Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  Notes

  PROLOGUE

  The Disciple

  1.Conor Cruise O’Brien, On the Eve of the Millennium: The Future of Democracy Through an Age of Unreason (New York: Free Press, 1994), pp. 11–12. O’Brien’s summary appraisal is unsparing: “I frankly abhor Pope John Paul II” [p. 16].

  2.Tad Szulc, Pope John Paul II: The Biography (New York: Scribner, 1995), p. 422 and following.

  3.Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi, His Holiness: John Paul II and the Hidden History of Our Time (New York: Doubleday, 1996), p. 508.

  4.David Willey, God’s Politician: Pope John Paul II, the Catholic Church, and the New World Order (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), p. xiii.

  5.“The Pope must make his church more catholic.” The Independent, August 3, 1993, p. 15.

  6.See John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), and Gift and Mystery: On the Fiftieth Anniversary of My Priestly Ordination (New York: Doubleday, 1996).

  7.“Introduction” to Our God’s Brother, in Karol Wojtyła, The Collected Plays and Writings on Theater, translated with introductions by Bolesław Taborski (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 159.

  8.Author’s conversation with Pope John Paul II, March 7, 1996.

  9.On the dramatic structure of the moral life and the centrality of Christ in the human drama, see Kenneth L. Schmitz, At the Center of the Human Drama: The Philosophical Anthropology of Karol Wojtyła/Pope John Paul II (Washington, D.C.: CUA Press, 1993), pp. 86, 146.

  10.John Paul II, “Address to the Fiftieth General Assembly of the United Nations Organization,” October 5, 1995, 17.

  11.Author’s conversation with Pope John Paul II, March 20, 1997.

  12.The image is from Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Pentecost Sermon,” in You Crown the Year with Your Goodness (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), pp. 135ff.

  13.John Paul II, “Address to the Fiftieth General Assembly of the United Nations Organization,” 16 [emphasis in original]. John Paul II habitually highlights phrases and words in his texts, underlining them in manuscript. These highlights are then transposed into italics in the printed version of his texts. It can make for a somewhat jarring style, but replicating it is essential for getting the flavor and the rhythm of the Pope’s prose.

  14.New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

  15.Cited in John Jay Hughes, Pontiffs: Popes Who Shaped History (Huntington, Ind.: Our Sunday Visitor Publishing Division, 1994), p. 11.

  CHAPTER 1

  A Son of Freedom: Poland Semper Fidelis

  1.Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trótsky 1879–1921 (New York: Vintage Books, 1965), p. 466.

  2.The main lines of this brief account of the Battle of the Vistula are taken from Richard M. Watt, Bitter Glory: Poland and Its Fate 1918–1939 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), pp. 142–149.

  3.See Document 59, “Political Report of the Central Committee RKP(b) to the Ninth All-Russian Conference of the Communist Party,” in The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive, ed. Richard Pipes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 95–115.

  4.Norman Davies, God’s Playground: A History of Poland, Volume I (New York: Columbia University Press,1982), p. 486; hereinafter, Davies, Volume I.

  5.Ibid., p. 79.

  6.Ibid., p. 151.

  7.Ibid., p. 160.

  8.Ibid., pp. 199–200.

  9.Ibid., p. 63.

  10.Rocco Buttiglione, Karol Wojtyła: The Thought of the Man Who Became Pope John Paul II (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), p. 1.

  11.See Buttiglione, Karol Wojtyła, chapter one, for an important discussion of history “viewed from the Vistula.”

  12.See Radek Sikorski, Full Circle: A Homecoming to Free Poland (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), p. 21.

  13.For “savage exotics,” see Davies, Volume I, p. 386.

  14.Ibid., p. 456.

  15.Author’s interview with Wojciech Giertych, OP, June 10, 1997.

  16.Davies, Volume I, p. 511. Enlightenment wits, confident of their cultural superiority, had their fun while Poland was murdered. Thus Voltaire had it that one Pole was a charmer, two Poles was a brawl; but three Poles, “Ah, that is the Polish Question.” [Ibid.]

  17.Cited in The Spectator, January 25, 1997, p. 30.

  18.See Norman Davies, Heart of Europe: A Short History of Poland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984),p. 159.

  19.For these and other difficulties in the early days of the Second Polish Republic, see Watt, Bitter Glory, pp. 79ff.

  20.Tadeusz Karolak, John Paul II: The Pope from Poland (Warsaw: Interpress Publishers, 1979), p. 10.

