Lessons in Hope

by George Weigel

  For the first times in years there were none of the facial distortions and frozenness caused by Parkinson’s disease. He was no longer stooped and bent. As I saw him there, his back straight and his face calm and at peace, I couldn’t help thinking of him as a newly elected pontiff, climbing steps two at a time, bantering with crowds, tossing babies in the air, kissing the halt, the lame, and the ill; or as a heroic bishop, celebrating Mass in a field in frozen Nowa Huta on Christmas Eve, defying godlessness and its proponents; or as a daredevil skier careening down a mountain in the Tatras. Inside his left arm was the silver pastoral staff he had taken over from Paul VI—the modernistic crucifix he waved to the crowds at his inaugural Mass like a great sword of faith; the cross he waved at the crowds of pious Catholics in Managua over the jeering Sandinista rabble. He was clad in red pontifical vestments with a gold miter, yet he was also unmistakably Karol Wojtyła, for he also wore the battered red-brown loafers that caused over a quarter-century of distress to the traditional managers of popes.

  After ten minutes of revery I prayed again for the repose of his soul, whispered, “Well done; thank you,” and left to try to bear witness to the witness during the televised liturgical drama in the days ahead.

  Archbishop Piero Marini drew his share of criticism as Master of Pontifical Liturgical Ceremonies, but no one who cared about the catechetical opportunity presented by John Paul II’s death could object to the ceremony Marini designed for the transfer of the Pope’s body on Monday afternoon from the Sala Clementina to a catafalque in front of Bernini’s great bronze baldacchino and the high altar of St. Peter’s. Vatican television had set up cameras along the lengthy route—which traversed the Apostolic Palace and the Raphael stanze, through the Sala Ducale and the Sala Regia, down the Scala Regia, out the Bronze Doors, and into the Piazza San Pietro, before turning toward the basilica itself—so we had a live feed of the procession. I had a copy of the special missal Marini had prepared for the papal exequies, so even as our live coverage followed the rule we had agreed on long before—let the pictures and the drama tell the story—I translated fragments of the psalms and canticles as requested by Brian Williams and briefly described the rooms and hallways through which the procession passed. The singing of the Litany of the Saints, I noted, was like going through a family photo album; this was the family of the Church in glory, being called to come to the aid of one whom many of us expected would soon be numbered among the saints—and who had been at the center of the global Catholic family for more than a quarter-century.

  It was a deeply moving ceremony and wonderful television. That it was televised at all suggested that at least something had been learned from the greatest of papal communicators: the people of the Church should be present, even if by television, at the last rites of the universal pastor of the Church.

  The next three days were consumed by television work and final preparations for the live broadcast of the funeral Mass on Friday morning. The obituary columns I was asked to write by the Wall Street Journal and Newsweek, and my own Catholic press column, had been filed weeks before, so it was possible to concentrate on the TV work—and marvel at the crowds that kept pouring into the city, effectively doubling its population in four days. Something unprecedented was happening; it was impressive and moving, but it also raised an urgent logistical question.

  Despite my having every press credential and security pass imaginable, it was going to be impossible on the day of the funeral to get across the Via della Conciliazione, which lay between the apartment I was living in and NBC’s platform for our broadcast: the crowd would simply be impassable, despite Roman officials’ attempts to draw people away from the Vatican by setting up jumbo TV screens at the Circus Maximus and other sites. So on the night of April 7, I took a long walk down the packed Conciliazione—noting the priests hearing confessions in doorways on either side of the boulevard that runs from the Tiber to the Piazza San Pietro—and tried a route I hoped would take me around the crowd the following morning.

  Back in the apartment, I called Piotr Malecki. We had spoken briefly on Sunday and I asked whether he, Teresa, and other Środowisko members would be coming to Rome for the funeral. They were too upset to think about it then, Piotr said. Days later, when it was impossible to get a hotel room in or near the city, they decided to come and, thinking correctly that they’d be sleeping outdoors, wore their old Wojtyła-style camping clothes. They’d called Archbishop Dziwisz and he’d come up with tickets. So I explained my apartment situation to Piotr and invited him and Teresa and anyone else they cared to invite to come up to the apartment for tea after the funeral Mass, saying we’d find each other by cell phone after the Mass was over.

