The End and the Beginning

by George Weigel

  On July 22, 1983, a month after the papal pilgrimage, martial law was formally ended and the WRON was dissolved. The Polish authorities may have seen this tactic as a means of defusing underground Solidarity; a restoration of a measure of constitutional normality was likely regarded as a necessity for getting Western sanctions lifted as well. However the communist logic ran, something else had changed: Poland II created the spiritual and psychological conditions for the possibility of a revival of civil society in the aftermath of martial law.

  THE MARTYRS’ ROAD TO FREEDOM

  The sixteen months after John Paul II’s second Polish pilgrimage were, by the testimony of Solidarity historians, a very difficult period for the underground trade union and the broader social movement it represented. The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Lech Wałęsa in October 1983 sent Yuri Andropov into a rage, and reignited his paranoia about the Catholic Church. In a letter to General Jaruzelski sent from his sickbed, the Soviet party chief charged that “the Church is reawakening the cult of Wałęsa.… This means that the Church is creating a new kind of confrontation with the Party. In this situation, the most important thing is not to make concessions.”47 Jaruzelski and his comrades refused to let Wałęsa receive his Peace Prize in person (his wife and son accepted for him). But in the wake of the papal visit, Jaruzelski was also concerned to put a favorable interpretation on what had been some forthright, even confrontational, conversations with John Paul II in June. Thus he wrote the Pope a letter in November, stating that he was still thinking about their discussions because, “regardless of understandable differences of assessment, they were full of heartfelt concern for the fate of our motherland and the well-being of man.”48 That “heartfelt concern” was not evident, however, in the stepped-up repression pursued by the regime Jaruzelski led. Solidarity historian Henryk Głębocki describes the situation in early 1984 in these stark terms:

  The turn of 1984 was marked by an offensive of police reprisals. There were beatings and mysterious deaths. Piotr Bartoszcze, the leader of Farmers’ Solidarity, died in mysterious circumstances. Especially brutal was the intimidation campaign against Solidarity members conducted by the SB in Toruń which abducted people in broad daylight, tortured them, and forced them to collaborate. Beaten and stripped down to their underwear, they were dumped in nearby forests.… In February and March 1984, the SB launched a broad campaign not only against political activists but also against charitable-aid committees operating under the protection of the Church. The campaign involved several thousand people, of whom some 200 were arrested.49

  The increased pressure in Poland mirrored, and may have reflected, continuing fears in Moscow that John Paul II’s defense of human rights threatened to unravel the entire “socialist order.” At a June 1984 conference called by the KGB, Warsaw Pact and Cuban intelligence operatives met to consider “joint measures for combating the subversive activities of the Vatican.” Among the issues discussed was the ongoing struggle in Poland, the demise of liberation theology’s influence in Latin America (blamed largely on the Roman Curia in concert with the Reagan administration), the beginnings of what John Paul II would call the “new evangelization” in Africa and Asia, and what was thought to be the de facto alignment of the Vatican with NATO and the People’s Republic of China. In addition to intensifying the use of informants and electronic eavesdropping equipment, the conferees agreed to do whatever they could to exploit the internal Vatican tensions they perceived between the Pope’s hard line and the tendencies of the veterans of the pre–John Paul II Ostpolitik. They also agreed to use “malleable publishers in capitalist and developing countries” to intensify campaigns aimed at destroying the Catholic Church’s international image by explorations of the Inquisition, the Church’s alleged affinities with mid-twentieth-century fascism, its wealth, and so forth. These efforts were to be complemented by blackmail campaigns against Vatican personnel, especially at Vatican Radio.50 Later that same year, in September 1984, LICHTBLICK (the German Benedictine Eugen Brammertz), using his Vatican sources, reported to his masters in East Berlin (and thence to the KGB) on the alleged cooperation of conservative U.S. Catholics with the Reagan administration, and the alleged effects of this cooperation on the U.S. bishops.51

