Despite the care he devoted to this matter of personnel, it sometimes happened that the pontiff was disappointed at the outcome of an appointment. In one case, where he probably had placed too much trust in a colleague, when someone objected to the candidate that he had selected, he replied, “I am afraid that it’s too late now.” Then, under his breath, as he was heading to the chapel to pray, he added, “If they lied to me, they’ve already lost. I’m not the leader of the Church, Jesus Christ is.” And to an old friend—who had heard the detachment with which he spoke of the Curia, as if it were something that he had to work with, or around, and had said to him, “But you are the pope, you can choose who you want”—Wojtyła replied very straightforwardly, “But it’s not that easy to find the right people.”
A FIRMNESS UNDERPINNED BY HUMILITY
From the very first months of his pontificate, John Paul II made clear his intention to complete the modernization of the Church in accordance with the indications of the Second Vatican Council. He involved numerous experts in a lengthy process of reflection and exploration, resulting in the production of the two Codes of Canons, for the Western and Eastern churches (published on January 25, 1983, and October 18, 1990, respectively), the new Catechism of the Catholic Church (promulgated on December 9, 1992), and the reorganization of the Roman Curia (with the apostolic constitution Pastor Bonus, dated June 28, 1988).
Pope Wojtyła understood perfectly well the institutional functions of the Roman Curia, which—beginning with the earliest dicasteries, or departments, established by Pope Sixtus V in the late sixteenth century—had gradually modified its structure to respond over time to a shifting series of requirements. And he recognized the fundamental role played by the Congregations as “governing bodies.” He focused his own vision of the Secretariat of State and the other Vatican offices on the goal of dealing effectively with the pastoral problems of the modern world. For that reason, as he laid out the organizational structure that he planned to deploy, he asked the colleagues who would be drafting the project to emphasize the institution of the Pontifical Councils, making them agencies for “dialogue and contact” to improve interactions with the world at large and with other religions. Of particular importance to him in this context was necessarily the Pontifical Council for Culture, since culture was to be considered “the working environment for all the dicasteries, just as it is in the lives of all men and all peoples.”
During the initial phase of his pontificate, the prefects of the Congregations met with John Paul II in periodic special audiences, called udienze di tabella, during which problems were presented for his consideration and decision. Over time, however, the only audiences that continued were those with the prefects of the Congregations for the Doctrine of the Faith, for the Bishops, and for the Evangelization of Peoples, which, according to a number of witnesses, had repercussions on the tranquility of relations with certain dicasteries.
Certainly, on a number of occasions, John Paul II found himself obliged to exercise the virtue of patience, but his awareness of his duties, when tensions arose among his closest colleagues, kept him from yielding.
He had already shown this firmness as archbishop of Cracow, as is illustrated by a significant episode described by George Weigel in his biography Witness to Hope: “A junior member of the archbishop’s staff, Father Tadeusz Pieronek, urging a certain point, said: ‘Your Eminence, you have to do this.’ The cardinal replied, ‘I can’t.’ Father Pieronek began to get angry and said, ‘You can.’ The cardinal replied again, ‘I can’t.’ The priest, now quite agitated, said a third time: ‘You can.’ At which point the cardinal took off his pectoral cross, held it out, and said, ‘Here, you rule …’ Father Pieronek was dumbstruck; the argument was over.”
In the Vatican, when there seemed to be no alternative, Wojtyła was capable of pounding his fists on the table and reacting with grim determination. When one colleague in the Roman Curia insisted stubbornly on his own opinion and showed no willingness to yield the point, John Paul II put an end to the argument by saying, “I believe that I too possess the Holy Spirit.” And another time, unable to persuade a person he highly respected to accept his decision, he reiterated the order and then put an end to the discussion with the words: “Now nothing is left to me but prayer.”
The pope prayed every day not only for the bishops that he had consecrated and the priests he had ordained but also for the entire Roman Curia. He kept next to his prie-dieu a photocopy of the Vatican directory with the list of employees by name, and he had instructed his entourage to take that document to Castel Gandolfo as well. After celebrating Mass, he always included an intention for them all.
His concern for his colleagues certainly extended to those at the lower end of the hierarchy, as is evidenced by a story that one of the Swiss Guards confided to a priest. The guard had been on duty outside the papal apartments one Christmas Eve, and a number of high ecclesiastical officials had come to extend their season’s greetings to the pope. “The only one who offered season’s greetings to me was the pope, who came and opened the door in person to wish me ‘Merry Christmas.’ ”
Such profound humility in his human relations was matched in his official work. In the Vatican, for instance, it is customary for an official who must issue an opinion that will then be evaluated at a higher level to add, at the end of his opinion, the abbreviation “smj,” which stands for the Latin phrase salvo meliore judicio (provided a better judgment is not made). John Paul II had such respect for the expertise of others that he too complied with this tradition and wrote in his own hand the abbreviation “smj” at the bottom of some of the documents that he had considered and concerning which, after he had expressed his own authoritative disposition, he still wished to receive further opinions.
