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The Keys of This Blood
In truth, Karol Wojtyla was not transformed by the papacy. Rather, he was practically tailored for the roles of priest and bishop within a Poland that was a microcosm of the troubled twentieth-century world around it, as well as for the role of Pope within the Church whose divinely mandated obligation was to be a source of eternal salvation within that world, come what may.
As a young cleric in the late forties and quickly as a bishop, in that Poland he was heir to a very specific ecclesiastical tradition. Preceding him and molding that tradition, men like Cardinals Stefan Wyszynski and Adam Sapieha insisted that the Church not flee to catacombs. It had to be everywhere in Polish life and society, even in the teeth of brutal repression. Nor had that Church made any of the compromises so disastrous to the Church in the United States, Latin America and Western Europe. Wojtyla inherited a thoroughly Roman Catholic tradition, unadulterated and vibrant.
Besides, the Church in Poland, in its thousand-year history, had developed an outlook that was genuinely global; and this globalism was faithfully reproduced in its political institutions, which, though serving Polish nationalism, were imbued with a genuinely geopolitical sense. This, too, he inherited.
The great difference between the Karol Wojtyla who entered the papal Conclave on October 14, 1978, and the man who emerged from it two days later was that he had walked in as Archbishop of Krakow, and had walked out as Bishop of Rome. He had become the 263rd successor to Simon Peter the Apostle, monarchic head of Vatican City State, religious leader of some 900 million Roman Catholics spread over virtually every nation of the five continents. He held in his hand the ancient Keys of Peter. He now possessed a georeligious power and a geopolitical role to play.
Now he was the sole legitimate head of the only georeligion the world has ever known—a living, active, multicultural, multinational, multiracial institutional organization, an institution structured so that the local and national norms of its members could be accommodated in harmony and union with the global aims of the universal organization now confided exclusively to Wojtyla’s leadership and care.
Moreover, he emerged from the Conclave as the personal embodiment of the global political entity known as the “Holy See.” In that capacity, he was accepted immediately—and, in a certain sense, as more than a peer—in the rambunctious world of international politics and diplomacy with which the Vatican is inextricably linked.
Hardly a day passes in that political world without some incident, large or small, that underscores the constant and intimate intertwining of the georeligion John Paul came to head with the geopolitical nature of the world arena. And each such incident, large or small, links the Roman Pontiff himself to the international life and political activity in what has come to be regarded as the secular world.
Even the briefest glance at a pair of such incidents from recent history is sufficient to illustrate how interesting a match had been made in Conclave between the papacy and the Pope who had learned so well at the feet of Sapieha and Wyszynski.
In the early 1940s, when young Wojtyla and his Poland were deeply and tragically caught in the connivances of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, and in the weak-kneed policies of Western governments, Archbishop Amleto Cicognani was posted to Washington, D.C., as Pope Pius XII’s Apostolic Delegate in the United States.
During his service at that post, Cicognani struck up a friendship of sorts with Maksim Maksimovich Litvinov, the best-loved and most large-minded Soviet ambassador the Kremlin has ever sent to Washington. Litvinov served there for three years, from 1941 to 1943.
It was an unlikely friendship, perhaps, given the committed and unremitting atheism of the Soviet Union and the equally committed and unremitting condemnation of the Soviets by every Roman Pope since Pius X. But Litvinov had a genius for friendship, and an exceptional gift for conversation. He talked with everyone and anyone, and many of his public and private pronouncements are still repeated by some in Washington today who are unaware of Litvinov as their author. A Polish Jew born in 1876 in Bialystok—that eastern portion of Poland occupied at the time by Czarist Russia—Litvinov had spent his professional life in the Soviet government’s Commission for Foreign Affairs.
