Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  27.See Kubik, The Power of Symbols Against the Symbols of Power, pp. 137–138.

  28.Cited in ibid., p. 138.

  29.Ibid.

  30.Garton Ash, The Polish Revolution: Solidarity, p. 28.

  31.“Communique of the Polish Episcopate,” OR [EWE], May 21, 1979, p. 2.

  32.John Paul II, Pilgrim to Poland, pp. 53–54 [emphasis in original].

  33.Ibid., pp. 56–58 [emphasis in original].

  34.Ibid., pp. 75, 77.

  35.Ibid., p. 82.

  36.Ibid., pp. 84–85.

  37.Ibid., pp. 89–91, 94 [emphasis in original].

  38.Francis X. Murphy, Michael Greene, and Norman Schaifer, Poland Greets the Pope (South Hackensack,N.J.: Shepherd Press, 1979), p. 20.

  39.John Paul II, Pilgrim to Poland, p. 96–97.

  40.Murphy et al., Poland Greets the Pope, p. 20.

  Radek Sikorski was a teenager in the crowd at Gniezno:

  [W]e stood and cheered on the square in front of the archbishop’s palace… waiting for the Pope to come out. A meeting with youth was scheduled; students bands played guitars and sang songs. Suddenly, two men came out onto the balcony: the Pope in white and, in cardinal’s crimson, Primate Wyszyński… The Pope’s face was jolly; one could tell he would have most gladly joined us down below with our guitar playing. Wyszyński was of the prewar school, severe. He stretched out his open palm level with his silk belt and cut through the air in a sideways movement like a Roman emperor. The unruly crowd of teenagers fell silent as if by the touch of a magic wand. I cannot remember what Wyszyński said, but the impression of steely authority emanating from that austere figure is with me to this day. [Sikorski, Full Circle, p. 66.]

  41.John Paul II, Pilgrim to Poland. pp. 99–109 [emphasis in original].

  42.David A. Andelman, “Pope Says Mass, Leads Folk Songs and Draw Cheers at Polish Shrine,” New York Times, June 5, 1979, p. 1.

  43.John Paul II, Pilgrim to Poland, pp. 121–122.

  44.Ibid., pp. 130–151.

  45.The New York Times editorial of that day had it exactly wrong when the editors wrote that, “As much as the visit of Pope John Paul II to Poland must reinvigorate and reinspire the Roman Catholic Church in Poland, it does not threaten the political order of the nation or of Eastern Europe.” [“The Polish Pope in Poland,” New York Times, June 5, 1979.]

  The address to the Polish Bishops’ Conference is also a decisive refutation of the claim, advanced by Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi, that John Paul II deliberately toned down his remarks after regime complaints about his statements in Warsaw and Gniezno. Cardinal Franciszek Macharski, who is alleged to have been the conduit between the government and the papal party, has no recollection of any such demarche. [Letter to the author from Cardinal Franciszek Macharski, June 8, 1998.] The authors are also mistaken, as the above citations make clear, in their argument that “religious themes took over from political ones” after Warsaw and Gniezno. John Paul II’s evangelism, and his determination to draw out the public consequences of the truths about the human person contained in the Gospel, was consistent throughout the June 1979 pilgrimage. [See Bernstein and Politi, His Holiness, pp. 221–222.]

  46.Hella Pick, “Party for the People but People for the Pope,” Manchester Guardian Weekly, June 17, 1979.

  47.John Paul II, Pilgrim to Poland, p. 185.

  48.Murphy et al., Poland Greets the Pope, p. 31.

  49.John Paul II, Pilgrim to Poland, pp. 191–192.

  50.Bolesław Wierzbianski, “Cracow and Vicinity,” in Wierzbianski, ed., The Shepherd for All People, pp. 35–36.

  51.Murphy et al., Poland Greets the Pope, p. 33.

  52.Neal Ascherson, “The Pope’s New Europe,” The Spectator, June 16, 1979, p. 7.

  53.Murphy et al., Poland Greets the Pope, p. 35.

  54.John Paul II, Pilgrim to Poland, pp. 198–201.

  55.Bolesław Wierzbianski, “A Native Son Comes Home,” in Wierzbianski, ed., The Shepherd for All People, pp. 38–39; John Paul II, Pilgrim to Poland, pp. 202–206.

  56.There are two camps in the complex the world has come to know by the double German name Auschwitz-Birkenau. Auschwitz I was in the town of Oświęcim, which lay in a part of Poland that had been absorbed into the Third Reich; it was originally a labor camp for Polish political prisoners, although thousands of executions took place there. Auschwitz II (Birkenau, or in Polish, “Brzezinka”) is four kilometers away and was built for the sole purpose of extermination; this is where the gas chambers and crematoria were located.

