Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  The Ostpolitik of Pope Paul VI and his “foreign minister,” Archbishop Agostino Casaroli, was a product of this venerable tradition, updated for the late twentieth century. The claims of some of its most vociferously anti-communist critics notwithstanding, the Ostpolitik was certainly aimed at defending the Church, its people, and its distinctive interests. But Paul VI and Casaroli, two veteran diplomats, read history and what Vatican II had called “the signs of the times” through rather conventional realist filters.

  The Ostpolitik of the Vatican, and indeed the character of papal diplomacy as a whole, changed dramatically on October 16, 1978, with Karol Wojtyła’s election as Pope John Paul II. The change was not simply a question of tactics—although those changed, too—but of premises. Wojtyła brought a distinctive reading of contemporary history to the papacy. Married to the vision of “the Church in the modern world” he had helped craft at Vatican II, that analysis led to a new model of papal diplomacy.

  Karol Wojtyła was a “realist” philosophically, convinced that the human mind could grasp the truth of things and give a coherent account of what it had grasped. Yet his philosophical “realism” did not translate into a “realist” view of international relations, in which the engine of history is understood to be economic and military power. Wojtyła disagreed, as a Christian and an analyst of history’s dynamics. As a Christian convinced that the Gospel revealed the truth about humanity and its destiny, he believed that God was in charge of history. This freed the Church to act in history in a singular way. As a Pole who had reflected long and hard on the fact that the Polish nation had survived when the Polish state was abolished, he was convinced that culture drove history, over the long run. The realists were wrong, not because military and economic power were unimportant, but because culture was more important. And the most powerful component of culture was cult, or religion.

  Realism in international relations theory read history as a realm of amorality. History was a butcher’s block, Hegel had argued. Wojtyła, again, disagreed. In his Christian-Polish view, history was best read through the prism of moral analysis, and viewed through that prism, the subjugation of the nations within Stalin’s external and internal empires was a moral catastrophe. Its rectification was the precondition to peace and what Paul VI had called “the development of peoples.”

  This was not an idiosyncratically “ethnic” vision of modern history. It was another way of taking Vatican II seriously. As his friend Professor Stefan Swiezawski put it, the Council had marked “the end of the Constantinian epoch,” in which the Church was a power alongside other political powers.5 In Dignitatis Humanae and Gaudium et Spes, the Council had taken the position that the just state was a state with limited, constitutionally defined powers.6 The loss of the Papal States in 1870, coupled with Vatican II’s moral judgment about the just state, implied a new, “post-Constantinian” relationship between the Church and the world of politics, Swiezawski believed. So did Karol Wojtyła.

  To be a “post-Constantinian” Church did not mean returning to the catacombs. The Church was the custodian of certain truths about the human condition and those truths had public consequences, so the Church’s diplomacy had to continue. But it should now deal with the world primarily through the realm of culture, Wojtyła thought. That meant the forthright defense of basic human and national rights. Witness to the truth about the inalienable dignity and rights of the human person should be the identifying mark of the “post-Constantinian” Church envisioned by Vatican II.

  The Ostpolitik of the Holy See also changed on October 16, 1978, because Pope John Paul II knew the Church’s situation behind the iron curtain as only a native of east central Europe, familiar with the local languages and culture, could. John Paul knew there was something radically different about communist regimes, a point that did not seem fully appreciated by the Vatican diplomats who conceived and executed Paul VI’s Ostpolitik. All states commit criminal acts sometimes; communist regimes were criminal enterprises by their very nature. The “rule of law” in a communist regime was a fiction; communist regimes committed violent acts and maintained an enormous apparatus of repression on principle. Under a communist regime, terror was a routine way to maintain order, which could give communist regimes an air of invincibility. This Pope, however, had measured communism’s weaknesses as well as its apparent strengths. And he knew that cultural resistance could be an effective antidote to the seemingly impregnable position of a criminal state.7

  The new Pope also believed that his entire life had been a preparation for the Office of Peter and its responsibility to “strengthen the brethren” (cf. Luke 22.32). This was not arrogance; he had not sought the position to which he had been elected. But the ease with which he assumed the papacy suggested a calm confidence, built on the foundation of a rocklike faith, that “strengthening the brethren” meant, among other things, revamping the Ostpolitik of the Holy See.

