Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  17.Weinberg, A World at Arms, p. 50. Weinberg claims that Polish intelligence provided British and French cryptographers with copies of Enigma in July 1939, which renders the British/French inactivity two months later even more pusillanimous.

  18.Pope John Paul II, 24th Jasna Góra Cycle Meditation, at the General Audience of August 8, 1990.

  19.Watt, Bitter Glory, p. 435.

  20.Memorials to this massacre are found in many Polish churches today, the Blessed Virgin cradling the head of a Polish officer, in the back of whose skull is a bullet hole.

  21.These details of the endgame are taken from Watt, Bitter Glory, pp. 438–439. For a firsthand view of the events of September 1939, see also Jan Nowak, Courier from Warsaw (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1982).

  22.Zamoyski, The Polish Way, p. 360.

  23.Cited in Davies, Volume I, p. 369.

  24.Quoted in James Michener, Poland (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1983), p. 451.

  25.Davies, Volume II, p. 441.

  26.Author’s interview with Danuta Michałowska, April 22, 1997. Miss Michałowska, at the risk of her life, helped hide books on Polish history and literature spirited away from a library in Kraków’s Old Town.

  27.Memorandum from Cardinal Franciszek Macharski to the author, June 17, 1997. The causes for the canonization of Fathers Dańkowski, Januszewski, Mazurek, and Kowalski are proceeding. The Soviet occupation of eastern Poland also added to the martyrology of Polish clergy, as priests from these regions were shipped off to the Gulag or executed. In Gift and Mystery, John Paul II recalled the case of Father Tadeusz Fedorowicz of the archdiocese of Lwów, who had “of his own free will gone to his Archbishop to ask if he could accompany a group of Poles being deported to the East. Archbishop Twardowicz gave his permission and so Father Fedorowicz was able to carry out his priestly mission among his fellow countrymen dispersed throughout the territories of the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan in particular” [p. 38].

  28.See Sikorski, Full Circle, pp. 100, 107, 120.

  29.John Paul II, Gift and Mystery, p. 26.

  30.George Blazynski, Pope John Paul II: A Man from Kraków (London: Sphere, 1979), p. 9.

  31.Wanda Połtawska, And I Am Afraid of My Dreams (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1987), p. 112.

  32.See Andrzej Micewski, Cardinal Wyszyński: A Biography (San Francisco: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,1984).

  33.Alan Furst, The Polish Officer (New York: Random House, 1995), is a fine fictional evocation of the atmosphere of the Occupation, to which I owe the image of an entire nation forced to think like criminals.

  34.On the flight from Kraków, see Svidercoschi, Letter, pp. 43–46.

  35.Ibid., pp. 52–53.

  36.Boniecki, Kalendarium, “Years of Occupation.”

  37.Karolak, John Paul II, pp. 45–50. International protests compelled the Nazis to release some of the Jagiellonian faculty members the following year. Some of those released died shortly after their return from Sachsenhausen.

  38.Oram, The People’s Pope, p. 50.

  39.Boniecki, Kalendarium, “Years of Occupation.”

  40.Quoted in ibid.

  41.Maliński, Pope John Paul II, pp. 28, 50. Maliński was then attending an engineering school, which the Occupation permitted to remain open in order to train Poles in low-level skills that would serve the Third Reich.

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

  43.Boniecki, Kalendarium, “Years of Occupation.”

  44.Ibid.

  45.Ibid.

  46.John Paul II, Gift and Mystery, p. 10.

  47.Cited in Oram, The People’s Pope, pp. 52–56.

  48.Boniecki, Kalendarium, “Years of Occupation.”

  49.John Paul II, Gift and Mystery, pp. 27–28; John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, p. 213.

  50.John Paul II, Gift and Mystery, p. 29.

  51.John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, p. 213.

  52.John Paul II, Gift and Mystery, pp. 21–22.

  53.“Tworzywo” [“Material”], from Kamieniołom [“The Quarry”], in Karol Wojtyła, Poezje i dramaty (Kraków: Znak, 1979), p. 44; translated by the author and Marek Skwarnicki.

  54.Ibid.

  55.John Paul II, Gift and Mystery, p. 9.

  56.Pamięci towarzysza [“In memory of a fellow worker”], from Kamieniołom [“The Quarry”], in Karol Wojtyła, Poezje i dramaty, 2nd rev. ed. (Kraków: Znak, 1998), p. 57; translated by the author and Marek Skwarnicki.

  57.See Janusz Kawecki, “Alpinista Duchowy,” in ?ród?o, March 9, 1997, pp. 8–9.