  57.John Paul II, Pilgrim to Poland, pp. 207–216.

  58.Ibid., pp. 221–222.

  59.Bolesław Wierzbianski, “A Native Son Comes Home,” in Wierzbianski, ed., The Shepherd for All People,p. 44.

  60.Murphy et al., Poland Greets the Pope, p. 50.

  61.Wierzbianskji, “A Native Son Comes Home,” pp. 48–50; author’s interview with Jerzy Janik, July 17,1996. Professor Janik is certain that John Paul sensed a political riot brewing amid the unbridled youthful enthusiasm and decided on the spot to “do something else—which was deeper.”

  62.Henryk Mikołaj Górecki came to international attention in 1993 when his Third Symphony, the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs for soprano and orchestra, rocketed to the top of both the classical and pop charts. Its Polish premiere in 1976 had made him a national musical hero. Born near Katowice in 1933, Górecki, a deeply committed Catholic, eventually became rector of the Higher School of Music in that Silesian city. His acceptance of Wojtyła’s commission and the performance of “Beatus Vir” in Kraków subjected him to endless harassment from communist officials, with his phone calls, correspondence, and meetings under secret or open surveillance. He was prevented from hiring talented young musicians; his image was airbrushed out of photographs of an anniversary celebration at the Higher School in 1979; his home was ransacked by hoodlums. Górecki became, officially, a nonperson, and finally resigned his position as rector. [See Adrian Thomas, Górecki (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. xiii, 94–100, and Jane Perlez, “Henryk Górecki,” New York Times Magazine, February 27, 1994.] This account of Górecki’s composition and performance is taken from the author’s July 13, 1998, interview with Piotr and Teresa Malecki, old friends with whom Górecki stayed during the papal visit to Kraków in 1979.

  63.John Paul II, Pilgrim to Poland, pp. 254–270 [emphasis in original].

  64.Ibid., p. 278.

  65.See Murphy et al., Poland Greets the Pope, pp. 59–60; John Paul II, Pilgrim to Poland, pp. 277–280.

  66.Szajkowski, Next to God… Poland, p. 72.

  67.Garton Ash, The Polish Revolution: Solidarity, p. 28.

  68.Adam Michnik, “A Lesson in Dignity,” in Michnik, Letters from Prison and Other Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 160.

  69.Author’s interview with Maciej Zięba, OP, September 10, 1991. After working in the Solidarity movement in the early 1980s, Zięba abandoned his scientific career, entered the Dominican Order, and was ordained a priest. After becoming a prominent columnist in the Polish secular and Catholic press and a friend and adviser to Pope John Paul II, he was elected provincial superior of the Polish Dominicans in January 1998.

  70.Author’s interview with Father Józef Tischner, June 15, 1991.

  71.Quoted in Sławomir Majman, “Road to Damascus,” Warsaw Voice, June 9, 1991, p. 6.

  72.Quoted in Garton Ash, The Polish Revolution: Solidarity, p. 29.

  73.Author’s interview with Sister Emilia Ehrlich, OSU, March 21, 1997. Sister Emilia was told this story by a nun who overheard the miners’ conversation.

  74.Author’s interview with Tadeusz Mazowiecki, April 7, 1997.

  75.Adam Michnik was another witness to this phenomenon of personal connection amid mass audiences; see “A Lesson in Dignity,” p. 167.

  76.Ibid., p. 160.

  77.Ibid.

  78.Cited in ibid., p. 161.

  79.Sikorski, Full Circle, pp. 66–67.

  80.See
Michnik, “A Lesson in Dignity,” pp. 161–162.

  81.Peter Osnos and Michael Getler, “Poland Indicates Irritation About Pope’s Comments,” Washington Post, June 7, 1979.

  82.See Michnik, “A Lesson in Dignity,” p. 162.

  Other Warsaw Pact countries tried to ignore what was happening, imposing what amounted to a news blackout in their own media. But the news, and the Pope’s message, got through on Western radios such as the BBC, the Voice of America, Deutsche Welle, and Radio Free Europe. RFE’s Polish service broadcast up to thirteen hours of coverage every day. During the papal visit, the Soviet Union continued jamming U.S.-financed Radio Liberty. [See Michael Dobbs, “Pope’s Words Pierce East’s Blackout,” Washington Post, June 7, 1979, p. A34.]

