The End and the Beginning

by George Weigel

  Pope Paul VI died on August 6, 1978, after a pontificate riven with strife—one that raised the question of whether any man could fill the shoes of the fisherman in the late twentieth century. Some evidently thought Karol Wojtyła could, for he seems to have received a scattering of votes at the conclave that elected Albino Luciani, patriarch of Venice, as Pope John Paul I on August 26. Still, a Polish pope was beyond the imagination of most of the cardinal-electors—until the profound shock of John Paul I’s death after a thirty-three-day pontificate reshaped the psychological dynamics of the second conclave of 1978, creating the human conditions for the possibility of doing the previously unimaginable. Thus on October 16, 1978, the archbishop of Kraków, Cardinal Karol Józef Wojtyła, was elected the successor of St. Peter, taking the name John Paul II: the first non-Italian pontiff in four and a half centuries and the first Slavic pope ever.

  THE EVANGELICAL PAPACY AND THE UNIVERSAL CALL TO HOLINESS

  If the Holy Spirit had seen fit to call the archbishop of Kraków to be Bishop of Rome, John Paul II once said, then that must mean that there was something in the experience of Kraków that was of value for the universal Church.5 Thus the new pope did not await instruction from the traditional managers of popes on how to conduct his office, but seized the papacy in his capable hands and bent its functioning to his understanding of what it meant to be a bishop in the post–Vatican II Church. He quickly broke out of the gilded cage of the Vatican, visiting Italian shrines and introducing himself to his new flock. He immediately took up the cause of the “Church of Silence” behind the communist Iron Curtain. He insisted on maintaining direct, personal contact with friends and colleagues all over the world by telephone and letter, and turned the sala da pranzo of the papal apartment into a seminar room, where he hosted guests for meals twice or more each day, probing them for information and analysis of the world situation and their local churches. He even left the Vatican surreptitiously to go skiing, knowing that he needed a certain amount of exercise to keep himself psychologically and spiritually, as well as physically, fit.

  His inaugural encyclical, Redemptor Hominis [The Redeemer of Man], issued on March 4, 1979, was the first extensive papal exposition of Christian anthropology and provided the program notes for the next two decades of the pontificate. Redemptor Hominis was later complemented by two other encyclicals in a Trinitarian triptych: Dives in Misericordia [Rich in Mercy], a 1980 meditation on God the Father as the Father of mercies; and Dominum et Vivificantem [Lord and Giver of Life], a 1986 letter to the world Church on the Holy Spirit. Over the next twenty years, John Paul II also wrote a triptych of encyclicals on Catholic social doctrine: Laborem Exercens [On Human Work], a 1981 exposition of work as man’s participation in God’s ongoing creativity of the world; Sollicitudo Rei Socialis [The Church’s Social Concern], a 1987 letter that defined a human “right of economic initiative” and warned against the dangers of a consumerism that confused having more with being more; and Centesimus Annus [The Hundredth Year], which recast the Church’s social doctrine for the twenty-first century while commemorating the social doctrine’s magna carta, Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum. John Paul also wrote encyclicals on the evangelization of the Slavic lands (Slavorum Apostoli [The Apostles of the Slavs], issued in 1985); on the Blessed Virgin Mary (the 1987 letter, Redemptoris Mater [The Mother of the Redeemer]); on Christian mission (the 1990 letter, Redemptoris Missio [The Mission of the Redeemer]); on the renewal of Catholic moral theology (the 1993 letter, Veritatis Splendor [The Splendor of Truth]); on the Church’s commitment to Christian unity (the 1995 letter, Ut Unum Sint [That They May Be One]); on the defense of life from conception until natural death (the 1995 letter, Evangelium Vitae [The Gospel of Life]); and on the complementarity of faith and reason (the 1998 letter, Fides et Ratio).