“IT WILL TAKE BLOOD TO CONVERT”
On Tuesday, May 12, 1981, John Paul II visited the Vatican medical center. After inspecting the facilities and meeting with the staff, he was accompanied to the exit by Dr. Renato Buzzonetti, director of the facility and his own personal physician. Pointing out a new ambulance parked nearby, the doctor asked the pope to bless it. As he sprinkled it with holy water, John Paul II said, “I also bless the first patient who will use this ambulance.” Twenty-four hours later, the first patient transported in that vehicle would be none other than himself.
“If the word has not converted, then blood will convert,” Cardinal Wojtyła had written, shortly before being elected to the pontificate, in the poem Stanisław, devoted to the martyred saint of Cracow. The assassination attempt on May 13, 1981, by Ali Ağca, would endow those verses with an evident autobiographical dimension, radically modifying the perception that the pope had of his mission. From that moment onward, his calvary began, illuminated by the awareness that he had been given life a second time, in order to be able to offer it for the benefit of all humanity. “For a man, and especially for a priest, there is nothing greater and more wonderful than this—that God sees fit to make use of him,” he replied one day to a colleague who asked what he saw as the meaning of that traumatic event. He considered his shooting to have been “a grace,” because, through his suffering, he had been permitted to testify to Christ and to evangelize.
In 1991, on the tenth anniversary of the attempted assassination, John Paul II traveled to Fátima to thank the Madonna. According to a witness who testified in the process of beatification, when greetings were being exchanged just before the Mass began, one of the cardinals present turned to him and said, “Holy Father, my cordial best wishes for your birthday!” The pope listened to those words and moved on, then turned on his heel and replied, “You are quite right, my first life was given to me, but then my second life was bestowed upon me ten years ago.” A gift that he regularly celebrated, on the afternoon of every May 13 at the hour of the assassination attempt, by saying a Holy Mass of thanksgiving in his private chapel.
From the very beginning, the pontiff expressed the deeply held belief that it was the Virgin of Fátima
who had watched over him, interceding for his life. As soon as he was strong enough, then, he asked the Polish office of the Secretariat of State to obtain for him all the books about the apparitions of the Virgin Mary to the three little shepherd children, so that he could better identify and understand the details of the story. To one friend who was able to visit him in his hospital room at the Gemelli Polyclinic on the evening of May 14, and who had said to him, “The Virgin will sustain Your Holiness in his suffering,” the pope replied with great conviction, “She has watched over all of this. Totus tuus.”
In the period immediately prior to the assassination attempt, the pontiff had begun working on a text for the celebration planned in the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore for the solemn observance of Pentecost, on June 7, 1981, in commemoration of the 1,600th anniversary of the first Council of Constantinople and the 1,550th anniversary of the Council of Ephesus. The instructions that he subsequently gave to his colleagues were to subdivide the speech into three acts: veneration, thanksgiving, and dedication to the Madonna. In particular, he was focused on the latter, and wished to place all of humanity in the hands of Mary—an idea he reiterated repeatedly, on one occasion in the presence of the original statue of the Virgin brought specially from Fátima to St. Peter’s Square.
John Paul II knew that he was the potential target of a criminal attack: “Nothing could have been easier than to shoot at the pope, who showed himself to the people without protection,” he later commented. This awareness, however, never led him to avoid contact with the crowd or to protect himself in any specific way. Watching a television program about the assassination attempt, he said calmly to a dinner guest, “They would like it if I wore a bulletproof vest so that I could always be secure … but the shepherd always has to be in the middle of his flock, even at the cost of his own life.”
Some time before the assassination attempt, the Italian secret intelligence services had warned of a plan by the terrorist organization called the Red Brigades to kidnap John Paul II. Perhaps that is in part why, immediately after being shot, the pope confided to his secretary, Father Stanisław, the instinctive thought “Just like Bachelet,” with reference to the Catholic vice president of the Italian Superior Council of Magistrates who was assassinated in Rome by the Red Brigades on February 12, 1980.
The Holy Father also wondered about the motivations for the attempted assassination, of course, but he cared much more deeply about the spiritual interpretation of the dramatic events that he had experienced. This explains why he always preferred to assign to the Secretariat of State the task of establishing the Holy See’s official position with regard to the trial of Ali Ağca, as well as pronouncing on whether or not clemency was appropriate.
To his close friends, however, he recounted having spoken about the so-called “Bulgarian connection” with the secretary of the Russian Communist Party, Mikhail Gorbachev, and with the Polish general Wojciech Jaruzelski. Gorbachev told him that he had been unable to find anything in the state archives of the USSR that supported that hypothesis, while Jaruzelski told him that at the time he had asked Todor Zhivkov, first secretary of the Bulgarian Communist Party, about it. Zhivkov had replied, “Comrade, do you think we are imbeciles? If Antonov had been involved in the assassination attempt, we would have evacuated him from Italy the following day. Instead, he remained on the job.”
