Unlike Mazowiecki and Skwarnicki, Halina Bortnowska, another Tygodnik Powszechny writer, had drifted away from the John Paul II circle by the time I met her in April 1997. She was a peppery personality who didn’t have much use for the current Church leadership in Poland and suggested to me that things in Poland had never been quite as “integrated” as people thought they were—one example being the fracture of the Solidarity coalition a few years after 1989. She had been Wojtyła’s student at KUL, thought him a “better lecturer than a writer,” and remembered him as an excellent seminar leader, reading and commenting on a text and getting students to dig into what they were reading.
She understood the gap between the world in which Wojtyła had written Love and Responsibility (whose second edition she had edited) and the postcommunist world of the late twentieth century: “It was a different culture of emotions then, living was more restrained, with more control.” But this thinker and writer who, in the conventional categories, had moved steadily to the left over her life still believed that the argument for chaste, ecstatic love in Love and Responsibility held up: “If it doesn’t stand up today, people are the poorer for it.”
INSIDE THE HOLY SEE–ISRAEL NEGOTIATIONS
AUSTIN, MAY 1997
TWO WEEKS AFTER I RETURNED FROM POLAND, I WENT TO AUSTIN, Texas, to get inside one of the great controversies in the pontificate of John Paul II: the establishment of full diplomatic relations between the Holy See and Israel, an initiative widely applauded throughout the world but one that caused serious heartburn in parts of the Roman Curia. My interlocutor was the kind of person who could only have played a significant role in a pontificate like John Paul’s, in which a pope was willing to go outside the box to achieve his goals.
When we met, Father David-Maria Jaeger, a Franciscan, was the only native-born Israeli of Jewish background to have been ordained a Catholic priest since the state of Israel was founded in 1948. His conversion to Catholicism had been an intellectual one, but he was baptized in an Anglican church at eighteen because he couldn’t find a Catholic priest willing to baptize a sabra, a native-born Israeli. So he accepted baptism from the Anglicans and then presented himself at the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, the local Roman Catholic headquarters, and announced, “All right, you can now receive me as a Protestant convert.”
Jaeger entered the Franciscans of the Custody of the Holy Land at twenty-six and was sent to Rome for studies. He was dispensed from the prescribed baccalaureate course and awarded the baccalaureate degree in sacred theology after being examined by a specially appointed pontifical commission, which recognized that he had already taught himself more theology than he was likely to learn in the classroom. He later completed a doctorate in canon law with a dissertation on the role of the popes in defending Holy Land Christians.
David Jaeger may have been the only man in the world with the requisite skills the Holy See needed for the stickiest parts of its negotiations with the state of Israel over a Fundamental Agreement between the two parties. He was a native Hebrew-speaker who knew Israeli law as well as Church law. He had extensive on-site experience with the problems that needed to be resolved to regularize the Church’s legal position in Israel. He was a tough negotiator. He was a priest who could be trusted with the Church’s interests.
I took away from our two days of conversation in Austin (where Jaeger was working for the local diocese) almost thirty single-spaced, typewritten notes. Throughout, he insisted that full credit for getting the Fundamental Agreement done be given to Archbishop Andrea Cordero Lanza di Montezemolo, who had led the Vatican negotiating team, and Monsignor Luigi Gatti, the Secretariat of State’s expert on the Middle East. But Fr. Jaeger also made it clear that the key man in pushing this forward was John Paul II: “No one else would have had the courage to do it.” It was also clear that, at several key moments, Jaeger’s back-channel work with Israeli diplomats cleared out logjams created by ignorance, bureaucratic sluggishness, and political nervousness on both sides.
The story of this epic achievement turned out to be the longest single section in Witness to Hope. It was a story worth telling at length because it illustrated John Paul II’s vision, tenacity, and patience in pursuing something that he knew would bend the history of Catholic-Jewish relations in the direction he was convinced the Lord of history wanted. At the same time, it nicely illustrated the human passions, fears, and prejudices that made what might have seemed a simple matter a complex business indeed.
