During the offertory procession of the canonization Mass, when the bread and wine to be consecrated were brought to the altar, two Albertine Sisters presented John Paul with a reproduction of St. Albert Chmielowski’s most famous painting, Ecce Homo.45
Blessed Agnes of Bohemia had died c. 1282. The long gap between her death and her canonization gave John Paul the opportunity to preach about the strange ways of Providence in history, and how the past could shed light on the sometimes-opaque present. Agnes had had to deal with suffering in her life; so had the Catholics of Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia today. What had marked Agnes of Bohemia was her willingness to accept “with total confidence the events which Providence permitted, in the certainty that everything passes away, but [Christ’s] truth remains for ever! ” That, John Paul insisted, was “the lesson the new saint gives to you, her dear compatriots,” in 1989: “Human history is in continual movement…but the Truth of Christ, which enlightens and saves, lasts, even amid changing events. Everything that happens on earth is willed or permitted by the Most High so that men and women may thirst or long for Truth, tend towards it, seek it, and reach it!”46 Even, the Pope implied, forty years of persecution.
Over seven centuries, Czechs had told themselves that something miraculous would happen when Agnes of Bohemia was finally canonized. The first step toward fulfilling that popular prophecy came at the canonization itself. The Czechoslovak government had been reasonably accommodating about passports, and thousands of Czechoslovakians found themselves in Rome at the same time, breathing free air. Men and women of the underground Church who hadn’t seen each other for four decades met again in St. Peter’s Square. In the rediscovery of old friends and the making of new allies at a weekend of canonization ceremonies, Catholics from all over Czechoslovakia discovered the degree to which their Church had survived the Stalinism of the 1950s and Husákian “normalization” after the Soviet invasion of 1968. There were far more of them than they had imagined. They were stronger than they had thought. They had the recent example of the Poles and the East Germans before them. Reunited because of the long-awaited canonization of Blessed Agnes, they went home to build their own gentle revolution.47
SURRENDER
During the Second World War, Henri de Lubac, trying to parse the singular terrors of the mid-century, proposed that “atheistic humanism” was something genuinely new in human affairs. “Everyday atheism” was a common enough phenomenon throughout history. This was different: it was atheism with a developed worldview, a program, a dynamic. Its prophets—Comte, Feuerbach, Marx, and Nietzsche—all taught that the God of Christians was “an antagonist,” the “enemy of [human] dignity.”48
This was a great reversal. The ancient world had experienced biblical religion as a great liberation from Fate. If God had created the world and the men and women who inhabited it, and if each of those men and women had “a direct link with the Creator, the Ruler of the stars themselves,” human beings were no longer at the mercy of “countless Powers—gods, spirits, demons—who pinioned human life in the net of their tyrannical wills….” Relief from Fate was no longer the preserve of a small elite with access to the secret of escape from the capricious will of the powers that controlled destinies.49
What the biblical revelation proclaimed as a liberation, the prophets of the new atheistic humanism believed was a yoke. “Getting rid of God” was the precondition to “regain[ing] possession of the human greatness” that God cruelly withheld. This was not the atheism of the decadent wealthy or the atheism of despair. This was atheistic humanism, on the march in the name of human liberation, and it was at the root of the “great crisis of modern times,” de Lubac argued.50
The idea of atheistic humanism had had enormous consequences. Mediated through the politics of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and sundry lesser communist leaders, it had proven something, de Lubac believed: “It is not true, as is sometimes said, that man cannot organize the world without God. What is true is that, without God, he can ultimately organize it only against man. Exclusive humanism is inhuman humanism.”51
On December 1, 1989, the representative of the world’s greatest experiment in atheistic humanism, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, came to the Vatican to call on the world’s foremost representative of Christian humanism.
It made little difference that Mikhail Gorbachev was a new kind of Soviet leader, neither reptilian in cold-blooded cruelty like his Stalinist predecessors nor imbued with revolutionary ardor like the early Bolsheviks. Perhaps by this time Gorbachev himself had begun to doubt the possibility of reforming communism. Perhaps he had begun to grasp that there could be no genuine perestroika [restructuring] without much greater glasnost [openness]—and greater glasnost meant an end to the Communist Party’s monopoly on power. What Gorbachev thought about the immediate future was of no particular consequence on this day, though. History had brought him to the Vatican as the embodiment of one contending power in the great drama of modernity, a representative of the century-long effort to liberate humanity by rejecting God in principle.
Close Encounter
Everyone in Rome knew that something epic was afoot on December 1, 1989. The streets were packed with gawking Romans. Skeptical reporters were genuinely excited. Veteran curial monsignori leaned out their windows for a look at the President of the USSR and his wife, Raisa, as they drove around St. Peter’s Square, down a brief stretch of the Via di Porta Angelica, through the Porta Sant’Anna, and up the gently sloping Vatican hill. The heir to Lenin’s revolution and his consort got out of their black limousine in the Cortile San Damaso and were greeted with the honors due a head of state by the Prefect of the Pontifical Household, the gentiluomini of the Holy Father, and the Swiss Guard. Then they went inside.
