Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  66.Ibid., 83–84.

  67.Author’s interview with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, September 12, 1996. Cardinal Ratzinger’s impression that Redemptor Hominis was not planned at the outset as the first in a three-part series of encyclicals was confirmed by Pope John Paul II in a conversation with the author on January 16, 1997.

  68.See Diary of Blessed Sister M. Faustina Kowalska (Stockbridge, Mass.: Marians of the Immaculate Conception, 1996).

  69.Author’s conversation with Pope John Paul II, January 16, 1997. On the theological implications of Sister Faustina’s life and work, see Raymond Gawronski, SJ, “‘My Name Is Sacrifice’: The Mission of Blessed Faustina,” Communio 24 (Winter 1997), pp. 815–842. Sister Faustina Kowalska was beatified by Pope John Paul II on April 18, 1993.

  70.Wojtyła, “Reflections on Fatherhood,” in Wojtyła, The Collected Plays, p. 368.

  71.John Paul II, Dives in Misericordia, 4.12, 4.3, in Miller, Encyclicals.

  72.Ibid., 4.11.

  73.Ibid., 8.1.

  74.See “Editor’s Introduction to Dives in Misericordia,” in Miller, The Encyclicals of John Paul II, p. 100.

  75.John Paul II, Dives in Misericordia, 5.4, in ibid.

  76.Ibid., 6.1–6.5.

  77.Ibid., 12.3.

  78.See “Editor’s Introduction to Dives in Misericordia,” in Miller, ed., The Encyclicals of John Paul II, p. 102.

  79.In English, “Aaron.” Both spellings are acceptable in French.

  80.See Choosing God—Chosen by God: Conversations with Jean-Marie Cardinal Lustiger (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), pp. 17–61, 191–224, 267–282.

  81.Lustiger may have been influenced in this analysis by the late Cardinal Pierre Veuillot, who called the young priest to his deathbed in early 1968 and said, “Pure, pure, pure. Everything must be pure….We have to make a true spiritual revolution. The Pope realizes it, few people have; but that is what the Church needs.” [See ibid., p. 213.]

  82.Author’s interview with Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, October 24, 1996.

  83.After a French publisher had turned down one of Wojtyła’s books in May 1978, a few pages of excerpts were published in the September 1978 Communio along with a biographical introduction to the cardinal by Agnes Kalinowski, Jerzy Kalinowski’s daughter and Wojtyła’s goddaughter. The introduction was “the most accurate and comprehensive biography the French press had in October 1978” when Wojtyła was elected. [Memorandum to the author from Jean Duchesne, special adviser to Cardinal Lustiger, May 27,1998.]

  84.Henri de Lubac, SJ, took this view of the situation in France and undoubtedly had shared it with Wojtyła over the years. [Memorandum to the author from Jean Duchesne, May 11, 1998.]

  85.Grammont had reopened the ancient Norman abbey of Le Bec-Hellouin in 1948 and made it into a thriving spiritual and cultural center, combining classical liturgy with ecumenism and an intense interest in Jewish-Christian dialogue: a singular combination of characteristics that gave him a reputation as a master of the spiritual life and a position above the corrosive left/right divide in the French Church. [Memorandum to the author from Jean Duchesne, May 22, 1998.]

  86.Author’s interview with Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, October 24, 1996; memoranda to the author from Jean Duchesne, May 11, 22, 27, 1998. On Lustiger’s early meeting with the Paris clergy, see Kwitny, Man of the Century, p. 382.

  87.The population of Asia in 1997 was approximately 3.6 billion. Asia’s Christian population in 1998 was approximately 286 million. [International Bulletin of Missionary Research 22:1 (January 1998), p. 27.]

  88.T. Nowakowski, “Destination Far East,” in Wierzbianski, ed., The Shepherd for All People, p. 269; Nowakowski’s report was originally prepared for London’s Tydzien Polski.

  89.Marek Skwarnicki, “John Paul II in the Far East,” in Wierzbianski, ed., The Shepherd for All People, pp. 285–286.

  90.Cited in Nowakowski, “Destination Far East,” p. 269.

  91.Felix B. Bautista, Cardinal Sin and the Miracle of Asia (Manila: Vera-Reyes, 1987), p. 89.

  92.Memorandum to the author by Cardinal Jaime L. Sin, December 9, 1997.

  93.Bautista, Cardinal Sin and the Miracle of Asia, pp. 91–92; Skwarnicki, “John Paul II in the Far East,” p.288.

  94.Pope John Paul II, The Far East Journey of Peace and Brotherhood (Boston: St. Paul Editions, 1981), p. 43.

