Then more trouble began.
When the O’Connor party arrived at the airport, we were told that our flight back to Havana would be delayed for hours because the Cuban government had decreed that no planes could be allowed in Cuban airspace while the papal plane was in the air. This was an obvious lie, as we could see planes taking off and landing while we stewed in the un–air conditioned airport. What had happened? It wouldn’t have surprised me if the regime, seriously put off by Archbishop Meurice’s denunciation of Fidel but unable to retaliate against the Pope, decided to stick it to the Americans by holding us in Santiago for a good long time. The former US Navy admiral John Joseph O’Connor was not amused, and as the hours wore on it was not hard to envision steam emanating from his ears.
When they finally decided to let us go, I walked out of the fetid airport with Cardinal Hickey. We were chatting about nothing in particular when a Cuban security official stepped in front of our party and said, “Gentlemen, would you please stand against that wall there for a moment?” As we lined up, Hickey, not previously known for rapierlike wit, stage-whispered to me, “Could I please have a written statement that I’m about to be shot in odium fidei [in hatred of the faith]? It’ll simplify the beatification process.”
One more story from those days should be told here. On the night of the Mass in Camagüey, I was sitting in the hotel bar with some American colleagues, rehashing the day and sharing intelligence about the politics of the visit and the bailout of most American journalists, stampeding back to Washington to cover what they expected would be the resignation of President Clinton because of the Lewinsky affair. The hotel was one of those five-star monsters built for conscience-light tourists who didn’t mind vacationing in an apartheid society far more rigidly segregated between rich foreigners and poor locals than Johannesburg ever was between whites and blacks. Clumsily disguised “bellboys”—Cuban internal security goons—were everywhere, making sure that the proper apartheid distance was being maintained and that we weren’t slipping dollars to the waiters (which we did anyway).
Then, in walked an American cardinal with a gang of youngsters he had just met at a local church trailing behind him. The cardinal invited them into the bar for a Coke and, as they were a choir, asked them to sing. Their beautiful, clear voices got everyone’s attention and I asked the cardinal what was going on. “I met them in their church,” he answered, “and asked them to come here and sing about the real revolution—the revolution of Jesus Christ.”
The cardinal wasn’t through yet. As the ferrets watched, speechless, he took these twenty kids up the escalators to one of the hotel’s posh restaurants and stood them to a dinner the likes of which none of them had ever seen before, walking up and down the buffet and explaining to these impoverished youngsters in fluent Spanish what each dish was. After they had eaten the cardinal encouraged them to sing again and sat nearby so that the security types wouldn’t interfere. Everything in the restaurant simply stopped, as guests, staff, and goons were serenaded for perhaps twenty minutes by songs about the love of Christ.
In the middle of this impromptu concert I went over to where the cardinal was sitting and whispered, “I doubt that this is accurate theologically, but I think you’ve performed a kind of exorcism here tonight.” He smiled and we shook hands, knowing that we were living a very special moment
The cardinal was Bernard Francis Law of Boston. What he did that night—working a small miracle of evangelical love—is another part of his legacy that deserves to be remembered.
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE? YOU ARE NOT FROM MILWAUKEE…”
ROME, MARCH 1998
IN JULY 1997, MSGR. JAMES HARVEY WAS NAMED ASSESSOR FOR ORDINARY Affairs in the Secretariat of State—the first American to hold the third-ranking position at the top tier of the Vatican bureaucratic pyramid and a kind of chief of staff to the papal chief of staff, the Sostituto. Harvey was not to stay assessor for long, though. In February 1998 John Paul II decided to rearrange the senior papal staff to get some order into the preparations for the Great Jubilee of 2000, and in that reshuffle, Harvey was named Prefect of the Papal Household, to manage the Pope’s entire public schedule along with a new Prefetto Aggiunto, or “adjunct prefect,” Stanisław Dziwisz. Both Harvey and Dziwisz were named bishops, as was Piero Marini, the Master of Pontifical Liturgical Ceremonies.
