Keys of This Blood

by Malachi Martin

  The two Poles left Rome and returned to Poland with a rather accurate picture of the internal crisis in the Church of Rome. The transition from one pontificate to another had been too smooth to be true. Meanwhile, Wyszynski had an important rendezvous in Germany.

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  Wyszynski had prepared the ground for the German visit. His letter of 1965 to the German bishops was blunt: “We forgive and we ask for forgiveness.” Polish-German hatred had to end. Wyszynski could not conceive of a “Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals” without Germany and without Poland. In response, the chief bishops of Germany had come to Poland on what could be described as a visit of penitence and reconciliation. Suddenly, all the governing circles in Poland, Germany and the USSR saw the long-range effect of Wyszynski’s letter. All this took place in the sixties.

  In September of 1978, on his return from Rome, Wyszynski set out for a five-day visit to West Germany, accompanied by Karol Wojtyla and a delegation of Polish bishops. Now he had created a platform to broadcast his geopolitical views on that “Europe to come.”

  “Our two nations,” he said in his first speech, “have been educated by the Roman Catholic Church. Providence has given us a basis for unity because we have not merely common borders but also a shared religious heritage.” At Fulda, West Germany, on September 20, he was more specific: “Many times we hoped that the day would come when we—Poles and Germans—could do what has been done in the past and as we are doing today: namely, build a Europe of Christ, a Christian Europe.” The next day, he warned that “our meeting … might even be an outrage in the eyes of politicians,” and then he brandished the source of his confidence: “We have worked for centuries in Central Europe to establish here the Kingdom of Christ.” Whether Marxists or Socialists or Christian Democrats liked it or not, “Europe must realize once again that she is a new Bethlehem—of the world, of peoples and nations.” Wyszynski’s implied reservation, which today is John Paul II’s reservation, was clear to all listeners: “Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals” is possible only if based on Christian civilization and motivated by Christian values—both finally depend on the millennial tutelage of the papacy.

  When Wyszynski returned to Warsaw that week of September beginning on Sunday, September 24, he was given a piece of news that greatly, but strangely, disturbed him. Pope John Paul I had received a certain Russian Orthodox cleric, Metropolitan Nikodim of Leningrad and Ladoga, the second-highest-ranking clergyman in the Soviet-run Russian Orthodox Church, who enjoyed the status of colonel in the KGB. Nikodim, eleven times the object of KGB interrogations on suspicion of treason, the unofficial negotiator of the arrangement between Pope John XXIII and Nikita Khrushchev in 1960, had died of an apparent heart attack in the papal study in Rome, receiving Absolution of Sins and Blessing for the Dying from John Paul I.

  Wyszynski’s sense of trouble was confirmed in the early hours of Thursday of that same week: a telephone call from Rome announced that John Paul I had been found dead in bed. The Primate knew the consequences: another Conclave, another pope, yes, but now, most probably, a confrontation. No other Albino Luciani was available for election. The College of Cardinals had already been polarized. A first-class hierarchical crisis hovered over the Polish cardinals’ return journey to Rome, for which Wojtyla again packed a small overnight valise. Whatever happened would have to happen quickly, so few alternatives remained for the Cardinal Electors.

  Down in Rome, during the days and hours immediately preceding the Conclave, there was no doubt among the future Cardinal Electors on two scores.

  First, they were divided down the middle—almost evenly—with ostensibly no common plank to share between them in choosing a successor to the now dead “Smiling Pope,” John Paul I. That dreadful ambiguity, Paul VI’s legacy, underlay their irreconcilability. Second, the one dominant figure among them was cut by Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski.

  The “people of God” partisans, ecclesiastical “heavies,” all of them, wanted a candidate who would pursue the decentralization of Church administration, who would be a symbol of unity, not of jurisdiction. The papal Curia should become a local diocesan chancery. The bishops should act by general consensus. The laity should have full access to all posts in the Church. Unity of faith was to be forged with other religions as equals in possession of truth. Religion should become the handmaiden of men’s efforts to create a one world order. The leaders of the bloc were formidable—Giovanni Benelli of Florence, Leo Suenens of Belgium, Jan Willebrands of Holland, Franz Koenig of Austria, Paulo Evaristo Arns of São Paulo, Brazil, Eduardo Pironio of Argentina, Basil Hume of England, François Marty of Paris. They had their preferred candidates: Hume, Marty, Benelli.

