The End and the Beginning

by George Weigel

  Be not afraid to welcome Christ and accept his power. Help the Pope and all who wish to serve Christ and with Christ’s power to serve the human person and the whole of mankind.

  Be not afraid. Open the doors for Christ. To his saving power open the boundaries of states, economic and political systems, the vast fields of culture, civilization, and development.

  Be not afraid. Christ knows “what is in man.” He alone knows it.…

  I ask you … I beg you, let Christ speak to [you]. He alone has words of life, yes, of eternal life.14

  The architects of the Vatican Ostpolitik had had some experience of the new pope and knew him for a “great personality” who was well respected throughout the leadership of the world Church.15 Perhaps they imagined that this pope could be managed, as the Curia had managed popes for centuries. Yet John Paul immediately made clear that he was prepared to make symbolic gestures that were bound to aggravate communist sensibilities (such as sending his cardinal’s zuchetto to Lithuania) and to meet with prominent Catholic personalities whom Moscow considered untouchables (such as Ukrainian Greek Catholic major-archbishop Iosyf Slipyi, whose persecuted Church the Soviet Union did not recognize legally). But the changes being rung were not just symbolic: on several occasions within his first weeks in office, John Paul II went out of his way publicly to defend religious freedom as the first of human rights.16

  The KGB did not waste time in taking countermeasures. Shortly after John Paul II’s election, several “illegals” were sent into Poland, among them Oleg Petrovich Buryen (DEREVLYOV), whose cover was to act as the representative of a Canadian publishing company interested in Polish missionaries in Asia. DEREVLYOV was told that, were he to be arrested by the police or the SB, he was to hold fast to his cover; in an emergency, however, he could contact Colonel Jan Slovikowski of the SB, who seems to have helped previous KGB agents who had gotten into difficulties in Poland. Buryen/DEREVLYOV worked hard to build a relationship with Father Józef Tischner, a philosopher who was close to John Paul II.17

  The Polish SB already had a considerable intelligence asset in Rome: Edward Kotowski, or PIETRO, an able and intelligent art historian who for the past three years had been given Italian language training and instructed to learn everything he could about the Vatican and its ways. Deployed to Rome from Warsaw in October 1978, PIETRO worked undercover as a diplomat at the Polish Embassy in Rome, cultivating contacts—as diplomats would—with Vatican counterparts. Decades later, Kotowski told the Polish historian Andrzej Grajewski that the “majority” of Polish diplomats in Rome in the first five years of John Paul’s pontificate were in fact working for the SB; the primary task of these SB assets was to try to influence the work of the Poggi/Szablewski working contacts group. Other SB assets in Rome in the first years of the pontificate included employees of LOT Polish Airlines and the Polish state travel agency, Orbis; members of the Polish trade mission to Italy; representatives of Polish companies involved in international business; and various “illegals,” who communicated directly with SB headquarters in Warsaw, rather than with Kotowski. It was an extensive network, on which considerable resources were being expended; it would grow; and the damage it attempted would become more severe over time.18

  On the analytic side, an early Soviet-bloc interpretation of the likely implications of John Paul II’s election was done by the KGB and shared with allied intelligence services. The translation of the document by the East German Stasi, which is dated November 16, 1978, is marked STRENG GEHEIM [strictly confidential]; its distribution list was limited to Stasi spymaster Markus Wolf and two others. From internal evidence in the document, the principal sources for the analysis seem to be the Polish secret police and the Polish internal security services. The biographical details are accurate and reflect previous SB analyses of Wojtyła’s abilities and character. The analysts miss John Paul II’s morally driven view of politics and underestimate his political savvy; their claim that he likes and seeks applause is laughable. Interestingly, however, the Polish sources do report accurately on the roots of Wojtyła’s critique of communism in his major (and very difficult) philosophical masterwork, Person and Act: that totalitarianism’s denial of basic human rights is ultimately an antihuman-ism because it diminishes personal moral responsibility. Wojtyła’s most recent contacts with dissidents such as Jacek Kuron are duly noted, as is the enthusiasm with which his election was received by “anti-socialist groups in Poland.” As for the future of the Ostpolitik, “opinions are widely divided,” with some expecting a continuation of the Casaroli approach; the “predominant opinion,” though, was that John Paul II’s “hands-on experience” of life under communism would lead to a “tough Vatican position” in matters of human rights.19

