Instead, once he had stepped off his papal plane, everything he had done had spoken volubly and dramatically of a peculiar kind of power. He had behaved everywhere as if he was possessed of, or heralded, a force to be reckoned with, a force his peers in government could neither ignore nor maltreat with impunity. This they seemed to sense.
For Warsaw and for its neighbors on every side, John Paul had demonstrated that the very papal persona of Karol Wojtyla embodied the unshakable Roman Catholic persuasion that the papacy, older by far than any secular government, and certainly more durable than the Marxist “revolution” of 1917, would be alive and vibrant long after the “Polish experiment” was reduced to a few pages of recorded history.
No doubt some Poles may and do choose to become atheistic Marxists and anticlerical Communists. But in the presence of Peter’s 263rd successor, and in the face of the total intertwining of Roman Catholicism with Polish nationalism, such Poles in particular fall victim to what Lord Acton cleverly called the “millennia jealousy”—the deep and helpless frustration of those who had thought to face and outlast such millennial force as John Paul represented, but who see all too clearly that they have no realistic chance of making it around the next curve of history’s road.
In Poland, John Paul had successfully staked out his first strong claim to be heard as a judging voice, and not merely in an ecclesiastical setting—in a papal letter or a sermon from a church pulpit. He had entered the arena of public and civil and political affairs in a segment of the world claimed as the turf of superpower. He had held up in despicable detail the total lack of justice and popular support of that regime. He had exposed the local Communist leadership as not merely unloved, but as inconsequential. More important for his adversaries, East and West, this seemingly unpapal Pope had redefined power in unexpected, irresistible terms; and then he had taken that power in his two hands and marched off with it.
In the aftermath of the drama that had been played out, it was neither in Warsaw nor Moscow nor the Vatican, but primarily among Western commentators and observers, that the peculiarly Slavic ironies, and the sometimes almost mystic overtones of the give-and-take that had passed between John Paul and his reluctant hosts, remained puzzling for some time. A few Western reports and commentaries did contrast the Pontiff’s reception as head of state with his proclaimed role as pilgrim. But they seemed unable to reconcile the two. Perhaps The New York Times summarized as well as anyone the early Western assessment of the strange endeavors of this unconventional Pope at this stage in his pontificate: “The visit of John Paul to Poland does not threaten the political order of the nation or of Eastern Europe.” If only the Times editorialist could have had a crystal ball for 1989.
Not for much longer, surmised John Paul’s advisers among themselves, would the real successes of the papal visit to Poland be dimmed, either by Western misunderstanding or by the faint praises of Polish government spokesmen conceding to the Pontiff the puny stature of an “outstanding personality … a great humanist.”
For the Roman assessment of John Paul’s pilgrimage to Poland was this: Without a single armored division at his command—a factor that would always emphasize his power for some, and throw doubt upon it for others—John Paul had taken on not merely a national regime but an international system of government. He had violated with impunity all the taboos imposed by a rigid dictatorship of Big Brother. He had opened the first effective challenge to the political order of the Soviet satellite system, and of the Soviet Union itself. Just as he had said he would in his earliest speeches after his papal election, he had indeed called for the beginnings of “a new order” in Central Europe, and in the international, political and economic order enlaced with it.
He had, in short, within eight months of his election as Pope, made his first entry into the high-stakes competition to which he had committed his papacy. And he had emerged from it with the stature of an international figure.
“I am a giver,” John Paul once said of himself. “I touch forces that expand the mind.”
It was true. Some special magnetism that had been apparent even in his earliest days in the papacy seemed to follow him everywhere. As Pope, he had been heard calling for Poland’s free integration not only into a free Europe but into an integrated world.
His voice was that of a Polish bishop become Roman Pope. But, if he had his way, the message was of one who would be regarded by increasing millions in many lands over decades to come as the patriarch of that integration.
