As for the world’s surprise at their choice on October 16, 1978, Baum confirmed my view that, however unknown Wojtyła was in the echo chamber of the international media, he was very well known to the people who mattered: the papal electors. So for Baum, at least, there was no surprise when Wojtyła won, or when he so quickly put his mark on the papacy. “He ‘spoke as one having authority’… with great love, but with enormous strength.… And knowing him, I wasn’t surprised that he had this… this force.”
When I noted that some, grading the pontificate, gave John Paul an A for priest, A for prophet, and C-for king, Cardinal Baum said that he had heard “echoes” of concern that John Paul II wasn’t a strong manager and didn’t fire people enough, but he contended that the Pope “believes in this other way. He believes in a clear and constant proclamation of the truth.” Baum also insisted that no pope in history had taken his brother bishops so seriously: “That’s one of the chief characteristics of [the] pontificate—his profound respect for the episcopate and for every bishop.… He wants to hear from bishops and he wants the bishops to take responsibility also. It shouldn’t always be the Roman pontiff acting.” It was a telling comment, even as it suggested that one of the unanticipated downsides to such a strong pope was a sense among those bishops who wanted to avoid controversy that they could pass the buck, knowing that “Rome” (meaning John Paul II) would deal with it. Cardinal Ratzinger expressed the same concern on several occasions.
It was also Cardinal Baum who gave me the line that John Paul II was “the greatest vocations director in history.” Baum kept a close eye on the American scene and understood that an entire generation of seminarians was studying for the priesthood because of the influence of John Paul II. William Wakefield Baum had not been a vocation magnet in his days as a diocesan bishop, which coincided with some of the most confused years of the post–Vatican II Church. But he was a man of humility and no little self-knowledge, and he could see and appreciate in John Paul II strengths he knew he lacked, strengths that led to an impact on others he might have wished he had had.
Joaquín Navarro-Valls finally convinced Cardinal Agostino Casaroli that he should swallow his unhappiness with my criticism of his Ostpolitik and see me, after I had written the cardinal requesting an interview and included in my letter a copy of the mandatum scribendi. When we met in the cardinal’s apartment in the Palazzina dell’Arciprete on February 14, 1997, Casaroli greeted me warmly, dressed in a plain black house cassock with neither pectoral cross nor ring—and then got the proceedings started in the classic manner of high-ranking Vatican officials of a certain ethnicity and generation. With great diffidence he said he wasn’t sure he could be of much help. I said I was confident that was not the case and that I had much to learn from him. He then said that, at eighty-two, his memory wasn’t what it used to be about specific events. I replied that I was more interested in background analysis and large themes. These preliminary rituals completed, we sat down in his living room for a fascinating conversation that lasted over an hour and a half. In the course of it, Casaroli demonstrated that his memory was quite sharp and that details of experiences decades in the past were at his fingertips—even as he perhaps unintentionally sharpened my understanding of how John Paul II had brilliantly deployed this veteran diplomat while pursuing a strategy with which Casaroli fundamentally disagreed.
Casaroli first met Karol Wojtyła in 1967 on a three-month-long scouting trip to Poland to gauge the situation: a lengthy visit prompted by the Polish government’s complaint to the Vatican that its only “reporter” in Poland was Cardinal Wyszyński. Casaroli’s recollections of what he learned in Poland suggested that he and Paul VI initially shared the communists’ view that the tough-minded Wyszyński was somehow cooking the books, although Casaroli did admit that he finally concluded that the “Wyszyński picture” and the “real picture” were “substantially the same.” It was a remarkable if indirect admission that Casaroli and his collaborators in the Curia had imagined that they understood Polish communists and their ways better than the Church’s veteran point man on the scene.
Yet Casaroli also admitted that he came to admire his antagonist in this polite but serious struggle. Cardinal Wyszyński, he said, was “a real prince, although he came from a rather poor family.” Moreover, he was “a great man of the Church” with “great political skills,” including the essential skill of knowing just where the edge of the precipice was: a point Casaroli illustrated by saying that the Polish primate was “like one of those boys’ toys that you wind up”—and here he walked his fingers across the coffee table to its edge—“and then…” it stops.
