It would be four more years before Karol’s vocation found full expression. That was an event that, as he himself later put it, “remains a mystery, even to me. How does one explain the ways of God? Yet I know that, at a certain point in my life, I became convinced that Christ was saying to me what he had said to thousands before me: ‘Come, follow me!’ There was a clear sense that what I heard in my heart was no human voice, nor just an idea of my own. Christ was calling me to serve him as a priest.” He was welcomed to the seminary by the rector, Father Jan Piwowarczyk, who urged him to preserve absolute secrecy, even with his nearest and dearest. The situation, in fact, was truly precarious.
Beginning on the first of September 1939, when Hitler’s army invaded Poland, the seminary building had been requisitioned to house the SS unit in charge of security for the occupation forces in the city of Cracow. For the first few months, the seminary students had been moved to lodgings on the third floor of the archbishop’s palace. But once the Nazi occupying governor ordered all educational institutions closed, Archbishop Sapieha distributed some of the students to the various parishes as assistants while the rest of the students, assigned to work for companies placed under the control of the German authorities, would continue their studies at home. These undercover seminary students knew nothing about one another. Textbooks for their studies of philosophy and theology were delivered to them directly from the prefect, Father Kazimierz Kłósak; each student then took his exams on a one-on-one basis with the professor.
For two years, from the autumn of 1942 to the summer of 1944, Wojtyła was a member of this second group. In order to avoid being deported to Germany for slave labor, he needed the vital German Ausweis, a pass issued by the German authorities to workers deemed “useful to society,” and so he too—after a brief stint as a delivery boy for a restaurant—had taken a job in 1940 in the stone quarry of Zakrzówek, half an hour’s walk from his house in Debniki, as assistant to the man who set off the explosive charges in the quarry.
In the spring of 1942, he took a new job at the Solvay chemical plant in Borek Fałęcki, where he was in charge of purifying the water in the boilers. Here he continued to work while undertaking his studies as a clandestine seminarist. His fellow workers always saw him with a book and, thinking that he was a university student, covered for him, allowing him to study on the job.
His spiritual director was Father Stanisław Smoleński, who considered him gifted with a great intellectual and moral foundation, and who appreciated how willing Karol was to sacrifice and to work hard. Karol was sustained by a sturdy constitution, which enabled him to overcome the accident that occurred on February 29, 1944. Hit by a truck on his way to work, he was left unconscious at the side of Konopnicka Street and only regained consciousness in the hospital, with a bandaged head.
At the beginning of August 1944, Karol left his job at the Solvay plant in response to the summons of Archbishop Sapieha. When the Warsaw insurrection began, the archbishop had ordered all the seminary students to return to the archbishop’s palace on Franciszkańska Street. He justified this step with the Nazis by saying, “I have a few seminary students staying with me because, as archbishop, I have a right to have someone to help me serve Mass.”
Karol arrived at the seminary dressed in a white shirt and a pair of cotton trousers, with clogs on his feet. The following day he received a cassock, a donation from a diocesan priest. The ten or so seminarians were initially given lodgings on the second floor of a side wing of the palace, with windows overlooking an inner courtyard and Wiślna Street. In October, after the Warsaw uprising was crushed, the archbishop offered their rooms to priests who had fled the capital, moving the entire group of seminary students to the audience hall, next to his own suite of rooms. The young men slept on metal cots set close to one another, and attended lessons in the same area.
The days were busy. They woke every morning at five, performed their ablutions, and then exercised in the atrium, followed by prayer in the chapel and meditation. The metropolitan celebrated Mass, then they breakfasted and attended lessons in philosophy and theology. At one o’clock, they had lunch, then were free to walk in the inner courtyard. After that came adoration of the Holy Sacrament, study, and spiritual readings. Dinner was at eight, then religious service in the chapel, followed by silent pursuits. At nine, the metropolitan went into the chapel for an hour of adoration, which he performed prostrate on the chapel floor before the Eucharist, and at ten o’clock he returned to his apartment, looking in on the seminarians in the audience hall to make sure they were asleep.
