Dear Brothers and Sisters…

  The crowd began to cheer, hearing their language, sensing his good will, wanting to encourage him.

  …We are all still grieved after the death of our most beloved John Paul I. And now the eminent cardinals have called a new bishop of Rome. They have called him from a far country: far, but always near through the communion of faith and in the Christian tradition….

  He had, the British actor Sir John Gielgud once said, a perfect sense of timing. Now, the crowd with him, he let them know him as a man and as a fellow Catholic, making the connection between their native Marian piety and his own:

  …I was afraid to receive this nomination, but I did it in the spirit of obedience to our Lord Jesus Christ and in total confidence in his Mother, the most holy Madonna.

  I don’t know if I can make myself clear in your… our Italian language. If I make a mistake, you will correct me….

  Even louder cheers broke out. There was one last thing to do. The rapport established, a theme had to be proclaimed. No one who knew him could doubt it would be Christian humanism:

  …And so I present myself to you all, to confess our common faith, our hope, our trust in the Mother of Christ and of the Church, and also to start anew on this road of history and the Church, with the help of God and with the help of men.64

  “Wujek JUST BECAME POPE!”

  Polish television, state-controlled, didn’t make the announcement for several hours after word of Wojtyła’s election had been received; an official party position had to be worked out. Meanwhile, the news had reached the Metropolitan Curia in Kraków by phone, and as Father Stanisław Małysiak remembers, “went around like spilled water.” A huge, spontaneous celebration erupted throughout the city as the story spread. The bells of the Mariacki Church started ringing; then the bells at Wawel Cathedral, including the gigantic Sigismund bell, rung on only the most important Church and national occasions; then, it seemed, every bell in Kraków. People poured into the streets with lighted candles and flowers, waving Polish flags, crying, embracing spontaneously. A photograph of Cardinal Wojtyła was placed on the pedestal of the statue of Adam Mickiewicz in the market square, and a mound of flowers began to form in front of his old residence at Franciszkańska, 3. Within an hour, the Mariacki was filled to overflowing and a Mass was hastily organized.65

  Stanisław Rybicki was home in bed, sick. His wife, Danuta, was out late, and on coming home, found her husband in tears; “Don’t be mad that I’m late,” she said. “Wujek just became Pope,” he replied. They cried together, feeling as if they had lost a member of the family. Then they broke open a bottle of wine they had bought on holiday in Czechoslovakia. Their usual vintage, Red Cardinal, had been unavailable. Now, to toas
t the election of Wujek, they drank what they had found—White Cardinal. On hearing the news, Stanisław Rybicki remembered, he couldn’t help marveling, “He went from a kayak to the Barque of Peter….”66

  Teresa Życzkowska was also home in bed with a terrible cold. Her uncle called and said, “Habemus Papam—Karolek!” “Don’t be stupid,” she replied. Her husband then turned on the radio, and the news was confirmed. “We’ve lost Wujek,” she thought, shocked.67

  In Lublin, Jerzy Gałkowski came home and found his house filled with people in the midst of a party. When he asked what on earth was going on, they told him that KUL had just given the world a pope. Gałkowski brought out the wine and they all sat around the TV, eager to see how the government would play the story—which became, in the hands of the communist spin doctors, a triumph of Polish nationalism.68

  An old priest came pounding on the door of the Swiezawskis’ apartment in Warsaw. Maria Swiezawska answered the door, and the old man blurted out the news. She took her head in her hands; thinking what he would do as pope and what could be done to him, she could only say, “Jezus Maria! Jezus Maria! ”69

  In Wadowice, Father Edward Zacher was praying in the local church. One of the younger priests came running over from the parish house and said, “We’ve got a Pope!” “Who is that?” the pastor asked. “It’s Lolek!” said the assistant. The old man blinked, felt his heart pounding, and then shouted, “Thanks to heaven!” He ran over to the parish house, got the news confirmed on the radio, and then ran back to the church to ring its bells. People started pouring out into the streets, and within minutes the church was packed. Father Zacher, who had taught Lolek his catechism, tried to speak. But he couldn’t. Emotion choked him, and one of his assistants made the formal announcement.70 When he got himself under a bit of control, Father Zacher kept saying, with a huge smile, “But he did not keep his word, he did not keep his word.” At a celebration marking the fiftieth anniversary of Wojtyła’s baptism, Zacher had given his fifth sermon in praise of his former student and said there would be only one more, a sixth, when the cardinal was elected Pope. The cardinal had grunted and said there would be no sixth sermon. Now, Zacher told everybody, “he didn’t keep his word for the first time in his life.”71 Later, the old man went to the baptismal registry for 1920. Here, in telegraphic phrases, were recorded the milestones of Karol Wojtyła’s Christian life: his baptism, confirmation, priestly ordination, episcopal consecration, nomination as archbishop of Kraków, and election to the College of Cardinals. Now, Father Zacher made yet another entry under the name of “Carolus Joseph Wojtyła”: Die 16 X 1978 in Summum Pontificem electus et sibi nomen Ioannem Paulum II imposuit.72