  His first months in office had signaled this “Wojtyła Difference” in a number of ways.

  His inaugural sermon with its antiphon—“Be not afraid!”—and its theme—“Open the doors to Christ!”—was an unmistakable call to a different kind of arms for the persecuted Church behind the iron curtain. So were his frequent references to religious freedom in his first public statements as Pope. So was his Christmas letter to the Church in Kraków, in which he challenged his people and the Polish regime. St. Stanisław, he wrote, was “the patron of moral order in our country.” He had defended his society from the evil that threatened it, “and he did not hesitate to confront the ruler when defense of the moral order called for it.”8 Communist censors cut the references to the martyred saint and told Jerzy Turowicz to run a bowdlerized version in Tygodnik Powszechny; Turowicz refused. The full text, which could not be published, was then read from all the pulpits of the archdiocese.

  John Paul’s forthright defense of the persecuted was not limited to the Church in Poland. He moved quickly to strengthen the Church in Czechoslovakia, the hardest-pressed Catholic community in the Soviet external empire. Greeting Prague’s Cardinal František Tomášek in the Sistine Chapel during the cardinals’ homage immediately after his election, he embraced the seventy-nine-year-old prelate and said, “We are standing very close to one another and will stand closer still, because now the responsibility for you is being transferred to me.” The Pope reiterated this “special feeling of nearness” to the Czech Church in a 1978 Christmas message to Cardinal Tomášek and in a letter dated March 2, 1979, marking the 250th anniversary of the canonization of St. John Nepomucene, martyred in 1393 at the hands of the Bohemian King Wenceslas IV. John Paul urged Czechoslovaks to imitate their patron saint’s “faith, alive like an ardent flame… [which] develops in us such certainties as to make us fearless in the avowal and practice of our religion.” In an unmistakable reference to the regime-sponsored “Pacem in Terris” priests (known in Czechoslovakia as the “pax terriers”), the Pope cited the Gospel description of the good shepherd who, “unlike the hireling,” goes in search of his sheep, encourages them, and helps them carry their burdens.9

  The results of John Paul’s personal support were impressive. During the next decade, Cardinal Tomášek, who had been quite timid in his relations with the Czechoslovak communist regime and had criticized Catholic participation in the Charter 77 human rights movement, became one of Czechoslovak communism’s fiercest and most feared critics. Czechs and Slovaks throughout the 1980s witnessed “this singular spectacle of the [octogenarian] cardinal getting older and tougher at the same time.”10

  The new Pope also reached out to another veteran of persecution, the Ukrainian Cardinal Iosyf Slipyi, in a letter dated March 19, 1979. The letter anticipated the 1988 millennium of Christianity in Kievan Rus’, now Ukraine, which marked the beginnings of Christianity among the eastern Slavs. John Paul reminded the Ukrainians, who were “especially dear” to him, that the baptism of Kievan Rus’ had taken place when Christianity, later divided into Roman Catholicism
and Orthodoxy, was united in faith and communion. The Pope closed by citing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its “principle of religious freedom,” which guaranteed rights most certainly not enjoyed in practice by the Greek Catholic Church in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.11

  The Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, came to the Vatican on January 24, 1979, to take the measure of the new Pope in person. Gromyko, who allowed that the Soviet government “knew the Vatican was in no way isolated from world politics,” had had one meeting with John XXIII and five with Paul VI, with whom “questions of war and peace were the main topic.” Gromyko’s description of his meeting with John Paul II is instructive:

  [The Pope] greeted us and remarked, “I want to underline the importance of contacts for helping to secure peace on earth.”

