In the teeth of all that, leaders of East and West remained stubbornly engaged in the ancient exercise of international politics reduced to its grossest terms—the maintenance of the status quo through constant interplay between the threat and the use of raw power.
That unacceptable and untenable world condition was one that Karol Wojtyla knew intimately. By the time he was elected Pope, he had worked for nearly thirty years beside the tough and canny Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski of Warsaw, a man who earned his stripes as the “Fox of Europe” by planning and executing the only geopolitical strategy—the only successful strategy—ever carried out by an Eastern satellite nation against the Soviet Union.
All during those years, the two Churchmen—the Cardinal and the future Pope—already thought and worked in terms of what Wyszynski called the “three Internationales.” That was the classical term he used to talk about geopolitical contenders for true world power.
There exist on this earth, Wyszynski used to say, only three Internationales. The “Golden Internationale” was his shorthand term for the financial powers of the world—the Transnationalist and Internationalist globalist leaders of the West.
The “Red Internationale” was, of course, the Leninist-Marxist Party-State of the Soviet Union, with which he and Wojtyla and their compatriots had such long and painfully intimate experience.
The third geopolitical contender—the Roman Catholic Church; the “Black Internationale”—was destined in Wyszynski’s view to be the ultimate victor in any contention with those rivals.
Surely such a thought seemed outlandish to much of the world—including much of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in the Vatican and elsewhere. Nonetheless, it was a view that Karol Wojtyla not only shared. It was one that he had helped to prove against the Soviets and that he now carried into the papacy itself.
According to the outlook Wojtyla brought to the office and the role of Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Church, it was unthinkable that the Marxist East and the capitalist West should continue to determine the international scheme of things. It was intolerable that the world should be frozen in the humanly unprofitable and largely dehumanizing stalemate of ideological contention, coupled with permissive connivance that marked all the dealings between those two forces, with no exit in sight.
In a move that was so totally unexpected at that moment in time that it was misread by most of the world—but a move that was characteristic in its display of his independence of both East and West—Pope John Paul embarked without delay on his papal gamble to force the hand of geopolitical change.
In the late spring of 1979, he made an official visit as newly elected Roman Pope to his Soviet-run homeland of Poland. There, he demonstrated for the masters of Leninism and capitalism alike that the national situations that obtained in the Soviet satellites, and the international status quo that obtained in the world as a whole, were outclassed and transcended by certain issues of a truly geopolitical nature. Issues that he defined again and again in terms based solely and solidly on Roman Catholic principles, while Soviet tanks and arms rumbled and rattled helplessly all around him.
It is a measure of the frozen mentalities of that time that few in the West understood the enormous leap John Paul accomplished in that first of his many papal travels. Most observers took it as the return of a religious leader to his beloved Poland; as an emotional but otherwise unremarkable apostolic visit, complete with sermons and ceremonies and excited, weeping throngs.
One commentator, however, writing in the German newspaper Frankfurter Zeitung, not only read the papal achievement accurately but read the papal intent as well: “A new factor has been added to the presently accepted formula of international contention. It is a Slavic Pope. The imbalance in our thinking has been unobtrusively but decisively and, as it were, overnight corrected by the emergence of John Paul. For his persona has refocused international attention away from the two extremes, East and West, and on the actual center of change, Mitteleuropa, the central bloc of Europe’s nations.”
Presciently as well as by planned design, the Pontiff’s first step into the geopolitical arena was eastward into Poland, the underbelly of the Soviet Union. In John Paul’s geopolitical analysis, Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals is a giant seesaw of power. Europe from the Baltic to the Adriatic Sea is the center of that power. The Holy Father’s battle was to control that center.
World commentary and opinion aside, therefore, the point of John Paul’s foray into Poland was not merely that he was a religious leader. The point was that he was more. He was a geopolitical pope. He was a Slav who had come from a nation that had always viewed its own role and its fate within a geopolitical framework—within the large picture of world forces. Now he had served notice that he intended to take up and effectively exercise once more the international role that had been central to the tradition of Rome, and to the very mandate Catholics maintain was conferred by Christ upon Peter and upon each of his successors.
For fifteen hundred years and more, Rome had kept as strong a hand as possible in each local community around the wide world. Still, because what might be advantageous for one locale might be detrimental for another, it had always been an essential practice for Rome to make its major decisions on the premise that the good of the geocommunity must take precedence over all local advantages. International politics might be driven and regulated according to the benefit to be derived by certain groups or nations at the cost of others. But geopolitics properly conducted must serve the absolute needs of the whole society of nations.
By and large, and admitting some exceptions, that had been the Roman view until two hundred years of inactivity had been imposed on the papacy by the major secular powers of the world. By and large, that had been the Polish view, as well, until some two hundred years of official nonexistence had been imposed on the Poles as a nation by those same powers.
It was the first distinguishing mark of John Paul’s career as Pontiff that he had thrown off the straitjacket of papal inactivity in major world affairs.
On his trip to Poland in 1979, barely eight months after his election, he signaled the opening of the millennium endgame. He became the first of the three players to enter the new geopolitical arena.
