Lessons in Hope

by George Weigel

  At the same time he knew he was both the decider and the agenda-setter. Thus after years of discussion about post–Vatican II Catholicism’s lag in missionary fervor, it was John Paul who said that “it was about time” for him to “say something” about the Church’s need to rediscover itself as an essentially missionary or evangelical enterprise. The result was the 1990 encyclical Redemptoris Missio and the steady proclamation of a New Evangelization over the last decade and a half of the pontificate.

  Tomko spoke with feeling about seeing John Paul II get “this look in his eye when he has an inspiration”— Tomko sensed, somehow, that the channel to God and the divine will was open. One such moment came in 1979 when the Pope asked Tomko, “What are we going to do for Cyril and Methodius?,” the apostles of the Slavs, whose invention of the Cyrillic (or Glagolitic) alphabet and translation of the liturgy and the Bible into a standardized form of Old Church Slavonic were key moments in the cultural history of Central and Eastern Europe—and great examples of the inculturation of the Gospel. Tomko was surprised by the question and said, “Perhaps [make them] Doctors of the Church?” Then John Paul “got that look” and said, “Co-patrons of Europe.” Ten years before the Berlin Wall came down, John Paul II was already thinking about a Europe breathing once again with both its lungs, East and West.

  John Paul the decider and agenda-setter also put heart into his colleagues, Tomko reported. The cardinal had been complaining to the Pope about some serious problems of the Church in Africa and his inability to see any progress in resolving them. John Paul listened carefully and then said, “Look, hope is also a virtue.” It was just what Tomko needed to here at that moment. And as he noted, “When you put that together with the title of his book” (Crossing the Threshold of Hope) you saw that “this is not a theory” but the reality from which the Pope lived.

  Father Roberto Tucci, SJ, the head of Vatican Radio, had been John Paul II’s travel agent—the advance man for all papal travels abroad—for fifteen years when I met him in September 1997. The son of an Italian father and an English mother, he was an able organizer, a diplomat of both tact and steel, and a great storyteller. My primary interests were the visits that had caused him headaches, and he told me with some relish about his challenges in preparing the papal trip to Nicaragua in 1983.

  I quickly got the impression that Tucci regarded the Sandinistas—the former Marxist guerillas then running Nicaragua—as inept and ill-mannered adolescents, no matter their real age. But he had turned the vanity of teenagers to the Pope’s advantage by talking Daniel Ortega and his comrades into allowing a television broadcast of the papal Mass in Managua, which was shown all over Central America. The Sandinistas’ attempts to stack the crowd at the outdoor Mass, the silly revolutionary chants they indulged during the Mass from a platform next to the altar, and the Pope shouting “Silencio!” so that his homily could be heard, were shown all over the region and badly embarrassed the regime. What could have been a mess that only a few knew about became the point from which the Marxist tide began to recede in Central America. They were a rather “stupid” bunch, Tucci concluded, “and I could have told them how to be much more effective authoritarians.”

  When the second papal pilgrimage to Poland was moved back a year, from 1982 to 1983, because of martial law, Tucci had to negotiate the terms of the visit with two of the worst characters in the Polish communist apparat, Czesław Kiszczak, the interior minister, and his deputy, Konrad Straszewski, who had led the department of the Polish secret police set up to “disintegrate” the Catholic Church. The Pope was determined to meet Lech Wałęsa, and Kiszczak was just as determined that he wouldn’t—as Tucci told me, Kiszczak wouldn’t even pronounce Wałęsa’s name, referring to him as “that guy,” or the winner of “the so-called Nobel Prize,” or “the man with the big family.” “Why does the Pope want to meet with a man who doesn’t represent anybody in this country?” Kiszczak demanded at one point.

  Then there was Chile in 1987. At the closing Mass, some goons, probably connected to the Pinochet regime, started burning tires and a large cloud of acrid smoke began drifting over the altar platform. It was the first and only time, Tucci recalled, that he thought of taking the Pope out of a venue. But the police finally got the situation under control, and Tucci told me that he’d learned a valuable lesson: always have some lemons with you in situations where there might be smoke or tear gas, because if you squeeze lemon juice into a handkerchief you can breathe through it.

