If people are being degraded because they are believers and profess Christ, and attend church; if people are barred from academic promotion, that is a scandal! Because science must serve the truth! And we have a right to demand, from this place, that the Constitution be observed! That the bill of human rights, signed by the government of our country, be respected! … [This] hardworking, generous society … [must not be] handicapped because it does not embrace atheism, because human dignity and conscience do not allow it.59
And in his last appearance at Piekary śląskie as archbishop of Kraków, he reminded his listeners, many of whom were compelled to work sometimes on Sundays, that God had mandated the Sabbath for a reason: so that men and women could rest and rediscover within themselves the image of the God who had rested on the seventh day. To lose touch with that image was to waste the gift of life: “[So] let us ask—are there not too many lives being wasted in our Homeland? Let us ask—are the new generations of Poles not threatened … by the feeling of the absurdity of life and work?”60
The Piekary śląskie pilgrimage was a particular aggravation for the regime during the 1970s, Silesia being party chieftain Gierek’s political base. Surveillance of the pilgrimage by local communist officials and the SB was extensive; buses bringing pilgrims had their license plates photographed; work schedules were arranged by coal mine and steel mill managers to drive down the numbers of pilgrims. And still they came by the tens and hundreds of thousands, spilling down the wooded hillside below the Marian shrine, as far as the eye could see.61 They knew they were performing an act of resistance; but it was resistance of a different sort. Or, as one coal miner answered, when asked why he had come to a similar event a few years later, “To praise the Mother of God and to spite those bastards.”
The Kraków Corpus Christi procession and the pilgrimage to Piekary śląskie were similar in that they were struggles for space: space for the Church to be itself, space for Poland to be itself, in a country where the regime tried to occupy all public space. The battle for the church in Nowa Huta was another struggle for space, at once both similar and in certain respects different. Nowa Huta was deliberately created to be a godless space; it was located hard by Kraków in order to punish the recalcitrant Cracovians for returning the highest anticommunist vote in the fake “people’s referendum” in 1946 and in the equally bogus 1947 parliamentary “election.” Nowa Huta was also a sociological experiment in rapid communist-style urbanization; thousands of men and women from rural areas were enticed to the new city by the promise of higher-paying industrial jobs and better recreational facilities; failures on both these fronts, as well as all the tensions attendant on people being uprooted from a settled way of rural life and transplanted into a completely different social environment, made for innumerable social problems. Then there was the public imagery of the place, for Nowa Huta was, in part, an attempt to re-create Poland’s national mythology. The nineteenth-century rebuilding of Kraków’s magnificent Old Town embodied the romantic myth of Polish nationalism in stone and brick and decoration at a time when “Poland” did not exist. The functionalist design of Nowa Huta, with its vast apartment blocks and its heavy industry, was intended by at least some communist planners to kill the Polish national myth found in the living stones of the Kraków Old Town and to supplant it with the new mythology of the workers’ state.62 No one was fooled, least of all the workers. But a response was required.
Cardinal Wojtyła gave that response, by winning the battle for a church in Nowa Huta and building a striking modern building, one that lifted rather than depressed the spirits of the people who would use it. As his longtime secretary, Stanisław Dziwisz, would write, decades after the battle had been won, “The Nowa Huta experience permanently shaped Wojtyła’s pastoral program as an archbishop, just as it permanently shaped [his] personality as an unyielding defender of human rights, of the rights of freedom of conscience and religion.” Wojtyła’s battle “on behalf of the dignity of the human person began right there at Nowa Huta.”63
There was a notable symmetry, or perhaps better, congruence, between Wojtyła’s increasingly vocal human rights advocacy—with its evocations of Poland’s Christian roots and contemporary identity—and the evolving mood in the country, especially among dissidents. The 1970 Gdańsk massacres were a historic turning point in the four decades of Polish communism. As the 1970s unfolded, the old symbols of national self-consciousness that had kept the idea of “Poland” alive after the final 1795 partition were rediscovered and reappropriated: Poland began to reimagine itself in categories pioneered by the nineteenth-century Polish Romantics: as a suffering community, its suffering given meaning by a profound religious conviction that such suffering had a purpose. Here, as one keen observer put it, was a nationalism with a universal horizon.64 Nurtured by the country’s real leaders, such as Cardinal Karol Wojtyła (who was himself steeped in the literary traditions of nineteenth-century Polish Romanticism), this recovery of the past would eventually prove to be a potent instrument for creating a different future.
