John Paul II could not come to Moscow, but Gorbachev could come to Rome and did so on December 1, 1989. Seemingly nervous at the beginning of his day at the Vatican, he was sufficiently relaxed at the end of his ninety-minute private conversation with John Paul II that he could introduce his wife to the Pope in glowing terms: “Raisa Maximovna, I have the honor to introduce the highest moral authority on earth … and he’s Slavic, like us!”86
It was not Canossa, with a repentant Holy Roman Emperor standing in the snow, craving a papal absolution. But it was, symbolically, a moment of surrender. The communist war against Karol Wojtyła, which had been prosecuted with an array of weapons for more than four decades, was over. Wojtyła had won, not only by playing an effective defense but by deploying an offense whose power communism simply could not match. For the power of Wojtyła’s resistance was a moral power—and this was, at bottom, a war over the truth about man and the truth about the good.
John Paul II would never think of his triumph as a personal victory. Nor would he have regarded his struggle against communism as essentially political in character. Zbigniew Brzeziński understood that John Paul’s authority derived from the depth of his faith, and from the intelligence with which he had brought that faith to maturity and used it as an optic through which to understand the world. Yet Brzeziński could write in his memoirs of being impressed, after a 1980 Vatican conversation, with “how political the Pope’s thinking was.”87 Henry Kissinger had a different recollection of a conversation with John Paul II, which perhaps gets closer to the mark in grasping the essence of the Pope’s politics, such as they were.
Shortly after the first papal pilgrimage to the United States in October 1979, Kissinger was in Rome and met with the Pope. John Paul asked how the former secretary of state thought the American visit had gone. Kissinger replied that it was not for him, a non-Catholic, to analyze or comment on the visit, but that, as a political man, he couldn’t help noticing that the Pope had chosen themes for his homilies that were guaranteed to create some friction with his primary constituency, the Catholics of the United States. The Pope replied by saying that he was deeply concerned about the degree to which the Church had become politicized, with the lines blurred in Latin America between Catholicism and Marxism. “The Church is in the business of truth,” John Paul concluded, and if he adapted his message to please every different audience, Catholicism would end up as just another social service agency. Kissinger was impressed, and later remembered thinking that “no politician would ever say such a thing.”88
Perhaps, however, there was an exception to that rule: a politician who grasped the moral core of John Paul II’s approach to the affairs of the world, the moral passion that shaped his strategy throughout his long battle against communism, and the convictions that forged the unique weapons he deployed to such effect in the last decade of that battle. If so, that politician was Václav Havel, suddenly the president of a free and democratic Czechoslovakia, who welcomed John Paul II to Prague on April 21, 1990:
I am not sure that I know what a miracle is. In spite of this, I dare say that, at this moment, I am participating in a miracle: the man who six months ago was arrested as an enemy of the State stands here today as the President of that State, and bids welcome to the first Pontiff in the history of the Catholic Church to set foot in this land.
I am not sure that I know what a miracle is. In spite of this, I dare say that this afternoon I shall participate in a miracle: in the same place where, five months ago, on the day in which we rejoiced over the canonization of Agnes of Bohemia, when the future of our Country was decided, today the head of the Catholic Church will celebrate Mass and probably thank our saint for her intercession before him who holds in his hand the inscrutable course of all things.
I am not sure that I know what a miracle is. In spite of this I dare say that at this moment I am participating in a miracle: in a country devastated by the ideology of hatred, the messenger of love has arrived; in a country devastated by the government of the ignorant, the living symbol of culture has arrived; in a country which until a short time ago was devastated by the idea of confrontation and division in the world, the messenger of peace, dialogue, mutual tolerance, esteem and calm understanding, the messenger of fraternal unity in diversity has arrived.