  Tucci was obviously an able diplomat, because he was the one who had to explain to friendly heads of state or government why they couldn’t travel with the Pope when John Paul was in their country: because it would create a precedent that would allow a Jaruzelski or Pinochet to demand similar treatment when John Paul was on their turf. But Tucci could put his foot down when he had to. When we spoke, he said that he’d recently had a sharp conversation with Fidel Castro about John Paul’s impending visit to Cuba. Castro was making difficulties on some Church-state issues, and Tucci finally said to him, over the phone, “Look, he’s doing you a big favor coming.… And he’s taking a lot of criticism for it. What are you going to do for him?” Fidel tried to bluff his way out by saying that Cuba had separation of Church and state, at which point Tucci barked at the Jesuit high school graduate, “Don’t try that stuff on me or the Holy Father.” Fidel, he seemed to think, had taken it under advisement.

  “SOMETHING USEFUL FOR THE UNIVERSAL CHURCH”

  ROME, MARCH 1997

  MSGR. DZIWSZ KEPT LONG HOURS AND SEEMED TO ASSUME OTHERS did, too, calling me at 11 p.m. on Wednesday night, March 19, 1997, when I was dead asleep, to invite me to lunch with the Pope the following afternoon. There, we talked at length about the material I had been reading, analyzing, and trying to summarize for a week: his Theology of the Body, its origins, and its impact.

  It began, John Paul said, with his Środowisko, his young student friends in Kraków, when he was their chaplain. Even under communism, their question was not, “Does God exist?” It was, “How do we prepare a good marriage?” A pastor’s care for meeting those questions and concerns was the genesis of Love and Responsibility, the archdiocesan institute on marriage and the family he had created, and, ultimately, the Theology of the Body. So he began sketching what would later be published as Original Unity of Man and Woman (the first of four volumes of that theology) during the balloting that eventually produced Pope John Paul I.

  It was, John Paul II said, an interesting intellectual puzzle, philosophically and theologically, that God created two complementary creatures, man and woman, who shared one humanity. Pondering that puzzle with the help of the first chapters of Genesis led to his mature thought on sexuality, its built-in moral dynamics, and the question of how the Church could present its understanding of the beauty of human love to a world that imagined itself “adult” in these matters but was really just jaded. John Paul II was also aware that Humanae Vitae, Paul VI’s encyclical on the morally appropriate means of regulating fertility, had had a very rough reception, so it seemed time to try a fresh articulation of the Church’s marital ethic. Out of that mix of intellectual curiosity and pastoral concern came not only the Theology of the Body but the apostolic exhortation Familiaris Consortio (which John Paul clearly liked a lot) and the encyclical Evangelium Vitae. The linchpin of the whole structure, though, was the Theology of the Body, and the Pope was happy to hear that it had made an impression on young people who didn’t expect to be impressed by a papal reflection on sex and love.

  That he kept coming back to the influence of his Cracovian experience on his papacy gave me an opportunity to ask him why so many initiatives in his pontificate had been previewed in Kraków. Dziwisz immediately jumped in and said, “It is the same man,” but John Paul had a different kind of answer: “It is confidence in the Holy Spirit, who was calling to the See of Peter a cardinal with this experience, this background. It means that there is something here that is useful for the universal Church.”<
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  Bishop Ryłko said that the Pope had a special concern for a world without a real sense of fatherhood, which helped explain the three poems Wojtyła had written on the theme of paternity, including the very difficult metaphysical poem “Radiation of Fatherhood.” This led me to ask whether the Pope was still writing poetry, and John Paul answered that “Stanisław” had been his last poem: “I paid my debt to Kraków.” He then said, with a smile, “I dedicated it to my successor, who said that he was ‘unworthy’”—at which Dziwisz, who also loved Cardinal Macharski, started chuckling: a reminder that poking gentle fun at old friends was very much part of the human dynamic within the inner circle of John Paul II.