  The opposing bloc grouped itself around Giuseppe Siri of Genoa, Josef Höffner of Cologne, Pericle Felici of the Vatican. The first was truly the ancient lion of Church politics, once a pope-elect in his own right, a formidable adversary in argument, and very influential in political circles. Höffner, aristocratic in outlook, intolerant of any idea about “democratization” of the Church, chief prelate of a very “well-heeled” province of the Catholic Church, respected creditor of Catholics in many Third World countries, was backed up by personal prestige and towering political stature not only in West Germany, but in the countries of Central Europe. Felici was a veteran of the Second Vatican Council as its Secretary, an excellent canon lawyer who did his best, but failed to prevent the “hijacking” of that Council by the anti-Church party.

  From the start of the pre-Conclave discussions in Rome in preparation for the Conclave now set to begin at 5 P.M. on Saturday, October 14, 1978, one cardinal, Wyszynski of Poland, stood out because of one impressive trait in his behavior—his unique flexibility—and because he quite obviously did not speak in terms, partisan or other, of the divisive ecclesiology alienating the two blocs. Wyszynski’s focus of interest was elsewhere. He was speaking of the near future, and in geopolitical terms. The superpowers—the United States and the USSR; the major powers—Germany, France, Japan, Europe from “the Atlantic to the Urals” as a unit; the grinding poverty of the Third World; the Westernization of African and Asian nations through trade and industry; these constituted the substance of his comments.

  Furthermore, this Pole, his brother cardinals realized, had been to Hell and back, so to speak. And he came bearing his permanent scars of mind and will as trophies of a strength beyond the strength of all human cleverness. He came furnished with rare lessons and insights; rewarded for his genuine heroism with a deep sense of what the Church is; ready with unbeatable skills for close combat; enlightened in ultimate truth about the Petrine Office beyond the capacity of any other in Conclave to gainsay him. He was, for all, venerable.

  Clothing this personality was a unique and attractive flexibility, a genuine ability to enter the other man’s mind, understand it and find whatever common ground there might be between them. He had only one limit: no compromise on essentials. In one who always spoke with the “big picture” of human affairs in view, this flexibility made him unique. He had no match, and everybody knew it, curial cardinals and “home” cardinals alike, although all had to acknowledge their impasse before they turned seriously to him for a way out. And no other Cardinal Elector was able to tackle the crisis with an ability matching his. Bureaucrat cardinals, “pastoral” cardinals, academician cardinals, “limousine” cardinals, cardinals de salon, saintly cardinals, politician cardinals, de-Catholicized cardinals, aristocratic cardinals, “popular front” cardinals, reactionary cardinals, apostate cardinals—none of them walked into Conclave with the indwelling power of spirit that Wyszynski had earned in the killing fields of Poland, adjacent to the Leninist Gulag Archipelago. The volatility of a Benelli was stabilized into reverence in Wyszynski’s presence. The tawdriness of a Hume, the raw ambition of a Pironio, the fecklessness of a Willebrands—all were muted when faced with the well-known Wyszynski stare and the knowledge of the Polish Primate’s firsthand experience on the front lines.

/>   By the time they entered Conclave on October 15, two elements went with them: the impossibility of a genuine compromise candidate of Albino Luciani’s kind; and the dependence of the Conclave outcome on Wyszynski’s stance in the actual voting. The first day was ritually devoted to putting each of the blocs on notice officially—by successive and issue-less voting sessions—that neither bloc could muster the required majority of two thirds plus one to put a candidate over the top. Wyszynski’s greatest hour came on the following day, Monday, October 16.

  From the memories of those who were actively concerned with the choice of a candidate pope—for a certain number were more passive than anything else—it is clear that the Wyszynski mental mold became a fixture in the Cardinal Electors’ minds. They came to see the world around them as he did, although they did not all share his assessment of that world.

  There were Wyszynski’s three Internationals: the Red International of Leninist Marxism, the Golden International of Great Money, and the Black International of the Clerical Church. Those elders who had made their compromises with Marxism or with the Lodge winced, of course, at his strictures. But they had to agree with his structuring of the society of nations.