As for the Ostpolitik, he repeated the familiar tropes: the Ostpolitik was conducted on the principle of salvare il salvabile (to save what was salvageable) so that the sacramental life of the Church could continue under communist regimes; it was a quest for a modus non moriendi (a way of not dying). Paul VI, he said, was often in “torment” over what he understood was the abandonment of some of the Church’s bravest people, the dissidents. But Pope Paul stayed “faithful to the vision” and choked down his instinct to speak out in condemnation of the persecution of men like the Slovak Jesuit Ján Chryzostom Korec. And yes, there were times when Paul VI said, “This is impossible” (i.e., he had to say something) and Casaroli had to “restrain him.”
Given that Casaroli knew my views of the Ostpolitik, I was impressed by his candor. Yet it seemed to me he had still not come to grips with that policy’s abject failure. Rather, with his talk about a “ripening” situation in the late 1970s, he seemed to think that he had successfully prepared the Revolution of 1989. This made even less sense when I began reading communist secret police files demonstrating that the Ostpolitik led to a deep penetration of the Vatican by Warsaw Pact intelligence services, even as it accelerated the destruction of the independence of many local Churches behind the iron curtain.
Cardinal Casaroli once said of John Paul II, “I would like to help this pope, but I find him so different.” Our conversation suggested that this very intelligent man also had serious problems understanding Karol Wojtyła when he was Archbishop of Kraków. In discussing their interactions in the 1970s, Casaroli remembered being struck by Wojtyła as someone not interested in “concrete political problems.” The cardinal also said that he “was impressed that Cardinal Wojtyła had never met the Secretary General of the Party, Gierek, who held the real power.” It seemed not to have occurred to Casaroli that Wojtyła’s struggle for the Church’s “place” in Kraków—like the battle for the church in Nowa Huta—was a matter of addressing “concrete political problems,” or that Wojtyła would have regarded an exchange of banalities with Edward Gierek as a complete waste of his time. Casaroli was impressed by Wojtyła’s interest in contacts and conversation with intellectuals and other laity; but once again revealing perhaps more than he intended, he described those initiatives as a “restraint” on Wojtyła’s ability to be involved in “political conversations.”
Cardinal Casaroli’s apartment, or at least the parts of it I saw, was revealing. There was a huge oil portrait of Paul VI in the foyer, and photographs and paintings of the cardinal, sometimes with Pope Paul, were evident in the rooms I saw; but there was neither photograph nor painting of John Paul II, who had made Casaroli a cardinal and his secretary of state. There was also something touchingly bourgeois (or perhaps just male celibate) about the breakfront in the living room: it was full of stemware and other pieces of crystal given to the cardinal—and each piece still had the small manufacturer’s sticker attached.
My lengthy conversation with Cardinal Casaroli convinced me that John Paul II’s choice of him as secretary of state was a stroke of genius. Casaroli was a capable man and that certainly had something to do with his appointment. But John Paul II must have realized that naming the architect and protagonist of the Vatican Ostpolitik as his chief collaborator provided him invaluable cover: while he, the Pope, continued to hammer on communist regimes for th
eir human rights violations, there was Casaroli, the first man in the Curia, as living assurance to the communists that there really wasn’t anything to this (as Casaroli once put it to the Polish authorities in Kraków after John Paul II had a sharp, table-pounding exchange with General Jaruzelski). It was brilliant strategy on John Paul’s part, and its effects were on display throughout the 1980s.
When we parted, Cardinal Casaroli, who seemed to enjoy the exchange, invited me back for a second round. I would have been happy to oblige, for he was full of charm and kindness, but he died in June 1998 before we could meet again.
