It was another sharp blow for John Paul II. Though Cardinal Wyszyński was not the kind of paternal figure for Karol Wojtyła that Cardinal Sapieha had been, Wojtyła admired Wyszyński immensely. His praise for him after the second conclave in 1978 and during his 1979 pilgrimage to Poland was genuine and heartfelt, not simply honorific or tactical. The Primate, for his part, had come to think of his onetime junior as a providential man for Poland and for the Church. The rise of Solidarity had not been the Primate’s finest hour, but in the spring 1981 crisis he had made clear that he thought Solidarity was Poland’s future.
While John Paul was mourning the Primate and pondering the question of Wyszyński’s successor, the papal doctors were becoming worried about their patient’s condition. On May 27, the day before Wyszyński’s death, the Pope had difficulty breathing, shortness of breath, and chest pains, in addition to the fever. The situation improved somewhat during the next few days, and the medical team agreed that John Paul could return to the Apostolic Palace on June 3 to continue his convalescence at home. The Pope, for his part, wanted to participate in the solemn commemoration of two ecumenical councils on June 6 and 7: the sixteenth centenary of the First Council of Constantinople, and the 1,550th anniversary of the Council of Ephesus, which had solemnly ratified Mary’s title of Theotokos, “Mother of God.” It was too much to ask of himself. He could only manage a five-minute appearance and message from the loggia of St. Peter’s on June 6. A taped message was sent to the celebrations at the Basilica of St. Mary Major on June 7.71
By June 10, his fever was rising close to 104° Fahrenheit (39.5° Celsius) and then falling. He had an infection in his right lung, but that could be treated by antibiotics and did not account for the spiking fever and his failure to regain his strength. Fear for his life once again stalked his staff and doctors. The gray-faced Pope looked terrible. His eyes, sunken in dark sockets, had lost their customary intensity and sparkle—and no one knew what the problem was. A drip feed was begun again, and on June 12, a viral expert was called in for consultation. By June 20, the situation had deteriorated to the point where a return to the Gemelli for more tests was imperative. During the next several days, the Pope had a series of X-rays and a CAT-scan, none of which revealed anything. Finally, the proper diagnosis was made. John Paul’s system had been invaded by a cytomegalovirus, which had been transmitted to him through a tainted blood transfusion on May 13. The “second agony,” as Gabriel Turowski later described it, was the result of his tremendous loss of blood between the shooting and the surgery. The cytomegalovirus has a twenty-four-hour cycle, and there would have been no problem if the donated pint of blood had been kept for a day. The urgency of the situation at the beginning of the surgery had required the use of freshly donated blood. Once the cause of his persistent illness was clear, John Paul characteristically wanted to know what the virus looked like. The doctors showed him the slide from which the diagnosis had been made.72
Since there was no antibiotic remedy for viruses, supportive therapy—intravenous feeding, glucose, painkillers, and fever reducers—were administered until John Paul’s body rid itself of the cytomegalovirus. By June 24, his temperature had returned to normal, and the medical bulletin that day reported that, with his cardiopulmonary and digestive systems working properly again, “the general situation shows signs of an overall improvement.”73 During the crisis, his doctors told the Pope that he could not read office-related material and should instead read thrillers or something similar for relaxation. John Paul reread Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis and read Jan Nowak’s memoir of the Polish Home Army and the Warsaw Uprising, Courier from Warsaw.74
THE CONTINUING CRISIS
As John Paul continued to recuperate throughout July from the effects of Agca’s bullet and what André Frossard described as the “auxiliary terrorist,” the cytomegalovirus, he conducted his office from the tenth floor of the Gemelli, where Cardinal Casaroli; Archbishop Martínez Somalo, the Sostituto, or chief-of-staff; and Archbishop Silvestrini, the “foreign minister,” were constant visitors. The most urgent issue was the appointment of a successor to Cardinal Wyszyński. Cardinal Casaroli was concerned that, if the Soviets invaded Poland and a Primate weren’t in place, the Church would lose the capacity to make its own appointments.75 The Polish Communist Party congress was scheduled to start on July 14 and Solidarity was planning its first national congress for early September. It was important that a successor be named and installed in time for what were bound to be historic, and potentially explosive, events.