  21.Ibid., p. 22. Wawro was the embodiment of the artist who lives out of, rather than against, local popular culture, and as such he may have influenced Karol Wojtyła’s later thinking about the relationship of popular piety to high culture. [Author’s interviews with Marek Skwarnicki, June 4, 1997, and Father Kazimierz Suder, July 14, 1997.]

  22.See Davies, Heart of Europe, pp. 118, 120. Ukrainians were fifteen percent of the population of the interwar republic, Jews nine percent, Byelorussians five percent, and Germans two percent. [Ibid.]

  23.Author’s interview with Jerzy Kluger, March 15, 1997; author’s conversation with Pope John Paul II, March 20, 1997.

  24.John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, p. 96.

  25.Author’s interview with Jerzy Kluger, March 15, 1997.

  26.Ibid., and author’s interview with Father Kazimierz Suder, July 14, 1997.

  27.Author’s interview with Jerzy Kluger, March 15, 1997.

  28.Cardinal Karol Wojtyła memorialized Rafał Kalinowski in a 1963 sermon, “Two Rebels,” reprinted in the Kraków weekly, Tygodnik Powszechny, no. 33 (1963).

  29.Author’s conversation with Pope John Paul II, January 22, 1997; see also A. Kijkowski and J. J. Szczepański, with the collaboration of K. Zanussi, From a Far Country: The Story of Karol Wojtyła of Poland (Santa Monica, Calif.: ERI/NEFF, 1981).

  30.The loss of church records during World War II and the problems of memory have caused certain unresolvable confusions about the early married life of the Wojtyłas. According to military records searched by a German writer, Karol Wojtyła was assigned to the 56th Infantry Regiment (a unit of Polish troops officered by Austrians) in Wadowice after being drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army in 1900. After a year of service there he was transferred to Lwów (L’viv, in today’s Ukraine). In 1904 he was transferred back to Wadowice and, at that juncture, married Emilia Kaczorowska. This reconstructed sequence, however, contradicts the account of Wojtyła’s stepsister Stefania, who had it that the marriage took place while the young soldier was assigned to quartermaster duties in Kraków. Stefania also believed that Karol and Emilia Wojtyła lived in Kraków for some time before moving to Wadowice. [See Adam Boniecki, MIC, Kalendarium, “Family,” translated by Irena and Thaddeus Mirecki et al.; manuscript copy obtained by the author.] Father Kazimierz Suder, a seminary classmate of Pope John Paul II and pastor of the church in Wadowice, assured me that the Wojtyłas had been married at the Church of Sts. Peter and Paul in Kraków, located along the Royal Way between Wawel Castle and the great market square, which served as the military church of the city. [Author’s interview with Father Kazimierz Suder, July 14, 1997.]

  31.These details are taken from Boniecki, Kalendarium, “Family.”

  32.Ibid.

  33.Author’s interview with Father Kazimierz Suder, July 14, 1997.

  34.European usage would call this the first floor.

  35.Author’s conversation with Pope John Paul II, January 22, 1997. To be technically precise, Francis Joseph was emperor of Austria from 1848 to 1916 and King of Hungary from 1867 (when he divided his empire into the Dual Monarchy) until 1916.

  36.A personal questionnaire completed by Karol Wojtyła at the Jagiellonian University indicated that his father had retired “about 1927,” and the extant military records show him on the retired officers list as of the 1928 issue of
the Officers’ Annual. [Boniecki, Kalendarium, “Family.”]

  37.Author’s interview with Jerzy Kluger, March 15, 1997.

  38.Boniecki, Kalendarium, “School Years.”

  39.The cause of death was listed as myocarditis nephritis in the parish register. [Ibid.]

  40.Tad Szulc, in Pope John Paul II, simply asserts that the Pope’s “cult of Mary flowered from his mother’s death: the natural identification” [p. 66]. That Emilia’s death was the beginning of an alleged difficulty relating to women is one of the leitmotifs of Bernstein/Politi, His Holiness. John Paul II seems to have a different understanding of his Marian piety, which he described as serious but rather conventional, prior to his later encounter with the works of St. Louis de Montfort. See Gift and Mystery, pp. 28–30.

  41.John Paul II, Gift and Mystery, p. 20. A 1939 poem that must be considered part of Wojtyła’s juvenilia, “Over This Your White Grave,” is a reflection on the loss of Emilia and is included in The Place Within: The Poetry of Pope John Paul II, translated by Jerzy Peterkiewicz (New York: Random House, 1994), p. ix.

