Success for John Paul would mean a tacit acceptance by a variety of players—not all of them visible onstage—of a long-range challenge that he would offer on the basis of the apparently fragile strength of the papacy. A challenge not to his Polish Catholics, but certainly to the Communist Party in Poland, to the Soviet system itself and, further, to the entrenched powers of the world beyond Eastern Europe that had tied certain vital interests of their own to Poland’s deplorable condition. As no other man alive, John Paul saw himself at this one moment in a position to show up the limits of the Soviet system on the very ground it occupied, and to show the way to a different path—a different direction—for politics and policies.
Still, success for John Paul did not mean that Poland was to establish its freedom by leaving the Soviet system. Rather, the role he saw for Poland was messianic, in the sense that it would—if he succeeded—become the very leaven that would change the Soviet system itself. And not only in Warsaw, but at its heart.
And if he failed? Despite the obviously decayed system of Soviet Communism, both the task John Paul had set for himself and his risk of failure seemed monumental to those advisers privy to his aims. Perhaps he was leading from strength by coming first to Poland. But there were dangers enough to match the advantages. He would have his own tightrope to walk.
For one thing, John Paul could not afford an uprising in Poland any more than could his unwilling hosts. He was about to come home to 35 million Poles who in their majority would rise up if he said to rise up, who would respond to his every emotion. Yet if he allowed his presence to become a signal for riots and revolt, then what was meant to be the beginning of a long, patient and dangerous road would instead be the end for all his plans. He would at the very least be branded as an American lackey. He would certainly be seen as a bull let loose in the china shop of Cold War tensions. Just as certainly, his delicate probe at the Soviet Union, already under way in various East European countries, would be doomed. He would introduce no challenge, no new spirit, no leaven, in Poland or anywhere else. He would, in fact, be unwelcome in the world; and plans already on the drawing board of his mind for future variations of this Poland card he was about to play would be worse than useless. He would have no choice but to slink back to Rome to rethink his entire papacy.
There could be no loss of control, therefore. However emotional this homecoming might be for him—and how could it be otherwise?—there could be no bowing to short-term ego satisfactions, no empty triumphalism, no isolated moments of inflammatory mistakes.
Never in any future trip would John Paul have the same breathless sense of opening a door and stepping into the unknown. No subsequent papal action of his would involve so lethal a gamble.
As the date drew near for this split-screen drama of the Polish Party and the Polish Pope to begin, those who settled in to watch with interest included some in Western capitals who regarded the whole venture as unwarranted papal meddling in the politics of a very sensitive area—and in the profits they reaped from it. There were others, in the Soviet-dominated East, who had already decided this Polish Pope had feet too big even for the sandals of the Great Fisherman. And there were those in John Paul’s own Vatican who fervently wished this entire episode would quickly end, and that there would be no more of its kind to follow from this venturesome Pope.
At 10:05 on Saturday morning, June 2, as Pope John Paul’s all-white Alitalia 727 jet transport touched down at Okecie, Warsaw’s military airport, bells in every church, monastery and convent throughout Poland’s eleven thousand cities, towns and villages rang in joyous welcome. A smiling John Paul II stepped from the plane to the shouts and cheers of twenty thousand people from the Warsaw quadrant who had been allowed to approach the landing site.
Every unsmiling member of the formal reception committee watched as the Pope knelt and kissed the ground of Poland. Was this a kiss of love from a returning son? Or was it an embrace of the land and its people by a Pope claiming possession of both?
No hint of an answer came from John Paul as he rose, squared his shoulders and for some seconds looked each government official in the eyes. For, to be sure, every official worthy of the name was there: CPP Chief Edward Gierek; President Henryk Jablonski; Prime Minister Piotr Jaroszewicz; Polityka’s editor, Mieczyslaw Rakowski; CPP Secretary Stanislaw Kania; Cults Minister Kazimierz Kakol; some three or four more. They all had to be there; for no one or two or three would have come without the whole contingent.
