The End and the Beginning

by George Weigel

  The second event, which would have a marked bearing on the future of the struggle between Catholicism and communism, was the Prague Spring of 1968, crushed by Soviet tanks in August of that year. This act of brutal repression caused some in the employ of communist governments, appalled at the violence, to reconsider. It was after the tanks rolled into Prague that Vasili Mitrokhin began copying a vast archive of KGB records he would eventually exfiltrate to the West.41 The assault on the Prague Spring was also a crucial factor in persuading a Polish army officer, Ryszard Kukliński, to find contacts with U.S. intelligence through which he could inform the Western alliance of future Warsaw Pact military plans.42 Furthermore, the liquidation of the Prague Spring was a crisis for intellectuals chafing under Marxism, for it seemed to underscore the impossibility of any “reform communism.” Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski began a revisionist account of the history of Marxism, eventually going into exile and concluding in his masterwork, Main Currents of Marxism, that Stalinism was Marxism’s natural outgrowth, not the aberration described by Nikita Khrushchev at the twentieth Soviet Communist Party Congress.43 Bronisław Geremek, a medieval historian of Jewish heritage who had received a Catholic elementary education in postwar Poland, resigned from the communist party and began seeking contacts among other dissident intellectuals.

  The events in Czechoslovakia were mirrored, if in a less dramatic way, by considerable unrest in Poland in 1968. The excessive response to that unrest—which included thousands of detentions and arrests and large-scale student expulsions from the universities, which were in an uproar throughout the country—reflected a rising level of paranoia in the communist leadership throughout central and eastern Europe. It was relatively easy for Wladysław Gomułka and others to blame Geremek’s dissent on “Zionism” and to try to deflect attention from the country’s real problems by an official campaign of anti-Semitic agitation. But it was a clear sign that the longtime Polish party leader was losing his grip when he told the Politburo that Leszek Kołakowski, a thoroughly secular philosopher, was “one of Wyszyński’s clients.”44

  That was not plausible. But something in fact had shifted in the Polish Catholic hierarchy’s address to these waves of unrest and repression, perhaps under the influence of the newly created Cardinal Wojtyła. The Church had long taken up the cudgels to defend its people and its priests. Now, the Polish bishops defended the human rights of those intellectuals and artists who had not only been irreligious, but who had previously shown antagonism toward the Church.

  The most extreme form of paranoia during the upheavals of 1968, however, came from the KGB. Yuri Andropov, still bearing the psychological scars of having been surprised by the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, had become KGB chairman in 1967—just in time for the surprise of the Prague Spring. The juxtaposition was evidently too much and reinforced Andropov’s long-standing fear of anti-Soviet conspiracies emanating from the Vatican, which he was convinced was bent on the ideological subversion of the USSR (which was, of course, true, if not in the sense that Andropov understood “ideological subversion”). Thus, at precisely the time that the Casaroli Ostpolitik was entering its most energetic phase, the KGB was working on an assumption that would have boggled the curial diplomat’s mind, had he known about it: Andropov and his comrades were persuaded that the Vatican Secretariat of State had worked out a master plan to splinter the unity of the Soviet Union and that the plan was under the direction of Paul VI’s closest aide, Archbishop Giovanni Benelli.45

  TO “DISINTEGRATE” THE CHURCH

  Karol Wojtyła came into his own as a bishop and a human rights advocate in the late sixties. In the thirteen years left to him in Kraków after the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council, he sustained a tremendous pace of pastoral activity that marked him as one of the most creative, dynamic bishops in the post-conciliar Catholic Church. At the same time, his work at several international Synods of Bishops and in the Roman curial congregations to which he was assigned as a cardinal, and his occasional forays into international intellectual life, drew the respect of senior churchmen around the world. Those who came to visit him in Kraków could see for themselves that the Defensor Civitatis was not only a happy warrior, but an effective one.46

  His effectiveness was all the more impressive because of the complex political and ecclesiastical circumstances he faced. The political situation was, in one sense, simple—“we” and “they,” “the society” and “the power,” all the time. In other respects, however, the politics were far more complex than they had been in the classic period of Polish Catholic anticommunist resistance, from 1953 to 1956.