  I agreed with him, of course, and then went on to describe some of the major Soviet initiatives designed to achieve that end. “As far as I can judge,” I finished, “the Catholic Church accords great importance to strengthening peace, to disarmament, and to the liquidation of weapons of mass destruction. The Soviet leadership believes that this position has great value. As for ideological or religious differences, they must not be allowed to stand in the way of collaboration on this noble goal.”

  The Pope moved on to the issue of religious belief. “It is possible that the obstacles to freedom of religion have not been removed everywhere.” He paused. “According to some sources, something of this sort may be happening in the USSR.”

  This kind of accusation was nothing new to us. I replied, “Not all rumors deserve attention. The West spreads all kinds of misinformation about the state of the Church in the Soviet Union, but the truth is that from the first day of its existence the Soviet state has guaranteed freedom of religious belief…. We have religious people, but that doesn’t create problems either for themselves or for Soviet society.”

  The Pope and Casaroli listened thoughtfully. Then the Pope said, “That’s more or less what we thought.”

  No more was said on the subject.

  This first meeting with John Paul II took place before the events of the early 1980s in Poland, in relation to which the Vatican took up a position that crossed the threshold dividing politics from religion….12

  John Paul II had a rather different recollection of this encounter. When he raised the question of religious freedom at the beginning of their conversation, the Pope recalled, Gromyko replied that he was a deputy to the Supreme Soviet from Byelorussia and he knew that the churches were full there. What was the Pope making such a fuss about? John Paul, fully aware of the Soviet foreign minister’s view that the Church, “by back alleys and back doors…encourages ideological unity with the exploiting class,” didn’t pursue the matter further with such an accomplished liar. The next day he told reporters that the audience was the “most tiresome” he had had as Pope.13

  He had made his point, however, and it had registered. However they analyzed (and distorted) the matter through their own ideological presuppositions, the Soviets knew that they were dealing with a very different kind of pope.

  DEPLOYING ASSETS

  Cardinal Jean Villot, the Secretary of State of the Holy See, died on March 9, 1979. This opening at the pinnacle of the Church’s central bureaucracy gave John Paul the opportunity to reshape the senior leadership of the Roman Curia, which he did seven weeks later, on April 30. Archbishop Agostino Casaroli was named Secretary of State and given two new deputies. A Spaniard, Archbishop Eduardo Martínez Somalo, formerly nuncio in Colombia, became Sostituto or deputy Secretary of State for “ordinary” affairs (i.e., having to do with the internal governance of the Church) and Monsignor Achille Silvestrini, another veteran Vatican diplomat, was named “foreign minister” (technically, Secretary of the Council for the Public Affairs of the Church) to replace Casaroli. Monsignor Audrys Bačkis, a native Lithuanian who had grown up in exile, was named undersecretary to Silvestrini, who was also appointed a titular archbishop.14

  Given the “Wojtyła Difference” and Casaroli’s role as architect of the Ostpolitik of Paul VI, Casaroli’s appointment as Secretary of State may have struck some as curious. In fact, the appointment was a good example of John Paul II’s adroit deployment of the Curia’s resources to advance his own agenda.

  The Pope and his new Secretary of State did not share a common view of the Church’s situation in east central Europe, and Casaroli must have found John Paul II’s approach to the Church in the world a challenge to his own longstanding views on how the Holy See’s diplomacy should be conducted. Yet the two could work together, because Casaroli was a faithful servant and John Paul II found multiple advantages in having the veteran Italian Curialist as his chief operating officer.

  The appointment of Casaroli helped ease the strain of the transition to a Polish Pope for many in the Church’s central bureaucracy. Casaroli was widely recognized as the most accomplished member of the Holy See’s diplomatic service, and his elevation could be understood as a compliment to his peers and longtime colleagues. In addition, Casaroli was an adept tactician and skillful diplomat who was also a good priest, devoting his free time to a ministry to juvenile delinquents in Rome. John Paul II had no intention of micromanaging the internal affairs of the Church, and Casaroli, very much a man of the system, could be counted on to keep the machinery running according to the broad policy outlines set by the Pope.