“THE ONLY REAL IDEOLOGICAL THREAT IN POLAND”
By the mid-1970s, the communist government of Poland and its secret police apparatus had come to loathe and fear Cardinal Wojtyła more than they feared Cardinal Wyszyński. It was not as if the Primate had lost his toughness; it was just that, after thirty years of confrontation, both sides knew the steps in this particular dance. Moreover, the communists understood, as did Archbishop Casaroli, that Wyszyński was a man with a keen sense of where the edge of the abyss was located and a settled determination not to go beyond that edge. It was different with Wojtyła. He had “swindled” the party, as the prison warden in Gdańsk had complained a decade before. He had refused to be drawn into divide-and-conquer politics, remaining steadfastly loyal to Wyszyński. And yet this poet, this philosopher, this mystic had become a man of action, deploying words as weapons in a way that struck at communism on its own home ground—its claims to be the true humanism, the true bearer of the truth about man, and the true champion of human freedom. Worse yet, Wojtyła had become a point of contact between various clusters of dissidents, both Catholic and secular. If Wyszyński were to die, who knew what Wojtyła would do, were he to become Primate of Poland.
SB reports sent to KGB headquarters in Moscow suggest that Polish prosecutors, on three occasions in 1973–74, had considered arresting Wojtyła and charging him with sedition under article 194 of the criminal code.65 But 1973 and 1974 were not 1953, and Gierek did not dare do what his predecessors had done to Stefan Wyszyński. So the surveillance on Wojtyła and the attempts to suborn his associates were increased, and so was the threat of brutality. On one occasion, Father Andrzej Bardecki was beaten senseless by thugs, either SB or SB-inspired, while walking home from a Tygodnik Powszechny editors’ meeting with Wojtyła; the cardinal came to see the priest in the hospital the next day and said, “You replaced me; you were beaten instead of me.”66
Meanwhile, while the authorities ground their teeth in frustration over their inability to silence the man party ideologist Andrzej Werblan had declared “the only real ideological threat in Poland,” the cardinal and his friends adopted their own methods of frustrating the comrades ever more.67 One such method involved the archiepiscopal car, an Opel Admiral driven by the cardinal’s chauffeur, Józef Mucha, a legendary character in Cracovian Catholic circles. One July, as they were leaving Warsaw for the drive into the countryside where the archbishop’s annual kayaking trip would begin, Mr. Mucha (as he was always called) pointed out to the cardinal and his friend, Stanisław Rybicki, a veteran member of Wojtyła’s Środowisko, the spies on the side of the road, keeping the car under surveillance. Mr. Mucha then looked into his rearview mirror, where he noticed a car following them. As Dr. Rybicki recalled with relish years later, Mr. Mucha “smiled with ironic tolerance” as he sped up the far more powerful Opel and watched the SB tail getting smaller and smaller in the mirror. On entering the forest that was their destination, t
hey slowed down, just missing a gigantic elk that had sauntered across a dirt road, and finally eluded the SB.
