The End and the Beginning

by George Weigel

  And then there was the Pope’s desire to position the Holy See as a potential interlocutor in a superpower crisis threatening nuclear war, a strategic goal that seemed ever more urgent in light of the nuclear showdown of October 1962. It was an ambitious agenda, in which the Pope’s concern for the Church under communism intersected with John XXIII’s commitment to peace. The initial accomplishments of John’s Ostpolitik were modest. Yet according to one of Casaroli’s chief deputies, Achille Silvestrini, the dying pontiff was satisfied, because he believed that “nothing would be able to re-seal the crack that he had managed to open in the iron curtain.” Thus when Casaroli briefed the Pope on his quiet visits to Budapest and Prague in the spring of 1963, John, who would die three weeks later, said, at the end of the audience, “Let us go forward with goodwill and trust, but without rushing.”16

  Giovanni Battista Montini, who took the name Paul VI at his election on June 21, 1963, was another papal veteran of the Vatican diplomatic service, although he had had little experience in the field, having spent most of his career as a senior Vatican bureaucrat prior to becoming archbishop of Milan in 1954. One of his admirers (and another agent of the Ostpolitik), the Viennese cardinal Franz König, appreciated Paul’s intellectual and spiritual gifts while acknowledging his weaknesses: he was “often uncertain,” König once conceded, but that was “because he was so intelligent and wanted to make the best of everything.”17 At the beginning of a difficult, fifteen-year pontificate, Paul, who brought what Casaroli once described as a “more pessimistic” cast of mind to the Ostpolitik, nonetheless agreed that the policy John XXIII and Casaroli had begun must continue, in order to achieve a modus non moriendi, a “way of not dying,” for the Catholic Church in central and eastern Europe. In practical terms, this meant that Paul VI deferred to Casaroli and the team he had begun to assemble, which included fellow Italian curial diplomats such as Achille Silvestrini and Luigi Poggi, on the steps to be taken—including a ratcheting down of papal anticommunist rhetoric. That the Vatican’s new geniality would not be met by a comparable geniality on the part of Soviet-bloc communist authorities created a situation that was “a torment” for Paul VI; years later, Casaroli would remember having to “restrain” the pope when Paul VI was determined to speak out against some communist act of perfidy.18

  Casaroli and his colleagues brought diplomatic skill, a gift for languages, and patience to their work. What they did not bring was experience—experience of life in what the Czech playwright Václav Havel would later describe as the communist “culture of the lie,” and experience in dealing with Soviet-bloc intelligence agencies. They were afraid, as was Paul VI, that an underground Catholic Church, detached from Rome and left to its own devices behind the Iron Curtain, would produce various aberrations even as it slowly suffocated. But they did not seem willing to take seriously the counsel of completely loyal churchmen in east central Europe who insisted that normal diplomatic methods would only work to the disadvantage of local Catholic Churches.19

  And indeed to the Vatican’s disadvantage—for the Holy See had virtually no developed counterintelligence capability with which to resist the penetration, disinformation, and destabilization efforts that the Ostpolitik unintentionally, but inevitably, made possible. Pope John’s determination to bring bishops from behind the Iron Curtain to Vatican II was matched by aggressive and extensive efforts on the part of Soviet-bloc intelligence agencies to use the Council as an opportunity to penetrate the Vatican and influence the diplomacy of the Holy See. Thus the Hungarian delegation that came to Rome for the Council’s opening in 1962 included several informants and operational agents, while a year later nine of the fifteen Hungarian bishops, theologians, and journalists at the Council’s second session were working for Hungarian intelligence. The Hungarians, in fact, already had an intelligence asset in place in Rome: Fritz Kusen, an employee of Vatican Radio and a friend of the conservative curial theologian Sebastian Tromp, S.J.; Kusen worked under the code name MOZART and may have been a double agent. When the Ostpolitik ripened to the point at which serious discussions could begin between Vatican representatives and the Hungarian communist authorities, MOZART and two fellow moles in Rome helped prepare the Hungarian side of the negotiation, explained that there was a split in the Vatican between those determined to support the intransigent Cardinal Mindszenty and those who were seeking a way around the embattled Hungarian primate and were working with their Vatican contacts to support the anti-Mindszenty party in Rome. By contrast, the Holy See’s representatives to the talks that began in Budapest in May 1963 were not so well briefed on the local situation. And in any event, the day before Casaroli arrived to begin the negotiation, Hungarian intelligence laid out an operational plan by which seventeen secret police agents were to track his every move throughout the country.