  In December 1970, protests broke out in Gdańsk, quickly spread throughout Poland’s Baltic region, and then spilled over into much of the country, leading to dozens of deaths, a thousand injuries, thousands of detentions (often followed by harsh beatings)—and the resignation of Władysław Gomułka as head of the Polish Communist Party, fourteen years after he had taken power in response to the unrest of 1956. Gomułka’s replacement was Edward Gierek, whose political base was industrial Silesia and who could, it was hoped, appeal to workers who remained on a high boil of unrest after Gomułka’s demise. In a dramatic move, Gierek went to Gdańsk and, after listening to a long litany of complaints about incompetence, brutality, harsh working conditions, poor wages, and food prices, challenged the shipyard workers to be part of the solution: “So what do you say? Will you help?” He got the answer he wanted, if unenthusiastically: “We will help!” As Andrzej Paczkowski puts it, “That fragment of dialogue”—that simulacrum of a democratic conversation—was “seized on and repeated endlessly by official propaganda,” becoming the “first slogan” of the Polish 1970s. The fundamental question about the system, which was raised by one of the workers who met with Gierek, remained unanswered: “Why must the workers pay for every change with their blood?”47

  The “change” was a parody of real economics: “consumer socialism,” to be paid for by extensive foreign borrowing. Some aspects of everyday life improved, at least temporarily; but the gap between life behind the Iron Curtain and life in western Europe became more and more of a chasm, a fact known by every Pole with access to a radio. Yet the regime persisted in mounting a crude “propaganda of success,” trumpeting its accomplishments in providing a variety of cultural and sporting events even as the first economic accomplishments of the “change” soon dissipated and the promised cornucopia of consumer goods never materialized. The propaganda barrage and the regime’s relentless boasting simply served to alienate ordinary Poles even more and to depress the public spirit.48

  This unhappy situation helped create the political and economic context for Wojtyła’s work as archbishop; other factors added to the complexity of his situation. There were new dynamics in Polish dissent: the first probes at rapprochement were under way between restive workers (almost universally Catholic) and dissident intellectuals (often secular, and sometimes anticlerical). Ironically, the regime, while using the SB to penetrate and suborn these efforts, helped make this new, coalitional opposition activism possible, as the government’s need to service Poland’s foreign debt provided a measure of protection for the new dissidents against too public a display of regime brutality.49 Another complicating factor for Wojtyła was the Vatican Ostpolitik, which was becoming ever more energetic even as Cardinal Wyszyński’s skepticism about it increased. Wojtyła was devoted to Paul VI, who was ultimately responsible for the Ostpolitik; yet he had to maintain a common front with Wyszyński against the government, and his own experience led him to the conviction that a vocal, public defense of the human rights of all was a moral imperative, whatever Archbishop Casaroli and his negotiators were doing with Poland’s communist leaders behind closed doors. And in the midst of these tensions and complexities, he had the tremendous task of leading the implementation of Vatican II in his archdiocese.

  Whatever other superficial changes there were in the Gierek years, one fact of Polish ecclesiastical and polit
ical life did not change: the regime’s war against the Church took on a new, harder edge in November 1973 with the formation of “Independent Group D” of Department IV of the SB. Led by a veteran SB anti-Church operative, Konrad Straszewski, Group D was charged with “disintegrating” Catholic activities through a coordinated assault on the integrity of the Church.50 Working with four other officers, Straszewski led a program whose mission statement identified four objectives: to discover and impede the “inimical ideologies” as well as the “social activities” of the Catholic Church, focusing on the diocesan clergy, the religious orders, and lay organizations; to identify and combat those Catholic priests and bishops deemed especially dangerous; to uncover and sever the Polish Church’s contacts with other Catholic entities and organizations outside of Poland; and to enhance the loyalty of Polish Catholic clergy and laity to the Polish People’s Republic.51 Thus all of Wojtyła’s initiatives as archbishop came under close scrutiny by the SB, which did everything in its power to undermine and “distintegrate” his plans using collaborators in the Kraków archdiocesan curia. They were unsuccessful, but it was not for lack of effort.