4
The Visible Man
Pope John Paul’s foray into Poland was deeply successful in several ways. It had been performed with such precision that, with no crude revolutionary onslaught upon the political and security systems in place, the Pontiff had nonetheless forced powerful and appealing alternatives into the forefront of the arena. Not only had Poland and the entire Eastern bloc been compelled to look those alternatives straight in the eye. The Western bloc, which had long acquiesced for its own benefit in the status quo, was forced to face those alternatives as well. That could only have profound and lasting consequences on every side.
Equally important was the fact that, for millions upon millions of people, John Paul had given those powerful and appealing alternatives a human face. The face of Christ’s Vicar on Earth.
Nevertheless, and though the drumbeat of publicity that attended his every step in Poland had been all but deafening, it proved difficult in their own din for the hordes of journalists and commentators to catch up with the mind-set of this Pope. It sometimes seemed to John Paul’s aides that the press was watching a bravura performance whose substance remained a mystery for them.
Right enough, a certain dramatic slant came through in the Polish coverage. But the most that came from that was the portrait of an exiled and now powerfully placed son of Polonia Sacra who had returned for a high noon face-off, a personal challenge Vatican-style, with the Soviet-controlled persecution that had blanketed Karol Wojtyla’s homeland for nearly thirty-five years.
Even at the most favorable level, and as John Paul’s travels multiplied far beyond Poland and far beyond 1979, they were understood and presented in the media for as long as possible, and commented upon by experts, as no more than pastoral visits by a caring Pope to troubled parts of his Church. The wider and deeper confrontation John Paul had in mind seemed stubbornly to escape the torrent of public reportage and expert commentary.
Perhaps there was a tinge of wishful thinking in such commentary, or perhaps some other powerful force drove it along its own lines. In any case, memories seemed very short. It had not been so long since Cardinal Malula stood like a symbolic spokesman for the world, a prophet of sorts, in St. Peter’s Square that October day in 1978 and demanded that “Everything must change!” Yet now that the change had truly begun—now that there was no longer to be a Pope echoing the familiar tones and behavior of his predecessors who had been content or constrained to wait upon history—everyone seemed to reject the idea as unintelligible or indigestible or invisible.
This mentality was to pursue John Paul for years. In September 1989, 1.1 million young people—in their quasi totality ranging in age between sixteen and twenty-five—came of their own accord to greet John Paul at St. James de Compostela in Spain. No television or radio networks, no government agency, no international PR company promoted the visit. There was no television coverage of that huge gathering. Why not?
It was as if it was too difficult—and for some, within and outside the Church, too unwelcome—to recognize that in John Paul II they were not dealing with anything like a traditional papal mind. And they were certainly not dealing, as some appeared determined to think, with a provincial cleric at play in a worldwide ecclesiastical maze.
What they were dealing with was a pope who had come to the papacy already fitted with a supremely innovative mind. A man who had been schooled by long experience, and by such tough and wily Polish Churchmen as Cardinal Sapieha and Cardinal Wyszynski, at a uniq
ue, subtle, unremitting and successful confrontation with brute power. They were dealing with a pope who had emerged from the crucible called Poland, where religious reality and moral justice had survived centuries of daily warfare with every changing face of oppression. They were dealing with a man whose intent was to leave behind all that was done and over in the papacy, the Church and the world, and take with him as many as he could, to span the quantum leap to a fast-approaching new world order.
The time finally did have to come, of course, for a different range of reactions to set in.
It began to be noted that, though John Paul’s trips multiplied, there remained an unexplainable absence of any changes such as might have been expected, though dreaded, if the Pope’s intent and motive had to do with pastoral reform. After a public humiliation accompanied by sacrilege in Sandinista Nicaragua in 1983, after being insolently insulted during his American visit—and with the connivance of the American bishops—after he was burned in effigy and had his “popemobile” spattered with excrement by Dutch Catholics in 1986, there were no witch hunts, no vindictive appointments, no retaliatory actions. In strict law, he should have reacted punitively. He bore an office, and his was the duty to defend its rights and prerogatives. He did nothing.
