In two thousand years of Church history, never had one nation offered itself, as Wyszynski now intended that Poland would, for the sake of the world. Nor is it likely in the purely natural course of things that any nation that had been treated by the world as Poland had would have had any such inclination.
Perhaps there was in Wyszynski’s idea a trace of the nineteenth-century Polish Messianists; for it did presume a messianic role for Poland. But if so, it rested on none of the false Catholicism of those poet-dreamers. And it was eminently achievable.
Wyszynski’s plan was laid out quickly and realistically. It would take time and concerted effort to arrange for the entire nation to come together as one in a solemn vow of dedication. Wyszynski looked, therefore, to the perfect timing of the millennium of Poland’s conversion to Christianity as the date of full-blown national consecration. That one-thousand-year anniversary would fall in 1966. The Cardinal would have ten years in which to prepare for the celebration. Preparations would begin with a solemn vow of national dedication by the nation and its bishops on August 26, 1956. Each year, in August, Wyszynski’s bishops would organize popular processions in which reproductions of the holy icon of Our Lady of Jasna Góra would be carried from city to town to village. Each year, the bishops would lead their people in the millennium vow as composed by the Cardinal Primate. And during each of those yearly celebrations, the bishops would deliver sermons emphasizing the overall themes of that vow. Finally, in 1966, the bishops would lead all the people in one final, national repetition of that vow.
How Wyszynski would manage to coordinate all this from his isolation at Komancza was not a matter that troubled him. Heaven—and his bishops and people—would supply what was needed; for now he was acting as Primate and Intenex. Besides, the overall animator of the spirit of this national dedication was Karol Wojtyla. He grasped, apparently, the geopolitical and georeligious issues involved in the whole proposal. On that future date in 1966, Wojtyla would preach the keynote sermon and display a wide-sweeping grasp of the hugely vital world issues involved in Poland’s conduct under pressure from Leninist Marxism.
On the very day he made his decision, therefore—March 15, 1956—with no glitter or fanfare to mark the occasion, Wyszynski wrote out the words to be used in the dedication. Those words were simple, mentioning only Poland, its families, its country, its work, its religion, its hopes. But it was the religious offering of all these—“in the spirit of the vows of our ancestors,” the Three Pacts of Polishness—that constituted the moral power of that national dedication.
Once he had composed that national vow, he started on practical plans. The supernatural intention of the Cardinal Primate seemed to develop among the Poles with a striking internal energy. On August 26 of that very year, just five months after Wyszynski’s decision, the people assembled all over Poland for the first of the annual celebrations. At Jasna Góra alone, a million people assembled around the monastery where the quintessentially Polish icon of Mary is preserved. In every corner of the land, as each of the promises of the vow was announced by the bishops, Polish voices everywhere cried out in answer: “Queen of Poland, we promise!”
Alone in his prison at Komancza, Cardinal Primate Wyszynski stood before a reproduction of the Czestochowa icon and recited the vow he had composed. Later, it was determined that the first dedication had been carried out in all parts of the country within the same time span of about twenty minutes, and with remarkable spontaneity.
From that moment on, Stefan Wyszynski’s release from his “final and irreversible” confinement and his restoration to his public duties as Primate would seem to have been no more than a matter of time, and of timing.
Pressures that had already been building on the new government of Edward Ochab were becoming intolerable. The situation was becoming increasingly fraught with the danger of wide-scale riots and national revolt. Even Polish Communists were dissatisfied with Stalinist methods, and Ochab found he could not curb the national unrest. In mid-October, Ochab was replaced by Wladyslaw Gomulka as President and First Secretary of the Polish CP.
There were those who always suspected that Gomulka suffered from deep psychological disturbance. If so, the problem didn’t get in the way of his understanding that for the vast majority of Polish workers—for the bulk of the population, therefore—Stefan Wyszynski represented the only credible vestige of acceptable authority. That being the case, Gomulka quickly dispatched two emissaries to Komancza to talk with the imprisoned Wyszynski.
