Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  With members of Edith Stein’s family, including nieces who remembered her as Tante Edith, present, the Pope then concluded:

  Dear brothers and sisters: We bow today with the entire Church before this great woman whom from now on we may call one of the blessed in God’s glory, before this great daughter of Israel, who found the fulfillment of her faith and her vocation for the people of God in Christ the Savior…. She saw the inexorable approach of the cross. She did not flee…. Hers was asynthesis of a history full of deep wounds, wounds that still hurt, and for the healing of which responsible men and women have continued to work up to the present day. At the same time it was a synthesis of the full truth [about] man, in a heart that remained restless and unsatisfied “until it finally found peace in God.”…Blessed be Edith Stein, Sister Teresa Benedicta a Cruce, a true worshiper of God—in spirit and in truth. She is among the blessed. Amen.35

  Two days later, in Munich’s Olympic Stadium, John Paul beatified Father Rupert Mayer, a Jesuit who became the first Catholic priest to win the Iron Cross while serving as a World War I chaplain. A popular pastor in interwar Munich, Mayer, who had lost a leg during the war, had taken his ministry to the local beer halls, where on one occasion he met Hitler—whose movement he then denounced as anti-Christian for, among other reasons, its anti-Semitism. Arrested twice for preaching against the regime, he was eventually sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. When his health started to fail, the Nazis shipped him off to a monastery in Bavaria to avoid making a martyr out of a decorated German patriot. Father Rupert Mayer died in 1945, but he had lived long enough to lead the first Corpus Christi procession through the streets of post-Nazi Munich. “So,” he cracked, “a one-legged old Jesuit has outlived the thousand-year Reich.”36

  The Nazis’ euthanasia program and the corrupt moral reasoning that justified it was also on John Paul II’s mind during his German pilgrimage. At Münster, he prayed at the tomb of Cardinal Clemens August von Galen, who had publicly condemned the Nazi policy of performing euthanasia on the mentally handicapped, the elderly, and other “unproductive” members of society. We should not, John Paul warned, be so sure of our immunity to committing similar horrors. When the inalienable dignity of human life was denied and the value of lives was measured according to pragmatic criteria of utility— “Is this life useful?” “Is this life troublesome or bothersome?”—something akin to the Nazi concept of lebensunwertes Leben, “life not worth living,” was at work.37 The eugenic impulse remained alive in modernity, as defenses of abortion and euthanasia on grounds of “convenience” illustrated.38

  In Speyer on the last day of his 1987 pilgrimage, John Paul spoke for the first time of a Europe united “from the Atlantic to the Urals,” the positive side of the intuition he had nurtured, since at least 1981, that communism was finished. Ending the artificial Yalta division of the continent did not settle the crucial questions, he suggested. What kind of Europe, reflecting what sort of values, would emerge from the ashes of the twentieth century? Edith Stein, Rupert Mayer, and Clemens August von Galen were all witnesses to a civil Europe rebuilt according to the respect for human dignity embedded in Europe’s Christian cultural roots. But there were other possible Europes, some of them horrific beyond imagining. False humanisms wedded to modern technologies had lethal consequences.39 Europe had learned that about its recent past. It was time to start thinking about the basic issues of the European future.

  Two years before the communist crackup in east central Europe and four years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, John Paul II was already focused on the next set of questions: “What kind of freedom?” and “Freedom for what?”

  SOLIDARITY, AGAIN

  The year 1987 marked the 600th anniversary of Lithuania’s conversion to Christianity. On June 5, John Paul sent an apostolic letter to the bishops of Lithuania, praising the “great spiritual wealth [of]…the Lithuanian Catholic community” and “its centuries-old fidelity to Christ…” Three weeks later, he would beatify Archbishop Jurgis Matulaitis of Vilnius (1871–1927), “a great son and pastor of your people.” The presence of bishops from all over Europe on that occasion would, he wrote, express the communion between Catholic Churches east and west, which had remained unbroken despite the iron curtain.

