Bishop Stanisław Smoleński, in very good form at age eighty-two, was Karol Wojtyła’s spiritual director and confessor in Sapieha’s underground seminary during World War II and later served as one of Wojtyła’s auxiliary bishops. A few minutes into our conversation he asked a favor of Father Jarosław Kupczak, OP (who was translating), and me: “Please don’t call me ‘Your Excellency.’ This is Kraków.” It was Smoleński who gave me one of the most touching descriptions of Karol Wojtyła when he said that his former penitent was a man who “loved easily”—even though, Smoleński reminded me, he had come to the underground seminary having experienced a lot of sorrow in his life: the deaths of his parents and brother, his friends shot, his experience of hard manual labor.
Wojtyła “loved the style of Sapieha and imitated it—the openness, the spontaneity, the friendliness.” He also took from Sapieha, who organized covert aid to prisoners at Auschwitz I and pleaded with Nazi Governor-General of Poland Hans Frank for the lives of Jews, the determination to be the defensor civitatis. Wojtyła’s other models of what Smoleński called “total sacrifice” were St. John Vianney and Brat Albert, St. Albert Chmielowski; St. Maximilian Kolbe was another model, but Vianney and Chmielowski were more important because they were “in the foreground” of Wojtyła’s spiritual formation.
And it was Bishop Smoleński who explained to me Cardinal Wojtyła’s unique way of addressing problems or pastoral challenges as archbishop. The first question he asked was, “What truth of faith sheds light on this situation?” And the second question was, “Who could help, or who could we get trained, to deal with this?” In other words, it was not about him: it was about Gospel truth and collaborating with people who had been well prepared for their task.
Father Michał Szafarski, a Salesian priest, was one of the youngest members of the Living Rosary groups in which Karol Wojtyła had participated during the war. I met him at the rectory of Wojtyła’s old parish, St. Stanisław Kostka in the Dębniki district, to learn more about Jan Tyranowski, the lay mystic and tailor who introduced the future pope to the works of St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Ávila, and St. Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort. Fr. Szafarski showed me a letter he had received the year before from John Paul II, who described Tyranowski as “a very important person in my life [whose] example… showed me the beauty of eternal life, which is connected to the gift of vocation to the service of Christ.” The Pope’s memories were similar to those of Tyranowski’s spiritual director, Father Alexander Drozd, who, Szafarski told me, had described Tyranowski as a “spiritual alpinist” who was “going to heights I could never reach.… Grace radiated from his face, his eyes, his person, demanding reverence.”
Fr. Szafarski, who was serving on an archdiocesan commission preparing Jan Tyranowski’s beatification cause, walked me through Tyranowski’s spiritual diary, in which he recorded his daily points for meditation in a fine, almost calligraphic handwriting that seemed to be that of an artist, not a tailor. There was obviously a precision and discipline to his method of prayer and meditation, and it was intriguing to imagine this “unexpected apostle” (as Wojtyła described him after Tyranowski’s death in 1947) instructing the future pope in the arts of contemplative prayer as Nazi bullhorns blasted out news of the latest triumphs of the invincible Wehrmacht.
Then there was Fr. Józef Tischner, whom I had first met while working on The Final Revolution. This hearty soul had real insights into Wojtyła’s philosophical mind, emphasizing that he was a man of “synthesis,” a “connecter” of ideas: thus love and responsibility; Aristotelian-Thomistic realism and phenomenology; person and act. Tischner also stressed Wojtyła’s humanism, his effort to “meet someone wisely” by being open to what others had to say. Or, as Tischner put it in an intriguing comparison with another contemporary philosopher: “[Paul] Ricoeur remembers a text, even if he forgets who wrote it; the Holy Father is the opposite”—he remembered the person.
Tischner loved to tell jokes and in one of our conversations asked me to solve an “ancient problem in Polish moral philosophy: if Poland is invaded again by Germans and Russians, at whom is Polish army to shoot first?” I said I hadn’t a clue. “Shoot first at Germans,” Tischner said, “on ancient moral principle, business before pleasure.” But it was John Paul II’s sense of humor that Tischner regaled me about on April 23, 1997. Tischner had invited the German theologian Johann Baptist Metz, the intellectual father of liberation theology, to one of John Paul’s summer humanities seminars at Castel Gandolfo, and when the group photo was being organized, people were shuffling around, not wanting to seem to be pushing themselves closer to John Paul, who was left standing a bit alone—and who then called out to Metz, “You, Metz, a little closer to the Pope!” At which point everyone, including Metz (who did what he was told), cracked up.