  In addition to his encyclicals, John Paul II wrote apostolic letters on a wide range of issues and questions: the nature and meaning of suffering; modern feminism; priestly celibacy; and the importance of Sunday in both human and Christian terms. The apostolic exhortations by which he completed the work of various international Synods of Bishops proposed a vision of authentic Catholic higher education, defended the family as the first unit of society, called the Church back to the practice of sacramental confession, lifted up the lay mission in the world, and called for sweeping reforms in both priestly formation and consecrated religious life. Over the first two decades of his pontificate, John Paul II also became one of history’s premier papal legislators, issuing a new code of canon law for the Latin-rite Church in 1983 with the apostolic constitution Sacrae Disciplinae Leges [The Laws of Its Sacred Discipline], and promulgating history’s first code of canons for the Eastern Catholic Churches in 1990 with the apostolic constitution Sacri Canones [The Sacred Canons]. In three other apostolic constitutions, John Paul revamped the process by which the Church recognizes someone as a saint, restructured the Roman Curia, and refined the rules for papal elections.

  In addition to all this, the Pope turned his weekly general audiences from 1979 through 1984 into catechetical moments that were eventually collected into what became known as the Theology of the Body—perhaps John Paul’s boldest proposal in the field of Christian thought. Subsequent weekly audience catecheses in the 1980s and 1990s yielded a four-volume papal reflection on the Creed, in which the Pope explored the theology of the Trinitarian persons and the nature of the Church, and a fifth volume on the Virgin Mary’s roles as Theotokos [God-Bearer] and model of Christian discipleship. And in 1994, John Paul did something that no pope had ever done before, publishing an international bestseller, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, that eventually appeared in more than five dozen languages.

  Thus, throughout the first twenty years of his papacy, John Paul II was creating a body of papal teaching with which the Catholic Church—and indeed the entire world of human culture—would be grappling for centuries. He understood his teaching to flow from the teaching of the Second Vatican Council, which he took to be a development of the Church’s tradition, not a rupture with that tradition. Toward the end of securing that understanding of Vatican II, he summoned an Extraordinary Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, which met in Rome in November and December 1985 to consider both the Council’s accomplishments and the Church’s failures to implement it properly—an exercise that accelerated the process of interpreting the Council as an extension of 2,000 years of Catholic doctrine and that led to the 1992 promulgation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

  John Paul II’s determination to implement the Second Vatican Council faithfully and fully, which he had said at his election would be one of the principal tasks of his pontificate, was not merely, or even primarily, a matter of winning an argument over what had transpired in Rome between October 1962 and December 1965, however; it was a matter of reigniting in the Church the experience of Vatican II as a “new Pentecost,” a preparation for a third millennium of ever more energetic evangelization. And the most effective form of evangelization, the Pope believed, was not argument, but sanctity: the witness of lives lived as a gift to others, as our lives are a gift to each of us. The Holy Spirit, John Paul II believed, had not exhausted his charismatic and sanctifying gifts to the Church at the first Pentecost, recorded in Acts 2. The Holy Spirit had been active throughout history and was still active in the modern world, calling forth new witnesses to the love of God, manifest in new experiences of the love of Christ. Those convictions about the energetic presence of the Holy Spirit in the Church were the source of two more distinctive attributes of the pontificate in its first two decades: unprecedented numbers of beatifications and canonizations, and John Paul’s forthright support of new renewal movements and new Christian communities.

  His beati and his new saints were a remarkable panorama of human personalities, including such extraordinary figures as Maximilian Kolbe and Edith Stein, both martyred at Auschwitz; Mary Faustyna Kowalska, the apostle of divine mercy; 103 Korean martyrs of the nineteenth century; 110 Vietnamese mart
yrs of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; Albert Chmielowski, the Polish avant-garde painter turned advocate for the destitute; Kateri Tekakwitha, the seventeenth-century “Lily of the Mohawks”; Brother André Bessette, the twentieth-century Thaumaturge at Montréal’s Oratory of St. Joseph; Fra Angelico, the master of the early Renaissance fresco; Miguel Pro, shot during the Cristero uprising in Mexico in 1927 (and quite possibly the first person whose martyrdom was photographed); Pier Giorgio Frassati, “the man of the Beatitudes” who was also a Milanese bon vivant in the Roaring Twenties; Mary MacKillop, an Australian nun once excommunicated by an irate bishop; and Father Damien of Molokai, who gave his life for lepers.