Then, too, there was the curious fact that, as John Paul ranged ever more widely throughout the world, he was obviously throwing a far wider net than was needed for his Roman Catholics. He spoke not only with them and not only with Christians.
One day it would be five resident swamis in Los Angeles, and on another it would be animist priests in Togoland. Or maybe it would be Buddhists in Thailand; Parsis and Hindus and Muslims and Jains in India; or Protestants in South Carolina; or Humanists in Switzerland; or the Anglican Royal Family in England. This Pope clearly showed that he wanted to meet them all, talk with them, pray over and with them, bless and be liked by them.
If such papal behavior was strange, the reaction of some of the most interested commentators was at least as strange. To be sure, the publicity tone changed; but understanding did not deepen. The general approach seemed not so much to explain the extraordinary—for such papal behavior as this was nothing if not extraordinary—but to explain it away as a new act in a sort of continuing papal road show.
“This Pope,” commented one U.S. writer, “is tremendously at home with crowds.”
An Irish editorial commented on the Pontiff’s “natural flair” for “the public relations gesture.”
The Times of London summed up its view of John Paul’s visit to France in 1980 as though it were covering some costly civic parade. “On the whole,” said the Times, “the Pope was well received. But it is to be doubted that the outlay of expenses will be justified very soon.”
Some accused John Paul of traveling to escape a Vatican bureaucracy they were certain he found unbearable, and of being a bad administrator incapable of governing his Church. “We have, in fact, a simple Polish Bishop,” commented one highly placed Roman official, “who remains merely a Bishop at heart and who craves simple, pastoral work. He’s not papal timber.”
Others saw a kind of perverse triumphalism of retrenchment and defeat in the papal travels. “The Pope,” declared one American Protestant scholar in a global masterpiece of backhanded praise, “is well aware that, in the next century, Catholicism will survive only in Third World countries. Catholicism has always flourished only in poor populations of low educational quality. The sophisticated West can take Catholicism’s narrowness no longer. The Pope realizes that.”
On the whole, then, the general feeling seemed to set in, at a very acceptable level of reporting, that Pope John Paul was simply doing what he did best. You might pick a fight over whether he was escaping from the burden of day-to-day governance of his Church, or over the crueler accusation that he was doing the only thing he was capable of doing. Such quibbling aside, however, it was taken as modern gospel that John Paul II was neither more nor less than a public relations genius. If he could only skip some of his more puritanical and narrow opinions—especially the ones on morality—he could be expected to do no great damage to anyone. In fact, it was generally conceded, in some instances he might even be a rather effective ambassador of good will.
As time went on, it was only natural that some papal sources within the Vatican did show a certain exasperation with such insistently naive interpretations of the Pontiff’s motives and intent on his travels. It seemed to these observers and participants that commentators and reporters had not paid sufficient attention even to their own early stories about Wojtyla’s record of “firsts,” or about Wojtyla as a man marked for a special destiny, or about what he had accomplished as priest and bishop in Poland.
Still, Rome is a persevering and patient place. It was felt that, even without rereading the early press, and without extensive papal interviews either, a simple review of John Paul’s achievements would soon force recognition that, by his travels alone, in a true and benign sense, this Pope was turning the papacy inside out.
Besides, argued some of John Paul’s aides, in all fairness it was not surprising that public and private understanding lagged far behind the reality of what John Paul was really about in undertaking his trips. The mere fact that he was becoming a sort of papal Marco Polo was in itself a revolution that took some getting used to.
