The End and the Beginning

by George Weigel

  The month after the TRIANGOLO diary affair, John Paul II added another item to the KGB’s bill of complaints against him with a seven-day pilgrimage to Central America. By standing firm against Sandinista attempts to drown out his sermon in the Nicaraguan capital, Managua—a provocation televised all over Central America, thanks to some adept advance work by Father Roberto Tucci, S.J., the Pope’s travel planner—John Paul helped strengthen the local pro-democracy forces then contending with Marxists such as the Sandinistas and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front [FMLN] in El Salvador for the future of the region. At the same time, he buttressed the position of Church reformers who had stood against both oligarchic brutality and Marxist revolution. None of this was received with satisfaction in the KGB’s Moscow Center, which had high hopes for winning the Cold War in the Third World and had invested considerable resources in promoting the Sandinistas and the FMLN in North America, not least among religious activists affiliated with fronts like CISPES [Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador].27 Throughout this period, Moscow Center used Cuban intelligence assets at the Cuban diplomatic mission to the Holy See (with which Fidel Castro had never broken diplomatic relations) to try to advance the communist cause in Latin America and to impede John Paul II’s effective countermeasures.28

  Eight days after the Pope left Central America, Polish foreign minister Stefan Olszowski met in Warsaw with Archbishop Luigi Poggi, still head of the Polish-Vatican permanent working contacts group, to discuss the impending papal pilgrimage to Poland. In an “Urgent Note” that served as a memorandum of conversation for the Polish foreign ministry, Olszowski painted a detailed picture of the conversation, in which he stressed to Poggi that “stability was returning in politics and society” and that “stability had the upper hand.” An example of this was the formation of PRON, “which was very much in favor of upholding the constitution” and was being led by a notable Catholic writer, Jan Dobraczyński. The remaining difficulties in Poland were the result of Western policies, especially the “sanctions imposed by the United States and other NATO countries” and the rise of “neo-revisionism in the Federal Republic of Germany.” Olszowski then argued that the impending papal visit was “evidence of our openness in our politics and [our] commitment to the principles embodied in the constitution.” He then averred that the “government is cooperating fully in all preparations for the visit” but that there were “forces abroad and in a few places in our country that want to sabotage the visit and stir up opposition.” Thus it was important that “religious gatherings” during the Pope’s visit not “be used to spread anti-government propaganda, for example by the use of banners, or for demonstrations intended to cause disturbances.”

  In Poggi’s reply as recounted by Olszowski, the veteran Vatican diplomat agreed that the acts of “Western empires” had had “negative effects on Polish society.” Poggi then mentioned the Pope’s January 1, 1983, World Day of Peace message and its stress on “dialogue” in “maintaining peace.” The visit concluded with a discussion of the government’s recent suspension of the distribution of the Polish edition of L’Osservatore Romano, which contained the text of a speech given by Msgr. Francesco Canalini of the Holy See at the Madrid Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. There, the Vatican representative had spoken sharply about human rights violations and the suppression of Solidarity. Olszowski argued that the publication of this text violated an agreement that the Polish monthly edition of the Vatican newspaper “should not include material that does not promote understanding and good relations between Poland and the Apostolic See.” Poggi, Olszowski concluded, promised to “convey our point of view,” but also asked that the Vatican’s request that the next edition be distributed be “considered in a positive light,” as it would help prepare for the papal visit.29

