Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  He then addressed Cardinal Wyszyński: “Venerable and beloved Cardinal Primate, allow me to tell you just what I think. This Polish Pope, who today, full of fear of God, but also of trust, is beginning a new pontificate, would not be on Peter’s chair were it not for your faith which did not retreat before prison and suffering….” When Wyszyński tried, once again, to genuflect before the Pope and kiss his ring, John Paul II, once again, bent down and drew the old man into a tight embrace.25

  The Primate may have been first among the brethren, but the Pope did not forget his other countrymen—including Poland’s communists—in fitting this great drama into a history that, he insisted, had a divine scriptwriter. They were all caught up, he told them, in something much larger than they could understand. It was a patriotism that had “nothing in common with a narrow nationalism or chauvinism.” What they were feeling sprang “from the law of the human heart” and bore witness to the nobility of the human spirit, which had been tested harshly “many times during our difficult history.”

  Leaving was hard, and there was no sense denying it. “But if such is Christ’s will, it is necessary to accept it, and therefore I accept it.” He asked the prayers of all Poland, then closed with his blessing, “and I do so not only by virtue of my mission as bishop and pope, but also to meet a deep need of my heart.” As for his “beloved Kraków,” he asked, in a second letter sent to the archdiocese through auxiliary bishop Juliusz Groblicki, that the archdiocese believe that “coming to Rome for the conclave, I had no other desire than to come back among you…but Christ’s will was different.” Perhaps he could come back for the jubilee of St. Stanisław and the closing of the archdiocesan Synod.26

  Four days later, in his second week as Pope, the pain of separation was still clear in a letter to his cousin Felicja Wiadrowska, the daughter of his mother’s sister, Maria:

  Dear Lusia:

  God has decreed that I remain in Rome. It is indeed an unusual edict of Holy Providence. These days I think a lot of my parents and of Mundek, but I also think of your mother and father, who were always so good to me…You are the only one left living of all my closest family…John Paul II27

  Audiences for the College of Cardinals and for the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See were normal papal events, as were a new pope’s meetings with old friends and colleagues. But the managers of popes had to adjust quickly to the distinctive cast of characters with whom the new pontiff was engaged—and intended to remain engaged. Jerzy Kluger, his wife and children were invited to stop by and meet his old classmate on October 23. A few days earlier, the managers had first met Sister Emilia Ehrlich. After consoling the nun who badly wanted Cardinal Benelli to become pope—“She was crying because her cardinal wasn’t elected and I was crying because mine was.”—Sister Emilia had gone back to her studies at the Pontifical Biblical Institute. On the Thursday after Wojtyła’s election, a functionary tracked her down there and said, “I don’t understand it, but they’re telephoning and saying that the Pope wants to see you.” Sister Emilia took the bus to the Vatican and presented herself at the Porta Sant’Anna. “They were quite scandalized. They gave me two Swiss Guards, like I was a prisoner, and walked me for quite some distance.” When she saw the Pope, Sister Emilia “had a color shock: he came in all in white, and I had never seen him that way.” They stood there for a moment, looking at each other, and then Sister Emilia started to cry. The Pope said, “Let’s not go soft,” and told her that he needed help dealing with the blizzard of requests for the rights to his poetry that had been pouring in from publishers. He wanted her to take care of it and told her that she should “see the Secretariat of State.” Sister Emilia didn’t know where that was, but set off to find it, no doubt to the further amazement of the managers of popes.28

  In the weeks after his inaugural Mass, John Paul II regularly broke out of the gilded cage that was now his home and office. On October 29, he went by helicopter to the Marian shrine at Mentorella, cared for by the Resurrectionist Fathers, a group of priests whose nineteenth-century founding was inspired by Adam Mickiewicz. As word of the Pope’s visit spread, thousands of people flocked to the shrine from the neighboring areas. John Paul II apologized to the local authorities for causing such trouble, and then explained why he had come. Mentorella, he said, was a place that had “helped me a great deal to pray” during his visits to Rome. Now that he was a Roman, he wanted to come back, because “prayer… [is] the first task and almost the first signal of the Pope, just as it is the first condition of his service in the Church and in the world.”29

