On October 14, Wojtyła once again entered the Conclave. Two days later, at 5:15 P.M. on October 16, 1978, he was elected the 263rd successor to St. Peter, the first non-Italian since the death of the Dutch Pope Adrian VI in 1523. A few hours before that, Cardinal Wyszyński had reminded his confrere Léon-Etienne Duval, archbishop of Algiers, that this was the feast day of St. Jadwiga, Queen of Poland, and therefore suggested that he vote for the cardinal from Cracow. He then described the cardinal: “He is a mystic, a poet, a shepherd, a philosopher, a saint … but he is a bad administrator,” referring to the difficulties that he had encountered, in Wyszyński’s opinion, less in the management of material concerns than in the organization of the curial government.
At the moment of his election, Wojtyła must certainly have been reminded of the prophecy uttered by Cracow’s archbishop Eugeniusz Baziak the day that he had gone to inform him that he had been appointed his auxiliary bishop. Baziak had taken the young Father Karol by the arm and led him into the waiting room, where a number of priests were sitting. He had then announced in a strong voice: “Habemus Papam.”
Immediately after his election, another of his onetime teachers and mentors, the rector of the Pontifical Belgian College, Maximilien de Furstenberg, since created cardinal, sent John Paul II this significant message of good cheer: “Magister adest et vocat te” (The Teacher [Jesus] is here and is calling you). The pontiff replied, “Obeying in faith to Christ, my Lord, placing my trust in the Mother of Christ and of the Church, despite these great difficulties, I accept.” Words that set the seal upon his entire papal ministry.
Chapter Two
THE POPE
THE SECOND HOME OF THE POLES
On October 16, 1978, for the first and only time in the history of the People’s Republic of Poland, the evening news report did not begin punctually. When the anchorman finally appeared on the screen, his face pinched in an expression of tension and embarrassment, everyone watching understood that something extraordinary had happened, something that had taken the Communist authorities by surprise. Attempting to minimize, however awkwardly, the historic scope of the event, the announcer informed the Polish people of the election of Karol Wojtyła to the papacy. The black-and-white picture on the television screen, so much a part of the memory that most Poles have of that event, suddenly seemed colored with hope. People, still incredulous, threw open the doors of their apartments and went to ring their neighbors’ doorbells: “Did you hear what’s happened?” In the street, people were running about and hugging jubilantly, a festive exchange of good wishes while church bells were pealing in unison.
One witness testifying in the process for beatification recalled, “With my girlfriend and a few friends, we had decided to go to the movies that evening. But that news report changed our plans, and we were soon at the parish church exulting, embracing one another, and celebrating.” Everyone wholeheartedly rallied around their fellow Pole, who had been elected by the cardinals of the whole world as the man best suited to steer the Church toward the third millennium of the Christian era.
In the years to come, for many Poles the Vatican would become the ideal second home of their nation, a welcoming space in which to share moments bound up with their national traditions, with their homeland, especially during the Christmas season. For the students of the Pontifical Polish College, the old friends from Cracow, and fellow Poles working in the Roman Curia, it was customary to celebrate with the pontiff the ceremony of the Opłatek, in which season’s greetings are exchanged by breaking a special nonconsecrated wafer. “The appointment was made with the unfailing phone call from Father Stanisław: ‘This afternoon the pope wants you all to come over to sing Christmas carols,’ ” recalled one of the most assiduous participants in those get-togethers. “We met in the private library, in a comfortable family atmosphere. John Paul II would sit down and we would gather around him. Then we would begin singing in chorus and he, with his beautiful voice, would naturally take the lead part. There was a sort of lullaby that he liked a lot, and he loved to invent new verses for it, adapting it to the particular situation and the people who were present.”