  The amnesty proposed by the Jaruzelski regime and adopted by the rubber-stamp Sejm on July 21, 1984, did not mark any easing of the authorities’ determination to crush the opposition; quite the contrary, it was aimed at burying underground Solidarity once and for all while providing a reason for the West to lift sanctions and for Poland to rejoin the international economy.52 Continuing disputes between the TKK (which wanted stronger action against the government) and the Wałęsa-led Solidarity leadership (which kept calling for dialogue with the regime), coupled with increasing public apathy and demoralization, resulted in the emergence of radical organizations such as Fighting Solidarity, which attracted young activists. The government seemed on the verge of achieving its goal of so demoralizing the populace and so fracturing the opposition that it could have its way without excessive difficulty.

  The homicidal brutality of the SB then changed the moral and political calculus, decisively.

  Father Jerzy Popiełuszko had long been an aggravation to the SB and the interior ministry, not least because the young priest kept alive the message of John Paul II in his monthly “Mass for the Fatherland,” celebrated before a packed Church of St. Stanisław Kostka in Warsaw’s Żoliborz neighborhood, with thousands of congregants standing outside and listening on loudspeakers. During Poland II, John Paul II had challenged his people to “vanquish evil with good.” The thirty-five-year-old Father Popiełuszko used his sermons to spell out what that might mean. He urged his listeners to respect the human rights of all, and to live Christian charity. At the same time, he demanded resistance—people should live “as if” they were free, refusing to participate in the continuing culture of lies that was communism. Next to the altar at which Father Jerzy celebrated each Mass for the Fatherland was a banner of St. Maximilian Kolbe, the martyr of the Auschwitz starvation bunker and the “Patron of Long-suffering Poland” (as the banner read). With that icon of spiritual resistance to evil before them, Popiełuszko challenged his congregants to choose: “Which side will you take? The side of good or the side of evil? Truth or falsehood? Hatred or love?”53

  This was unprecedented. As New York Times correspondent Michael Kaufman would write later, “Nowhere else from East Berlin to Vladivostok could anyone stand before ten or fifteen thousand people and use a microphone to condemn the errors of state and party. Nowhere, in that vast stretch encompassing some four hundred million people, was anyone else openly telling a crowd that defiance of authority was an obligation of the heart, of religion, manhood, and nationhood.”54

  Unprecedented, to be sure, but also intolerable, from the SB’s point of view: this meddlesome priest would have to be eliminated. Thus, on the night of October 19, 1984, Father Popiełuszko’s car was stopped on the road between Bydgoszcz and Warsaw by an SB detachment led by Grzegorz Piotrowski, the man who had bungled the TRIANGOLO diary affair the year before. Piotrowski was taking no chances this time. He and his comrades beat Father Jerzy to death, then dumped his trussed corpse into the Vistula River near the city of Włocławek.

  The next day, state radio announced that Popiełuszko was missing and was presumed kidnapped by parties unknown. Thousands upon thousands of people began to converge on the church in Żoliborz, where Masses for the missing priest’s deliverance were said hourly. Lech Wałęsa came on October 21 and begged for peaceful resistance: “Dear countrymen: There is a great danger hanging over our Fatherland. I appeal to you, please, do not let anyone provoke you to bloodshed. I beg you to maintain peace and to pray constantly for Father Jerzy.”

  The Masses went on for nine more days. Then, on October 30, came the news all had been fearing: the body of Father Jerzy Popiełuszko had been dredged from the Vistula. A friend of Father Jerzy’s, Father Antonin Lewek, asked the
stunned crowd to remember Christ weeping at the tomb of Lazarus. And then, as Father Lewek recalled, something remarkable happened. Three times, the throng repeated the invocation of the Lord’s Prayer: “And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And forgive us our trespasses …”