  The architects of the Vatican Ostpolitik may not have been overly concerned about efforts by Soviet-bloc security services to penetrate the Vatican. It seems that John Paul II was, however. In any case, he was taking no chances and changed the papal routine accordingly. Unlike previous popes, he did not dictate memoranda of conversations with prominent personalities or political figures (for the duration of his pontificate, such memoranda would have been filed for ready reference in the Vatican’s Secretariat of State, whose counterintelligence capabilities were not overly developed). Rather, in the evening, John Paul II would go over each day’s meetings and conversations, both those on the official schedule and those of an unofficial or private nature, with his longtime secretary, Stanisław Dziwisz. Dziwisz recorded all of this in a series of diaries that were kept in the papal apartment, where those who had no business seeing the thematic record of these papal conversations would have no possibility of access to them.20

  Thus there was no aide-mémoire of the Pope’s conversation on January 24, 1979, with Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko, who came to Rome with an eye to sizing up the new menace for himself. He informed the Pope and Archbishop Casaroli that “rumors” of religious persecution or discrimination against believers in the USSR were the result of Western disinformation campaigns. John Paul, for his part, later described the meeting to a group of reporters as the “most tiresome” he had had thus far as pontiff.21

  Two days after Andrei Gromyko had reinforced his reputation as a formidable liar, John Paul II landed in Mexico to address the decennial conference of CELAM [the Council of Latin American Bishops’ Conferences]. The first of John Paul’s papal pilgrimages outside Italy had several strategic goals. The Pope wanted to support the bishops of Latin America in their work to build authentic societies of freedom. He was also determined to urge them to do so without embracing the “Marxist analysis” that underwrote many of the new theologies of liberation. Thus his critique of Marxism’s “anthropological error” in his address to the bishops on January 28 added another item to the KGB’s list of grievances against the Pope, for the liberation movements prominent in several Latin American countries, especially in Central America, were crucial to Moscow Center’s strategy of winning the Cold War in the Third World.22

  In addition to his concerns about the future of the Church in the most Catholic continent on the planet, John Paul II presciently saw the links between a Mexican pilgrimage and Poland. Despite the intense Catholic piety of its people, Mexico was, officially, an aggressively secular state in which priests and nuns were forbidden to wear religious habits in public. John Paul, showing himself shrewder than some of his cautious diplomats, knew that if he were permitted to come to Mexico, the calculus regarding any future Polish visit would change: “If they receive me in an anticlerical country like Mexico, how can they refuse to allow me to return to Poland later?” he asked his aides.23

  Two months after the Pope’s Mexican trip, on March 26, 1979, another Stasi analysis of the Vatican under John Paul II was completed. “Diverse Information on the Vatican” was based on information from “an IM” [Inoffizielen Mitarbeiter, Unofficial Employee] who lived in Rome, had “professional relations in the Vatican,” and was reporting on John Paul II’s new order
based on his conversations with “various … dignitaries of the Curia.” John Paul II had been well received by both Church bureaucrats and people, the IM’s sources reported. The Stasi analysis also included speculations on impending changes in senior curial positions, noted that some Vatican officials saw “special significance” in the Pope’s meeting with Soviet foreign minister Gromyko, and suggested that a “formal understanding about the continuation of the so-called Vatican Ostpolitik was reached-” The IM reported that the Pope’s Mexican trip was regarded as a considerable success, briefly described John Paul’s disinclination to micromanage the Vatican, and noted that the new pope had upset those who thought they knew how to manage popes: John Paul violated “protocol traditions cultivated for years,” and had instructed his collaborators that “letters addressed directly to the Pope are to be [delivered] to him unopened.” The analysis concluded with remarks on the likely future of Vatican relations with the German Democratic Republic and complaints about the ways in which the Catholic Church in West Germany provided material and financial support to the Church in East Germany.24