On what turned out to be Wojtyła’s last kayaking-and-camping excursion, in 1978, a different tactic was adopted, reflecting the kayakers’ experience with the local police and militia the year before. Mr. Mucha drove the cardinal to a prearranged, isolated place, off the main roads but near the initial campground; then, while the SB tails labored to catch up with the Opel, Wojtyła’s modest luggage and the cardinal were spirited into Stanisław Rybicki’s car for transport to Środowisko’s gathering point. Mr. Mucha then turned around, reentered the main highway, drove back toward Kraków, and watched, perhaps with more “ironic tolerance,” as the tails sailed by on the other side of the road, still trying to catch up.68
It was not all camping trips and shaking SB surveillance, of course. In April 1974, Cardinal Wojtyła defied the exceptionally hard-line communist leadership of Czechoslovakia by attending the funeral of Cardinal Stefan Trochta, who had died of a heart attack after a severe interrogation by the Czechoslovak secret police. The authorities refused permission for Wojtyła and the other senior churchmen present to concelebrate the funeral Mass in Litoměřice. At the end of the service, Wojtyła walked from his pew and stood beside the casket of the late cardinal, who had survived the Theresienstadt concentration camp only to be murdered by communists, and began his commendation of Trochta (which the communists had also forbidden) with the words, “I am not worthy to celebrate the Mass on the steps of the altar where the martyr stood.”69
Ten months after Cardinal Trochta’s funeral, the KGB hosted yet another all-Soviet-bloc conference of intelligence services to coordinate anti-Vatican activities; during the conference, the Poles, the Czechoslovaks, and the Hungarians all reported “significant agent positions in the Vatican.” The Mitrokhin records do not note a similar claim by the KGB, despite a now eight-year-old effort to cultivate senior Vatican officials, including Archbishop Casaroli and Archbishop Poggi, the two key figures in the Vatican Ostpolitik toward Poland. The same KGB active measures campaign included placing agents masquerading as Lithuanian seminarians (ANTANAS and VIDMANATAS) at Rome’s Gregorian University and using ADAMANT (Russian Orthodox Metropolitan Nikodim) as an ecumenical disinformation conduit.70 Andrew and Mitrokhin note that none of this seems to have had “a discernible effect on Vatican policy”; it is also true, if surprisingly, that none of it seems to have raised questions or serious concerns in the minds of Casaroli and his key aides about increased Soviet-bloc penetration of the Holy See at the height of the Vatican Ostpolitik.71
The Mitrokhin records do not indicate, but it is not difficult to surmise, that during the exchange of information at this conference, the Hungarians shared with their comrades their judgment that Wojtyła would be an especially dangerous man as pope.72 Whether or not that possibility had occurred to the SB, Department IV was keeping a close watch on Cardinal Wojtyła, with a 1976 analysis emphasizing his intellectual ability and his stress on the difference between society and the state.73 During this period, however, the SB evidently did not discover Wojtyła’s clandestine ordinations of priests for Czechoslovakia, which were carried out in the chapel of the archbishop’s residence, after the candidate had been smuggled across the Czechoslovak-Polish border and the proper authorization had been received from the candidate’s superior; the clandestine courier (who, in one authorization system, had half a torn card sent by a legitimate religious superior) did not travel to Kraków with the ordinand (who had the matching, other half of the torn card).
In 1976, the SB undertook further active measures to “distintegrate” the Kraków intelligentsia and Wojtyła’s work with them, by trying to exacerbate and exaggerate divisions within various groups (intellectuals being notoriously fractious), by mounting disinformation campaigns about alleged liturgical aberrations, and by trying to foment jealousies between Kraków’s Catholic theologians and philosophers and their colleagues at the Catholic University of Lublin.74 Wojtyła, undeterred, intensified his contacts with the Catholic dissident movement, including such important new figures as Bohdan Cywiński, and then used those contacts to initiate conversations with secular dissident intellectuals such as Jacek Kuroń—gestures particularly appreciated as the regime stepped up its pressure on new dissident groups such as KOR, the Workers’ Defense Committee.75 In the wake of the 1976 strikes at the Ursus tractor factory (a showpiece of Gierek’s new economic model and a colossal failure) and in Radom, Wojtyła supported a strike fund to assist workers.
