Rome’s Communist newspaper, L’Unità—the name means unity, but not the brand John Paul had in mind—was quicker off the mark when it came to a clear understanding of the political consequences of such “universal unity” on the lips and as the policy and driving force of a Roman Catholic pope. Such a “universal unity,” L’Unità warned, over which this Roman Pope would obviously claim primacy, clearly implied “an interference in the internal affairs of the USSR whose Russian Orthodox Church belongs to no pope.”
L’Unità seemed almost alone, however, in its trenchant willingness to look John Paul and his policy straight in the eye. As Christmas 1978 approached, many newspapers appeared content to concentrate on another sort of papal first in John Paul’s Vatican: an all-Polish Christmas feast was described in succulent detail. The barszcz; the small stuffed pastries called pierogi; the roast pork; the cabbage and kielbasa and cake: all received lighthearted and sometimes hilarious attention.
With the turn of the new year, 1979, John Paul began in earnest to flesh out his early statement about starting “anew on the road of history and of the Church.” In initiatives that were highly visible and depended solely on him for their success and effect, his earlier references to the role of his papacy within the scope of international affairs became a central focus of his most public activity.
On January 9, John Paul’s personal representative, Antonio Cardinal Samore of the Vatican’s Secretariat of State, succeeded in a dicey bit of international diplomacy at which even the Queen’s government in England had failed. At issue was a question of war and peace between two of South America’s most important countries, Argentina and Chile. Those two had fought bloody wars before, and were seemingly willing to go at it again—this time over the possession of the three islands, Nueva, Picton and Lennox, in the strategically important Beagle Channel.
After what amounted to extensive shuttle diplomacy that took him back and forth between the capital cities of Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile, Samore at last persuaded the two governments to send their negotiators to the neutral grounds of nearby Montevideo, Uruguay. There, under Samore’s guidance, foreign ministers Carlos W. Pastor of Argentina and Hernan Cubillos of Chile signed an agreement pledging both countries to demilitarize the disputed area, and to submit to binding arbitration that would be conducted by John Paul’s papal envoys.
What stood out as the fascinating element in this Latin American venture were two things. First, that John Paul was willing to commit himself and his prestige in an international arena at the very outset of his pontificate. And second, that without politicking of any kind, but solely because of the religious and psychological prestige of John Paul and his Vatican, two nations backed off from political claims so intense and so laden with history and emotion that war had seemed the inevitable recourse.
On January 24, John Paul dramatically underscored the worldwide ambit he had in mind for exactly that type of apolitical intervention by his unconventional papacy. He met that day in the Vatican with the Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko. The Pontiff spent nearly two hours in private face-to-face discussion in fluent Russian with the man the Soviets had nicknamed the “Icy Survivor.”
Western diplomats who had dealt with Gromyko had always been impressed—sometimes frightened—by the cluster of talents he had displayed in negotiations, and by his near-miraculous political agility in surviving nearly forty years of Soviet intrigue and other vagaries of Kremlin life. John Paul, too, was impressed. In answer to a query about what he thought of Gromyko in comparison to all the other diplomats who had dutifully trooped through his private study in the first months of his pontificate, the Pope was undiplomatically candid: “He’s the only horse shod on all four feet.”
Of more concern for Western governments, perhaps, was Gromyko’s interest in Pope John Paul. Gromyko rarely spent that amount of time with any individual statesman. The question in embassies and cabinet rooms and chanceries was: What on earth had they discussed for two hours, this unpredictable Roman Pope and this wiliest of Soviet diplomats? Beyond Gromyko’s reference to John Paul after their meeting as “a man with a worldview,” the Soviet gave no hint of what had passed between the two of them. Characteristically, it was the Pope, sometime later, who spoke frankly with reporters.
“I welcome any criticism from Communist officials,” John Paul said, adding that he and Gromyko had discussed “the prospects for world peace.”