  Casaroli’s promotion also made things more complex for the Soviet Union and its satellites. It was difficult for them to suggest publicly that the Holy See had abandoned its interest in finding common ground when the principal architect of the former Ostpolitik had just been elevated to the highest position in the Curia. Moreover, Casaroli had been the key figure in the Holy See’s adherence to the Helsinki Final Act in 1975, a treaty the Soviet Union badly wanted in order to secure the Yalta division of Europe (even if getting it had required accepting the human rights guarantees that Casaroli and others insisted on writing into the Final Act).15

  Casaroli and Silvestrini would continue to negotiate quietly with these regimes and nurture what relationships had been built up over a decade of attempted rapprochement. Meanwhile, the Pope would pursue his far more assertive approach to the problems of the persecuted Church, hammering away publicly on human rights issues, with special reference to religious freedom. The Pope, who believed in “normalization” of relations as a tool for transforming the communist world, deftly deployed subordinates who had been committed to “normalization” as an end in itself. John Paul II, often accused of not being terribly interested in management, in fact knew quite well how to do different things and achieve different goals using the same people who had served his predecessors.16

  The new order was harder on Cardinal Casaroli than on John Paul II. The cardinal once confessed that “I would like to help this Pope more, but I find him so different.” They were, in fact, very different men: a veteran Church bureaucrat and a man who had spent his entire priesthood and episcopate in the front lines of the struggle for religious freedom. John Paul II believed that he should be the voice of those who had no voice. Casaroli believed that such matters could be settled quietly with governments without apparent reference to those voices. Yet Cardinal Casaroli did help John Paul II, who realized the wealth of experience that his Secretary of State brought to his responsibilities and took advantage of that experience, confident of Casaroli’s loyalty.17

  THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE

  John Paul II’s return to Poland was inevitable. Getting it done was a complicated and difficult business.

  In his remarks to the Poles who had attended his inauguration in Rome, the new Pope had indicated that he wanted to return home for the ninth centenary of the death of St. Stanisław, which would also coincide with the closing of the Synod of Kraków. The Polish bishops had raised the question even earlier. In a statement issued the day after his election, the episcopate enthusiastically expressed the hope that their former colleague
would come for the Stanisław anniversary in 1979 and for the 600th anniversary of the arrival of the icon of the Black Madonna in Częstochowa in 1982. As negotiations for a papal visit began between the regime in Warsaw and the Vatican, the Polish government gave no public indication of its attitude, in part because opinions among the communist cadres were divided. The upper echelons argued for a generous welcome. Lower-level operatives, perhaps closer to the population’s real feelings, expressed grave doubts about the visit’s impact. On January 11, 1979, John Paul II tried to move things along by, in effect, inviting himself home, telling the Polish authorities that it was his “duty” to take part in the ceremonies commemorating the anniversary of Stanisław’s martyrdom.18

  Senior Polish party and government officials knew they had no other choice than to agree to a visit. But they were not independent agents, and their Soviet allies were not enthusiastic. Even as Cardinal Wyszyński and Archbishop Luigi Poggi, a key Casaroli aide, pressed Polish party leader Edward Gierek to agree to an official welcome, Gierek was being pressured by Moscow. In his memoirs, the Polish party boss described an angry, indeed bizarre, telephone call he received from Soviet party chieftain Leonid Brezhnev in early 1979.

  After Gierek had said that the Polish regime would give John Paul a respectful reception, Brezhnev shot back, “Take my advice, don’t give him any reception. It will only cause trouble.” When Gierek explained that it was impossible for a Polish government not to receive a Polish pope, the Soviet leader had another idea: “Tell the Pope—he’s a wise man—he can declare publicly that he can’t come due to illness.” After being informed that that, too, was impossible, Brezhnev told Gierek that Gomułka had been a “better communist” because “he didn’t receive Paul VI in Poland, and nothing awful happened. The Poles have survived the refusal to admit a pope once; they’ll survive it a second time.” Gierek insisted that “political reasons” required him to admit John Paul II to Poland. “Well,” Brezhnev concluded, “do as you wish. But be careful you don’t regret it later.”19