John Paul II’s hope animated his conviction that sanctity was within the reach of every baptized person who was willing to open himself or herself to the grace of God. Thus this hope was one of the sources of the extraordinary numbers of beatifications and canonizations over which he presided, a sometimes criticized aspect of the pontificate. Roman bureaucrats occasionally said, tartly or slyly, that these beatifications and canonizations were a matter of the Pope’s “wanting to take a new blessed in his pocket” on his travels. John Paul’s deeper intention, however, was to rekindle around the world a vibrant Christian hope in the possibility of sanctity, for his faith had taught him that the gifts of the Holy Spirit were not exhausted in that Upper Room in Jerusalem on the first Christian Pentecost.
The hope that grew from Karol Wojtyła’s faith also accounts for several other dimensions of his personality. It helps explain his intense interest in the person who was in front of him at any given moment—here was someone called to sanctity, someone for whom the Son of God had become incarnate, suffered, and died. It helps account for his conviction that life itself was sanctifying, especially that part of life that engaged the moral relationships between people (as his friend and fellow philosopher Karol Tarnowski once put it).18 That hope was another source of his remarkable calm amidst adversity, as well as of his willingness to let situations and decisions mature. Because his hope was grounded in an Easter faith that taught him that God’s purposes would, ultimately, be vindicated, he did not demand instant results from history: his hope informed the humility by which he was content to sow the seed, in the confidence that others would reap the harvest.
Karol Wojtyła’s hope also sheds light on his lifelong disregard of possessions and material comfort. As his hope was centered elsewhere, he was liberated from acquisitiveness, even as he was grateful for the generosity of the people of the Church that made it possible for him to live his ministerial life without regard for income.
In the wake of his death, it was far too soon to judge whether that hope for a “springtime of the human spirit” of which John Paul II spoke to the United Nations as well as his hope for a parallel “springtime of evangelization” in the life of the Catholic Church were shaped by too sanguine a reading of the possibilities present in the riptides of early twenty-first-century history. No man is an infallible judge of the future, though, and if John Paul’s hope led him to imagine possibilities incapable of actualization at the world’s turn into the third millennium, it must also be remembered that that same hope led him to discern possibilities for liberation in the contest with communism that others quite simply missed.
In a season of fear, John Paul challenged the Church and the world to courage with his signature antiphon, “Be not afraid!” In a moment of foreshortened horizons, he dared to challenge the world to hope. Both the courage and the hope were, in the life of Karol Wojtyła, built on faith. He was a man of hope, not because of a psychological tick or an invincible naïveté, but because the virtue of hope infused into him at his baptism grew throughout a life of metanoia, which was not without its moments of darkness.
Love
While references to St. Paul’s famous delineation of the characteristics of Christian love in 1 Corinthians 13 are not frequent in the preaching and writing of Karol Wojtyła, his interior life does seem to have been shaped by the “more excellent way” with which the apostle introduces his hymn to caritas. The spiritual director of Archbishop Sapieha’s underground seminary, Stanisław Smoleński, once described Wojtyła as a man who “loved easily,” and from an early age.19 As the Catholic Church understands it, caritas is the greatest of the theological virtues, and is both “the source and the goal” of the Christian practice of faith and hope.20 Examining the ways in which Karol Wojtyła exercised the virtue of Christian charity thus sheds light on many other aspects of his personality and his interior life.
High-energy individuals are often thought to be working out some psychological crotchet or meeting some inner “need.” Love, however, was the engine of Wojtyła’s astonishing energy, manifest in the relentless giving of himself that characterized his priesthood, his episcopacy, and his Petrine service as Bishop of Rome. Christian love is “harsh and dreadful,” according to Dorothy Day, cofounder of the Catholic Worker movement, because Christian love is unsparing; it demands everything of those who would practice it. John Paul II demonstrated what the immolation of self might mean in his embodiment of crucified love in the last months of his life. Yet Wojtyła’s personal pilgrimage also suggests that the other side of this “harsh and dreadful” love is joy—for, as Joaquín Navarro insisted, he was, to the end, un’uomo allegro, a cheerful man. No small part of that cheerfulness came from expending himself in the proclamation and demonstration of the “more excellent way.”