Far from satisfying the questions, the Pope’s remarks raised concern in certain government and diplomatic quarters to a higher pitch. Why on earth would Gromyko discuss matters of “world peace”—matters, in other words, that were exclusively of a political and geopolitical nature—with this Pope who hailed from the Polish backwater? For that matter, why would the Pope of Rome discuss them with this Soviet man?
It was still January of 1979 when, with such questions hanging in the air of international diplomacy, John Paul gave the surest sign that he would not merely set a grand new papal tone for others to pick up. He would not merely say what was to be done by means traditionally used by popes and then leave it to his hierarchy and the faithful to get it done.
That signal was John Paul’s first trip to Mexico, widely covered by the media, from January 25 to 30. That trip did begin to reveal something about what the world beyond the Vatican and Rome could expect from the reign of John Paul II. But it demonstrated again that commentators were not prepared for so radical a change as was even then under way, and certainly not for one so quick in coming.
Already well behind the new pace and the new course being set by the Pontiff, the eighteen hundred reporters and commentators assigned to cover this papal trip assumed that the Pope wanted simply to counteract the spread of Marxism—a recognized target of Vatican and Roman Catholic opposition, after all—among his clergy and people in that part of the world.
It was admittedly difficult for those covering the trip not to be beguiled by what seemed to be this Pope’s public relations instincts, already in full swing during the ten-and-a-half-hour flight from Rome across the Atlantic. Passing over the Azores, John Paul sent his blessing by radio to the Portuguese living there. Flying over the island of Puerto Rico, he chatted with President Jimmy Carter by radio.
Not even his opening words—“I am come as a traveler of peace and hope”—spoken during a one-day stopover (January 25–26) in Santo Domingo, were seen as pointing to the new role this Pope had chosen for himself.
It was only to be expected, after all, that he would present himself at this gateway to the Americas as the embodiment of five hundred years of Christianity in the Western Hemisphere. Referring to the fact that Santo Domingo was the selfsame Hispaniola where Columbus had first set foot in 1493, John Paul offered the reminder that “here the first Mass was celebrated, the first cross was placed.”
However, speaking later to a quarter of a million people gathered in Santo Domingo’s Plaza de Independencia, the Pope began to speak, not of some self-satisfied continuation of old ways, but of something like a revolution for which he wanted to prepare as many as would listen to him. “The present period of human history requires a revived dimension of faith, in order to communicate to today’s people the perennial message of Christ adapted to the realistic conditions of life.”
Later, in the Cathedral of Santa María la Menor, the oldest cathedral in the Americas, built of limestone blocks in the early 1500s, John Paul carried the point further and again applied its pressure to more than his own Roman Catholics. “All Christians,” he declared, “and all peoples must commit themselves to construct a more just, humane and habitable world, which does not close itself in, but which opens itself to God.”
This combination of traditional religious devotion to the Mass and to the Cross of Christ, on the one hand, and allusions to sweeping geopolitical intentions, on the other, had much the same effect in the world press as John Paul’s December 8 commitment to “universal unity.” Even seasoned observers were simply not able
to take it in.
Things went much the same way in Mexico. Commentators and reporters expected the Pope to talk with his bishops. And they expected his remarks about Marxism and religion. A pope is supposed to do that sort of thing.
But now, perhaps, they had even come to expect the same freewheeling personal spontaneity that had so endeared John Paul to the people of Italy. And sure enough, everyone loved the exotic touch in his meetings with the Indians and campesinos in Monterrey and Guadalajara. He kissed babies and embraced invalids, led crowds amiably in their spontaneous chant, as enthusiastic as for some home-game football match: “Papa! Papa! Rah-rah-rah!” He joined happy crowds in singing a popular Mexican song. He donned all the hats he was offered—a peasant’s straw sombrero, a broad-brimmed ranchero’s hat, a feathered Indian headdress. He joined eighty thousand in singing Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”
Given that beguiling dimension of John Paul’s performance, most journalists gave the world a folkloric, if not folksy, view of John Paul’s entire stay in Mexico. They did, of course, report the Pontiff’s conversation of nearly two hours with Mexico’s President López Portillo, who, though born a Catholic, described himself as “a Hegelian.” And they reported that López Portillo took the Holy Father to visit the President’s mother and sister in the private chapel of their home.