  The Church in Lithuania knew the meaning of martyrdom. Since 1940, Lithuanians had faced “humiliation, discrimination, suffering, sometimes persecution and even exile, imprisonment, deportation, and death, rejoicing to suffer dishonor for the name of Jesus” Lithuanians were facing the same trials in 1987. Those trials were a source of strength because the cross, “embraced in union with the redemptive sufferings of Jesus,” became “an instrument of grace and sanctification.” With that strength, the youth of Lithuania would “become the seed of a great hope” which knew no better name than true freedom.40

  Having offered a heartfelt papal salute to Lithuania, John Paul turned his attention to the cultural conditions for freedom in his homeland. His third Polish pilgrimage began in Warsaw on June 8 and took him to Lublin, Tarnów, Kraków, the Baltic Coast, Częstochowa, and ?odz. The Pope’s June 1979 pilgrimage had ignited the Polish revolution. His June 1983 pilgrimage had helped keep it alive. The week-long June 1987 pilgrimage was intended to prepare the ground for the revolution’s victory and identify the basic issues the free Poland of the future would face.

  The government, as usual, had made the arrangements difficult. Gdańsk, birthplace of Solidarity, had been the forbidden city during the 1983 pilgrimage. John Paul insisted that it be on the 1987 itinerary or he would not come. The regime had finally agreed. While this negotiation was going on, Poles were rediscovering their own social solidarity in preparations for the Pope’s visit. The new town of Zaspa, a gray imitation of Nowa Huta built on an abandoned airfield outside Gdańsk, was transformed, according to its most famous resident, Lech Wałęsa, into a “living organism…a community of people with distinctive personalities and angles of vision,” as it prepared to host a papal Mass. The people of Zaspa battled the regime over the design of the altar platform that was to occupy one end of an old runway, which ran between the huge apartment buildings of the development. True to Gdańsk’s maritime and religious heritage, Marian Kolodziej, set designer of the Gdańsk Theater and a former prisoner in Auschwitz, had designed the platform as a ship with three masts, “onto whose bridge the Pilot of the Church was to ascend.” Hundreds of hours of volunteer labor had gone into building the altar platform when the authorities decided that the masts were too similar to the monument to slain workers built outside the Lenin Shipyard gates as part of the 1980 Gdańsk Accords. After much argument and haggling, work was allowed to resume three days before the Pope arrived.41

  John Paul minced no words in his response to General Wojciech Jaruzelski’s welcoming address at Warsaw’s royal palace. Jaruzelski often spoke of his fervent desire for “peace,” the Pope noted. Thanks to the experience of the World War during which Poland had suffered so cruelly, the modern world had learned that peace required the effective protection of basic human rights. What was true between nations was also true within them. Peace within Poland required the vindication of human rights. The leaders of the Polish People’s Republic must recognize that taking the human dignity of their people seriously was the only path to the national renewal they talked about incessantly. John Paul then offered General Jaruzelski a basic lesson in Catholic social doctrine, which in this case coincided point for point with democratic political theory.

  Society, he said, was composed of men and women who were the bearers of inalienable rights. The state existed for the good of society, not society for the state. The human dignity of the members of society demanded that they be permitted to participate in the decisions that shaped their lives. The Pope understood that Poland was living through a difficult economic period. He also understood that there was no resolving the crisis of Polish social and economic life without taking these basic truths into account. Therefore, John Paul wished
to commend to the President of the Polish State Council and his colleagues “the following pertinent words of the Second Vatican Council: ‘One must pay tribute to those nations whose systems permit the largest possible number of citizens to take part in public life in a climate of genuine freedom (Gaudium et Spes, 31).’”42

  Everyone present knew on which side of the Yalta division of Europe those systems were to be found.

  Having attended to the representatives of the failing Polish state, John Paul turned to the Polish nation, where hope for Poland’s renewal really lodged.

