Lessons in Hope

by George Weigel

  PILSNER ON TAP AND MARTYR-CONFESSORS

  PRAGUE AND BRATISLAVA, OCTOBER 1991

  IN ROME IN MAY 1991, JOAQUÍN NAVARRO-VALLS SUGGESTED THAT, when it came time to explore the Czechoslovak dimension of John Paul II’s effect on 1989, I get in touch with Father Tomáš Halík, the secretary of the Czechoslovak bishops’ conference, whom Joaquín described as an “archetypal figure”: a priest ordained underground who had carried on a clandestine ministry for years before playing wordsmith for the octogenarian Cardinal František Tomášek during the Velvet Revolution of November–December 1989. I wrote Fr. Halík, explaining my project; he arranged for me to stay at the Prague seminary in October and indicated that he would be on hand to help arrange my interviews.

  But when I arrived in Prague on October 18, 1991, there was no Fr. Halík, who had decamped for a few months to Rome. A driver from the bishops’ conference met me, waving a Vatican flag; the ride into town was subdued, as we didn’t share a word in common. The seminary had recently been recovered from the communists, who had turned it into a publication house for propaganda materials. I was given a large three-room suite, far larger than I needed, for the comrades had taken good care of themselves; but while its people were immensely hospitable, the seminary was desperately poor.

  The rector, Father Karel Pilík, greeted me, saw me to the suite, and said he’d come and fetch me for dinner. Our conversation on the way to the meal was a bit stilted, as he had no English and my high school conversational French proved less than serviceable in carrying on a conversation in his one Western European language. I was seated at the head table with the faculty, many of them elderly men recently released from work camps, including uranium mines. They could not have been friendlier, and the seminarians were told that I was an honored guest who had come to Prague to learn their Church’s story and then tell it to the West.

  Then came the “honor,” as I was presented with a platter of carp heads—not the whole fish, just the heads—from which dull, piscine eyes stared out at me. It was, I deduced, a local delicacy, and these good men were trying in their straitened circumstances to be generous. So I picked at the heads during the meal, while trying to carry on some sort of conversation in very bad French and remnants of Latin—and immediately repaired afterwards to a nearby hotel bar; there were ample bar snacks, and the draft beers included Pilsner Urquell and real Czech Budějovický Budvar (not to be confused with insipid American Budweiser). That bar became my evening refectory over the next nine days, and I lost a fair amount of weight on what I came to call the “Prague seminary diet.”

  My linguistic luck improved the next day when, looking for help in the offices of the Czechoslovak bishops’ conference (also housed in the seminary), I had another coincidental/providential moment. First, I ran into a man Halík had recommended I see, Václav Vaško, the premier historian of the persecuted Church in communist-run Czechoslovakia; then I bumped into Ondřej Fischer, a seminarian with good English. Vaško gave me a multihour crash course in the history he knew so well, and Fischer became my tour guide in Prague. I was also fortunate in meeting, at the English-language Sunday Mass at St. Joseph’s Church, the secretary of the new Vatican embassy to Czechoslovakia, Monsignor Thomas Gullickson, a son of South Dakota who helped arrange meetings for me and got me into a Mass and reception that marked the anniversary of John Paul II’s visit to Prague. There, I met and arranged interviews with a remarkable cast of characters who had played large roles in the Catholic part of the Velvet Revolution.

  In the early Church, persecuted (and often tortured) Christians who survived their ordeals were known as “martyr-confessors,” and over a week of conversations I met such men and women in Prague and Bratislava: modern martyr-confessors, including underground priests and bishops, who had all done serious jail or labor-camp time. Their stories of John Paul II’s impact on them in the 1980s deepened my conviction that the Ostpolitik of Pope Paul VI was a well-intentioned failure, even as I learned how Vatican efforts to appease communist regimes in the hope that they would play nicely were especially catastrophic in Czechoslovakia.