Caritas was also at the root of one of John Paul II’s most striking personal characteristics: his insatiable curiosity. To the end of his life, he always wanted to know what was happening—intellectually, culturally, ecclesiastically, and in the personal lives of his friends and those with whom he came into conversation. Again, this could be read psychologically as the turbulence of a restless mind. But to those who experienced the force of Wojtyła’s curiosity, it seemed something else entirely: a curiosity born of his commitment to introducing others to the “more excellent way,” or to deepening the experience of caritas for those already embarked on the journey of Christian faith. He had the good pastor’s memory for difficulties and problems; years after being asked to pray for someone, he would spontaneously ask, “How is.…?” Thus he continued to exercise a personal pastoral charity amidst all the other demands of his papal office.
The power of his love was notably displayed in his conversation in prison with Mehmet Ali Agca, the man who had tried to kill him. Agca had no serious religious formation and was deeply superstitious; someone had told him that he had shot the Pope on the feast day of Our Lady of Fátima; the veteran Turkish assassin was convinced that the “Goddess of Fátima” was very angry with him and was going to express that anger in a dramatic (and, for Agca, unpleasant) way. John Paul patiently explained that this was no “goddess,” but the Mother of Jesus, honored by Muslims, and that she, too, forgave him for what he had done. At the other end of the spectrum of his public life, it was also caritas that informed John Paul II’s passionate defense of the most defenseless of human beings: the unborn, the elderly, the severely handicapped. His caritas taught him that, as all lived within the ambit of divine love, all ought to belong within the human community of common care and protection. To narrow the boundaries of that community was wrong as a matter of justice, John Paul II believed; it was also a defect of love—and injustice wedded to a lack of charity would, he was persuaded, yield very unfortunate public consequences.
The character of John Paul II’s love is perhaps best described as “paternal”: through his love, he exercised forms of spiritual paternity that touched human lives in an astonishing variety of milieu. Here, his curiosity, his pastoral skill, and the instinct for fatherhood he had learned from his own father, the Captain, and from the unbroken prince, Cardinal Sapieha, intersected. As Stefan Sawicki, who knew Wojtyła at the Catholic University of Lublin, once put it, Wojtyła was “enormously interested in another man, not in the sense of prying into his personal life or in terms of trying to direct him; rather, he tried to accompany someone in their problems; he was open to revealing the humanity of another.”21 Karol Tarnowski put the same characteristic in a slightly different way: Wojtyła had the “faculty of entering into others’ experiences, even when he had not had the same experiences.” In another personality, not formed by caritas, this could have led to manipulation and dominance. Because he had been formed in caritas, which led him to respect the freedom of others, Wojtyła “never pressed.”22 Indeed, as Tarnowski recalled, Wojtyła the confessor “did not order or dictate; the stress was always on personal responsibility—‘you can decide because you are capable of understanding the truth.
’ ” Because the distinctive form of his caritas as a pastor was paternal, he “didn’t treat [adults] like children.”23 As his friend and fellow philosopher Józef Tischner once put it, it was all a matter of “meeting someone wisely”: meeting someone with the respect for another’s freedom that comes from the liberating experience of the love of God.24
Wojtyła’s concept of spiritual paternity was also shaped by his meditation on St. Joseph, the foster father of Jesus, about whom he wrote the 1989 apostolic exhortation Redemptoris Custos [Guardian of the Redeemer]. More than a decade later, in Alzatevi, andiamo!, John Paul II returned to the largely unknown figure of Joseph while making a striking theological observation about what the “guardian” had contributed to the human formation of Christ, and to the Christian understanding of God:
We know that Jesus addressed God with the word “Abba”—a loving, familiar word that would have been used by children in first-century Palestine when speaking to their fathers. Most probably Jesus, like other children, used this same word when speaking to Saint Joseph. Can any more be said about the mystery of human fatherhood? Jesus himself, as a man, experienced the fatherhood of God through the father-son relationship with Saint Joseph. This filial encounter with Joseph then fed into Our Lord’s revelation of the paternal name of God.… Christ in his divinity had his own experience of divine fatherhood and sonship within the Most Holy Trinity. In his humanity, he experienced sonship thanks to Saint Joseph.25
From the point of view of Karol Wojtyła’s Trinitarian faith, then, paternity was the source of all that is. He put that conviction most concisely in concluding his 1964 essay, “Reflections on Fatherhood”:
And in the end … everything else will turn out to be unimportant and inessential, except for this: father, child, love.