  A week later, on Sunday, November 5, John Paul, in his new office as Primate of Italy, presented himself to his people at the shrines of Italy’s two patrons, St. Francis of Assisi and St. Catherine of Siena. After flying to Assisi, the Pope told an enormous crowd at the basilica that, because he “was not born in this land, I feel more than ever the need of a spiritual ‘birth’ in it.” That was why he had come to Assisi, where St. Francis, the Poverello, “wrote Christ’s Gospel in incisive characters in the hearts of the men of his time”—the new Bishop of Rome needed his prayers. Returning to Rome that evening, he drove to the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, within whose high altar rest the remains of Catherine of Siena. Standing beside the relics of this corrector of popes—the woman who, by force of will, had virtually compelled Pope Gregory XI to return to Rome from Avignon in 1376—John Paul reflected on “how deeply the mission of women is inscribed in the mystery of the Church,” and suggested that he would “say many things about this theme” in the future.30

  On Thursday, November 9, John Paul II met the priests of Rome in the Hall of Benedictions. The following Sunday, November 12, he took possession of his cathedral as Bishop of Rome, the Basilica of St. John Lateran.31 Or, to put it more accurately, he came to ask his diocese to accept him: “As you welcomed my predecessors throughout the centuries…I beg you to welcome me, too.” He also had a challenge for the Romans, residents of a city where Catholic practice was often lax: “Go in spirit to the banks of the Jordan, where John the Baptist taught—John, who is the patron saint of this basilica, the cathedral of Rome. Listen once more to what he said, indicating the Christ: ‘Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.’…Believe with renewed faith…in Christ, the Savior of the world!”32

  John Paul met with thirteen thousand cheering teenagers on November 29, and asked them to “tell everyone that the Pope counts a great deal on the young.”33 On December 3, the first Sunday free on his calendar, he made his first Roman parish visitation to the church in Garbatello where he had worked during his student days.34 The following Sunday, he was at the Vatican “parish” church of St. Anne’s just inside the Porta Sant’Anna, where he began his homily to “my fellow parishioners” with the words of St. Augustine: Vobis sum…episcopus, vobiscum sum christianus [For you I am a bishop; with you I am a Christian].35

  The next day, December 11, the thirtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, he urged that “freedom of religion for everyone and for all people must be respected by everyone everywhere.”36 It was a theme to which he returned in his homily at midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, in his World Day of Peace message on January 1, and in his New Year’s address to the diplomatic corps on January 12, 1979. During his first two months in office, John Paul II conducted the most assertive papal defense of religious freedom in the thirteen years since the Second Vatican Council had adopted Dignitatis Humanae.

  The new Pope took his first diplomatic initiative two days before Christmas, 1978, when he sent Cardinal Antonio Samorè to Chile and Argentina to mediate a solution to the Beagle Channel boundary dispute, which was threatening to break out into open warfare. The Holy See had not served as an international mediator since settling the 1885 dispute between Spain and Germany over the Caroline Islands, and some of his more cautious advisers worried that Vatican prestige would suffer if the attempted mediation failed. John Paul had a different view—as
he put it to a Vatican diplomat who congratulated him on his courage, “Do you think that, after accepting this office, I could stand by and watch those two Catholic countries go to war?”37 Samorè’s mission, a classic diplomatic shuttle between Buenos Aires and Santiago, was a success. On January 9, 1979, the two countries formally requested Holy See mediation of the boundary dispute and forswore the use of armed force during the mediation. Given the anxiety in the Vatican Secretariat of State, it was only the direct, personal initiative of John Paul II that prevented a small but bloody war.38

  The Romans, meanwhile, had decided that they loved their new bishop. In his Urbi et Orbi message “to the city and the world” on Christmas Day, he had told them that Christmas was the “feast of man.” “Every human being…unique and unrepeatable” had been given the power to become a child of God, for God, by entering human history in the stable at Bethlehem, had given human nature an unsurpassable dignity.39 The next day, hundreds of Romans came back to St. Peter’s Square. It was a Tuesday, and neither a general audience nor the recitation of the Angelus was scheduled, but the crowd began to clap and call for the Pope. He came to the window shortly before noon, prayed the Angelus with the crowd, and teased them: “I rejoice with you and I wonder why you have come. Perhaps you came to see if the Pope is at home on the second day of Christmas. And then I think you have come because today is a really beautiful day and attracts one outside. But the Pope has to stay at home because he never knows when people are coming to recite the Angelus.” The crowd continued to cheer, and the banter continued: “I do not understand what you are saying. You do not have microphones. But I understand that you love the Pope. Thank you and a Merry Christmas to all…. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”40

