Providing leadership to the Roman Catholic Church and being present to all the other communities to which the pope is a “bridge” is an extraordinarily complex task. Its inherent complexity is magnified by the fact that, misconceptions notwithstanding, the pope is not an absolute monarch. During Vatican II, Paul VI once proposed that the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church include the phrase that the pope is “accountable to the Lord alone.” This was rejected by the Council’s Theological Commission, which noted that “the Roman Pontiff is also bound to revelation itself, to the fundamental structure of the Church, to the sacraments, to the definitions of earlier Councils, and other obligations too numerous to mention.”3 Among the latter is his obligation to the truth of things as they are, which is another limit on his authority. A distinguished philosopher, who considers himself an extremely orthodox Catholic, once told a gathering that “If the Pope said that ‘2+2=5’ I’d believe him.” Another distinguished philosopher, no less committed to the papacy, gave the far more orthodox reply: “If the Holy Father said that ‘2+2=5,’ I would say publicly, ‘Perhaps I have misunderstood His Holiness’s meaning.’ Privately, I would pray for his sanity.” The pope is not an authoritarian figure who issues arbitrary decisions by virtue of his own unbridled will. The pope is the custodian of an authoritative tradition of teaching, a “magisterium,” that defines the boundaries of the Church. He is its servant, not its master.4
For Karol Wojtyła, who had long been convinced that truth is liberating, the “limitations” of the papacy were not constraints at all. The truth that binds and frees at the same time was, in his judgment, an instrument for exercising the Office of Peter in service to human freedom. And he intended to exercise that office according to the biblical model of Luke 22.32, in which Christ instructs Peter that his special task among the apostles is to “strengthen your brethren.”
In the first days of his papacy, more than one observer remarked that John Paul II seemed to have been “doing this all his life.” One of the men who elected him, Cardinal William Baum, a close student of Church history, said years later, “I cannot think of anyone who was more prepared [for the papacy] than Cardinal Wojtyła.”5 Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, who would have occasion in the future to be nervous about just how this new-model Pope was conducting his office, confessed in his retirement that “Poland was too small for the large personality of Cardinal Wojtyła… [which was] more fitting for a pope.”6 This was not simply a clerical view of a particularly gifted member of the club. The Kraków physicist Jerzy Janik knew his old friend Karol Wojtyła well, and thought that “he was well-adjusted from the beginning to the world-scale.”7 His press spokesman for many years, the Spanish layman Joaquín Navarro-Valls, agreed—John Paul II “felt at ease” in his office from the beginning.8
Although this ease was frequently attributed to the skills of an accomplished actor quickly adjusting to a new role, that is not how John Paul II understood it. There was no pause between his ministry as archbishop of Kraków and his ministry as Bishop of Rome, he said, because of his “confidence in the Holy Spirit, who was calling to the See of Peter a cardinal with this experience, with this background”—which must have meant that “this background is useful for the universal Church.”9 The new Pope did not think he required extensive instruction on how to be a bishop from those accustomed to managing popes. He had been a bishop for twenty years and the leader of a historic archdiocese for fourteen. And he was determined to mark visibly the continuity between the two experiences—even if that, too, involved breaking precedent.
Archbishop Bruno Heim, the Church’s acknowledged authority on ecclesiastical heraldry, prepared seven sketches of a coat-of-arms for John Paul II. The new Pope declined them all and kept the arms he had borne as archbishop of Kraków: a large capital “M” beneath a cross, representing Mary beneath the cross of Christ, with the Montfort-inspired motto, Totus Tuus. Archbishop Heim sniffed that “the practice of using initials is completely opposed to the true heraldic diction and reminds one of the commercial advertisement or trademark.”10 Bishop Jacques Martin, Prefect of the Papal Household, was another offended expert, noting that “the coat of arms of this Polish Pope is far more expressive in its spiritual meaning than in its heraldic conformity.”11 Though it may seem a small matter, it was a declaration of independence by the new Pope and an expression of his conviction that history should note that he had come to the See of St. Peter from the See of St. Stanisław. Every structure in the Vatican that would be built or altered in his pontificate would bear the distinctive, stubbornly nonconformist arms of the former archbishop of Kraków.
He had faced the emotional upheaval of assuming the impossible task of the papacy before and during the conclave that elected him. From the moment he answered Cardinal Villot, “Accepto,” he was determined to lead—and to do so in the way he had led since his consecration as a bishop, twenty years before.
EARTHQUAKE IN THE CURIA
John Paul II may have felt at ease in the papacy from the beginning, but some of his collaborators did not feel entirely comfortable with him. If his accession to the papacy was a terremoto, an earthquake, then the quake’s epicenter was the Church’s central administration, the Roman Curia. The world press, the Soviet leadership, and the College of Cardinals were all shocked, in different ways, by the election of John Paul II. The most shocked of all were the Italian priests, bishops, and cardinals of the Curia.