The guests all knew that this invitation was not simply a gift that John Paul II reserved for those people who were dear to him: deprived from a very young age of all family ties, he actually needed the feeling of a family’s warmth around him, a family made up of people with whom he had established deep and lasting ties. In some sense, this also explains the number of personal references that the pope scattered throughout his speeches for the entire duration of his pontificate, confidences that have made it possible to retrace a genuine “autobiography of the heart,” published in 2008 by the Vatican Publishing House, titled Vi racconto la mia vita (Let Me Tell You About My Life).
A POLE ON ST. PETER’S THRONE
It is not at all easy to summarize a papacy like that of John Paul II, the third longest in history, with its nearly twenty-seven years. Let us attempt to do it with the description provided by one of his closest friends: “The most important moments can be broken up into four phases. The first is that of the enthusiastic papacy, the pope who travels new paths, who is familiar with the reality of the world, who ventures out of the Vatican and makes contact with the entire Church. The second phase consists of the assassination attempt, his illnesses, his suffering, his recovery in the hospital, his bearing of the cross. The third phase is when he was hung upon the cross, immobilized and confined to a wheelchair. The fourth phase was his death, which had a paschal dimension, and was an integral part of his entire life.”
Certainly, John Paul II’s pontificate represented a clear break from the past—a break that was evident from the very beginning—when he called into question the tradition of the papal coat of arms, deciding to keep the one he had as archbishop, with a large cross on a blue field and an M in the lower right quadrant, symbolizing the Madonna at the feet of the crucified Jesus. Experts in heraldry were appalled, but there was nothing to be done. The pope did not even want the papal tiara above his coat of arms: he would allow at most a miter. Here, however, the insistence of officialdom, with a steady stream of notes about historical tradition and what is appropriate, managed to dent Wojtyła’s determination, and he agreed to use the tiara.
Equally astonishing was his decision to go, the day after his election, to visit Monsignor Andrzej Maria Deskur at the Gemelli Polyclinic, where he was a patient. That the pope, behaving like an ordinary mortal, should go to see a sick friend (which he had previously done on October 14, before entering the Conclave) on the occasion of his first official sortie from the Vatican was an absolute break with tradition and ceremony, a decisive shift that furrowed more than a few brows. Those who knew him well, however, were able to read in this act a sincere gesture of gratitude to a man that Karol Wojtyła would ever afterward consider one of the cireneos (selfless toilers) of his papacy.
Wojtyła and Deskur first met in Cracow in 1945, when they were both officers of the association of Catholic university students, Bratnia Pomoc. They became closer friends in the seminary, despite the four-year age difference, and their friendship remained strong even when, after their ordination into the priesthood, Deskur was sent to the Vatican Secretariat of State to work in the field of social communications, becoming president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications in 1973 and bishop in 1974.
For Wojtyła, Deskur thereafter became an important point of reference during his visits to Rome. He would sleep at Deskur’s house whenever he was summoned to the Vatican, and he confided in him and discussed with him the projects he was mulling over. During the sessions of the Second Vatican Council, Deskur was also Wojtyła’s confessor. Wojtyła promoted him to archbishop in 1980, and in 1984 he appointed him president emeritus of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications. The following year he created him cardinal.
Three days before Wojtyła’s election to the papacy, on October 13, Deskur had been stricken with paralysis at home, and had been ta
ken to the hospital with slim chances of survival. “I did not merely yield to an impulse of the heart when I went up there, to Monte Mario, to visit somebody who was a friend of mine,” John Paul II explained in a speech on December 21, 1980. “At the time I wished to give—and I can confirm this at a remove of two years—a very specific indication of the way in which I conceived and continue to conceive of the formidable ministry of the successor to St. Peter. In that setting, I said to the patients that I counted greatly, very greatly indeed, on them: for their prayers and especially for the offering of their sufferings, which could provide me with a special strength, a strength that was and is necessary to me in order to perform in a less unworthy manner my serious duties in the bosom of the church of Christ.”
Deskur himself later wrote in the Osservatore Romano on December 11, 2003: “My suffering supports this fruitful pontificate. That is what Mary wanted, and I am her servant!” He recovered from his stroke, though he was forced to live the rest of his life in a wheelchair.