THE “OPEN LETTER” TO ALI AĞCA
On December 27, 1983, John Paul II had a long and intense conversation with his would-be murderer, in the Roman prison of Rebibbia. Later the pontiff declared: “Today I was able to meet my assailant and repeat to him that I forgave him, as I already did right away, as soon as I could. We met as men and as brothers and all the events of our lives bring us toward this brotherhood.”
The pope had forgiven Ali Ağca immediately, communicating this to the world when he recited the “Regina Coeli,” on May 17, 1981, from the Gemelli Polyclinic: “I pray for the brother who shot me, and whom I have sincerely forgiven.” An attitude that, as has emerged from the testimony of several witnesses, took on an immediate emblematic significance and shook the consciences of many people. Not least among them was the Polish general Jaruzelski: after being gravely wounded in an attempted assassination in 1994, he decided not to prosecute those responsible for the attack, explaining that the pope’s example had won his heart.
Previously unpublished, on the other hand, is the “open letter” that the Holy Father had begun to prepare on September 11, 1981, for the general audience on October 21 of that year. He later decided not to make that letter public, probably choosing caution in view of the ongoing investigations. The two sheets of the draft, found with a large X traced over them, read verbatim:
1. Today once again I would like to devote some words, during this meeting of ours in audience, to the subject of the event of May 13. On that day two men met: one who was trying to take the life of the other, and that other whose life he was trying to take. Divine Providence, however, saw to it that this life was not taken. And so that other man was able to address the first, to speak to him—this, if we consider the nature of the event, seems particularly significant and pertinent. It is important that not even an episode like that of May 13 can succeed in opening an abyss between one man and another, cannot create a silence that signifies the breaking off of all communication. Christ—the Word incarnate—taught us words of this truth that never ceases to produce a contact between people, despite the distance that can be created by events that at times pit them one against another. Nonetheless, what I want to tell you today, my dear listeners at this audience, is intended just as much for this brother of mine who on May 13 wanted to take my life and, even though that did not happen, was still the cause of many wounds that I was forced to nurse for a number of months. Thus my words today will be in a certain sense an “open letter” (perhaps in a way similar to the letter written some time ago by Pope Paul VI after Aldo Moro was kidnapped, and yet at the same time very different).
2. The first word of this “letter”—perhaps we should say, of this open “address”—was already spoken publicly on May 17, during the Angelus [actually the “Regina Coeli”]. Allow me to quote that text (to quote all of it or at least the part that speaks of forgiveness … perhaps it would be best to include all of it, in remembrance as well of two people who were injured!). On Sunday May 17, these words were spoken publicly. But the possibility of pronouncing them even earlier, in the ambulance that was transporting me from the Vatican to the Gemelli Polyclinic, where the first and decisive surgery was performed, I consider the fruit of a particular grace conceded to me by Jesus, my Lord and Teacher. Yes! I believe that it was a particular grace of the crucified Jesus who, among the words he spoke on Golgotha, first of all said that phrase “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.” The act of forgiveness is the first and fundamental condition that allows us, as humans, not to be reciprocally divided and pitted one against another, as enemies. Because we seek from God, who is our Father, understanding and union. This is important and substantial when we are talking about the behavior of one man toward another, but also …
The text that was actually spoken at the general audience on October 21 was in any case dedicated to the theme of forgiveness, described as “a grace and a mystery of the human heart.” After remembering that “Regina Coeli” of May 17, and after quoting the passages of the Gospels in which Christ speaks of forgiveness, Pope Wojtyła continued: “At that time, then, when the man who tried to take my life was being tried and when he was given his sentence, I thought about the story of Cain and Abel, which biblically expresses the ‘beginning’ of the sin against human life. In our times, when that sin has become again, and in a new manner, threatening, while so many innocent men perish at the hands of other men, the biblical description of what happened between Cain and Abel becomes particularly eloquent. Even more complete, even more disturbing than the very commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ ”
And he
concluded: “Christ taught us to forgive. Forgiveness is indispensable also so that God can pose questions to the human conscience, expecting answers in all our inner truth. In these days, when so many innocent men perish at the hands of other men, it would appear that we are under a special imperative to approach each of those who kill, approach them with forgiveness in our hearts and at the same time, with the same question that God, Creator and Lord of human life, asked the first man who tried to take the life of his brother, and indeed took it—took what is the property only of the Creator and Lord of life. Christ taught us to forgive. He taught Peter to forgive “seventy-seven times” (Matthew 18:22). God himself forgives when man answers the question addressed to his conscience and to his heart with all the inner truth of conversion. Leaving to God himself the judgment and the sentence in its definitive dimension, we cannot stop asking: ‘Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.’ ”
“OPEN THE BORDERS OF THE STATES”
For the Polish authorities, the year 1981 was an annus horribilis, because the attempted assassination of the pontiff on May 13 and the death of the primate Stefan Wyszyński on May 28 both coincided with a phase of high tension in the domestic political and social domain. This inevitably had serious repercussions on relations between the Warsaw regime and the Soviet Union.
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