Karol Wojtyla’s mentor, Cardinal Wyszynski of Warsaw, used to say that “certain historical developments are willed by the Lord of History, and they shall take place. About many other—mostly minor—developments, that same Lord is willing.” He allows men the free will to choose between various options, and he will go along with those choices; for, in the end, all human choices will be co-opted as grist into God’s mill, which grinds slowly but always grinds exceedingly fine.”
From that unfashionable point of view, it was not to be wondered that suddenly, and without any of the laborious worldwide politicking that normally attends such matters, Karol Wojtyla was placed at the head of the world’s only existing and fully operating georeligious institution: the universal organization of his Roman Catholic Church.
From that point of view, in fact, it was Karol Wojtyla’s destiny, as Pope John Paul 11, to be the first world leader to take up a central position in the geopolitical arena of the society of nations in the twentieth century. For not only did his unexpected supremacy of leadership of the Roman Church immediately put him within the machinery of geopolitics. His bent of mind, his training as a priest in Nazi Poland and in Rome, and his work as a member of the Catholic hierarchy in Stalinist Poland all provided him with the noblest weapons tested against the most abject sociopolitical systems the world had yet devised. He was one of a relatively few individuals in a position of great power in the world who had already been prepared for what was to come.
Though in one sense his new life as Roman Pontiff was a very public one, another dimension of that life gave John Paul a certain invaluable immunity from suspicious and prying eyes. That white robe and skullcap, that Fisherman’s Ring on his index finger, the panoply of papal liturgy, the appanage of pontifical life
, all meant that the rank and file of world leaders, as well as most observers and commentators, would see him almost exclusively as a religious leader.
There were some early advantages for John Paul in that immunity. For one thing, his remarkable new vantage point was like a one-way geopolitical window at which he could stand, at least for a time, relatively unobserved himself and essentially undisturbed. With all the incomparable information of the papal office at his disposal, he could suddenly train his vision with extraordinary accuracy on the whole human scene. He could sift through all of those historical developments Wyszynski had mused about. He could examine them in terms of what would work geopolitically, and what would be pointless. He could form an accurate picture of the few—the very few—inevitable trends and forces in the world that were slowly and surely, if still covertly, affecting the lives and fortunes of nations as the world headed into the 1980s.
More, he could clearly discern all the players—the champions of those inevitable forces—as they emerged and came to the fore in the confrontation of the millennium endgame. Even before the competition had begun, he could predict from where the true competitors would have to come. In general terms, he could outline where they would stand and in what direction they would plan to move. Finally, once all of the individuals who would be in true and serious contention were in place—once all the players had names and faces, as well as ideologies and agendas that were clear—he thought he could simply put the final pieces together.
By examining the vision each contender held concerning the supreme realities governing human life, and by paying careful attention to the designs they fashioned and pursued in the practical world, he did form a clear enough idea of the brand of geopolitics they would attempt to command, and of the new world order they would attempt to create.
All in all, then, Karol Wojtyla was in a privileged position, from which he could form the most accurate advance picture possible of the millennium endgame arena. He could assess the lay of the land; sort out the primary forces of history likely to be at work in the competition; look in the right direction to find the likely champions of those major forces; and reckon what might be their chances for success.
A second advantage for Pope John Paul in the peculiar papal immunity he enjoyed was that the champions he expected to enter the endgame arena did not expect him to be a contender. They failed to read him in the same geopolitical terms he applied to them. He was not seen as a threat even in those political, cultural and financial circles outside the Roman Church where there has always been an abiding fear of “caesaropapism.” A fear that implied an ugly suspicion of totalitarian and antidemocratic ambition in any pope, whoever he might be. The ancient but still entertained fear that if any Roman pope had his way, he would damage or abolish democratic freedoms—above all, the freedom to think, to experiment and to develop politically. There seemed to be no fear of John Paul as a potential Caesar.
In point of fact, however, John Paul’s ambition went very far. As far as his view of himself as the servant of God who would slowly prepare all men and women, in their earthly condition, for eternal salvation in the Heaven of God’s glory. For many minds, the combination of such transcendent aims with the worldly-wise discernment of a canny geopolitician would have been an unacceptable shock.
As it was, however—and well before globalism was even added to the lexicon of high government officials and powerful corporate CEOs around the world; well before the world was treated to the spectacle of Mikhail Gorbachev as supreme public impresario of dazzling changes in the world’s political landscape; well before the globalist trends now taken for granted were apparent to most of the world’s leaders—this Slavic Pope had a certain leisure to scan the society of nations, with a new eye toward a purpose that is as old as the papacy itself. With an eye that was not merely international, but truly global. And with a purpose to lay his papal plans in concert with those few and very certain developments Cardinal Wyszynski had spoken of as “willed by the Lord of History.” In concert with those trends that were already moving the whole society of mankind the way the stars move across the heavens—according to the awesome inevitability of the unbreakable will of God.
As clearly as if they had been color-keyed features marked on a contour map, Pope John Paul recognized the inevitabilities of late-twentieth-century geopolitics already flowing like irresistible rivers across the world’s landscape in the fall of 1978.