BACK IN SYNC IN POLAND
KRAKÓW, JUNE 1997
WHEN WE WERE FIRST DISCUSSING THE LOGISTICS OF MY PROJECT, Joaquín Navarro-Valls told me never to travel with the press party on a papal trip. “We’re in a tunnel,” he said, and it was better to be with the people experiencing the visit to get a feel for these events. It was good advice that proved itself in the summer of 1997.
The 1997 papal pilgrimage to Poland went far better than its 1991 predecessor, in part because the country’s mood had changed and in perhaps greater part because my friend Fr. Maciej Zięba helped shape the themes of the visit and the Pope’s texts. Their collaboration meant that the Pope was in far better sync with the situation than had been the case six years before and could speak accordingly, to the enthusiastic response of his audiences.
I got some follow-up interviewing done during the maelstrom of the papal visit, but my fondest memories of those days revolve around two bits of fun, sandwiched around something astonishing.
On my April visit, I had left behind in Fr. Zięba’s office a magnum of W. L. Weller Special Reserve, to which I attached a Post-it note: “NOT TO BE OPENED UNTIL JUNE 4, 1997.” With unhappy memories of a dry Warsaw during the 1991 papal visit, I didn’t want to get caught in an officially decreed desert again. My prudence had good journalistic results, for on Saturday, June 7, I got a call from Celestine Bohlen, the New York Times bureau chief in Rome and a friend. Celestine had just arrived in Kraków and wanted to get together; she also asked, “Where can you get a drink in this place?” I invited her to meet me at Fr. Zięba’s office that evening for a little Kentucky succor, after which we would have dinner with several Dominicans who could fill her in on the local scene. We had a delightful time; the gallant Dominican moral theologian Wojciech Giertych escorted Celestine back to her hotel after our dinner (all the more convivial because my Dominican friends convinced the proprietors of the restaurant that the intention of the law would be honored if they served us wine in teapots); and Celestine wrote a terrific story about the next day’s canonization of the fourteenth-century Polish queen Jadwiga.
That canonization was the astonishment. Fr. Zięba had secured seats for us near the platform from which John Paul II would celebrate the canonization Mass on the Błonia Krakowskie, the vast Kraków Commons—Europe’s only in-city meadow, created in the Middle Ages and preserved as a meadow ever since. With all vehicular traffic in the city banned until after the Mass, we left the Dominican priory at 7 a.m. to walk—along with over a million others—to the venue. The Mass was wonderful, a unique experience of 1.2 million people falling completely silent at the same time, when the Pope preached and during the consecration of the Eucharist. Perhaps even more amazing was the sight of those vast throngs, dressed in formal religious garb or regional folk costumes, walking through Kraków to the Błonia. In my entire Catholic life, which was not without colorful scenes, I’d never seen anything more vibrant and vivid than what I saw during that hour-long morning walk across the city, amid what seemed a Slavic foretaste of the Wedding Fast of the Lamb in Revelation 21.
That evening, Krzysztof Zanussi’s film of Our God’s Brother, Karol Wojtyła’s play featuring “Crypto-Lenin” in contest with St. Albert Chmielowski, premiered at the Słowacki Theater in the Kraków Old Town: a grand old building modeled on the Paris opera house, from which the author of what was about to be shown had been banned during the German occupation, like all other Poles. For some reason I had been given a premium seat in the orchestra and fou
nd myself in the midst of the papal party. Immediately to my right was Archbishop Giovanni Battista Re, who seemed to remember me and asked what I was doing in town. “Working,” I replied, and then tried to interest him, without much success, in some of what I had learned before the papal pilgrimage reached Kraków. Forty-five minutes later, I felt a head on my right shoulder. It was the high-energy Sostituto, fast asleep. I left Archbishop Re in peace, thinking my forbearance might later help me get the documents to which he was blocking my access. Alas, that tactic didn’t work.
CAMELS FOR DAUGHTERS?
KRAKÓW AND PARIS, AUGUST 1997
I RETURNED TO KRAKÓW IN JULY 1997 FOR THE ANNUAL CENTESIMUS Annus seminar, and when I wasn’t teaching I continued my interviews with the local Wojtyła experts, making two new acquaintances who helped me get inside my subject.