There was no question that the Cardinal would simply step out into the sunlight of his personal freedom. As had always been the case, he understood himself to be dealing in the Communist regime with an adversary of inferior force. Gomulka would have to negotiate. And Wyszynski was a past master at the art.
What, the President’s representatives asked, were the Primate’s conditions for consenting to leave his confinement, for accepting restoration to his rightful place, and for helping Gomulka restore and maintain order in Poland?
The Cardinal’s reply was a simple and straightforward litany of terrible wrongs to be righted. There must be a restoration of all ecclesiastical freedom in Poland, including Church appointments of clergy and bishops. The Mixed Commission was to be reinstated, to its full if cantankerous functioning. Through Wyszynski himself as Primate, negotiations were to take place with the Holy See in order to reach a formal and internationally valid agreement, a Concordat, between the Holy See and Poland. All bishops, priests and theologians who had been imprisoned were to be released. All restrictive laws were to be lifted so that newspaper press runs would not be restricted, passports and publishing licenses would not be denied, and banking facilities could operate on something approaching a reasonable basis. And, not least, the Party must repudiate the forced show-trial “confessions” of Bishop Kaczmarek; and Kaczmarek himself must be released and restored to the Church.
In making his demands, Wyszynski was not relying on anything as flimsy as the changing and deepening conditions of social and political unrest in Poland. For one thing, to do so would have been to ignore the known arrogance of the Leninist-Marxist ideologues in both Warsaw and Moscow of the 1950s. Very shortly, in fact, some of those ideologues would venture in their arrogance even as far as the brink of nuclear war with the United States. For another thing, Wyszynski understood that, now no less than before, the Polish Communists truly and deeply desired to be rid of him and the very existence of his Church.
But mainly, for the believer Wyszynski was, and for any believer examining the circumstances of his successful return as functioning Primate and Interrex of Poland, all those conditions of social and political unrest that had brought the regime to this interesting juncture were precisely the elements used by God’s providence in Poland’s behalf. The “bread and freedom” riots in Poznan; the Hungarian revolt; Boleslaw Bierut’s failure; the gross mismanagement of Poland’s economy; the failure of Edward “Gloom-and-Doom-and-Boom” Ochab—all of that Wyszynski understood on the plane of spirit, of God’s grace, and of human destiny as a matter planned by God, the Lord of human history.
In his venturesome recourse to the intercessory power of Mary as the Mother of God, Wyszynski knew that on a national scale he had called on God’s power. As far as he was concerned, therefore, he held all the cards. And he had not overplayed his hand.
By the evening of October 28, 1956, Wyszynski was home again in the Primate’s residence on Miodowa Street, with all the conditions he had demanded in his pocket, and on his record a total and unexpected victory over an enemy that had appeared to be overwhelmingly powerful. Wyszynski’s Poles were the first to understand the Cardinal’s laconic comment on his successful defeat of the government: “Deus vicit!” God conquered!
Wyszynski was not adapting a phrase from Julius Caesar. He was echoing the victory statement of Poland’s King Jan Sobieski III after his successful rout of an overwhelmingly powerful Turkish army at Mount Kahlenberg, Vienna, on September 12, 1683.
The Ottoman Turk, at the zenith of his power, almost conquered all of western Europe. “Veni, vidi, Deus vicit!”—I came, I saw, God conquered!—was Sobieski’s retort to the acclamations he received for his victory. Forever after, that patch of ground with its memorial chapel on Mount Kahlenberg has been ceded by the Austrians to Poles as a piece of Polish territory.
30
Papal Training Ground: Under the Sign of Solidarność
It is true that the Karol Wojtyla who has come to be known to the world as Pope John Paul II was formed in the womb of Poland’s proud and terrible history, and that he was raised in the cradle of Polish romanitas and the Three Pacts of Polishness. But it is also true—and every bit as important—that he came to maturity as priest, as bishop and as geopolitician by the side of Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, who was the Primate Churchman of Poland and its most redoubtable Interrex for over thirty years—precisely the years of Wojtyla’s formation as a Churchman.