  The basic story they told me was that the Catholic Church in Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia, having been laid low by the Casaroli Ostpolitik, was reborn in resistance, a rebirth that began on October 16, 1978. That afternoon, while he was receiving the cardinals’ homage in the Sistine Chapel, the just-elected John Paul embraced the ancient Cardinal Tomášek, Archbishop of Prague, and somehow gave that hitherto timid figure a transfusion of spiritual energy. The result over the next decade was “this singular spectacle of the cardinal getting older and tougher at the same time,” as former-dissident-become-parliamentarian Pavel Bratinka put it to me.

  But the cardinal was not the only dramatic figure in the amazing, John Paul II–inspired story I learned over a week of intense conversation.

  Cardinal Ján Chryzostom Korec, SJ, was clandestinely ordained a bishop in 1951 at age twenty-seven and conducted his episcopate underground while working as a warehouseman, elevator repairman, and night watchman—when he wasn’t serving a dozen years in prison for his ministry.

  Father Oto Mádr, an elfin figure who, like Tomáš Halík, had helped give words to Cardinal Tomášek’s new toughness, spent a year wondering every morning whether the death sentence he had received in 1951 for being a “spy” would be carried out. The fifteen years he served in prison were, he said, “a very happy period of my life, with many conversions,” because being in prison “gave the Church a new apostolate.”

  Václav Benda, a bear of a man wearing a Harvard sweatshirt, was a Catholic parallel to another Václav, Havel, although a philosopher rather than a playwright; Benda’s underground writings gave intellectual depth to the idea of “living in the truth”—in this case, the truth of Christ—as the way to exercise Havel’s “power of the powerless.” An evening spent with him and his wife Kamila, who surreptitiously brought her husband Holy Communion in prison on the four times each year she was permitted a visit, was an experience of Catholic and democratic solidarity across national and linguistic barriers that left a deep impression.

  Benda’s Slovak counterpart, Silvester Krčméry, had done thirteen years in jail for “treason,” meaning that he had catechized young people and translated the social encyclicals into Slovak. Like Fr. Mádr, Dr. Krčméry looked back on his jail time with wry affection, telling me that, in prison, meditation “was like spiritual weightlessness—you lost contact with the cell and the prison.”

  Then there was Father Václav Malý, another underground priest, who catechized his fellow stokers in a hotel boiler room before becoming the master of ceremonies at the Velvet Revolution’s great demonstrations in Wenceslas Square. President Havel offered him a government post after the revolution, but Malý replied that he just wanted to be a priest, openly.

  These men, and the Slovak parliamentarian František Mikloško, emphasized that the Ostpolitik of Paul VI had made matters worse, not better, irrespective of the Pope’s intention to guarantee the sacramental life of Czech and Slovak Catholics. The persecution of real Catholics never let up, and in fact intensified. Under the Ostpolitik, the faux-Catholic collaborators with the regime were empowered, like the priests in the fake peace organization, Pacem in Terris, whom the dissidents called “pax terriers.” What was left of the Church’s institutions became, in effect, extensions of the state. And the regime, rather than acting more benignly, as the Ostpolitik assumed it would, cracked down with greater severity, sensing weakness in Rome and an unwillingness to defend the Church’s most vocal proponents of religious freedom. Remarkably, the former dissidents weren’t bitter. But they were puzzled—how could Paul VI and Agostino Casaroli have so mistaken the nature of communism and communists?

  John Paul II changed all this. The change in Cardinal Tomášek accelerated after a 1982 instruction from the Vatican’s Congregation for the Clergy banning priests’ involvement in partisan politics. Widely deplored in the West as another attack on Latin A
merican liberation theology, the instruction put paid to the pax terriers and gave Tomášek a weapon against clerical dissidents who were de facto agents of the regime. Then there was John Paul II’s social teaching, which, Václav Benda said, provided a bridge between Christian humanism and the idea of a “parallel polis” being developed by the secular people in Havel’s human rights movement, Charter 77. John Paul II’s openness also convinced Cardinal Tomášek that coalition-building with nonbelievers was not a trap for the Church but could strengthen Czech Catholicism. Thus by 1983, Benda said, Tomášek, at the ripe old age of eighty-four, was “fully engaged” with the Catholic resistance.