  Olszowski’s initial approach, with its stress on “stability,” demonstrated that the Polish government well understood the imperatives as understood by Cardinal Casaroli, Archbishop Silvestrini, and Archbishop Poggi. The foreign minister’s description of PRON was risible, of course, as was his emphasis on the “principles embodied in the constitution”—which did not provide for martial law, hence the de facto coup d’etat of WRON on December 13, 1981. Olszowski’s concern for the Pope’s safety was rather ironic, in light of May 13, 1981, and his fretting about those, even inside Poland, who were trying to “sabotage” the visit obviously did not include the SB, which had just failed, in the TRIANGOLO diary affair, to blackmail the Pope and the Church. There was something a bit pathetic in the foreign minister’s plea that religious events not turn “political”: would a regime as “stable” as Olszowski claimed the Polish regime was be afraid of banners? The Holy See intervention at the Madrid Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe clearly rankled, as the sparring over the Polish L’Osservatore Romano indicated. It is instructive that Archbishop Poggi did not defend the Canalini speech, nor did he mention, to a foreign minister representing a government steeped in mendacity, that the 1983 World Day of Peace message had stressed that truth was essential to genuine dialogue. That a government confident of “political and social stability” would not be engaged in the most crude forms of censorship also seems to have gone unremarked from the Vatican side of the table. Poggi’s generally accommodating—and certainly nonconfrontational—line with Olszowski, the representative of a regime still holding thousands of political prisoners under martial law, may, in the Vatican diplomat’s mind, have been necessary in order not to exacerbate tensions prior to the papal visit. But with Olszowski eager for a visit that would redound well on the Polish government, some might argue that a bit more push-back was in order from the Holy See’s diplomats, particularly over the censorship of texts that had been cleared by Poggi’s associates in the Secretariat of State and that reflected the concerns of the Pope.30

  The issue of L’Osservatore Romano and its Polish distribution came up again the following day, when Archbishop Poggi met with four other Polish officials, led by the minister for religious affairs, Adam Łopatka. According to a classified aide-mémoire prepared afterward, the meeting began with some preliminary joshing about how Poggi’s Polish would improve if the nunciature that Casaroli and the Polish government had long wanted were established. Poggi replied with some ice-breaking of his own, expressing his pleasure at talking to “a minister who is also a professor of constitutional law.” The two delegations then discussed numerous practical issues, including church building permits, that ought to be cleared up before the Pope arrived in June. Poggi rather apologized for pressing so many questions at once, noting that “too much meat has been put on a fire that is not hot enough,” but pressed harder on the resumption of distribution of L’Osservatore Romano than he had the day before with Stefan Olszowski. Łopatka took particular umbrage at the charge, made at Madrid, that there are “flagrant and permanent violations of human rights on a massive scale” in Poland, which he flatly (and brazenly) denied. Poggi did not challenge this, perhaps assuming that the battle over the distribution of the next Polish issue of L’Osservatore Romano had been won. The meeting concluded with Polish governmental complaints about the Roman activities of Cardinal Slipyi, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic major-archbishop, in the course of discussion of whether a Greek Catholic diocese could be restored in southeastern Poland.31

  Minister Łopatka’s continued carping about the Canalini intervention at Madrid suggests two things: that the “stable” Polish regime was extremely sensitive to international criticism on its human rights record, and that it was even more nervous that John Paul II would take a similar line in June, openly challenging the regime. The Polish delegation’s self-evident lack of interest in doing anything to help the Ukrainian Greek Catholics of southeastern Poland, and the deprecatory references to Cardinal Slipyi, also suggest that Polish policy on Ukrainian Catholics in Poland was driven by Soviet fears that Catholicism was the repository of Ukrainian nationalism, which the Soviets had attempted to
stamp out in 1946 by “dissolving” the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine and having it merged into the local Russian Orthodox Church.

  On April 25, 1983, five weeks after Poggi’s meetings in Warsaw, Jerzy Kuberski (who had replaced Kazimierz Szablewski as Archbishop Poggi’s counterpart in the Polish-Vatican permanent working contacts group) met with Archbishop Achille Silvestrini, the Vatican foreign minister. In a secret, coded cable, Kuberski reported on the meeting to foreign minister Stefan Olszowski. The short report contained excerpts from the Pope’s official response to the official invitation to come to Poland that had been extended by the chairman of the People’s State Council, Professor Henryk Jabłoński. Kuberski also reported that, while a general release of political prisoners was not, according to Silvestrini, an absolute precondition of the papal pilgrimage from the Vatican’s point of view, such a gesture would certainly help prepare the “conditions” for a successful visit.32