  The renewal movements and new Christian communities that had been founded, or had flourished, after the Second Vatican Council were a “charismatic” fruit of the Council, the Pope was convinced. Moreover, John Paul knew that virtually all true reform in the Church had been initiated outside the bureaucratic structures of Catholic life, even if such “charismatic” reforms eventually had to be incorporated into the regular rhythms and structures of the Church’s life in order to be completely fruitful spiritually. Nonetheless, the Pope was also determined to protect what was new, and often seemed strange, to more cautious churchmen, and thus demonstrated on numerous occasions an intense, personal interest in such movements and communities as the worldwide charismatic renewal, Communion and Liberation, the Emmanuel Community, Focolare, the L’ Arche community, the Neocatechumenal Way, Regnum Christi, and the Sant’Egidio Community, while granting the status of a personal prelature (a kind of global diocese) to Opus Dei.

  All of this, John Paul II believed, was a matter of the Bishop of Rome supporting what Vatican II, in its Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium [Light of the Nations] had described as the “universal call to holiness.” He had learned all about that in Kraków, from his Środowisko and others, long before anyone had dreamed of a new ecumenical council. And in the first two decades of his pontificate, in fidelity to that experience and in obedience to the teaching of Vatican II, he challenged the Church throughout the world to recognize that sanctity is every baptized person’s human and Christian destiny.

  APOSTLE ON THE MOVE

  John Paul II’s living redefinition of the papal office as one of evangelical witness in and for the world seized the public imagination from October 1978 on. That redefinition was embodied in the Pope’s extensive travels, which he insisted were “pilgrimages”—the successor of St. Peter fulfilling the mission given to Peter by the Risen Christ, to “strengthen your brethren” (Luke 22.32). From the beginning of his pontificate, the Pope set about to re-evangelize Italy, making more than ninety pastoral visits to Italian cities, towns, dioceses, and regions between 1978 and 1999, while personally visiting hundreds of Roman parishes; there, the Polish-born Bishop of Rome celebrated Sunday Mass and preached in his sonorous Italian. John Paul II thus lived his title of “Primate of Italy” far more intensely than had any Italian pope in centuries, and perhaps ever.

  Then there was the world beyond the Alps. Among more than ninety papal pilgrimages outside Italy between 1979 and 1999, several were of decisive importance for the Church and the world.

  In Mexico in January 1979, John Paul II challenged the Church in Latin America to be an effective force for social, economic, and political reform while rejecting Marxist distortions in the theologies of liberation. His very presence in Mexico, and the reception he received, altered the anticlerical attitudes in parts of the Mexican establishment, allowing the Catholic Church in Mexico to be itself openly for the first time in decades.

  John Paul’s first pilgrimage to Poland, the “Nine Days” of June 1979, created a hinge point in the history of the twentieth century and will be discussed in detail in Chapter Three, and Poland II (in 1983) and Poland III (in 1987) in Chapter Four.

  In the United States in October 1979, John Paul II demonstrated his ability to communicate his message of evangelical adventure through (and occasionally around) a skeptical media, and forcefully defended religious freedom as the first of human rights in his first address to the General Assembly of the United Nations.

  A month later, in December 1979, the Pope underscored his commitment to ecumenism during a visit to the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, where he told Patriarch Dimitrios I that he hoped the day when they could concelebrate the Eucharist together would come very soon.

  In June 1980, John Paul gave what was one of his favorite public addresses, a dense analysis of the centrality of culture in the human experience, which he delivered in Paris before the 109th meeting of UNESCO’s executive council. On that same pilgrimage to France, the Pope forthrightly asked the “eldest daughter of the Church” whether she had forgotten the vows of her baptism.

  In May and June 1982, John Paul II refused to let the Falklands War impede a planned pilgrimage to Great Britain, inviting the bishops of Britain and Argentina to concelebrate Mass together in St. Peter’s before he went to Britain and then adding Argentina to the immediate post-U.K. papal travel schedule.

