The first two summits between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, held in Geneva in November 1985 and in Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1986, produced little in the way of specific agreements, but signaled a marked improvement over the state of affairs a mere three years before, when Yuri Andropov was convinced that the American administration was plotting a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union to end the Cold War by force. John Paul II was briefed by U.S. officials after each summit, at Reagan’s order. The briefer in 1986 was General Edward Rowny, an American of Polish descent, who, while hurrying toward the Pope along a marble corridor, tripped over a step he hadn’t seen and had his fall broken by a senior cleric in a red zuchetto. As John Paul stepped forward to help the presidential envoy, the Pope couldn’t resist a joke: “Nice catch, for a cardinal.” The Pope was also aware that Rowny had been critical of the U.S. bishops’ pastoral letter on nuclear weapons, which had been issued in 1983. During their meeting, John Paul, with a twinkle in his eye, said, “Tell me, General, how are you getting along with your bishops in the United States?” Rowny replied, “Holy Father, I didn’t know they were my bishops. I thought they were your bishops.” John Paul smiled and conceded, “Bardzo dobrze [Very good]”67
General Wojciech Jaruzelski was not likely in a bantering mood when he came to the Vatican for an official visit on January 13, 1987; indeed, as a Swiss Guard assigned to the Polish leader’s escort recalled, the general was “visibly nervous.”68 That was not, however, the impression of his performance Jaruzelski tried to convey in a lengthy, classified report to the Polish Communist Party Politburo, which seems to have been written to convince Jaruzelski’s Polish comrades, and perhaps the comrades in Moscow as well, that he still had a firm grip on affairs. His rather clumsy attempt to propose a future of Polish church-state relations characterized by “ideological/philosophical competition, political coexistence, [and] social cooperation” could not have made much of an impression on John Paul II. The Pope, for his part, stressed Poland’s traditions of religious tolerance, citing the Reformation-era king Zygmunt August, who had famously said to his religiously contentious subjects, “I am not the king of your consciences.”
Some elements of Jaruzelski’s report were almost comical; he stressed that he had been given special treatment, which “set a precedent as far as visits of heads of state are concerned,” and seemed particularly struck that he had been accompanied by the Swiss Guard throughout the three-and-a-half-hour visit; in fact, he received the same welcome and escort as any other similarly situated leader. He made one of his clerical escorts, the prefect of the papal household, Dino Monduzzi, a cardinal more than a decade before John Paul II did. Yet there was also something almost plaintive about Jaruzelski’s conversation that day, at least as conveyed (probably unintentionally) by his report—his reference to his “dialogue” with John Paul II in 1983 (which had begun with the Pope suggesting that the general was running “one great concentration camp”) hints at a man reaching for a political lifeline.
Jaruzelski suggested that, since the Pope had last been in Poland, “society views the authorities with greater credibility,” and defended martial law as a necessity in creating the conditions for the possibility of reform. John Paul II, for his part, knew that both assertions were as untrue as Jaruzelski’s claim that “the healing process has … started in the very foundations of the economy”—which was, in fact, falling apart. Jaruzelski congratulated the Pope for suggesting, in the 1987 papal message for the January 1 World Day of Peace, that nonbelievers and heretics were “not excluded from the human family”—a strange, even bizarre, compliment, as it suggested that the opposite was once settled Catholic doctrine, changed by papal fiat. The general expressed a desire that the Polish episcopate speak more frequently on “the militarization of the world”—meaning, of course, the policies of the Reagan administration. Yet Jaruzelski also urged the Pope to keep those same Polish bishops in check, lest they “ruin opportunities” for the forthcoming third papal pilgrimage, scheduled for June, to result in more “positive relations between Church and State.” As if to underscore yet again that he had been the man driving the conversation and setting the terms of “dialogue,” General Jaruzelski ended his report to the Politburo by noting that “the talks were conducted in an atmosphere of deep mutual concern for the future of our country,” and that the “Pope’s conversations with the Chairman of the State Council [i.e., Jaruzelski] were sincere, courteous, and very respectful.”69
Wojciech Jaruzelski, whose views as reflected in this report suggest that he held to a kind of modified Brezhnev doctrine in terms of Poland’s future (“the state is ours, what’s yours we can discuss”), may have been sincere in his hope for a June 1987 papal visit that would lead to more positive church-state relations within the political status quo. John Paul II had something rather different in mind: he was going to Poland to lay the moral, spiritual, and conceptual foundations for his country’s transition to freedom, which he now seemed to believe could come far sooner than had once been thought possible.