  95.Marek Skwarnicki, “Light in the Orient,” in Wierzbianski, ed., The Shepherd for All People, pp. 282–283.

  96.John Paul II, The Far East Journey of Peace and Brotherhood, pp. 79–86.

  97.Nowakowski, “Destination Far East,” p. 273.

  98.John Paul II, The Far East Journey of Peace and Brotherhood, p. 177.

  99.Skwarnicki, “John Paul II in the Far East,” p. 289.

  100.Ibid., p. 289.

  101.John Paul II, The Far East Journey of Peace and Brotherhood, pp. 280–281.

  102.Among those martyred with Lorenzo Ruiz had been a Polish Jesuit from Kraków, Father Wojciech Maczynski. [Nowakowski, “Destination Far East,” p. 278.]

  103.Marek Skwarnicki, “In Nagasaki and Anchorage,” in Wierzbianski, ed., The Shepherd for All People, p.296.

  104.“The Pope in Alaska,” Anchorage Daily News, February 27, 1981, p. B2.

  105.Ibid., p. B3.

  106.Nowakowski, “Destination Far East,” p. 279.

  CHAPTER 12

  In the Eye of the Storm: Months of Violence and Dissent

  1.On the L’viv Sobor, see Bociurkiw, The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the Soviet State (1939–1950), pp. 148–188.

  The resolution declaring the L’viv Sobor null and void was adopted by the diaspora bishops in the presence of Cardinal Władysław Rubin, Prefect of the Congregation for Oriental Churches and an old friend of John Paul II. Both the Ukrainians and the Russians assumed that meant that the Pope knew the details of the resolution and supported its passage. When the resolution was “unofficially” published by the Ukrainians, the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate of Moscow was furious and immediately sent its ecumenical liaison officer, Metropolitan Juvenaly, to Rome. After Juvenaly failed to get the Pope to disown the resolution, Patriarch Pimen himself wrote John Paul on December 22, demanding a papal repudiation of the “direction selected by the Ukrainian Catholic bishops,” and threatening a cutoff of ecumenical relations if the Pope did not comply. The Pope’s reply, in a private letter of January 24, 1981, defended the Greek Catholics’ right to religious freedom while indicating that the resolution had been passed without his having had the opportunity to study it closely. The Patriarchate of Moscow then released the Pimen–John Paul correspondence (presumably to embarrass the Pope, who had not shared Pimen’s letter to him, or his to Pimen, with Cardinal Slipyi, the exiled leader of Ukrainian Catholics); the Greek Catholics in the Ukrainian underground were outraged, and discontent rippled through the Ukrainian diaspora. Yet while this incident damaged the Pope’s image with Ukrainian Catholics who simply could not understand the ecumenical imperative with Russian Orthodoxy (which they identified not with John Paul’s ecumenical commitment, but with the most accommodationist elements of the previous Vatican Ostpolitik), the Soviet leadership was further confirmed in its fears that John Paul represented a grave threat, not simply in the Warsaw Pact, but in the Soviet internal empire.

  2.Author’s interview with Bogdan Bociurkiw, August 10, 1996. See also Bociurkiw, “The Ukrainian Catholic Church in the USSR Under Gorbachev,” p. 7.

  3.Szajkowski, Next to God… Poland, pp. 87–90; the poetry is cited in Garton Ash, The Polish Revolution: Solidarity, p. 331.

  4.Tina Rosenberg, “It Sired a Free Market and It’s Paying a Price,” International Herald Tribune, March 18, 1997, p. 11.

  5.Szajkowski, Next to God… Poland, pp. 90–91.

  6.Author’s conversation with Pope John Paul II, October 23, 1998.

  7.The Pope spoke to the Poles at the August 20 general audience in their common language:

  And now, dear countrym
en, regarding the news which has come from Poland, I wish to read again before you present here, or rather to recite, two prayers which the Polish Church uses: the first on the Solemnity of Mary, Queen of Poland, on 3 May, and the second on the Solemnity of Our Lady of Częstochowa on 26 August. First that of 3 May:

  “O God, who has given to the Polish nation, in the Most Holy Virgin Mary, a wonderful help and shield, grant that through the intercession of our Mother and Queen, the Church may always enjoy freedom, and the country, peace and security.”

  And now the second, that of 26 August:

  “Assist, O Lord, the people which you strengthen with Your Body and Blood, and through the intercession of your Most Holy Mother, deliver them from all evil and every danger, and surround with your protection all their good works.”

  These prayers by themselves say how much we here in Rome are united with our fellow Poles and with the Church in particular, whose problems are close to the heart, and for which we seek the Lord’s aid. [OR (EWE), August 25, 1980, p. 1.]