Italian state television had placed cameras throughout the Apostolic Palace so that viewers could watch the Soviet leader’s historic progress to the papal apartment. It was evident from the outset that Gorbachev, very aware of the importance of the moment, was ill-at-ease, particularly for a leader who normally exuded robust self-confidence. One seminarian, watching the dramatic scene on television, thought he looked like a man on his way from death row to the execution chamber. A veteran Roman reporter disagreed, thinking that Gorbachev looked more moved and bewildered than frightened. Papal spokesman Joaquín Navarro-Valls, the erstwhile psychiatrist, thought Gorbachev seemed tense, uncomfortable, unsure about how to behave—Should he look stern? Should he laugh?52
Whatever his psychological or emotional condition, Mikhail Gorbachev did not, in his first minutes in the Vatican, project the image of a man looking forward to what lay ahead of him—perhaps because he was unsure of precisely what did lie ahead of him. But he must have had some intuition of what this moment meant historically. By the mere fact of his presence at the Vatican, the system he represented was acknowledging that it had been wrong about the relationship between Christianity and genuine humanism, about Christianity and human liberation.
The reporters had been allowed to watch the first moments of encounter between the Pope and the Soviet leader, and it was obvious to those used to such things that John Paul was emotionally involved in what was happening. His first reactions, the veterans said, were usually a tip to what was up, and the Pope gave Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev the most cordial of greetings.53 Gorbachev was a man of principle, the Pope believed, someone who would act on his convictions even if they led to results he didn’t like.54 Though Gorbachev might have wanted to “save ‘communism with a human face’” (a project John Paul regarded as self-contradictory), a man of principle was someone who could be talked to, understood, and dealt with, in a way that was impossible with men concerned only with power.55
The two men went into the Pope’s library for a private discussion, using two interpreters (John Paul can read Russian but doesn’t speak it): one provided by the Vatican’s Secretariat of State, and Valery Kovlikov, a Soviet Foreign Service officer. Both leaders seemed interested in getting to know each ot
her. The Pope pressed the case for religious freedom, as he had done in all his previous meetings with Soviet officials, but he was also taking the measure of his visitor. Who was this man? What did he believe? How did he justify those beliefs?56
While Raisa Gorbachev toured the Sistine Chapel (and pronounced Michelangelo’s frescoes inferior to Russian icons), the Soviet President and the Pope talked for an hour and a half, a half-hour longer than anticipated. According to Gorbachev, John Paul spoke of his “European creed” and his conviction that the new coming-together of Europe “from the Urals to the Atlantic” should be regarded as a restoration of normality, a return to Europe’s true historical course. Among other things, that meant that the West should look on the events of 1989 less as a victory than as an opportunity to recover an aspect of its heritage.57
When John Paul II and Gorbachev had finished their private conversation, Raisa Gorbachev was brought in to be formally presented to the Pope. Her husband, now very relaxed, took her by the hand and said, “Raisa Maximovna, I have the honor to introduce the highest moral authority on earth.” Then he added, with a chuckle, “…and he’s Slavic, like us!”58
When they came out of the papal library to rejoin their respective parties and make formal statements, no one in the room was immune to the excitement of the moment. It was electric, and even the veteran reporters felt themselves caught up in it.59
John Paul’s hands were trembling with emotion when he came to the podium to deliver his formal address of greeting. It gave him, he began, “particular pleasure” to welcome the Soviet president, his wife, foreign minister, and entourage, to the Vatican. A gentle history lesson, coupled with a reflection on the great drama being played out that day, immediately followed. The millennium of the baptism of Rus’, which had been celebrated a year before, had been a reminder of the “profound mark left…on the history of the peoples who on that occasion received the message of Christ,” John Paul noted. “I am pleased to consider your visit, Mr. President, against the back-drop of the Millennium celebration and, at the same time, to look upon it as a promise-filled sign for the future….”
Next came the issue closest to his heart—religious freedom. With his beleaguered Lithuanian and Ukrainian flocks in mind, but speaking so as to make clear his concern for the religious freedom of all, he was polite but pointed: “The events of past decades and the painful trials to which so many citizens were subjected because of their faith are widely known. In particular, it is well known that many Catholic communities are today eagerly awaiting the opportunity of reestablishing themselves and of being able to rejoice in the leadership of their Pastors.” It was thus time to make good on “the repeatedly affirmed decision of your Government to proceed with a renewal of internal legislation” on religious freedom so that Soviet practice might be brought “into full harmony with the solemn international commitments to which the Soviet Union has…subscribed.” It was the precise argument he had made to Leonid Brezhnev in his historic letter of December 16, 1980, urging Gorbachev’s predecessor not to invade Poland. This time, it was the human rights provisions of the Helsinki Final Act, rather than its security guarantees, that were in play. In any case, it was his “expectation”—which was identical with “the expectations of millions of [Gorbachev’s] fellow-citizens”—that “the law on freedom of conscience soon to be discussed by the Supreme Soviet will help to guarantee to all believers the full exercise of the right to religious freedom,” which was the “foundation” of all other freedoms.