  83.Michnik, “A Lesson in Dignity,” pp. 162–163.

  84.Ibid., p. 164.

  85.As the Pope put it to students and faculty of the Catholic University of Lublin when he met with them in Częstochowa on June 6, “Any man who chooses his ideology honestly and through his own conviction deserves respect.” The real problem was that communism, by preventing the free pursuit of the truth, had created a society in which a deadening conformity suffocated social life. [Cited in Szajkowski, Next to God… Poland, p. 69.]

  86.Ascherson, “The Pope’s New Europe,” p. 7.

  87.See Garton Ash, The Polish Revolution: Solidarity, p. 30.

  88.Tad Szulc’s comment that “John Paul II’s ‘Nine Days in June’ do not seem—in retrospect—to have fundamentally altered the situation in Poland, except in a general psychological sense” is, to put it gently, unpersuasive. [Szulc, Pope John Paul II, p. 309.] It is precisely in retrospect that the Pope’s determinative influence on the formation of the Solidarity movement becomes unmistakably clear. Szulc’s judgment is shared by virtually no one who participated in the Solidarity movement. It may have been shared by Poland’s communist rulers, one of whom, Mieczysław Rakowski, was a principal source for Szulc.

  Andrzej Wajda’s film, Man of Iron, a fictional recreation of the Gdańsk shipyard strike that won the Grand Prize at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival, cinematically captures the change wrought by the Pope. An alcoholic hack journalist for a regime-controlled newspaper is sent to Gdańsk during the heat of the August 1980 strike to smear one of the strike leaders, the “man of iron.” But the old communist tactics of lies and violence (which Wajda deftly weaves into the drama through flashbacks using archival footage of the failed strike attempt in 1970) no longer work: not simply because of the regime’s ineptness, but because the “man of iron” has learned his own dignity and cannot be intimidated.

  89.See Davies, Heart of Europe, p. 62.

  90.Cited in Garton Ash, The Polish Revolution: Solidarity, p. 280.

  91.Author’s interview with Father Mieczysław Maliński, June 15, 1991.

  92.Cited in Garton Ash, The Polish Revolution: Solidarity, p. 280.

  93.Cited in Timothy Garton Ash, We the People: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin and Prague (Cambridge: Granta Books, 1990), pp. 139–140.

  94.Cited in Garton Ash, The Polish Revolution: Solidarity, p. 282.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Ways of Freedom: Truths Personal and Public

  1.Author’s interview with Cardinal Jan Schotte, CICM, March 14, 1997.

  2.Author’s interview with Rocco Buttiglione, February 27, 1997.

  3.“Ai giovani di Comunione e Liberazione,” Insegnamenti di Giovanni Paolo II, 1979.

  4.John Paul II, “Letter to All the Priests of the Church on the Occasion of Holy Thursday 1979,” in John Paul II, Letters to My Brother Priests, ed. James P. Socias (Princeton: Scepter Publishers, 1994), p. 35.

  5.Ibid., p. 40. The stole is the liturgical vestment that signifies the authority of the priest to consecrate the Eucharist (“the moment of transubstantiation”), which according to Catholic doctrine becomes at the moment of consecration the Body and Blood of Christ. The Latin formula of sacramental absolution in confession begins Ego te absolvo… [I absolve you from your sins… ].

  6.John Paul II, “To the Italian Episcopal Conference,” OR [EWE], June 11, 1979, pp. 13–14 [emphasis in original].

  7.John Paul II, “To General Assembly of Italian Bishops,” OR [EWE], pp. 2–3.

  8.Paroled in 1985 but refused permission to function publicly as a bishop, Ignatius Gong Pin-Mei came to the United States in 1988 (at age eighty-seven) to live in retirement. Two months short of his ninetieth birthday, his name was publicly revealed and he was formally invested as a cardinal on June 28, 1991.

  9.John Paul II, “To the Sant’Egidio Community,” OR [EWE], July 30, 1979, p. 10.

  10.Author’s interview with Monsignor Vincenzo Paglia, March 25, 1997. Monsignor Paglia has been chaplain, or “ecclesiastical assistant,” to the Sant’Egidio Community throughout the pontificate of John Paul II. When Sant’Egidio did become too big for its small church, its liturgical activities, including a splendid celebration of Vespers every evening, moved to the Basilica of S. Maria in Trastevere, where Monsignor Paglia is rector.

  11.See OR [EWE], August 20, 1979, p. 3; OR [EWE], September 17, 1979, p. 5.