No one in Washington ever doubted his devotion as Joseph Stalin’s representative in those three crucial years of World War II. But his closest Washington associates always felt that Litvinov the Jew had Litvinov the Soviet representative under strict control; that he always had his eyes fixed on the larger picture—on basic human values—as he surveyed the world scene. In fact, even after he retired, in 1946, Litvinov maintained his foreign contacts and collaborated, sometimes, through quite unofficial channels, with Vatican personnel and others in the West—especially when humanitarian causes were involved.
In those war years, the perennial topic that surfaced in the private chats between Litvinov and Archbishop Cicognani was that diehard opposition of the Church under Pius XII against having anything to do with Stalin, with Stalinism, with Leninist Marxism, or with the Soviet regime. Soviet strategy at that critical moment was directed toward securing some softening of Pius’s position. The geopolitical purpose of this Soviet effort was to galvanize the war effort against Hitler’s Germany, which was still far from beaten. To gain even the neutrality of the Holy See and its representatives throughout the world would be an improvement and a help.
So important was Pius XII’s stance considered by all sides in the war that several countries had joined the Soviets in bringing immense pressures to bear on the Pope’s administration to let up on its official opposition to the “Soviet ally.” Even New York’s doughty and conservative Francis Cardinal Spellman, though always a great supporter of Pius XII, was one of a fair number of powerful papal representatives who joined the international pressure group. Using as pretext his position as Chaplain General of the U.S. Armed Forces, Spellman undertook a worldwide tour of the Catholic hierarchy to lobby for the temporary softening of official Catholic horror of Stalin and Stalinist Russia. “Hitler has to be beaten, one way or another,” the American Cardinal would say in his own defense. The line was his own version of Winston Churchill’s more famous defense of Britain’s alliance with the Soviet Union against Hitler: “Any stick is good enough to beat a dog, when you’ve got to beat him.”
It was in that internationally charged atmosphere, and in one conversation in particular, that the topic of Pius’s intransigence toward Stalin surfaced yet again between Amleto Cicognani and Maksim Litvinov.
To the Soviet ambassador’s reasoned arguments, Cicognani finally replied that Generalissimo Stalin—for so he was called during the war—once saved from annihilation, would very likely consign every Catholic priest, prelate and nun to a one-way cattle-car trip to Siberian death camps, just as he had disposed of some four million independent Ukrainian farm owners. “We know all about the kulaks,” Cicognani said in pointed reference to that slaughter.
“Oh, no, Excellency!” Litvinov engaged in no shallow denials. Instead, he pointed to that all-important geopolitical power bound up with the Holy See. “The Generalissimo knows you people are not kulaks. Enemies of socialism, yes; that he knows. But he also knows your terrain is the world of nations, not some godforsaken acres in the Soviet hinterland.”
A little more than two decades later, in a different part of the “world of nations” that even Stalin understood to be papal terrain, another, smaller war erupted. Again, though Stalin and Litvinov had departed the scene, Soviet influence was present. And again the unique geopolitical status and capability of the Holy See became crucial.
On April 24–25, 1965, in the tiny island nation of the Dominican Republic, rebellious army units under Colonel Francisco Caamaño Deñó seized part of the capital city, Santo Domingo. He distributed large quantities of arms indiscriminately to the populace at large, and demanded that ousted president Juan Bosch be reinstated in office. Bosch had been deposed in 1963 by the military, who correctly suspecte
d him of being under Communist influence.
Under the command of General Antonio Imbert Barreras, meanwhile, military forces loyal to the current Dominican government established control in the parts of the capital not occupied by Caamaño, and in the surrounding countryside.
To no one’s surprise, it was rapidly established that Caamaño’s rebels included an important Communist element and that the hidden hand of the KGB had been at work. The Santo Domingo uprising was therefore quickly seen to be a crisis of international importance. It had implications for the whole hemisphere, in fact. The United States was in no mood at the time to allow another Cuba, or another shredding of the Monroe Doctrine.