During these long decades, the Spirit was banished from our country. I have the honor of witnessing the moment in which its soil is kissed by the apostle of spirituality.89
THE DIFFERENCE THE OSTPOLITIK DID, AND DID NOT, MAKE
Cardinal Agostino Casaroli once said, rather wistfully, “I would like to help this pope but I find him so different.”90 As John Paul’s spokesman, Joaquín Navarro-Valls, noted afterward, the “difference” was the difference between a man who had been a Church bureaucrat and diplomat for fifty years (albeit an exceedingly competent one) and a man from the front lines.91 The man from the front lines, however, recognized the skills that Casaroli brought to the Holy See’s diplomacy, even if Casaroli could never quite bring himself to acknowledge that this “different” pope had a deeper, more penetrating, and, ultimately, more realistic view of the European communist project than he did. John Paul II took full advantage of Casaroli’s skills; promoting the author of the Ostpolitik of Paul VI to the second-highest position in the central bureaucratic leadership of the Catholic Church also gave needed cover to a more assertive papal stance on human rights and religious freedom. That did not mean, however, that the difference Casaroli felt was not real. It was. John Paul II believed himself to be the voice of the voiceless, as he made clear at Assisi shortly after his election, when he said that the Church of Silence was no longer silent because it spoke with his voice. Cardinal Casaroli sympathized with the plight of the voices that had previously had no voice; yet, until the end, he remained convinced that their plight could be quietly resolved with governments, without much reference to the voices that had been silenced.
The Ostpolitik and Agostino Casaroli created diplomatic openings and contacts that were useful during the last decade of Karol Wojtyła’s struggle against communism; they added, as it were, another string to his bow. But it is not easy to see that the old Ostpolitik was successful beyond that—beyond being an accompaniment, and a minor one at that, to John Paul II’s moral revolution and its effects in central and eastern Europe.
Cardinal Miloslav Vlk, a former underground priest in Czechoslovakia compelled to work as a window washer in order to avoid arrest as a vagrant, believed that the old Ostpolitik was designed and executed by men who didn’t understand communism because they hadn’t lived it. And because they didn’t understand it, they made serious strategic and tactical errors. As Vlk once put it, speaking of Czechoslovakia, Pope Paul VI “saw a Church without bishops” and tried to make deals with the government to rectify that; “he ended up with bishops who were puppets.”92 The same could be said for Hungary.
Jan Nowak, who also knew communism from the inside and who played a major role in supporting the Solidarity revolution from abroad (as he had in keeping Poles informed by his prior work at Radio Free Europe), liked Cardinal Casaroli personally while disagreeing with his analysis of the situation in east central Europe. Casaroli, according to Nowak, believed that the martyrdoms in the region in the immediate postwar period, the inability of Cardinal Mindszenty to function while living as a refugee in the American Embassy in Budapest, and the similar disempowerment of the interned Archbishop Josef Beran in Czechoslovakia all meant that the underground Church, the resistance Church, was wrong, both tactically and, over the long haul, strategically. Casaroli also shared Paul VI’s concern that an underground Catholicism cut off from Rome would lead to sectarianism, deviations, and various ecclesial corruptions. Nowak disagreed and once discussed the question with John Paul II, who took the view that Nowak was right and Casaroli mistaken.93
Not infrequently (and not surprisingly), the most bitter criticisms of the old Ostpolitik came from advocates of the Greek Catholic Church in Ukrai
