June 8 found the Pontiff in the town of Nowy Targ, a site nearer still to the Czechoslovak border. At a place called Blonie Krakowskie—a large grassland area in the shadow of Mount Kosciuszko, itself named to honor Poland’s most famous freedom fighter against Russian imperialism—the Pope delivered another rousing pan-Slavic speech to a multitude of Poles, Czechs, Hungarians and East Germans. His message again was laced with the themes of human rights and the right of all individual nations to be independent.
The same day, he made what he termed “a pilgrimage to the heart of cruelty”—the Nazi death camps of Birkenau and Oświęcim. It was at the latter, known in the West as Auschwitz, that, aides later said, John Paul experienced an onrush of emotions that could have unbalanced his entire performance. He celebrated Mass. He placed a wreath of flowers at the Wall of Death, where Nazi jailers had whipped and clubbed and shot their prisoners to death. He made a visit to Cell Block 11, and to one dungeon in particular, where prisoner No. 16670—a Franciscan priest named Maximilian Kolbe—had been starved and then injected by his impatient captors with a lethal dose of phenol into his heart.
“How far can cruelty go?” John Paul murmured audibly at the door of Kolbe’s dungeon. To his aides, his anger at this moment was open and visible for the first time during his exhausting pilgrimage; it was an anger that transcended all the past grisly work of the Nazis, and spilled over in a wave of emotion against the extermination being carried out right then throughout the entire Soviet Gulag system. The Pope confided not long after to close and trusted personal associates that he wanted to say then and there, “Communism is the same evil as Nazism—only the face is different!” He was on the verge of saying, “The Gulag here among us is the same as the one in Hitler’s day. Is it not time—high time!—that we disinfect our Motherland, Poland, and all of God’s holy world, of this institutionalized evil!”
Had he said any of that, of course, all constraints would have been off. He had raised public emotions to such a pitch that his own self-control was the only sure safeguard against a wildfire of insurrection. It would have been a release for him, and for millions whose emotions were tuned to his own. And, as at Warsaw or at Czestochowa, it would have been the failure of all his plans.
It cost him a deep personal toll to keep his silence; but keep it he did. A couple of years later, he did make his statement, but in a different way, open only to him and his Church. He raised Maximilian Kolbe to sainthood.
Ironically, the June 9 papal visit to the suburbs of Nowa Huta, feared and resisted with such tenacity by the Party leaders in the early negotiations, turned out to be an interlude of relative peace compared to the prior days. The mood of the crowds was like his—gently and strangely triumphant. They had jointly beaten the regime. They were alive; the regime was already half dead. This was the spirit abroad at that moment.
The night of June 9, however, his last in Poland, was a different matter. A very tired Pope John Paul addressed a crowd of ten thousand people gathered outside the Cardinal’s residence, where he was staying. High emotions were evident in the songs and chants and cheers that filled the night air. The people were unwilling to let their Papa Wojtyla go. He finally did leave the balcony to get a few hours of much needed rest; but even then the crowd did not disperse.
Lying in his bed, John Paul listened to songs he had so often sung himself. He heard thousands of voices rise one more time in a solemn chorus of the Polish anthem, “Poland Is Ours Forever!” At a certain moment, as if some cue had been given, silence became the frame for a young voice chanting over a hand-held microphone. The words had been set down over a hundred years before, in 1846, by Julius Slowacki, Poland’s greatest poet:
We need strength
To lift this world of God’s.
Thus here comes a Slavic Pope,
A brother of the people!
And already he pours
Balms of the world on our bosoms,
And the angels’ chorus
Sweeps his throne with flowers….
This was no common moment of affection and symbolic embrace. For John Paul, it was an experience of deep personal temptation. In the very intimacy of the emotion between himself and the men and women who were so loath to see him go lay the possibility that he could take this crowd to the highest pitch of danger. For them, he was that pseudo-messianic “Slavic Pope” of Slowacki’s verse. How quickly would any spark—whether from him, or from the crowd, or from the ever-present and always heavy-handed government authorities—have converted that crowd into a rambunctious, rampaging street mob.