  The Stasi analysis was a striking combination of insight and misapprehension. The IM, who was clearly proud of his access to prominent Catholic personalities, nicely captured curial resentments over John Paul II’s insistence on maintaining his own lines of communication to the world outside the Vatican, and curial worries about the Pope’s distinctive management style. On the other hand, there is little in this document that couldn’t have been cobbled together by anyone with an ear closely attuned to the Roman rumor mill, and there are some striking misunderstandings and misreadings of situations. The analysis of the Pope’s first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis [The Redeemer of Man] as a kind of papal thank-you note to those who elected Wojtyła is bizarre; the encyclical was in fact a clear statement of the Pope’s distinct Christian anthropology, the theoretical basis of his defense of human rights. The IM reported that an exceptionally large number of cardinals were present at the funeral of the secretary of state John Paul II had inherited from Paul VI, the French cardinal Jean Villot; yet there was nothing surprising about such a show of respect for the Church’s second-ranking figure; and the IM’s speculations on possible successors to Villot (the Genoese cardinal Giuseppe Siri and Paul VI’s former chief of staff, Giovanni Benelli) were, to put it gently, strange.25 The IM (who may, of course, have been telling his masters what he thought they wanted to hear) dramatically overstated the meaning of the Gromyko audience—although the notion of its “special significance” may also reflect what the Vatican architects of the Ostpolitik wanted to believe about that encounter. Moreover, and perhaps most strikingly, the IM missed the single most important personnel move that John Paul II had made: installing as his principal secretary Stanisław Dziwisz, the man who would see to the execution of the Pope’s orders and who would make sure that John Paul saw and talked with those whom he wanted to meet, formally or informally.

  A month later, another Stasi analysis—“Information on Some Essential Questions of Vatican Politics after the Election of Wojtyła as Pope”—took up in greater detail the question of the future of the Vatican Ostpolitik. According to this April 12 analysis, Vatican sources were reporting that the Ostpolitik would continue in “general” terms, but that the Pope’s personal experience with “Marxist praxis” will lead to a “more determined approach” to problems than was evident under Paul VI: “Thus it is not to be excluded that this could lead to a temporary worsening of Vatican relations with the governments of the socialist states.” On the other hand, the analysis affirmed, John Paul II would insist that the Church throughout the world not be a political institution; his personal task would be that of defending the Catholic Church’s evangelical activities against “state atheism.” In this regard, the analysis warned of future papal statements in defense of human rights and religious freedom, even as the Pope urged Catholics to contribute to the welfare of the societies in which they lived. According to the Stasi, the Vatican (meaning the Vatican’s diplomats) “is not inclined to burden its politics with the socialist states and its relations to them by supporting ‘dissidents’ who live abroad,” nor did the Vatican bureaucracy favor open support for “opposition forces in the socialist states, even though it is thoroughly informed about such forces or movements.” Yet the analysis also warned that John Paul’s approach to these issues “over the long haul is not … clear.” The analysis correctly noted that John Paul “considers the Polish episcopate far more combative … than the Hungarian [episcopate],” and that the Pope believes “the Hungarian episcopate should do more for the religious education of the people.” The analysis concluded with a lengthy speculation on the Pope’s likely approach to German affairs, including the familiar complaints about the Church in West Germany and its alleged interference both in East Germany and with the Vatican.26

  Like its March 1979 predecessor, this Stasi analysis combined both insight and ignorance. The analysts clearly grasped the tactical purposes of John Paul II’s insistence that the Church does not do politics; but they missed his larger strategic goal, which was to redefine the battlefield in the Church’s contest with communism, moving the contest from the realm of politics to the realm of conscience and culture. The analysts’ Roman sources seem to have figured out that there would be tensions between the initiatives emanating from the papal apartment and the diplomatic instincts of the Secretariat of State. Moreover, there is a striking similarity between what the Stasi reported as Soviet concerns about “many incalculables” with John Paul II and the concerns of the Vatican’s diplomats: both in Moscow (that is, in the minds of Brezhnev and Andropov) and among some in Rome (that is, in the minds of Casaroli and his associates), stability was a paramount value, if for different reasons. In the same way, if also for different reasons, this analysis suggests that both Moscow and the Vatican’s diplomats shared a concern that the Poles could begin to pose major problems, during and after any future papal visit to Poland: a suggestion confirmed by a subsequent directive to all Stasi IMs with Catholic contacts to intensify their reporting on “any planned hostile action” during John Paul’s expected pilgrimage to his homeland.27