After all, as these partisans of patience reminded their Vatican colleagues, the Roman Catholic Pope had always been someone who resided and presided in Rome. Even for Romans, he had always been permanently “there,” never in the “here” of our ordinary lives. He had been perpetually separated from “here” by flanks of cardinals and prelates. He had been housed in hush and secrecy. A precious few might gain access to a semiprivate audience, where they would listen to the Pope speak from a throne surrounded by severe-faced chamberlains and exotically dressed guards. People who were very special might have their picture taken with the Holy Father and kiss his ring. A very few—usually important people in their own right, the kind who lived in a “there” somewhere else—might actually meet deep in the mysterious recesses of the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace for a conversation with the Pope.
The ancient ecclesiastical reason for this most Catholic attitude had always seemed simple and clear and willingly accepted. It was true that, as a point of sacred physical origin, the mother church of all Christianity was in Jerusalem. But it was also true that, under the Holy Spirit’s inspiration, Christianity had long ago renounced all freehold lease on those places made holy by Christ’s earthly presence as a mortal man. In the primary Christian optic, it was on one of Rome’s seven hills—on mons vaticanus, Vatican Hill—that God had staked a perpetual claim to 110 acres for the precise geographical and spiritual center of his visible Church as sole source of blessing and salvation.
And so had Rome been held in all the long heyday of Catholicism as the universal religion in all of Europe. From Galway Bay in Ireland to the Ural Mountains of pre-Soviet and even Soviet Russia, and from Archangel in the Arctic Circle to the Congo River in Africa, this Rome was held to be the truest center of the universe.
Even when the Americas and Asia and Oceania hove into sight of Christian eyes, Rome remained the center. And the European countries ringed nearest around it came to be seen as the Christian heartland in an expanding world.
For the first seventeen hundred years of the papacy, then, and in a very real sense, it could fairly be said that the Pope was Rome, and Rome was the Pope. It wasn’t exactly that no pope ever traveled outside Rome. But it was true that no pope ever traveled over the high seas. Never beyond that Christian heartland, in fact. Not even in forced exile.
It was true, as well, and just as significant, that whatever papal travels there were had always had a pointedly clear and totally ecclesiastical objective. A special council of bishops, perhaps; a royal coronation; a political meeting; a visit to a particularly venerable shrine.
The few exceptions only served to prove the rule. The instance of Julius
II riding out in the full regalia of a knight at arms to fight his own battles, in the literal, hand-to-hand sense of the term, was something Catholics preferred to forget as most unpapal behavior. Even when the papacy was transferred to Avignon in southern France—allegedly for security reasons that encompassed sixty-nine years and six pontificates—the popes stayed put at Avignon. The principle, if not the site, remained the same. They still were “Roman popes.”
In the nineteenth century, there were two exceptions to this tradition. Pius VI and Pius VII left Rome, but only because they were kidnapped by French governments and imprisoned on French soil. Even then the reason was arguably—and perhaps doubly—ecclesiastical. And while Pius VI died in his imprisonment, Pius VII made it back to Rome as soon as he was allowed by his captors.
Moreover, staying in Rome has not always been an easy matter. Leaving aside the early martyr popes, who included Peter himself, as late as 1870 Pius IX suffered the loss of all papal territory in Italy—a swath of some 16, 000 square miles—to the infant Italian state. In retaliation, Pius declared himself a “prisoner of the Vatican.” He not only refused to leave the complex of buildings on Vatican Hill; he would not so much as set foot on the front balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica to give his blessing to the crowds in the square below.
This historic resolve was perpetuated by every pope after Pius IX until, in 1929, the Italian government made honorable amends, indemnifying the Vatican of Pius XI for its earlier losses with an undisclosed sum of money and certain concessions of privilege in the social, economic and political life of the country.
No sense of wanderlust invaded the papacy even then, however. Rather, popes simply and most naturally reverted to the ancient pattern. Neither the summer retreats of Pius XII to Castel Gandolfo, for example, nor his compassionate succoring of the wounded in the streets of Rome in the midst of at least one of the twenty Allied bombings during World War II, were seen by him or anyone else as exceptions.
Keys of This Blood Page 14