Cardinal Edward Cassidy, an Australian, was a strikingly open, friendly, and cooperative man, not always appreciated in Rome but very much appreciated by me for his candor and his insight into John Paul II’s passion for Christian unity. That enthusiasm eventually gave birth to history’s first papal encyclical on the subject, Ut Unum Sint (That They May Be One), published in 1995. Long before that, however, the Pope had demonstrated his ecumenical commitment by insisting that every papal trip abroad include an ecumenical meeting or prayer service. This steady papal engagement in ecumenism had already had impressive human results, Cassidy told me: “It’s amazing for me to see how many leaders of other churches want to come to Rome, want to meet with the Pope. You don’t have to go back many years before these people would never have thought of coming to Rome and meeting the Pope; it was so alien to their own ecclesiology and their understanding of their relationship to the Catholic Church.” John Paul’s openness, the respect he showed other Christian leaders, his understanding—all of these were “attractive ways in which he exercise[d] the primacy” of the Bishop of Rome.
But all that openness could not open the door that was perhaps highest on John Paul’s list of priorities: the door to Russia. Throughout his entire tenure at the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, Cassidy shared John Paul’s frustration at the recalcitrance of the Russian Orthodox Church, which had seemed more open in the waning years of communism and the USSR than since the Soviet crack-up and the reemergence from underground of the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine and other Eastern-rite Catholics Churches in the countries of the former Warsaw Pact. One prime example of this obstinacy was Metropolitan Kirill, Russian Orthodoxy’s chief ecumenical officer (and later Patriarch of Moscow), who told Cassidy that the rebirth of the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine “blocks everything.” Cassidy understood that this reflected the Russian refusal to acknowledge that the Russian Orthodox Church had collaborated with the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, in a brutal attempt to liquidate the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in 1946: “Sometimes when you’ve got something to hide, the tendency is to be a bit aggressive. You don’t defend it because you can’t defend it, so you attack, and you attack us. And that’s a very simple thing to attack, the Catholic Church, because of [Russian Orthodoxy’s] own history and ecclesiology.” Moreover, Cassidy said, the fact that the Russian Church originated in Kyiv, not Moscow, was another factor in Russian intransigence toward Ukrainian independence and the Russian sense that a vibrant Greek Catholicism in the Ukrainian capital posed a threat.
If the historical, ethnic, and geopolitical complexities of ecumenism with the eastern Slavs made Cassidy’s work challenging, so did the fact that, in ecumenical efforts with Western Christian communities, the goalposts kept moving. The Anglican–Roman Catholic dialogue, which once seemed so promising, had foundered on the question of the ordination of women, which, as Cassidy rightly understood, was a question of the nature and authority of the Church: the Anglicans looked at the question “as a question of ‘who’ you can ordain, rather than ‘by what authority.’ And this is now the real problem”—the question of what is authoritative for the Church. There were once hopes, he said, that the Anglican Communion would think of itself as part of “the ‘Catholic Church’ in the wide sense, along with the Orthodox and the Roman Catholics,” and thus wouldn’t take steps that the Catholics and the Orthodox couldn’t take. But that hope was now in the rearview mirror. Anglicanism had decided that it was its own authority, as had so many other mainline Protestant communities that no longer seemed to operate within stable theological and moral boundaries.
None of these difficulties altered Cardinal Cassidy’s good humor or enthusiasm for the ecumenical task. He did not succeed in arranging a meeting between John Paul II and Russian Patriarch Aleksii II (KGB code name: DROZDOV), although he came close at one point before the Russians dug in their heels. And as we said in one conversation, that would have been an interesting session: John Paul II, the man whom many (including me) believed was at the receiving end of a bullet ultimately fired by the KGB, and a former KGB officer, meeting in Vienna.
The career of Cardinal Roger Etchegaray illustrated John Paul II’s ability to get the best out of people who were on a somewhat different page theologically. Etchegaray’s tenure as Archbishop of Marseilles had not been a happy one, but John Paul II recognized the Frenchman’s talents as a schmoozer and connector. So he got him out of Marseilles, gave him the red hat, and turned him into a back-channel papal diplomatic troubleshooter.