  58.Author’s interview with Michal Szafarski, SDB, April 9, 1997.

  59.Author’s interview with Father Mieczysław Maliński, April 12, 1997.

  60.For an examination of the chief intellectual influences on Tyranowski, see Williams, The Mind of John Paul II, pp. 77–81.

  61.See Buttiglione, Karol Wojtyła, pp. 28–29.

  62.Mieczysław Maliński describes his first encounter with Jan Tyranowski and the tailor’s unique personal style of overcoming adolescent resistance in Pope John Paul II, pp. 9–20.

  63.Author’s interview with Michal Szafarski, SDB, April 9, 1997.

  64.Maliński, Pope John Paul II, pp. 28–31.

  65.Karol Wojtyła, “Aposto?,” Tygodnik Powszechny n. 35 (1949). This tribute to Jan Tyranowski was Karol Wojtyła’s second published essay.

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

  67.John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, p. 142.

  68.See Pope John Paul II, “Master in the Faith: Apostolic Letter for the Fourth Centenary of the Death of St. John of the Cross,” issued December 14, 1990.

  69.Boniecki, Kalendarium, “Years of Occupation.”

  70.Taborski, “Introduction,” in Wojtyła, The Collected Plays, p. 4; Boniecki, Kalendarium, “Years of Occupation.”

  71.See Taborski, “Introduction to Job,” in Wojtyła, The Collected Plays, pp. 19–24.

  72.Taborski, “Introduction to Jeremiah,” in Wojtyła, The Collected Plays, p. 81.

  73.Ibid., p. 91. Taborski’s introductions to his translations of Job and Jeremiah are indispensable for grappling with Wojtyła’s methods and intentions in these early works, located as they are on the borderline between juvenilia and mature literary product.

  74.Taborski, “Introduction,” in Wojtyła, The Collected Plays, p. 4.

  75.Ibid., p. 5.

  76.Ibid., p. 4; Oram, The People’s Pope, p. 61.

  77.Boniecki, Kalendarium, “Years of Occupation.”

  78.Author’s interview with Maria Kotlarczyk ?wikła, July 12, 1997.

  79.Cited in Taborski, “Introduction,” in Wojtyła, The Collected Plays, p. 6.

  80.Author’s conversation with Pope John Paul II, September 30, 1997.

  81.See Kwitny, Man of the Century, p. 56.

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

  83.See Kwitny, Man of the Century, pp. 71–71, for details of this split, based on Danuta Michałowska’s recollections.

  84.Boniecki, Kalendarium, “Years of Occupation.” Danuta Michałowska, Halina Królikiewicz, and Krystyna Dębowska would all go on to make the theater their careers.

  85.Boniecki, Kalendarium, “Years of Occupation.”

  86.According to the recollection of Danuta Michałowska; see Kwitny, Man of the Century, p. 72.

  87.On these performances, see Taborski, “Introduction,” in Wojtyła, The Collected Plays, pp. 7–9.

  88.As related by Mieczysław Kotlarczyk in Boniecki, Kalendarium, “Years of Occupation.”

  89.Author’s interviews with Danuta Michałowska, April 22, 1997, and Halina Kwiatkowska, November 8, 1998.

  90.Ibid.

  91.Tadeusz Kwiatkowski remembered the impact of this incident twenty-one years later: because Wojtyła refused to concede to the power of the megaphone, “Mickiewicz did not take up the war of shouting. When the barker finished her glorification of Germa
n atrocities, Mickiewicz was announcing the reconciliation of Soplica with the Keymaster. I looked at the faces of the assembled guests. The same thought animated all of us. We all felt we were sons of this nation, a nation which over the course of centuries was often betrayed, but which will not succumb to terror.” [Boniecki, Kalendarium, “Theological Studies.”]

  92.The Rhapsodic Theater continued after the war until it was shut down in 1953 at the height of Stalinism in Poland. Reopening in 1957, it survived until 1967 when the communist regime once again closed its doors. The fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Rhapsodic Theater was marked by the publication of a fine collection of commemorative and historical essays, illustrated by wonderful if grainy old photographs: “…trzeb dać świadectwo”: 50-lecie powstania Teatru Rapsodycznego w Krakowie was edited by Danuta Michałowska, to whom I am most grateful for providing me with a copy.

  93.See Garry Wills, “All the Pope’s Men,” The New Yorker, December 2, 1996, pp. 107–113, and the quotations from Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg in Paul Elie, “John Paul II’s Jewish Dilemma,” New York Times Magazine, April 26, 1998, p. 38.