  On April 30, 1979, John Paul II confounded the Stasi’s Roman sources by appointing Archbishop Agostino Casaroli as the new secretary of state of the Holy See (technically, the pro-secretary of state, until Casaroli could be elevated to the cardinalate in June). Four days after Casaroli’s appointment, John Paul named Casaroli’s deputy, Achille Silvestrini, as Vatican “foreign minister” in place of Casaroli. Both men were thoroughly committed to the Ostpolitik of Paul VI, about which John Paul II manifestly had his doubts. Their appointments to the two key diplomatic positions in the Holy See meant that the Pope would henceforth pursue a dual-track approach to the Catholic contest with communism. The old diplomacy of the Ostpolitik would continue, and perhaps something could be achieved along those lines; in any event, no one could accuse the Church of reneging on previous agreements, what with Casaroli and Silvestrini in charge. Meanwhile, John Paul would pursue his personal campaign on behalf of human rights and religious freedom, appealing to consciences and cultures over the heads of communist rulers.28

  The Stasi refined its analysis of the future of the Ostpolitik in the wake of the new Vatican appointments in a May 18, 1979, analysis, “Information on Several Aspects of the Further Ostpolitik of the Vatican during the Pontificate of Pope John Paul II.” The analysis correctly notes that intellectuals and young people would be primary concerns of a pontificate determined to strengthen Catholic doctrinal identity. Seven months into the papacy of John Paul II, it now seemed clear to the Stasi that, while “no basic changes of principle are to be expected” with respect to the Ostpolitik, “one should nevertheless expect to deal, in part, with a more aggressive and offensive Vatican course.” Part of this shift was attributed to John Paul II himself, but the Pope was said to be following decisions reached by the College of Cardinals during the 1978 conclaves
, which stressed that religious freedom should be the “exclusive” goal of the Vatican’s diplomacy behind the Iron Curtain. The primary resistance to this shift, the Stasi suggested, came from “the right wing of the Curia,” which was said to prefer a more aggressive posture toward international communism than was characteristic of either John XXIII or Paul VI. “According to present estimates” from Stasi sources in Rome, local bishops and their bishops’ conferences would play an increasing role in the Vatican’s Ostpolitik, such that these conferences, and not Vatican diplomats, would frame much of the “diplomatic dialogue” in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary, while the curial diplomats would take the lead role in dealing with Albania, Bulgaria, and the German Democratic Republic. The purpose of strengthening the local bishops’ hands was to compel the “recognition of the institutional Church” as a genuine actor in society. The Stasi analysts suggested that John Paul had taken the side of the curial diplomats against Cardinal Wyszyński in the question of a Vatican nunciature in Warsaw, and that the appointments of Casaroli and Silvestrini to the Holy See’s key diplomatic posts were made against the “wishes of the West German bishops, who have had strong reservations about Casaroli and his course until now.” The document concluded with the admonition not to use the information it contains for propaganda purposes, “in the interest of the security of the sources.”29

  As before, this Stasi analysis displayed a keen grasp of some matters: John Paul II’s outreach to young people and intellectuals; his conviction that doctrinal laxness and confusion had diminished the Church’s capacity to shape society, culture, and politics, including world politics; the fact that things were going to be different, diplomatically, with the new pope. Yet the analysts continued to miss crucial aspects of John Paul II’s program: his conviction that effective pastoral work and witness has political consequences, under certain circumstances, and his dual-track approach to the Ostpolitik. Stasi sources in Rome may have been reflecting certain curialists’ sentiments (or hopes) in reporting a rift between John Paul II and Cardinal Wyszyński on the question of a Vatican Embassy in Warsaw; but no such rift existed, ever.30