Their ordinations were set for March 19, and while I was writing furiously and making good progress, I wasn’t going to miss the episcopal consecration of one of my closest friends. So I made a quick trip to Rome, squeezing in some follow-up interviewing before and after the ordination. What I hadn’t anticipated was that the three ordinands would each choose one person to be a lector at the ordination Mass and that Harvey would choose me. At the rehearsal the day before, a rather supercilious and quite short junior master of ceremonies asked me whether I would “read in English or American.” I looked down and gave him what my children used to call “the look,” which ended that line of inquiry. At the end of the walk-through, he asked me whether I would sing the Verbum Domini (The Word of the Lord) at the end of the reading or whether a Sistine Choir cantor should intone it. Old choirboy that I was, I said I’d take care of it—and then spent fifteen minutes practicing on the roof of the North American College that evening.
Before Mass began, I went over to the choir and said to the director, twice, and in Italian, “I’ll sing the Verbum Domini.” When the moment came for my reading from 2 Samuel, I was brought up to the portable ambo then used in St. Peter’s by Monsignor William Millea, a Connecticut priest and one of the other assistant emcees. Coming in front of the Pope, who was seated before the altar, we made a deep bow. When I looked up, there was John Paul II waving at me—and the same thought probably ran through several thousand Italian minds: “Chi è quel laico?” (Who’s that layman?). The reading went fine. But I hadn’t gotten a half second into intoning the Verbum Domini when the wretched Sistine Choir cantor cut in—and I just kept going. Bill Millea, escorting me back to my seat, muttered, “Nice stereo.”
The next day the Pope was meeting guests of the three new bishops and Bishop Harvey invited me to join his family and friends from Milwaukee. I tried to decline, saying that I saw the Pope frequently and his friends ought not have an interloper when they had their chance, but he insisted. The audience was in the Sala Clementina and I put myself at the end of the queue. When I finally got to the Pope, John Paul looked at me, put on a mock-stern expression, and said, “What are you doing here? You are not from Milwaukee. You should be home writing.” He then laughed and I said, “Be not afraid: I’ve got four chapters done.”
“JOAN OR GWYNETH?”
ROME, APRIL 1998
MY OLDER DAUGHTER, GWYNETH, WAS DOING HER UNIVERSITY OF Dallas Rome semester in the spring of 1998, and as she and I were both going to be there for Holy Week and Easter week, it seemed a good time to bring the rest of the family over. On the morning of April 7, I was having breakfast in the North American College faculty dining room before leaving with the librarian, Sister Rebecca Abel, OSB, to pick up Joan, Monica, and Stephen at Fiumicino. Then the phone rang and Msgr. Tim Dolan went to the small alcove between the dining room and the faculty lounge—the famous Red Room—to take the call. Dolan is the only person I’ve ever known who can make me laugh at breakfast, but on this particular morning, he administered a shock rather than a joke to jolt me into full consciousness. “That was Marini’s office,” he said when he got back to the table. “They need an English-speaking woman to read at the Pope’s Easter Sunday Mass. So who’s it going to be—Joan or Gwyneth?” I said I thought Gwyneth might have other opportunities, so let’s make it Joan.
She was a bit surprised to get the news later that day, but Joan handled the assignment with aplomb—no easy business, as the Mass was outdoors on the Sagrato, the platform in front of St. Peter’s, which was a lot harder venue in which to read than the basilica itself. It began raining lightly toward the end of Mass and the five of us huddled under ra
incoats and umbrellas as the lengthy queue of cardinals, bishops, monsignori, and lower clergy lined up to process back into the basilica. Bishop Dziwisz, ever alert, spotted me and gave me a wave, meaning “Follow us.” So the tail end of the procession that day was la famiglia Weigel, slightly bedraggled from the rain and a bit late because we had to rescue Monica from a plainclothes Vatican policeman who didn’t understand that she was with us.
Inside St. Peter’s, the Pope had unvested in the chapel of the Pietà, which became a makeshift sacristy during outdoor papal Masses. After greeting and thanking the altar servers and others, he came up to the five of us, still clad in rain gear. Everyone got a papal hug and kiss, with no chaffing this time about “What are you doing here?”