One evening, I drove over to Wadowice with Msgr. Tim Dolan, in town visiting the seminar, to talk with the pastor of Karol Wojtyła’s parish church, Father Kazimierz Suder. In addition to giving me a copy of the parish registry page on which the significant events of Wojtyła’s life, from baptism to papal election, were inscribed, Fr. Suder told me some interesting tales of young Karol Wojtyła and the local priests who had influenced him, not least in shaping his profound respect for Jews and Judaism. Then I met with Maria Ćwikła, the younger sister of Rhapsodic Theater impresario Miecyzsław Kotlarczyk, who lived briefly with Wojtyła and the Kotlarczyks during the war. Having known the house at Tyniecka 10, she sketched for me the layout of the “catacombs,” the basement apartment in which Wojtyła and his father lived and in which the latter died in 1941: a helpful recollection, as the apartment was not open to the public in 1997. Her memories of the rehearsals and recitals that constantly took place in the “catacombs” gave me a sense of the atmosphere of fearlessness that surrounded Karol Wojtyła even then.
The following month I went to Paris and stayed with my old friend Jean Duchesne and his family for World Youth Day 1997. I had met Jean, who did a lot of work with Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger of Paris, the year after my Wilson Center sabbatical: Lustiger was in Washington, Jim Billington set up a meeting for him in the Smithsonian Castle, and I was invited for coffee and conversation. Duchesne and I hit it off immediately and stayed in touch over the years on various projects.
His large apartment in the Auteuil neighborhood was part of a complex owned by his wife’s family, which included the flats in which the families of two of Jean’s old friends, the distinguished philosophers Rémi Brague and Jean-Luc Marion, also lived. The three men were part of Cardinal Lustiger’s cultural surround, so it was all conversation, all the time, in an environment that combined serious Catholic faith with cutting-edge intellectual life and a lot of fun, each of these scholarly gentlemen being a devotee of the cartoon character Tintin, whose adventures they insisted I read.
My daughters Gwyneth and Monica were part of the Washington pilgrimage group to World Youth Day, so after the papal opening ceremony on the Champs de Mars, we met at a designated leg of the Eiffel Tower and went to a restaurant near the Duchesnes’ apartment for dinner. We must have run into Rémi Brague that evening; a few days later, this world-renowned scholar of (among many other things) Islamic philosophy and law asked me over lunch, “How many camels do you wish for your daughters?”
The papal Mass closing World Youth Day 1997 was held at the Longchamp Racecourse, into which a half million souls packed themselves. Later that afternoon, Jean Duchesne and I drove to his family’s country house in the Norman village of Nonancourt to relax after a very busy week. We turned on the evening news, and there was our friend, the cardinal, speaking with an obviously stunned anchorman, who couldn’t believe that so many young people were passionate about the Church. Lustiger was in a robust, even combative mood. You shouldn’t read these young people through your own experience, he told the anchorman. You abandoned the faith of your fathers and think of that as something mature and superior. These young people have discovered Jesus Christ and want to explore all that that means. They don’t think that being Christian and being intelligent, engaged, and compassionate are mutually exclusive. Don’t put them down for that.
At which point, we opened another bottle of champagne.
POLONIA ON THE POTOMAC
WASHINGTON, 1997–1998
MY RESEARCH ON THE POLAND THAT SHAPED KAROL WOJTYŁA—and his role in helping liberate his native land—wasn’t conducted solely along the banks of the Vistula. It also took place along the Potomac littoral, in conversation with two native-born Poles who had led dramatic lives, were longtime residents of Washington, DC, and taught me important things about John Paul II and the darker recesses of world politics.
Zbigniew Brzezinski’s first response to my request to get together for my biography project set the tone for our future discussions: he said that he was glad I was doing the book because others hadn’t gotten the story right—by which he meant the attempts by several authors to suggest some sort of collusion between John Paul II and the United States government in the collapse of European communism. John Paul, he insisted, had a “long-range and more detached view” than the conspiracy theorists imagined.
Zbig had first met the future pope in 1976 when Cardinal Wojtyła lectured at a Harvard summer school, where Brzezinski found him a man of “calm strength” and “intelligence.” They shared the view that communism was not just evil but corrupt and inefficient, and thus doomed to fall eventually. And both were convinced, as Zbig put it, that communism’s disintegration could be “accelerated” by a cultural resistance: one that, by emphasizing human dignity, would provide an alternative to the brutal, but also hopeless, project of creating New Soviet Man.