  94.The preexisting underground groups included “Warszawianka,” whose members included men who had served in the prewar administration of the Second Polish Republic; “Grunwald,” another Warsaw-based organization, more blue-collar in character; and “Nowa Polska,” which had been formed in and around Kraków under the leadership of Jerzy Braun, a Catholic philosopher and writer.

  95.Information on UNIA was provided in a memorandum to the author from Juliusz Braun (a member of the Polish parliament and nephew of UNIA leader Jerzy Braun), translated by Professor Kazimierz Braun. Juliusz Braun also kindly provided me with several documents reflecting UNIA’s ideological position and postwar proposals. In addition, Mr. Braun sent me a reprint of an article in French by Konstanty Regamey, another UNIA leader, which stressed that, among the “unknown aspects of the Polish resistance,” was the widespread interest underground in articulating a new political philosophy for postwar Poland. The Polish resistance, in other words, was not only “against” the Occupation but was striving to set in place the foundations “for” a new Poland.

  96.Boniecki, Kalendarium, “Years of Occupation.”

  97.Szulc, Pope John Paul II, p. 117.

  98.Cited in ibid.

  99.Author’s conversation with Bishop Stanisław Ryłko, December 10, 1996.

  100.John Paul II, Gift and Mystery, p. 34.

  101.Ibid., p. 20.

  102.Ibid., p. 3.

  103.Author’s conversation with Pope John Paul II, December 16, 1998.

  104.Danuta Michałowska, quoted in Kwitny, Man of the Century, p. 78.

  105.Author’s interview with Halina Kwiatkowska, November 8, 1998.

  106.Ibid.

  107.As recounted in Kwitny, Man of the Century, p. 78.

  108.Frossard and John Paul II, “Be Not Afraid!,” p. 17.

  109.John Paul II, Curriculum Philosophicum.

  110.John Paul II, Gift and Mystery, p. 42–43.

  111.See Maliński, Pope John Paul II, pp. 63–69.

  112.Svidercoschi, Letter, p. 77.

  113.Boniecki, Kalendarium, “Theological Studies.”

  114.The pectoral cross, suspended from the neck by a chain, is, with the episcopal ring and staff (or crosier), one of the bishop’s signs of authority in Catholic vesture. A world beyond the imagination of either pontiff or aristocratic bishop would become familiar with this particular pectoral cross decades later.

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

  116.Author’s interview with Stanisław Rodziński, June 9, 1997.

  117.Author’s interview with Cardinal Franciszek Macharski, April 10, 1997.

  118.Cardinal Puzyna cast the last imperial veto in a papal conclave, blocking the election of Cardinal Mariano Rampolla in 1904 on instructions from the Emperor Francis Joseph. In the aftermath of this anachronism the conclave rules were changed and the right of imperial veto abrogated.

  119.Author’s interview with Bishop Stanisław Smoleński, April 9, 1997; author’s conversation with Pope John Paul II, September 10, 1996; author’s interview with Henryk Woźniakowski, November 6, 1998.

  120.B. Stasiewski, “Hlond, Augustyn,” New Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 7, p. 41.

  121.Author’s interview with Sister Emilia Ehrlich, OSU, March 21, 1997.

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

  123.Author’s interview with Bishop Stanisław Smoleński, April 9, 1997; Buttiglione, Karol Wojtyła, pp. 30–31.

  124.Author’s interview with Bishop Stanisław Smoleński, April 9, 1997.

  125.Boniecki, Kalendarium, “Theological Studies.”

  126.Ibid.

  127.Maliński, Pope John Paul II, p.74.

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

  129.John Paul II, Gift and Mystery, p. 13.

  130.Maliński, Pope John Paul II, p. 85.

  131.See Davies, Volume II, p. 471.

  132.Ibid., p. 489.

  133.Ibid., p. 491.

  134.Ibid., p. 545.

  135.On Gomułka, see ibid., pp. 547–548.

  136.Davies, Heart of Europe, p. 3.

  137.Author’s interview with Sister Emilia Ehrlich, OSU, March 21, 1997.

  138.This last incident took place after the seminary had been restored to its old quarters near Wawel Cathedral, after the Occupation. See Boniecki, Kalendarium, “Theological Studies.”

  139.Ibid.

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

  141.The “Litany of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Priest and Victim” is reprinted in full in John Paul II, Gift and Mystery, pp. 108–114.

  142.See ibid., p. 18.

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

  144.Boniecki, Kalendarium, “Theological Studies.”

  145.The Athenaeum, staffed then as now by Dominicans, would later become the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas, and was known to everyone under either configuration as “the Angelicum,” or, more informally, “the Ange,” in distinction from the Jesuit-led Pontifical Gregorian University, “the Greg.”