  A few weeks later, yet another precedent was broken. Popes do not usually perform weddings. This Pope, determined to remain a pastor, was different. During the Christmas season, he had visited the Christmas crib or crèche set up by Roman street cleaners near the Vatican. Vittoria Janni, a street cleaner’s daughter, asked the Pope if he would perform her wedding. John Paul II smiled and agreed. Vittoria Janni and Mario Maltese were married at a Mass celebrated by the Pope on February 25 in the Vatican’s Pauline Chapel.41 Four days later, John Paul met with 13,000 members of the Italian military, mugged for the cameras in the plumed helmet of a bersagliere, and quoted Pascal: “Outside Jesus Christ we do not know what is our life, or our death, God or ourselves.”42 Two days later, he began leading the First Saturday Rosary internationally broadcast on Vatican Radio. Other Roman clergy had usually led the half-hour ceremony of prayer; listener demand caused the change.43

  On the solemnity of the Epiphany, January 6, 1979, John Paul II conferred episcopal ordination on the man he had named his successor as Archbishop of Kraków—Franciszek Macharski, an old friend, fellow seminarian, and one of the key leaders of the Synod of Kraków. After the ceremony in St. Peter’s, at a meeting with the new archbishop and those who had come to Rome with him from Kraków, the Pope presented his successor with the simple gold pectoral cross that Pope Pius X had given Adam Stefan Sapieha in 1911 and which Karol Wojtyła had worn during his fourteen years as archbishop: “This,” he said to Macharski, “belongs to the archbishop of Kraków.” Macharski, knowing how much the Pope loved the Sapieha cross, had an exact replica made and gave it to John Paul II some months later. The Pope has worn the duplicate Sapieha cross ever since.44

  Within four months of his election, the nonstop Pope had reinvigorated the world’s most ancient office, making clear, by his actions as well as his words, that evangelization and reevangelization were his pastoral priorities. He had demonstrated that he intended to exercise his titles as “Bishop of Rome” and “Primate of Italy” far more directly than his Italian predecessors. He had let the young people of the world know that they were his favorites and his great hope. He had demonstrated his reverence and concern for marriage and family life. He had deftly deployed the traditional diplomatic levers at his command, even as he had begun to reorient the Church’s interaction with the worlds of power. His forthright defense of religious freedom sent unmistakable signals throughout the world, and particularly throughout the communist leadership. This was a Pope who would not be bound by the usual rules, who would deliberately bring the pressure of world opinion to bear on behalf of human rights.

  CHANGING THE ROUTINE

  In addition to doing things that popes simply hadn’t done before, John Paul II did them at a pace that was dizzying by the standards of the institutional culture in which he now found himself.

  He rose at 5:30 A.M. (“not easily,” as he once put it), and after dressing went straight to his chapel for the best part of his day, more than an hour of private prayer, kneeling before a modern crucifix and an icon of the Black Madonna. What he once called the “geography” of his prayer extended beyond the world crises and the concerns of local Churches he brought before the Lord. It included the hundreds of personal prayer requests the household nuns took from his correspondence and typed on sheets they placed inside the top of his prie-dieu.45 At 7:30 A.M., he concelebrated Mass with his secretaries and other priests, before a small congregation that almost always included invited guests as well as the nuns who cared for the papal apartment. At 8:30 he had breakfast, often with guests invited to stay after Mass.

