Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  22.Author’s interview with Archbishop Jan Schotte, CICM, May 10, 1991.

  23.Author’s interview with Monsignor Andrzej Bardecki, July 11, 1996.

  24.Cited in Michael Ledeen, Freedom Betrayed, (Washington, D.C.: AEI Press, 1996), p. 35.

  25.A statue of this remarkable scene is now in the courtyard of the Catholic University of Lublin, where Wyszyński was once bishop and Wojtyła once taught.

  26.John Paul II, “Two Messages to Poland,” OR [EWE], November 9, 1978, pp. 3, 9.

  27.Boniecki, Kalendarium, “Family.”

  28.Author’s interview with Sister Emilia Ehrlich, OSU, February 21, 1997.

  The question of approving translations of the new pope’s poetry and plays was finally given over to a commission under the aegis of the Libreria Editrice Vaticana, the Holy See’s publishing house.

  29.John Paul II, “Address at Mentorella,” OR [EWE], November 9, 1978, p. 1. The original text is in Insegnamenti di Giovanni Paolo II, 1978; the Vatican translation brings annuncio into English as “announcement,” but “signal” is probably closer to the Pope’s meaning here.

  30.John Paul II, “Address at Assisi” and “Address at S. Maria sopra Minerva,” OR [EWE], November 16, 1978, pp. 6, 7.

  31.St. John Lateran is the cathedral church of the Diocese of Rome and one of Rome’s four “patriarchal basilicas,” the others being St. Peter’s, St. Mary Major, and St. Paul’s Outside the Walls. St. Peter’s, also known as the “Patriarchal Vatican Basilica,” belongs, so to speak, to the whole Church and to the Pope as its universal pastor; St. John Lateran is the pope’s cathedral church in his specific character as Bishop of Rome. The Lateran Palace, next door to the basilica, houses the offices of the Vicariate of Rome, the administrative center of the diocese, which is headed by a Cardinal Vicar appointed by the Pope as his delegate for running the day-to-day affairs of the diocese.

  32.John Paul II, “Homily at St. John Lateran,” OR [EWE], November 23, 1978, pp. 6–7.

  33.John Paul II, “Address to Audience for Young People,” OR [EWE], December 7, 1978, p. 11.

  34.Boniecki, Kalendarium, “Theological Studies.”

  35.In the course of his homily the Pope cited the entire text from Augustine’s Sermon 340: “While I am frightened by what I am for you, I am consoled by what I am with you. For you, in fact, I am a bishop, with you I am a Christian. The former is the name of an office, the latter of grace; the former is a name of danger, the latter of salvation.” The full text of the homily in translation is in OR [EWE], December 21, 1978],p. 11; the Italian original is in Insegnamenti di Giovanni Paolo II, 1978.

  36.Cited in Bernstein and Politi, His Holiness, p. 188.

  37.Author’s interview with Cardinal Pio Laghi, November 5, 1996. Cardinal Laghi, then an archbishop, was apostolic nuncio in Argentina at the time.

  Argentina and Chile had requested Holy See mediation in their dispute shortly after John Paul II’s election. But disagreement over the precise wording of the letter that the two governments would send to the Holy See, formally requesting its services as mediator, caused a crisis. In mid-December both countries were mobilizing their armed forces and the Argentinians sent an aircraft carrier into the Beagle Channel. It was widely assumed that, in any armed confrontation, Argentina would prevail because of its 4:1 advantage in military manpower. But there would have been a lot of bloodshed in the process, given the character of the two military governments involved. In the south of Chile, red crosses were being painted on the roofs of hospitals and schools, in anticipation of air raids, as Christmas approached. [Author’s interview with Cardinal Angelo Sodano, December 13, 1996; then-Archbishop Sodano was the apostolic nuncio in Chile at the time.]

  38.Author’s interview with Cardinal Angelo Sodano, December 13, 1996.

  39.John Paul II, “Christmas Message Urbi et Orbi,” OR [EWE], January 1, 1979, p. 1.

  40.“An Unscheduled ‘Angelus’ with the Pope,” OR [EWE], January 1, 1979, p. 12. The Angelus is a devotion containing three biblical texts about the Incarnation of Christ, three “Hail Marys,” and a concluding prayer. The Pope, from the window of his apartment overlooking St. Peter’s Square, customarily prays it with pilgrims on Sundays at noon.

  41.The Pope’s homily at the wedding is in OR [EWE], March 5, 1979, p. 8.

  42.John Paul II, “Address to Italian Military,” OR [EWE], March 12, 1979, p. 11.

  43.“Pope’s Rosary Broadcast by Vatican Radio,” OR [EWE], March 12, 1979.

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

  45.On the “geography” of the Pope’s prayer, see John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, pp. 19–26.