Rome, after all, is an Italian diocese. And if “Italian” was a concept with no political expression until far into the Italian domination of the papacy, the idea that the Roman episcopate was an “Italian” prerogative had real cultural and linguistic meaning for the operation of the Roman Curia. Rome’s 2,700-year civic history, and the Roman See’s endurance when the city itself had fallen on hard times, were historical realities that gave perspective to the pressures of present-day decision making in a global Church. “We think in centuries here,” a classic curial comment, can, in fact, be a helpful attitude in a media-driven age of constant, rapid change.
On the other hand, the Curia, and especially its Italian members, had gotten used to “managing” popes. That proprietary instinct gradually extended to a sense of managing the entire Church, so that local Churches became branch offices of Roman Catholic Church, Inc. In light of Vatican II’s teaching on the collegiality of bishops, this was no longer a viable model. Those who “think in centuries,” however, can sometimes be late in getting the word of change.
During the last years of Paul VI, it became almost de rigueur for journalists to portray the Curia as a nest of ambitious vipers at worst and a den of self-serving rascals at best. Neither image touches the truth of the matter, or the crucial issue that John Paul II faced on his election. One of John Paul’s closest associates has said, privately, that of the several hundred figures he had dealt with in the Roman Curia, only one or two could be called scoundrels, a very good percentage in any human organization. The primary problem with the Roman Curia in October 1978 when John Paul II became Pope was not rascality but attitude—an unwarranted, if historically understandable, devotion to “the way we do things here,” which many Italian Curialists in particular had come to identify with God’s will for the Church. Gli stranieri, the foreigners, don’t really fit in well here, a very senior curial official once said, quite without embarrassment. A Pope who had his own ideas about how things ought to be done, who had tested those ideas and found them true in direct pastoral practice, was inevitably going to be resented in that kind of environment. Add to this the natural disappointment of “losing” the papacy to gli stranieri, and one of the problems confronting John Paul II at the beginning of his pontificate comes into focus.
From the outset, John Paul II showed that he was not a man to be “managed.” At his first press conference, he once again broke precedent by walking through the crowd of journalists in the Hall of Benedictions, fielding impromptu questions in English, Italian, French, Polish, and German. When one of the
papal “managers” present tried to stop him from descending from the dais, John Paul simply shook him off. Someone asked whether he would go to Poland. “If they’ll let me,” came the papal response. Another reporter asked whether he would continue to ski. “If they’ll let me,” the Pope said again.12 In each case, everyone knew who “they” were.13 John Paul II was also aware of the strain between his immediate predecessor and certain members of the Curia, and he was determined that “they” would not run, or ruin, his life.
As his Kraków years had shown, he was not a leader given to micro-managing the work of others or summarily dismissing difficult subordinates. He had learned that establishing and pursuing his priorities was a far better way to be a bishop than struggling against a bureaucracy. He, too, could think in centuries, and he knew that certain encrusted aspects of the curial style would eventually fall off the Barque of Peter like so many barnacles. Why waste energy, and why hurt individuals, by forcing change now, as long as the barnacles didn’t interfere with the pursuit of the priorities? He was singularly uninterested in bureaucratic intrigues and other institutional trifles, so he could simply ignore many of the things that agitated or obsessed some of his collaborators.
As Pope, Karol Wojtyła could lead the Church and challenge the world by embodying a new, pastorally and evangelically assertive style of papal ministry. Or he could spend his pontificate wrestling with the Roman Curia. Given those options, the only one real choice was to lead, not by fighting an internal war of attrition, but by creating new facts—immediately, by new initiatives, and over time, by new appointments.14 At the same time, he left no doubt as to who was in charge. He did not ask anyone’s permission to keep doing, from the See of St. Peter, what he had been doing in the See of St. Stanisław, just as he hadn’t asked permission to visit his friend Bishop Deskur in the hospital immediately after Conclave II ended. Deskur, his former guide through the Roman maze, said that he knew what his role in the new pontificate would be: “My mission now,” he said, “is to support the Holy Father with my suffering.”15
THE ACTIVIST
Even before his installation, John Paul II began to lay out, in word and deed, many of the key themes that would shape his pontificate for two decades.
He had asked the cardinals to remain in conclave with him on October 16, the night of his election. After sleeping in his old cell, 91, he concelebrated Mass with the electors the next morning and, in an address after the liturgy, gave them and the Church a preview of what was coming.