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

  13.See Our Sunday Visitor, June 3, 1979.

  14.Cited in Hebblethwaite and Kaufmann, Pope John Paul II: A Pictorial Biography, p. 89.

  15.Author’s interview with Cardinal Pio Laghi, November 5, 1996.

  16.Cited in de Lubac, At the Service of the Church, p. 172.

  17.John Paul II, The Theology of the Body (Boston: Pauline Books and Media, 1997).

  18.The confusions attendant on this text had been made obvious, yet again, in the reactions to Jimmy Carter’s confession to a Playboy magazine interviewer during the 1976 U.S. presidential campaign that he had committed adultery in his heart.

  19.This series was interrupted for a year, from February 9, 1983, to May 23, 1984, as the Church observed a special Holy Year of the Redemption and the Pope dedicated his general audience addresses to this theme.

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

  21.Ibid.

  22.John Paul II, Original Unity of Man and Woman (Boston: St. Paul Books and Media, 1981).

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

  24.John Paul II, Original Unity of Man and Woman, p. 73.

  25.Ibid., pp. 73–74. On this point, see also Mary Rousseau, “John Paul II’s Teaching on Women,” in The Catholic Woman, Ralph McInerny, ed. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), pp. 12–13.

  26.John Paul II, Blessed Are the Pure of Heart (Boston: St. Paul Books and Media, 1983), p. 19.

  27.Ibid., p. 131.

  28.Ibid., pp. 142–149.

  29.Ibid., p. 150.

  30.Ibid., p. 185.

  31.Ibid., p. 191.

  32.Ibid., pp. 194–195.

  33.Ibid., p. 229.

  34.Ibid., pp. 241–246.

  35.John Paul criticizes pornography in this context. “Privacy” is essential if sexual self-giving is to be genuine mutual self-donation. Pornography violates the “right of privacy” built into the moral structure of human sexuality by turning what is most intensely personal and subjective into public property, an “object.” [Ibid., pp. 276–289.] This analysis is particularly interesting in the U.S. context, in which the Supreme Court has declared “privacy” a freestanding liberty right that legally justifies virtually any consensual sexual activity. But this is a “privacy” devoid of moral structure; and as such, it tends to destroy the intensely interpersonal nature of sexual love, by turning the “other” into an anonymous sexual object.

  36.Ibid., p. 292.

  37.John Paul II, The Theology of Marriage and Celibacy (Boston: St. Paul Editions, 1986), pp. 17–38.

  38.Ibid., pp. 83–89.

  39.Ibid., pp. 96–111; 171–177.

  40.Ibid,. pp. 301–307.

  41.Ibid., pp. 191–197.

  42.Ibid.,
pp. 215–224.

  43.Ibid., pp. 276–282.

  44.Ibid., pp. 363–368.

  45.John Paul II, Reflections on Humanae Vitae (Boston: St. Paul Books and Media, 1984), pp. 13–18.

  46.Ibid., pp. 35–40.

  47.Ibid., pp. 41–47.

  48.Ibid., pp. 61–67.

  49.Ibid., p. 93.

  50.This brief summary does scant justice to the richness of John Paul’s reflections or to their extensive mining of ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary sources. To take but two examples: The notes to the second address in Original Unity of Man and Woman discuss the various positions taken on God’s self-definition in Exodus 3.14 by Augustine, Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, and Meister Eckhardt—the last as interpreted by the great modern Thomist, Etienne Gilson. The notes to the third address include a lengthy discussion of the different views of “myth” proposed by Rudolf Otto, Carl Gustav Jung, Mircea Eliade, Paul Tillich, Heinrich Schlier, and Paul Ricoeur, with special reference to the latter’s analysis of the “Adamic myth” in Genesis.

  51.Author’s interview with Bishop Angelo Scola, February 26, 1997.

  52.See Leo G. Walsh, “On the Edge of Europe,” in Wierzbianski, ed., The Shepherd for All People, pp. 94–95.

  53.Cited in ibid., pp. 98–99.

  54.Cited in ibid., p. 102.

  55.See ibid., p. 110.

  56.Cited in Time, October 15, 1979, p. 16.

  57.John Paul II, Address to the 34th General Assembly of the United Nations Organization [hereinafter, John Paul II, UN-I], 5.

  58.Ibid., 6 [emphasis in original].

  59.Ibid., 7 [emphasis in original].

  60.Ibid., 9.

  61.Ibid., 11.

  62.Ibid., 14.

  63.See ibid., 17.

  64.Ibid., 19 [emphasis in original].

  65.Ibid.