  At 5 a.m. on April 8, I left the apartment and walked away from the Vatican, past the Castel Sant’Angelo and down the Tiber to the garish Palazzo di Giustizia, where I crossed the river on the Ponte Umberto I. I then retraced my route on the other side until I recrossed the river on the Ponte Principe Amedeo Savoia Aosta and walked to the base of the Janiculum; from there, I could get to the lawn of the Pontifical Urban University and our platform for broadcasting the funeral Mass. It took fifty minutes and along the way I saw more Polish flags than I’d ever seen in one place before, including Poland, but I managed to avoid getting trapped.

  That, however, was not Brian Williams’s fate. Fearing that the anchor would not be able to get from his hotel on the Via Veneto to our platform on the Janiculum, NBC somehow managed to get Brian a room for Thursday night, April 7, at the Hotel Columbus on the Via della Conciliazione. There was only one problem: he couldn’t get out of the hotel and up to our platform overlooking St. Peter’s Square, thanks to the crush on the Conciliazione. The burly Italians Phil Alongi hired to act as errand runners now had a new mission: exfiltrate the anchor from the Columbus and get him up to us. I sketched an escape route out the back of the hotel on a paper napkin and off the runners went, to return safely about forty-five minutes later with the anchor in tow. As the Duke of Wellington said of Waterloo, it was a near-run thing.

  I was proud of our three and a half hours of live coverage of what Brian aptly called, at the very beginning, “the human event of a generation.” The commentary filled in what needed to be explained or amplified, but as we had agreed beforehand, we let the Mass tell its own story. There was no chattering about the many famous personalities present. Brian gave me the time necessary to explain what needed explaining about the rite in a catechetical way: thus I was able to describe the baptismal significance of the white veil placed over the Pope’s face by Archbishop Dziwisz just before the casket was closed, linking it to the white robe of the newly christened and the pall covering the casket at every Catholic funeral. The solemnity of the vast crowd (estimated to be between three-quarters of a million and a million, just around the Vatican) somehow came through the broadcast and helped set the proper tone—this was a mega-event, but of a different sort.

  There were deeply touching moments over those three-plus hours: seeing the plain cypress casket for the first time as it was carried out of the basilica; watching the pages of the Book of the Gospels, placed on the casket of the man who had announced the New Evangelization, blow gently in the breeze; the beautiful homily of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, with its call to John Paul to bless us all from the window of the Father’s house. But the most striking moment during the funeral Mass of John Paul II was not in the missal.

  The night before, as we were going over things one last time in our NBC “newsroom,” I said that we should be alert for cries of magnus or magno—“great” in Latin or Italian—at the end of the Mass; it was not a risky prediction, as I had been told by friends that they intended to do just that, and I didn’t think they were the only ones. That electric moment came right after the distribution of Holy Communion was completed and Cardinal Ratzinger chanted the post-Communion prayer. It began with applause, and then the voices came—“Magnus!” “Santo subito!” “Magno!”—and continued for a few minutes, as I explain
ed that this was something that hadn’t happened since the funeral of Pope St. Gregory the Great. Canonizations in the first millennium, I said, were often spontaneous acclamations by the people of the Church. That was what happened in 604 at the death of Gregory I, and something similar was happening here: the people of the Church were proclaiming their conviction that this was a life of heroic virtue, and that, like Leo I and Gregory I, John Paul II should be known as “Pope St. John Paul the Great.”

  After the cries of “Magnus!” and “Santo subito!” stopped, the Mass continued with one of Marini’s innovations: chanted prayers of commendation in Greek by the Eastern-rite cardinals and bishops present. Since these somewhat exotic churchmen were not well known in the West, the lengthy chant gave me the opportunity to explain the rich diversity of the global Catholic family and to pay tribute to the largest of the Eastern Catholic Churches, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, which had lived underground for decades during Soviet times. Then it was over but for one more emotional moment. As the casket reached the entrance to the basilica, those carrying it, the Sediarii, turned around so that, in the mind’s eye, the deceased was facing his people, and indeed all who had come to pay him their respects, one last time. The last scene in the drama needed no verbal overlay.