His first task and “definitive duty,” he told them, was to complete the implementation of the Second Vatican Council, an “event of utmost importance in the almost two thousand year history of the Church.” In that implementation, the leaders of the Church would have to “take once again into our hands the ‘Magna Carta’ of the Council, the Dogmatic Constitution Lumen Gentium, so that with renewed and invigorating zeal we may meditate on the nature and function of the Church, its way of being and acting.” This was the strategy he had discussed with Cardinal Ratzinger before Conclave I: the Church’s proposal to the modern world had to be distinctively Catholic and Christian if the Church was to fulfill its unique mission “in the paths of life and of history.” After pledging himself to implementing the Council’s teaching on collegiality through the Synod of Bishops, he committed his pontificate to furthering the “lofty” cause of Christian unity and to developing the Church’s mission to help build peace and justice among nations, singling out religious freedom for special attention.16
On October 19 he met again with the College of Cardinals in his first formal papal audience, reflecting on the “great courage” it had taken for them to call him to be Bishop of Rome. He recalled that each new cardinal swears to be faithful to Christ “unto the shedding of your blood,” and he linked that pledge to the commitment of those countless, unknown Christians around the world “who are still not spared the experience of prison, sufferings, and humiliation for Christ.” It was the second explicit reference to the persecuted Church in three days. At the end of the audience another precedent fell. After giving the College his apostolic blessing, he asked them to join him in imparting that same blessing to the whole Church as a sign of their brotherhood and the Church’s universality.17
On October 20, John Paul II received the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See. He stressed that the men and women he was meeting were “not only the representatives of governments, but also of peoples and nations,” ancient countries with long histories and new countries full of possibilities. In contributing to human development, the Church recognized a “special richness in the diversity and plurality of…cultures, histories, and languages,” some of which the Church had helped form. The sometimes tragic history of Poland, he said, had taught him “to respect the specific values of each nation and each people, their traditions and their rights among other peoples.” The Holy See had no pretensions to power, as the world understood power. Its aim was to contribute “above all to the formation of consciences.” The Church did not need special privileges to do that. Justice, however, demanded religious freedom for all, including the right to worship and the believer’s right “to participate fully in public life.” Although a brief discourse, it marked the first step in a new papal approach to international politics, in which the conversion of culture was the first priority and religious freedom was the nonnegotiable litmus test of a just society.18
The press conference followed on October 21. The Pope thanked the journalists for their extensive coverage of “the really historic labor of the great Pope Paul VI,” for “having made so familiar the smiling face and the evangelical attitude of my immediate predecessor, John Paul I,” and for “the favorable coverage” of the events surrounding his election. It was, he said, “always difficult to read events and to enable others to read them.” For his part, he wanted journalists to find “the help they need from competent” Church bodies. Journalism, he went on to say, was a kind of vocation, a “service which the Church and humanity appreciate.” All the more reason then, to be grateful for the freedom in which some journalists work: “Think yourselves lucky to enjoy it!” Once again, without fanfare but also without flinching, another signal had been sent to the masters of the land from which he had come.
They were not happy with him, to put it gently. The party line, expressed on TV and in a telegram of congratulations from Poland’s communist chieftains, was that his election was a great triumph for the Polish nation.19 John Paul II quickly replied, in an October 21 telegram to Polish Communist Party leader Edward Gierek, that the history of the Polish nation had “been bound up for a thousand years with the mission and service of the Catholic Church.”20 The regime was, by its own standards, generous with passports for Poles wanting to attend the October 22 inauguration in Rome, but couldn’t resist using even that process for petty harassment, score settling, and minor espionage. Jacek Woźniakowski and Tadeusz Mazowiecki, two prominent Catholic writers and friends of the new Pope, were denied passports. The son of one of the Pope’s Środowisko friends was told that he could have a passport and the price of his ticket if he agreed to tell the SB what was happening in his department at the Jagiellonian University.21 Polish TV agreed to devote three hours to the inaugural Mass. John Paul II made sure that the ceremony was exactly that long, so that the last image transmitted back to his homeland was his blessing the vast crowd with the papal crosier, not Rome-based Polish communist commentators applying on-site “spin” to the story.22
The Polish communist leadership was also the target of sarcasm from its fraternal socialist ally. At the inaugural Mass, the Soviet ambassador to Italy turned to Polish President Henryk Jabłoński and acidly observed that “the greatest achievement of the Polish People’s Republic was to give the world a Polish pope.”23 Giancarlo Pajetta, an Italian communist with much experience in Poland, tried to put the best face on things by suggesting that “At least our Polish comrades won’t have him breaking their balls any more.”24 H
e was wrong about that, too.
On October 23, the day after his installation, John Paul II held an emotional farewell audience for Polish pilgrims in the new Vatican audience hall. He sent the Polish bishops home with two letters. The first was given to the Primate with the request that he and the bishops distribute it throughout the country. In it, he told his countrymen that “it was difficult to think and speak” of leaving the See of Stanisław for Rome “without a very deep emotion. It seems that the human heart—and in particular the Polish heart—is not sufficient to contain such an emotion.” Because of World War II and the repression of the communist years, the Church in Poland had become “the Church of a special witness.” Without that witness, “it is not possible to understand why a Polish pope is speaking to you today.” How could any of this have happened, he asked—the election of John Paul I on the feast of Our Lady of Częstochowa, his wholly unexpected death, a Polish cardinal called to St. Peter’s Chair, his acceptance by the Church—without the finger of God being on it?
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