  WOJTYŁA’S POLAND IN DEPTH

  WARSAW, KRAKÓW, AND LUBLIN, APRIL 1997

  AFTER ALMOST A YEAR OF INTENSE ROMAN RESEARCH, I RETURNED to Poland in the spring of 1997 to Poland to look into the Pope’s pre-papal life in greater depth. Having formed a close working relationship with the Dominican priory in Kraków, I wrote the prior, Father Mirosław Pilśniak, asking what might be a good time for an extended research trip. He thought the weather would be fine right after Easter, so he suggested that I come on Low Sunday and said I would be welcome to use a priory guest room as my base for as long as I liked. I took Fr. Mirek at his word and arranged to arrive in Poland on April 6.

  It had been freezing cold for weeks; it was snowing when I arrived, and it snowed for the next twenty days, right until I returned to Washington on April 26. At times, the snow was so fierce that I couldn’t see the landscape as I traveled by train to Lublin. Moreover, the good prior had believed his own weather forecast, so the boilers in the priory were shut down for repairs on Palm Sunday. The Polish Dominicans of Kraków thus celebrated Holy Week and Easter in a rather arctic Basilica of the Holy Trinity, their half-frozen breath visible to the hearty congregation of university students they attracted. I took to sleeping in the guest room in an overcoat, the inner man warmed by a pre-slumber sampling of one of Kentucky’s finest distilled products.

  Meteorological circumstances notwithstanding, it was a wonderful three-week research trip, invaluable in painting a portrait of Karol Wojtyła from inside.

  If John Paul II had not been so insistent that I meet his old friends from his university chaplaincy days, I probably wouldn’t have devoted more than a few pages of Witness to Hope to those years of his life. But he had said time and again that I couldn’t understand him unless I understood them, so I set out to learn what they could teach me. They had been burned before, by other Americans and other writers, but after some initial reticence was overcome and the doors were opened to their treasure trove of memories, I was so taken by their stories—and by this unique set of relationships that helped form a pope as no other had been previously formed—that I devoted an entire chapter of Witness to Hope to Środowisko.

  Danuta Ciesielska, the widow of Jerzy Ciesielski, was the titular head of Środowisko and its unofficial historian. But she was quite shy, so my most extended Środowisko conversations were with three couples—Piotr and Teresa Malecki, Stanisław and Danuta Rybicki, Gabriel and Bożena Turowski—and with Teresa Heydel Życzkowska, Stanisław Rodziński, and Karol Tarnowski. The first thing that struck me was that most of these men and women had gone on to professional careers, some of them quite distinguished. And the second thing I noticed was that their stories, while displaying the personal touches that came from intimate friendships involving unique personalities, were completely coherent in the portrait they drew of Karol Wojtyła as priest, bishop, and friend.

  The first characteristic they all stressed was what Teresa Malecka called Wojtyła’s “permanent openness.” Then there was Stanisław Rybicki’s recollection, confirmed by all the others, that Wujek, their “uncle” (as he had told them to call him as a sort of Stalinist-era nom de guerre), was a man who had “mastered the art of listening.” Those two qualities met in a third: Wujek’s insistence on the individual’s moral responsibility. They would talk about everything, but he would never impose a view. Even in spiritual direction, his signature phrase had been “You must decide.”

  The result was a zone of freedom in a world of greyness and conformity. In a communist environment that remained stifling even after the worst of the Stalinist repression, they “felt completely free with him,” as Teresa Malecka put it. “While he was among us we felt that everything was all right.” They also emphasized that all of this—hiking, kayaking, skiing with young people and young couples, parties in their homes for name days and after the baptisms of their children—was unheard of among other Polish clergy. So was Wojtyła’s custom of saying Mass on their summer vacations with an overturned kayak as an improvised altar.

  Stanisław and Danuta Rybicki were among the first of Wojtyła’s “kids” and met for the first time when they were students and a “young, pious, poorly dressed priest” at St. Florian’s parish near the Kraków Polytechnic was forming a choir to sing Gregorian chant at Sunday Mass. It was Danuta who told me some of the best stories from the first years of this unique network of friendships: how they only gradually broke through the inbred caution of the Stalinist period and learned each other’s surnames; how Wojtyła quoted one of the most famous lines in Polish literature, “Call me ‘Uncle,’” as a humorous yet serious way to protect both them and himself from the ubiquitous secret police (organized Catholic youth groups meeting with a priest was illegal in those days); how they met him in Częstochowa after his ordination as a bishop and he said, “Don’t worry, Wujek will remain Wujek”; and how he assured them that nothing had changed in their relationship—“Wujek will remain Wujek”—after his election as pope.

