At the beginning of the 1960s, under the heading F Group, the Intelligence Service set up a special unit devoted to the constant surveillance of Bishop Wojtyła. The instructions to the operatives were very specific: “You must monitor systematically all the official speeches given by the subject on the occasion of ecclesial celebrations, both in the Cracow city area and in the diocese. Afterward you must judge the speeches from the following points of view: the subject’s interpretation of the changes in our country (political, economic, and cultural changes); the attitudes suggested to the faithful for the catechesis of young people and adults, for the implementation of the Great Novena project, et cetera; whether in any of the speeches in question there are negative references or even just allusions to the people’s authorities.”
The interest of the authorities was not limited to surveillance of Wojtyła’s public activities but extended to scrutinizing his private life as well: “You must carry out systematic observation of the contacts entering the private apartment of Bishop Wojtyła. Do so after receiving the signal from Department T concerning planned meetings. Continue observation at all hours of the day. Making use of the assistance of the Office of Religion of the National Council of the city of Cracow and of the Department for Politics of the National Council for the old city, establish a formal charge in the deliberative council for the fact that he hindered inspection of his apartment. Make use of the visits of the rental board with the failure to comply with the obligation despite a written warning.”
Following the death of Archbishop Baziak and the election of Wojtyła as vicar capitular, the Intelligence Service cracked down even harder. At the time, the appointments of bishops were supposed to receive the approval of the Polish authorities and so, repeatedly, the ecclesiastical representatives had informally submitted to the Communist official in charge of religious matters, Zenon Kliszko, lists of potential candidates. The name of Karol Wojtyła was marked off in a corner, but Kliszko said that the Communist Party would prefer him: in fact, they thought that he had no interest in political matters, but was rather a scholar, a philosopher. “A man of dialogue” is how Kliszko described him to Cardinal Wyszyński, remembering a negotiation that he carried out with the auxiliary bishop concerning the Cracow seminary.
The officers of the Polish Secret Police thought differently, and expressed to the political operatives their strong opposition to the appointment of Wojtyła: “The reasons that argue against his candidacy: Bishop Wojtyła is unreservedly engaged in the actions of the Church. Since he is a particularly gifted person with a great talent for organization, he is the only bishop who would be able not only to consolidate the members of the curia and the diocesan clergy but also to attract a substantial portion of the intelligentsia and the young Catholics, among whom he enjoys considerable respect. Unlike many other diocesan administrators, he is on easy terms with monasteries and convents, which are numerous in the territory of the archdiocese. Despite his apparent elasticity and openness to compromise in his contacts with the state authorities, he is an especially dangerous ideological adversary.”
Meanwhile, the Holy See had also become active, sending Monsignor Franco Costa, a personal friend of Pope Paul VI and general ecclesiastical assistant of the Azione Cattolica Italiana (Catholic Action), to carry out a confidential investigation in Poland. Upon his return, Costa reported that he had been deeply impressed by the spiritual substance and the cultural erudition of the young Bishop Karol Wojtyła. His words to Pope Montini were more or less these: “Poland does not have only Cardinal Wyszyński. It also possesses impressive younger bishops, such as Wojtyła, who are certainly worth as much as the primate.”
Wojtyła must have had some inkling of what was going on around him. This is indicated by a remark he made at the end of a letter he sent to Padre Pio da Pietrelcina on December 14, 1963, when he was in Rome for the Second Vatican Council: “At the same time, I venture to submit to you the immense pastoral difficulties that my poor efforts encounter in the present situation.”
The outcome we know: Karol Wojtyła was named archbishop of Cracow. The Intelligence Service was therefore obliged to intensify its operation, and Wojtyła began to be kept under surveillance even when he traveled abroad. The analysts of the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR) drew up this concise summary of his work in Rome: “Thanks to his active participation in the preparation of the council documents, the contents of the speeches delivered during the sessions of the Second Vatican Council, and his work on the council commissions, he was appreciated in the Vatican as well. This certainly led to the development that, in June 1967, Wojtyła by a papal appointment became a cardinal.”
He was elevated to the rank of cardinal by Pope Paul VI on June 28, 1967. From that point onward, the archival material becomes more voluminous each year, indicating the Polish authorities’ awareness that Wojtyła was now the leading figure in the Catholic Church of Poland as well as the most dangerous adversary facing the Polish Communist regime.
In the documents, we find an assortment of fairly thoroughly reasoned judgments about his personality and his actions, in which it is possible to detect a vein of thinly disguised admiration on the part of the writer: “He is unanimously described as a talented, hard-working, ambitious person. He is considered one of the more intelligent bishops, a clear thinker possessed of sound judgment. In his private life he is outgoing, straightforward, and modest. He does not flaunt the dignity of his ecclesiastical position and his vast learning. He is not particularly interested in material things. He reads a great deal. He has not been noticed trying to imitate others. In his actions, he always relies on his own analysis of conditions. With respect to the clergy, the cardinal has proven to be an energetic diocesan administrator willing to try new ideas, and at the same time he is tractable and open-minded.”