Whatever Jaruzelski’s real intentions, however, getting Poland III done the way John Paul II wanted it done was not an easy business.
Barred from Gdańsk during Poland II, John Paul was determined to go to the birthplace of Solidarity in 1987. Gdańsk’s bishop, Tadeusz Gocłowski, a tenacious defender of Solidarity, was equally determined to get the Pope there. Some months before the visit, Gocłowski was in Rome to discuss plans, and had brought with him to dinner a personal letter, inviting the Pope to his city. Prior to the meal, the Pope’s secretary, Stanisław Dziwisz (who knew what Gocłowski wanted), said, with reference to the letter, “Wait until the right moment; I’ll tell you.” The fourth party to the dinner conversation was Bishop Bronisław Dąbrowski, the secretary of the Polish bishops conference; he was a man loyal to his early patron, Cardinal Wyszyński, but he was also of a diplomatic temperament, and as one of the Polish episcopate’s chief interlocutors with the Jaruzelski regime, he tried to avoid confrontations.
As the discussion unfolded, Dziwisz gave Gocłowski the signal, and the bishop of Gdańsk handed the letter across the dining room table to John Paul II, who said, “I know what’s in it; thank you.” Gocłowski replied, “We’ll be glad to welcome you.” But then Dąbrowski interjected, “It’s still impossible,” meaning the regime would never allow it. Silence ensued, for perhaps a minute, with the Pope looking down at the table. Then John Paul said, “If I can’t go to Gdańsk, I can’t go to Poland. If I don’t go to Gdańsk, I’ll just be an instrument of the communists.”70
So Gdańsk made it onto the program. But there were still arguments about what the Pope was to do there. Gocłowski’s plan was for the Pope to have four events: a meeting with workers; a meeting with the sick and their doctors; a meeting with young people (at Westerplattte, where World War II began); and a public event at the Three Crosses Monument to workers killed in 1970, built at the Lenin Shipyard in response to one of Solidarity’s August 1980 demands. The Polish bishops were nervous about this program, Gocłowski knew, and some were opposed to it, thinking it too provocative. So the bishop wrote another private letter to the Pope, reiterating the four points on the program; the letter came back, with “Yes—JPII” handwritten beside each point.71
Poland III, which began on June 8, 1987, took the Pope to Warsaw, Lublin, Tarnów, Kraków, Szczecin, Gdynia, Sopot, Częstochowa, and Łódź, in addition to Gdańsk. Throughout the country, for the first time since martial law, large numbers of white-and-red banners with the famous jumbly-letter Solidarność logo rose above the crowds, giving the papal events a festive and yet decidedly pointed visual framework. In Warsaw, John Paul II went to Żoliborz, where he knelt, prayed, and kissed the tomb of Father Jerzy Popiełuszko in the churchyard at St. Stanisław Kostka. In Gdańsk, as throughout the country, he used the once forbidden word “solidarity” time and again, telling hundreds of thousands in the banned union’s birthplace that “this word has been pr
onounced in a new way, and in a new context, here, and the world cannot forget it.”
The visit opened briskly, with the Pope reminding Wojciech Jaruzelski and his government of “the following pertinent words of the Second Vatican Council: ‘One must pay tribute to those nations whose systems permit the largest possible number of citizens to take part in public life in a climate of genuine freedom.’ ”72 Then, having said what he had to say publicly to the representatives of Poland’s morally bankrupt regime, the Pope turned his attention for the next six days to the Polish people and nation, with whom any real hope of reform, reconciliation, and national renewal lay. The visit was conducted in the context of a National Eucharistic Congress, which the Pope opened in Warsaw on June 8 and closed on June 14. The redemption wrought by Christ, John Paul preached, was a redemption “of the history of man and of the world.” Christ, present in the Holy Eucharist, made that redemption available to the men and women of today, and empowered them to build genuine human community out of liberated consciences, freed “from the inheritance of hatred and egoism.” Poles had something to conquer, but it was not the communist state, which John Paul sensed was collapsing of its own implausibility. No, what had to be conquered was a “way of seeing the world” in which God is a pious myth, and love, compassion, and tolerance are equated with impotence. Having broken free of those restraints on their humanity, the Polish people could reclaim Poland in true freedom. Ordaining fifty new priests in Lublin on June 9, John Paul sketched a vision of a new Poland in which these newly ordained men would “collaborate with lay people aware of their responsibility for the Church, and for a Christian form of life [in society].” By liberating within their people a new awareness of their inalienable human dignity, Poland’s new priests would be servants of “the truth that liberates every man.”