The late Primate’s candidate as his successor was his former secretary, Józef Glemp, who had been bishop of Warmia and chairman of the Polish bishops’ justice and peace commission since April 1979. The two men had had a close personal relationship, but Wyszyński was not a sentimentalist and affection could not have been his only reason for promoting Glemp as his successor. Glemp held doctorates in civil and canon law, and Wyszyński may have thought that this was what was needed in the next phase of the struggle for religious freedom and civil liberties in Poland: a man who knew how to read the fine print of contracts.
Józef Glemp was appointed archbishop of Gniezno and Warsaw, and thus Primate of Poland, on July 7, 1981, almost six weeks after Wyszyński’s death. The relatively lengthy interregnum—given the urgency of the Polish situation—cannot be attributed solely to John Paul’s physical condition. This was a decision that evidently involved debate and anguish. To appoint Glemp as Primate of Poland would be to put the man in a difficult, almost impossible, situation. Wyszyński had possessed extraordinary personal authority that could not be transferred, even by papal appointment. Wyszyński had been physically imposing; Glemp was physically unprepossessing. Wyszyński was a master at appealing to popular religious sentiment; Glemp, who was at least as intelligent as the old Primate, lacked his personal touch and thought in bureaucratic rather than populist terms. Wyszyński could appeal for unity within the Church and speak with the authority of a man who had defied the regime with his epic Non possumus; faced with an activist younger clergy inspired by John Paul II and Solidarity, Glemp could only invoke the authority of office, and thus inevitably appear to be an authoritarian. Glemp had a lawyer’s view of negotiations, which was that they should take place between experts—not the approach that would win him the confidence of workers and intellectual dissidents experiencing their first taste of democratic process inside Solidarity. And finally, although no one could ever say it, everyone knew that, with Cardinal Wyszyński’s death, the de facto Primate of Poland was in Rome.
Nonetheless, after weeks of wrestling with the decision, John Paul II chose Bishop Glemp. The new archbishop of Gniezno and Warsaw was a dedicated churchman and a Polish patriot. But his selection as Primate would not be a success—for himself, for the Church in Poland, or for the man who made the appointment.
Three days after Archbishop Glemp’s nomination, the Polish Communist Party began a tumultuous four-day congress, at the end of which the Politburo and Central Committee were reshuffled and Edward Gierek was expelled from the party. Stanisław Kania survived, for the moment, but the fundamental contradiction in Polish life remained. The party that insisted on the “leading role” in national life had been rejected by the majority of an increasingly assertive nation.76
Toward the end of July, John Paul began lobbying his doctors to reverse his colostomy sooner than they had planned. The medical team had proposed waiting until cooler weather in the fall; there were also concerns about risking another tainted blood transfusion so shortly after the cytomegalovirus had been beaten. John Paul insisted that he was strong enough to withstand the procedure. He told a meeting of the “Sanhedrin” that, while they were the technical experts, he had a right to explain his problems as their patient. Among other things, he didn’t want to go back to the Apostolic Palace until he was completely well and could put the entire assassination episode behind him. All his life, he said, he had defended the rights of man; “today,” he said, “I my
self am ‘man.’” Dr. Crucitti was impressed. The Pope had reminded his doctors that they were not oracles, and that an individual knew things about himself that clinicians could not measure with their instruments and tests.77
At the end of the meeting, the medical team agreed and John Paul set the date of his operation himself: August 5, the feast of Our Lady of the Snows.78 The hour-long surgery was successful, and the Pope returned to the Vatican on August 14. The next day, he celebrated the great feast of Mary’s Assumption in St. Peter’s Square with 50,000 congregants, an unheard-of number during a month when Romans are traditionally anywhere but the broiling, humid Eternal City. That afternoon, at 5:30, John Paul flew by helicopter to his summer residence at Castel Gandolfo, where he remained through September.