  42.As John Paul II told the French writer André Frossard, “My father was admirable and almost all the memories of my childhood and adolescence are connected with him.” [André Frossard and Pope John Paul II, Be Not Afraid! (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), p. 14.]

  43.Boniecki, Kalendarium, “Family.”

  44.Author’s interview with Jerzy Kluger, March 15, 1997.

  45.In 1904, forty-seven percent of the officers were familiar with Czech, thirty-four percent with Hungarian, nineteen percent with Polish, and fifteen percent with Serbo-Croatian, in addition to the German that was the army’s lingua franca. The army recognized ten official languages; officers and noncoms had to be able to use the language that was used by twenty percent or more of a given unit. See Istvan Deak, Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History of the Habsburg Officer Corps 1848–1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 99ff.

  46.Karol Wojtyła, Sr., was also a man of courage; in the early days of World War I, he was awarded the Iron Cross with Wreath.

  47.Author’s interview with Jerzy Kluger, March 15, 1997.

  48.Ibid.

  49.Ibid.

  50.Gian Franco Svidercoschi, Letter to a Jewish Friend (New York: Crossroad, 1994), p. 15; hereinafter, Letter.

  51.John Paul II, Gift and Mystery, p. 20.

  52.John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, pp. 142–143.

  53.Ibid., p. 104 [emphasis in original].

  54.Author’s conversation with Pope John Paul II, September 10, 1996.

  55.John Paul II, Gift and Mystery, p. 20 [emphasis in original].

  56.Recounted by Bogusław Banas in Mieczysław Maliński, Pope John Paul II: The Life of Karol Wojtyła (New York: Seabury, 1979), pp. 274–275.

  57.Boniecki, Kalendarium, “School Years,” citing a reminiscence published by Father Figlewicz in the Kraków Catholic weekly, Tygodnik Powszechny, shortly after the election of John Paul II.

  58.John Paul II, Gift and Mystery, p. 25.

  59.Author’s interview with Father Kazimierz Suder, July 14, 1997.

  60.See Frossard and John Paul II, Be Not Afraid!, p. 14, and Jonathan Kwitny, Man of the Century: The Life and Times of Pope John Paul II (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), p. 38.

  61.Boniecki, Kalendarium, “School Years.”

  62.Kwitny, Man of the Century, p. 39.

  63.This episode has been recounted numerous times, most authoritatively by the subject himself in Gift and Mystery, p. 5.

  64.Ibid., p. 6. Several of Karol Wojtyła’s youthful poems were published in 1999 under the title Renesansowy Psalterz [Renaissance Psalter] (Kraków: Białykruk, 1999).

  65.Author’s interview with Anna Karoń-Ostrowska, April 8, 1997.

  66.Henryk Sienkiewicz, The Deluge, Volume I, translated by W. S. Kuniczak (New York: Copernicus Society of America/Hippocrene Books, 1991), pp. 764–765.

  67.Czesław Miłosz, The History of Polish Literature, 2d ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983),p. 232; hereinafter, History.

  68.Ibid., pp. 221–222.

  69.See ibid., p. 226.

  70.George Huntston Williams, The Mind of John Paul II: Origins of His Thought and Action (New York: Seabury, 1981), p. 58.

  71.See Miłosz, History, p. 226.

  72.Author’s interview with Marek Skwarnicki, June 4, 1997.

  73.Author’s interview with Danuta Michałowska, April 22, 1997.

  74.Miłosz, History, p. 241.

  75.Ibid., p. 240

  76.Ibid., p. 271.

  77.Ibid., p. 273.

  78.Ibid., p. 273–274.

  79.Author’s conversation with Marek Skwarnicki, June 4, 1997.

  80.See Gift and Mystery, pp. 5–6; the story of the poetry competition is from the author’s interview with Halina Kwiatkowska, November 8, 1998.

  81.Miłosz, History, p. 235.

  82.Kwitny, Man of the Century, p. 46; Boniecki, Kalendarium, “School Years.”

  83.Miłosz, History, p. 245.

  84.Ibid. The text of The Undivine Comedy may be found in Polish Romantic Drama: Three Plays in English Translation, Harold B. Segel, ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977).

  85.Author’s interview with Danuta Michałowska, April 22, 1997.

  86.Ibid.

  87.Ibid.

  88.See Buttiglione, Karol Wojtyła, p. 21.

  89.Ibid.

  90.Ibid., p. 22.

  91.Author’s interview with Danuta Michałowska, April 22, 1997. See also Bolesław Taborski, “Introduction” to Wojtyła, The Collected Plays, p. 6.