But there was, of course, more to joke-telling in Tischner’s evaluation of John Paul II, which he summed up in one lucid phrase: “his ideas turned into institutions.”
The Catholic University of Lublin (KUL, in its Polish initials) was the only Catholic institution of higher learning between the iron curtain and the Pacific hinterlands of the Soviet Union—or as Stefan Swieżawski, one of Karol Wojtyła’s colleagues in the KUL philosophy department, put it, “the only place between Berlin and Vladivostok where philosophy was free.” KUL was Wojtyła’s academic base from 1954 until his election to the papacy, and I had to get to know its people and their history in order to understand him “from inside.” But before I went to Lublin for two very busy days in April 1997, I spoke with Professor Swieżawski and his wife in Warsaw, where they were living in retirement.
They were a sprightly couple: Maria, who had asked the young Father Wojtyła to be the catechist of her children, was Cardinal Sapieha’s great-niece; Stefan, as he insisted I call him, had just turned ninety and built a biographical and conceptual bridge between Wojtyła’s wartime experience and KUL in the 1950s. The catastrophe of the war, he said, had raised “fundamental questions,” to the point that even metaphysics classes were oversubscribed, with students sitting on seats, in the window sills, on the floor—“everywhere.” This was the atmosphere—an intense interest in questions of first principles—into which Swieżawski, who served on the committee approving Wojtyła’s habilitation thesis, invited the young priest to come as a junior lecturer in philosophical ethics. He also recalled how he introduced Wojtyła to the works of the French philosophers Étienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain, which took Wojtyła beyond the intellectual milieu in which he was immersed at the Angelicum during his doctoral studies. But his most extraordinary story had to do not with Lublin but with a Thomistic Congress held at the Abbey of Fossanova in 1974 to mark the seven hundredth anniversary of Thomas Aquinas’s death.
Wojtyła gave an academic paper and celebrated one of the Congress Masses, during which he preached on the “two Thomases,” Aquinas and the doubting apostle. During the homily, the thought came, unbidden, to Swieżawski: “He will be pope.” After Mass, he told his wife and said he thought he had an obligation to tell Wojtyła; she was having none of it, saying that if her husband insisted on telling their friend “this stupidity,” he was on his own. So Swieżawski went off, found his old friend and colleague in the sacristy of the abbey church, stood in front of him, and said, simply, “You will be pope.” Wojtyła looked at him, said nothing, and walked away.
Wojtyła’s philosophical project came into sharper focus in my conversation with his chief philosophical disciple, Fr. Tadeusz Styczeń. An energetic talker and a Salvatorian priest, he had done his master’s, his doctorate, and his habilitation degrees under Wojtyła’s direction, and then served as his assistant when Wojtyła’s pastoral responsibilities as auxiliary bishop and later archbishop in Kraków drastically limited the time he could spend at KUL. While our conversation ranged all over the philosophical landscape, several points stood out. The first was that Wojtyła, the unfootnoted philosopher, liked to do philosophy “from the standpoint of Adam: astoni
shed with the world, while recognizing that what is wonderful in this world is yet incommensurable with the human person, who is the only one who can ‘wonder.’” Second, the “Lublin Project” in which Wojtyła, Styczeń, and their students (some of whom later became colleagues) were engaged was nothing less than an attempt to change the course of Western philosophy since the eighteenth century: to overcome David Hume’s is/ought fallacy and put moral philosophy back on a secure intellectual footing, so that ethics would not drift off into subjectivism and then relativism. But they would do this not from abstract principles but by thinking through a philosophical anthropology that would get them to the truth of things built into the human condition, then working up from there to ethics. It was a formidable goal, never really achieved; yet its very scope said something about the boldness of the minds involved in it.