  146.The subdiaconate was abrogated by Pope Paul VI in 1972. In 1946 the subdiaconate was considered the first of the Church’s “major orders,” although it was not regarded as part of the sacrament of Holy Orders, which encompasses ordination to the offices of deacon, priest, and bishop. After the abrogation of 1972, the functions of the subdeacon were assumed by the lay ministries of reader and acolyte. Easternrite Catholic Churches have continued the order of subdeacon.

  147.Wojtyła’s classmates, including Kazimierz Suder, were ordained priests the following Palm Sunday. [John Paul II, Gift and Mystery, p. 41.]

  148.Fifty years later, Pope John Paul II remembered the impact of this moment on his subsequent priestly ministry: to lie helpless on the floor indicated the candidate’s “complete willingness to undertake the ministry being entrusted to him,” his willingness to be a “floor” on which others might walk in faith. The “ultimate meaning of all priestly spirituality” was this commitment to spend oneself completely in service to others. [John Paul II, Gift and Mystery, pp. 45–46.]

  149.The rite of the ordination of priests has changed considerably since 1946, and the ceremonial books of that era are not easy to come by. I am very grateful to Father Vincent McMurry, SS, who lent me the booklet containing the rite in Latin and English which he had given to his mother at his own ordination in 1949. [The Ordination of a Priest (Paterson, N.J.: St. Anthony’s Guild, 1948).] I have modified the book-let’s translations of the Latin somewhat to reflect certain current usages.

  150.John Paul II, Gift and Mystery, p. 48.

  151.Boniecki, Kalendarium, “Theological Studies.”

  152.Ibid. Shortly after his ordination, Father Wojtyła is said to have declined to baptize a
n orphaned Jewish child being cared for by Christian foster parents, explaining that there was still hope that the child might be claimed by Jewish relatives who would raise the little boy in the Jewish tradition. [See Yaffa Eliach, Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust (New York: Vintage Books, 1988)]. Pope John Paul II has said that this is, in fact, “a legend,” adding that “I simply don’t remember doing it.” The Pope did not suggest, however, that such a decision would have been out of character for him. Indeed, it would have been entirely in character. “But I cannot remember such an incident,” he concluded. [Author’s conversation with Pope John Paul II, December 16, 1998.]

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

  154.Author’s interview with Archbishop Jorge M. Mejía, November 13, 1996.

  155.John Paul II, Gift and Mystery, p. 52.

  156.Cardijn was a critic of the worker-priest movement, telling one of Wojtyła’s Belgian College fellow students that “a worker does not want a priest to become a worker, but to be essentially a priest for them, too. A worker-priest can never be a real worker, because at any moment he can stop being a worker.” [Letter to the author from Canon Gustaaf Joos, July 11, 1998.]

  157.Letter to the author from Canon Gustaaf Joos, February 8, 1998.

  158.John Paul II, Gift and Mystery, p. 53.

  159.Boniecki, Kalendarium, “Theological Studies.” Wojtyła reported the practice in a letter to Mieczysław Kotlarczyk.

  160.Author’s conversation with Pope John Paul II, December 13, 1997. During this conversation the Holy Father did not mention the legend that Padre Pio had predicted Wojtyła’s election as pope during his confession. The Holy Father’s emphasis on the brevity, clarity, and simplicity of Padre Pio as a confessor tells against the legend which, if true, John Paul would quite properly have regarded as a private matter.

  161.Subiaco and Paris: Boniecki, Kalendarium, “Theological Studies.”

  162.John Paul II, Gift and Mystery, p. 55.

  163.Ibid.

  164.Ibid., p. 56.

  165.Ibid., p. 58.

  166.Ibid., p. 56.

  167.Author’s interview with Michal Szafarski, SDB, April 9, 1997.

  168.Author’s interview with Archbishop Jorge Mejía, November 13, 1996. Mejía studied at the Angelicum at the same time as Karol Wojtyła. He rightly cautions against reading that situation through the lens of today’s expectations about the character of a graduate theological education. Judged by those standards, the Angelicum was not an “exciting” intellectual environment; some of its professors were excellent, and others were rather dull. But by giving its students a firm foundation in the tradition, the Angelicum, for all that it lacked the intellectual sparkle of more adventurous faculties of its era, armored its students against faddishness in their intellectual lives. Another student living at the Belgian College at the time, Gustaaf Joos, remembered decades later that Roman theology students knew that “the exploratory edge of theology was located more in Paris and Louvain.” [Letter to the author from Canon Gustaaf Joos, July 11, 1998.]