  Then there was the Wyszynski policy of “no more catacombs” and of actively dealing with Leninist Marxism—cohabiting with and defeating it on its own ground and aboveground in the sociopolitical fields. Finally, there was his very sober, very vibrant, authentic-sounding forecast about the fate of the Church organization in the remaining years of this millennium. The USSR, with its Gulag Archipelago of oppression and its gaggle of captive nations and “republics,” was on the way to dissolution—a dissolution deliberately engineered by the wise architects of the Party-State. The key territory and focal area of the change would be Central Europe. The “mover and shaker” of the change would be Russia. The whole society of nations would inevitably be influenced by that gargantuan change.

  Whether they were “people of God” partisans or “hierarchic Church” partisans, all of them supported and shared the Second Vatican Council’s document that presented the Virgin Mary as the Mother of the Church—“people” or “hierarchic.” Wyszynski played on this unity. “The whole constitution [of the Church],” he said, “is at once Christocentric and Marian. It is as if there are arms to embrace the Family of Man…. The [Vatican] Council brought Mariology together with ecclesiology.”

  Wyszynski was implicitly invoking a spiritual force—Mary’s all-powerful intercession with God—as Poles like him had done in all their vicissitudes. His was the same voice as Jan Kazimierz’s, Jan Sobieski’s, Primate August Hlond’s. Wyszynski went even further than they; he called down Mary’s blessing on his brother cardinals, using the title Poles had always conferred on her: Our Lady of Jasna Góra, the Bright Mountain. His plan to break the deadlock was, in its essential terms, as simple as that.

  But no one listening to this man in a private conversation or in a public address could mistake him for a simple pious, devotional character with no realization of the hard facts of life. They knew otherwise about Stefan Wyszynski. They had seen him in action. Some of them had taken him on in an argument, only to find themselves outclassed.

  “Nothing beats living” is an old adage. Wyszynski had lived it all: brainwashed prelates, apostate priests, ecclesiastical double agents, screaming commissars, bribe offers, calumnies, isolation, imprisonment, financial ruin, vindictive laws, boneheaded diplomats. If anyone like Giovanni Benelli or Eduardo Pironio decried papal leadership, he could tell them how the papacy and its Secretariat of State had saved Poland. To the ecumenical fantasies of a Jan Willebrands he could oppose the reality in Poland between Eastern Orthodox (under Moscow’s thumb) and Roman Catholic. Whoever from the United States or Belgium or Holland spoke airily about female liberation or the mitigation of clerical celibacy was inundated with the lurid facts of the Polish experience with the Mariavite sect in Poland. (Mariavites had married bishops and priests, ordained wives. Aberrations in doctrine and behavior have blotched and marred the Mariavite history.)

  Any attempt by a Paulo Arns to plead for compromise with Leninist Marxism was met with an array of facts and the cruel truth about the nature of Leninist deception. Any Marxist-inspired attack on capitalism was rebuffed by a careful explanation of what Leninist Marxism really meant in terms of malnutrition, miserable living conditions, fettering of the mind, corruption of the family. The grandiose generalities of a Basil Hume about democratizing the hierarchical structure of the Church were exposed by Wyszynski as the most vicious fallacy of the Anglo-Saxon mind. When anyone from the United States or France even hinted that the perennial Catholic devotion to Mary was a hindrance to Christian unity with Protestant churches and sects, he was told summarily that without Mary, there was no hope of Christian unity.

  Wyszynski could back everything up from experience. He was not theorizing. He spoke from lived experience. No doubt about it: Many of those hardheaded Churchmen were overcome by Wyszynski’s dialectical skill, by his obvious kindness, and, yes, by the obvious superiority of a Churchman who was not indentured to any sociopolitical elite, and whose soaring vision of earth, of man’s time and God’s eternity, recalled many of his fellow cardinals to their duty to choose a Catholic pope.

  Still, the sudden change in the pattern of voting during October 16, the quick leap of Karol Wojtyla’s name to a small majority, then a comfortable majority, and quickly to that irresistible two-thirds-plus-one majority took most Cardinal Electors by surprise and left the diehards on both sides—a Basil Hume of Westminster, a Giuseppe Siri of Genoa—somewhat dazed. Wojtyla’s election was miraculous.