That Holy Week and Easter week were full of unforgettable moments in addition to that very familial session with John Paul: eleven-year-old Stephen falling asleep onto a restaurant tabletop; Msgr. Dolan completing the fastest celebration of the Easter Vigil in the history of the Roman Rite, with cigars and bourbon to follow; Christopher Nalty, then a New Orleans seminarian, inadvertently putting a post-Lenten champagne cork through a window of the pediatric hospital beside the North American College; Bishop Harvey giving the five Weigels the Sistine Chapel to ourselves for an hour, including a visit to the “Room of Tears,” where newly elected popes first don papal garments. But there was also work to be done, and while the family did some touring, I spent more than four hours with another member of his informal papal family whom John Paul II insisted I meet.
“HE IS A SOURCE OF LIGHT”
ROME, APRIL 1998
IRINA ILOVAYSKAYA ALBERTI WAS THE DAUGHTER OF RUSSIAN émigré parents who fled the country after the Bolshevik Revolution. She was raised in Yugoslavia, where she met her future husband, an Italian diplomat; separated during World War II, they married in Rome in 1946. Her husband died in 1975, at which point Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn asked her to come to Cavendish, Vermont, as a personal and family assistant. With her own children grown, she accepted the offer and spent four years with the Solzhenitsyns in the Green Mountain State.
On October 16, 1978, she was doing some shopping for the family in a drugstore owned by Polish-Americans when the news came over the radio of Karol Wotyła’s election as pope—“It was a madhouse” of celebration, she recalled. When she got back to the Solzhenitsyn farm, they turned on the news to verify the story, and when it was clear that Wojtyła was in fact pope, the Nobel laureate threw his arms out and said, “It’s a miracle! It’s the first positive event since World War I and it’s going to change the face of the world!” Why did the great author think that, I asked Mrs. Alberti? Because, she answered, while he didn’t know Wojtyła, Solzhenitsyn knew what the election meant: resistance to communism would now be rooted in religion and culture, which were the strongest forces in the world.
After she moved back to Europe, a Polish friend arranged for Irina Alberti to be in the first row of a papal general audience in 1983 or thereabouts. She and John Paul spoke briefly, and the Pope was “very friendly and interested.” Mrs. Alberti said she felt “a great emotion” at this Pole’s love for Russia, for “Poles hate Russians and they’re right” to do so. Yet here was a man who was interested in her ancestral homeland, “not only in a scholarly way but in a human and spiritual way.”
The next encounter came when another Nobel laureate, Andrei Sakharov, was on hunger strike in Gorky, trying to force the Soviet authorities to let his wife, Elena Bonner, leave the country for heart surgery. Elena Bonner and Irina Alberti were old friends, and when Bonner’s children came to Rome as part of the international agitation on their mother’s behalf, Mrs. Alberti flew to Rome from Paris, where she was then living, and got them in to see John Paul. Despite fretting in the Secretariat of State about a public “confrontation” with the Soviets, the Pope immediately agreed to see the Bonner children, spoke with them for ten minutes with Mrs. Alberti translating, and promised to keep working on the case. As the papal managers whisked John Paul away, he turned back to Irina Alberti and said, “Come and see me the next time you’re in Rome.” “How?” she asked. “Talk to my secretary,” the Pope replied.
That seemed a bit unusual, but her French confessor said she should just call the Vatican and ask for Msgr. Dziwisz. A meeting at Castel Gandolfo was arranged for the summer of 1985; there, they had a long conversation about conditions in the USSR, about the new Gorbachev government, and about the situation of Christian communities in the Soviet Union. At the end of the meeting, John Paul invited her to get in touch when she next returned to Rome.
When Elena Bonner was finally allowed to leave the USSR for medical treatment, Irina Alberti arranged for her to meet the Pope in an “absolutely secret and private” meeting. One condition for Bonner’s getting a passport was that she wouldn’t meet with public figures, and Sakharov, back in the USSR, was a hostage to her good behavior. So Mrs. Alberti and Mrs. Bonner sandbagged the world media into following the Bonner children while the two women snuck into the Vatican. Elena Bonner spent two hours with John Paul in an extensive discussion of life in the USSR. The Pope listened carefully while showing Bonner a lot of personal kindness. When this very tough dissident came out of the meeting she was sobbing: “He’s the most incredible man I’ve ever met. He’s all light. He is a source of light.”