In his apartment in the Palazzo San Calisto, the cardinal spoke at length and with relish about the almost thirty informal diplomatic missions he had undertaken for John Paul, traveling to combat zones, dodging land mines and bullets, and trying to thaw what was frozen in the Holy See’s relationship with difficult countries. These efforts, he said, were “parallel” or “complementary” to what the Vatican diplomatic service did in trouble spots. The point was to demonstrate, through “presence,” the Pope’s concern for stricken people, and to try and get all the parties to a conflict together. It worked, Etchegaray said, because John Paul II was “sopra, non fuori, la politica”—above, not outside, politics.
Cardinal Bernardin Gantin, a Beninese, was Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops. Vescovi, as everyone in Rome called it, was responsible for vetting nominations for the episcopate outside mission territories (which were handled by the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples): so it was Gantin who had the task of shaping the episcopate in the developed world in light of John Paul II’s authoritative interpretation of Vatican II.
Like Joseph Ratzinger, he was one of the last of Paul VI’s cardinals and was helpful to me in clarifying another of the dynamics of the conclave that elected John Paul II in October 1978. One of the protagonists of that conclave, Franz König of Vienna, saw Karol Wojtyła as a bridge between East and West. Some cardinals knew him as a thoughtful intellectual and a good listener, and others were determined to break the hegemonic Italian grip on the papacy. But according to Gantin’s description of him, the Africans—the new Christians—seem to have been impressed above all by two things: the clarity and luminosity of Karol Wojtyła’s faith, and his humility.
John Paul rarely looked back on the assassination attempt of May 13, 1981. Cardinal Gantin, for his part, thought about it often, and gave a copy of the famous photograph of the Pope collapsing into Msgr. Dziwisz’s arms at the moment he was shot to every new staff member of the Congregation. That image was, for Gantin, an icon: “That photograph has profoundly influenced me. Here is a man who has been shot, and is perhaps collapsing to his death, but with extraordinary serenity and perfect unity with God. He immediately began to say the Hail Mary.” John Paul knew, Gantin observed, that “fear is what destroys man,” that fear of the future “cripples us.” And that is why, the cardinal said, he offered men and women the possibility of receiving God—so that they could live beyond fear.
Archbishop Zenon Grocholewski was part of the tiny Polish contingent in the Vatican when John Paul II arrived in October 1978. A canon lawyer, he was appointed to the second position on the Apostolic Signatura, the Church’s appellate court, in 1982, having been one of the seven men who worked with John Paul to complete the revision of the Latin-rite Church’s Code of Canon Law, begun by John XXIII. In addition to helping me understand the new Code of Canon Law as an expression o
f Vatican II’s theology of the Church, Archbishop Grocholewski also made the point, a new one to me, that John Paul II was one of the great legislator-popes. In addition to the 1983 Western Code of Canon Law we were discussing, he promulgated in 1990 a new Code of Canon Law for the Eastern Catholic Churches. In 1983 he dramatically changed the paradigm and altered the procedures for considering beatifications and canonizations in the apostolic constitution Divinus Perfectionis Magister (The Teacher of Divine Wisdom), and in 1988, he issued an apostolic constitution reorganizing the Roman Curia (Pastor Bonus [The Good Shepherd]). Then there was the 1990 apostolic constitution on the reform of Catholic higher education, Ex Corde Ecclesiae (From the Heart of the Church). And finally, there was Universi Dominici Gregis (The Shepherd of the Lord’s Whole Flock), the 1996 apostolic constitution reforming the procedures for a papal election. The world may have thought of him as “John Paul Superstar”; Grocholewski and those of his canonical cast of mind thought of John Paul as an exceptionally prolific legislator.
I had gotten to know Cardinal Pio Laghi during his days as apostolic delegate and then nuncio in Washington. He was a wily old thing, something of a northern Italian Catholic liberal at heart, but adept at tacking to the prevailing ecclesiastical winds. He was sent to the United States with clear instructions from John Paul II to bring what might be called “dynamic orthodoxy” to the center of the American episcopate: he was to seek out potential bishops of pastoral skill who were also fully committed to the Church’s teaching, capable of explaining it publicly, and good at attracting vocations to the priesthood and religious life.
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