Standing to one side in a delegation of black-robed Churchmen was the slightly built, sharp-eyed Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski. He exchanged an unsmiling glance with the younger man, once his protégé, now his Pope. By now, the Cardinal and the Church in Poland had prepared things as well as could be done. Advance copies of John Paul’s speeches had been widely distributed. Stewards from local parishes all over the country had been organized and instructed by Catholic groups to help keep things calm. On this morning, Wyszynski’s shining blue eyes gave the only hint of his satisfaction at this, his latest triumph, of his affection for Karol Wojtyla, of his hope for this venture that had earned the derision of one Polish official as “a piece of papal mania.”
Standing between his old enemy, Party Chief Gierek, and his old friend. Cardinal Wyszynski, Pope John Paul viewed the march-past of the goose-stepping honor guard. He listened to the solemn playing of the Vatican anthem. He heard the familiar words of the Polish anthem: “… while we live, who still believe in Poland’s ancestral faith….” He heard the formal words of welcome from his hosts.
When John Paul’s turn at the microphone came, there was an immediate contrast to the civil but frigid official welcome. With appealing reference to the Polish anthem’s refrain, the Pontiff exulted that “a Pole coming today from the land of Italy to the land of Poland is received on the threshold of his pilgrimage with those words which we have always used to express the nation’s unflagging will to live.” Every Pole who heard him—officials and citizens alike—understood his meaning. Polands “ancestral faith,” he was saying, is the heart of its people. Without faith as a living presence, the people die and there is no Poland.
The response from the crowd was like a tidal wave sweeping outward from Okecie Airport. Whether or not they had actually heard his remarks at his arrival or read an advance copy of his speech, his very presence was meaning enough. An estimated 290,000 cheering, weeping, chanting, praying Poles scattered flowers in the path of the Pontiff’s motorcade; they waved a forest of papal and Polish flags and displayed brightly colored banners.
His Communist hosts, on the other hand, were enraged from the start. They were not to be fooled by the Pope’s official references to his visit over the past weeks as a pilgrimage. “What is Mr. Karol Wojtyla, head of a superstitious church, doing in our socialist Poland?” one Warsaw newspaper would scream in its editorial headline the following day.
“Mr. Wojtyla” gave them reason enough for concern from the outset. In the heart of Warsaw on this first day of his pilgrimage, John Paul began to speak with the voice of insistent and unambiguous truth that would remain the same for the next nine days. There was, first of all, the official reception—as agreed, no wives were present—in Henryk Jablonski’s presidential home, the Belvedere Palace. Jablonski, Gierek and their colleagues heard unwelcome facts wrapped in John Paul’s gentle language. Facts about Poland, and about military and political alliances. The acceptability and validity of such alliances, John Paul declared, depended totally on whether they led to more well-being and prosperity for the participant state—Poland. Ideology, he said, was not acceptable as a criterion for a good alliance.
As his speech went on, no one could mistake the Christianity of his message, or the anti-Communism of his proposals. “The exclusion of Christ from history,” he said, referring to the Soviet habit of omitting from the record what they did not like, “is an act of sin against man…. Without Christ, it is impossible to understand the history of Poland, the history of the people who have
passed through or are passing through this land”—a subtle reference both to the occupying Soviets and their quisling Polish supporters. “These are just passersby,” Wojtyla was saying, “like so many others who thought to enslave Poland.”
After so bold a start, John Paul went on that day to say Mass for over 200,000 Poles who jammed into Warsaw’s historic Victory Square. In response to his appearance, his voice and his message of hope, a spirit of pandemonium began to surface, lapping outward from the center to the farthest edges of the great crowd. A great chant—a kind of hunger cry on behalf of millions—rose up: “We want God! We want God! We want God!”
“It was like the sort of throaty growl that raises goose bumps on you,” wrote one Western newsman. “That crowd was taking on the single emotion of the classic ‘street mob.’”