  The pastoral context for the Pope’s pilgrimage was a National Eucharistic Congress, which he opened in Warsaw on the evening of June 8, 1987, and closed there on June 14, just before departing for Rome. Its theme—“He loved them to the end”—was taken from the Gospel of John, and referred to Christ’s love for the apostles with whom he was about to share the Last Supper (see John 13.13). The Eucharist, John Paul said in his opening homily, had been instituted at the beginning of “Christ’s redemptive hour,” which was “the redemptive hour of the history of man and of the world.” In that hour, Christ “reaffirmed the salvific power of love to the end,” giving his life for his friends and for the salvation of the world. In that, he revealed that “God himself is love.”

  The Eucharist built community out of cleansed consciences, which were crucial to renewing society. Poles had to free themselves “from [the] inheritance of hatred and egoism.” They had to conquer that “way of seeing the world” in which God is a fiction and love is impotence, before they could reclaim their country in genuine freedom.43

  The next morning, June 9, John Paul flew by helicopter to the Majdanek death camp outside Lublin, site of some of the most odious “medical experiments” of the Holocaust. After praying in silence at the memorial to the camp’s victims, the Pope signed the visitors’ book with the text from the book of Wisdom, “The souls of the just are in the hands of God.”44 He then went to the Catholic University of Lublin to meet Polish academics and tell them that they, too, were crucial to the future of freedom. Standing under a canopy in the medieval-style cloisters of KUL, his former colleagues seated to his right in their academic finery and the students packed into the courtyard before him, he began with a citation from Thomas Aquinas: Intellectus est quodammodo omnia [The human intellect is in a certain sense all things]. Everything that exists had been given to the faculty and students of KUL, indeed to all men and women, as an intellectual task. Everything that is, is of interest. Everything that is ought to be examined freely, as a payment on our “indebtedness…toward reality in all its diversity… Man owes truth to the world.” Thus KUL, and all Polish universities, had a crucial mission in the task of national renewal: “Serve truth! If you serve truth—you serve freedom. The freedom of man and of the nation. Serve life!”45

  At Mass later that afternoon, John Paul ordained fifty new priests, a small portion of the enormous number of vocations that had flourished in Poland in the 1980s. In his homily, he asked the newly ordained to avoid the dangers of clericalism in the new Poland he was sure was being born: “Your task, my dear new priests, will be to collaborate with lay people aware of their responsibility for the Church, and for a Christian form of life [in society]…They have an enormous potential of good will, of competence, of availability for service.” The specific, priestly task of the newly ordained was another form of Christian liberation: “To serve God—to serve man: to liberate in man the consciousness of royal priesthood, of that dignity proper to man as a son or daughter of God himself and proper to the Christian of whom it is said that he is ‘another Christ.’” To be a servant of the people meant to be a “servant of the truth which liberates every man,” and to remember that “the transcendent power” of the truth belonged, not to them, but to God. “Yes. To God. Not to us. To God!”46

  On the morning of June 10, John Paul was in Tarnów, where he beatified Karolina Kozka, a young peasant girl killed while resisting rape by a Russian soldier in 1914. Her resistance to violence, the Pope said, “speaks of the great dignity of woman: of the dignity of the human person… [and] of the dignity of the body….” That was what saints did—they gave witness to the great dignity of the human person by giving witness to Christ. This untutored peasant girl was a reminder that heroic virtue was within every Pole’s grasp.47

  Later that day, John Paul traveled the short distance to Kraków, “my Kraków, the city of my life, the city of our history.” Before more than a million Cracovians on the Błonia Krakowskie, he apologized for not stopping longer, explaining that Kraków had decided to share him with the rest of the country a bit more generously than in 1979 and 1983. At a Mass later that day in Wawel Cathedral, he remembered his debt to Father Kazimierz Figlewicz and the debt all Poland owed to the Jagiellonian University Faculty of Theology, which in its exile from the university he had recently named a Pontifical Academy. What, he asked, is Kraków without it? What was Polish culture without it?48 It was a pointed reminder of a bitter struggle from the past and a marker for the future.