As Archbishop Adam Sapieha had done before him, Cardinal Wyszynski singled out Father Karol Wojtyla from among his fellow priests as someone with a cluster of personal talents that marked him out for a special Church career. Wojtyla had a comprehensive mind that always placed details within the larger context. He had a profound personal piety that was authentically Roman Catholic; at the same time, he had a voracious intellectual curiosity, an up-to-date acquaintance with currents of political and religious thought, and a sturdy independence of judgment. He also had “presence”—that indefinable but definite mark of a powerful personality. Of such stuff, Wyszynski knew, were leaders made.
Over twenty-two years, from Wyszynski’s return to Warsaw in 1956 until Karol Wojtyla’s election as Pope in October of 1978, there grew between these two temperamentally different Churchmen a symbiosis of religious devotion, of attachment to the Polish motherland, of agreement about Poland’s destiny within the society of nations, and about the geopolitical function of the Roman papacy.
In the words of his perceptive biographer Andrzej Micewski, Stefan Wyszynski “created no new doctrines or ideologies. He simply paid attention to the worst possibilities,” while pursuing the best that his people were capable of. And in doing that, he followed the dictum of his own immediate predecessor, August Cardinal Hlond. He went “into action with the Church … with a mighty offensive on all fronts.” Until the end of his life, Wyszynski worked with his whole Church, with his bishops and priests and people, to see that parochialism—whether of the Marxist variety, or any other—would die; and to ensure that “what is the truth of the spirit and the substance of supernatural life” would live.
Because of the complex role the Cardinal was called upon to play in this crucial period of Poland’s history (1948-80), it was perhaps predictable that not everyone in the world would see Wyszynski’s actions in quite so favorable a light. From the moment he was called upon by Party Secretary Wladyslaw Gomulka to provide the help the Communist government needed so badly—which is to say, virtually from the moment of Wyszynski’s return to Warsaw—the Polish Primate had his critics at home, abroad and in the Vatican chancery.
Gomulka’s government was composed in its top leadership of frightened men and in its lower echelons of Party stalwarts, really old-time Stalinists. The Party leaders had come to the point of admitting, at least in private, that their weakness lay in the fact that the mass of Poles would not go along with any form of intense Sovietization of Poland. As First Secretary of the Party, therefore, Gomulka—together with Aleksander Zawadzki as head of state, Adam Rapacki as foreign minister, and Prime Minister Jozef Cyrankiewicz, who had just come a cropper in his intention never to see Wyszynski a free man again—came up with a plan to fashion a “Polish Road to Socialism.”
For their plan to work, they needed Stefan Wyszynski and his calming authority over the people. And to the confusion and surprise of many inside Poland and abroad, Wyszynski acquiesced.
In doing so, the Cardinal drew the reproach of a good number of Poland-watchers, who might not themselves have had the grit and the wit to search for ways to come out on top, had they ever been forced to share their homeland with a Leninist-Marxist totalitarian government.
In their own poverty of alternatives, perhaps some of those critics nourished the idea that Wyszynski was no more than a political conservative who would, if he could, return to the state of things before Communism took over. Like the Polish Party leaders themselves, however, such fault-finders might have found greater profit in the thought that, given the prior ideologies that had so often cost Wyszynski’s nation so dearly, there would be precious little gain for Poland in turning back the clock.
More than that, however, the truth was that the Cardinal was neither conservative nor liberal in any classical political sense of those terms. Rather, his outlook was thoroughly ecclesiastical and authentically Roman Catholic. Moreover, it remained true that the Polish Communist leaders had no enemy in Stefan Wyszynski. He would fight their ideology and their stiff-necked policies and their stubborn wrongheadedness with all his wiliness and courage and might. But even after his brutal treatment at their hands, he still regarded Gomulka and that whole crowd as his errant Polish children.
Finally, it was also true that the Cardinal had not been born yesterday. Gomulka might call his plan a Polish Road to Socialism; but Wyszynski called it a government ploy to gain time. He understood as well as Gomulka did that the urgent object of the government exercise was less to be found in Poland than in the Soviet Union. For, as Poles themselves, Wyszynski’s “errant children” wanted at all costs to avoid a complete takeover of the country by the armed forces of the Soviet Union. To do that, they had to head off any further riots, demonstrations and industrial unrest. And for that, Wyszynski was indispensable.