And then, looking at the simplest things, all of us will say: could we have not learned this long ago? Has this not always been embedded at the bottom of everything that is?26
Paternal love played itself out in history in what Karol Wojtyła came to understand as a cosmic drama, inside which the drama of each human life was enacted. While John Paul II clearly respected the work of the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, with its stress on drama as the “form” of the Christian life, John Paul came to his understanding of the drama of caritas by a route different from that of Balthasar. As Wojtyła’s former student Stanisław Grygiel put it, Balthasar’s understanding of drama as the “form” or gestalt of life came from reading dramatic literature. Wojtyła’s convictions about the dramatic structure of the human condition came from his life experiences (the deaths of his mother, brother, and father; the deaths and deportations of his friends during the war; the fate of his Jewish classmates); from his work in the theater; and from his pastoral experience with the drama of human love in others’ lives.27 Spiritual paternity thus came to mean, for him, accompanying another in the dramatic gap between the person I am today and the person my human and Christian destiny calls me to be.
The cosmic drama of divine love being played out in the human quest for a true and pure love could only be lived in freedom: this was one angle from which John Paul II saw the world and its story, and because he saw things that way, he was determined to be an agent of freedom, of authentic human liberation, for others. That dramatic optic on history and humanity also bred in him a deep respect for others who understood the springs of moral tension in the human drama, even if, like Václav Havel (a man John Paul II much admired), they were not believers in the sense of conventional Christian piety.28 He brought an understanding of the universality of the human drama to the Office of Peter; that office gave his instinct for paternity a wider geography, as it were. That John Paul could “connect” with people in an extraordinary diversity of cultural settings tells us something about the depth of that paternal instinct within him. That he took upon himself the burden of others’ pain in microcosm, in the daily prayer that was shaped by requests for his prayers from around the world, tells us something about the strength that came from his caritas, and his willingness to make himself vulnerable to others’ suffering.
A RICHNESS OF CHARACTER
Faith, hope, and love combined in Karol Wojtyła to form an exceptionally attractive human character and personality.
Contrary to the ill-informed (and in some instances, malicious) charges of some critics, he retained his intellectual curiosity throughout his life; in his ninth decade, he may have been the only man who ever read the French philosopher of dialogue, Emmanuel Levinas, for enjoyment.29 At the same time, he was an avid sportsman and, until his body failed him, he was not simply an observer: the man who had hiked, swam, skied, and kayaked all over Poland surreptitiously escaped from the Vatican to ski, once surprising Italian president Alessandro Pertini on the slopes of the Adamello Mountains (Pertini: “Compliments, Your Holiness, I must confess that I am amazed to see you move so skillfully in the snow.” John Paul II: “Mr. President, I am a son of the mountains.”)30
He was a man of disciplined personal habits, who cared little for food (except dessert) and lived in as simple a manner as possible within the renaissance grandeur of the Apostolic Palace. His discipline was also psychological. He was, if not indifferent to criticism, then at least emotionally immune to the slings and arrows of often critical commentary that whizzed past his head daily. Polish prime minister Hanna Suchocka, meeting John Paul in 1992, noted that she shared with the Pope the burden of being constantly criticized; the Pope waved the comment away, saying, “You should see what they say about me,” and then offered his sympathy and personal support.31 That same personal discipline was also a barrier against succumbing to the calculations that politicians and statesmen ordinarily make. No one, least of all John Paul II, would claim that his every decision as pope was correct. But it seems clear that his decision-making was also strikingly disinterested, with no concern for whatever trouble or criticism he might be bringing upon himself. In this respect, he was quite different from a predecessor he admired, Paul VI, who felt criticism keenly and thus worried constantly over his decisions.32