One fellow student recalled that what struck him about Wojtyła was “above all his kindness, his benevolence, and his sense of comradeship. He conversed easily, did his best to understand, and discussed subjects that were of interest and importance to each of us. He spoke sparingly and listened more than he talked; occasionally, he would make a discreet observation. In any case, he never imposed his views on others and never hurt anyone’s feelings with offensive words. He had a serene gaze, he was witty and cheerful, and he liked to listen to funny stories that made him laugh. He observed the rules of the seminary faithfully. During lessons he was focused, taking diligent notes and getting the teacher’s point rapidly. At examinations he was clear and direct; his responses met with his professors’ approval and aroused the admiration of us all.”
THE PHANTOM OF THE DOUBLE HOMICIDE
Harking back to this dramatic period is a defamatory accusation that was leveled against Wojtyła by the radio and television journalist Marco Dolcetta in his book Gli Spettri del Quarto Reich (The Specters of the Fourth Reich), published in Italy by BUR in November 2007. Let us reconstruct the story that Dolcetta tells, which leaves a significant number of questions unresolved.
In the context of an investigation into the last gasps of Nazism at the end of the twentieth century, Dolcetta reports that he interviewed a certain Horia Sima, the leader of the Romanian Legionary Movement (Iron Guard) in 1938 and deputy prime minister of Romania between 1940 and 1941. Sima later became a secret agent reporting to Heinrich Himmler, the chief of the Nazi police forces, and infiltrated the ranks of the Polish resistance movement on behalf of the Gestapo and the SS. The interview, “preceded by waverings, fears, and second thoughts,” took place in Madrid in an unspecified month in 1978. It is, however, no longer possible to check these statements with Sima: he died on May 25, 1993, in Madrid.
During the conversation, Sima showed Dolcetta a sheet of paper with a few terse phrases in German, which translate as: “Secret Notes of the High Command. Chief Reich Security Department. General Division. Multiple statements confirm that a Polish Catholic priest, Karol Wojtyła by name, took active part in the murder of Germans. He committed the crime with a knife. I hereby order that the murderer’s name be entered on the list of individuals wanted for arrest. To implement said recommendation contact the Cracow Gestapo directly. Department F. VII A. Sent by SD I and II Gestapo I RSM 87.”
A shocking revelation, which Sima explained to the Italian writer with these words: “In Cracow, we maintained special surveillance of the city’s archbishop, Prince Adam Stefan Sapieha, because of the extreme freedom with which he engaged in anti-German activities. After a series of meetings with the local clergy, in which I passed myself off as a Hungarian refugee, a high school teacher, and a Catholic, wanted by the SS, I learned about the undercover organization operating under Church protection.… Sunday, August 7 [1944] was the day of major Gestapo roundups throughout Cracow. I was in Gestapo headquarters going over the lists of potential terrorists. When I saw the name of Karol Wojtyła I had a strong reaction, because he was a very religious young man, kept under special observation because he was thought to be the son of a Jewish woman, Emilia Katz, naturalized with the Polish name of Kaczorowska, and because he was friends with young Jews, whom he protected.”
The account continued with the appearance of a second protagonist, Grigori Caratiniescu, one of Sima’s collaborators: “Caratin
iescu, who had got a good look at the conspirators, moved around Cracow in the company of two officers of the Gestapo, all three in civilian clothes. Wojtyła lived in the center of Cracow, and Caratiniescu identified him as he was returning home with two other young men. Before they could stop them, the three young men ran off. They followed them, but Caratiniescu couldn’t keep up with the Poles and the two Germans who were chasing them. He saw them run off and then, on turning a corner, he saw the bodies of the two Germans on the ground, bleeding. There was no sign of the three fugitives.… The next day, the two wounded officers died. It was learned that Wojtyła had been given shelter in the palace of Prince Sapieha, the archbishop, and that Sapieha had given cassocks to him and twenty other Catholic subversives, and that he hastily made them clerics.… I was astonished, but only somewhat astonished, many years later, when he was elected pope. This was only a further confirmation of my views on the Vatican.”
