The End and the Beginning

by George Weigel

  Critics also worried that the Pope’s longtime secretary and confidant, Archbishop Stanisław Dziwisz, had become, toward the end, a kind of vice-pope, a position for which there is no room in the Church. Archbishop Dziwisz was indeed the gatekeeper to John Paul II, but that was a role he had played since October 1978, and as he knew Karol Wojtyła’s mind well, he kept the papal apartment door open to an extraordinarily wide range of contacts, until it became physically impossible for the Pope to conduct meetings beyond those absolutely essential for the functioning of his office—which John Paul did until the very end. Dziwisz was as susceptible to misreading personalities as any man and no doubt made his share of mistakes in trusting those he ought not have trusted, including Marcial Maciel. The criticism that, in functioning as the link between an increasingly disabled Pope and the Curia, Dziwisz was acting on his own judgment rather than executing the Pope’s will was, however, rarely if ever heard—and with reason.

  The lot of a papal secretary after his master’s death is not, typically, a happy one, as the secretaries of Pius XII, John XXIII, and Paul VI quickly learned. That Stanisław Dziwisz retained the affection and respect of those senior churchmen with whom he had worked—and to whom he had had to say no on many occasions—testifies to the fact that his loyalty to John Paul II was well understood, as was his commitment to executing what he believed to be the Pope’s will, not his own.

  Did the munus regendi suffer in the last years of John Paul II because of his increasing physical debilitation? In some respects, yes. But that was often the result of incapacity and weakness on the part of the Pope’s subordinates, who ought to have had, when circumstances demanded it, the courage to lead according to the pattern he had set. In any event, the powerful evangelical witness John Paul gave in his last encyclical—his patient suffering and his holy death—was of such magnitude as to render the defects in the munus regendi over the past years of the pontificate of far less immediate consequence.

  The Unavoidable Dilemma. Shortly before John Paul II’s death, the distinguished German theologian Hermann Josef Pottmeyer wrote an intriguing essay defending John Paul II as an underappreciated reformer. John Paul’s exercise of the munus regendi, Pottmeyer argued, was an impressive, if not always successful, effort to hold together the twin imperatives of spiritual reform (centered on the notion of the Church as a communion of radically converted disciples) and shared responsibility (manifest in various forms of consultation and common deliberation within the Church, from the local parish council to the Synod of Bishops). Reflecting on John Paul’s reiteration of these two imperatives in the 2001 apostolic letter, Novo Millennio Ineunte, Pottmeyer offered an analysis of the unavoidable dilemma in which John Paul II found himself in the course of exercising the munus regendi. The German theologian’s observations are worthy of consideration by anyone attempting a serious appraisal of John Paul II’s successes and failures in governing the Catholic Church:

  By laying out his view of the mutual relationship between spiritual and structural reform, the Pope indicates a dilemma which all demands for structural reform, no matter how well founded, must confront. The dilemma is this. Without conversion to the communio mentality which the Pope describes, all forms of consultation and shared responsibility remain empty shells which can easily be manipulated to obtain goals that do not promote the Church’s welfare. At the same time, without such forms, the many gifts bestowed by God on the Church will remain either ineffective or of limited effect—which would also be a disservice to the Church’s welfare and to its mission. That is why the Pope demands from the Church’s pastors and faithful alike both spiritual and structural reform.… We cannot have reform of either kind without the other. This is a tremendous challenge to the Church. That the Pope does not consider this challenge hopeless is rooted in his remarkably strong faith that the Holy Spirit is at work in the Church and in each of us. In this, the Pope differs from many of his associates, and indeed from many of us.141

  THE CHRISTIAN DISCIPLE AS PROPHET OF A NEW HUMANISM

  The communications revolution of the late twentieth century and its effects on the human attention span have not been kind to large-scale public figures. One after another, men and women who were long accustomed to dominating the public square lost the public’s attention and were tuned out—and, in some cases, turned out. The exception to this law of declining public affection was Karol Wojtyła, Pope John Paul II. Unlike the men and women of the world of power with whom he dealt, John Paul’s ability to capture the public imagination—which had begun at his election and during his epic first pilgrimage to Poland—increased in the last dozen years of his pontificate and peaked during the period of his greatest physical decline. In the first half of the pontificate, John Paul II shared the global stage with other large personalities whose impact on history was considerable. After the publication of Crossing the Threshold of Hope in 1994, John Paul II held the world’s attention, and indeed became an ever greater focus of interest and concern, in a way that no other figure of his time managed. Why?

