Lessons in Hope

by George Weigel

  Jan also shed light on one of the most intriguing characters in the drama of Poland’s self-liberation, Colonel Ryszard Kukliński, a Polish army officer so revolted by the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 that he became an American intelligence asset in 1972. Thanks to Kukliński, American officials knew the details of the Soviet invasion plan for December 1980 (including their plans to execute the Solidarity leadership after summary courts-martial) and were able to respond in the ways Brzezinski had described. In Jan’s view, Zbig and the heroic Polish colonel “saved Poland from invasion—I am sure of it.”

  Jan told me that John Paul II was thoroughly briefed on Kukliński and his clandestine role because President Reagan had ordered that the Pope be told “everything,” both information and sources. Kukliński was finally exfiltrated from Poland with his family in 1981 after his cover was blown; both his sons died in strange circumstances while the family was living in the Washington area. When the question of Kukliński’s return to Poland after the fall of communism became controversial, some claiming that he had violated his officer’s oath, John Paul II quietly put the word around that Ryszard Kukliński should be welcomed back to Poland as a national hero. (Zbigniew Brzezinski, for his part, described Kukliński as “the first Polish officer in NATO.”)

  Jan was also full of insight into the martial law imposition in December 1981, which he thought entirely the doing of Wojciech Jaruzelski. Everything the Soviets did after the thwarted invasion of December 1980, he argued, was “bluff.” They wanted Jaruzelski and the Poles to do the dirty work; Jaruzelski, for his part, wanted a small Soviet military contingent to come into Poland right after martial law to provide him with cover (“See, I had to do it or they would have invaded…”); the Soviets, knowing the game, refused. Jaruzelski, Jan insisted, lied in the 1990s about what he did in December 1981 and why, but he was not a traitor in that he didn’t liquidate the Solidarity leadership, as both the Soviets and Polish communist hard-liners would have done.

  As for Karol Wojtyła’s role in sowing the seeds that eventually grew into the Solidarity movement, Jan suggested that it was primarily a matter of changing the Church: that when Wojtyła changed the focus of Catholic anticommunist polemic from defending the rights of believers to defending everyone (including dissident Marxists), the possibility emerged of creating a Solidarity-like coalition across the usual ideological and class divides.

  Jan confirmed my hunch that the appointment of Józef Glemp as Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński’s successor was done at Wyszynski’s urging, and suggested that the relationship between Warsaw and the papal apartment was not nearly as warm and cordial as it had been when the old primate was alive. And, like just about everyone else, Jan believed that the trail backwards from the assassination attempt of May 13, 1981, eventually led to Moscow, the Lubyanka, the KGB, and Yuri Andropov.

  LITERARY ARCHITECTURE

  CHARLESTON, SEPTEMBER 1997

  ON MY RETURN FROM PARIS IN AUGUST 1997 I CALLED MY FRIEND Father Jay Scott Newman at Divine Redeemer Catholic Church in Hanahan, South Carolina, near Charleston: might I stay with him for a week while I decided how to structure Witness to Hope? The amount of material I had gathered was threatening to become overwhelming, so it seemed the right time, and Fr. Newman’s rectory the right place, to erect a framework on which the book could be built. Ever the gracious Southern gentleman, Fr. Newman replied that his guest room was at my disposal for as long as I liked.

  The biggest structural problem in designing Witness to Hope was to figure out how to insert discussions of Karol Wojtyła’s thought and John Paul II’s magisterium into the narrative without bogging down the story. When I finished wrestling with this problem at Fr. Newman’s, I had an outline of some 125 pages, into which I inserted references—to books, articles, or interview notes—so that when it came to writing, I wasn’t juggling masses of paper trying to find what I was looking for.

  Books in progress are like children: a book has a kind of mind of its own, and it will push back against an author. No matter how well planned, at some point or another the book is going to want to go that way and the author is going to say, “No, we’re going this way.” There was one such tug of war when it came to writing Witness to Hope, involving where to insert a discussion of Wojtyła’s philosophical work. Other than that, the long outline I completed during that week in South Carolina stood me in good stead over the next year of intense writing.