If we link this last statement with the date claimed for the interview, 1978, a first suspicious contradiction emerges. Wojtyła was elected pope on October 16. Unless the interview happened to be conducted in the last couple of months of that year, it would be impossible for Sima to refer to his election. But if it was, then his reference to the distant past (“when he was elected pope”) for an event that in theory occurred no more than a few weeks earlier is stranger still.
It seems all the more incomprehensible that, at the very moment that the world’s attention was focused on the newly elected Wojtyła, both Sima and Dolcetta should have failed to exploit a piece of information that, if it were true, would have been a spectacular scoop. Equally noteworthy is Dolcetta’s perseverance in keeping this journalistic bombshell to himself for some thirty years, and then dropping it casually into the story on page 155 of his book. Moreover, we should point out a significant detail that certainly undermines the accuracy of this historical reconstruction: in 1944, the date mentioned, August 7, actually fell on a Monday!
In any case, it is evident that an accusation of such gravity naturally led the Postulatio for the cause of John Paul II to take active steps to ascertain the truth of the matter. When questioned about the case, the most respected source on this subject, the Commission for Contemporary History, with headquarters in Bonn, issued over the signature of Doctor Karl-Joseph Hummel the dry reply that “since 2003 there exists a microfilm edition of all available documentation and reports of the state secret police, of the head SD office of the SS and the head office of Reich Security from 1933 to 1945: this edition does not contain the document in question, and the name Wojtyła does not appear in the detailed opening volume, not even as an index entry.”
Doctor Hummel was unsparing as he continued with his analysis: “A comparison of the documents in the microfilm edition with Dolcetta’s document reinforces the impression that Dolcetta’s document is a counterfeit, and not a particularly clever one: the heading lacks indication of date and location; the person sending the document is not identified as required and the recipient is not indicated either; the Gestapo normally knew who they were talking about and would not be likely to identify a Polish theology student as a ‘Catholic priest.’ ” And he concludes, after explaining that he requested clarifications from the author to no avail, that “perhaps the reason for his silence is the fact that this document does not exist in the archives, and was in fact ‘fabricated’ at some later date.”
In light of these considerations, the accusation appears wholly baseless. This explains, among other things, why despite its supposedly being a “bombshell,” historians have entirely ignored it.
IN THE SERVICE OF GOD AND OF HIS PEOPLE
In October 1946, now–Cardinal Sapieha decided to send Wojtyła to Rome to complete his studies at a pontifical university. He set the first of November, the Feast of All Saints, as the date for Wojtyła’s ordination as a priest. Early that morning Karol presented himself, accompanied by a small group of friends and relatives, in the metropolitan’s private chapel, where the ceremony took place.
On November 2, which Catholic liturgy dedicates to the commemoration of the dead, he celebrated his first Mass in St. Leonard’s Crypt at the Wawel Cathedral in Cracow. In the days that followed, he also celebrated Mass in the parish church of St. Stanisław Kostka in Debniki and in the Church of the Presentation of the Mother of God in Wadowice. He celebrated another Mass at the altar of St. Stanisław, also in the Wawel Cathedral, for his friends from the Theater of the Living Word and for the members of the clandestine organization called Union to which he had belonged during the Nazi occupation.
His ordination was an absolutely central moment in Karol Wojtyła’s life. He has emphasized that point himself, declaring that “nothing means more to me or gives me greater joy than to celebrate Mass each day and to serve God’s people in the Church. That has been true since the day of my ordination as a priest. Nothing has ever changed this, not even becoming pope.”
A significant testimony in this respect is provided by a monsignor who chanced to recognize a homeless person who was always to be found in Rome’s Via della Traspontina, not far from St. Peter’s, as a priest who had left the ministry. The monsignor managed to include the homeless man in a papal audience in the Vatican’s Sala Clementina and alerted John Paul II to his presence. Once the gathering was over, Pope Wojtyła summoned the man into the adjoining hall, and sat alone with him. When the homeless priest emerged, he was in tears. The pontiff, he explained, had asked him to confess to him; after confession, Wojtyła had said, “Do you see the grandeur of the priesthood? Don’t besmirch it.”