It would have been an easy matter for John Paul to let emotions run. Or worse, to whip them to fever heat and set the people loose on Henryk Jablonski’s presidential palace and on CPP headquarters. How impressive that might have been for a moment; how dramatic for the world’s press. If John Paul was tempted in that direction for a fraction of a second, it was not apparent. Instead, the Pontiff went on with his address, calming the crowd with his own calm words, his gestures, his presence.
There was no doubt that the deadly game the government had feared and expected had begun. They seemed to be up for it, however. The catcalls and high-pitched protests of the officially controlled media began in earnest on June 3, the day following John Paul’s arrival. “This visit,” warned Bogdan Bogin, minister for religious affairs, “may have a harmful effect…. How dare this self-styled Slavic Pope appeal to the people of Eastern Europe over the heads of the Party leaders? A critical error on his part!” That same day, a commentator on Moscow television suggested darkly that “Church leaders are trying to use this event [the papal visit] for antistate purposes.”
One Eastern European diplomat speaking to an American colleague suggested that Poland was in quite the same position as the United States. Referring to John Paul’s insistence on Slavic Christianity, the Communist official warned, “This Pope is not saying these things because the spirit moves him. These are calculated statements designed to pose a direct challenge to governments that no modern nation—especially you Americans with your separation of church and state—could tolerate.”
Even as the June 3 Warsaw editorials sounded the first exasperated denouncements of Pope, papacy and pilgrimage, John Paul was already in Gniezno, the headquarters city of the second quadrant of his visit. This spot was not only the official See—though no longer the actual residence—of Poland’s Cardinal Primate; it was also a place redolent for Poles with ancestral pride of race, a place of Polish roots and a focus of Polish national folklore: the “nest of the Polish white eagle”—Poland’s symbol.
Official anger notwithstanding, the Pontiff did not abandon his religious theme. Rather, he widened its focus. Had the government censored St. Stanislaw from his Christmas message? Well, then, at Gniezno he would preach about St. Adalbert, apostle of the whole Slav race. More, he would use that apostle to promote the spiritual unity of all Europe, with Poland as its geographical center.
His challenge to the Soviet empire could not have been clearer, broader or more insistent: All Eastern European Communist governments should allow freedom of conscience, individual rights, individual possession of private property, open elections and national independence. And he emphasized, in an equally trenchant challenge to the West, that “there can be no just Europe without the independence of Poland marked on its map.”
Such enormous challenges—already sounded in Warsaw as a theme—rose into a fully scored symphony in Gniezno. But played as they were with a moderation of tone and language, they made the government’s high-pitched countercampaign seem lurid by contrast. The Pope indulged in no anger or shouting or sarcasm. He didn’t even joke, as Poles are wont to do, about Communism’s ridiculous claims and mythical success stories. Always he sounded the lightsome note at just the right moment. He taught his Poles to sing again, and to hope again for better and greater things, and for yet a while longer to be patient.
June 4 was the day John Paul arrived at Jasna Góra, the deeply popular mountain shrine to Mary, at the monastery of Częstochowa. It was the third day of his pilgrimage, and would mark the first dangerous confrontation with the government since the Victory Square face-off in Warsaw.
The heartfelt and enormously enthusiastic response the Pope generated from the people everywhere had increased with every speech—almost with every wave of his hand to the crowds that lined the streets and pressed forward as he passed to and from official meetings and Masses and other gatherings. He was fast transforming his pilgrimage into a kind of trick mirror in which were reflected all the details of the Polish regime’s complete lack of popular support. With that high visibility that he had already cultivated so well, and with the international media following each step, John Paul forced the world’s gaze upon the drab, grim, dilapidated, run-down, oppressed condition of this nation under the control of its Soviet-supported keepers.
By the time John Paul actually arrived at the mountain shrine of Jasna Góra, therefore, it may have been that the huge crowds amounting to almost a million people gathered around the shrine caused the local officials to be a little trigger-happy. In any case, John Paul delivered an unmistakable, stinging indictment of Marxism; and he made the Polish regime a special target for its 1976 refusal to permit Pope Paul VI to visit Poland.