  Less than two months before the Pope was scheduled to arrive in Poland, the Polish government was under severe pressure from East German communist leader Erich Honecker and Czechoslovak party boss Gustav Husak to take the hardest possible line on an amnesty for political prisoners and on lifting martial law. The tacit agreement seems to have been that a full amnesty would follow Poland II—so there was, in fact, and despite regime denials, a link between the visit and the end of martial law. At the same time, however, the regime seems to have been flexing its own muscles, hinting that it was strong enough to do both—manage a papal visit and a postvisit amnesty. The Kuberski cable contained two other noteworthy points. In his letter to Henryk Jabłoński, John Paul II asserted his right to be a Polish patriot—or, as he put it, he still had “the sacred right and responsibility to feel at one with the nation.”33 John Paul was not, in other words, ceding to the Polish government a monopoly on the definition of what constituted Polish patriotism, no matter how much the regime might complain about Holy See interventions in defense of human rights at international conferences. The second noteworthy thing about the cable was that the name of “Comrade Jabłoński” (the nominal head of state) appeared below that of “Comrade Jaruzelski” on the decoded cable’s distribution list. Whatever line Polish diplomats were spinning to their Vatican interlocutors about PRON, it was clear to everyone involved, in Poland, that real power remained with Jaruzelski.

  As the June papal visit drew closer, the Polish regime’s nervousness about it, and attempts to impede it, grew more grave and more comic. On April 5, the new KGB chairman, Viktor Chebrikov, received a request from Polish interior minister Czesław Kiszczak for “ ‘material and technical assistance in connection with the Pope’s visit’: 150 rifles of the kind used for firing rubber bullets, 20 armored personnel carriers, 300 cars for transporting plainclothes personnel and surveillance equipment, 200 army tents and various medical supplies.”34 According to Vadim Pavlov, KGB rezident in Warsaw, Kiszczak was almost panicking, fearful that the Pope would frontally assault the martial law that Kiszczak, as interior minister, had so brutally imposed. “At the present time,” Kiszczak was reported to have said, “we can only dream of the possibility that God will recall him to his bosom as soon as possible.” Grasping at whatever straws were available, Kiszczak shared with the KGB a bizarre SB report that John Paul had leukemia and masked its effects with cosmetics. The KGB’s worries that the Polish comrades were losing their grip in anticipation of Poland II were intensified when the Polish government agreed to large, open-air Masses in Kraków and Katowice, thus opening the dread possibility of “inflaming religious fanaticism among the working class.”35

  Moscow Center had reason to worry, at least about the competence of parts of the SB, which had mounted a particularly silly and futile effort to keep the Pope out of Katowice and the country’s Silesian industrial core. In this instance, the effort involved a regime-generated letter-writing campaign, by which ordinary Polish citizens would write the bishop of Katowice, stating, simply, “We don’t want the Pope.” When the people refused to participate, the SB forged both the letters and the signatures and delivered them in large postal bags to the bishop’s residence. One day, the sister who answered the door looked at yet another bag and asked, “How many more of these will there be?” The dim apparatchik delivering them answered, “I don’t know; we haven’t finished yet.”36

  The battle over the Pope’s itinerary continued; John Paul II won on Kraków and Katowice, but the regime, led by Kiszczak and his deputy, veteran SB hard-liner Konrad Straszewski, told papal-trip planner Father Roberto Tucci, S.J., that Gdańsk was out of the question. The regime was also adamant that the Pope not meet with Wałęsa; the Pope insisted that he would not come unless he could do so. As Stanisław Dziwisz recalled latter, “to get beyond the impasse, they worked out a compromise. It was a pretty flimsy one, though. A lot was still up in the air, or was left implicit, and many of the details were still vague.”37 Kiszczak, for his part, refused to even use Wałęsa’s name in his negotiations with Tucci, referring to him as “that guy” or “the man with the big family” and demanding to know why the Pope “wants to meet with a man who doesn’t represent anybody in this country.”38

