Even in the context of his great competition, therefore, there were always those who warned the Pope that if he didn’t address the decay and disarray in his own papal backyard, he could gamble his whole position right out the window. Now more than ever, this argument went, leaders are powerful only insofar as they stand at the apex of a powerful institution or organization. Obvious examples were cited again and again over time to sway John Paul’s mind. The power of the American presidency, he was reminded, rises or declines in our time with the power and hegemony of the United States as military and economic centerpiece of the Western alliance. Later, the more somber example of Ferdinand Marcos was brought to bear. For when Marcos lost control of his political machine and of the Philippine Army officer corps, his fate was sealed.
Except that they had lately become more unforgiving and inexorable, the essentials of that equation of power had not changed since the rise of the Egyptian pharaohs six thousand years ago. However grand one’s past, anyone whose hand slips for a moment from the levers of power finds himself the next moment to be the pawn in someone else’s game. That was the warning to John Paul.
Despite this cyclone of questions and lethal arguments that swirled around himself and his papacy, however, this young and stubborn Pope John Paul II remained the steady-as-you-go Vicar of Christ for whom everything—no matter how important it might appear to others—was and would remain secondary to his central perspective and preoccupation: the progress and outcome of the international, winner-take-all competition.
In the arena where that competition would be fought, government reports from around the world were already beginning to take account of the wide-ranging mind of this Pontiff, and of the accuracy of his judgments, which, even before his election in October of 1978, were somehow based on deep and exact intelligence. And as if to give the lie to the dire warnings of what happened to men like Marcos, who lose everything when they lose their visible power base, John Paul was perceived to hold in his hand such real power, in spite of the tatters of his institutional Church, that many of the players arrayed against him in his supercompetition felt themselves impelled to seek him out for the respect and legitimacy he alone seemed able to confer on them, and on their causes.
Great power brokers who had no use for what they regarded as his outmoded faith or his Petrine privilege—but who certainly coveted his institutions and his universal authority—quickly began to seek even the briefest meetings with John Paul II. Like rival guerrilla leaders who learn to stop shooting at the enemy long enough for a good photo opportunity, current and rising and declining political leaders of every stripe trooped to Rome. International and transnational money managers came and went. Professional technocrats and humanists who busied themselves with the nuts and bolts of the new internationalism joined the crowd. For in spite of their back teeth, John Paul had to be recognized as the X factor who had entered the millennium endgame they had thought they had all but sewed up.
With each of those encounters—no matter how contradictory or bizarre they might seem to some—it became clear to his adversaries that, by a long shot, this Pope was not, as some were suggesting in apparent frustration and lusty irreverence, just some Polish bishop who had stumbled in from the Soviet satellite Gulag of Poland, locked away in its nineteenth-century Marxism, and then lost his way in the world of the twentieth century. Instead, many recalled those terse words of assessment the Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, had given after the first of his several meetings with the new Pope: “a man with a worldview.”
Nevertheless, and even if the world competition had to be the driving force of his pontificate, there still remained all those urgent and painful questions of the Catholic faithful themselves. Even though he was so busy about so many things, was there still not some way John Paul could attend to the upheaval in the Church that was tossing the faithful about like so many millions of rag dolls? With so wide a spectrum within the Church from Right to Left, and with so deep a hunger at the Center for some measure of comfort—the smallest measure would do, perhaps—could John Paul not find the opportunity to satisfy somebody?
Certainly, there were those who expected—who demanded—that he try.
John Paul did not even try. Instead, this very public man in the white robe stood as though he were the prophet Habakkuk standing on his watch, waiting for the appointed time to roll around, waiting upon the vision that would surely come, the vision that would not tarry and that would not disappoint when it dawned around him.
Yet soon, very soon, in his pontificate, and vision or no, this Pope who had been hailed as a man of firsts and as marked by destiny from birth was seen by the faithful adherents of his Church as the ultimate enigma: the first successor to Peter the Apostle destined to be everyone’s guest, but nobody’s Pope.
3
Into the Arena: Poland
The hard-faced men of the Soviet surrogate regime in the Poland of 1979 needed no help from press or commentators to make up their minds about Karol Wojtyla. Scratch the surface of government sentiment about him, and you would hear such descriptions as “stormy petrel,” “troublemaker,” “dangerous,” “unpredictable.”
Their history of difficulties with Wojtyla reached back through his years as protégé of Poland’s Primate, Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski of Warsaw. The “Fox of Europe” had for nearly forty years successfully outwitted the plots of Russian commissars, Nazi Gauleiters and Polish Stalinists. He had groomed the younger man carefully to follow in his steps.
Wojtyla had been an apt and eager pupil. Most recently, the Polish government had suffered him as the thorny Cardinal Archbishop of Krakow. Even as recently as September of 1978, not long before he was summoned to Rome for the second papal Conclave in as many months, Wojtyla had written and circulated throughout Poland a pastoral letter in which he had not merely denounced state censorship, but declared that “freedom of information is the proper climate for the full development of a people, and without freedom all progress dies.”