On September 5, the first Solidarity Congress opened in Gdańsk. That same day the Soviet Union, never renowned for political subtlety, began a massive military and naval exercise in the Baltic, including landings on the coasts of Lithuania and Latvia. But 896 delegates to the congress, representing 9,484,000 Solidarity members, were not deterred, and their deliberations concluded with calls for free elections to the Polish parliament and to local and regional councils; self-management in industry; and the abolition of the Nomenklatura system by which only party members could be appointed to governmental posts.79 The delegates were in a radical mood. Wałęsa was denounced for excessive moderation, and was reelected head of Solidarity with only fifty-five percent of the vote. The Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party sent its Polish comrades a letter describing the Congress as a “disgusting provocation.”80
The Congress had opened with a Mass celebrated by the new Primate, Archbishop Glemp. The following day, John Paul signaled his concern about the Soviet reaction to the Congress, telling a group of Polish pilgrims at Castel Gandolfo that “the right of our nation to independence is a condition for world peace.” During the Congress itself, John Paul’s “voice” was that of his old Kraków friend and intellectual colleague, Father Józef Tischner, the Congress chaplain. His sermon at Mass before the second day of meetings crystallized the difference between Solidarity and the regime, between the Christian concept of work and its Marxist counterpart, by lyrically evoking the Christian humanism he and Karol Wojtyła had discussed for years:
…We must look at the issue [of work] from above, like looking from the peaks of the Tatras, where the waters of the Vistula have their beginning. The very liturgy of the Mass encourages us to do this…This bread and this wine shall become in a moment the body and blood of the Son of God. This has a deep meaning…. Were it not for human work, there would beno bread and wine. Without bread and wine, there would not be among us the Son of God. God does not come to us through a creation of nature alone, holy trees, water, or fire. God comes to us through the first creation of culture—bread and wine. Work that creates bread and wine paves the way toward God. But every work has a part in this work. Our work, too. In this way our work, the work of each one of us, paves the way to God….
Our concern is with the independence of Polish work. The word independence must be understood properly. It does not aim at breaking away from others. Work is reciprocity, it is agreement, it is a multifaceted dependence. Work creates a communion….
We are living history. A living history means one that bears fruit. Christ has said, “Let the dead bury their dead” (Matthew 8.22). Thus, let us do the same. Let us become occupied with bearing fruit….81
By resolution of the entire assembly, Father Tischner’s sermon was included in the official records of the Congress.
Two weeks later, John Paul II gave authoritative form to many of the themes his friend had preached at Gdańsk, in his first social encyclical.
THE GOSPEL OF WORK
Although it traces its intellectual roots back to mid-nineteenth-century Germany and France, modern Catholic social doctrine really begins with Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum. Pope Pius XI marked this historic document’s fortieth anniversary in 1931 with the encyclical Quadragesimo Anno; Pope John XXIII extended the tradition of an anniversary encyclical with his 1961 letter, Mater et Magistra. John Paul II had intended to continue the custom on Rerum Novarum’s ninetieth anniversary, but that fell on May 15, 1981, two days after the attempt on his life. During his convalescence the Pope continued to work on the encyclical, and Laborem Exercens [On Human Work] was finally published on September 14, 1981.
In Laborem Exercens, John Paul II took the discussion of “the social question” in a more humanistic direction than his papal predecessors, focusing on the nature of work and the dignity of the worker. In this respect, Laborem Exercens is the most tightly focused social encyclical in the history of modern Catholic social doctrine. It is also the most personal, as John Paul brought his own distinctive experience as a manual laborer to bear in analyzing the moral meaning of human labor.
The most theologically creative sections of Laborem Exercens unfold John Paul’s teaching that, through work, men and women participate “in the very action of the Creator of the universe,” in fulfillment of God’s initial command to “Be fruitful, and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it.”82 In work, human beings are called to “imitate God.”83 Work is a vocation to which human beings have been called “from the beginning.”