  92.Kwitny, Man of the Century, p. 45.

  93.Jonathan Kwitny was simply mistaken in claiming that the elder Karol Wojtyła was uninterested in his son’s burgeoning theatrical career. [Man of the Century, p. 43.] Asked whether his father had attended his performances, Pope John Paul II seemed surprised by the question and replied that his father had never opposed his activities in the theater, “so of course he came.” [Author’s conversation with Pope John Paul II, December 11, 1996.]

  94.Svidercoschi, Letter, p. 28; Kwitny, Man of the Century, pp. 46–47; O’Brien, The Hidden Pope, p. 124.

  95.Svidercoschi, Letter, pp. 30–32.

  96.Boniecki, Kalendarium, “School Years.”

  97.Ibid.

  98.Author’s interview with Maria Kotlarczyk Ćwikla, July 12, 1997.

  99.Williams, The Mind of John Paul II, p. 31. As Pope, Karol Wojtyła would make numerous references to Włodkowic as a precursor of modern human rights theory; cf., among many examples, his “Address to the 50th General Assembly of the United Nations Organization,” p. 6.

  100.Karol Wojtyła, “The Problem of the Constitution of Culture Through Human Praxis,” in Person and Community: Selected Essays (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), 264.

  101.Pope John Paul II, Curriculum Philosophicum, unpublished autobiographical memorandum provided to the author.

  102.John Paul II, Gift and Mystery, p. 7; John Paul II, Curriculum Philosophicum.

  103.Ibid. Pope John Paul II wrote about this fifty years later:

  “The word, before it is ever spoken on the stage, is already present in human history as a fundamental dimension of man’s spiritual experience. Ultimately, the mystery of language brings us back to the inscrutable mystery of God himself. As I came to appreciate the power of the word in my literary and linguistic studies, I inevitably drew closer to the mystery of the Word—that Word of which we speak every day in the Angelus, “And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1.14). Later I came to realize that my study of Polish language and letters had prepared the ground for a different kind of interest and study. It had prepared me for an encounter with philosophy and theology.” [John Paul II, Gift and Mystery, pp. 7–8 (emphasis in original)].

  104.Svidercoschi, Letter, pp. 38–39.

  105.The details of Karol Wojtyła’s first year at the Jagiellonian University are taken fr
om Boniecki, Kalendarium, “University,” which also reports that years later, when Anna Nawrocka had cancer, Cardinal Karol Wojtyła arranged for her to receive medicines from the United States that were unavailable in Poland at the time.

  106.See Adam Bujak and Michał Rozek, Wojtyła (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo DolnoŚląsk,ie, 1997), p. 25.

  107.Author’s interview with Jerzy Kluger, March 15, 1997.

  108.Ibid.

  109.On young Karol Wojtyła’s gifts as a mimic, see O’Brien, The Hidden Pope, p. 81.

  110.John Paul II, Gift and Mystery, p. 20.

  111.Radiation of Fatherhood, in Wojtyła, The Collected Plays, pp. 355, 341.

  CHAPTER 2

  From the Underground: The Third Reich vs. the Kingdom of Truth

  1.Pope John Paul II, “Message on the Fiftieth Anniversary of the End of the Second World War in Europe,” OR [EWE], May 17, 1995, p. 1.

  2.See Watt, Bitter Glory, p. 461.

  3.Quoted in Szulc, Pope John Paul II, p. 41.

  4.See Norman Davies, God’s Playground: A History of Poland, Volume II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 426; hereinafter, Davies, Volume II.

  5.Watt, Bitter Glory, p. 456.

  6.Davies, Volume II, p. 427.

  7.Ibid., p. 222.

  8.Watt, Bitter Glory, p. 456.

  9.See ibid., pp. 386, 458.

  10.The Times Atlas of the Second World War, John Keegan, editor (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), p. 38.

  11.Cited in James Oram, The People’s Pope: The Story of Karol Wojtyła of Poland (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1979), p. 43.

  12.The chronology here is taken from Gerhard Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

  13.For the Polish war plan and the comparative conditions of the opposed forces, see Watt, Bitter Glory, pp. 415–418.

  14.Adam Zamoyski, The Polish Way: A Thousand-Year History of the Poles and Their Culture (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1994), p. 357. The diversionary attack is described in Watt, Bitter Glory, p. 430.

  15.Zamoyski, The Polish Way, p.359.

  16.See John Keegan, Six Armies in Normandy (New York: Viking, 1982), pp. 262–292.