Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  The next morning, June 7, John Paul went on pilgrimage to Kalwaria Zebrzydowska. There, he said, virtually every problem he had faced as archbishop had “reached its maturity,” not in strategic planning but in prayer, amid “the great mystery of faith that Kalwaria holds within itself.” Along its paths of Jesus and Mary, up hills, down ravines, and across brooks, the great shrine “expressed a synthesis of all that is part of our earthly pilgrimage,” which had been transformed from darkness to light through the Incarnation of the Son of God. From the woods of Kalwaria he wanted to issue a “simple fundamental invitation” to whoever might be listening: “pray.” Pray especially, he asked, “for one of the pilgrims of Kalwaria whom Christ has called with the same words He spoke to Simon Peter, ‘Feed my lambs…Feed my sheep’ ( John 21.15,19). Pray for me here, during my life and after my death.”54

  From Kalwaria, he went to his birthplace, Wadowice. Leaving his helicopter, he spotted the peaks of the Beskidy Mountains on the horizon, named them one by one, and asked whether he had forgotten any. He hadn’t. Thirty thousand people, twice the normal town population, waited for him on the soccer field where he had played goalie and in the square where he and Jerzy Kluger had gotten into trouble with the somnolent policeman, Officer Ćwięk. The native son mingled with his fellow townsmen, shaking hands, blessing children, and singing “Poland Semper Fidelis” along with the local band. “We always had a good band in Wadowice,” he remembered aloud. “Before the war it was the band of the 12th Infantry, but you young people wouldn’t remember that….”

  He was formally welcomed by Monsignor Edward Zacher, his old religion teacher and still the town pastor, who greeted the Pope and the crowd with the words that Cardinal Felici had used in Rome eight months before: “Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum, habemus Papam!” The Pope responded by praying for all those who had touched his life here, “beginning with my parents, my brother and my sister, whose memory is linked for me with this city.” Most of all, he said, he wanted to give thanks for his baptism on June 20, 1920. Prior to addressing the crowd from the church balcony, he had gone inside, genuflected, and kissed the font in which he had been christened.55

  John Paul’s pilgrimage turned from life to death and from icons of goodness to the great modern icon of evil as he flew by helicopter to the town of Oświęcim and the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camps.56 From the helicopter pad on the outskirts of town, the Pope was driven to the gate of the Auschwitz concentration camp in a limousine constantly pelted with flowers thrown by the half-million Poles lining the roadway. But this was neither the place nor the moment for smiles. John Paul walked through the wrought-iron entrance gate with its infamously cynical inscription, Arbeit Macht Frei [Work Makes You Free], and along the gravel paths separating the red-brick barracks buildings until he came to Block 11. There, in the basement, in Cell 18, Maximilian Kolbe had died a martyr to charity. The Pope knelt in prayer, kissed the cement floor where Kolbe had lain in agony, and then left a bouquet of red-and-white flowers and an Easter candle brought from Rome. Outside Block 11 was the “Wall of Death,” against which prisoners were executed by firing squad. En route to praying there with West Germany’s Cardinal Hermann Volk, the Pope met and embraced seventy-eight-year-old Franciszek Gajowniczek, whose life Father Kolbe had saved by his self-sacrifice.

  A brief helicopter ride then took the Pope a few kilometers to the Auschwitz II extermination camp at Birkenau, where industrial-age mass slaughter had been carried out less than thirty-five years before. An altar platform had been set up over the tracks on which the victims had arrived by train, some to be dispatched immediately to the gas chambers and crematoria, others to rude wooden huts to await execution. The cross on the platform was “crowned” with barbed wire, and from one of its arms hung the striped material used in making prisoner uniforms at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