Work is about who we are, as well as what we do and produce. Whether they be agricultural, industrial, post-industrial, or artistic laborers, workers are above all persons, which means that in work, properly understood, human beings are always becoming more, not just making more. This spiritual and moral character—this “subjectivity”—gives work its genuine value and gives workers their specific dignity.84
Work is hard. And yet in spite of this toil—perhaps, in a sense, because of it—“work is a good thing” for human beings. For in work, John Paul writes, “man not only transforms nature, adapting it to his own needs, but he also achieves fulfillment as a human being and indeed, in a sense, becomes ‘more a human being.’”85 Work is another signal of transcendence, an ordinary reality on the other side of which is an extraordinary truth about human dignity.
That is why, following the tradition of Catholic social doctrine, John Paul teaches “the principle of the priority of labor over capital ”86 and rejects what he terms “economism,” which is “considering human labor solely according to its economic purposes.” The priority of labor over capital also touches the question of ownership. John Paul affirms the right to own private property, but places it under a social mortgage—property, which is meant to make freedom and creativity possible, must be used for the common good.87 The worker should be “a sharer in responsibility and creativity at the workbench to which he applies himself.”88 Sharing in decision making and profits are expressions, the Pope concludes, of an economic system that recognizes workers as “a true subject of work with an initiative of his own.”89
In discussing the “rights of workers,” John Paul defends a right to employment, a right to a just wage and appropriate benefits, and a right to organize free associations of workers, which includes the right to strike. These, too, were traditional Catholic themes, as was the Pope’s affirmation of the “family wage,” that is, one sufficient to sustain a family without both parents working simultaneously. John Paul gave this teaching a modern twist by proposing as an alternative social benefits such as “family allowances or grants to mothers devoting themselves exclusively to their families.”90 John Paul’s argument that society will benefit when mothers are primarily engaged in child rearing may have offended proponents of some forms of feminism, but it was based on the experience of the communist attempt to erode family life by requiring both parents to work. In any case the Pope insisted that mothers should not be penalized or suffer “psychological or practical discrimination” if they devoted themselves to raising children for various periods of their lives.91 The argument, as always, was a humanistic one, and paralleled proposals for flex-time arrangements and generous maternal leave polic
ies.
Catholic social doctrine had always regarded unions as “movements of solidarity,” instruments for the promotion of social justice.92 Unions, the Pope teaches, should not only agitate for better wages and conditions, important as these are, they should promote the “subjective” dimension of work, so that “workers will not only have more” but will “realize their humanity more fully in every respect.”93
Throughout the encyclical, John Paul uses the phrase “the Gospel of work” to suggest that work has a spiritual dimension, born from its participation in God’s ongoing creation of the world.94 Work has been ennobled by Christ, who spent the greater part of his earthly life as a worker.95 Work touches the mystery of redemption when the worker identifies his or her toil and suffering with the passion and death of the Lord. In doing so, the worker participates “not only in earthly progress but also in the development of the Kingdom of God.”96
As this bold theological ending suggests, Laborem Exercens is another chapter in the unfolding book of John Paul II’s Christian humanism.97 Laborem Exercens also breathes deeply of the spirit of Cyprian Kamil Norwid, the Polish poet who taught the redeeming power of “work accepted with love [as] the highest manifestation of human freedom.”98 Thus Laborem Exercens is the first social encyclical in which a poet was a major theological inspiration.
The encyclical’s brief discussion of the world economic situation is perhaps its least persuasive section. “The economy” in Laborem Exercens remains the economy of the industrial revolution. The dramatic transformation of the global economy through the computer revolution is not on the encyclical’s horizon. The encyclical is also empirically questionable at other points: it deplores the increasing costs of raw materials and energy, many of which would fall over the next decades; it worries that the world is becoming “intolerably polluted” when at least part of the world—the free world—was becoming less polluted than it had been in decades.99 John Paul’s vigorous defense of free associations of workers was, without doubt, a powerful endorsement of Solidarity, but the encyclical’s failure to discuss the ways in which unions in free economies can become status quo institutions weakened its analysis of contemporary trade unionism.
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