At the end of a century of slaughter, John Paul looked forward to the birth of a new humanism, a new “concern for man,” that would in turn give birth to a “universal solidarity.” Solidarity would be stillborn, however, if the lesson of World War II was forgotten: “If fundamental ethical values are forgotten, fearful consequences for the fate of peoples can result and even the greatest of enterprises can end in failure.” Their meeting, he concluded, was not simply unusual. It was “singularly meaningful: a sign of the times that has slowly matured, a sign that is rich with promise.”60
Mikhail Gorbachev had been working on his own formal remarks up until the last minute. When Joaquín Navarro-Valls had asked for an embargoed copy the afternoon before (the Soviets having already been given the text of the Pope’s address), he was told that Gorbachev’s statement wasn’t finished.
The Soviet leader was not to be outdone in defining the exceptional quality of the moment. “A truly extraordinary event has taken place,” he began, an event “made possible by the profound changes that are taking place in many countries and nations.” Seventy years of fierce anti-Vatican Soviet propaganda came to an abrupt halt when Gorbachev freely conceded that the Holy See was working “to promote solutions to common European problems and to create a favorable external environment enabling nations to make their own independent choices.” The Soviet president then declared Holy See–USSR diplomatic relations a virtually completed matter, with “the formalities” to be sorted out in short order by the diplomats of both parties. Gorbachev also pledged to deliver on his promise of a new law on religious freedom, and concluded, “Within the sphere of the movement of perestroika we are learning the difficult but indispensable art of global cooperation and consolidation of society on the basis of renewal.”61
The last sentence was reminiscent of the stilted vocabulary of the past. But Mikhail Gorbachev wasn’t through yet. In an impromptu and unexpected coda that caught everyone by surprise, he invited the Pope to visit the Soviet Union.
It was another electric moment, and some reporters thought that John Paul’s failure to accept, spontaneously and on the spot, was a great lost opportunity. The Pope, keenly aware of ecumenical sensibilities, knew he would have to be invited to the USSR by the Russian Orthodox Church. The Soviet president, familiar with the historic relationship between his office and that of the Patriarch of Moscow, may well have thought that the Patriarchate could be brought around, so to speak. Before that could happen, though, Gorbachev had fallen from power and the USSR had ceased to exist.62
A Providential Man?
In trying to understand John Paul II’s statement that Mikhail Gorbachev was a “providential man,” a description he has used on many occasions with colleagues and friends, it is important to remember the theological lens through which the Pope perceives all of reality. In dealing with President Gorbachev, John Paul did not cease being Karol Wojtyła, the man for whom everything takes place inside the horizon of his conviction that Jesus Christ is the answer to the question that is every human life. That included the life of Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev. Dealing with Gorbachev, John Paul was a pastor who was also fulfilling a statesman’s role, not a statesman who was a pastor when he returned to the sanctuary.
John Paul also met Gorbachev as a Pole, intensely aware that this Russian, unlike all of his predecessors, czarist or communist, had permitted Poland to assert its freedom and sovereignty. It seemed to others that Gorbachev had no other choice in the summer of 1989. Given his own domestic problems, he was in no position to reassert the Brezhnev Doctrine in east central Europe. That does not seem to have been the view of John Paul or his Polish colleagues in the Vatican. It may be that the Pope, who had gotten completely beyond a traditional Polish view of the Great Power to the east culturally and spiritually, had not fully done so politically.63
John Paul respected Gorbachev as a politician willing to take risks on behalf of what he believed to be the truth of things, and as a man who had come to understand that the human person, not the collectivity, had to be at the center of public concern.64 That respect did not extend, as some commentators have suggested, to a sympathetic papal appraisal of Gorbachev’s plan to maintain the Soviet Union in its post–World War II form.65 The Pope fully understood that the “union” that made up the USSR had been imposed and maintained by often-brutal force. The destinies of two of Catholicism’s most hard-pressed local churches, in Lithuania and Ukraine, were also involved. The Baltic republics were clear
ly different from Great Russia, culturally and historically. A similar argument could be made for the historical distinctiveness of Ukraine, although this was a much harder case to make to Russians, and especially to the Russian Orthodox Church. Given Orthodoxy’s eastern Slavic origins in the lands around Kiev, an independent Ukraine would be a serious blow to the historic claims of the Patriarchate of Moscow.66 In any event, the Pope who had defended the “rights of nations” from the beginning of his pontificate was not likely to become a proponent for the world’s last multinational empire.
Mikhail Gorbachev, who allotted little more than a page in his 700-page memoirs to an account of his December 1, 1989, meeting with Pope John Paul II, may indeed have been a “providential man.” Yet even within a morally focused analysis of late twentieth-century history, Gorbachev seems more likely to appear as the instrument of a Providence he never understood than as the conscious servant of a higher design. However Gorbachev, the man and the statesman, is finally assessed, the historical meaning of his meeting with the Pope will become clearer as the event recedes into the past. This was an act of surrender.
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