  John Paul II walked through that place of incredible horror slowly, his head bowed, stopping at the monument with commemorative tablets memorializing the Nazis’ victims in their twenty languages. He paused for the longest periods at the tablets in memory of the Jewish, Russian, and Polish dead, and then walked back down the tracks, stopping wherever he saw former prisoners dressed in their distinctive striped camp uniforms, to the altar where he celebrated Mass with a crowd estimated at more than one million. His concelebrants were priests and bishops who had been imprisoned in the camps during the war. In his sermon at what he called this “Golgotha of the modern world,” he spoke of Father Kolbe’s “victory through faith and love” in a place “built for the negation of faith—faith in God and faith in man.” This was a place meant “to trample radically not only on love but on all signs of human dignity, of humanity,” a place “built on hatred and contempt for man in the name of a crazed ideology.” Some may have been surprised that he had come to a “place built on cruelty.” But he had “begun his first encyclical with the words ‘Redemptor Hominis’ and [had] dedicated it to the whole cause of man, to the dignity of man, to the threats to him, and finally to his inalienable rights…” So it was “impossible for me not to come here as Pope.”

  He had come, now, as a pilgrim, to kneel in prayer:

  I kneel before all the inscriptions that come one after another bearing the memory of the victims of Oświęcim in [their] languages: Polish, English, Bulgarian, Romany, Czech, Danish, French, Greek, Hebrew, Yiddish, Spanish, Flemish, Serbo-Croat, German, Norwegian, Russian, Romanian, Hungarian, and Italian.

  In particular, I pause…before the inscription in Hebrew. This inscription awakens the memory of the people whose sons and daughters were intended for total extermination. This People draws its origin from Abraham, our father in faith (cf. Romans 4.12), as was expressed by Paul of Tarsus. The very people that received from God the commandment, “You shall not kill,” itself experienced in a special measure what is meant by killing. It is not permissible for anyone to pass by this inscription with indifference…

  Remembering Auschwitz, he concluded, had to yield a commitment—that the rights of every human person, enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights written in the shadow of Auschwitz, be honored and respected, along with the legitimate rights of nations to their language, culture, freedom, and development. What had happened at Auschwitz must never be permitted to happen again: “Never one at the other’s expense, at the cost of the enslavement of the other, at the cost of conquest, outrage, exploitation, and death…Holy is God! Holy and strong! Holy Immortal One! From plague, from famine, from fire and from war, deliver us, O Lord. Amen.”57

  The next day, Friday, the Pope, nursing a sore throat, flew to Nowy Targ in the foothills of the Carpathians to meet Poland’s highlanders. Once again, the crowd was estimated at more than a million, and given the mountaineers’ splendid native dress, it was the most colorful gathering thus far. Entire parishes had come from the surrounding territory or had trekked across the mountains from Czechoslovakia and Hungary. The altar platform was built of rough-hewn wood, in the local style, and was topped by the wooden statue of the Madonna of Ludmierz, the principal Marian shrine of the Tatra Mountains. The atmosphere was entirely different from that of the afternoon before, the Pope engaging in another informal give-and-take with the mountain people and telling highlander jokes in the local dialect. His homily was a paean to “this beautiful land,” to the love for work on the land that had animated Poles for centuries, and to the Polish family. He also challenged the young people present to be “witnesses for Christ,” reminding them that the Greek word for “witness” was the basis of the word “martyr.”58 Youngsters from the Light and Life movement had brought huge bread baskets, now filled with Bibles rather than loaves. The Pope helped distribute the books, then led the young people in a vow, sworn on the Bibles, that they would commit themselves to “liberation from the slavery of alcoholism and other addictions, and the slavery of lies and fear.”59 After Mass, the Pope was serenaded by a hundred-piece highlander band, complete with fid
dles and shawms, the local bagpipes. On the way to the airport, the highlanders began laying their brilliantly decorated coats under the wheels of the car carrying their departing friend.60

  That afternoon, John Paul presided over the solemn closing of the Synod of Kraków in Wawel Cathedral. Mass began with a procession involving 1,500 participants in the Synod, after which Archbishop Macharski presented his predecessor with the Synod documents and a commemorative medal. John Paul’s homily began with a simple declaration: “Today, the ardent desire of my heart is fulfilled.” The Synod he had called to implement the Second Vatican Council fully in Kraków, and to link the aggiornamento of John XXIII to the witness-unto-death of St. Stanisław, had finished its work. He laid the completed documents of the Synod on the sarcophagus of the martyr-bishop.