A FIERY SERMON
The archbishop was never reluctant to comply with government requests for meetings. Indeed, he took advantage of those meetings to display the moral strength that he felt he possessed. We can see a fine illustration in this note drafted by the director of the Office of Religion: “This is Wojtyła’s first personal contact with the regional authorities. I never saw him ‘in action.’ I can therefore say something about him in comparison with others. Wojtyła was trying to be a little different from the ones we already know (Jerzy Karol Ablewicz, archbishop of Tarnów; Jan Jaroszewicz, bishop of Kielce) by maintaining a degree of spontaneity in his demeanor and attitude. That is to say that from the beginning of the meeting he made an effort to settle comfortably in his chair, resting his chin on his thumb; he tried to make all his movements relaxed and completely natural. Perhaps he wanted to stress his own confidence, he wanted us to understand that he was an important, influential man. At the same time, he was very straightforward. He smiled constantly in a slightly benevolent manner. And he showed great freedom in his thinking. He was in no hurry to give his answers, which were clear and logical.”
The power of his reasoning put the Communist officials in serious difficulties when they were required to reply to him on matters regarding the diocese. Even the delegation chief of the Office of Religion, Kąkol, was obliged to acknowledge this during a meeting in Poland with the Vatican nuncio Luigi Poggi in the mid-1970s. During Wojtyła’s cause for beatification, an eyewitness recalled that “in one of the breaks in the meeting Kąkol, speaking about certain Polish bishops, said of Wojtyła that when he wrote to the authorities, it took sweat to respond with adequate arguments.”
Lucid and incontestable, the words that the archbishop leveled against his institutional interlocutors were sometimes charged with an unusual and overwhelming energy. This once happened during a pilgrimage to Kalwaria Zebrzydowska at the beginning of the 1970s. As one witness has recounted, Wojtyła delivered on that occasion his fieriest homily against the Communist rulers, subjecting them to a pitiless criticism. During the trip back to Cracow, he was asked, “What happened, Father Cardinal? This is the first time I have heard you
so heated.” Wojtyła replied, “During the Mass I felt a force enter into me, an imperative to which I could not answer ‘no.’ ” A force that, from that moment on, would always power his homilies and sermons, giving the Polish authorities a good few reasons for concern.
The regime knew very well who it was dealing with. One of the countless analyses composed on the subject of Wojtyła by the Communist functionaries in the mid-1970s said, “Our analysis of the workings of the Roman Catholic Church in Poland allows us to state that, for the past several years now, the church of Cracow occupies a leading position, so that the main power in the supervision of the life and activity of the Church in Poland is increasingly being held by the command center in Cracow. While absolutely not demonizing the person of the metropolitan archbishop of Cracow, we must admit objectively that his wisdom and the authority that he enjoys consist, among other things, in the magnificent capacity to make use of the scholarly potential that the church of Cracow has at its fingertips, both through the Catholic organizations and with the support of leading personalities in the city’s academic circles.”
When Wojtyła was elected pope in 1978, the documentation about him that the Intelligence Service transmitted to the Ministry of the Interior in Warsaw filled no fewer than eighteen cartons. In dealing with such an unexpected development, a number of analysts from the Political Office read that material with a fairly naïve and optimistic mindset: from the top of Vatican Hill, they argued, the view is much broader than from Cracow’s Wawel Hill. Their hope was that Cardinal Wojtyła, once he became pope, would shift his focus to the world at large, and that this would allow him to glimpse the glaring shortcomings of capitalism and the misery of the underdeveloped parts of the world, thus shifting his opinion about the values of Communism. A hope that proved utterly vain.
The Polish Intelligence Service stubbornly continued its surveillance throughout the 1980s, intensifying its spying during the pontiff’s trips to Poland in 1979 and again in 1983 and 1987. Two years later, all that paper would be tossed aside by the impetuous winds of history.
THE BELLS OF POPE PAUL VI
When in June 1967 a letter arrived from the Vatican announcing that he had been appointed cardinal at the express wishes of Pope Paul VI, Wojtyła was performing a pastoral visit. The chancellor informed him of the letter’s arrival, and the archbishop returned to the curia, opened the envelope, read the letter, then set it on his desk and stood bowed over it for a long time, without speaking a word. At last, the chancellor asked him whether the letter was confirming the rumors that he had been named a cardinal, and he replied, “Yes, but one can also refuse the appointment.” The chancellor replied that one could not go against a decision made by the Holy Father. At that point, everyone offered him their best wishes and congratulations, and he asked them all to pray. Upon his return from Rome, his only comment was “On my back I carry the gift for the archdiocese.”
The relationship between Wojtyła and Pope Paul VI was a long-standing one, based on sentiments of mutual respect and deep-seated affection. As early as 1962, during the first session of the Second Vatican Council, the auxiliary bishop had had the opportunity to thank then-cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini for the generous gift that the archdiocese of Milan had given to the collegiate church of St. Florian in Cracow: three new bells, blessed with the eloquent names Virgin Mary, Ambrose–Charles Borromeo, and Florian. They had been requested by Father Tadeusz Kurowski, rector of St. Florian, but Wojtyła knew perfectly well that Montini meant them as an expression of his personal goodwill toward him, one of the youngest bishops in the world.