  Soviet-bloc intelligence operatives were also hard at work in Rome. In the years immediately following Vatican II, the KGB received reports from sources in the office of Paul VI’s secretary of state, the French cardinal Jean Villot, and in the Holy See’s “foreign ministry,” the Council for the Public Affairs of the Church—including virtually verbatim reports on Pope Paul’s conversations with West German chancellor Willy Brandt and South Vietnamese foreign minister Tran Van Lam, and an outline of the Pope’s 1970 discussion with U.S. president Richard M. Nixon. Electronic eavesdropping devices were placed in the apartment of the Ostpolitik’s principal architect, Archbishop Casaroli, while Vatican counterintelligence measures ranged from primitive to nonexistent: stenographic transcripts of delicate negotiating sessions were archived in the Vatican Secretariat of State with evidently little concern that copies might find their way to Warsaw, East Berlin, and Moscow.52

  Given all of this, and the new intensity of the Polish communist regime’s assault on the Church through the SB, there is no little irony in the fact that, in precisely this same period, the architects of the Vatican Ostpolitik achieved what seemed to them a major breakthrough: in 1974, “permanent working contacts” were established between the Holy See and the Polish communist government, with Kazimierz Szablewski, who worked out of the Polish Embassy in Rome, and Archbishop Luigi Poggi as cochairmen.

  The Vatican’s diplomats thought this arrangement a useful first step toward establishing formal diplomatic relations between the Holy See and the Polish People’s Republic. From the SB’s point of view, however, the permanent working contacts group created new opportunities to undercut Cardinal Wyszyński’s position, another strategic goal of the “disintegration” campaign. Thus Archbishop Poggi’s Polish interlocutors would stress to their Vatican contacts, and particularly to Archbishop Casaroli, their difficulties with the Polish primate. Meanwhile, the SB used its operational contacts in Rome, which included both Department I (foreign intelligence) and Department IV (anti-Church activity) collaborators and informants, to uncover the diplomatic strategies and tactics of the Poggi team; the information gathered was passed along to Szablewski and the other Polish members of the contacts group. Concurrently, the Szablewski/Poggi meetings and the informal contacts that necessarily accompanied the formal sessions created occasions for Department IV to conduct disinformation campaigns against Polish bishops it particularly wished to “disintegrate”—actions approved, it should be noted, by the Central Committee of the Polish Communist Party. Konrad Straszewski’s Independent Group D also had its piece of the Roman SB action, and was responsible for “distintegration” activities against the Polish service of Vatican Radio; in these operations, Group D utilized a number of secret collaborators among Rome-based members of religious orders, including Jesuits and Franciscans. In aid of these and other efforts, Group D maintained both official and informal contacts with the KGB.53

  AN ARCHBISHOP IN FULL

  The years of the SB’s relentless effort to “distintegrate” the Catholic Church in Poland were a period of growing charisma for Cardinal Karol Wojtyła—the years in which he became a magnetic public personality. His pastoral plans required a shrewd sense of how to maneuver around regime-imposed restrictions on the Church. If Catholic youth groups were banned, then the Church would utilize other settings—altar boys’ picnics, for example—as moments for catechesis and Christian formation as well as recreation. If the “Oasis” summer camps of the Light and Life renewal movement were harassed by the local police and the SB, the cardinal-archbishop would provide what protection he could by arranging to visit the camps and the families who were fined for letting Light and Life use their property as campsites.54 These strategems by the Defensor Civitatis were undoubtedly an aggravation to the communist regime. What truly frightened them, however, was Wojtyła’s emergence as a dynamic public speaker, who increasingly used great religious events as moments to challenge the regime on human rights.