  While the Pope was closing the Synod at Wawel, tens of thousands of young students and workers had been gathering at St. Michael’s Church at Skałka for a youth meeting with John Paul that had been scheduled for Friday evening. After a brief prayer service inside the church—the actual site of St. Stanisław’s martyrdom by King Bolesław—the Pope came outside to address the young people. The atmosphere was festive and highly charged. Emotions had been building throughout this incredible week, and had now reached a fever pitch of youthful enthusiasm. The Pope was showered yet again with flowers and serenaded by a string orchestra, trumpets, guitars, and a brass band. The youngsters kept shouting Sto lat, sto lat to the point where John Paul jokingly asked, “How can the Pope live to be a hundred when you shout him down? Will you let me speak?” Some semblance of order being restored, he simply said, “I love you all.”

  Formal remarks had been prepared, in which the Pope planned to make a simple request: “Allow Christ to find you…. Be afraid only of thoughtlessness and pusillanimity.” Perhaps warned that a political demonstration might break out, or perhaps just sensing that things could get out of control and provide the regime with an excuse to crack down on the youngsters, John Paul announced that he wasn’t going to give his prepared text, on the grounds that he still had a sore throat and that “the text I had written is not appropriate to the occasion.” He could, he said, “improvise in Polish.”

  Laughter at that wisecrack broke the mounting tension, and the Pope started reminiscing about his days as a young priest. “When I was told that I was to be a bishop, I asked the Primate whether I could still go climbing in the Tatras. He said I could. But now that I am Bishop of Rome, it might be harder….” The youngsters started chanting, “Then stay with us, stay with us….” “Ah, you’re wise now,” John Paul replied, “but it’s too late. Where were you on October 16 [the date of his election]? You weren’t there to defend me. Just like Poles, to close the barn door when the horse is gone.” Another wave of laughter swept the crowd. The banter back and forth continued until about 10:30 P.M., the Pope mixing jokes with admonitions drawn from his formal remarks and the young people chanting and singing. The atmosphere slowly changed and tension gave way to reflectiveness. Finally, in what may have originally been intended as the beginning of a mass demonstration, several young men lifted up a twelve-foot-tall cross, and tens of thousands of youngsters immediately raised smaller crosses they had been hiding. “It was an eerie, shattering scene,” a foreign reporter later wrote, “as the street lights cast shadows on the young faces and the crosses held above them.” A single word from the Pope, one misinterpreted signal from this man they were prepared to follow anywhere, could have started a riot in defiance of the government.

  John Paul II simply said, “It’s late, my friends. Let’s go home quietly.” And they did. As the papal limousine drove slowly back to Franciszkańska, 3, the guitars played a farewell song. The white-clad figure inside the car covered his face with his hands and wept.61

  The next morning, after a meeting in his former residence with the faculty and students of the Pontifical Faculty of Theology, the Pope’s helicopter took him to the Cistercian abbey of Mogiła on the outskirts of Nowa Huta. Forbidden by the authorities to visit the Ark Church, John Paul threw a bouquet of flowers over it from the window of the helicopter. Hundreds of thousands of Nowa Huta residents had assembled to meet the man who had defended their religious freedom so tenaciously during his episcopate. The parishioners of the Ark Church had wanted the Pope to crown a new statue of Mary, Queen of Poland, for their hard-fought sanctuary; when the authorities struck Nowa Huta from the papal itinerary, the parishioners decided to bring the statue to the Pope in Mogiła. In his sermon, he recounted the drama of the Ark Church and the struggle for a church in Miestrzejowice, returning “in prayer and heart to the tomb of Father Józef [Kurzeja] of holy memory,” whose church-building efforts had cost him his life. Surrounded by workers from the Nowa Huta steel mills, John Paul also insisted that “Christ will never approve that man be considered, or that man consider himself…merely as a means of production, or that he be appreciated, esteemed, and valued in accordance with that principle. Christ will never approve of it.” The cross that had been raised on the spot where the Ark Church now stood was a symbol of the fact that Christ, and Christians, opposed “any form of degradation of man.” The building of the church, however great an accomplishment, was only the beginning, though. “You have built the church,” he concluded. “Now build your lives with the Gospel.”

  In the middle of the homily, a voice was heard clearly from the crowd: “Long live the Pope who knows what he is doing.”

  After a brief rest at Franciszkańska, 3, John Paul visited and prayed at the graves of his parents and brother in the Rakowice cemetery, met with nuns at the Mariacki Church in the Old Town market square, held a reception for distinguished visitors and visiting bishops at his old residence, and attended a concert at the Franciscan Church where he had so often made the stations of the cross. The concert was the premiere of Henryk Górecki’s “Beatus Vir,” which Cardinal Karol Wojtyła had commissioned as part of the Stanisław anniversary and which the composer himself conducted. Górecki had found the Latin psalm texts for his piece in a missal lent to him by Piotr Malecki, one of the members of Wojtyła’s Środowisko and the Pope’s first altar boy at St. Florian’s; it was the missal Wojtyła had given Malecki in the 1950s. A rehearsal of “Beatus Vir,” which Górecki was writing up to the very last minute, was interrupted shortly before the premiere when the woodwinds rushed to a window to serenade John Paul as the Popemobile drove by. For the performance itself, Cardinal Casaroli and Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, the papal trip planner, had decreed that the Pope could not sit at the front of the Franciscan basilica, as had been hoped, but had to sit at the rear. At the end of the performance, Górecki, one of whose legs is shorter than the other, limped down the eighty-yard-long center aisle, tears streaming down his face, to embrace the Pope.62

  June 10, the last day of the pilgrimage, began with Mass on the Kraków Commons, attended by the largest crowd in Polish history—between 2 and 3 million. The Mass marked the official close of the Stanisław jubilee, and the Gospel text for the day was Christ’s great commission to the apostles: “Full authority has been given to me both in heaven and on earth; go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations. Baptize them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Teach them to carry out everything I have commanded you. And know that I am with you always, until the end of the world” (Matthew 28.18–20). Here, John Paul said, was a “great mystery in the history of humanity and in the history of the individual human person.”

  Time was the rhythm of human lives. To be truly human, time, he proposed, must be ordered toward a goal. Otherwise, the human person would disappear along with the ever-receding past. The Gospel text that had just been proclaimed pointed human beings beyond the fragility of time and gave history its rightful nobility. Christ remained with his followers in time and history, immersing them and the world “into the living God,” and preparing them for a life without end in the unity of God’s own life, “for which earthly life is merely a preface, an i
ntroduction.” The goal of human life was to be found in “the world of God.” This was where men and women discovered “fulfillment in life and in the human vocation.”

  That vocation demanded to be lived in the interior freedom by which we search for the truth and adhere to it freely. The men and women before him did not live their freedom as strangers in the strange land of modernity. They were the heirs of a tradition that was “a treasure, a spiritual enrichment…a great common good.” How could anyone throw this away? “Can one refuse Christ and all that He has brought into history?”

  Virtually everyone there had received the sacrament of confirmation as a young adult. Now, John Paul said, his people were living a “great ‘Confirmation of history,’” a new anointing by the Holy Spirit, in the anniversary of St. Stanisław and its link to the millennium of Poland’s baptism. So he had something to ask of them, as he prepared to leave “this Kraków in which every stone and every brick is dear to me,” as he prepared to leave “my Poland,” which had received him as it had received no other son in a thousand years:

  You must be strong, dear brothers and sisters…. You must be strong with the strength of faith.…Today more than in any other age you need this strength. You must be strong with the strength of hope, hope that brings the perfect joy of life and does not allow us to grieve the Holy Spirit.

  You must be strong with love, which is stronger than death…and helps us to set up the great dialogue with man and the world rooted in the dialogue with God Himself, with the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit, the dialogue of salvation….