  It surely had something to do with his remarkable ability to embody paternity in a world yearning for the combination of manly strength and compassion that is true fatherhood lived well. Then there was his palpable respect for others, especially those others who did not share his convictions and commitments, which offered a model of genuine human encounter amidst intolerance and fanaticism. Many of the men and women of late modernity sensed a human and spiritual hollowness in their lives, and found in John Paul II a thoroughly modern man who could put contemporary searchers in touch with ancient spiritual and moral truths.

  A further reason for Karol Wojtyła’s unique capacity to hold the world’s attention for more than a quarter century may lie in his singular intuition into the central problem of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: a world striving for freedom had not learned to live freedom nobly because it had lost touch with the nobility of the human person, which consists in our ability to know, choose, and adhere to the truth.

  Wojtyła’s 1959 letter to the Vatican commission preparing the agenda for the Second Vatican Council was arguably the pivot on which his life turned, defining his public vocation and giving him the lever by which he moved history. In that letter, he located the deepest wound of modernity in a defective humanism that had left the world morally adrift and had created a global charnel house in which great hopes had been burnt to ashes. Life had become fragmented and atomized. The alienation experienced by the men and women of late modernity was far deeper and more complex than the alienation analyzed by Karl Marx: men and women had become alienated from their own interiority, having lost sight of a transcendent spiritual and moral horizon against which to live their lives. This deeper alienation had profound public consequences. Like his friend Henri de Lubac, Wojtyła was convinced that defective humanisms had created a situation in which men and women could only organize the world against each other.142 Ultramundane humanism inevitably became inhuman humanism.

  In the face of this crisis, Karol Wojtyła believed that the Catholic Church should bend its global mission toward the recovery, defense, and promotion of the inalienable dignity and value of every human person. That conviction was at the center of everything he proposed to the world during the twenty-six and a half years of his pontificate, both in his teaching and in his living. It was the focus of his anthropology and his ethics, including his sexual ethics. It informed his defense of the family and his development of a new Christian feminism. It shaped his social doctrine, including his defense of universal human rights, his philosophy of freedom, and his theory of democracy. It was at the foundation of his idea of culture as the chief dynamic of history. It enlivened his thinking and teaching about the Church itself. It defined the way he lived, and it defined the way he died.

  In the Lenten retreat he preached before Pope Paul VI and the Roman Curia in 1976, Karol Wojtyła told the assembled leaders of the Catholic Church that they were “in the front line
in a lively battle for the dignity of man.”143 When he assumed the supreme pastoral leadership of the Church as Pope John Paul II, he took command of the battle, called the Church out of the trenches, and spent two and a half decades leading Catholicism in a forthright engagement with the principal ideas contesting for the future of humanity: first, communism; later, pragmatism and utilitarianism, hedonism, secularism, and Islamism. In each instance, the struggle was for the dignity of the human person.

  For Karol Wojtyła, of course, the truth about the human person was ultimately revealed in Jesus Christ, in whom we discover the truth about the merciful Father and the truth about ourselves. What was so striking about the accomplishment of John Paul II was that this unshakable and distinctively Christian conviction set the platform on which he became a universal figure, a reference point for universal moral truths. Because he truly believed that Jesus Christ is the answer to the question that is every human life, and because he further believed that that question deserved the utmost respect, he could engage those who did not know Christ, who were hostile to Christ, or who had simply become bored with the claims of religion.