Living in the truth; living responsibly, living in solidarity, living “a more mature way of life”—John Paul relentlessly drove home the message that the change for which so many Poles longed had to be built on the revolution of conscience that had given birth to Solidarity seven years before. The Pope knew that, even when its external forms were gone, communism would leave a deadening residue in its wake: the conviction that men and women were not responsible for history, that what we call “history” is simply the exhaust fumes of impersonal economic and political processes. That attitude constituted another form of slavery, and the Pope was determined to challenge it.73
Wojciech Jaruzelski, whose minions had complained to Vatican officials about the Pope’s “tone” throughout the visit, was not happy with all this. He demanded an extra fifty-minute meeting with John Paul, and then crudely suggested (with the international press present) that, while the Pope would return to Rome with the country’s “image” in his heart, “you will not take with you the homeland’s real problems.”74 It was a startling performance, and to those with ears to hear, Jaruzelski sounded like a man who knew that the endgame had begun, that a “national compromise” was impossible, and that this was a game that would end when someone won, and someone else lost.
There were still a few moves left on the board before the endgame was completed. In November of 1987, after a large reorganization of ministries in the central government, Jaruzelski tried to hold a plebiscite on the country’s future; the opposition urged a boycott of the voting or a “no” vote on the government’s proposals, which duly failed to be ratified by a no longer cowed populace. Meanwhile, the resurrection of Solidarity continued, with Wałęsa in control and a new National Executive Commission established in October 1987. With the economy collapsing in late 1987 and the first half of 1988, things were unraveling at such a pace that even the regime realized that the end was at hand. Prodded by the Polish episcopate, which on August 26, 1988, urged “union pluralism,” the government conceded that talks with “representatives of a variety of social and occupational groups” were required. Thus on August 31, 1988, the eighth anniversary of the Gdańsk agreements that launched Solidarity, interior minister Czesław Kiszczak met with “that man,” the winner of the “so-called Peace Prize,” at the beginning of a process that led to the Round Table negotiations on Poland’s political future, which were conducted between February 6 and April 5, 1989. In the midst of these maneuvers, Edward Kotowski—PIETRO, perhaps the SB’s most effective Vatican operative, who had been back in Warsaw since 1983 and working at the government’s office for religious affairs—was used by Jaruzelski as a contact point with the Polish bishops; Kotowski, by his own account, pushed Jaruzelski to complete a deal by which the government would issue a decree recognizing the legal personality of the Church.75
(For his part, John Paul II was already, and typically, thinking ahead. When two old friends, Piotr and Teresa Malecki, visited the Pope at Castel Gandolfo in the late summer of 1988, Wujek posed a question: “What do you think will happen if Wałęsa wins?” The Maleckis, surprised, replied, “Wujek, that’s science fiction for us.” But John Paul pressed on: “Are you ready? Is Poland ready for a break?” and then talked at length about Poland’s postcommunist future.)76
The Round Table was no easy affair, for while the Solidarity side was united, the communist negotiators were fractured, with various factions seeking to get what they could out of the proceedings. Some were clearly taking advantage of this interim period to clear up the historical record—or, better, obliterate it; thus the TRIANGOLO records disappeared from the files of the SB while the Round Table was in progress.77 Nevertheless, after two months of work, an agreement was reached; it provided for “union pluralism,” for partially free elections to the Sejm, and for an open election to a newly created Senate.78
After a brisk campaign, in which Wałęsa did not run but was photographed with every Solidarity-backed candidate for his or her campaign materials—thus making unmistakably clear who was “one of ours”—the June 4 election was an unambiguous and overwhelming victory for Solidarity. Finally given a choice, Poland had said no to communism. That this “no” had much to do with the “yes” to solidarity and Solidarity preached and taught by John Paul II, no one doubted.