A few years later, in 1968, Wojtyła was one of the few bishops who was clearly aligned with Pope Paul VI when he began his reflection on the topics of marriage and procreation, and he went so far as to establish in Cracow a committee for further study of the matter, which provided the pope with a number of ideas to counter the position of those who wished to soften the Church’s stand on contraceptives. And when Pope Paul VI issued the encyclical Humanae vitae in July 1968, reaffirming the unacceptability of artificial methods of contraception, Wojtyła prepared a memorandum on the encyclical’s doctrinal and pastoral consequences that was published in the Osservatore Romano on January 5, 1969.
At the beginning of February 1976, a phone call from the future cardinal Władysław Rubin informed Wojtyła that the pope wished him to lead the Lenten spiritual exercises in the Vatican. There were only about twenty days available in which to prepare the texts for the exercises, so the cardinal moved to the convent of the Grey Ursulines in Jaszczurówka. Until noon he wrote his meditations (later published in book form with the title Sign of Contradiction), each afternoon he went skiing, and in the evening he resumed his writing.
That experience, Wojtyła himself recalled in his book Wstańcie, chodźmy! (Rise, Let Us Be On Our Way), “was particularly important for me, because it made me realize just how necessary it is for a bishop to be ready to speak of his faith, wherever the Lord asks this of him. Every bishop needs to be prepared for this, including the successor of Peter himself, just as Paul VI needed me to be ready and willing for the task.” On November 1, 1993, John Paul II wrote to Marek Skwarnicki: “There is controversy over Christianity, Jesus himself, and his Gospels. I myself have a certain predilection for being a ‘sign of contradiction,’ even if it is through no merit of my own, but by grace.”
One official of the Roman Curia who was present at those spiritual exercises testified that “Wojtyła had the courage to ‘engage in polemics’ with the pope. In particular we can detect this in the lecture on Gethsemane, in which he expressed the solitude of Pope Paul VI. The cardinal ‘polemicized’ in the following manner: he described the opportunity that the Apostles lost in the olive garden to respond to Jesus’ prayer and urged Pope Montini to do his best to regain that lost possibility. Little did he realize that two years later he himself would have to respond to that challenge.”
When Pope Paul VI died on August 6, 1978, Cardinal Wojtyła sketched to a group of friends a prophetic picture of the needs of the Church: “It seems to me that the Church, and the world as well, needs a very spiritual pope. This must be his first and indispensable characteristic, so that he can be the father of a religious community. Asia, Africa, and Latin America are struggling with new and difficult situations, and they will seek a successor to Pope Paul VI who can help them and, more important, understand them in their time of difficulty.”
THE PROPHETIC “HABEMUS PAPAM”
The Conclave began on August 25, 1978. In the last Mass celebrated before entering the Sistine Chapel, the cardinal recited this prayer: “We pray to you, Almighty Father, that, if a man is elected pope who realizes that he is not strong enough to bear the weight of the responsibility that comes with the task of serving as vicar to your Beloved Son, you will infuse him with the courage to say, in the words of St. Peter: ‘Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!’ But if he does take on this responsibility, give him a great store of faith, hope, and love, so that he can bear the cross that you impose upon him.”
The decision of the cardinals to elect the Venetian Albino Luciani, who took the name of John Paul I, was wholeheartedly endorsed by him: “I believe he is the the ideal man, with his piety and humility, susceptible to the action of the Holy Spirit. This is the pope that the Church needs today.” But little more than a month later, during the night of September 28–29, Pope Luciani died as well.
Wojtyła later said of him: “His words deeply touched the hearts of the people crowding into St. Peter’s Square. From his first appearance in the central loggia of the basilica of the Vatican he established a current of spontaneous sympathy with those present. His smiling face, his open, trusting gaze won the hearts of the Romans and the faithful of the entire world. His words and his person entered into the souls of one and all. With his sudden death, there was extinguished the smile of a Shepherd who was close to his people, who with serenity and equilibrium managed to establish a dialogue wi
th culture and with the world.”
Józef Mucha, the driver for the archbishopric of Cracow, was the one to deliver the news of the death of John Paul I. The cardinal was seated at the breakfast table, and when he heard those words, uttered by the man through the opening between the kitchen and the dining room, he was seized by a powerful wave of intense emotion, and he dropped the spoon he was holding onto his plate. A short while later, a severe migraine forced him to cancel the trip that was scheduled for that day. He went into the chapel to pray, and to the members of the secretariat he said thoughtfully, “What is the Lord trying to tell us with this?”
Before boarding the plane that would take him back to Rome, on October 3, 1978, Cardinal Wojtyła completed a visitation to a parish in the archdiocese of Cracow, the Parish of St. Joseph in Złote Łany, a new residential quarter of Bielsko-Biała. Upon his return, he celebrated a Suffrage Mass for the late pope, and then went to Warsaw for the proceedings of the Polish Episcopal Conference. He finally left for the Vatican “without the knowledge that I was going there to stay,” as he later commented. As if in a presentiment, when the driver who took him to the airport wished him a safe and timely return home, he replied in a serious voice touched with sadness, “One never knows.”
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