  Things would go from bad to worse in Hungary in the years ahead, even as the Ostpolitik seemed, on the surface, to be working well there. An agreement, including provisions for the nomination of bishops, was signed between the Vatican and the Hungarian regime of János Kádár on September 15, 1964, the first such agreement between the Holy See and a communist government. Yet within the next five years, many of the Hungarian bishops nominated under this accord would cooperate with both Hungary’s internal security and foreign intelligence agencies, to the point that, in 1969, the Hungarian bishops’ conference was in large measure controlled by the Hungarian state. As this was unfolding in Hungary, the Hungarian College in Rome became a subsidiary of Hungarian intelligence. The emigrant clergy who had lived there since the 1956 revolution were expelled. Every rector of the College between 1965 and 1987 would be a trained and skillful agent, with expertise in both disinformation operations and bugging. Over half the visiting students and scholars who came to the College were agents; the College’s leadership had ready access to Archbishop Casaroli, Archbishop Giovanni Cheli (Casaroli’s point man on Hungary), and others in charge of the Ostpolitik, in which capacity they became important instruments of the Hungarian communist government’s Vatican policy.20

  While their Hungarian colleagues were exploiting the Ostpolitik with considerable success, the Polish SB also tried to turn the Second Vatican Council into a moment of opportunity in its war against the Church. It had the advantage of a well-placed clerical collaborator, code-named JANKOWSKI—Father Michał Czajkowski, a biblical scholar devoted to advancing the Jewish-Catholic dialogue, who seems to have been lured into working for the SB in the conviction that cooperation with the government would undermine the influence in Poland of Cardinal Wyszyński, whom Father Czajkowski regarded as far too conservative; here, as in Hungary, Soviet-bloc intelligence exploited the widening ideological divisions in the Catholic Church for its own purposes. JANKOWSKI reported to the Polish intelligence services on the activities of the Polish bishops at Vatican II (where he was working as a journalist) and on Roman curial affairs, maintaining contacts with both the Roman SB chief and a controller in Poland from Department IV.

  Cardinal Wyszyński’s concerns about the relentlessness of the SB’s efforts to penetrate and then divide the Catholic Church in Poland shaped his thinking about certain issues at the Council. Thus, under Wyszyński’s leadership, the Polish bishops were not enthusiastic about proposals from western European bishops and theologians to restore the diaconate as a permanent office in the Catholic Church and to ordain married men as deacons. To Wyszyński and other Polish Church leaders, a corps of married deacons would provide the SB with a rich new menu of targets for its penetration and recruitment efforts.21 For its part, disempowering Wyszyński seems to have been the primary strategic goal of the SB during Vatican II. Throughout the four sessions of the Council, Polish intelligence worked to erode Wyszyński’s authority with both the Polish bishops and the Vatican, while sowing seeds of discord about the proper interpretation of the Council’s documents among the Polish bishops and undercutting Wyszyński’s efforts to maintain his position as the sole contact between the Vatican an
d the Polish government; the Vatican architects of the Ostpolitik were, for example, eager to explore the possibility of diplomatic relations between the Vatican and Poland, which the Polish cardinal regarded (and not without reason) as but another opportunity for the communists to play divide-and-conquer.