The significance of those visits was another matter, however. Nobody raised publicly the interesting question as to why López Portillo, as president of constitutionally anti-Catholic and anticlerical Mexico, should have anything of substance to discuss for nearly two hours with this greatest of Catholic clerics. Or why López Portillo should have taken the personal trouble of escorting the Pope to what amounted to an audience for his mother and sister in a private chapel. At its most serious, the Mexican trip was taken as an exceptional and even overdramatic gesture by His Holiness; and López Portillo’s behavior was taken as equally exceptional.
Still, offstage and away from the glare of the press, there were again those who were becoming alarmed over the Pope’s ability to command and sustain a high level of world attention for far longer than had been foreseen.
Once back in the Vatican, John Paul was unperturbed by any carping criticisms that did begin to surface. He continued his pontificate with the same personal touch that was so natural to him. On February 24, 1979, in fulfillment of a spontaneous promise he had made to Vittoria Ianni, the daughter of a Roman street cleaner, John Paul solemnized that young woman’s marriage to Mario Maltese, a Roman electrical worker. And he continued to step farther along that “new road” he had proclaimed for himself and his Church.
On March 8, he received a delegation of thirty Shintoists, together with their High Priest, a man called Nizo, from the famous Ise Shrine in Japan. No pope had ever done such a thing. Within the Vatican—a place of venerable protocol and strict emphasis on religious priority—this extraordinary papal gesture was alarming to just about everyone. Here, without doubt, was an unexpected change in the rules everyone—friend and enemy alike—had thought they understood. The gesture was so extraordinary, in fact, that in Japan—which pays little even in the way of lip service to the religious side of Rome—and even in religious quarters elsewhere long noted for denunciation of Rome’s traditional claim to religious exclusivity, eyebrows began to knit in puzzlement. They, too, had thought they knew the rules.
That same month of March saw the publication, with John Paul’s permission, of a book of his poetry in Britain, another land not altogether easy in its ecclesiastical relations with the Holy See. In Italy, meanwhile, a translation was prepared of a two-act play that Papa Wojtyla had written in much earlier days, The Goldsmith’s Shop, and it was broadcast over Italian radio.
As such a welter of papal interest and activity piled up for all the world to see, opinions about him in the media became almost schizophrenic in their confusion. At one extreme, there were emotional expressions of admiration for the versatility of his character. At the other, there was at least a growing distrust for what appeared to many to be his unpredictability. What there was not, was any publicly expressed understanding or analysis of John Paul’s actions in the light of his own early, continuing and exceptionally clear announcements about his intentions. What made that lack of understanding more remarkable was the fact that John Paul was so insistent in his message and that phrases and sentences were turning up as “quotable quotes”—but as virtually no more than that—in Italian and foreign news coverage.
“The Church wishes to stay free with regard to competing systems….” “The inexorable paradox of atheistic humanism … the drama of men deprived of an essential dimension of their being, denying him his search for the infinite….” “Market forces alone should not determine the price of goods….” “We must clarify and resolve the problem of a more adequate and more effective institutional framework of worldwide solidarity … human solidarity within each country and between countries….” “The fundamental question of the just price and the just contract….” “The process [of remuneration for work done] cannot simply be left to … the dominant influence of small groups….”
Finally, by dint of repetition, as John Paul’s conversations, addresses, discourses—even his off-the-cuff remarks—became more and more widely reproduced, the reaction to him began to take on a more cohesive aspect. Early on, one English writer had taken it upon himself to dismiss this Pontiff as merely a Polish bishop elected Pope by “the ingrown minds of superannuated cardinals, and let loose on the complicated world of today.”