  There were no riots then, nor were there any on the day of the funeral Mass, November 3, when hundreds of thousands of Warsavians, and Poles from all over the country, came to the church of St. Stanisław Kostka for the funeral Mass and burial of Solidarity’s martyr-priest. Father Jerzy Popiełuszko’s grave in the Żoliborz churchyard quickly became a “Solidarity sanctuary, a little piece of free Poland,” as activist Janusz Onyszkiewicz put it. The murder of the man who had fearlessly preached that “one cannot murder hopes,” and the massive demonstration of support for Solidarity that his funeral Mass evoked, reenergized a demoralized people. These events also demonstrated, irrefutably, that Jaruzelski’s vaunted “normalization” was a fiction, and would remain so until the regime began a serious conversation with its opponents about the country’s future.55

  Father Jerzy Popiełuszko was, in a sense, the voice of John Paul II in Poland in the aftermath of Poland II.56 The themes of his preaching—the demands of conscience, the imperative of resisting evil, the obligation to remain nonviolent, the challenge of “living in the truth”—somehow extended the Nine Days of June 1979 and the Poland II pilgrimage into a period when both the activist resistance and the general populace of Poland were flagging, morally, spiritually, psychologically—and politically. Being the voice of John Paul II cost Jerzy Popiełuszko his life. Like Karol Wojtyła, the man whose fearlessness inspired him, Father Jerzy lived—and died—in the mystery of Jesus Christ, priest and victim.57

  Four months after Father Popiełuszko’s funeral, on March 10, 1985, Konstantin Chernenko (who had succeeded Yuri Andropov as leader of the Soviet Communist Party on Andropov’s death in February 1984) died, and Mikhail Gorbachev was chosen to succeed him. Gorbachev had been a protégé of both Andropov and Andrei Gromyko, and the latter assured his Politburo comrades that, while the younger and more stylish Gorbachev “has a nice smile,” he also “has iron teeth.”58 John Paul II, however, thought that there might be something a bit different here. Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko: these were men whose formative political experience had been Stalin’s purge trials in the late 1930s. As young men, they had seen their friends disappear, only to reappear, be charged with treason, and then be shot in the back of the head in the Lubyanka basement. Experiences like that did something to a man, as the subsequent careers of Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko illustrated. Whatever else Mikhail Gorbachev was or was not, he was “of a new generation,” as the Pope put it years later, and would likely take a different approach: “he wanted to save communism ‘with a human face.’ ”59

  That, of course, would prove impossible, as John Paul II knew it would: the fundamental errors in communism’s understanding of the human person, human community, and human destiny were not reparable by the patchwork fix of perestroika and glasnost. The system itself would have to go; the human yearning for freedom would have to be realized, politically and economically, in central and eastern Europe; the artificial Yalta division of Europe into two competing, hostile camps would have to be repaired. But with Gorbachev as leader of the USSR, perhaps the path to a different future would no longer be marked by the graves of so many martyrs.

  ENDGAME

  On April 11, 1985, a month after Mikhail Gorbachev’s accession to power in the Soviet Union, over 1,000 priests—one-third of the Catholic clergy of Czechoslovakia—came to the shrine at Velehrad in Moravia to concelebrate Mass together. During the liturgy, eighty-six-year-old Cardinal František Tomášek of Prague read a letter from John Paul II, who urged the priests to “continue intrepidly on the path of evangelization and testimony, even if the present situation makes it arduous, difficult, and even bitter.” Three months after that, more than 150,000 Catholic pilgrims came to Velehrad on July 5 to mark the 1,100th anniversary of the death of St. Methodius, whom John Paul had named a co-patron of Europe with his brother, St. Cyril (creator of the alphabet used in eastern Slavic languages). The regime of Gustav Husak, one of the most bitterly anticlerical leaders in the Warsaw Pact, refused permission for John Paul II to attend, while trying to co-opt the Methodius anniversary and turn the event into a “peace festival.” When officials welcomed the pilgrims to Velehrad in those terms, the people of Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia shouted them down with cries of “This is a pilgrimage! We want the Pope! We want Mass!”60