Karol Wojtyła cherished and nurtured his friendships while remaining a man of somewhat courtly manners; he rarely used the familiar form of the Polish personal pronoun, even with men and women he had known for decades. He was faithful to friends, even if their demands on him became burdensome, or, as with his former colleagues at Tygodnik Powszechny, their views veered off onto a track different from his own.33 Part of his gift for friendship (as for paternity) was his marked ability as a listener—as a young priest, according to veteran Środowisko member Stanisław Rybicki, he had “mastered the art of listening.”34 There were rituals to his friendships, as there are in all friendships; within the circle of Środowisko, some folk songs and ballads were understood to be Wujek’s only, and he sang them in all their verses with gusto. Every Christmas season, a phone call would be arranged with John Paul II at one end and a large gathering of several generations of Środowisko on the other—and, as they had done during the old days in Kraków, they sang Christmas carols together, for a considerable period of time. (Wojtyła had a remarkable memory for lyrics, and by the account of some very sober-minded academics and professionals, knew virtually every traditional Polish carol down to the last verse.) His personal favorites among Polish patriotic anthems were “Red Flowers on Monte Cassino” and “Legionowa,” the latter dating back to the heady first days of Polish independence in 1918.35
Wojtyła’s sense of humor, frequently displayed among clerical colleagues and Środowisko members alike during his Kraków years, remained robust during his papacy—and on more than one occasion turned on the papacy itself. Jerzy Stuhr, a distinguished Polish actor and later rector of the Kraków Academy for the Dramatic Arts, once found himself in Rome and was invited to dinner at the papal apartment. John Paul asked him about his present work and Stuhr replied that he was playing in a production of Adam Mickiewicz’s Forefathers’ Eve, arguably the most famous drama in the history of
Polish literature. John Paul said that it was a very important play indeed, and what part did Stuhr take? Stuhr, a bit embarrassed, said he regretted to report that he was playing Satan. To which John Paul replied, “Well, we don’t get to choose our roles, do we?”36
John Paul’s humor was not mean, but he could enjoy making the occasional jab that didn’t quite draw blood. At one of the first of the Castel Gandolfo humanities seminars he occasionally hosted during the summer months, the participants included the German theologian Johann Baptist Metz, sometimes considered the intellectual inspiration of liberation theology and a man firmly on the port side of Catholic intellectual life. On the seminar’s last day, several dozen distinguished scholars were shuffling around while lining up for a group picture, with no one wanting to look as if he was jockeying for position closer to the Pope. John Paul spotted Metz, and said in a loud voice, “You, Metz, a little closer to the Pope!” Everyone laughed, including Metz, who did as he was told.37
Another German Catholic personality came within range of the skirmishing fire of John Paul’s humor a bit later. In the aftermath of the Banco Ambrosiano scandal of the 1980s, in which the Vatican bank, the Institute for the Works of Religion, was deeply involved, the Pope summoned a group of fifteen cardinals, all presumably knowledgeable about finance, to the Vatican to sort through the mess. After a morning listening to a sorry tale of incompetence, perfidy, and bureaucratic self-preservation, John Paul decided that it was time for lunch and walked with the cardinals to the meal. Spotting the German Joachim Meisner, and remembering that Germans had often referred to shoddy goods or general incompetence during the 1970s as polnische Wirtschaft [Polish business], he walked up to Meisner and said, in German, “So, Eminence, do you think we have some polnische Wirtschaft in the Vatican finances?” Meisner was speechless. Others, seeing the laughter in the Pope’s eyes, asked the German what John Paul had said; Meisner replied that “it can’t be translated.”38
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