When a new government led by Catholic intellectual and veteran Solidarity adviser Tadeusz Mazowiecki took office in September, the SB was abolished. Nemesis had been defeated, in Poland.
SURRENDER
The wave that first crested in Poland in June 1989 soon swept over the rest of central and eastern Europe, with nonviolent transitions to various forms of democracy taking place throughout the fall of 1989, and one violent overthrow of communism in Romania. The last domino to fall in the Soviet external empire was Czechoslovakia, where a priest inspired by John Paul II, Father Václav Malý, served as a kind of master of ceremonies at the great public pro-democracy demonstrations in Wenceslas Square in November 1989. The nonagenarian cardinal, František Tomášek, cagily declined the government’s offer to serve as a mediator between the regime and the democratic opposition, firmly aligned the Church with the movement whose most visible leader was Václav Havel, and became the third great symbol of what history would know as the Velvet Revolution, along with Havel and the deposed leader of the 1968 Prague Spring, Alexander Dubček. The remarkable transformation of the cardinal and the Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia, which began in earnest when John Paul II greeted Tomášek in the Sistine Chapel on October 16, 1978, was complete.79 Then there was Russia, and the Baltics, and Ukraine—and the Soviet Union.
Karol Wojtyła had a deep appreciation of Russian theology and Orthodox culture. He had read the modern Russian theological masters seriously—Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergii Bulgakov, Simon Frank, Pavel Florensky, Georges Florovsky, and Vladimir Soloviev, among others.80 His pan-European view of the continent’s cultural history led him to speak frequently of Europe as a body with “two lungs”—Catholicism and Orthodoxy. The health of both was essential if Europe was to recover from the disasters of the twentieth century.
Thus the Pope did everything in his power to lift up Russian Orthodoxy, as Gorbachev’s
glasnost created new opportunities for open religious expression in the USSR. It was a delicate business. Throughout the 1980s, the Russian Orthodox leadership remained firmly in the control of the KGB.81 With rare exceptions such as Aleksandr Menn, the dissident Russian Orthodox clergy was anti-ecumenical, identifying “ecumenism” with the work of KGB-manipulated and KGB-owned Orthodox clergy at the World Council of Churches. Then there was the underground Greek Catholic Church in the Ukrainian SSR; it had been “dissolved” and forcibly merged into Orthodoxy at the illegal L’viv “Sobor” [Council] of 1946, thus creating the world’s largest illegal religious community and underground Church. Wojtyła had long been sympathetic to the Ukrainian Greek Catholic cause, which was an untouchable issue for Russian Orthodoxy for both ecclesiastical and political reasons; keeping faith with that long-standing commitment while seeking a bridge to Orthodoxy created endless difficulties.82 The Pope was also aware of Orthodox depredations and Soviet persecution of Catholics in Lithuania, where the resistance Church played a role similar to that of the Greek Catholics in Ukraine, serving as the repository of national identity in a situation in which the central political authority was determined to obliterate that identity.
Many of these issues came to a head in the planning for the celebration of the Millennium of Christianity among the eastern Slavs in 1988. The Ukrainians claimed the anniversary as their own, given that it was the baptism of Prince Vladimir and Princess Olga of Kievan ’Rus that was being commemorated. Russian Orthodoxy, for its part, was determined to claim the Millennium for itself, even as it held stubbornly to the position that the Greek Catholic Church of Ukraine did not exist. Had John Paul II’s wish to come to the Soviet Union for the Millennium celebrations been granted, he would have had to traverse an ecumenical and political minefield perhaps unprecedented in world Christianity. Patriarch Pimen, head of the Moscow Patriarchate and a man completely under the KGB’s thumb, refused to have John Paul in Russia for the occasion.83 So the Pope sent an exceptionally prestigious Vatican delegation, led by Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, the secretary of state, and including the papal spokesman Joaquín Navarro-Valls.84 The delegation met with Mikhail Gorbachev and delivered a personal letter from John Paul II. Gorbachev, for his part, sought to put Casaroli at ease by telling him that both he and foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze had been baptized and that his parents had kept an icon hidden behind the obligatory photo of Lenin in his childhood home.85
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