The inability of the United States to maintain its former world hegemony was undeniable in its clarity. Just as clear was the similar inability of the Soviet Union to hold all the unnatural members of its ungainly body in its close embrace. Those two factors alone made it necessary to take a fresh reading of the efforts to form a new “Europe.” A different alignment of power would inevitably supersede the old Western alliance that had been put together for the purpose of offsetting the Soviet threat.
Then there was the question of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Neither the Soviet East nor the democratic West could afford to ignore China’s importance; but neither had found the key to unlock its door.
True, the Soviet Union was engaged with the PRC in a carefully planned and executed international tango—the Soviet Union’s Leonid Brezhnev showed the softer face of negotiation toward democratic egalitarianism, while China stood as the threatening giant of hard-line Leninist Marxism to stampede the West into Brezhnev’s corral.
The democratic alliance was interested in Brezhnev’s dance of détente, all right. To some degree, it was gulled; and to some degree, it found its own interests were served in cooperating with some of Brezhnev’s proposals—the Helsinki Accords of 1975, for example, and the START negotiations.
However, the West was not heating a defensive path to Moscow’s door. On the contrary, the Western democracies seemed more interested in beating their own path to Beijing. Using its best weapon—entrepreneurship—the West embarked on a campaign to alter the ideology of the East and Far East with a flood of managerial and technological know-how, and with the vision if not the reality of a rising tide of the good things of capitalist life.
Interestingly enough from the point of view of fomenting geopolitical change in the near term, all this activity focused on China had a greater effect on the relationship between the USSR and the West nations, than on the leadership of the PRC. For if China intended to remain essentially closed, then, at least in the opening phases of the millennium endgame, central Europe would remain what it had always been—the indispensable springboard for geopolitical power.
There was one more geopolitical inevitability that John Paul faced as he entered on his pontificate in 1978. And while it directly affected all of Europe and all of the Americas, as well as the whole of the Soviet empire, it was of no deep concern to any geopolitical contender except the Polish Pope. The reality in all the territories of the world that were once thoroughly Christian was that even the last vestiges of Christianity’s moral rules for human living and behavior were being drowned by the increasing prevalence of a “human ethic” or “value system” in the management and direction of all public and most individual matters. For all his adult life, Karol Wojtyla had lived in a world dominated by such ethics and value systems. Poland had been buried alive for two hundred years by such ethics and value systems. There was not a doubt in Pope John Paul’s mind about what lay in store for the world in such an un-Godly climate.
In the broadest outlines, that was essentially the state of affairs when John Paul made his decision to travel to Poland in 1979. If God was with him, he would use his own homeland—the historical plaque tournante of Central Europe—to disrupt the unacceptable status quo of the postwar years. That much accomplished, trickles of innovation and experimentation would be the first sign that the floodgates of geopolitical change would crank slowly open.
Though certain Western leaders—Jean Monnet was but one among many—had for some decades been keen on a rather restricted idea of a commercially united Europe, it
was in fact the Soviet Union that was the first and most deeply impressed by John Paul’s 1979 challenge in Poland. Given the internal conditions of the USSR, that was not altogether surprising.
The following year, the Kremlin masters of Leninist Marxism responded to the papal challenge by giving the green light to the accords between Poland’s shipyard workers in Gdansk and the Stalinist government in Warsaw. From those accords came the birth of the urban Solidarity trade union, followed shortly by the rural Solidarity union. It was the first trickle of innovation; the first experimental breach of the Iron Curtain.
Though that experiment failed—less, it must be said, from Soviet recalcitrance than from Western connivance and fear at the loss of a cheap labor source—John Paul knew that the issue of geopolitical innovation was joined now in the minds of Moscow. The matter only awaited a wider application by a Soviet leadership increasingly desperate for a new alignment of forces.
The motive impelling Moscow’s interest in John Paul’s challenge was not innovation for its own sake, of course. The engine driving their interest was their dilemma—becoming more urgent month by month—of how to relieve the tensions threatening the USSR with economic implosion, without destroying the Soviet drive toward ultimate proletarian victory throughout the world.
In one of those interesting coincidences that often attend the great forces of history, Mikhail Gorbachev ascended to the Soviet central hierarchy of power in the same year that Karol Wojtyla became Pope. In 1978, under the personal direction of Moscow’s baleful General Secretary, former KGB chief Yuri Andropov, Gorbachev was named Secretary of Soviet Agriculture and Secretary of the Central Committee (CC) of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU).
As the intimate and most trusted protégé of two supreme Soviet leaders—Andropov and his immediate successor, Konstantin Chernenko—the young Gorbachev dealt directly and from the highest vantage of power with the USSR’s economic stagnation, its industrial ineptitude, its sociopolitical backwardness and its technological deficiency. By the time a fully seasoned Gorbachev emerged in 1985 as General Secretary of the CPSU and supreme leader of the Soviet apparatus and empire, he had a clear understanding of the internal ills plaguing the Soviet Union and threatening the Leninist-Marxist world revolution.
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