  Wyszynski, as was his wont, did not hesitate later to tell it as he saw it: “If people doubt there are signs and miracles in the world today, I say to them, ‘If anything is a miracle, what happened in the Sistine Chapel on October 16 is one.’ … When I approached John Paul II to pay my first homage, he and I almost simultaneously pronounced the name of Our Lady of Jasna Gora; this was her work. So we believed, and so we decidedly still believe.”

  In the end, therefore, it was not the iron will of the power brokers, and not the political savvy of crafty Churchmen, but the childlike simplicity of a few great men relying on the truth of Catholicism’s central mystery—God’s entering the womb of a human mother—that obtained the saving grace for an institution racked in its essentials by a malignant cancer. His American brother cardinals, many Europeans and not a few media commentators had gently—and sometimes not so gently—mocked and lampooned the childlike simplicity and trust of seventy-four-year-old John Cardinal Carberry of St. Louis. The ten chocolate bars he took into Conclave as provisions, and his quite obvious and childlike reliance on an actual revelation from the Holy Spirit to guide the final choice of this October Conclave, were lumped in one category: irrealism and the “out-of-touch” attitude of an old man with passé ideas.

  But it was the power of such faith in a Carberry, as in the Ave Marias of millions of obscure Catholic believers during those three days, and as in the hearts of the two Polish cardinals with their personal dedication to that human Mother of God, that moved the mountain of difficulty threatening the Roman Catholic institutional organization that autumn of 1978. Canny Cardinal Confalonieri’s remark after the Conclave was heard by many as merely an evasive truism. But he told the absolute truth of that Conclave: “Abbiamo un Papa cattolico!” he said. We have a Catholic Pope! He surely implied that the opposite had been possible.

  There are many still alive today who know now that during the sixty-four hours of this Conclave, the huddled but confused leaders of the Roman Church peered more than once over the edge of the abyss between mortal flesh and divine spirit, realizing that in the final count of affairs, they and they alone would be held accountable by the tremendous, sacred God of Heaven and earth for what would happen yet to literally billions of human souls.

  Some of these 111 men had not said a Rosary for years; some had identified the glory of God w
ith all their own petty ambitions; and some had worked silently for the liquidation of the Petrine Office of Pope. But, in that hour, they all became willy-nilly the instruments of providence. In their fears, in their nescience of the future, and relying on the saving grace of Mary’s divine Son, two thirds plus one of them gave the world a Slavic Pope anointed under the seal of the human Mother of God.

  Doubtless, at a later moment and a more tranquil time for Poland, for this Slavic Pope, and for his Church, Stefan Wyszynski will be declared to have been a Servant of God—the first step in the long process of being declared a Saint of the Church. In the meantime, and in the immediate aftermath of the October Conclave, there were two scenes of this great man’s life that are indelibly etched on human memories as memorials to his greatness and signposts of the Slavic Pope, Wyszynski’s protégé and pride, his gift to the Church Universal.

  On Sunday, October 22, there was the Obeisance. It took place at the solemn investiture of the new Pope with a single symbol—the pallium, an embroidered woolen stole placed around his shoulders. The ceremony was witnessed by a live audience of some 75,000 and an estimated television audience of a billion and a half people. One high point of the ceremony came when the cardinals walked forward one by one to perform in public their personal obeisance to this new Vicar of Christ.

  John Paul II sat on a low thronelike chair, wearing his pontifical vestments and the pallium. Each cardinal came up to him, knelt at his feet, kissed the Ring of the Great Fisherman on the Pope’s fourth finger, whispered a few words of blessing and congratulation, and retired. There were variations with this or that particular cardinal. The Pope might take the cardinal’s hands between his, he might exchange a few quiet words with him; with a few he exchanged the Christian kiss of peace.

  But with Wyszynski, there was a different exchange. Onlookers could see, between these two, an interchange that was at one and the same time breathtaking and heartrending. In ceremonial, and in ritual symbol, they were Pope and Cardinal. In the reality of spirit and in ultimate truth, they were son and father, friend and friend, comrade and comrade. They were all of that, and something else besides, something too deep even for the sudden, unbidden salt of tears we cannot explain, and too intangible for any image of the fantasy or thought of the mind. It could only be witnessed.