John Paul gave up any idea of sleep. He rose from bed, put on his white cassock and went out again to the balcony. His voice cracked more with emotion than with weariness; but there was a nicely tuned edge of humor, too, as he pretended to scold: “Who’s making all that noise?”
A wave of laughter rose up from the crowd; then a hush again as John Paul spoke to them—embraced them—for a little while longer. At last, though, the moment came to give his solemn blessing to them all, and to retire for the second time.
This time, the crowd slowly dispersed. John Paul had not lessened their passion. He had contained it and molded it and channeled it in such a way that, with himself as its very symbol, it would do its work far beyond this June night, and for long after he had gone. It was for this, at least in part, that he had come. It was for this, at least in part, that he would make many more visits to many other places.
The last big public event of John Paul’s homeland stay was the open-air Mass with which he ended his pilgrimage to Krakow. A million people were there. When Mass was over, however, the ordeal for the government had still not quite ended.
Together with Poland’s foreign minister and a few other dignitaries, President Henryk Jablonski and CPP Chief Edward Gierek had traveled to Krakow Airport for the ritual send-off. They had to cool their heels for an extra half hour, however. Tearful crowds slowed the progress of John Paul’s motorcade, as the people said farewell to this ebullient figure of a man who had preached faith and encouragement and hope to them; had laughed and wept and sung with them; had chided and reproached their oppressors; and had dared to become the first man in thirty-five years to speak the truth publicly and insistently.
When at last the Pontiff did arrive at the airport, many of the details of the official leave-taking seemed on the surface very like the Warsaw welcome nine days before. There was the same martial music; troops were reviewed; officials spoke. But everyone there felt how completely the atmosphere had changed.
Nearly every step this traveling, teaching Pope had taken had been strewn with flowers from Poland’s fields and gardens. He had managed to push the noses of President Jablonski and the other CPP officials into the cold reality of Polish life. Every illusion the CPP had sought for so long to foster about its hold and command over Polish hearts and minds had been shattered forever during John Paul’s brief time there.
To adapt a description Gabriel García Márquez used in The Autumn of the Patriarch, the CPP had been brought without surprise to the ignominious fate of commanding without power, of being exalted without glory, of being obeyed without authority, of living without love. John Paul had made it all so obvious.
After reviewing the honor guard of mountaineer troops, John Paul stepped to the microphone for his final address. He spoke to the eleven thousand people who crowded around the edges of the tarmac, and to the millions throughout Poland and its neighboring countries who crowded around their radios.
“The visit of the Pope to Poland,” he said, speaking of himself in the third person, as he rarely did, “is certainly an unprecedented event, not only in this century, but also in the entire millennium of Christian life in Poland—especially as it is the visit of a Polish Pope, who has the sacrosanct right to share the sentiments of his own nation….” Sentiments, he did not need to add, that would remain a living presence for years to come. Hundreds of thousands of tapes had already been recorded of his speech
es; and they would multiply still more, circulate still further, to be heard not only in Poland but in all the “nations of silence” where John Paul had staged his incredible witness, and had called forth the lesson of history before the eyes of the world.
Turning to Party Chief Edward Gierek, John Paul held out an infinitely careful hand to him and his Politburo companions: “The unprecedented event [of this papal visit] is undoubtedly an act of courage both on the part of those who gave the invitation”—he smiled at Gierek—“and on the part of the person who was invited. However, in our times, such an act of courage is necessary … just as once Simon Peter needed the courage to journey from Galilee to Rome, a place unknown to him.”
His remarks finished, John Paul embraced President Jablonski just long enough to whisper a blessing to be conveyed to his wife. He gave his papal blessing to the weeping crowds near the tarmac. Then he knelt down once more and kissed the ground. “Farewell, Poland.” He said the words softly, but those nearest could hear “Farewell, my Motherland.”