There was another two-hour meeting, some time later, with both Sakharov and Bonner; assistants kept trying to interrupt and pull the Pope away, but he insisted on staying with his two guests. Sakharov was then being wooed by Mikhail Gorbachev to stand for election to the Supreme Soviet and didn’t like the idea; he thought Gorbachev was still a communist who believed in reform communism, and Sakharov didn’t. The whole matter was weighing heavily on him, and Elena Bonner said, “This may be the only place in the world where you can ask the question that’s been tormenting you.” So Sakharov explained his dilemma and asked John Paul, “By getting into this game, am I directing it onto a better course, or will I be compromised?” It was, Mrs. Alberti said, a form of going to confession—something new for Andrei Sakharov. The Pope thought awhile and replied, “You have a strong and clear conscience. You can be sure you won’t make mistakes.… I think you can be of use.” And the greatest of Soviet dissidents took the Pope’s advice and “got into the game.”
Sakharov, Mrs. Alberti said, was “a theist unsure of his relationship to God.” When the great physicist and human rights champion died, the Pope sent a “beautiful telegram” to Elena Bonner over the objections of the Secretariat of State—Sakharov was a private person, he wasn’t a Catholic, it will make things more difficult, etc., etc. John Paul just went ahead and sent it. Mrs. Bonner was invited to a Mass in the Pope’s private chapel after her husband’s death and once again came out crying and saying to Irina Alberti, “He is a source of light.”
The Pope’s burning desire to reach out to Russia and the Russians manifested itself in his intense interest in the celebrations being planned for the millennium of the baptism of Rus’ in 1988. He was “never judgmental,” Mrs. Alberti said, about what she called “the greatest mistake in history,” the Russian Church’s adhesion to Constantinople after the latter’s split with Rome in 1054; rather, he knew the immense spiritual power of Orthodoxy. But he also knew the Soviet government was “playing games” with the 1988 millennium, proposing one or two big public events for elites with no media coverage—and thus no effect on the general population. By proclaiming all over the world that the Catholic Church was going to celebrate this great moment in Christian and Russian history, John Paul effectively took that option off the table for the Soviets. And thus the great irony: the Pope whom Russian Orthodox Patriarch Pimen (a KGB lackey) said was “unwelcome” in Moscow in June 1988 was the one who compelled the regime to acknowledge the baptism of Rus’ as a great historical moment.
Mrs. Alberti also remarked that many curial officials were surprised by the Russian Orthodox leadership’s negativity toward the possibility of a papal visit
to Moscow for the 1988 millennium, thinking they had a good relationship with Russian Orthodoxy. But as Mrs. Alberti noted, all these curial Russophiles ever did was “give in to [Russian] demands,” so there was no incentive for the Orthodoxy to be anything but difficult.
Irina Alberti was not sanguine about the near-term future of Russian Orthodoxy. Its leadership did not share John Paul’s view that the pursuit of Christian unity is a Christian’s duty before God. The Pope, for his part, understood the ROC leadership’s tendency to think of everything in terms of power; but it was a completely asymmetrical relationship, she said, because they “simply don’t get” what the Pope said about the religious obligation of ecumenism in Ut Unum Sint.
When we met, Mrs. Alberti was going to Russia every month for ten days or so; if she learned “anything interesting,” she let John Paul know. She obviously knew the Pope’s mind well and told me that, while there were differences between Karol Wojtyła and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—for John Paul, World War I meant the beginning of free Poland, while for Solzhenitsyn it meant the end of free Russia—they shared a Slavic view of spiritual power in history: God is Lord of history, which means that spiritual and moral values are historically decisive. She spoke knowledgeably about the Pope’s regard for Vladimir Soloviev and told me that John Paul had read deeply, in French or Polish translations, in the works of exiled or émigré Russian Orthodox thinkers, including Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergei Bulgakov, Semyon Frank, Pavel Florensky, and Georges Florovsky. These men, some of them converts from Marxism to Christianity, had helped him understand “what is Russia” and “what it could give the world,” which was “more than the evil of communism.”
Irina Alberti was already concerned about a renascent Russian “messianism,” in which an Orthodox/nationalist ideology would serve as the replacement ideology for communism. But this was of no interest to the mass of Russian people; it was a political phenomenon, she thought, an ideological justification for reestablishing a Russian-dominated empire. (She told me this, I now remind myself, when Vladimir Putin was Deputy Mayor of St. Petersburg, an unknown figure outside certain intelligence circles.)
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