  An hour or so after John Paul II had been buried in the Vatican basilica’s grottos, Piotr Malecki and I made contact by cell phone and arranged to meet in front of the Hotel Columbus a half hour later. Some seventy Środowisko men and women had arrived in Rome the previous day and spent the night on a street near the Vatican. On arriving at the basilica, they discovered that the tickets Archbishop Dziwisz got for them were not far out in the Square but up on the Sagrato, directly behind the heads of state and government. It was a perfect Dziwisz touch: Karol Wojtyła’s oldest friends, dressed in outdoor gear, as the first mourners at his funeral Mass, save for those whom protocol required be seated in the front rows.

  Piotr and I finally spotted each other on the Via della Conciliazione; he was with Teresa, her sister Maria (the widow of John Paul’s old friend Krzysztof Rybicki), and Karol Tarnowski, another Kraków philosopher and longtime Wojtyła friend. They looked not too much the worse for wear and we went to the Borgo Pio apartment for tea, vino bianco, cookies, and the inevitable tears. But not too many.

  Piotr’s insightful comment the week before the Pope’s death—“I think they’re finally beginning to understand him”—had been borne out by what we had all just experienced. As I said during the NBC coverage, the world is full of talk about “the global community”; well, here was real global community, and it was gathered and formed by Christian faith, not by political or economic forces. John Paul II cemented the principle of solidarity into the foundations of Catholic social doctrine by his magisterium, especially in Centesimus Annus. He had also empowered solidarity, the human experience, during the Nine Days of June 1979 on which the history of the twentieth century pivoted. Now, present in a different way, he created solidarity in a vast throng drawn from all over the globe, through an act of worship.

  There were no tears to be shed over that. There was, rather, a profound sense of gratitude for having known such a man—and the reassuring conviction, born of Easter faith, that he was now where he always wanted to be.

  MISSION CONTINUED

  In July 2007, Fr. Maciej Zięba, with whom I was teaching in Kraków during what had been renamed the Tertio Millennio Seminar on the Free Society, gave me a dossier of documents in which he thought I “might be interested.” That was an understatement.

  What Fr. Zięba brought were copies of official documents from the Polish secret police (the Służba Bezpieczeństwa, or SB), various organs of the Polish communist government, and the East German secret police, the Stasi, recording the comrades’ attempts to impede the work of Karol Wojtyła before and after he assumed the Office of Peter. The documents had been culled from Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance and the Stasi Records Agency by Andrzej Grajewski, a Polish historian interested in the Cold War efforts of Eastern bloc intelligence services to penetrate the Catholic Church and to worm their way into the Vatican. Grajewski made copies of documents he thought might interest me as I continued to explore the life and times of Pope John Paul II.

  The documents Fr. Zięba left with me were a gold mine—SB reports on Cardinal Wojyła to the Polish Communist Party politburo; Polish decrypts of ciphered cables sent from Rome to the Polish foreign ministry, reporting on diplomatic contacts with the Vatican; reports from the Polish Ministry of Religious Affairs on its own Vatican conversations; General Wojciech Jaruzelski’s memo to the politburo on his negotiations in Rome prior to John Paul’s third Polish pilgrimage in 1987; and four Stasi analyses of John Paul II’s potential impact on the Cold War from the crucial first months of the pontificate. Before I became the beneficiary of Dr. Grajewski’s meticulous research and generosity, I had studied the Soviet secret police materials on the Ostpolitik of Paul VI and on John Paul II analyzed by British intelligence expert Christopher Andrew in a groundbreaking book, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB, published while Witness to Hope was in press. But I certainly never expected to see memoranda prepared for the notorious head of Stasi foreign intelligence, Markus Wolf, using information and speculations from moles in the Vatican, or detailed reports of the SB’s efforts to understand (and undermine) Karol Wojtyła. As I worked through these materials, discussed the communists’ endless anti-Wojtyła/John Paul II projects with Grajewski, and dug into scholarly analyses of materials newly available from other communist security service archives, my concept of what I should do in keeping the promise I made to John Paul II at our last meeting changed.

  Originally, I thought a second volume would tell the John Paul II story from 1999 until the Pope’s death, ending with a more comprehensive evaluation of his life and accomplishments than was possible in Witness to Hope. Now, it seemed that I should preface the completion and evaluation of the John Paul II story with a much more detailed examination of the Ostpolitik of Paul VI, Wojtyła’s battle with Polish communism in Kraków, and John Paul II’s efforts to work for the liberation of Central and Eastern Europe amid the communist penetration of the Vatican that was one result of the Ostpolitik.

  Then my plans were altered further.

  While analyzing the materials I’d been given by Andrzej Grajewski and others, I was invited to be an official witness for John Paul’s II’s beatification cause—an experience that would lead me to rethink the evaluative section of my second biographical volume, the book that would eventually be published in 2010 as The End and the Beginning: Pope John Paul II—The Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy.

  Professor Jerzy Gałkowski of the Catholic University of Lublin told me in 1997 that “adventures weren’t unusual with Karol Wojtyła.” In my case, those adventures continued for more than a decade after the publication of Witness to Hope and for five years after the Pope’s death. There was more to be learned and a deeper understanding to be gained.

  A GOLD MINE OF SECRETS

  POLAND AND ROME, 2007–2008

  A QUARTER-CENTURY AFTER THE COMMUNIST CRACK-UP IN CENTRAL and Eastern Europe, the contradictions with which the Marxist-Leninist project was riven are still not well understood in the West. A prime example involves communism and religion.

  Lenin founded the world’s first officially atheistic state; the Soviet regime he created maintained a colossal academic and propaganda apparatus to advance the cause of state atheism; communist regimes, led by the USSR, were the greatest persecutors and murderers of Christians in history. Yet for all that they mocked religious conviction as fantasy, the communists seemed curiously unpersuaded by their own dismissive attitude toward faith.

  The same regimes that scorned those unscientific religious primitives also expended enormous financial and human resources trying to “disintegrate” religious communities (as the Polish SB put it), thus showing themselves terri
fied by religious conviction and religious institutions. And the particular focus of communist fear and animus was the Catholic Church. No less a figure than Yuri Andropov, longtime head of the KGB and successor to Leonid Brezhnev as leader of the USSR, was convinced that the Catholic Church and the Vatican were conducting ongoing, dangerous ideological sabotage against communism in general and the USSR in particular. Marx may have believed religion an opiate; for Andropov and similarly ruthless spymasters like the German Markus Wolf and the Pole Konrad Straszewski, the Catholic Church was a sinister enemy with which there could be no compromise.

  That communism was permanently and determinedly at war with the Catholic Church was not well understood in the Vatican of Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI. These men and their diplomats thought the deep freeze in Soviet-Vatican relations and in relations between Church and state in the Soviets’ Warsaw Pact satellites was in part the Church’s fault. From that premise, they concluded that a thaw was possible, were the Church to dial down its rhetoric. This led to the Vatican Ostpolitik of the 1960s and 1970s.

  None of this made sense to me when I was writing The Final Revolution. It made even less sense when I was preparing Witness to Hope. The documentary evidence that I worked with in writing The End and the Beginning helped demonstrate from primary sources the truth of what I had argued in the two previous books: the Ostpolitik was a failure that John Paul II was quite right to jettison, if in his own unique and shrewd way.

  On meeting him, few would imagine Andrzej Grajewski a keen student of the darkest secrets of the Cold War. A mild-mannered historian whose day job involved writing for the Polish Catholic weekly Gość Niedzielny (Sunday Visitor), Grajewski was a tenacious researcher—and even more important, a judicious judge of evidence. For the world that produced the previously classified documents he shared with me was a wilderness of mirrors: a world of maximum feasible tawdriness in which it was important to retain the capacity to be shocked while maintaining a clinical distance from the shock in order to analyze motives and impacts.