Styczeń also pointed out that this commitment to truth as something that can possess us was at the root of Wojtyła’s fearlessness. It was the dissident Marxist Milovan Djilas, Styczeń told me, who said that John Paul II was the only man he knew who was without fear, and it seemed to Styczeń, and to me, that the Pope’s fearlessness came from his security in the truth. Which in turn shed some light on the old Solidarity slogan, “For Poland to be free, 2 + 2 must always = 4.” At first blush, it seemed a slap at communism’s ubiquitous lies, but on further reflection, it was a recognition that one is only free when living “in the truth.”
If Tadeusz Styczeń was Wojtyła’s philosophical son (and the man close enough to him to say, of the draft of Person and Act, “perhaps it could be translated from Polish into Polish to make it easier for the reader to understand—including me!”) Father Andrzej Szostek, a Marian priest, was John Paul’s philosophical grandson, whose doctoral dissertation was the last he ever read (and did so as pope). Szostek pointed me to the centrality of what Wojtyła would call the “Law of the Gift” in his philosophical ethics: the truth, built into the human person, that we come to fulfillment through the gift of ourselves, rather than the assertion of ourselves.
Sister Zofia Zdybicka, an Ursuline nun then the Dean of Philosophy at KUL and another Wojtyła protégé, thought it providential that, amid the contemporary West’s current cultural crisis, a pope whose entire intellectual project had to do with rebuilding humanism had been called to Rome. Yet another Wojtyła doctoral student turned professor, Jerzy Gałkowski, told me of the overflow crowds that packed Wojtyła’s undergraduate KUL lectures, which reflected Wojtyła’s ability to relate his teaching to real-life issues. His graduate-level lectures were different in that he was clearly thinking something through in them—including the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham, as if anticipating the next challenge to Christian humanism after Marxism imploded. Professor Gałkowski also told me a wonderful story about him and his wife being married by the cardinal archbishop in a small chapel in the woods at seven o’clock in the morning: “Adventures weren’t unusual with Karol Wojtyła.”
And then there was Stefan Sawicki, who helped me locate Wojtyła’s poetry in the history of Polish literature. Sawicki had enough critical distance on his old colleague to say that he wasn’t a poet of the first rank like Czesław Miłosz, Zbigniew Herbert, or Miron Białoszewski. But Wojtyła was a serious poet, and modern Polish poetry “would be incomplete without him,” for he formed a bridge between the country’s tradition of mystical poetry and the contemporary literary scene. Sawicki also recalled that it was Wojtyła who urged him to read what Sawicki called “dark literature,” such as Camus’s The Plague and Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory: another insight into the range of Wojtyła’s imagination and its fascination with the human condition in all of its aspects.
Danuta Michałowska, a teenager when she joined the Rhapsodic Theater during World War II, later became a successful actress and drama teacher. Back in Kraków, I was struck by the precision with which she pronounced her words while giving me tea and a glimpse into a world of young people resisting totalitarianism through that theatrical troupe, under the tutelage of another exceptional personality, Mieczysław Kotlarczyk.
Miss Michałowska grew up in Kraków and didn’t know Kotlarczyk before he came to live with Karol Wojtyła during the war. But in the pressure cooker of the occupation, she got to know his story. Kotlarczyk’s father, she said, had been a “fanatic for theater” who would wake his family up at night to share a new dramatic idea that had just occurred to him. It was a single-mindedness he passed along to his son, who was “a man of one idea—the theater” but also a deeply converted Christian believer who thought of theatrical work as a “way of perfection.” He was, Miss Michałowska said, “a radical man, stubborn and fanatical,” compared to whom “Savonarola was nothing.” Yet it was precisely that stubbornness that was needed to create an avant-garde theatrical group as “a conspiracy,” wielding the weapons of poetry and drama to frustrate the Nazis’ efforts to “demoralize Polish culture.”
As a keen student of Polish literature, Danuta Michałowska saw her fellow Rhapsodist, now the pope, through the lens of some of the Polish authors she knew so well, especially Juliusz Słowacki, whose plays and poems combined Christian themes with Eastern religions, German romanticism, and Hegelian philosophical idealism in an intoxicating brew. She suggested that his epic poem, King-Spirit, anticipated John Paul II and his impact on the world when Słowacki wrote of a spiritual leader who “will give love as others give weapons” and thereby bend the course of history through peaceful revolution.