  He was sometimes called a prophet, because he seemed to have seen possibilities in history—such as the imminence of the communist crack-up—that escaped others. He was indeed a prophet. But the nature of his prophetic charism, which included a penetrating insight into historical circumstances and possibilities, had to do, not with clairvoyance, but with faith: faith in the dignity of the human person; faith in the human capacity to choose the good freely; faith, ultimately, in Christ. Karol Wojtyła, Pope John Paul II, became the prophet of a new and genuine humanism—and changed the world—because he was a disciple: a radically converted Christian whose unshakable faith in Christ gave birth to a world-changing hope for a new springtime of the human spirit.

  NOTES

  Prologue

  1. See George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II (New York: HarperCollins, 1999).

  2. Sapieha came from the Polish-Lithuanian nobility and was thus known as the “prince-archbishop.”

  3. Środowisko doesn’t translate very well. One possibility is “Environment.” Wojtyła always preferred the more humanistic “Milieu.”

  4. For an explanation of why Person and Act is preferable to the more familiar English-language title of Wojtyła’s work (The Acting Person), see Weigel, Witness to Hope, pp. 172–78.

  5. Author’s conversation with Pope John Paul II, March 20, 1997.

  Chapter One

  1. The story of Witold Pilecki and his persecution by Polish communists was not publicly revealed until the collapse of communism in 1989. Pilecki and others falsely condemned were legally rehabilitated by Poland’s first postcommunist government on October 1, 1990. In 1995, Witold Pilecki was posthumously awarded the Order of Polonia Restituta. A Polish Foundation, Fundacja Paradis Judaeorum, now works to have May 25, the day Pilecki was shot, declared a European Union holiday, “The Day of the Heroes of the Struggle with Totalitarianism.”

  An extensive literature on Pilecki now exists, and his remarkable Auschwitz report is available online. For links, see the entry “Witold Pilecki” at http://en.wikipedia.org.wiki/Witold_Pilecki; a brief article with details on Pilecki’s resistance activities may be found at http://www.polishresistance-ak.org/14%20Article.htm. See also Kamil Tchorek, “Double life of Witold Pilecki, the Auschwitz volunteer who uncovered Holocaust secrets,” Sunday Times, March 29, 2009.

  2. See Richard Pipes, ed., The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 95–115.

  3. On these three points, see Andrzej Paczkowski, The Spring Will Be Ours: Poland and the Poles from Occupation to Freedom, trans. Jane Cave (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), pp. vii–viii.

  4. On Poland being “completely changed” by World War II, see ibid., p. ix.

  5. Ibid., p. 38.

  6. Norman Davies reviews the arguments in Rising ’44: The Battle for Warsaw (New York: Viking, 2003), pp. 619ff.

  7. On this point, see Jan Nowak, Courier from Warsaw (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1982), pp. 450–52.

  8. See Paczkowski, The Spring Will Be Ours, pp. 161–62.

  9. Quoted in Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (New York: Basic Books, 2001), p. 3.

  10. See George Weigel, The Final Revolution: The Resistance Church and the Collapse of Communism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 4–12.

  11. See Pope John Paul II, Gift and Mystery: On the Fiftieth Anniversary of My Priestly Ordination (New York: Doubleday, 1996), pp. 34–36.

  12. See Marek Lasota, Donos na Wojtyła: Karol Wojtyła w teczkach bezpiecki (Kraków: Znak, 2006), chapter 1. See also Jan. M. Malecki, A History of Kraków for Everyone (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2008), p. 252.

  13. For a detailed account of Karol Wojtyła’s wartime years, see Weigel, Witness to Hope, chapter 2.

  14. See Paczkowski, The Spring Will Be Ours, p. 186.

  15. Malecki, A History of Kraków for Everyone, p. 253.

  16. The idiocy was neatly illustrated by a Soviet delegate to a cultural congress in Wrocław in 1948, who said that “If hyenas knew how to use a fountain-pen and jackals could type, they would write like T. S. Eliot” [cited in Paczkowski, The Spring Will Be Ours, p. 258].