  Kiszczak and his comrades were not the only ones who were nervous about what Poland II would bring. According to Bohdan Cywiński, the underground Solidarity leadership was worried that the “political message” of any papal visit under martial law wouldn’t be the right one—that, contrary to the Pope’s intention, Jaruzelski would use the visit to bolster his position by demonstrating that John Paul was coming to Poland at the general’s behest. The Pope, for his part, thought that direct contact with the people of Poland was of such importance that it was worth the risk—and, as Cywiński put it, fifteen years later, “he was right.”39

  It didn’t begin with the explosion of emotion that had greeted John Paul II on his arrival in Warsaw on June 2, 1979. Yet, as was so often the case, Karol Wojtyła’s sense of how to play a particular scene won out. During the welcoming ceremonies on June 16, he stood with a bowed head and a somber expression on his face. The country immediately got it. As one older woman said, “He is sad. You see, he understands.” From that welcome, at which Henryk Jabłoński prattled on about “the gradual normalization of life in our country,” John Paul went to St. John’s Cathedral, where he said he had come to Poland to stand alongside those “who are most acutely tasting the bitterness of disappointment, humiliation, suffering, of being deprived of their freedom, of being wronged, of having their dignity trampled on.” The censors cut his statement about “the painful events connected with the date December 13, 1981” from both the secular and Catholic press, but it didn’t make any difference. The tens of thousands of Poles who marched from the cathedral past communist party headquarters chanting “So-li-dar-ność, So-li-dar-ność,” “Lech Wa-łę-sa, Lech Wa-łę-sa,” and “De-mo-kra-cja, De-mo-kra-cja” knew that the Pope knew what they had borne.40

  As for General Jaruzelski, reporters noted that he looked shaken, even agitated, after his meeting with the Pope at Warsaw’s Belvedere Palace. Well he might, for John Paul had opened their private session by telling the general that Poland was “one great concentration camp.”41 But the Pope wasn’t through with making it clear to his “hosts” that he would do what he thought he had to do. The “compromise” on his seeing Wałęsa was indeed flimsy, and no agreement had been reached about a meeting. The Pope then told his aides, “If I can’t see him, then I’m going back to Rome.” “Some of his entourage” raised objections, Stanisław Dziwisz recalled; it can only have been Cardinal Casaroli. But the Pope was not to be deflected from the course of what he regarded as a moral responsibility, stating flatly, “I have to be consistent in the eyes of the people.”42 The diplomats got to work, and a deal was reached: the Pope could see the interned Solidarity leader at a cabin in the south of the country, in what the regime insisted would be a “strictly private meeting.” Father Józef Tischner blew that euphemism away with a single statement of
fact: “There are no private meetings with the pope.”

  Despite the exceptional efforts of the SB and other Warsaw Pact intelligence agencies to impede or even implode it, Poland II accomplished what John Paul II had hoped for his pilgrimage, both as a pastor and as a patriot: it restored hope to a people who had begun to lose hope. In so doing, Stanisław Dziwisz contended, it “decided the future of Poland.”43 No one imagined that the path ahead would be simple or easy; maintaining morale in a virtual police state suffering serious economic deprivation is never an easy business. But by drawing on Poland’s long history of resistance to tyranny backed by overwhelming material force—in Kraków on June 22, John Paul II beatified two monks, Rafał Kalinowski and “Brother Albert” Chmielowski, both of whom had been rebels in the 1863 insurrection against czarist Russia—John Paul II reminded his people that tools of resistance can be forged from holiness and courage. He even managed to restore a sense of humor in the resistance: an underground Solidarity cartoon had SB agents disguised as sheep and goats carrying boom microphones as they tried to eavesdrop on the Pope’s conversation with Wałęsa in that cabin in the Tatras.44 The only person who didn’t seem to get the message was the deputy editor of L’Osservatore Romano, who wrote an odd editorial suggesting that Poland II had been a papal farewell to Solidarity, which the editor described as a spent force. It remains unclear whether this editorial was planted by someone in the Secretariat of State, but in any event it certainly did not represent the Pope’s judgment.45 As Stanisław Dziwisz put it years later, the entire point of the pilgrimage, from a public point of view, was to demonstrate “that the movement for freedom and solidarity hadn’t died.” That was why the meeting with Wałęsa was “a very decisive moment.”46