In such circumstances, it is doubtful if the Cardinal cared two inflated zlotys whether he and his clergy were said by some to have gone “soft on Communism” or were perceived as “men of the Left.” For the truth of the matter was that despite a common desire to keep the Soviet armies out of Poland, the war between the Polish Communist government and the Polish Episcopate was not over.
In fact, despite Gomulka’s need for the Cardinal’s help, there wasn’t even a truce between the two sides. If it seemed otherwise to some distant observers for a time, it was just that no one else had ever fought such a war as Wyszynski and his clergy had taken on; nor had anyone even tried. So almost no one except some members of the Vatican chancery and some few others had the remotest appreciation of the new struggle that began in Poland in October of 1956 under Wyszynski’s direction.
That there was a war between Wyszynski and Gomulka is beyond cavil. From the start, and despite the Cardinal’s cooperation in calming his Poles and inducing the idea of patience with events, the government’s “programmed laicization, atheization and demoralization,” as Wyszynski called it, was incessantly promoted. Indeed, the inventory of harassment, subversion and personal attacks was only longer and more detailed than before.
New tax assessments on Church real estate were so heavy that to pay them, all Church properties would have had to be sold off. There were sudden raids on diocesan chanceries and heavy-handed inspections of seminaries. The Church’s account at the National Bank of Poland was canceled and the funds transferred to the Polish Savings Bank—a move that meant the Church was no longer a public institution and therefore in another tax bracket. Passports were again refused to some prelates. Taxi-loads of theatrically drunk government lackeys dressed as priests careened around the main streets of Warsaw, noisily asking the way to the nearest brothels. Priests were systematically excluded from the state’s health insurance coverage. Catechetical centers at schools were closed. There were continued attempts to interfere with the nomination of Churchmen to ecclesiastical positions. Attempts were even made to enlist members of Wyszynski’s own family and his barber as informants.
All in all, if the government was lacking in fruitful imagination, its energy and ingenuity were stupendous in i
ts war of unremitting harassment against the Polish Episcopate.
For his part, meanwhile, Wyszynski appeared on the surface to do no more than take up his end of the warfare where he had left off when he was “removed” from Warsaw in 1953. He was engaged again in continuous rounds of consultation with his bishops and such key members of his activist clergy as Karol Wojtyla, who became Bishop of Krakow in 1958 and immediately showed his mettle in the tortuous dealings with government officials. Wyszynski wrangled endlessly with the Mixed Commission and with his dedicated adversary Prime Minister Cyrankiewicz. He took up his unflagging pastoral visits throughout Poland, each year giving hundreds upon hundreds of sermons and public addresses. Always and continuously, he sustained an incredible level of private conversations and correspondence.
In reality, however, there was now a totally new dimension to Wyszynski’s end of the struggle with ideological Communism and materialist Leninist Marxism. The Cardinal was intent upon harnessing the personal hopes and national prospects of the people with the universalism of their Roman Catholic Pope in Rome. His aim was that the minds of Poles generally should move with familiarity and facility, as his own mind did, on the plane of international life and geopolitical trends. He wanted it again to become a commonplace of Polish thinking to consider their position and their prospects within the framework of the greater Europe they had always understood to extend from the Atlantic to the Urals. More, he aimed at a universalist perspective in Poland that would be coterminous with the universalist perspective of the Roman papacy. In all this, with his innate love of Poland, Wyszynski wanted to see his people and their country prosper.
Except for the part about prosperity, Wyszynski’s vision for his people, as well as the agenda it entailed, was extremely rare, if not absent, in Western democracies in the late 1950s. Certainly, they were totally nonexistent in any other Soviet-bloc nation. Nevertheless, it was that vision and that agenda that would prove to be lethal for the Leninist-Marxist system in Poland. As had so often been the case, Poland would be the spearhead nation in Central Europe.
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