The existence of a particular correspondence, in the lives of men of faith, between suffering and the spiritual aid offered by other people through that suffering was a deep-rooted conviction for Karol Wojtyła, and the fact that his own election to the pontificate should have coincided with the beginning of a grave illness for one of his closest friends only confirmed that belief.
In a previously unpublished note dating from the days immediately subsequent to his election, we read: “I cannot fail to link the fact that on October 16 I was elected as the successor [to John Paul I] with what took place three days earlier. The sacrifice of Andrzej, my brother in the episcopate, appears to me as preparatory to this event. Everything, through his suffering, is inscribed within the mystery of the cross and of the redemption brought about by Christ. I also find a certain analogous quality in an event that occurred eleven years ago when, during my stay in Rome for the consistory at which I was summoned to join the College of Cardinals, my friend Father Marian Jaworski lost his hand in a railroad accident near Nidzica.” The writing ends with the admission “Debitor factus sum” (I have become a debtor).
In 1967, in fact, Wojtyła had asked Father Marian Jaworski to replace him as preacher in a series of spiritual exercises. During the trip, however, there was a train crash and the priest suffered the traumatic amputation of a hand.
Jaworski was also a longtime friend, though he was six years younger. They had met in 1951, when Wojtyła was studying for his doctorate in Cracow. In 1959, after Wojtyła was made bishop, he came to live in his residence, and in 1963, when the auxiliary bishop became the archbishop of Cracow, he moved with Wojtyła into the archbishop’s palace on Franciszkańska Street. What chiefly bound them together were their shared philosophical and theological interests and their involvement in the Deparment of Theology in Cracow, where Jaworski taught and was also the rector. In 1984, John Paul II named him a bishop, and in 1991 promoted him to the position of metropolitan of the Archdiocese of Lviv of the Latins, in Ukraine. After being included on an in pectore basis in the Consistory of 1998, in 2001 his creation as a cardinal was made public, allowing him to participate in the Conclave that on April 19, 2005, elected Benedict XVI.
Although he is nineteen years younger, there is a third Pole whose name cannot be separated from that of John Paul II. That is, obviously, the current archbishop of Cracow, Cardinal Stanisław Dziwisz, who in 1957, during his first year of seminary, came to know Wojtyła as a professor of philosophy and, later, of moral theology and social doctrine of the Church. In 1966, the archbishop asked him to become his private secretary. In this role, Dziwisz accompanied Wojtyła to Rome for the Conclave and remained at his side for his entire papacy. In 1998, John Paul II decided to consecrate him bishop. When he objected that he was too young, Wojtyła simply pointed out that at that age he was already pope!
In the perfect inner circle, a woman has every right to be included: Dr. Wanda Półtawska, for whose recovery from a tumor Wojtyła asked and obtained the intercession of Padre Pio da Pietrelcina. The woman, a Catholic partisan fighter in Cracow, had been captured by the Nazis and confined at the Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she was subjected to inhuman medical experiments. Having survived the camp, she studied psychiatry, and met Father Karol when he was entrusted with the pastoral care of the young university students. Their acquaintance turned into a story of spiritual guidance and a close friendship, which survived intact throughout the years of the pontificate, when she and her family were frequently invited to the Vatican and to Castel Gandolfo during the summer holidays.
A letter written on October 20, 1978, just four days after his election, clearly reveals how crucial that friendship was for John Paul II: “The Lord has decided that everything we talked about on various occasions, and which to some degree you predicted after the death of Pope Paul VI, should become reality. I thank God that this time he has given me such great inner peace, which evidently was still lacking in August, and which has allowed me to live through this moment without tension.… In all of this, I think of you. I have always believed that you, in the concentration camp of Ravensbrück, suffered in part for me.… It is on the basis of this belief that I have come to the idea that yours might be my family and you a sister to me.” At the bottom of the page is not the papal signature but the affectionate appellation by which Wanda often called him: “Brother.”