  46.Author’s interview with Archbishop Emery Kabongo, September 20, 1998. Archbishop Kabongo, prior to his ordination as a bishop, served as a papal secretary from February 1982 until January 1988.

  47.Author’s interview with Bishop Stanisław Ryłko, November 25, 1997.

  48.Author’s interview with Archbishop Emery Kabongo, September 20, 1998.

  49.Author’s interview with Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran, March 14, 1997.

  50.The news summary was described for me by Monsignor James Harvey, then the Assessor of the Secretariat of State, and later Prefect of the Papal Household. The remark about “Campo de’Fiori” was related to me by Joaquín Navarro-Valls in an interview on December 18, 1997.

  51.Author’s interview with Joaquín Navarro-Valls, December 18, 1997.

  52.Author’s interview with Jerzy Janik, July 17, 1996.

  John Paul II did something else to Castel Gandolfo that bears his personal imprint. In the chapel at the papal villa, Pius XI (the former apostolic visitator and nuncio in Warsaw) had had two large murals painted on the side walls flanking the sanctuary. One was of Prior Kordecki and the defense of Częstochowa against the Swedish “Deluge” in 1655. The other was of the Battle of Warsaw in 1920, the “Miracle on the Vistula,” and featured another heroic priest, Father Ignacy Jan Skorupka, and maps of the troop movements in Piłsudski’s epic victory. They had been covered up during the pontificate of Paul VI. John Paul II had the paintings, “which in a certain sense had prepared the way for a Polish Pope,” uncovered. [Memorandum to the author from Bishop Stanisław Ryłko, September 15, 1998.]

  53.Pinckaers, The Sources of Christian Ethics, p. 258.

  54.Author’s conversation with Pope John Paul II, January 16, 1997.

  55.“Official Soviet Reaction to the New Pope,” RL 251/78 (Radio Liberty Research).

  56.Author’s interview with Jerzy Turowicz, July 19, 1996.

  57.On Andropov and Solzhenitsyn, see David Remnick, Resurrection: The Struggle for a New Russia (New York: Random House, 1997).

  58.Felix Corley, “Soviet Reaction to the Election of Pope John Paul II,” Religion, State and Society 22:1(1994), p. 41. Andropov’s evident assumption that something might have been done to prevent Wojtyła’s election suggests that Paul VI’s concerns for the security of the conclave, which some dismissed at the time as excessive, may not have been entirely without foundation. On this point, see also Vladimir Bukovsky, Jugement a Moscou: Un dissident dans les archives du Kremlin (Paris: Laffont, 1995), pp. 213–214.

  59.Ibid.

  60.Ibid.

  61.For a detailed study of this persecution, arguably the most intense in the twentieth century, see Bohdan R. Bociurkiw, The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the Soviet State (1939–1950) (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 1996).

  62.Szulc, Pope John Paul II, p. 283. Vilnius (the Polish “Wilno”) was the birthplace of Józef Piłsudski; both Adam Mickiewicz and Czesław Miłosz had attended the university there.

  63.Cited in Corley, “Soviet Reaction to Pope John Paul II”, p. 46.

  64.See Michael Bourdeaux, The Gospel’s Triumph over Communism (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1991), pp. 134–148. Copies of the Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania, a detailed record of persecution and resistance, were c
landestinely shipped in a plain wrapper to Brooklyn, New York, where they were translated and distributed by Lithuanian Catholic Religious Aid, a volunteer organization.

  65.Author’s interview with Archbishop Norberto Rivera Carrera, November 21, 1997.

  66.“Mexican Priests, Nuns, Defy Ban on Wearing Church Garb in Public,” Seattle Times, January 28, 1979.

  67.Author’s interview with Marcial Maciel, LC, February 19, 1998.

  68.An overview of the common threads running through the various liberation theologies at the time of John Paul II’s address to CELAM from the perspective of a sympathizer to the liberation theology project may be found in Phillip Berryman, “Latin American Liberation Theologies,” Theological Studies 34:3 (September 1973).

  69.Gustavo Gutierrez, cited in Richard John Neuhaus, “Liberation Theology and the Captivities of Jesus,” Worldview, June 1973, p. 48.

  70.See ibid.

  71.John Paul II, “Address to the Third General Assembly of CELAM,” in Puebla: A Pilgrimage of Faith (Boston: St. Paul Editions, 1979), pp. 100–101.

  72.Ibid.

  73.Ibid., p. 101.

  74.Cf. ibid., pp. 106–107.

  75.The analysis of the “anthropological error” in Marxism in John Paul II’s Puebla address is similar to that of the Pope’s colleague in the drafting of Gaudium et Spes, Henri de Lubac; see de Lubac, The Drama of Atheistic Humanism (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995); the first French edition of de Lubac’s work was published in 1944.

