Lessons in Hope

by George Weigel

  Our lunch with Father Kolvenbach took an instructive turn when he spoke of the future of his own religious order, which John Paul II had taken into a kind of papal receivership a decade earlier. Musing on what was permanent and what was transitory in the Church, Kolvenbach said that what was utterly permanent was the triad bishops/priests/people; but it also seemed likely that there were permanent religious charisms or forms of consecrated life in the Church. There would always be something like the Benedictine form of religious life, he thought, and there seemed a certain permanence to the distinctively Dominican and Franciscan ways of living the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. But what powerfully struck Richard and me was that the twenty-eighth successor to St. Ignatius Loyola as General of the Society of Jesus didn’t argue that the Jesuit charism was a permanent fixture in the Church.

  The best stories of the week came from Cardinal Jozef Tomko, then running the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, which everyone in Rome still called by its pre–Vatican II name, Propaganda Fide (Propagation of the Faith), or simply “Prop.” Tomko was a Slovak and, in those days, part of the John Paul II inner circle. He told us that the emir of Dubai had told him that “John Paul II was chosen by Allah to be the figure shaping world history” at that moment. And then he said something arresting about John Paul’s management style and his confidence in Providence. They had been discussing some intractable problem or other, about which Tomko was evidently at his wit’s end. The Pope’s response? “Jozef, we’re just supposed to keep doing our jobs.”

  “DO YOU HAVE SOME POLISH ANCESTORS?”

  WARSAW, KRAKÓW, GDAŃSK, AND TARNÓW, JUNE 1991

  THE MOST OBVIOUS PLACE TO SEARCH FOR CLUES TO JOHN PAUL II’S role in the Revolution of 1989 was his native Poland, which I visited for the first time over twelve days in June 1991. The answer I got to my most important question—“When did the events that led to 1989 begin?”—was the same, no matter who I asked: Solidarity activist, government official, journalist, academic, priest, bishop, cardinal, housewife, believer, nonbeliever, liberal, conservative, or radical. Without exception, everyone said that “all of it” began ten years earlier, during John Paul II’s epic June 1979 pilgrimage to Poland, the Nine Days that changed the history of the twentieth century.

  There were certainly complexities in the great historical upheaval of 1989. It made a considerable difference to the way the 1980s worked out that Mikhail Gorbachev was running the Soviet Union, not one of his reptilian predecessors, who would have rolled tanks into Poland without a second thought. It made a great difference that Ronald Reagan was president of the United States, not Jimmy Carter, and that Margaret Thatcher, not James Callaghan or Michael Foot, was living at 10 Downing Street. By linking human rights activists on both sides of the iron curtain, the Helsinki process surely played its role, as did the first phase of the IT revolution and the new economics of globalization. Like any great historical inflection point, 1989 happened because of the confluence of multiple forces.

  Yet 1989 had a special human and moral texture that set it apart. The twentieth century’s normal method of effecting massive social change was violence and bloodletting on a colossal scale; 1989 was different. That difference, my Polish conversation partners confirmed in June 1991, was the John Paul II difference.

  During my year at the Woodrow Wilson Center, I had been fortunate to draw as my research assistant a Georgetown senior, Rodger Potocki, who later won a Kosciuszko Foundation fellowship for graduate study in Poland; there, he got a good grip on the language and met his future wife, whose parents lived in Nowa Huta, near Kraków. In 1991, Rodger was working part-time at the National Endowment for Democracy while doing his doctoral coursework at Georgetown, and he quickly accepted my suggestion that he accompany me to Poland as translator and guide.