The struggle for “space” continued, and even as the Ark Church began to rise in Nowa Huta, there were losses: Father Józef Kurzeja, who was working to build a second Nowa Huta church in the Miestrzejowice neighborhood of the city and was constantly harassed and interrogated by the SB, died of a heart attack at age forty on August 15, 1976—the date in 1941 on which the remains of Maximilian Kolbe had been cremated at Auschwitz. Andrzej Paczkowski sums up the Polish Church-state situation in the mid-and late 1970s in these terms:
Relations with the Church assumed increasing importance for the Gierek leadership as economic problems worsened. Nevertheless, extremely strong barriers of both an ideological and political kind caused official policy toward the [Church] to be characterized by about-faces and duplicity. The communists, too, had their non possumus: fulfilling the demands of the Church and the recommendations set out in bishops’ homilies or official documents would have required a fundamental change in the entire system. Thus, while trying to preserve appearances … the party leadership did not actually budge an inch: it took no steps toward granting the Church legal status; the return of religious instruction to the schools was out of the question; atheistic propaganda continued; publishing was strictly controlled and circulation restricted; and building permits were issued grudgingly and sparingly.76
Nor would things change significantly after what was regarded as another triumph for the Ostpolitik: the meeting at the Vatican on December 1, 1977, between Edward Gierek and Pope Paul VI. In the months after that audience, the Casaroli team worked hard to persuade the ailing Pope that some form of diplomatic relations should be concluded with the Polish communist government: perhaps first, an apostolic delegate accredited to the Polish hierarchy but resident in the old Vatican Embassy in Warsaw; then a full-fledged exchange of diplomatic representation at the ambassadorial level—which would, among other things, have cut Cardinal Wyszyński out of the serious conversations, despite Paul VI’s assurances to the contrary. In March 1978, five months before Paul died, the Primate sent a trusted aide, Bishop Bronisław Dąbrowski, to Rome to try to slow the process down. The Pope asked the Polish prelate whether the Primate didn’t understand that the Holy See had the Polish Church’s best interests in mind; Dąbrowski asked for time. The Pope agreed to let the situation develop a little further, although it seems clear that Archbishop Casaroli was eager to close the deal and even had a candidate chosen for the post in Warsaw—Archbishop Poggi, whose appointment Wyszyński would likely have regarded as making a bad deal even worse.77 According to Stanisław Dziwisz, there was no disagreement between the Primate and the archbishop of Kraków on the inadvisability of a Vatican Embassy in Warsaw at this juncture.78
While this drama was being played out in Rome, Cardinal Karol Wojtyła was looking forward to his annual kayaking expedition with his Środowisko friends and their families. It was one of the curiosities of the SB’s obsession with Wojtyła that it never seems to have occurred to Department IV or Independent Group D to try to suborn the cardinal’s lay friends. Somewhat in the manner of some pre–Vatican II clergy, the Polish secret police seemed to think that the only serious people in the Catholic Church were priests, bishops, monks, nuns, and other religious professionals. That a cardinal could be having serious conversations with laypeople was simply not within the realm of the ferrets’ imagination.79 In yet another irony, the communists were infinitely more clericalist in their obsession with ordained churchmen tha
n was the dangerous clergyman whose work they were so eager to distintegrate.
That the SB and the Polish communist leadership regarded Karol Wojtyła as an enemy, however, was obvious from the vast resources expended on watching him and attempting to impede his pastoral activity. They would shortly discover just how great a threat the Defensor Civitatis could be.
CHAPTER THREE
Confrontation
September 28–29, 1978 Pope John Paul I dies during the night.
October 16, 1978 Cardinal Karol Wojtyła is elected pope and takes the name John Paul II.
October 17, 1978 Warsaw KGB rezident sends report on Wojtyła to Moscow Center.
October 22, 1978 Pope John Paul II solemnly inaugurates his ministry as Bishop of Rome and challenges the world to “open the doors for Christ!”
November 5, 1978 John Paul II visits Assisi and defends “Church of Silence.”
November 16, 1978 First Stasi analysis of the impact of John Paul II’s election.
November 20, 1978 Pope John Paul II meets with Cardinal Iosyf Slipyi, major-archbishop of the illegal Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine.
November 22, 1978 Lithuanian Catholic Committee for the Defense of Believers’ Rights is formed.
January 24, 1979 Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko meets with John Paul II at the Vatican.
January 26–February 1, 1979 John Paul II, in Mexico, challenges “anthropological error” of Marxism.
March 26, 1979 Stasi analysis of Vatican operations under JohnPaul II.
April 3, 1979 Colonel Zenon Płatek, head of SB Department IV, goes to Vienna in aid of Operation TRIANGOLO.
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