  John Paul II’s support gave the resistance such a new sense of security that there was even a revival in Catholic circles of that biting form of Czech humor embodied by the eponymous protagonist of Jaroslav Hašek’s novel, The Good Soldier Šwejk. In 1985, Bishop František Lobkowicz told me, there had been the usual argument with the communists over how many people had come to Velehrad to mark the 1,100th anniversary of the death of St. Methodius (with his brother, St. Cyril, one of the apostles of the Slavs). The Velehrad event was a major turning point in the history of the resistance Church, and Cardinal Tomášek’s office said that 150,000 Czechs and Slovaks had attended; the state said there were 50,000. Then the Šwejkist humor kicked in as the Catholic resistance said, “We’re both right. We’re counting ours and they’re counting theirs.”

  On the evening of October 22, the martyr-confessors—and several thousand congregants—reassembled to commemorate John Paul II’s pilgrimage to their recently liberated country, eighteen months before. The principal celebrant of the Mass was the newly created Cardinal Korec. Words of welcome were offered by the newly appointed Archbishop of Prague, Miloslav Vlk, a former window washer who had conducted a clandestine ministry at night. The Bendas were there and so was Václav Vaško, who, in a splendid (and perhaps providential) irony, now ran a Catholic publishing house from the office formerly occupied by the chief pax terrier. In our conversations, these sophisticated people described what had happened over the past two years to them, their country, and their Church as nothing less than a miracle.

  I certainly wouldn’t have quarreled with that point: their new president, Václav Havel, said as much when welcoming John Paul II to Prague in April 1990. What my Czechoslovak research taught me was that the miracle was accomplished through the John Paul II Effect.

  IN THE ALPS

  LIECHTENSTEIN, JULY 1992

  BEFORE AND AFTER CENTESIMUS ANNUS WAS ISSUED, MICHAEL Novak was in contact with the Italian philosopher Rocco Buttiglione, who had a considerable influence on shaping the encyclical and its fresh approach to the classic themes of Catholic social doctrine. Rocco and Michael decided it would be useful to create a summer seminar for up-and-coming young Catholic thinkers from Europe and North America, who were likely to carry John Paul II’s teaching on the free and virtuous society into the twenty-first century. Michael recruited Richard Neuhaus and me for the core faculty, and it was decided to hold the seminar in Liechtenstein, where Rocco taught at the International Academy of Philosophy, whose facilities we could use for the academic part of the program.

  Thus began a twenty-five-year exercise in international education that, by 2016, had produced some eight hundred graduates, many of whom were taking leading positions in business, the academy, the Church, and politics in their respective societies: the United States, Canada, and Australia; Chile, Colombia, and Mexico; Italy, Portugal, and the United Kingdom; Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Romania, Macedonia, Croatia, Belarus, Georgia, Russia, Ukraine, and Moldova. After a second summer in Liechtenstein in 1993, we decided to move the seminar to Kraków—a transition John Paul II encouraged, for the Pope was keenly interested in our project, often sent a note of encouragement to the students, and was eager to get news of what had happened in the seminar after we completed each year of the program. In June 1994, for example, John Paul wrote the Polish partner who had joined our faculty team, Dominican Father Maciej Zięba, OP, asking Maciej to greet the student and faculty for him, thanking us for our work in promoting Centesimus Annus, and then musing that “in the old days (and even now) I never thought about seminars in July, only about how to tear myself away to get to the mountains or lakes.”*

  July 1992 in Liechtenstein gave me a much better idea of Rocco Buttiglione’s mind. He had the striking ability—matched only by Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, in my experience—to listen to a question, think, and then respond in complete paragraphs in what must have been his second or third language. Over dinner one night I told Rocco about my project on John Paul II and 1989, in which he expressed great interest. So I said I’d send him a set of page proofs when I got back home, for I had finished writing The Final Revolution and the book was well into production. In early September, Rocco called and said, “I just wanted to let you know that I’m taking your proofs to the Holy Father at Castel Gandolfo tonight.”

  “Those proofs are all marked up,” I replied. “Can’t it wait a week or so, when I can send you a clean copy of the book?”