  17. Ibid., p. 228.

  18. Ibid, p. 231.

  19. Ibid.

  20. Ibid., p. 237.

  21. Lasota, Donos na Wojtyłę, chapter 1.

  22. Paczkowski, The Spring Will Be Ours, p. 192.

  23. Author’s interview with T. David Curp, July 13, 2008. For further detail on some of these activities in the “recovered territories,” see Curp, A Clean Sweep? The Politics of Ethnic Cleansing in Western Poland, 1945–1960 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2006).

  24. See Paczkowski, The Spring Will Be Ours, p. 251.

  25. Author’s interview with Kazimierz Wóycicki, June 10, 1991.

  26. The full text may be found in Conscience and Captivity: Religion in Eastern Europe, ed. Janice Broun (Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1988), pp. 330–32.

  27. See ibid., pp. 333–34. Poland’s Catholic Church has long been accused of an untoward involvement in political affairs. Yet the 1953 bishops’ statement ended on a note that affirmed the institutional separation of Church and state and defended social pluralism:

  We are conscious of the special tasks and duties of the Catholic priest toward his country, and that is why we have often reminded our priests of them.… But we also demand, emphatically, that our priests should not be torn away from their religious duties; that they should not be drawn into political affairs which are alien to their vocations; that political pressure aimed at using them as instruments in the struggle of the State against the Church should be stopped [a clear reference to the work of the secret police]; and that they should not be forced to break the oath by which they pledged loyalty to the Church and their bishops. In short, in accord with the principle of the separation of Church and State, as guaranteed in our Constitution, the State must abstain from intruding in the religious, spiritual, and internal affairs of the Church. [Ibid.]

  28. See Weigel, The Final Revolution, pp. 110–11.

  29. For more on Father Karol Wojtyła’s work as curate in Niegowic, see Weigel, Witness to Hope, pp. 91–93.

  30. For further detail on this phase of Karol Wojtyła’s life and ministry, see ibid., chapter 3.

  31. Our God’s Brother was rejected by the Catholic literary monthly Znak and would not be published until 1979, when Tygodnik Powszechny ran the play in its entirety in its Christmas issue.

  Karol Wojtyła’s literary work in this period is discussed in more detail in ibid., chapter 3.

  32. See Lasota, Donos na Wojtyłę, chapter 2. Wojtyła had to resign from UNIA because its strict command structure an
d its equally strict rules of wartime confidentiality about personalities and operations were incompatible with a seminarian’s obligations to obey and speak freely to his religious superiors.

  33. See Małecki, A History of Kraków for Everyone, pp. 254–55.

  34. For a more detailed analysis of Wojtyła’s work on Scheler, see Weigel, Witness to Hope, chapter 4.

  35. Author’s interview with Stefan Swieżawski, April 7, 1997.

  36. The Lublin Committee’s formal name was the Polish Committee of National Liberation, Polski Komitet Wyzwolenia Narodowego. While technically a coalition of various political factions, the Lublin Committee was for all practical purposes an instrument of Soviet state power.

  37. Author’s interview with Stefan Swiezawski, April 7, 1997.

  38. For a more complete discussion of Wojtyła’s development as a philosopher and his work at KUL, see Weigel, Witness to Hope, chapter 4.

  39. For a developed discussion of the Law of the Gift from a later period of Wojtyła’s intellectual life, see Karol Wojtyła, “The Personal Structure of Self-Determination,” in Wojtyła, Person and Community: Selected Essays, trans. Theresa Sandok, O.F.M. (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), pp. 188–95.

  40. See Karol Wojtyła, Love and Responsibility, trans. H. T. Willetts (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993).

  41. For a more complete discussion of Wojtyła’s exposition of Catholic sexual ethics, see Weigel, Witness to Hope, chapter 4.

  42. See Malecki, A History of Kraków for Everyone, p. 267.