So effective were his words, and so immediate was the screaming, shouting assent of the vast crowd gathered on the Częstochowa hillside, that the government authorities panicked. Dozens of army tanks rattled their way toward the monastery and cordoned off the entire mountain.
It was a public indignity the government might have spared itself. The local parish stewards, who had long since been prepared for such situations, were scattered throughout the crowd and on the job as always. But it was a seemingly relaxed Pope John Paul, steady in his intention not to lose control of things, who defused the crisis.
With barely a glance down the hillside in the direction of the tanks, he spoke into the microphone. “I am sure,” he joked in an easy, familiar tone, “that there are people out there who are already having a hard time taking this Slavic Pope!”
The crowd loved it. Not only did they know the government had played the wrong card and been trumped; they knew they had been part of it. A big part. Just like old times at Nowa Huta!
John Paul was halfway through his homeland pilgrimage, heading for his scheduled June 7 arrival at his former diocese of Krakow, near Poland’s border with Czechoslovakia; and for his June 7 visit to his boyhood home of Wadowice, a few miles southeast of Krakow. Still the Party labored mightily to blunt the effect of his presence and his insistent message. “We have been surprised,” said one disingenuous spokesman for CPP Chief Edward Gierek, “by the political nature of many of the Pope’s statements.”
“The solution for the Karol Wojtyla problem,” Ukrainian Communist Party Chief M. Vladimir Shcherbitsky chimed in from across the Soviet border, “must lie in a renewed and more vigorous propaganda in favor of atheism in the Soviet Union and its ‘fraternal socialist societies.’”
John Paul’s rejoinder to these and similar messages was never long in coming. Yet no matter what measures the government took, the Pontiff never stepped over the danger line. He knew well how to stage his actions for maximum effect. He knew he could count on his Poles and on the organizing work that had been done before his arrival.
Krakow had been home to Karol Wojtyla; his visit here was a return to a virtual landscape of personal emotions. He visited with the silver-haired Helena Szczepanska, now eighty-nine, who had looked after him as a nine-year-old boy following his mother’s death. “He is just like the ‘Lolek’ I cared for as a child,” she said, referring to the Pontiff by his childhood name, as though nothing much had changed. He saw Maria Morda, who had
been his housekeeper during the sixteen trying years he had put in here as priest, bishop and cardinal. He visited Wolski Woods, a fifteen-minute drive from the center of Krakow, where he had often walked alone for hours, praying and pondering. He even got his pilot to wander off course a bit in midflight so that he could glimpse the Tatra Mountains, where he used to ski and contemplate the grandeur of God in nature.
In the flood of memories and reunions, was John Paul reminded of how alone he was now in Rome? Of how unsustained he was, as a rising world figure, by the old familiar faces and sights and sounds? If so, he allowed none of it to tell in his public behavior even here.
At Krakow University, students packed eagerly into St. Anne’s Church and heard rousing words of hope from John Paul. “The whole world is open to you in all fields,” he urged. He echoed again the meaning of the Polish anthem, as he had done on his arrival in Warsaw. “You must be strong with love, which is stronger than death.”
By agreement with the authorities, the Pope was not allowed to visit Silesia, the nearby sector of coalfields and industry. No matter. The Silesians came to the Pope instead. They poured into Krakow in huge numbers and, along with what seemed like the whole population of the Krakow quadrant, overflowed the Pontiff’s open-air Mass in the city square, where again he preached a militant, pan-Slavic Christianity.
His appeal was answered with enormous zest by the crowds. “Father!” the cry went up from the Czechoslovak pilgrims. “Come! Awaken us in Czechoslovakia!”
The answer from the authorities, largely predictable by now, was as ham-handed as ever. Seventy-five truckloads of Mobile Guards surrounded the area, only to be jeered noisily and continually, even while some in crowd were attacked and pummeled by government security men.
Still John Paul would not back away from the unforgiving edge of danger. His remaining three days were packed with yet more emotion-charged encounters, some of a most personal kind. Hour by hour, it seemed, he was able to demonstrate how hollow, how possessive, how inimical and how jittery was the regime that gripped the Slavic states.
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