  Rocco was having none of it: “No, he has to see this tonight.”

  So that was that. Later, I began to understand something of Rocco’s sense of urgency. He had long thought that what he called a “bridge” should be built between John Paul II and the United States, where the vision sketched in Centesimus Annus might be taken seriously. The Final Revolution was another span in that bridge, and I imagine he was also attracted by my argument that 1989 had been a revolution of the spirit, not just a political upheaval—indeed, that 1989 would have been inconceivable without a John Paul II–ignited revolution of conscience.

  So thanks to some weeks in improbable Liechtenstein, the protagonist of my book was reading it, if in rather battered and marked-up page proofs. From this much would come: unknown, and indeed unexpected, at the time.

  * John Paul II’s ongoing interest in the seminar led to an interesting moment twenty years or so later. Having taken over the leadership of the program from Mike in 1999, I would write John Paul a letter after each seminar, which was sent to him through the Vatican embassy diplomatic pouch. In 2001, some days after the letter had gotten to Rome, I was working at home and, feeling quite tired in the early afternoon, told my wife that I was going to take a nap and didn’t want to be awakened “unless the house is on fire or the Pope calls.” Fifteen minutes later, Joan came upstairs, walked into our bedroom, and said, “I know what you just said, but he’s calling.” It was Msgr. Dziwisz, calling from Castel Gandolfo and handing me over to John Paul, who wanted to talk about the letter he’d received and obviously just read of a summer’s evening, Rome time. Needless to say, I took the call, which had caused considerable shock to the receptionist at my office when the switchboard at the papal villa first called there and announced that the Pope was looking for me.

  COSÌ GIOVANE

  ROME, NOVEMBER 1992

  AFTER The Final Revolution: The Resistance Church and the Collapse of Communism was published in September 1992, it seemed a good idea to present the book’s arguments in Rome, so an evening lecture at the North American College, the US seminary up the Janiculum Hill from the Vatican, was arranged for November 18. Aside from the books that were to have been sold that night getting lost in the chaos of the Vatican post office—another lesson for the future—the event went well. But the far more important encounter that week was with John Paul II.

  I arrived in Rome on November 14 and had dinner that evening with Rocco Buttiglione, who asked about my schedule. Rocco must have then called Msgr. Stanisław Dziwisz, John Paul II’s secretary, because the following morning I received a note from the college porter instructing me in Italian to “present yourself tomorrow morning at 0630 at the Bronze Doors of the Piazza San Pietro to be taken to assist at the Mass of the Holy Father.” Dziwisz had written me previously, thanking me for the published copy of The Final Revol
ution I had sent him and for my recent interview in Tygodnik Powszechny, laying out the argument of the book—an indication that, fourteen years after leaving Kraków, John Paul was still reading Tygodnik Powszechny every week, and closely.

  Carrying an autographed copy of The Final Revolution for the Pope, I was at the Bronze Doors at the appointed hour and, with a group of about twenty or so, was escorted up to the Terza Loggia and the chapel of the papal apartment, where John Paul II was already immersed in prayer. The chapel, which had been redecorated by Paul VI, had one distinctively John Paul feature: an icon of the Black Madonna, mounted below the apse crucifix in the same position as the “M” on the Pope’s coat of arms. I was seated in the back row, and after Mass the guests were taken into the formal library of the papal apartment and lined up along its perimeter bookcases; the Pope would walk down the line, shaking hands and dispensing rosaries. Msgr. Dziwisz had spotted me earlier and told me to put myself at the very end of the line.

  The point was to give John Paul II some time with me as the others were leaving the library, without offending them by his spending time with someone in the middle of the queue. So when the Pope got to the tail end of the line, we shook hands, I offered him the autographed copy of the book (which he riffled through, pausing on the pictures of several of his friends), and, with a broad smile, he thanked me for what I had written. We spoke for about six or seven minutes; he asked how the book had been received, about my family, and about several mutual friends, including Richard Neuhaus, Mike Novak, and Rocco Buttiglione. Then, late for a breakfast meeting, he gave me his blessing, thanked me again, and asked me to stay in touch. I promised him I would.