  8.Szajkowski, Next to God… Poland, pp. 91–92.

  9.Ibid., pp. 92–93.

  10.In the judgment of Jan Nowak, former head of Radio Free Europe’s Polish service, Cardinal Wojtyła helped prepare the ground for Solidarity by changing the Polish Church from a Church that defended the rights of believers to a Church that defended everybody, including dissident Marxists and men of the left. [Author’s interview with Jan Nowak, May 13, 1998.]

  11.Szajkowski, Next to God… Poland, p. 93.

  12.Ibid. pp. 95–97.

  13.OR [EWE], September 1, 1980, p. 8.

  14.Szajkowski, Next to God… Poland, p. 97.

  15.The full text of the communiqué is in OR [EWE], September 8, 1980, pp. 6–7. The bishops put the right to unionize and to strike within the framework of the basic human rights that John Paul II had defended at the UN the previous October. Thus the Polish episcopate followed the Pope’s—and the workers’—lead in positioning the Gdańsk strike in a broad moral and humanistic context, rather than as an economic squabble.

  16.See Garton Ash, The Polish Revolution: Solidarity, p. 68.

  17.Ibid., p. 74.

  18.As Timothy Garton Ash would note later, “It was all faintly reminiscent of a joke current in the late 1970s: ‘What is the difference between Gierek and Gomułkał’ ‘None, only Gierek doesn’t know it yet….’”[Ibid., pp. 71–72.]

  19.Solidarity was, technically, a national federation of local unions. See ibid., p. 75.

  20.Ibid., p. 78.

  21.Ibid., pp. 79–80.

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

  23.Szajkowski, Next to God… Poland, pp. 102–104.

  24.Ibid., pp. 105–106.

  25.Ibid., p. 106; Garton Ash, The Polish Revolution: Solidarity, pp. 81–82; Kwitny, Man of the Century, p. 376.

  26.Szajkowski, Next to God… Poland, p. 107; Garton Ash, The Polish Revolution: Solidarity, pp. 84–85.

  27.Author’s interview with Jan Nowak, May 13, 1998. Kukliński, according to Nowak, knew everything that General Jaruzelski knew about Soviet plans “and more.” The Polish colonel provided the United States with the entire operational plan; this was then checked with the Red Army general and by satellite reconnaissance, but cloud cover over east central Europe made photographic confirmation of troop movements difficult.

  28.Author’s interview with Zbigniew Brzeziński, February 7, 1997; letter to the author from Zbigniew Brzeziński, May 14, 1998.

  29.Author’s interview with Jan Nowak, May 13, 1998.

  30.Author’s interview with Zbigniew Brzeziński, February 7, 1997.

  31.Ibid.

  32.Ibid.; author’s interview with Richard V. Allen, November 26, 1996.

  33.Jan Nowak is convinced that the two key figures in “saving Poland from Soviet invasion” were Ryszard Kukliński and Zbigniew Brzeziński: “I am sure of it.” [Author’s interview with Jan Nowak, May 13, 1998.] Colonel Kukliński’s recollections may be found in Ryszard Kukliński, “The Suppression of Solidarity,” Kultura, April 1987. Some of Kukliński’s reports may be found in Cold War International History Project Bulletin 11 (Winter 1998), pp. 53–56.

  34.With the authorization of Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Secretary of State of the Holy See, the text of this letter, which I personally examined, was read to me and translated by Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran, the Holy See’s Secretary for Relations with States, during an interview in the archbishop’s office on December 12, 1997.

  35.Author’s interview with Cardinal Jozef Tomko, November 14, 1996.

  36.Lech Wałęsa, A Way of Hope: An Autobiography (New York: Henry Holt, 1987), p. 165.

  37.Cited in ibid., pp. 164–165 [emphasis in original].

  38.John Paul II, “Mass for the Polish Delegation… ,” OR [EWE], February 9, 1981, p. 23.

  39.Wałęsa, A Way of Hope, p. 166. John Paul’s formal address to the Solidarity delegation is in OR [EWE], February 9, 1981, pp. 21–22.

  40.See Szajkowski, Next to God… Poland, p. 116.

  41.Author’s interview with Jan Nowak, May 13, 1998.

  By conventional Soviet reckoning, Wojciech Jaruzelski was the classic class enemy: a son of the land-owning gentry, educated in Catholic schools. That a man from this background, alone among the officers of his generation, rose unscathed through the ranks of the Polish military during the purges of the Stalinist and post-Stalinist eras, prospering during every shift of power and every change in personnel, suggests an exceptional degree of confidence in him, which Brezhnev once expressed in the simple phrase, “He is ours.” [Ibid.]