Danuta Michałowska struck me as a woman of a deep spiritual sensibility who’d had something of a hard life but wasn’t embittered by it. The story of her one-woman play, I Without Name—a meditation on Augustine’s anonymous concubine and the mother of his son, which she had performed for John Paul II in the Vatican—was one of my favorites among the many tales I heard while preparing Witness to Hope. She kindly autographed and gave me one of the last remaining copies of a book memorializing the Rhapsodic Theater that she assembled for the troupe’s fiftieth anniversary. At the end of our conversation, she told me she hadn’t been enthusiastic about meeting me, since she had “met so many people who write nonsense about him” (meaning John Paul), but now she understood that I was “serious.” I thanked her and said that my predecessors in the papal biographers’ union were my cross in this project.
To catalog Tadeusz Mazowiecki as a journalist may seem to do scant justice to Poland’s first noncommunist prime minister since World War II. Still, Mazowiecki made his living by his pen for decades, and what he did in editing Solidarity’s weekly magazine, Tygodnik Solidarność, was not dissimilar to what James Madison, John Jay, and Alexander Hamilton did in writing The Federalist Papers: using the tools of journalism to give depth of thought to a popular democratic movement. In April 1997, I was eager to clarify with him what I suspected were erroneous depictions of the Pope’s role during martial law, which he was very helpful in doing.
Mazowiecki was imprisoned like the rest of the Solidarity leadership and communicated with the Pope during those hard days by smuggled letters, the couriers being his son and Cardinal Macharski. There was no question in anyone’s mind that the Church would protect Solidarity and its people, he said, because by the time martial law was declared, Solidarity had enrolled a vast number of Poles, so to protect the Polish people was to protect Solidarity. The concern was that the Church, in the name of peace, would interpose itself with the regime as society’s representative, thus inadvertently undercutting Solidarity, which, having been declared illegal, was officially defunct. The Solidarity leadership knew from Radio Free Europe that they had the Pope’s support, but it was important to get a statement from the Pope that there would be no abstracting the idea of “solidarity” from the mass movement the regime was trying to crush. And that meant the legal restoration of Solidarity the trade union and national renewal movement: “There were some things that could not be given back.”
Mazowiecki told John Paul all this in a smuggled-out letter. And
when the Pope wrote back in a letter smuggled into the jail where Mazowiecki was being held, Mazowiecki was relieved: “We understood each other.” The Pope, knowing that other, unfriendly eyes, might eventually see his note, wrote, “I’ve read your letter and I’ve been thinking very carefully about the situation. I have read your letter three or four times.”
In other words, they agreed. The Pope would keep the idea of solidarity as a social virtue alive, press the regime for the legal restoration of Solidarity, and thus make clear to churchmen tempted to substitute themselves for the Solidarity leadership that that was not the kind of publicly engaged Church he had in mind.
Mazowiecki also had an interesting response to my question about what most powerfully struck him, an active layman, about John Paul II. He said that Cardinal Wojtyła had always been thought of as a good bishop and a serious intellectual, but as very much a Polish bishop and a Polish intellectual; the surprise was how easily he made “the transfer to the world stage.” Or, as he put it, “What strikes me most in the Pope’s personality is that his personality was ‘fulfilled’ when he became pope.”
Marek Skwarnicki was another multitasking journalist, a Tygodnik Powszechny staffer, published poet, and novelist. His descriptions of Karol Wojtyła just prior to Conclave II in 1978 influenced my depiction of those days in Witness to Hope. But he was just as helpful in giving me insights into Wojtyła the literary man. For Skwarnicki, Wojtyła wrote in order to work through questions and issues, like the question of the legitimacy of revolutionary violence in circumstances of serious oppression, which he explored in Our God’s Brother and which Skwarnicki saw as a preview of John Paul II’s later critique of liberation theology and its dalliance with armed resistance to injustice. As Danuta Michałowska explained to me how Wojtyła’s literary work was influenced by Juliusz Słowacki, Skwarnicki was my tutor in the influence of Cyprian Kamil Norwid, perhaps the most untranslatable of Polish poets, on Wojtyła, especially on his ideas about the creativity of work.
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