  The SB was not above attempting to pervert the Council’s discussion of some of the more specialized points of Catholic theology. Throughout the first two sessions of the Council, the question of whether Vatican II should issue a separate document on the Virgin Mary, or incorporate its reflection on Mary’s role in the history of salvation into its major document on the Church, was a point of some controversy. The SB saw an opportunity here to use Cardinal Wyszyński’s well-known Marian piety against him. Thus the director of Department IV, Colonel Stanisław Morawski, worked with a dozen or so clerical collaborators who were theological experts in Mariology to prepare a memorandum for the bishops of the Council, suggesting that the Polish primate’s views on Mary were excessive and even heterodox. The final form of this memorandum was prepared by a collaborator, STOLARSKI, who was a biblical scholar and a priest. The “Memorandum on Certain Aspects of the Cult of the Virgin Mary in Poland” was distributed to all the bishops at Vatican II, was widely disseminated in Europe, and was regarded as authentic by many journalists covering the Council. It cannot be doubted that it had an effect, if a temporary one, on Wyszyński’s reputation among his brother bishops, while weakening his position vis-à-vis the curialists working to establish Vatican diplomatic relations with Warsaw.22

  “A VERY DANGEROUS IDEOLOGICAL OPPONENT”

  When Vatican II began in October 1962, Karol Wojtyła was one of the youngest bishops in the world and was seated, as befit his junior status, some 500 feet from the high altar, near the door of St. Peter’s. By October 1965, when the Council’s final session opened, Wojtyła had become a significant figure in the Council’s deliberations, playing important roles in developing Vatican II’s texts on religious freedom and the vocation of the laity; he also helped draft one of the Council’s most controversial documents, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World.23 Wojtyła’s increasing prominence guaranteed that he would receive closer attention from the SB.

  SB activities during Vatican II, including the campaign against Cardinal Wyszyński, were run out of the Polish Embassy in Rome, where agents of Department I (foreign intelligence) used diplomatic assignments as cover for their activities, and the consular section (which handled passports) was another venue for intelligence work. Polish priests working in Rome had to renew their passports annually, and the conversations initiated during routine consular activities were used as an opportunity to identify potential recruits or to elicit information that could be useful to SB analysts. Blackmail, using compromising materials gathered (or fabricated) in Poland, played a large role in these recruitment efforts; if recruitment was rebuffed, the blackmail material could be used back home to damage a man’s reputation.

  SB activities extended far beyond the Polish Embassy, of course. One particularly valuable Department I agent during the Vatican II years was Ignacy Krasicki, who was in Rome under the auspices of Polish Radio. The son of an aristocratic family, he had ready access to Church circles, which he used to gather information for his controllers in Warsaw. In all of this work, Department IV agents, contacts, and collaborators worked closely with Department I; as one student of these affairs put it, “close contacts between Department I and [Department IV] constituted a routine operational practice at the stage of recruiting a new collaborator by intelligence services [and] these practices were constantly used in [assigning] further tasks and [in the] evaluations [of operations]” During the Council years and beyond, SB activities in Rome, and particularly those directed at the Roman Curia, were aimed at determining whether the Council’s aggiornamento or “updating” of the Catholic Church, of which the new Ostpolitik was a part, could be used to advance the interests of local communist parties and of Soviet foreign policy.24

  The SB’s intense interest in Catholic affairs during the Council years did not always lead to keener communist insight into certain prominent Catholic personalities, however, as the story of Karol Wojtyła’s nomination as archbishop of Kraków neatly illustrates.

  Archbishop Eugeniusz Baziak died on the night of June 14–15, 1962. On July 16, the Metropolitan Chapter of the archdiocese, a group of senior priests, elected Karol Wojtyła, the younger of Kraków’s two auxiliary bishops, as vicar capitular, that is, temporary administrator of the archdiocese, until a successor to Baziak could be agreed upon according to the procedures established in 1950—Cardinal Wyszyński would clear a name with Rome and then submit it to the government for review; the government could veto any candidate, but it could not impose its own. A deadlock quickly ensued and lasted for eighteen months. Wyszyński would secure approval from the Vatican for a nominee; the name would be sent to Zenon Kliszko, the second-ranking member and chief ideologist of the Polish Communist Party, and the Speaker of Poland’s rubber-stamp parliament, the Sejm; Kliszko would reject the name. This went on for a year and a half, through seven rounds. Then, in the fall of 1963, Stanisław Stomma, head of the miniature Catholic party permitted in the Sejm, had a talk about the Kraków situation with Kliszko, who told Stomma that “I’m waiting for Wojtyła and I’ll continue to veto names until I get him.” Stomma thanked the keeper of Polish communist ideological orthodoxy for sharing this confidence, all the while trying to keep a straight face; Wojtyła was precisely the nominee he, other activist Catholic laity, and the most engaged of Kraków’s priests wanted. Wyszyński, who had his doubts about Wojtyła, finally agreed, and the appointment was made by Pope Paul VI on December 30, 1963.