  Mother Teresa of Calcutta died a week before I got to Hanahan, and the Princess of Wales died five days after the foundress of the Missionaries of Charity. As Fr. Newman and I watched the evening news, we couldn’t help but notice the sharp contrast between how the world was reacting to the deaths of these two widely admired women, icons of different facets of the late twentieth century. Mother Teresa’s death was generally handled as it should have been, even by secular people skeptical about consecrated religious life: here was a saint, whether you believed in sanctity in the Catholic Church’s terms (heroic virtue made possible by grace) or the world’s terms (manifest decency and compassion). The contrast with the British reaction to Diana’s death was shattering. As I said to Fr. Newman when we were watching one TV news report of the semihysterical crowds outside Buckingham Palace, it wasn’t a pretty picture to see “an entire country having a nervous breakdown.” What on earth was going on? The subject would shortly recur at the papal board.

  “WHO EEZ BOB DEE-LAHN?”

  ROME, SEPTEMBER 1997

  ON SATURDAY EVENING, SEPTEMBER 27, 1997, JOHN PAUL II WENT BY helicopter to Bologna to close an Italian national Eucharistic Congress. Some imaginative soul in the Italian bishops’ conference had decided that Bob Dylan should be the setup act for the Pope. It seemed strange but perhaps interesting, so I planted myself in front of the television in the North American College faculty lounge and waited.

  And there he was, Dylan himself, floppy hat, guitar, and harmonica, coming on stage. I can’t remember how many songs he did—three or four—but he did them in that inimitable voice and then closed with “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Dylan left; John Paul came on stage and, discarding his prepared text, gave a wonderful impromptu talk about the Holy Spirit blowing in the wind of the last decade of the twentieth century and preparing the Church for the Great Jubilee of 2000. The man, I said to myself later that night, has game.

  The following Tuesday, I was up in the papal apartment for lunch and work. The Pope said grace, sat down, fixed me with that look across the table, and began the proceedings by asking, “Who eez Bob DEE-lahn?” To the everlasting aggravation of my daughter Monica, a great Dylan fan, I replied, “Holy Father, think of him as someone whose songs always sound better when someone else sings them.” Then we got into more serious matters.

  We talked at some length about Mother Teresa. John Paul said that her death had “left us all a little orphaned” and that, as Albert Chmielowski had been God’s brother, Mother Teresa had been the “sister of God.” I mentioned that Joan had been baptized in the same church in Calcutta where the diminutive nun had been laid out, and John Paul reminisced a bit about visiting her first Calcutta shelter. A few days later, the prime minister of India had said to the Pope, “You must come and visit India again,” at which point Msgr. Dziwisz, who, as usual, had gotten more puckish as the meal went on, said, “Perché no?” (Why not?) Which, as intended, elicited a roll of the papal eyes, a gentle self-smack on the papal forehead, and a muttered, “Dio mio!” Bishop Ryłko said, with the Pope nodding agreement, that Mother Teresa had been a “person-message” for our time and that she had embodied many of the great themes of the pontificate: pro-life, pro-family, concern for the poor, concern for women, human rights. Dziwisz, back in a more serious vein, said that John Paul and Mother Teresa had a kind of mutual or reciprocal understanding “senza parole” (without words), while the Pope recalled that every time they met, “she always said the same thing: ‘I have started a house in Russia, I have started a house in China,’” etc.,
etc. Her materially impoverished life was in sharp contrast to that of the Princess of Wales, although John Paul, ever the pastor, remarked thoughtfully on how Mother Teresa seemed to be a positive influence on Diana, who clearly admired the foundress of the Missionaries of Charity.