  From 9:30 to 11 A.M., he did his writing. As in Kraków, he often wrote in the chapel, before the Blessed Sacrament, and he retained the lifelong habit of putting a brief prayer at the top of every manuscript page. Here was where he worked on his encyclicals, apostolic letters and exhortations, and audience addresses. In the most important cases, he wrote his own drafts and then sent them out to be reviewed by trusted colleagues. In other instances, he worked from a draft text prepared by the Curia or by other consultants. At 11 A.M., his official appointments, including audiences for different groups, began and lasted for two and a half hours. At 1:30 P.M., he had pranzo, lunch, with guests. The most ample meal of the day included an antipasto, a pasta, a meat or fish course with numerous vegetables, a dolce (his favorite, visitors noted), and fresh fruit, served with wines and mineral water. When lunch was over, usually before 3 P.M., he took a ten-minute riposo and then tried to get some exercise, walking in the Vatican gardens, for example, while the Curia and the rest of Rome took their more ample midday naps. He prayed at least one of the several rosaries he said each day while he walked.

  A locked pouch containing documents, correspondence, and other official business came in from the Secretariat of State at 3 P.M. His secretaries sorted it out, and presented what had to be signed or decided to the Pope; sometimes the decision was “We need to study this some more.”46 In the late afternoon, official appointments began again. He met in scheduled, formal audiences with the Cardinal Secretary of State, the Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, the Sostituto (the deputy chief of the Secretariat of State and the Pope’s de facto chief-of-staff), and the “foreign minister,” the Secretary of the Section for Relations with States, once each week, and more often if necessary.

  Dinner was at 7:30 P.M., usually with guests, and concluded about 9 P.M. Another pouch came in from the Secretariat of State at this point. For the rest of the evening John Paul read, did more writing, conferred with his personal staff, or, when the technology became available, checked the incoming faxes until 11 P.M., when he went to bed.

  Relaxation, for John Paul II, did not usually mean music or movies, although he occasionally watched the latter and thought they could be an important stimulus for “creative work,” but rather catching up with philosophy.47 It was impossible to do systematic reading in his discipline, but the man who had left a new volume on Heidegger on his bed stand when he left for Conclave II was rarely without a philosophical title through which he browsed as time permitted.

  Amid all the splendor of the Apostolic Palace—the Raphael frescoes, the gilding, the rich tapestries, the
omnipresent marble—visitors can be surprised by the simplicity, indeed middle-class conventionality, of the Pope’s apartment. His two priest-secretaries shared an office just off the more “public” parts of the papal apartment—the chapel, the dining room, the large and small reception rooms. The Pope’s personal office was just beyond the secretaries’ room and featured a large icon of the Black Madonna. His bedroom was divided in two by an old-fashioned folding partition or screen. On one side was a small desk, and on the other the bedroom proper, which included a full-sized bed with a simple white counterpane, several freestanding closets, and a large table on which were displayed some of the large books of photography John Paul enjoyed scanning. On the far wall of the bedroom was a map of the Diocese of Rome; over the years, the parishes the Pope visited would be marked on it. There are only two photographs in John Paul’s private quarters: a small photograph of the Prince Cardinal, Adam Stefan Sapieha, on the desk in his personal office, and a small, silver-framed photo of his parents, taken shortly after their wedding, on the table in his bedroom.

  He tried to make the apartment a home for those who lived there. When a young Zaïrois priest, Father Emery Kabongo, became his second secretary in 1982, the African immediately noticed that John Paul II didn’t “act like a big chief,” but was “a man with whom you can live.” On the day Kabongo arrived from the Secretariat of State, the Pope walked in while the new man was being shown around the office by the first secretary; John Paul greeted him, gave him his blessing, took him into the kitchen to meet the sisters, told him that he was “part of the family,” and that “Stanislao [Dziwisz, the first secretary] is your brother.” In the six years that he worked for John Paul II, Kabongo never got a lecture from the Pope about how he should do his work. John Paul, he remembered, was never angry at inefficiency or bureaucratic mistakes; his rare displays of anger came when someone who should have known better denied a truth of the Catholic faith. The African also noticed that the Pope arranged his life to have as many contacts with people as possible.48 All of them were treated with an unaffected naturalness. John Paul, in many ways a man of almost courtly personal manners, did not encourage visitors to kiss his ring, as previous custom dictated, but neither did he embarrass those who wished to make this gesture of deference. His ability to put visitors at ease was amplified by his ability to speak the languages of most of his guests.