As his plane bore him away, veering south toward the Alps and Rome, John Paul left the Polish surrogates of the USSR and the Soviets themselves to deal with a future he had thrust upon them in terms he alone had chosen.
The Polish regime had been founded on bedrock opposition to everything the Pope stood for. It had seen itself entirely dependent on its Muscovite masters for its survival and progress. Now, however, a Polish bishop once written off as a provincial intellectual had lit up the entrance to a different landscape.
To be sure, the old familiar mad dogs of hate, mistrust, and inhuman cruelty had not been magically chained or tamed. The rage of some at the mere presence of “this bumbling prelate masquerading as one of us,” as Romania’s foreign minister complained of the Pope on radio, did not die at the Pontiff’s leaving. If anything, the desire grew in some quarters to see John Paul fail significantly, so that internationally he could be blamed for ineptitude and clumsiness; labeled as a disturber of the delicate status quo; uncovered as an interloping cleric poaching on the preserve of politics and superpower ideology.
For a while, Warsaw would put on the same old public face of the triumphant “People’s Republic.” Even before John Paul’s departure, Polish Foreign Ministry spokesman Stefan Staniszewski had declared the papal visit “a complete success. We are very pleased with it,” he insisted. “We are happy that the Pope is so broadly and warmly greeted. We are not surprised, and not embarrassed by this fact. He is a great Pole, an unusual, outstanding personality. He is a great humanist.”
Others continued the refrain in the wake of the papal pilgrimage. “The government,” said one, typically, “found much to agree with in Pope John Paul’s words, especially his affirmation of the dignity of the worker and his labor.”
In a certain sense, these were brave words, coming as they did from dedicated Communist spokesmen. For they could not be Polish and fail to know what John Paul claimed to know. And they could not but fear in some corner of the mind that the Pope’s claim on the people, and his claims in their behalf, might one day be vindicated.
In fact, that very possibility seemed to set itself out in bold relief when no less a leader than Edward Gierek admitted to a questioning Western newsman that there was no ready answer to John Paul’s pointed rebuke that “in an age of disclosure, and an age of vast exchange of information, it is difficult to understand and accept that any Pole, any Slav, cannot be informed and free to inquire.”
Jerzy Turowicz, a Polish commentator in the U.S.A., was among the first to turn the official questions around. And in doing so, he raised an amazing new agenda that John Paul had made it possible to think about in the heart of the Gulag: “How do you deal with so much hope, so much new self-confidence, all this new feeling of involvement and freedom?”
For most Western observers, and for the nervous Polish government, Moscow’s reaction of forbearance during and after the Pope’s visit to Poland was unexpected and puzzling. There had been some sniping, and even a salvo or two from the Soviets, of course. To John Paul’s stunningly open and persistent challenges to classic Marxism, however, some far more explosive and decisive reaction should have been forthcoming.
It was not that the Soviets had paid no attention. On the contrary, Leonid Brezhnev was not the only Soviet official who had received hourly bulletins as the papal visit had progressed. John Paul’s remorseless probing of his adversaries’ central weakness had been followed speech by speech.
“Europe,” Moscow had heard John Paul say, “which, despite its present and long-lasting divisions and regimes, ideologies, economic and political systems, cannot cease to seek its fundamental unity, must turn to Christianity…. Despite the different traditions that exist in the territory of Europe between the eastern and western parts, there lives in each the same Christianity. Christianity must commit itself anew to the formation of the spiritual unity of Europe.”
If those words jangled in some ears like the death knell for a failing and decrepit Marxism, Moscow gave no bellicose sign that it heard the same toll.
“The state,” John Paul had gone still further, “must always be subsidiary and subservient to the full sovereignty of the nation.” According to such reasoning, the Warsaw Pact and the Comecon economic organization should no longer exist, for their sole purpose was to provide logistical support for the Soviets in what Stalin had once contemptuously called “the Soviet back garden.”