  We talked briefly about the upcoming award of the title Doctor of the Church to St. Thérèse of Lisieux, which the Pope thought “fit well” with the recent World Youth Day in Paris, of which she had been one of the co-patrons; earlier in the conversation he said that the very idea of World Youth Days “had its origins in my Środowisko.” Then he switched gears and said that he had been “talking directly with Cardinal Ratzinger” about the long-delayed beatification cause of John Henry Newman, for whom he said he had a “great respect.” I asked him what in Newman drew his admiration and he replied that Newman had “opened new horizons” for the Church’s intellectual life.

  We talked about my recent conversations with Środowisko, and I mentioned that Piotr Malecki, whom the Pope remembered as “my first altar boy when I went to the parish of St. Florian,” had referred to himself as the “enfant terrible” of the group. John Paul chuckled and said, “I think not so terrible.” When I told him that Danuta Rybicka said that she heard her husband’s voice, as it were, at several moments in Wojtyła’s play The Jeweler’s Shop, John Paul admitted it was true, that he took situations “that only those present at the time could recognize” and wove them into his drama. My mention of Maria Kotlarcyk Ćwikła led the Pope into a reminiscence about the Rhapsodic Theater. He spoke of all those in the original group and, when he came to Danuta Michałowska, said, “She is a great artist,” then confirmed that Miss Michałowska had performed her play I Without Name in the parlor where I had been before lunch.

  The Pope asked whether I had yet spoken with Jerzy Turowicz and Marek Skwarnicki and when I replied that I had, several times, he said that these two colleagues at Tygodnik Powszechny were “the only two who understood” his poetry. I asked, “And Sister Emilia?” Dziwisz broke in again “Si, anche Emilia” (Yes, Emilia too). The Pope, chuckling at Dziwisz, said, “She has been very helpful to me,” and I said that Dziwisz was the real enfant terrible in the papal surround, which led to more chaffing in various directions. I left with John Paul saying that he hoped to see me soon, “at the next interrogation.”

  “ARE YOU PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN?”

  ROME AND VIENNA, NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 1997

  A SYNOD FOR AMERICA WAS MEETING IN ROME IN LATE NOVEMBER 1997, which seemed a good opportunity to discuss the Pope and the pontificate with bishops from throughout the Western Hemisphere. I got a lot of useful interviewing done in the interstices of the Synod and spoke with several key Italian political figures about John Paul II, but only after solving an urgent personal problem.

  John Paul nominated my close friend Father Richard Neuhaus as a Synod member; Richard and I were staying in small guest rooms on the top floor of the North American College, and as I should have expected, Richard was quickly getting bored. He was accustomed to the fast pace of his professional and pastoral life in New York; he was used to being the center of the action and conversation in any world in which he found himself; and here he was, the absolutely last name on the roster of Synod members, compelled to sit through hours of tedious ecclesiastical rhetoric, muffled—and to what purpose?

  So by the third or fourth night of the Synod, with Richard keeping me up to all hours while complaining about what a waste of time the whole exercise was, our decades-long friendship was becoming seriously strained. Then the light bulb came on and I interrupted one of his disquisitions on the futility of it all with a suggestion: “Why don’t you write a book about all this?” He immediately perked up and started scribbling some notes, which was my signal to escape. The book, Appointment in Rome, aggravated Cardinal Jan Schotte, the Synod General Secretary, by its criticism of Synod process, and Schotte wrote Richard to share his pain. The very same day Schotte’s minatory letter arrived in New York, Richard got a letter from the Pope about the book; John Paul II had loved it, and Richard enjoyed enclosing a copy of the Pope’s congratulatory letter in his response to Cardinal Schotte.

  During the last week of the Synod I took an overnight train to Vienna to talk with its archbishop emeritus, Cardinal Franz König, and the incumbent archbishop, Christoph Schönborn, OP, who was instrumental in preparing the Catechism of the Catholic Church under the direction of Cardinal Ratzinger.