  The radical change in the public character of Catholicism in Czechoslovakia was another result of John Paul II’s strategy of moral revolution in central and eastern Europe. At the time of Karol Wojtyła’s election as pope in 1978, the Czechoslovak Catholic situation was desperate and getting worse, thanks in part to the failures of the Ostpolitik, which had succeeded in getting bishops ordained in Czechoslovakia but had gutted the Church’s capacity for effective resistance in the process. The nominal head of the Church, Tomášek, was quiet and deferential to the regime. The activist clergy and laity were demoralized, believing that their counsel had been ignored by Agostino Casaroli and other agents of the Ostpolitik. There was even concern that Vatican investigations of the extensive network of underground clergy in the country had been useful to the regime in identifying and harassing underground priests.61

  This all began to change when the newly elected John Paul II drew the shy František Tomášek into an embrace in the Sistine Chapel at the end of the second conclave of 1978 and told the aging prelate that “we are standing very close to one another and will stand closer still, because the responsibility for you is being transferred to me.” John Paul was as good as his word, underscoring his “special feeling of nearness” to Tomášek and his people in a Christmas 1978 message; three months later, in a March 1979 letter marking the anniversary of the canonization of the Bohemian martyr St. John Nepomucene, the Pope challenged priests and people alike to be “fearless in avowal and practice” of Catholic faith. With the aging Tomášek now assured of papal support for a more assertive line, the entire country watched what human rights activist Pavel Bratinka would later call “this singular spectacle of the cardinal getting older and tougher at the same time.”62

  John Paul II’s emphasis on respect for human rights as the public meaning of the inalienable dignity of the human person meshed neatly with themes that were being developed by such secular human rights activists as Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia. As in Poland, the Church’s defense of human rights had to be universal: a defense of the rights of all, not a matter of seeking institutional breathing space from the totalitarian state. This political ecumenism, as it were, opened up the possibility for resistance coalitions in which Catholic dissidents and secular dissidents joined in a common effort. Institutionally, the Polish Church was a model of assertive, effective witness under totalitarianism; with the election of John Paul II, the Czechoslovakian Church was given permission to emulate that model, which the Ostpolitik had discouraged. And at a personal level, both the secular activists and the Catholic activists believed that they now had a pope who “understood their situation,” “who was an example of deep faith, who understood the communists, who wasn’t naive,” and who defended the resistance Church in Czechoslovakia.63 The first, dramatic, public demonstration of this new Czech and Slovak Catholicism, a fighting faith that would no longer shelter behind acquiescence, came at Velehrad in July 1985: an event John Paul II was not permitted to attend, but for whose success he could take considerable credit.64

  As the previously moribund Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia was being reborn in resistance, John Paul II was looking toward something few had dared to imagine at the beginning of the 1980s: a post-totalitarian future for central and eastern Europe. He remained a point of reference for dissidents and human rights activists from throughout the region, believers and unbelievers alike. In Decembe
r 1985, through the good work of one of his informal diplomatic agents, Irina Ilovayskaya Alberti, he met in the Vatican with Elena Bonner, wife of the leading Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov. The Pope spent two hours with Bonner, a very tough lady, who came out of their meeting saying, “He’s the most remarkable man I’ve ever met. He is all light, he is a source of light.”65 Shortly thereafter, East German Communist Party leader Erich Honecker, who had visited the Pope in Rome in April 1985, received a classified Stasi report speculating on continued tensions between Cardinal Casaroli and his diplomats, on the one hand, and John Paul II, on the other. The Pope, it was suggested, might “modify his present course of relatively uncompromising behavior” in order to facilitate relations with Mikhail Gorbachev, thus paving the way for a proposed papal visit to Lithuania and clearing the atmosphere for his third Polish pilgrimage in 1987.66 Seven years into the pontificate, the most astute of the Soviet-bloc intelligence agencies still didn’t understand their target.