There was no pretending that this Pope’s words were not heard far beyond Poland; that they were not heard by millions in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia; in Lithuania, the Ukraine, Armenia and all the captive republics of the USSR. There was no pretending they had not been heard even in Cuba and Nicaragua, half a world away.
What was it about John Paul that allowed him such liberty of speech? Why did Moscow suffer such flagrant violations of the first and cardinal rule of the Gulag system that declares, Thou shalt allow no man to speak freely to my people?
It was unheard of for Moscow to bear such a protracted, flagrantly public challenge. Had John Paul somehow managed to capture the cautious ear of at least some aging members of the Marxist-Leninist old guard, and of at least some of the younger men nearing the brink of power? Was it at least interesting for some Soviet leaders that John Paul’s seemingly inflammatory but truly controlled performance had brought on no mob scenes, no riots, not even so much as a strike or a workers’ slowdown? The system remained in place, even though its failures had been made clear.
It had been made equally clear, however, and on a worldwide stage, that one way or another, change was inevitable. If the leaven of change from within was the gift John Paul had intended to bear to Eastern Europe, then given a little time and patient kneading, perhaps the dough would rise even in Moscow.
While Warsaw and Moscow and the rest of the “socialist brothers” of the Soviet satellite empire reckoned up the tally of John Paul’s visit to Poland, so did the Pope and his close advisers in Rome and in Warsaw. There was no pretense among any of them—John Paul included—that even as monarchic head of Vatican City State and of the Roman Catholic Church, Karol Wojtyla could claim the kind of power profile shared among the visual brokers of clout in world affairs.
True, his Church had something in excess of 907 million nominal adherents—about 18 percent of the present world population. He had 483,488 priests and about 3,000 increasingly rambunctious bishops serving some 211,156 parishes, which formed the world’s 1,920 dioceses and 513 archdioceses. His institutional organization included an infrastructure of schools, universities, research institutes, medical and social science centers, hospitals, convents, churches, cathedrals, chapels, monasteries, religious centers, embassies, legations, archives, libraries, museums, newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, radio and television stations. True, too, he controlled his own Vatican Bank, with its team of international advisers who administered an extensive portfolio of the Holy See’s holdings and investments in virtually
every sector of the world’s commercial and industrial activity.
In spite of all that, however, John Paul knew that in terms of diplomatic power he was seen as an anomaly among traditional world leaders. Most of the 116 full-fledged embassies on Vatican Hill are, in the internationally recognized formula, accredited to the “Holy See.” In practical terms, Karol Wojtyla, as Pope John Paul II, is that Holy See. Neither his institutional organization nor his investment portfolio—and certainly not religious reverence or agreement with the Pope on moral matters or political ideals—dictates the necessity of maintaining those diplomatic missions, but simply hardheaded realism.
Most of those diplomatic stations are run by decidedly non-Catholic and often predominantly non-Christian states. Not all of them by far are benign either to religion in general or to Roman Catholicism in particular. Yet while all of them, from major nations to pint-sized principalities even smaller than the Vatican, are host to John Paul’s reciprocal diplomatic representatives, even the weakest national government in the most primitive of nations can, at least physically, cripple local sections of his worldwide organization.
In fact, at the very moment of his visit to Poland, several had taken it into their heads to do just that. And in doing so, they had demonstrated that as world leader, if that was what he claimed to be, John Paul had no military alliances to protect him or his interests. He had no economic or industrial punch to use as a retaliatory threat. He had no preponderance in international law or in the assemblies of nations to hold his attackers to account. He could not even call upon any preeminent scientific or academic prowess that would command the respect of Poland’s Communists, or any other regime for that matter.
Nevertheless, it was not lost on Moscow or on Warsaw that he had not gone to Poland as a weak supplicant asking for favors. Pilgrim though he might call himself, he had carried no beggar’s bowl, had waited upon no alms or contributions or official indulgence.
Keys of This Blood Page 13