  In March 1983, John Paul II stared down Sandinista demonstrators at his Mass in Managua, Nicaragua, pleaded for reconciliation in El Salvador, and began the process by which Marxist revolution was rolled back throughout Central America.

  From January 31 through February 11, 1986, the Pope visited India to lift up the work of a great friend, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, whose living embodiment of the Gospel of love he deemed the best method of advancing the Christian proposal in a culture deeply resistant to it.

  In April 1987, John Paul went to Chile and Argentina, where his teaching and example accelerated transitions to democracy in two countries long held under the boot of military dictatorship.

  June 1–10, 1989, saw history’s first papal pilgrimage to Scandinavia, where the Pope demonstrated the possibilities of personal evangelical witness in thawing the chill of centuries of embittered ecumenical relations.

  On January 15, 1995, John Paul II gathered the largest crowd in human history on the world’s least-Christian continent, when he celebrated the closing Mass of World Youth Day in Manila, capital of a country whose People Power revolution he had supported a decade earlier.

  Back at the United Nations on October 5, 1995, John Paul II defended the universality of human rights as a moral truth of the human condition that could be known by reason, proposed the natural moral law as a universal public “grammar” by which humanity could turn cacophony into conversation, and challenged the world to turn a “century of tears” into a “springtime of the human spirit.”

  In January 1998, John Paul took his message of Christian humanism and freedom to Cuba, where, as in Poland in June 1979, he tried to give back to an oppressed people their authentic history and culture.

  And then there was Africa—a continent beset by Cold War tensions before the collapse of European communism and ignored after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Alone among the world statesmen of the late twentieth century, Pope John Paul II refused to consider Africa either a political pawn or a hopeless case, devoting eleven pilgrimages to every part of the continent between 1980 and 1995.

  Pope John Paul II had thus become not only the most visible human being in history but the most consequential pope in five centuries. From the mid-1990s on, as his health began to deteriorate in various ways, his best days were often said to be behind him, at least by those watching from the outside. Those who knew Karol Józef Wojtyła better, however, sensed that the trajectory of his life pointed through the Holy Door of St. Peter’s—which he would open on Christmas Eve 1999 to inaugurate the jubilee year—toward something more. The drama of that “something more” would match the drama of his epic struggle with communism, to which we now turn, before rejoining John Paul II during the Great Jubilee of 2000.

  PART ONE

  NEMESIS

  Karol Wojtyła vs. Communism

  1945–1989

  CHAPTER ONE

  Opening Gambits />
  May 18, 1920 Karol Józef Wojtyła is born in Wadowice and baptized on June 20.

  August 16–17, 1920 Red Army invasion of Europe is repelled at the “Miracle on the Vistula.”

  August 1938 Wojtyła moves to Kraków to begin undergraduate studies in Polish philology at the Jagiellonian University.

  September 1, 1939 Germany invades Poland, launching World War II inEurope.

  September 17, 1939 The Red Army invades Poland, which is subsequently divided between two totalitarian powers.

  November 1939 Karol Wojtyła, now a manual laborer, begins underground academic life and resistance activities.

  Fall 1942 Wojtyła is accepted into Kraków’s clandestine seminary program.

  Fall 1945 Wojtyła’s name first appears in communist secret police records.

  May 3, 1946 Wojtyła participates in a student demonstration that is attacked by communist secret police and internal security forces.

  June 30, 1946 Kraków returns largest anticommunist vote in Poland during falsified “people’s referendum.”

  November 1, 1946 Karol Wojtyła is ordained a priest and leaves Poland two weeks later for graduate studies in Rome.

  January 17, 1947 Parliamentary “election” confirms communist control of Poland.

  November 12, 1948 Stefan Wyszyński is named archbishop of Gniezno and Warsaw and Primate of Poland.

  March 17, 1949 Father Karol Wojtyła begins academic chaplaincy at St. Florian’s Church in Kraków.

  March 5, 1953 Stalin dies.

  September 25, 1953 Cardinal Wyszyński begins three years of house arrest.