Unpacking this, we got into a discussion of Agostino Casaroli and his Ostpolitik. Casaroli, as Zbig understood him, thought that a “normalization” of Church-state relations behind the iron curtain would set a foundation for some measure of social pluralism and religious freedom. John Paul II had a different view. For him, Brzezinski said, “‘normalization’ was a part of… should I call it ‘destabilization’? Well, perhaps not. A tool for transformation.” Casaroli, like the German Social Democratic leader Willy Brandt, believed in a politics of “convergence” between East and West during which the geopolitical status quo—a divided Europe—would not change but would be made more “palatable.” John Paul II, by contrast, thought that making the status quo more palatable by creating zones of freedom in communist-dominated countries was a tool for undermining things-as-they-were.
My most striking conversation with Zbig was about the Solidarity crisis of December 1980, when the Soviet Union was poised to invade Poland and strangle the nascent “independent, self-governing trade union” in its cradle. It was an intriguing tale of cooperation between the outgoing Carter administration and the about-to-be-inaugurated Reagan administration, in which various levers of hard and soft power were deployed to cause Brezhnev’s Kremlin to think again and then back off. In the course of this discussion, Brzezinski repeated the famous story of his calling John Paul at the height of the crisis, briefing him, asking for the Pope’s private number in case of emergency—and then hearing John Paul whisper to Stanisław Dziwisz, “Do I have a private phone number?”
Brzezinski did not wear piety on his sleeve, but he never thought of himself as anything other than a Catholic, and a Polish Catholic at that. Moreover, his intellectual work recognized the role that religious and moral conviction play in world politics in a way that challenged the secularist bias often found in international political analysis. Thus I wasn’t surprised to learn that Zbig, who had great respect for John Paul as a shrewd political analyst and operator, was most touched by the depth of the Pope’s spiritual life. After Brzezinski left government, he was in Rome and attended a papal audience. John Paul, spotting him, pulled him aside and asked quietly, “Can you stay for lunch?” Dziwisz got him up to the papal apartment on the family elevator, and as the former national security adviser was walki
ng to the dining room he passed the chapel and saw the Pope kneeling there, his head bowed to the floor in prayer. “It wasn’t a trance or an ecstasy,” he said, “but a sense of a man in profound conversation with God.”
The most extraordinary figure in the Washington Polonia was a man far less well known to the general public but a legend in the anticommunist community, which in those days included both liberals and conservatives: Jan Nowak.
Born in 1914, Zdzisław Antoni Jeziorański was doing doctoral studies in economics when World War II broke out. After escaping a German POW compound, he joined the Polish underground in Warsaw and was given the nom de guerre he retained for the rest of his life: Jan Nowak, the Polish equivalent of “John Smith.” He smuggled crucial information for the Polish government-in-exile out of occupied Poland on hair-raising missions to Sweden and London, where he briefed Winston Churchill. He got back to Warsaw in July 1944, just in time for the Warsaw Uprising, during which he married Jadwiga Wolska—whom Washington would later get to know, during the fifty-five years of their marriage, by her code name, “Greta.” When the Uprising collapsed under a torrent of Wehrmacht artillery shells and Luftwaffe bombs, Jan and Greta escaped through the sewers with precious film records of the gallant attempt by the Polish Home Army to take back Poland’s national capital, made their way to London via Germany, Switzerland, and France—and didn’t return to Poland for more than four decades.
Jan ran the Polish service of Radio Free Europe for years; on meeting him, John Paul II told Jan that he recognized his voice as that of the man he had listened to (illegally) while shaving in the morning. Jan also worked with the National Security Council during both the Carter and Reagan administrations and was widely respected across the partisan divides of political Washington as a man of integrity, courage, discretion, and sound judgment. When we began discussing my biographical project in May 1998, he began exactly where Zbig Brzezinski had begun in February 1997: with a critique of other papal biographies, whose major mistake had been to “make John Paul II into a political pope.” John Paul had no “program” for the overthrow of communism, Jan insisted; he thought of himself as a pastor, and in pursuing that vocation he made an important contribution to the communist crack-up.
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