  Cardinal König was one of the Great Electors at the second conclave of 1978, and perhaps the key man in advancing the candidacy of Karol Wojtyła when the chief Italian candidates, Cardinals Giuseppe Siri and Giovanni Benelli, deadlocked. The cardinal was a spry ninety-two when we met in his apartment on the top floor of a retirement home run by the Daughters of Charity. He had gotten to know Karol Wojtyła during Vatican II, he said, and in those days, the Viennese cardinal had found him “intelligent,” “modest,” and “interesting for three reasons”: he spoke German well and was committed to Polish-German reconciliation; he presented his ideas clearly (“This is a clever boy”); he was from behind the iron curtain and yet thought his part of Europe was as much “Europe” as the West.

  König’s esteem for Wojtyła must have grown, for a day or two before Conclave II in 1978 opened, König said to his old friend, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński, “Who is your candidate?” The Polish primate replied, “I don’t know, I don’t really know anyone, I don’t have a candidate.” To which König replied, “Well, perhaps Poland could present a candidate?” Wyszyński snorted, “You think I should go to Rome? That would be a triumph for the communists…” Then, when the Austrian replied, “No, not you, but there is a second…” Wyszyński dismissed the idea out of hand: “No, he’s too young, he’s unknown, he could never be pope.”

  After Wojtyła was elected, König walked out for the presentation of the new pontiff with Cardinal Pericle Felici, the senior cardinal deacon who would announce the new pope from the central loggia of St. Peter’s. “How do you spell the name?” the Italian cardinal asked König. After König had spelled it out for him, the veteran curialist muttered, “What a terrible spelling.”

  Cardinal König had other interesting things to say about the conclaves of 1978. He had, for example, received letters from Italians toward the end of Pope Paul’s pontificate, asking him to help elect a non-Italian “because we are in such a mess here in Italy and would like to have a non-Italian pope.” But the Italian cardinals at Conclave I in 1978 brushed aside the notion of a non-Italian pontiff, saying “Look, we know this situation better; we’ve done this for centuries; we know how to do it.” The cardinal laughed at this last recollection and noted that John Paul II’s “impression on the international level [had been] enormous”—and that he was listened to much more in the US than in Western Europe.

  We got into a polite tussle over Paul VI’s encyclical on marital chastity, Humanae Vitae, the cardinal saying that its teaching ought to be understood as a matter of “guidelines” from which “personal conscience” would make decisions: Did I agree? I said that the encyclical, coming in 1968, couldn’t have happened at a worse time; the cardinal agreed. I then said that John Paul II’s Theology of the Body had given the teaching a more humanistic foundation than Humanae Vitae had provided; and the cardinal agreed with that. Then I said that, had Humanae Vitae been complemented by something like a recent Vatican instruction for confessors, which urged sensitivity and compassion in dealing with the challenges of chaste conjugal life, the encyclical might have had a better reception; and König agreed with that, too. Finally, I said that John Paul II had “gotten the Church over St. Augustine in matters of human sexuality,” such that the Church’s teaching about human love could be “heard” now in cultural circumstances in which a lot of people had been hurt by the sexual revolution; and the cardinal said, at least in respect of overcoming Augustine, “There is no doubt about that.” What struck me in all this, though, was that this very senior churchman, who was
at the center of global Catholic affairs from the Vatican II through the mid-1980s, seemed genuinely surprised by my suggestions, as if he’d never heard such a presentation before.

  After another interesting exchange about German theology and its possibly harmful impact on pastoral life, which the cardinal was “ashamed to [say] is not… good,” König took me downstairs and hailed me a cab. We never met again, but I’ve thought many times of something he said at the end of our two-hour conversation: “If the question of God means nothing to people, if the question of Jesus Christ disappears, this is a great decline… this is terrible.”

  Archbishop Schönborn was a bit late for our meeting, so while I was waiting I studied the portraits of his predecessors in a parlor and noticed that one of them was a Doctor of the Church, St. Peter Canisius. When the Dominican Schönborn came in to greet me, I said I hadn’t know there was a Doctor Ecclesiae among the bishops of Vienna and “maybe there will now be a second”; he quickly replied that the Jesuit Canisius “was only apostolic administrator for a little while.”