  42.See Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi (His Holiness, pp. 277–278) and Jonathan Kwitny (Man of the Century), pp. 386–387.

  During our conversation of December 16, 1998, I asked the Pope about the alleged March 28, 1981, meeting. He replied that he remembered no such thing.The Pope’s secretary, Bishop Stanisław Dziwisz, then retrieved the detailed diary of John Paul’s meetings he had kept for twenty years; the diary includes both the fact of a meeting and the topics discussed. Dziwisz looked through every entry for March 1981, and said, simply, “There was no such meeting.” Kwitny cites East German secret police files as a source. The fact that no such meeting ever took place suggests both the unreliability of many such sources and the vulnerability of analysts to disinformation.

  43.John Paul II, “Message to Primate of Poland,” OR [EWE], April 6, 1981, p. 2 (translation revised by the author in light of the original).

  44.Szajkowski, Next to God… Poland, pp. 121–122.

  45.Ibid., pp. 122–123.

  46.Ibid., p. 123.

  47.Both Zbigniew Brzeziński and Jan Nowak believe that “Soyuz 81” was a bluff, intended to keep pressure on the Polish communist leadership, but not a preparation for invasion, as the December 1980 maneuvers surely had been. Author’s interviews with Brzeziński, February 7, 1997, and Nowak, May 13, 1998.

  48.Cited in Szajkowski, Next to God… Poland, p. 124.

  49.The Brest meeting is described in detail in Bernstein and Politi, His Holiness, pp. 280–284, an account based on interviews with Jaruzelski and Kania, on Jaruzelski’s memoirs, and on Soviet Politburo minutes of April 9, 1981. The details of the debate are fascinating, but the analysis in which the narrative is lodged seems to accept Jaruzelski’s longstanding and self-justifying claim that martial law was the only alternative to Soviet military intervention—for which Brzeziński and Nowak claim there was no credible evidence at the time, later in the year, or in subsequently released documentation.

  50.John Paul II, “Homily at Sotto il Monte,” in OR [EWE], May 4, 1981, pp. 1–3.

  51.See Frossard and John Paul II, “Be Not Afraid!,” p. 225. Frossard’s account of the assassination attempt and its aftermath is particularly valuable because it is drawn from extended interviews with the Pope’s secretary, Monsignor Stanisław Dziwisz, and Dr. Francesco Crucitti, the lead surgeon in the Pope’s case.

  52.One
of these was Cardinal Bernardin Gantin, President of the Pontifical Justice and Peace Commission. The African cardinal gave a photograph of this tableau to every staff member of the Congregation for Bishops when he became its Prefect, as a reminder of what each of them should be prepared to suffer for the Church. Author’s interview with Cardinal Bernardin Gantin, December 13, 1997.

  53.Author’s interviews with Teresa Heydel Życzkowska, April 19, 1997, and Sister Emilia Ehrlich, OSU, March 21, 1997.

  54.Frossard and John Paul II, “Be Not Afraid!,” p. 251.

  55.John Paul had made clear at the beginning of his pontificate that, should he be ill, he should be taken to the hospital like anyone else—another innovation in papal style (Paul VI had had prostate surgery in a specially constructed operating room in the papal apartment). So the Gemelli knew that it was the Pope’s hospital of choice. That the suite was constantly on reserve was a precautionary measure that suggests that what had just happened was not entirely unanticipated.

  56.Frossard and John Paul II, “Be Not Afraid!,” p. 227.

  57.Ibid., p. 236.

  58.Ibid., pp. 236–237.

  59.Ibid., p. 223.

  60.Ibid., p. 251.

  61.Ibid., p. 225.

  62.OR [EWE], May 18, 1981, p. 6. The Latin prayer at the end of John Paul’s brief message was a reiteration of the motto on his coat-of-arms: “[I am] completely yours.” That Jesus Christ was both “priest and victim” was the theme of a litany frequently recited in the Kraków seminary during Karol Wojtyła’s student days.

  63.Frossard and John Paul II, “Be Not Afraid!,” p. 234.

  64.OR [EWE], May 25, 1981.

  65.Author’s interview with Gabriel and Bozena Turowski, June 10, 1997.

  66.Frossard and John Paul II, “Be Not Afraid!,” p. 230.

  67.Ibid., p. 246.

  68.Ibid., 249.

  69.Author’s conversation with Pope John Paul II, October 23, 1998; author’s interview with Jan Nowak, August 19, 1998.

  70.Frossard and John Paul II, “Be Not Afraid!,” p. 230.

  71.Ibid., p. 231.

  72.Ibid., p. 248; author’s interview with Gabriel Turowski, June 10, 1997.