On November 15, 1946, accompanied by the seminarian Stanisław Starowieyski, Father Wojtyła boarded the train that would take him across the Polish border for the first time. It was a long and emotional journey, as he recounted: “From the window of the moving train I looked at cities known only from my geography books. For the first time I saw Prague, Nuremberg, Strasbourg, and Paris, where we stopped as guests of the Polish Seminary on Rue des Irlandais. We soon departed, since time was pressing, and reached Rome in the last days of November.” He first stayed with the Pallottine Fathers, then moved permanently to the Pontificio Collegio Belga (Pontifical Belgian College) on Via del Quirinale, just a short distance from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas (Angelicum), where less than two years later, on June 19, 1948, he took his degree with a dissertation entitled “Doctrina de fide apud S. Ioannem a Cruce” (The Doctrine of Faith According to St. John of the Cross).
For Father Karol, the audience that he had in early 1947 with Pope Pius XII was a deeply moving experience. The pope greeted individually all of the young priests and seminarians of the Collegio Belga, and when he came to Father Karol, the rector Maximilien de Furstenberg introduced him and said he came from Poland. Pius XII stopped and, with evident emotion, repeated the words “from Poland” and then said, in Polish, “Praise be to Jesus Christ.”
Dating from that period was a conversation that Wojtyła had with a Belgian priest active in the Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne (Young Christian Workers), founded by the future cardinal Joseph Cardijn. Together they discussed the situation that had developed in Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War, and the Belgian priest said to him, “The Lord allowed the experience of something as evil as Communism to befall you—and why did He do that?” The Belgian went on to answer his own question: “We in the West were spared that experience, perhaps because we would not have been capable of withstanding such an ordeal. But you will succeed.” That is a phrase that John Paul II would later recall for its prophetic significance.
One of his classmates recalled that period: “Napoleon’s maxim ‘I may lose a battle but I should never lose a minute’ was frequently mentioned in our Collegio Belga. Wojtyła took advantage of every minute to complete his dissertation. We knew that he was a talented soccer player, but we couldn’t persuade him to become the captain of our team. Was that why we lost our matches against the Brazilian and English teams? In any event,
every once in a while he would come and play with us in the little games we held in the garden.”
WITH HIS ARMS EXTENDED IN THE SIGN OF THE CROSS
Karol was intensely focused on his goal. As a classmate from his time in Rome emphasized, “He was always very discreet when he was with friends, and the group photographs provide proof of that. He can always be seen in the back row. In conversation, he was never notably eloquent. I would not have imagined that, a few decades later, he would speak with such confidence and would become such an energetic and effective leader of the universal church. His case appears to me to be a demonstration of the French saying ‘The job makes the man.’ ”
With many of these friends, he fell out of touch for a number of years, but he insisted on seeing them all again in the Vatican not long after his election as pope. He invited them to celebrate Mass together in his private chapel, and then to dine with him. As one of those present recalled, John Paul II cordially said, “I know you all by first and last name. Who could have thought that I would have to become pope for us to get together again after thirty-one years?”
A few days after defending his thesis, Wojtyła returned to his diocese, where he was assigned his first working position—what the Polish call the aplikata—as assistant parish priest in Niegowić, about twenty miles east of Cracow. Niegowić was a community of five thousand people scattered among thirteen villages and hamlets, entirely isolated from the larger network of public transportation. On July 8, 1948, Father Karol boarded a bus leaving Cracow. At a certain point, he had to get off and proceed on foot. Then a farmer gave him a ride on his wagon. When they reached the border of his new parish, he asked the farmer to stop. He got down and knelt to pray for all his new parishioners, following the example of St. Jean-Baptiste-Marie Vianney, the famous Curé d’Ars.
Why He Is a Saint Page 3