  76.John Paul II, Puebla: A Pilgrimage of Faith, pp. 109–110.

  77.Ibid., p. 113.

  78.See ibid., pp. 117, 120.

  79.John Paul II, “Address in Cuilapan,” in Puebla: A Pilgrimage of Faith, p. 146.

  80.Thus the editors of the New York Times were factually mistaken when they criticized the Pope’s “disappointing” speech at Puebla for telling the Latin American bishops that “they must confine themselves to the pulpit and the altar,” as were the Manchester Guardian editors who accused John Paul of promoting “the old argument that the Church must avoid temporal disputes focusing on man’s soul.” [New York Times, January 30, 1979; Manchester Guardian Weekly, February 4, 1979.]

  These confusions persisted for decades. In 1997, for example, Jonathan Luxmoore wrote of a Pope who, in Latin America, “appeared to counsel resignation rather than resistance.” [Jonathan Luxmoore, “Pope John Paul II’s Liberation Theology,” The Tablet, October 11, 1997, p. 1281.]

  81.There was one exception to the extensive coverage given the Pope’s Mexican pilgrimage. The visit was virtually ignored by Soviet newscasters, as was John Paul’s critique of liberation theology. For the Soviet press to ignore such a major international event was usually an indication of the Kremlin’s displeasure with something that had happened: embarrassing or ideologically compromising news was best regarded as no news. The fact that Soviet newscasters did not report the Pope’s Mexican pilgrimage did not mean that their political masters did not take it seriously—it likely meant precisely the opposite. [See Paul Henze, “Postscript 1985,” in The Plot to Kill the Pope (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1985), p. 203.]

  82.Marek Skwarnicki, “Return from Mexico,” in Wierzbianski, The Shepherd for All People, p. 85.

  83.On the encyclical tradition, see J. Michael Miller, CSB, “Introduction to the Papal Encyclicals,” in The Encyclicals of John Paul II, edited with introductions by J. Michael Miller, CSP (Huntington, Ind.: Our Sunday Visitor Publishing Division, 1996); hereinafter, Miller, Encyclicals.

  84.Author’s conversation with Pope John Paul II, January 16, 1997.

  85.Ibid.; the official date of the encyclical was March 4, 1979, the First Sunday of Lent that year.

  86.John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, pp. 48–49.

  87.Redemptor Hominis 1.1, 1.2 [the number prior to the period refers to the heading in the original document, the number after the period to the paragraph enumeration added in the Miller volume].

  88.Redemptor Hominis, 12.2.

  89.Ibid., 15.1 – 16.4.

  90.Ibid., 17.8.

  91.Ibid., 18.1–19.6.

  CHAPTER 9

  “How Many Divisions Has the Pope?”: Confronting an Empire of Lies

  1.Davies, Volume I, pp. 20–21.

  2.John Paul II, Pilgrim to Poland (Boston: St. Paul Editions, 1979), pp. 63–72 [emphasis in original].

  3.See Timothy Garton Ash, The Polish Revolution: Solidarity (Sevenoaks, U.K.: Hodder and Stoughton, 1985), p. 29.

  4.On Poland as a communist state, not a communist country, see ibid. It was the writer Julian Stryjkowski who described the papal pilgrimage as “Poland’s second baptism” see Kubik, The Power of Symbols Against the Symbols of Power, pp. 138–139.

  5.Author’s interview with Stefan Swiezawski, April 7, 1997.

  6.See John Courtney Murray, SJ, “The Issue of Church and State at Vatican Council II,” Theological Studies 27:4 (December 1966).

  7.Author’s interview with Zbigniew Brzeziński, February 7, 1997. On the criminal character of communist regimes, see Stéphane Courtois et al., Le Livre Noir du Communisme: Crimes, Terreur, Répression (Paris: Laffont, 1997) and the review essay by Martin Malia, “The Lesser Evil?” in the Times Literary Supplement, March 27, 1998, pp. 3–4.

  This understanding of the inherently criminal character of communist regimes is missing from a standard reference on the Ostpolitik of Paul VI, Hansjakob Stehle’s Eastern Politics of the Vatican 1917–1979 (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1981). Stehle’s book includes a wealth of interesting detail. But this lacuna on the nature of communist states renders Stehle’s judgments less than useful—although the book does opens a window into the way of thinking about the communist world that was prominent in the Vatican’s Secretariat of State (where Stehle had many high-placed sources) during the pontificate of Paul VI.

  8.Cited in Bogdan Szajkowski, Next to God… Poland: Politics and Religion in Contemporary Poland (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), p. 63.