ne, who often believed that the Curia and its diplomats were hopelessly naive about the Soviet Union and about the Russian Orthodox Church. Fiercely loyal Greek Catholics charged that the Vatican’s efforts at a “dialogue of love” with Russian Orthodoxy meant, in practice, a “dialogue of love” with the KGB, which was clearly impossible, and just as clearly counterproductive. As one of those passionate Ukrainians, a distinguished historian, once said, “Imagine Christians being torn to pieces by wild beasts while St. Peter conducts a ‘dialogue of love’ with Nero”—a dramatic, and perhaps exaggerated, image, but one that came easily to the minds of many in the world’s largest illegal Church, most of whose leaders had perished in the Gulag. As for the more sophisticated analysts, they were no less critical of what they thought was the tactical ineptness of the old Ostpolitik: thus when Paul VI agreed that Ukrainian Greek Catholics without churches of their own could take holy communion in Russian Orthodox churches, he seemed unaware that the Orthodox would take this as an admission that the Greek Catholics (whose existence they continued to deny as a legal matter) didn’t really need their own churches, didn’t really need to celebrate Mass in the forests clandestinely, didn’t really need their own (clandestinely educated and ordained) clergy. Given the intransigence of Russian Orthodoxy on a full array of ecumenical issues during the pontificate of John Paul II, this is not an easy critique to rebut.94
Even as they miscalculated the degree to which ecumenical accommodation and a distancing of the Vatican from underground Catholic Churches could eviscerate morale and witness among Catholics determined to hold fast to their faith against communist persecution, the practitioners of the Casaroli Ostpolitik seem to have badly overestimated both the staying power of communism and the Ostpolitik’s role in preparing the ground for the Revolution of 1989 in central and eastern Europe and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Thus Cardinal Casaroli’s claim that Poland was “ripe” in 1978 and 1979 was true; but that ripening had virtually nothing to do with the Ostpolitik, for Poland was the country least affected by Casaroli’s initiatives and most resistant to some of them.95
The extraordinary efforts made by Soviet and Warsaw Pact intelligence agencies to penetrate the Vatican, suborn and recruit Vatican officials, and thereby impede Church initiatives coincided precisely with the high point of Casaroli’s Ostpolitik; of this there can be no question. The more accommodating the Holy See was, the more aggressive the KGB, the SB, the Stasi, Hungarian intelligence, Bulgarian intelligence, and the rest of the sordid lot became. Both the Italianate institutional culture of the Roman Curia and the innate aversion of diplomats to confrontation led to a situation in which those responsible for the Ostpolitik never grasped what Karol Wojtyła understood in Kraków: that it was “us” and “them,” all the time; that it was, in fact, all war, all the time.96 This was not an adjudicable struggle of the sort to which diplomats were accustomed. Somebody was going to win, and somebody was going to lose. On being elected pope, John Paul II did not believe that the day was close at hand when communism would lose. But he did understand the nature of the confrontation, and he was convinced that a forthright moral challenge to the communist culture of the lie was the most effective response to it—because it was the truest response to it.
There is no evidence that the penetration of the Vatican by Warsaw Pact intelligence services led to any alterations in John Paul II’s strategy or tactics. The Pope’s “Polish policy” between his election and the completion of the Solidarity Revolution in 1989 was run out of the papal apartment, not out of the Vatican’s Secretariat of State—in part because John Paul thought he understood the situation better, and in part, it seems likely, because of concerns that the Secretariat of State was not adept at counterintelligence. The vast expenditure of communist intelligence resources and personnel on espionage in the Vatican of John Paul II did nothing to impede the Pope; it did much to underscore the naïveté of the architects of the Ostpolitik, and to highlight the venality of more than a handful of second-, third-, and fourth-tier clerics in the employ of the Holy See.
One more point about the Ostpolitik should be noted. In the immediate postwar period, communist strategy aimed to separate local Catholic Churches from Rome. This was, for example, the ploy in Yugoslavia, and the refusal of Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac to go along with “secession” and create a Yugoslav Catholic Church “independent” from Rome led to his show trial, imprisonment, internment, and ultimately his death. Perhaps the most unfortunate effect of the Ostpolitik was that it created a situation in which the Soviet Union and its satellites could cleverly reverse this strategy, using Rome—and pressure from Vatican diplomacy—against local Catholic Churches (like those in Czechoslovakia and Hungary) that had resisted the “secession” approach.