CHOOSING HIS COLLEAGUES
Many have wondered what criteria John Paul II used to select the directors of the various offices of the Holy See and to appoint bishops in the thousands of Catholic dioceses around the world. The impression of those who knew him well is that, especially at the beginning of his pontificate, Wojtyła tended to single out personalities of elevated stature and set them like so many tiles into the mosaic of his larger pastoral project.
If it was natural to select Franciszek Macharski, who represented a clear line of continuity with his twenty-year ministry, to take his place at the helm of the archdiocese of Cracow, other appointments he made were more singular: the appointment of the then-archbishop of Munich, Joseph Ratzinger, to the leadership of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and of the Jesuit Carlo Maria Martini, then rector of the Pontifical Gregorian University, as archbishop of Milan. These were prestigious men, selected personally by the pope without any outside consultations or suggestions.
Wojtyła considered Cardinal Ratzinger one of the most authoritative personalities within the Church and a pastor of rare virtues. He chose him, in 1981, so that he could have at his side a theologian capable of helping him to implement in concrete terms the teachings of the Second Vatican Council. “He was the ultimate theologian of the Council,” as the pope so effectively described him to a friend. Their collaboration was solid and fruitful, and Wojtyła himself recognized that the theological profile of his papacy had essentially been forged in partnership with Cardinal Ratzinger.
Less straightforward was his relationship with Cardinal Martini. Wojtyła had known him since his time in Cracow, when he invited Martini to come to Poland and deliver a number of lectures on the Holy Scripture. Martini stayed in the archbishop’s palace, where those events took place, and the two often spent time conversing. Still, for Martini it came as a surprise to receive, just before Christmas in 1979, an invitation to meet with the pope in the Vatican. When John Paul II, during that meeting, proposed that he become archbishop of Milan, the Jesuit revealed his concerns, explaining that, since he had always been a professor, he had no familiarity with people. Wojtyła replied, “You will not need to go to the people, the people will come to you.”
The pope had been told that Martini took part in the pastoral activities of the community of Sant’Egidio, devoting himself to serving the poor as well as celebrating Mass in the poverty-stricken outskirts of Rome. Thus, to dispel the Jesuit’s objections about lack of pastoral experience, he needed only to ask, “So what exactly did you used to do on Sundays with the community of Sant’Egidio?” As time went on
, a number of observers had the impression that relations between them became more strained, not unlike a pair of university professors who do not agree on their analysis of the situation and the best strategy to adopt. Their mutual respect, however, never wavered.
Camillo Ruini too was chosen personally by John Paul II. At the time, Ruini was auxiliary bishop of Reggio Emilia and the pope had heard good things about him. At the beginning of 1985, he invited him to dinner at the Vatican and discussed the ecclesial situation in Italy. Finding that he and the bishop were fully in agreement, he asked Ruini to draft the speech that he would be delivering at the second Conference of the Italian Church in Loreto that April. It was probably as a result of this remarkable convergence of views that, in June 1986, Ruini was appointed secretary general of the Italian bishops’ conference, and was promoted to the office of president five years later. In an appreciation of his work, John Paul II, who at the beginning of his papacy hadn’t felt particularly close to the Italian bishops, stated that Cardinal Ruini “had restored the unity of the Italian episcopate with the pontiff.”
With the passage of time, Pope Wojtyła relied increasingly upon the suggestions of the Secretariat of State and the Congregation for the Bishops. It was decided that, for Italy as for other countries, it would become the responsibility of the nuncio, rather than the existing special commission, to evaluate the potential candidates for vacant dioceses. So John Paul II was duly presented with a trio of names, in order of the Congregation’s preference, and he generally chose the first name on the list. Yet he did not hesitate, especially when he noticed pressure being brought to bear in favor of one candidate, to opt for a name that was not on the list at all.
Why He Is a Saint Page 7