  Our first three days in Warsaw coincided with the last three days of John Paul II’s fourth Polish pilgrimage, which taught me a lesson for the future. Rodger and I spent Sunday at the closing papal Mass in the city’s Agrykola Park and visiting the grave of the Solidarity martyr Father Jerzy Popiełuszko. The warm day involved a lot of walking and by the time we got back to our hotel we were parched, so I proposed watching the Pope’s departure on the TV in the hotel bar. But when I tried to order a beer, I was informed that the city was dry until the Pope left—a precaution taken by the local authorities to prevent things from getting out of hand among already amped-up Poles. My somewhat exaggerated plea for mercy—“I’m a friend of the Pope; he wants me to have a beer!”—got me the universal stare that says, “I’ve heard that one before,” and no sustenance. I resolved not to be caught in a similar situation again.

  Twenty months after Tadeusz Mazowiecki became Poland’s first noncommunist prime minister since World War II, Warsaw retained much of its communist-era feel. The city had been flattened after the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, and if there is anything worse than having your capital destroyed by Nazis, it’s having it rebuilt by communists and then allowed to crumble during decades of neglect. The city was very grey and the skyline was dominated by the Palace of Culture and Science, another massive, ugly Stalinist wedding cake; according to the oft-repeated local joke, the best view of the Polish capital was from inside the Palace. (Years later, it would be remarkably improved, even humanized, by the addition of Big Ben–like clocks to its central tower.) I wasn’t in Warsaw to admire or deplore Stalin-era architecture, though, but to deepen my understanding of how John Paul II triggered a revolution of conscience in his people, with epic consequences.

  The most moving moments in my first visit to Warsaw came at the Church of St. Stanisław Kostka in the Żoliborz neighborhood, just off Woodrow Wilson Square (a name recently restored from the communist-era “Square of the Defense of the Paris Commune”). It had been Fr. Popiełuszko’s parish, where his monthly “Mass for the Fatherland” had drawn thousands, and he was buried in the churchyard under a huge polished granite cross. The church was a shrine to Solidarity’s martyr-priest, a museum of the struggles of the martial law period in the early 1980s, and a poignant reminder of the truth that freedom is never free.

  When I first arrived in Kraków on June 11, 1991, I certainly didn’t know that I would spend, all told, more than two years of my life there. But the combination of that remarkable Polish hospitality (in this case, offered by Rodger Potocki’s in-laws, Fred and Danuta Chrobok), the charms of the city itself, and the intensity of my conversations with its people quickly turned the city John Paul II called “my beloved Kraków” into a place close to my own heart. Kraków then was not the vibrant, multicolored jewel it is in the twenty-first century: dirt and grime still muted the brightness of its Main Market Square; many people wore the plastic shoes that were an emblem of consumer life under communism; there was only one passable restaurant in the Old Town. But one could sense the architectural and decorative vitality waiting to be reborn, as the city’s people had been, in the first freedom they had enjoyed since 1939.

  My first conversation in Kraków was the most important. Cardinal Franciszek Macharski, Karol Wojtyła’s successor as archbishop of Poland’s cultural capital, welcomed me on June 12 to the archiepiscopal residence and offices at Franciszkańska 3, an address I would get to know well over the next two and a half decades. Macharski did not have the vibrant public personality of his predecessor, but that he came from a family of heroes became clear when he told me about his experiences on September 1, 1939, when he was twelve years old. His father was a prosperous merchant and the family lived in a flat above their store on the Rynek Głowny, Kraków’s Main Market Square. As Luftwaffe bombs fell on the city, Mr. Macharski telephoned the aged Archbishop Adam Stefan Sapieha and asked, “What are you going to do?” “I stay!” Archbishop Sapieha replied forcefully—at which point Macharski’s father turned to his family and said, “We stay, too!”

  Macharski had been a bold, courageous defender of Solidarity under martial law, which he understood as part of his job description. F
or centuries, he told me, the local bishop was the defensor civitatis, the ultimate defender of the city and its people against those who would deny them their liberties. It was a tradition born in the eleventh century with the martyr-bishop of the city, St. Stanisław, and it had continued through the centuries as Cracovian bishops defended their people against one invader, occupier, or partitioning power after another. Archbishop Sapieha, he said, had exemplfied this tradition for Wojtyła and Macharski when they were young men.