  The Pope then went north to the Baltic coast cities where Solidarity had been born, and relentlessly drove home the theme of “solidarity” as the path to national renewal.

  He began on June 11 in Szczecin. The Baltic coast, he recalled, had been the site of “important pacts between State authorities and the world of work.” What had happened to those agreements? “What was the meaning of those pacts?”

  In Gdynia that afternoon he was even more direct. Speaking to sailors, fishermen, and other seafaring people at the port city built by the interwar Republic, he began with a lyrical evocation of the meaning of rivers and the sea for Poland: the Vistula which was “a silent witness of life in Poland through many generations,” and the Baltic, which, like other seas, spoke to people “in a language that transcends all limitations.” Then he made the connections—between these ancient, natural rumors of angels, the difficult present, and the human prospect in a world beyond the Cold War:

  The seas speak to peoples about the need to find themselves together…. It speaks of the need for solidarity, both between human beings and among nations.

  It is an important reality that the term “solidarity” was expressed right here before the Polish sea. It is a profound reality that was pronounced here in a new way, with a new meaning that concerns its eternal significance.

  Here, along the shore of the Baltic Sea, I too pronounce this word, this term “solidarity” (solidarno??), because it is an essential part of the consistent message of the Church’s social teaching….

  Yes, solidarity…purified struggles. There should never exist a struggle against another; a struggle that treats people like adversaries and enemies and leads toward destruction. However, a struggle for the human being and his rights, for his own genuine progress, is in order: this is a struggle for a more mature way of life. Indeed, human life on this earth becomes “more human” when it is governed by truth, freedom, justice and love….

  The hard road to freedom was not blocked only by communism, he reminded them. Communism had exploited the contemporary “disease of superficiality.” The answer to that threat was “to work…to re-acquire depth, that depth which is really the essence of the human person. The politics of a truly free Poland had to be built on the understanding that democracies had souls.49

  It was Gdańsk’s turn the next day. At a Mass for a million workers in Zaspa, John Paul saluted the Hanseatic port as the urban icon of the Polish struggle for freedom. It had not been cost-free; he had prayed earlier at the memorial to the workers shot down in 1970.50 But it was now time to think of the future.

  The 1980 shipyard strike that had brought the world to Gdańsk had been about work and the rights of workers, but the workers’ cause did not stop at the right to organize in the workplace. Because work contributed to the common good of society, workers had “the right to make decisions regarding the problems of the whole society”—in brief, to political freedom. Fre
edom, however, was not autonomy. John Paul concluded with a reminder of what solidarity, and Solidarity, were really about: “Solidarity means: one another, and if there is a burden, then this burden is carried together, in community. Thus: never one against another. Never one group against another, and never a ‘burden’ carried by one alone, without the help of others.”51

  This was the precise opposite of class struggle, a point the Pope reiterated when he addressed the Polish Bishops’ Conference in Warsaw on the last day of the pilgrimage, June 14. Twenty years before its 1966 millennial celebrations, postwar Poland had been called to confront the challenge of Marxism and its claim that religion deprived human beings of their humanity. As Polish bishops, they were used to thinking of that challenge as destructive, as it had been. Now was the time, however, to start thinking about the recent past in a different way. The bishops ought to remember the post-1945 period as a creative challenge that had compelled the Church to proclaim, “with a new depth and power of conviction,” the Gospel the Church was always called to proclaim: “the truth concerning God, Christ, and man.”

  Communism, albeit finished as a historical force, had left a terrible hangover in the cultures it had infected—the widespread sense that human beings were simply the objects of impersonal economic and political forces. This deeply ingrained attitude was another form of bondage. The Church had to help Poland overcome it, just as it had defended national independence, the right to participation in public life, and the right of religious freedom. That was the new evangelical mission of the Church in the new Poland that was being born.52