The effect of that letter on the people was still causing trouble for the Warsaw government, when a friendly warning arrived from Rome on October 16, 1978, the second day of the Conclave, that Karol Wojtyla was heading for election as Pope. The Politburo of the Communist Party of Poland (CPP) lost no time gathering for an emergency meeting. It was urgent that the leaders agree on an official government stance in the face of this most unwelcome news.
The wisest course, it was decided, would be to issue a calm, anodyne statement congratulating this son of Poland on his high honor and confidently predicting that his papal election would contribute to fraternal harmony and world peace: “The election of Cardinal Wojtyla to be the next Pope can lead to cooperation between the two ideologies, Marxism and Christianity.” That, it was hoped in official Warsaw, would be that.
In Rome, however, it proved to be the beginning. No sooner was Wojtyla invested as Pope John Paul II than the first trial balloons were floated in the press indicating that he was thinking of a papal trip to Poland. A few chats between well-placed acquaintances—between a member of the Vatican’s Secretariat of State and a Polish Embassy official in Rome, perhaps—nudged the proposal more firmly toward Warsaw.
May of 1979 soon emerged in such conversations as John Paul’s target date. The idea was to commemorate the nine hundredth anniversary of the martyrdom of St. Stanislaw at the hands of the tyrant King Boleslaw the Bold, who consequently lost his crown and kingdom.
The unofficial Vatican proposal was nightmarish for the Warsaw regime. In Polish eyes, Stanislaw was the dissident par excellence, the prime symbol of Polish resistance against a chauvinist and ultimately unsuccessful government. Unless the CPP wished to risk riots and strikes that might well shut down the whole country, it would not do to have millions of Poles listening to a typical Wojtyla speech on such a day.
As its reply, the CPP managed to get several Eastern European diplomats in Rome to point out to their counterparts in the Vatican Secretariat of Stat
e that any papal visit to Poland now—by which they meant the next five years or so—would be unwise. As to May of 1979, that would be impossible. To emphasize the point, the Warsaw government did something remarkably offensive: They censored John Paul’s 1978 Christmas message to Polish Catholics, pointedly excising from it all reference to St. Stanislaw.
The nightmare refused to evaporate, however. Instead, it walked into the presidential palace in Warsaw in the person of Karol Wojtyla’s old mentor, the now aging but always redoubtable Cardinal Wyszynski. With an icily superior demeanor, and his demonstrated ability to command the emotions and the actions of millions of citizens, Wyszynski froze Polish President Henryk Jablonski into a corner. For the sake of peace, and very likely his job, Jablonski conceded the possibility of a papal trip in, let us say, perhaps, a year or two.
“Nie! Tego roku, Ekscelencjo.” The Cardinal reportedly remained icily firm. “No! This year, Excellency.”
When Jablonski replied with a tentative query as to what date Wyszynski had in mind, the Cardinal had outmaneuvered the President. The papal trip was on. It remained only to fix those pesky dates—the Cardinal had June in his pocket before he left—and to set the itinerary.
The Communist leaders abhorred the discussions that followed between John Paul’s advance men and the government watchdogs. The CPP tried to dictate the length of the Pontiff’s stay, what he would discuss, what sort of reception he would be accorded, the cities he would visit. “The Pope can’t go everywhere he likes,” came one stiff negotiating rejoinder from Cults Minister Kazimierz Kakol. But having given the first crucial inch, they found that fiat was no longer a trump card for them. They were forced into negotiation.
No, the Pope could not visit the Katowice and Piekary Ślaskie coalfields just because he once worked in a quarry. No, there would be no state holiday so that schoolchildren and workers could greet the Pope. Yes, His Holiness would be officially received at the airport upon his arrival. Yes, President Jablonski would sit down in a private meeting with John Paul. No a thousand times to any papal visit to the church he had built at Nowa Huta in the teeth of the government’s armed opposition. Well, all right then, a visit to the Nowa Huta suburbs would be tolerated, and a few further side trips would be worked out. But emphatically no, there would be no official government “invitation.” Having been outmaneuvered was one thing. Allowing the government’s nose to be publicly rubbed in it was another.
Putting the best face on a bad situation, the government finally agreed on a plan to be offered to John Paul. The Pope’s representatives had named several places the Holy Father wished to visit. The government would divide the country into four parts. Each quadrant would be centered around a principal city John Paul insisted be included. There would be Warsaw, of course, as the capital where the Pope would arrive, and where he would have his reception and his meeting with President Jablonski. There would be Gniezno, the official See of Poland’s Cardinal Primate and a place of abiding religious and historical significance. The third quadrant would center around Częstochowa, the site of Poland’s great Marian shrine of Jasna Góra. Finally, Krakow, where John Paul himself had until recently been such a troublesome cardinal archbishop, would be the center of the fourth quadrant.
Citizens would be allowed to travel only within the quadrant where they lived in order to see Papa Wojtyla. The forty thousand Soviet garrison troops would be confined to barracks for the duration of the papal visit; but in their place, special mobile units of “security agents” would be trucked into each city.