  Gabriel Turowski, a physician, went to Rome for three months to “keep company with a suffering friend” after the assassination attempt of May 13, 1981, and taught me a lot about that drama—including the fact that the “second assassin,” the cytomegalovirus that threatened John Paul II’s recovery, came from a tainted blood transfusion during the surgery to repair the carnage done by Agca’s bullet. The Turowskis also added an intriguing detail to the story of Wojtyła’s cast of mind before the second conclave of 1978. I knew that Cardinal Wojtyła had been at their home on September 28, 1978, to celebrate his twentieth anniversary as a bishop with Środowisko. When I asked what he’d been like that night, they admitted that things hadn’t been quite the same. Then Dr. Turowski said, quietly, “He was saying farewell. He was thanking people for their friendship. He was behaving differently; there is a mystery here, and when we tried to talk to him about it he was silent.”

  These extraordinary relationships embodied what ecumenical theology calls a “mutual exchange of gifts.” Karol Wojtyła’s friends knew that they were an “experimental field for his ideas,” as one of them put it, for he had learned from them about the things he hadn’t experienced personally: courtship, marriage, young families, professional careers. Yet, as one said and all agreed, “We don’t feel proud that we taught him something; it was a mutual exchange”: they knew that they had received as much, and arguably more, than they gave.

  Cardinal Franciszek Macharski was his usual gracious self when we met on April 10, 1997, and he gave me a thorough tour of the archbishop’s residence at “Franciszkańska Three” (as everyone called it). Karol Wojtyła’s small suite—a bedroom with a single bed, a private office, and a small entry foyer—was left exactly as it had been when Wojtyła went to Rome for the second conclave of 1978. It overlooked the Planty, the great greenbelt surrounding the Kraków Old Town, and the Pope used it on his visits to Poland. There was a portrait of St. Charles Borromeo, Wojtyła’s patron saint, over the door leading into the private office, and the bed featured a colorful folk art counterpane that was one of the few gifts Wojtyła ever kept.

  Macharski also described the office routine when Wojtyła was archbishop: two hours of writing at a desk in the chapel, before the Blessed Sacrament, a few feet from where he was ordained a priest; then two hours of meetings with anyone w
ho wanted to see him; then lunch and a full schedule of afternoon and evening pastoral activities. Wojtyła, the good listener, was typically late for lunch and would tell his associates, when he came charging into the dining room, “The cardinal isn’t late; your watches are fast.” The numerous portraits and photos of Adam Stefan Sapieha in the residence bespoke the enduring place the man created cardinal by Pius XII in 1946 held in the hearts of his successors as the role model.

  Monsignor Stanisław Małysiak, a close associate during Wojtyła’s episcopate, helped me understand the archbishop’s priorities. Wojtyła had inherited a rather simple archdiocesan curia from Archbishop Baziak and opened new offices to broaden the Church’s pastoral outreach in the post–Vatican II battle with communism for Poland’s future. Thus Wojtyła created a new department of charitable activities to see to the needs of the poor, the addicted, and the sick, and a new department for family life that stressed marriage preparation and trained lay workers for family ministry. Cardinal Wojtyła placed a high priority on youth ministry, but putting programs in place for young people took ingenuity, given the communist ban on organized Catholic youth groups. Altar boys could be taken on hikes and picnics—and catechized along the way. University chaplaincy worked according to the same informal, catechetical multitasking. All of this, Małysiak stressed, was meant to “create a movement,” not just structures; Wojtyła never confused meetings, with which post–Vatican II Catholicism was replete, with real pastoral effectiveness.

  Msgr. Małysiak said that the cardinal “knew what he wanted” and was “very easy to read”; at the same time, he operated in a rather freewheeling way, open to ideas, happy to hear different views. He was strict in matters of moral principle but also compassionate: once, after telling a young priest firmly that he had to amend his ways, Wojtyła asked the startled young cleric to hear his, the archbishop’s, confession.