  9.Citations from Jan Hartmann, Bohumil Svoboda, and Václav Vaško, Kardinal Tomášek: Zeugnisse über einen behutsamen Bischof und einen tapferen Kardinal (Leipzig: Benno-Verlag, 1994), and from the letter of John Paul II to Cardinal Frantisek Tomáśek, OR [EWE], June 25, 1979, p. 4.

  Tomášek, a native Moravian, had been secretly ordained a bishop in 1949; Pius XII’s policy was that each Czechoslovak bishop should secretly ordain a successor to take over in case the bishop in question was arrested. Tomášek was arrested in 1951 and served three years in a labor camp, after which he was permitted to function as a village parish priest in Moravska Huzova; during this period, he was the only Czechoslovak bishop permitted to attend Vatican II, where he met Karol Wojtyła. When Prague’s Cardinal Josef Beran agreed to go into exile in Rome in 1965 as part of an attempted Vatican rapprochement with the Czechoslovak government, Tomášek was appointed apostolic administrator of Prague, where he was finally allowed to assume the title of archbishop in 1978. He was named a cardinal in pectore, or secretly, by Paul VI in 1976, and was publicly raised to the cardinalate in 1977 when the authorities allowed him to travel to Rome. [Obituary, The Independent, August 5, 1992.]

  10.Author’s interview with Pavel Bratinka, October 23, 1991. For a more detailed analysis of the dramatic transformation of the situation in Czechoslovakia under the impact of John Paul II, see the author’s study, The Final Revolution, chapter six.

  11.“To Cardinal Iosyf Slipyi,” OR [EWE], July 23, 1979, pp. 3–4.

  12.Andrei Gromyko, Memoirs (London: Hutchinson, 1989), pp. 212–213.

  13.Author’s conversation with Pope John Paul II, December 13, 1997. During this conversation I told the Pope an old joke: the reason Gromyko was never seen smiling was that Stalin had told him that smiling was counterrevolutionary, and Gromyko was still waiting for the order to frown to be rescinded. The response was an expressive pontifical grunt. The remark about the Gromyko interview being “tiresome” is from Wilton Wynn, Keepe
rs of the Keys (New York: Random House, 1988).

  14.Technically, Casaroli was “Pro-Secretary of State” until he was created a cardinal on June 30 and assumed the full, unencumbered title of his office. The Sostituto is the functional equivalent of a presidential chief-of-staff and holds a job of wide-ranging influence. For profiles of Silvestrini, Martínez Somalo, and Bačkis, see OR [EWE], May 14, 1979, p. 11.

  15.On the role of the Final Act’s human rights provisions in the collapse of European communism, see the author’s study, The Final Revolution, pp. 26–30.

  16.Author’s interviews with Zbigniew Brzeziński, February 7, 1997, and Joaquín Navarro-Valls, January 20, 1997.

  17.Author’s interview with Joaquín Navarro-Valls, January 20, 1997.

  18.Szajkowski, Next to God… Poland, pp. 61–63.

  19.Quotations are from Janusz Rolicki, Edward Gierek: Przewana dekada (Warsaw: Polska Oficyna Wydawnicza, 1990), cited in Bernstein and Politi, His Holiness, p. 191. Szulc, in Pope John Paul II, writes that Gierek recalled saying that the Pope would be received “with dignity” [p. 299].

  20.This rodomontade fooled no one. The underground newspaper Robotnik, in its April 1, 1979, issue, editorialized that “The authorities of the Polish People’s Republic were afraid of the visit and of this date. They were afraid of the date because the cult of St. Stanisław, the perseverant bishop murdered by King Bolesław the Bold, is identified with a dangerous word, opposition …” [Cited in Kubik, The Power of Symbols Against the Symbols of Power, p. 134.]

  21.Ewa Czarnecka, “John Paul II Visit to Poland,” in Wierzbianski, ed., The Shepherd for All People, p. 10 (originally published in the New York-based Polish journal Nowy Dziennik).

  22.Ibid., pp. 10–11.

  23.In Latin, rutilans agmen.

  24.See John Paul II, Pilgrim to Poland, p. 28.

  25.John Paul II, “Homily at the Polish Cemetery of Monte Cassino,” in OR [EWE], May 28, 1979, pp. 6–7.

  26.Cited in Kubik, The Power of Symbols Against the Symbols of Power, pp. 134–135. Meanwhile, Moscow was making its views known through one of its most reliable mouthpieces, the hardline Czechoslovak Communist Party weekly Tribuna. Who was this Stanisław the Pope was so interested in honoring? With an irony perhaps lost on many of its readers, Tribuna described him as a man who had spent his life “implementing the principles of, and demands for, the total domination of the world by the Pope and the Church, as formulated in the Middle Ages by Pope Gregory VII.” [Cited in Bernstein and Politi, His Holiness, p. 217.]