The side trips that would be allowed, it was finally determined, would include the Pope’s hometown of Wadowice and the Nazi death camps. But Nowa Huta’s little church still got an emphatic thumbs down.
It was specifically decided that none of the wives of government officials would attend any reception. Presumably, the danger was too great that some might be overcome with emotion at the Holy Father’s presence and kneel to kiss his ring.
Back and forth the discussions and the emissaries flew between Rome and Warsaw. When just about everything was in place except Moscow’s approval, one Vatican official summed up the tone and the mood of the negotiations: “It has been a fight from start to finish. The [Polish] authorities are terrified.”
Speculation inevitably arose in some quarters that Moscow’s relatively quick approval of the plan—surprising to some, and surely disappointing to officials in Warsaw—may have owed something to the long meeting a few months before between John Paul II and Andrei Gromyko. “This papal visit is a Polish bit of nonsense,” Soviet Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev reportedly grumbled. “Let them take care of it. But no accidents!”
Though it had been agreed that no official invitation would be forth-coming, Warsaw had insisted on making the first official announcement. It did so on March 2, 1979. His Holiness the Pope would come for a nine-day “pilgrimage” to Poland. The dates agreed were June 2 to June 11. Two hours later, a Radio Vatican broadcast followed with the same news, as arranged.
“This is not a religious or state visit.” Chauvinist editor Mieczyslaw Rakowski was quick to make clear the official CPP stance in an editorial published in the government organ, Polityka. “He [John Paul] is a Pole coming to his home country, and we will welcome him as a Pole…. We believe the papal visit will strengthen unity in Poland.”
This pair of announcements set the stage for a sort of split-screen drama, entirely new to current world politics, that would be played out in Poland’s streets and squares and conference rooms, a drama that would be ever so carefully monitored as a test case by John Paul’s adversaries and friends in the arena of geopolitical contention.
The Polish regime was one prime actor in the drama. It had been forced by Rome into a perilous tightrope situation. Since the Party’s beginnings after World War II as representative of a rabidly Stalinist Soviet regime, its history in Poland had been dismal. Its members had been consistently anti-Catholic and anti-papal. In 1948, seven hundred Catholic priests had been jailed. In 1953, Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski had been “deposed” and imprisoned. At least once, a plan to do away with Karol Cardinal Wojtyla had been contemplated.
The tally on the secular side of things was no better. The economy of Poland was in ruins. The infrastructure was aging and broken down. Production was sagging. The country’s debt to foreign banks ran well over $25 billion. The Communist regime existed in Poland only because of those forty thousand Soviet troops quartered in the eastern part of the country. At its maximum, the CPP itself counted a mere 2.5 million members out of a population of 35 million. After thirty-five years of total control over all means of production and all that was produced, and over education and the media, the brute fact was that in Poland, the special constituency of any Communist Party—the workers—was totally alienated from Communism in general and from this Communist regime in particular. And the brute fact was, further, that workers and nearly everybody else had remained firmly devoted to the Church.
Now the Warsaw Politburo was faced with the reality that it had been forced by Wyszynski and Wojtyla—two powerful adversaries they had thought to destroy—to receive one of them as Pope and as honored guest. To deny John Paul’s visit would have been seen as imposing further government oppression; and any such signal would have had two likely consequences. Further financial bailouts from the West would become a much more difficult proposition. And further unrest at home would become much more likely. Either one of those consequences could bring on the military investment of Poland by the Soviets.
Yet by acquiescing in the papal visit, the government leaders were not by any means clear of those same risks. They well knew from experience that John Paul could not be prevented from disseminating direct challenges, in person and over the airwaves, to vast crowds of Poles and to the world. Oh, they would do their best. They would delay and misroute busloads of pilgrims. They would beat “disorderly” Catholics now and again. They would grumble over the airwaves and arrange for third-party crit
icisms in the international media. But they knew they could neither totally predict John Paul’s actions nor totally control the public response to his presence for nine days.
Already rejected by the people they ruled and nominally represented, the CPP could not tolerate an open show of the Party’s weakness or of popular unrest. Whatever happened, they would have to act out the pretense that the visit was yet another triumph of the proletarian regime of the Polish People’s Republic, and then pick up the pieces as best they could.
On the other side of this split-screen drama, John Paul was about to make an extraordinary entrance, bringing with him to what seemed this unlikeliest of places a deep and compelling challenge to the status quo of the world order.
By contrast to the position of the Polish regime in this affair, it was true that in a certain sense John Paul was leading from strength in coming to Poland to make this first test of everything essential to his pontificate, as he planned it even then. He knew this country—its people, its leaders, its problems, its astonishing strengths—not only as one of its sons but as one of its heroes. In the negotiations just completed for his pilgrimage, he had demonstrated again his ability to use that knowledge to his advantage.
Nevertheless, the risks for the Pope were greater in some ways than those faced by the CPP. If he had his way, the Communist Party in Poland would be playing out an endgame of sorts. At the same time, however, the entire future of his own papal policy would stand or fall on this testing ground of Poland.
Keys of This Blood Page 11