  So Kraków was especially well prepared by its history, he continued, to appreciate Vatican II’s Declaration on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis Humanae. Religious freedom makes everything else possible: it puts a check on state power because it declares the inner lives of men and women out-of-bounds to state coercion. The cardinal also insisted that Dignitatis Humanae led to the kind of Church that Karol Wojtyła fostered in Kraków: an open Church that could, as Macharski put it, “open its space” to everyone, believer or unbeliever, who was “honest to man.” That openness was the tool with which Wojtyła built coalitions that proved crucial in stitching together the national movement of social renewal called Solidarność.

  Two days later, I met in the offices of Tygodnik Powszechny (Universal Weekly) with its longtime editor, Jerzy Turowicz, and Father Józef Tischner, the distinguished Polish philosopher who, like Turowicz, was a good friend and longtime collaborator of Karol Wojtyła.

  Under communism, Turowicz was responsible for the only reliable newspaper in the country, and Tygodnik Powszechny became an outstanding example of Catholic journalism, a platform for anyone willing to think outside the box of communist orthodoxy. It was also the paper in which a young priest named Wojtyła began to flex his wings as a commentator and to publish his poems pseudonymously. It was Turowicz who taught me that Karol Wojtyła, John Paul II, had become a European and a world figure because he was a Pole and a Cracovian. No one is a “European” in the “abstract,” Turowicz insisted; you become a “European” through your roots in one of the national cultures that make up the European heritage. John Paul II embodied universal truths about the human person he had learned from being a Cracovian: the son of a city of encounter and genuine pluralism, a city of cultures in conversation. It was a striking comment from the editor whose columnist had become pope, and a keen insight into what made Kraków, which made the man who became John Paul II, different.

  Tischner, a big, bluff son of the Górale, the Polish highlanders of the Tatra Mountains, combined robust Góral humor with a first-rate philosophical mind. His sermon at the first Mass of the first Solidarity Congress in Gdańsk in September 1981 was one of the greatest homilies of the twentieth century, and it was Tischner who coined the finest image of Solidarity: “a huge forest planted by awakened consciences.”Communism, he insisted, was a culture of lawlessness masquerading behind a façade of legality. The façade began to crack when, during John Paul II’s June 1979 pilgrimage, people said to themselves and to each other, “Let’s stop lying,” meaning “Let’s stop pretending to believe what ‘they’ tell us is true.” It was John Paul II, Tischner said, who had shown people that living in the truth was a “new way of being a partisan.” Poles had long been fierce partisan fighters; now, Tischner suggested, they had learned that there were ways to be a partisan that involved not swords and rifles but the weapons of the human spirit.

  On Sunday afternoon, June 16, another Polish priest, Father Kazimierz Jancarz, gave me a lesson in how hope was kept alive at the grassroots level in the 1980s, during and after martial law. We met at his parish, the Church of St. Maximilian Kolbe in the Mistrzejowice neighborhood of Nowa Huta. Fr. Jancarz described himself as “just a proletarian” and in fact was built like the New York Yankees’ fearsome closer Goose Gossage. Under his leadership, the Kolbe parish in Nowa Huta became a piece of free Poland when the regime tried to stamp out Solidarity and what it represented: free space for free associations of free people who could think freely about themselves and the future. An underground university was formed for the steelworkers, the professors coming from the Jagiellonian University and the Kraków Polytechnic; some four hundred workers “graduated” after four semesters (including their “proletarian” parish priest). “Evenings of Polish culture”—political cabarets, theatrical performances, musical programs—replicated Karol Wojtyła’s own experience in the cultural resistance during World War II: people in touch with their own culture can never be completely occupied, whether by a Nazi occupation force or by communist usurpers.