Increasingly, however, many of his own Churchmen, as well as many in government and power around the world, began to share Andrei Gromyko’s far different assessment of the “Polish bishop” as “a man with a worldview.”
In reality, as some began to think, this was a man with a perspective so new and a goal so vast that it was far beyond the imagining of a whole array of political and financial leaders who had thought themselves immune in their separate and protected strongholds.
Meanwhile, the public at large appeared to have no such concerns. John Paul’s personal appeal for ordinary men and women grew visibly from day to day. The crowds that came from nearby and from around the world to catch even a glimpse of him in the Vatican became so great and so unmanageable that the Pope ordered his regular Wednesday general audience to be shifted from the already vast space inside St. Peter’s Basilica to the still vaster square outside his door.
John Paul chose his first Easter as Pope to clarify as deeply and as pointedly as it was possible to do the thoughts and considerations that lay at the heart of all his actions: everything from his marriage of a street cleaner’s daughter and an electrical worker, to his meetings with Marxists and Shintoists in the Vatican, to his visit to Mexico, to his coming visit to Poland, already confirmed for the coming June, and the scores of papal trips still in store to every corner of the world.
In a 24,000-word document known, as papal documents generally are, by its now famous first words, Redemptor Hominis, John Paul displayed a depth of thought and consideration coupled with a message that was characteristically simple and startling.
No human activity escapes the religious dimension, he said; but especially important are the activities that constitute the sociopolitical life of men and women wherever they reside. Indeed, the note that dominated and animated that encyclical document was John Paul’s insistence that the hard, intractable problems of the world—hunger, violation of human dignity and human rights, war and violence, economic oppression, political persecution—any and all of these can be solved only by acceptance and implementation of the message of Christ’s revelation announced by the papacy and the Roman Catholic Church.
With the delivery of that encyclical, Pope John Paul seemed to mark a turning point. From that time forward, he did not go out of his way to explain his mind further than he had already done. He did not pause to smooth the ruffled feathers of those who felt he was clearly poaching now on the preserves of others. It
was as though he no longer considered it productive to try endlessly to correct wrong impressions, or to widen views narrower than his own.
If there were those who could or would not understand that, even in his simplest statements, he was saying something entirely new, they at least were learning that they were listening to a Pope who had taken it upon himself to break ancient customs. If few could yet know that he had arrived in Rome with a mind already filled with a new and wider and hitherto unimagined role for the successor to Peter, John Paul himself could not afford to wait for the rest to catch up with him. Friends and critics and all interested parties alike could read his Easter encyclical letter. And they could read his actions.
If there were many, whether of good will or ill, whether opposed to Rome or devoted to it, who couldn’t deal with the papacy turned inside out by John Paul’s innovations, he could only promise much more of the same. And if, finally, as often happens with the greatest of the world’s events, the real confrontation John Paul said was already taking place had escaped public notice, then time and great events would make everything clear even to those most unwilling to acknowledge it.
2
Nobody’s Pope
If the secular reaction to Pope John Paul II in the early days of his reign was strewn with misunderstanding, concern and confusion, it has to be said that most of those within the Roman Catholic Church itself were still more astonished and baffled.
Here, however, the consternation centered around the bare fact, visible to everyone everywhere, that John Paul’s Church was in shambles. And the confusion centered around the fact that this Pope’s conscious decision, unbelievably enough, was to refuse to halt the process of decay.
For the faithful in his Church, and arguably for the millions who had left it in pain and dismay during the long pontificate of Pope Paul VI, John Paul was more than an ordinary public figure, more than a man, more even than a religious leader. For them, he had become the personal representative of God on earth. His was the ultimate voice of authority about how the world should be governed by men. He was the court of last resort for all human doubts. He was supposed to fix the Church. Or at least to run it.
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