The Ostpolitik of Agostino Casaroli and Pope Paul VI was the Vatican’s version of détente: a strategy of engagement and dialogue with communism that promised much and delivered little, primarily because the proposed dialogue partner was not interested in dialogue. The Ostpolitik did not even manage to “save what was savable” in Czechoslovakia and Hungary; indeed, in those situations, it inadvertently made matters worse, just as détente did little to strengthen the hand of dissidents and human rights activists behind the Iron Curtain. Détente did help make possible the 1975 Helsinki Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, which then Archbishop Casaroli signed for the Holy See. And the CSCE’s “Basket Three” human rights provisions did help keep Western public opinion focused on the plight of human rights activists in communist countries who appealed to the Helsinki Accords for legitimation and protection.97 But it took leaders like President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II—the men who deliberately moved beyond détente and beyond the Ostpolitik—to give those voices and those appeals for freedom global reach, and global effect.
Thus Henry Kissinger’s verdict on the negotiations that produced the Helsinki Accords might well be applied to the diplomacy of the Vatican Ostpolitik between 1963 and 1978: “Rarely has a diplomatic process so illuminated the limitations of human foresight.”98
THE INDISPENSABLE MAN?
The notion that John Paul II played a pivotal role in the collapse of European communism was largely missed during and immediately after the Revolution of 1989 and the demise of the Soviet Union—a myopia presaged in the New York Times editorial of June 5, 1979, which declared that, while John Paul’s Nine Days (then under way) would “reinvigorate and inspire the Roman Catholic Church in Poland,” the Pope’s pilgrimage certainly did not “threaten the political order of the nation or of Eastern Europe.”99
Twenty-five years later, the true picture was coming into sharper focus. John Lewis Gaddis of Yale, America’s premier historian of the Cold War and a man with no Catholic agenda to advance, was unambiguous in his judgment on the matter: “When John Paul II kissed the ground at the Warsaw airport on June 2, 1979, he began the process by which communism in Poland—and ultimately everywhere—would come to an end.”100 Gaddis was not, of course, suggesting that John Paul was alone in bringing communism to its knees; rather, John Paul II was one of a number of leaders with the insight and courage to see a new situation and seize the opportunities inherent in it. For it was not until the early 1980s, Gaddis wrote,
that the material forms of power upon which the United States, the Soviet Union, and their allies had lavished so much attention for so long—the nuclear weapons and missiles, the conventional military forces, the intelligence establishments, the military-industrial complexes, the propaganda machines—began to lose their potency. Real power rested, during the final decade of the Cold War, with leaders like John Paul II whose mastery of intangibles—of such qualities as courage, eloquence, imagination, determination, and faith—allowed them to expose disparities between what people believed and the systems under which the Cold War obliged them to live. The gaps were most glaring in the Marxist-Leninist world: so much so that when fully revealed there was no way to close them other than t
o dismantle communism itself, and thereby end the Cold War.101
Gaddis’s conclusion—that “it took visionaries—saboteurs of the status quo—to widen the range of historical possibility”102—is neatly put, and applies to any number of figures during the 1980s, among whom he lists, in addition to the Pope, Lech Wałęsa, Margaret Thatcher, Deng Xiaoping, Ronald Reagan, and Mikhail Gorbachev. The latter two bear a moment’s reflection, in their relationship to John Paul II.
Ronald Reagan was smitten with Poland, with Polish courage, and with the Polish pope. He clearly understood that he and John Paul II had their separate and independent spheres of authority and influence, different sets of instruments at their disposal, and differing degrees of room for maneuvering. Yet Reagan also saw his work and the Pope’s during the 1980s as proceeding along parallel tracks toward a common goal: the defeat of communism and the victory of freedom. Both Reagan and John Paul II were regularly dismissed as “conservative” by commentators for whom that description was not meant as a compliment, but as a polite placeholder for “reactionary” The truth of the matter was that both men were radicals, and in two important senses: they both had a clear vision of the roots of the problem—that is, the communist lie about the human person and human aspirations—and they both disdained liberal shibboleths about “stability,” “détente,” and arms “control,” preferring change, liberation, and real disarmament.103
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