  It was all exhilarating, meeting these people who had made a different kind of revolution, and I must have bubbled over with stories when Rodger Potocki and I returned to his in-laws’ apartment in Nowa Huta at night to review the day. Living in one of those great apartment blocks in the steel-milling town built on the eastern outskirts of Kraków as Poland’s first “city without God” was itself an education. The blocks had been organized to facilitate secret police surveillance: there was no access from one apartment to another along the long axis of the building; if you wanted to visit a neighbor, you had to go downstairs, exit the building, and enter by another door, all the while being watched by the ubiquitous ferrets. Still, Fred and Danuta Chrobok had made themselves a handsome and friendly apartment, and one night, over vodka and steak tartare, Fred said to me, “Do you have some Polish ancestors?” And while the family tree didn’t yield a positive answer to Fred’s query, I decided that, as old-school Thomists might say, I had a “connatural” affinity for Poland and Poles.

  A brief visit to Gdańsk, the Baltic seaport where Solidarity, the “independent, self-governing trade union,” was born, introduced me to its intelligent and open bishop, Tadeusz Gocłowski, another great defender of Solidarity during its hardest years. Like Cardinal Macharski, Gocłowski was noticeably free of the clericalism that is not unknown among Polish bishops, and he spoke without hesitation about what the Church had gotten right, and what it had gotten not-so-right, during Solidarity’s crisis years and in the immediate postcommunist period.

  His cathedral in Oliwa boasted a most remarkable organ, its bellows animating a large cast of mobile angels holding stars, suns, trumpets, and bells in addition to the pipes, but impressive as that organ was, it was the bishop’s linkage between 1989 and Vatican II that made a lasting contribution to my work on John Paul II. Like Cardinal Macharski, Gocłowski stressed the importance of Vatican II’s defense of religious freedom as a fundamental human right. But he also underscored the importance of the Council’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes), on which Karol Wojtyła had worked to great effect. It was Gaudium et Spes, Gocłowski said, that defined an “integral humanism” across the fields of politics, economics, and culture. And it was that all-in, Christ-centered humanism that gave the Church the weapon it needed to resist what he called “administrative atheism”: not the atheism of personal intellectual conviction but a state-enforced atheism that sought to occupy every available space in society.

  Two days in Tarnów initiated my friendship with Józef Życiński, the youngest bishop in Poland and a man deeply versed in the philosophy of science, who was full of penetrating observations. Życiński, a new type of Polish prelate, nonetheless he went out of his way to praise the old primate, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński, for deliberately “maintaining the spiritual tension” in Polish society under communism, by which he meant stirring things up when the dead weight of the regime might have proven crushing. Like Cardinal Macharski in Kraków, Życiński proudly showed me the place in his home’s tile stove where one of many secret police bugs had been hidden and told me how the ferrets tried to recruit his predecessor’s driver as an informant.

  There were other memorable moments during that first visit to Poland: praying at the cell in Auschwitz where Maximilian Kolbe died; visiting the “Wojtyła sites” in Kraków, including the St. Leonard Crypt of Wawel Cathedral, where the young priest the world would know as John Paul II said his first Masses on November 2,
1946; making a first pilgrimage to the Black Madonna of Częstochowa, who would look over my desk for the next quarter century. But in addition to confirming my intuition that the Polish pope had played a large, if largely unrecognized, role in the Revolution of 1989, June 1991 in Poland taught me more about communism and how it had “worked” (and not worked) than I had learned from years of study and human rights activism.

  I had read and reread Václav Havel’s brilliant essay “The Power of the Powerless,” and I knew, conceptually, that communism was a “culture of the lie” that could be resisted by people willing to risk living in the truth. To actually meet such people, though, made for a different kind of learning. An avid reader of history since I was a boy, I was now in conversation with people who had made history, and in a singular way: for had there been any other such moment in recent centuries when the good guys won cleanly and against great odds?

  June 1991 also set me on a program of intense reading in Polish history and the classics of Polish literature. I began that crash course because sparks of intellectual and cultural curiosity were struck in my mind during twelve remarkable days. Those sparks would be fanned into a passion that would take me even deeper into Poland, and even deeper into the life of its greatest son.