As quickly as possible, the United States landed a large force in the island nation, and established a security zone dividing the Imbert forces from Caamaño’s rebel troops in Santo Domingo. By May, the Organization of American States (OAS) integrated the U.S. forces into an inter-American peace force commanded by a Brazilian general and composed of personnel from Brazil, Nicaragua, Honduras, Paraguay and Costa Rica.
The American public in particular, still mindful of the disaster at the Bay of Pigs and of the Cuban missile crisis, watched as the explosive Dominican situation unfolded in graphic press coverage. Striking and dramatic photos focused their attention increasingly on the strong frame of a man clad in the white summer cassock of a Roman Catholic cleric, a lone figure striding back and forth across the dangerous no-man’s-land that separated the two armed camps.
That man was Archbishop Luigi Raimondi, Pope John XXIII’s Apostolic Delegate to Mexico. With his broad forehead, sharp eyes behind spectacles, Roman nose and determined chin, Raimondi was the very embodiment of a man who was not so much immune to passions as able to place them in a larger context, and then to make that context compelling for all concerned.
Raimondi had been requested by the OAS authorities, and accepted by the Caamaño command as well, as an agreeable negotiator in the protracted truce efforts.
During those hot and trying months of negotiation that extended from the end of April to the end of August, one Santo Domingo newspaper editorialized on the choice of the Apostolic Delegate as the man for the job. And in doing so, it enlarged significantly on the point that Soviet Ambassador Litvinov had made to Archbishop Cicognani nearly twenty-five years before.
“Who could pass with immunity from one side to the other? Who could be trusted to take no side between rebels and authority, between Communist and capitalist, between foreigners and Dominicans? Only someone delegated by the one man on earth who is only on the side of God, the Heavenly Father of rebel and authority, of Communist and capitalist, of foreigner and Dominican. Only such a man as the Holy Father, and only his official representatives, have the Heavenly Father’s mind and love for all mankind; for only they serve all mankind as one family, and have the capacity to tend it as one family.”
The insight of that editorial into the mandate and the capacity of the Holy See, and the confidence it expressed in the Pope’s personal representative, were both on target. Raimondi’s negotiations led to the end of the military standoff by August 31, and to regularized elections and the final withdrawal of all foreign troops from Santo Domingo by September of the following year.
Both the Cicognani and Raimondi incidents, and the Dominican editorial as well, combine to put a tooth in one more story—less well documented but much repeated in the years following World War II—that linked the Soviet Union, Great Britain and the Holy See.
Britain’s Prime Minister Churchill, the story went, was urging on Stalin the importance of that very policy that Litvinov and so many others did in fact take up: As allies, Churchill reportedly argued, the British and Soviets ought to try somehow to co-opt Pope Pius into the war effort. In caustic contempt, Stalin is supposed to have replied, “How many divisions can the Pope supply us?”
As the story continued, after the war Churchill recounted the exchange to Pius XII. Rather than insist upon the obvious—on the fact that, despite his open contempt, Stalin had mustered world pressure in an effort to gain Vatican support—Pius is said to have replied, “Tell my son Joseph that he will meet my divisions in eternity.”
Whether that story is accurate in all or any of its details, it points up a great deal about the power that was later placed in John Paul’s hands when he accepted the papacy. Any world leader who discounts the eternal revelations on which papal power claims to be based flirts with problems. But, at the same time, any world leader who takes the Roman Pontiff as possessing only the spiritual weapons of the unseen world and the afterlife with which to deal in practical, this-worldly matters is making a strategic error of great proportions.
By definition, the problem faced by Stalin and the Allied nations in the 1940s, and the one faced in 1965 in Santo Domingo, were geopolitical. The common good of a wide community of nations was involved. And, as the Dominican editorial observed, only an institution with truly geopolitical capability—the capacity and the mandate to serve and tend “all mankind as one family”—can truly serve the greater good of the wider community of nations.
However unpalatable the idea may have become to much of the world in latter days, Karol Wojtyla was one man who came to the papacy with a full understanding and a sophisticated appreciation of the geopolitical power of the Holy See. And, an idea more unpalatable still, that geopolitical power was understood by him as generated by and inseparable from the georeligious power claimed at the very dawn of Christianity by its first preachers, the Apostles.
Christianity started off in the early thirties of the first century professing to tell all mankind about the divine revelations made for them all by Jesus Christ. “Go forth and teach all men, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit,” Jesus commanded his Apostles. That, backed up by his giving the Keys of salvation on this earth and in God’s Heaven to Simon Peter, alone and personally, was the last great and well-remembered instruction Jesus gave his Apostles before he disappeared from human sight.
It took almost two thirds of its nearly two-thousand-year existence for Christianity to achieve that georeligious status so clearly mandated by its founder. In hindsight, and even in simplified outline, it is easy to see by what painful fits and starts the Church finally developed the truly georeligious institutional organization placed in the hands of John Paul II.
For one thing, georeligion was not to be a simple question of mere numbers or of demographic spread. What was involved was something far more difficult: the slow-moving effort to free the human expression of that original divine revelation and mandate from the powerful limitations—the anti-georeligious elements—that have particularized all the other great historical movements of mankind. Limitations that break people into groups, and that maintain each group separate from all the others. Language; local customs; ethnic traditions; racial memories; nationalistic ideals and goals; and those greatest of all limiting factors, human egotism, selfishness and greed. All had to be faced and reinterpreted and overcome in a new context.
The earliest set of great limitations that Christianity had to face was the fervent Judaism of the first Christian Apostles and disciples themselves. Jews almost to a man, it took them nearly twenty years to realize that they were not commissioned by Christ to convert the world to the Judaism in which they had been raised. Their leader, Simon Peter, had to be instructed by a special revelation that forever changed his outlook. And, even then, he had to hear and understand the arguments of the fiery Paul of Tarsus, who bluntly declared to his non-Jewish converts that “there is neither Jew nor non-Jew, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
By A.D. 50, the matter was settled. The Christian leaders realized that, according to Jesus, they were not supposed to convert the world to a Christianized Judaism—Peter’s original misunderstanding. They were to convert all men to Christianity, which had inherited all the divine promises made to Judaism’s founde
rs. Christians were the spiritual descendants, the “seed” that God promised to Abraham some two thousand years before Christ’s birth. “If you belong to Christ, you are Abraham’s seed,” Paul wrote to the Galatians, “and, therefore, you are heirs to all that God promised Abraham.” That Christian claim laid the groundwork from the beginning for an undying enmity in Jews for Christians.
The next important shift in Roman Christianity’s march to georeligious status came after almost three hundred years of fierce and lethal persecutions under the iron hand of the dying Roman Empire.
Ironically enough, and portentously, this second shift began with Christianity’s success at last, during the fourth to sixth centuries, in adapting itself to the framework of that same ancient Roman Empire. And a vast shift it was; for it raised Christianity from the level of a provincial and sociopolitically nondescript sect, originating in the largely unknown backwater of Palestine, to civil, public and international status. There was a price to be paid for this huge facilitation of Christianity’s preaching: Roman Christianity adopted not merely the framework but many traits of the recent Roman imperialism.
Hardly had this shift taken place than Christianity was subjected to the destructive invasions by Nordic and Asiatic barbarians, principally between the sixth and eleventh centuries. Roman Christianity ultimately tamed the invaders, however. And in Christianizing them, it extended its religion from its originally small nucleus in Mediterranean lands, until it covered all of Europe. The See of Peter—the Holy See, as people called it—was the hub of that Europe.
Out of this new population, the Church diligently formed the matrix from which came the civilization that developed all those higher civil, political, artistic and cultural values treasured today as marks of progress and civilization—justice, compassion, democracy, dignity, the rights of man, even medicine and science. A new Europe now enjoyed a unity and a verve that the ancient Roman Empire, even at its apogee, had never been able to create.
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