  The SB had not been inactive during the eighteen-month-long struggle to find a successor to Archbishop Baziak. Its files were full of warning flags about Wojtyła’s recent activities, which would have been shared with Kliszko: the young bishop’s skill in keeping the Kraków seminary under the control of the archdiocese; his bold gesture of defiance in saving the Silesian seminary building in Kraków from a planned communist takeover (he had threatened to stand publicly with the faculty and students if they were evicted); his ongoing association with the suspect Rhapsodic Theater; his Christmas Midnight Masses in Nowa Huta; his January 1963 sermon in Wawel Cathedral, when he praised two fighters of the anti-czarist 1863 rebellion, Adam Chmielowski (who became “Brother Albert”) and Rafał Kalinowski (who became a Carmelite monk), and reminded Poles how often they had had to “break through to freedom from underground.” There was ample reason behind the judgment in one of Wojtyła’s SB files: “Despite his seemingly conciliatory and flexible nature, Wojtyła is a very dangerous ideological opponent.”25

  In the calculus of Zenon Kliszko and other Polish communist authorities, these storm signals and that judgment may have been offset by Wojtyła’s youth, his relative inexperience in political hardball, and his “theoretical” nature (after all, the man wrote poetry and taught philosophy)—all of which may have suggested that he could be manipulated into a compromising (or at least helpful) position in the government’s relentless game of divide-and-conquer with Cardinal Wyszyński. Wyszyński may also have feared this, not because of any doubts about Wojtyła’s loyalties but because of concerns about his shrewdness. Asked in Rome in 1964 about the new archbishop of Kraków, the Primate rather brusquely dismissed the query with a single sentence: “He is a poet.” That, in turn, suggests that Wyszyński may have been under at least some pressure from the Holy See to resolve the long-festering question of the Kraków succession (which from a canonical point of view had dragged on since 1951) by accepting Wojtyła, who had made a strong impression at Vatican II.

  Then there is the possibility that the men at the higher altitudes of Polish communism actually believed their own ideology, according to which ideas were ephemera, the exhaust fumes of economic processes, and intellectuals were by definition incapable of coping with the “re
al world.” True, there was that side of Wojtyła referred to in his 1960 SB profile—he could be a skillful administrator and tenacious defender of the Church when circumstances demanded. Yet, at bottom, he was a man of ideas, not a man of power as they understood power. Kliszko and the comrades may even have believed that Wojtyła’s intellectual interests and contacts could be turned to their advantage, by helping keep the always restive Kraków Catholic intelligentsia under control. Communist party and SB rivalries may also have played a role, if a minor one, in Kliszko’s decision: yes, the SB was worried that Wojtyła was “a very dangerous ideological opponent,” but the party chieftains would manage him nonetheless.

  While the question can never be resolved with certainty, it seems most likely that the communist leadership’s determination to play divide-and-conquer against the main ideological opponent, Cardinal Wyszyński, trumped the concerns the SB raised about Karol Wojtyła. Kliszko and the comrades seem to have been convinced that Wojtyła could be manipulated; fissures would open up in the solid front the Catholic Church in Poland had long maintained; those fissures could then be exploited in the war against the Church. As Father Andrzej Bardecki, an old friend of Wojtyła’s, put it years later, it was a perfect example of how “the Holy Spirit can work his will by darkening as well as enlightening people’s minds.”26