  Kraków’s annual Corpus Christi procession, a springtime ritual, was one such event. The communists, determined to eradicate such public displays of Catholic piety, first forbade the procession from leaving Wawel hill; the procession could circumnavigate the courtyard of the Royal Castle, period. After years of agitation, Wojtyła won permission for the Corpus Christi procession to leave Wawel hill and enter Kraków’s Old Town, although along a route much shorter than had been customary in the 1930s. At the four altar stations set up along the path of the truncated procession, Karol Wojtyła came into his own as a dramatic public speaker, as year by year he ratcheted up the pressure on the regime before crowds that gathered in the hundreds of thousands. In 1971, the cardinal-archbishop rejected the communist notion that Polish Catholicism and Polish patriotism could be separated: “We are the citizens of our country, the citizens of our city, but we are also a people of God which has its own Christian sensibility.… We will continue to demand our rights.… We will demand!” Three years later, the cardinal insisted before the vast crowds that “We are not from the periphery!” In 1975, Wojtyła, whose sense of humor inclined toward the ironic, indulged in a rare moment of public sarcasm; noting that the procession was still forbidden from entering Kraków’s great market square, he caustically commented, “I am inclined to think that such actions do not favor the processes of normalization between the Church and the state”—which could also have been taken, for those with ears to hear, as a subtle reminder to the Vatican champions of the Ostpolitik that “permanent working contacts” were not satisfactory substitutes for basic human rights such as religious freedom and freedom of association and assembly.55

  The great Marian shrine at Piekary śląskie, in the heart of Silesia, was another venue at which Cardinal Wojtyła displayed his new skills as a public human rights advocate. Every May, a pilgrimage of Silesian workers, principally miners, came to the shrine in the hundreds of thousands—grandfathers, fathers, and sons, the elders wearing the colorful uniforms that distinguished their ranks in the miners’ fraternity. Karol Wojtyła had first learned about manly piety from his father; the Captain’s lessons were embodied in the Silesian miners who walked across fields and down roads to pay homage to the Mother of God. Preaching in front of these men, their sons, and their teenage grandsons, Karol Wojtyła became an ever more assertive proponent of their dignity, as human beings and as men who earned their living by the sweat of their brows. In 1973, the cardinal challenged the government and its claims to represent the interests of workers on the always tense question of building permits for churches: “We have a right to have more space in this homeland where we are the majority! We have a right to have more roofs over our heads when we pray! We have the right … to more room for teaching religion, for catechesis in the parishes! And this right is not aimed against anybody; it is for the good of all! It is for peace!”56 In 1974, he blasted
the “tremendous threat to family life” represented by the regime’s pro-abortion policies: “We are afraid that it may so happen in our country that more lives are terminated than propagated. That would lead to incalculable and disastrous consequences.”57

  In 1975, he took on the regime’s promotion of atheism, which included both propaganda and the manipulation of family life and workers’ schedules:

  The Church of the People of God in Silesia has a … specific religious profile … one which is the union of prayer and work.… When we are in Piekary, we come to realize that one cannot fight with religion in the name of the working class, or in the name of its interests and needs! One cannot undertake a program of propagating atheism in the name of the truth of the Silesian coal miner.… It is necessary to keep demanding … that the principle of religious freedom be respected; that parents should have complete liberty, without any outside pressure, to raise their children and their youth in the truths of the faith that have accomplished so much here … that no one should suffer because of their religious beliefs, that you not be threatened with dismissal from work, regardless of whether you are a miner or a manager … that you not be forced to work on Sundays.58

  In 1976, he chose two key themes of Vatican II, defending the apostolic vocations of laypeople in the name of a Christian humanism more truly humane than the ersatz humanism the regime propagated in the name of workers: