Keys of This Blood

by Malachi Martin

  But, unlike the other summits, when this one was over and done with, there was no satisfactory precision available about what was transacted between these two men, the Pope of All the Catholics and the Leninist Leader of All the Russias. For transaction there surely was, a transaction much desired by the Soviet leader in his race to achieve a wholly new international status for his USSR, and a much prized transaction for this Slavic Pope, whose papal policy and personal devotion are irrevocably oriented to the lands of the Slavs. And, let it be said, it was a transaction that was assiduously monitored by leaders in the West, who had been stimulated by the meteoric Soviet president to link the future of their countries and nations intimately with this man’s future.

  Yet neither in the weeks preparatory to that summit nor in its aftermath was any precision to be had. There were fourteen hundred journalists and reporters assigned to cover the state visit of Mikhail Gorbachev to Italy. He was to hold important meetings with government officials. But that side of his visit was put on a “newsworthiness” par with Raisa Gorbachev’s visit to Messina on November 30. “Good copy,” certainly, but not front-page, large-headline news. The Wojtyla-Gorbachev meeting was the main focus of interest.

  It was announced, analyzed and critiqued extensively and intensively by the media for weeks before it took place. Comments by world leaders and predictions by pundits filled the newspaper columns and editorials. But no estimation of the forthcoming get-together between the reigning Pope and the current strongman of the largest, the most powerful, and still the officially anti-God state sounded satisfactory, even approximately accurate. Everyone knew some details. No one seemed able to spell it out in the round.

  For patently it was not a religious event, as we normally understand such a happening. Yet who could doubt that religion would be a conditioning factor on that day’s exchange between papal host and Soviet visitor? This was no ordinary meeting of the “greats”: a gelid encounter of wary warriors around the green-topped table of raw power. But still, if any genuine power existed on that day, it surely rode on the shoulders of Papa Wojtyla and Mikhail Gorbachev.

  The Soviet man was not in Rome on a social visit “to trace the footsteps of the Caesars” and, just by the way, “to see the Pope.” Nor was it a bargaining session, a “hard-tack” negotiation between international “horse dealers.” Lesser men, the “gremlins” and “back room” boys in Vatican and Kremlin, would do all the haggling and point-by-point bargaining.

  Nor, finally, was it foreseen as one of those “celebrations,” a diplomatic get-together wreathed in smiles and handshakes, punctuated with photo opportunities, highlighted by a public “signing” ceremony and giveaway memento pens, evoking good “feelings” about “the other side” and culminating in the clinking of champagne goblets at a state banquet for the glitterati. There would, indeed, be handshakes, and smiles, and photo opportunities, and—for the working “gremlins” backstage—refreshment alla italiana; but all that usual panoply was rendered in the chiaroscuro peculiar to the age-old romanità of the Holy See.

  During the last weeks and days of November, there were diligent attempts to downplay the meeting, to describe it as a quiet triumph of the Vatican’s long-suffering, almost fifty-year-old Ostpolitik originating in the Vatican of Pope Pius XII, maintained by Popes John XXIII and Paul VI, and crowned by Secretary of State Agostino Cardinal Casaroli. But this was not so. The twists and turns of that Ostpolitik had provided temporary easements in isolated cases. But the forthcoming meeting, if the child of that Ostpolitik, would be as surprising as a brilliant flamingo born from two bewildered barnyard fowl. Casaroli’s Ostpolitik was a long, winding, dark tunnel with never a speck of light, with no end in sight ever.

  If there never had been an Ostpolitik, that meeting would have taken place anyway. If there had been only that Ostpolitik, it would still be mired down in the morass of deliberately awkward protocol, and tortured on the brambles of intentional ill will. Only because of what Wojtyla had accomplished in his first ten years, and only because Gorbachev in his desperation looked beyond the here and now of mummified Leninist Marxism, was the forthcoming meeting possible.

  Other analysts saw it as a chance for those men—each one needing something from the other—to display their bargaining chips and claim their IOUs. But this was not the case. The IOUs had been paid. The chips had eliminated each other. That had been the essence of Ostpolitik.

  Still others contemplated the coming meeting with misplaced piety and historical myopia, seeing it as a fatal compromise bordering on blasphemy—the Church entertaining, beside the Tomb of the Apostles, the one man closely resembling the unclean Beast of Apocalypse foretold as polluting the Holy of Holies! But Papa Wojtyla had no intention of allowing that Tomb to be besmirched—he relied on the protection of the Archangel Michael for that proviso. President Gorbachev had no intention of trying to desecrate, to desacralize, or even to trivialize the Vatican ground he trod on and the sacred presence of the Most High housed immemorially within those walls. Anything of that nature was as distant from Pope and President in their intentions as a banal act of common lewdness.

  Between any such motivations and what actually animated the two leaders in the December meeting, the distance and the difference can be aptly compared to the distance and difference between a pigsty on a dirt farm and Mount Everest in the Himalayas. Not cluttered with busy details of personality and career, not hobbled with little vanities (complaints, preferences), and not designed even partially with a view to “the voters back home” or homeside parliamentary politics, the meeting concerned the structure of our human society, its substance, its promise, its perils and its ultimate foreseeable fate.

  In spite of the pervasive imprecision coloring the forthcoming summit, when all the conceivable forecasts and pre-analyses had been endlessly set forth, there remained one solid and widely shared persuasion, never expressed fully in words, but nevertheless washing around the minds of people.

  If anything really newsworthy, really important for the man in the street, was going to transpire on that December 1 in the Vatican, it would be in the nature of a drama; and all the rest belonged to “the grease and the paint” of the supporting cast, the carefully planned decor and the barely audible accompaniment of a very ancient and very modern voice reminding all and sundry of our deepest, wildest human hope—to see the Father of us all face-to-face and, finally, to taste the peace of true home on earth.

  This sense of drama, this universally experienced feeling that not merely were two important personages about to talk but something affecting all was about to happen, pervaded the minds of observers and commentators. The fate of all in the coming years was going to be not merely discussed but molded powerfully.

  For the generality of people today, there was no new thinking available “on credit,” and, therefore, no way they could think the thoughts Wojtyla and Gorbachev would verbalize carefully. Yet, it was realized that now, on the eve of the most important decade in two thousand years, someone with vaster stature than a mere “religious leader” was in close colloquy with someone endowed temporarily with more transcendent intuition than any of his Leninist predecessors.

  In effect, as that first Friday in December dawned, a sea of the same awareness about the drama unfolding in the Vatican was lapping around the minds of all—the proximate witnesses, those interested from afar, the inimical, the suspicious, the cynical, the hopeful. That sea of awareness seems to have been as universal as the waters of the oceans that ebbed and flowed around the edges of all five continents, providing a symbolism and an imagery peculiarly apt for the occasion. Whether it was around Soviet Archangel in the Arctic Circle, around the meandering coastlines of Old Europe, washed by its three main seas—the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the North Sea—around the continental bulks of Africa, India, Australia, or around the newly named Pacific Rim, these same ocean waters mirrored the widespread consciousness of the Vatican event. No one was not touched. Just as no human shore c
ould escape the washing ocean waters, so no one could be unaware, even the most adversarial—the Hermit Crab of the Adriatic’s Albania, the Clown of the Caribbean in Cuba, the Beggarman Dictator of Nicaragua, or the frightened band of Touch-Me-Not Purists in Beijing.

  Symbolically, too, those same waters heaved and rolled around the island of Malta, where President Bush, guarded by U.S. naval might, with a Soviet flotilla standing by, already awaited the Soviet president, straight after his visit with John Paul. There was a symbolic message and a daunting imagery carried by the wild waves of those waters, whipped slowly into fury by a winter storm around Malta. The Soviet president would have to wait and wait before getting together with the American president. The American leader would have to hazard a motor-launch trip through those troubled waters in order to reach the Soviet leader.

  By contrast, the coming together of Papa Wojtyla and President Gorbachev proceeded in great tranquillity and with customary Vatican punctilio. St. Peter’s Square, sunlit beneath a clear blue sky, was closed from early morning to all traffic. Behind barricades, a policeman stood every fifty feet. At 10:50 A.M., the Soviet motorcade of five Russian-made ZIL limousines, carrying Gorbachev, wife Raisa, and twenty-four officials and aides and led by an ever-watchful army helicopter, swept in quietly through the Renaissance archway into the Courtyard of St. Damasus. A group of black-suited gentlemen, the receiving line, stood by.

  Not waiting for the chauffeur to open the door, Gorbachev was out that door, hand extended, a broad smile on his lips as he walked over the Oriental rug spread on the ancient cobblestones, in order to greet Bishop Dino Monduzzi, prefect of the Pope’s own household. Raisa followed him, dressed in a red dress, Gorbachev in a dark-blue suit but without the usual panoply of medals Soviet leaders used to display, even when dressed in “civvies.” There were smiles and handshakes all around. Twenty-four Swiss Guards, dressed in the blue-and-gold-striped uniforms designed by Michelangelo, performed, as guard of honor, their four-point picchetto drill with halberds.

  Then the President, followed by his retinue, entered the Apostolic Palace and advanced along a red carpet up the corridor, studded with blinking pieces of audiovisual equipment. Fr. Giovanni D’Ercole, assistant press spokesman and “traffic director” for the moment, kept whispering into the microphone tucked behind his Roman collar as the Soviet party advanced, Gorbachev’s every step being watched on the ubiquitous digital monitors as the cortege approached the elevator.

  Arriving on the third floor of the Apostolic Palace, the Gorbachevs found a smiling John Paul II standing and waiting for them. He wore his papal white robe, with a gold cross pendant on his chest. He addressed the Soviet president in Russian as “Mr. President.” Gorbachev alternated between “Holy Father” and “Your Holiness,” as did Raisa Gorbachev.

  If these two men, Wojtyla as Pope and Gorbachev as Soviet strongman, had met ten years earlier—the moment when John Paul was fresh from Poland in his office as Pope and Gorbachev just up from the province of Stavropol and installed in Moscow as Secretary of Agriculture and Central Committee Secretary of the Communist Party—surely some exuberant commentators would have waxed poetic in their imaginations.

  They would have been fed by the lithe, almost panther-like loping stride of a still fresh-faced Karol Wojtyla—the Polish yeoman straight from the polanie (fields) of his motherland and in search of Poland’s traditional enemy to the East. They would have seen an invisible aura of mute confrontation between him and the bustling, husky figure of the Soviet man as the self-assertive, overriding and fast-talking Russian boyar ready at a moment’s notice to hack and hew his way stolidly with a broadsword to the goal of empire and foreign possessions.

  But the intervening decade has taken its toll on both men. On one as the Holder of the Petrine Keys to Heaven, which shine with the human blood of his God. On the other as the quintessential Leninist commissar, Champion of the Hammer and Sickle, which he claims today he has wiped clean of the human blood of millions mowed down in the ugly harvest of death on the way to the never-never land of the Marxist Utopia. Both men have paid their dues for their personal access to the cold, bleak plane of geopolitics they now occupy and on which they will converse alone this December day.

  Perhaps, indeed, neither of them is any longer aware of the vast change of mind he has undergone because of what he has had to suffer in order to achieve a tolerable balance and equilibrium on those little-frequented heights. That was not suffering of body but of spirit, leaving invisible wounds that never heal, never scar.

  Wojtyla and Gorbachev are far, far older than ten ordinary years will ensure of themselves; and the twelve-year difference between Pope (seventy) and President (fifty-eight) makes no difference. They have learned, as leaders, when to pause in wait on events and when to leap ahead of them; as inspirers, what hopes not to evoke; as commanders in chief, what commands not to give. They are wiser, not sadder, but certainly more sober and relaxed because surer than ever before that the construction they have put on events will be verified by what is going to happen for the remainder of their days on earth.

  A first look at each other as they advance to shake hands, the first eyes-to-eyes stare crisscrossing between them in quick appraisal of mood and temper, the press of palm on palm and fingers on fingers, the very sound of their first syllables—all that is quite enough for quick recognition, for establishing between them the authenticity of the forthcoming conversation.

  With conventional preliminaries over, Vatican aides softly and deftly guide everyone: Foreign Minister Shevardnadze with his aides and advisers off in one direction for a sit-down discussion with Cardinal Casaroli, with the Vice-Secretary of State, Archbishop Cassidy, and with their teammates from the Vatican’s “Second Section”; Raisa Gorbachev on her way to see the Raphael Rooms and “Loggias” (she has already seen their replicas in the Leningrad Hermitage) and to be frustrated in this, her second attempt to see the Sistine Chapel. When she and her husband were here as little-remarked visitors in 1971, the Chapel was closed for repairs; likewise today, December 1, 1989, she cannot get to see it.

  At 11:03 A.M., Pope John Paul ushers Mikhail Gorbachev into his private library, motions him to a chair, sits down opposite him, opens his notes and starts talking. A reproduction of Poland’s national treasure, the icon of Our Lady of Czestochowa, bearing the slash mark of a Tartar saber on the cheek, has been placed on an easel to the right of the two leaders and some few feet from the table at which they sit. It is John Paul’s “touch” to the scene.

  Outside the closed doors of the papal library, four Swiss Guards stand on watch. All approaches to those doors, within the Apostolic Palace, are littered with elements of the Vatican Secret Service, the Italian police, some of President Gorbachev’s personal bodyguards. Television monitors and radio communications sweep every inch of corridors, rooms, elevators and lobbies. Outside electronic and “body” surveillance on the grounds around the Palace and in the air above it seal off the two men from any interference.

  As planned, the two men will have about five minutes alone, conversing in Russian. Then they will be joined by interpreters and some others. The switch ensures accuracy and correctness of understanding, as well as a witnessed record of what transpires between the two leaders. Enemies and friends of both men in the Vatican and the Kremlin must have some crumbs to chew on and digest.

  The initial minutes together and alone permit these men some things they both need. The meat of today’s transaction between Papa Wojtyla and President Gorbachev is reviewed here. Before any third party from either side participates, they must be able to agree on what will not be aired verbally during the full session. For both men have dissidents and adversaries in their political households, and those must not be privy to certain ultimate goals and certain decisions Papa Wojtyla and President Gorbachev nourish in the only confidentiality that is absolute—their own hearts and wills.

  In addition, one or two subjects are to be touched on that are best not mentioned
in public communiqués. Perhaps some particular individual on one side or the other? A forgotten prisoner in the Gulag? An intelligence matter between Vatican and Kremlin? A fleeting exchange about John Paul’s would-be assassin, Mehmet Ali Agca?

  And then there are assurances to be given mutually, about which the wide world will never hear: John Paul’s deepest intention in visiting the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev’s ultimate disposition regarding God and religion and Russia. These themes are ultimately connected, since both men are convinced that the papal visit will be much more than a mere papal visit. On that event will hang the ultimate judgment of history about the significance of Gorbachev and Wojtyla. Perhaps, indeed, that is why the Soviet president interspersed his actual words of invitation to John Paul with an “if God keeps us all alive and well in the meantime” phrase.

  Lastly, between the two there is an agreed-upon assessment of where world affairs stand and the most desirable directions in which they should go. It is not the first time this subject has arisen between them. They already share common words, concepts and principles, so there is no need for long-winded explanations or detailed exposition. Already, through trusted personal intermediaries, they have had substantial communication on the ticklish issues. So now they act more or less after the manner of two master mariners preparing to set sail who finger the key rigging, test the rudder, ensure the working order of the ship’s radio, glance at their provisions and scrutinize momentarily their already planned voyage on the map. There is very little need of talk or extended discussion; just telling phrases and indicative gestures. Then they are ready to give orders to the working crew.