That the Supreme Pontiff is someone aptly described as a Christian radical has also been something of a surprise within the Catholic Church. The surprise is not because the recent history of the papacy has replicated the rascalities and scandals of the Renaissance. Since the sixteenth century Counter-Reformation, though, the exercise of the world’s oldest office had been cut to fit a certain template designed primarily by and for the Italians who dominated Vatican life. Brilliant and dedicated Italians, many of them saints, saved Catholicism in the sixteenth century: men like Charles Borromeo, Robert Bellarmine, and Antonio Ghislieri, whom history remembers as Pope Pius V. Over time, however, this historically and culturally conditioned model for the papacy came to be understood as a reflection of God’s enduring intentions for the Office of Peter in the Church. And in that model, especially as it evolved after the loss of the Papal States in 1870, the principal jobs of the Roman Pontiff were thought to be the effective management of the Roman Curia, the central bureaucratic machinery of the Catholic Church, and the careful management of the Church’s relations with sovereign states, in a diplomacy conducted according to the premises of the modern state system.
The theory had it that the pope should manage the Church’s permanent bureaucracy, but the bureaucracy often thought it should manage the pope. For more than four centuries, the curial managers of popes believed, not without reason, that “we know how to do this” (as they often put it) and that wise popes would accommodate themselves to the prevailing methodology. Those who accommodated—and they all did, to one degree or another—were often men of intellectual sophistication and personal sanctity. By agreeing to conduct their office as curial tradition dictated, however, they agreed to a papacy that was more managerial and bureaucratic than evangelical in character.
Karol Wojtyła was an outsider to all this. He had not been acculturated, one might say, to be a pope. But he had been one of the world’s most dynamic, innovative, and successful local bishops. And he had been that precisely because he was an evangelist and pastor who was a Christian radical. As he once put it, if the Holy Spirit had seen fit to call the bishop of Kraków to the office of Bishop of Rome and pastor of the universal Church, there must have been something in his experience that was useful for others.11 Thus the Church, as well as the world, has had to learn to live with a very different kind of pontificate, the most distinctive characteristics of which are expressions of Karol Wojtyła, the disciple who was a product of the Church in the modern world, not of the Roman bureaucracy.
A QUESTION OF RELEVANCE
Because he is, at heart, a Christian disciple, it may seem that Wojtyła’s story is of interest solely to Christians, perhaps only to Catholics. Yet the world has not responded to John Paul II as some might have predicted. Moreover, John Paul II has understood himself to be making a proposal to the entire world about the nature of the human person, the moral requirements for human community, the meaning of human history, and the trajectory of human destiny.
That proposal, the public implications of the “more excellent way” that has been the lodestar of Wojtyła’s life, comes at a time when the cause of freedom, often taken to be synonymous with the cause of democracy, appears historically triumphant. Closer examination suggests the possibility of a more ominous situation.
The secular argument for human freedom, launched almost three centuries ago under the rubric of “natural rights,” has often been reduced to a calculation of probabilities: democracy and the personal freedoms it protects are good not because they have an inherent moral superiority over other forms of organizing society, but because they are the least messy alternative in a world of dramatic differences. Being tolerant, civil, and, in a word, “democratic” is just easier than being cranky and assertive; it keeps the lid on, so to speak. But if the social pressures of plurality and difference become intense, the answer to the question, “Why be tolerant, civil, democratic?” cannot simply be “Because it works better.” That essentially pragmatic answer cannot be sustained when racial, ethnic, or religious conflict reaches the boiling point. Only a moral commitment to tolerance and democratic civility that is buttressed by norms transcending our immediate circumstances can sustain a commitment to the freedom of the “other” when that “other” becomes threatening. And that is the situation of a world in which “otherness” impinges on us daily, thanks to the transportation and communications revolutions.
Perhaps even more ominously, the Promethean temptation to steal fire from the gods and remake the human condition has reemerged on the edge of a new millennium, not from race- or class-based political fanatics this time, but from science. The very question of who counts as a human being is now being debated in a way our grandparents could not imagine. Is a cloned human being a member of the human community? What about the socially unproductive and the inconvenient, the gravely handicapped, the elderly, the unborn? If the question, “What are these putative people good for?” is the only question our cultures and our laws recognize, then we really are living in Aldous Huxley’s brave new world, and tyranny cannot be far around the corner.
In these circumstances, John Paul II’s proposal about the moral foundations of the free society, based on his distinctive understanding of the nature and dignity of the human person, is assuredly not for-Catholics-only. It has implications for the Pope’s fellow Christians, for Jews, for Muslims, for adherents of the other great world religions, and for “all men and women of good will” (as his encyclicals put it). The papacy has traditionally claimed a universal reach. John Paul’s pontificate is the first in history in which that claim has been empirically validated. It is a very obscure corner of this planet that has not been touched in some way by the life of this pope and by his proposals for humanity’s future.
THE BROADNESS OF A GAUGE
Modern assertiveness notwithstanding, we are neither self-constituting nor self-defining. Family, education, physique, languages, native culture, friendships, vocation, hobbies, religious and philosophical convictions—these constitute some of the many rails on which our lives run. That all life journeys run along such rails is a given of the human condition, but the gauge of the rails differs.12 Some lives run along narrow gauges, others along broad. One way to think of Karol Wojtyła’s life “from inside” is to think of it as running along a particularly broad-gauged rail bed.
He is an intellectual who is unbeholden to the shibboleths of the professoriat and who has a deep appreciation for untutored popular piety.
He is an accomplished philosopher, recognized as such by peers throughout the world, but he never took a serious course in the subject.
He is a mystic who was a vigorous sportsman for almost seventy years.
He is a celibate with a remarkable insight into human sexuality, especially as viewed from the perspective and experience of women.
He lived from age nineteen until age fifty-eight under totalitarian regimes and has written cogently about the cultural factors that make democracy possible.
He is a Pole with a marked sensitivity toward Jews and Judaism.
He has had a considerable impact on world affairs and the life of the Church while evincing not the slightest interest in management theory or in the conventions of politics.
He is arguably the most well-informed man in the world, yet he rarely reads newspapers.
He has been a notably successful statesman without extensive preparation for the job.
He was blessed with great mentors as a young man, but he is primarily an autodidact who learns quickly from experience.
He has a penetrating insight into those he meets, such that one wants to entrust him with one’s decisions, but his signature phrase as a confessor and spiritual counselor has always been “You must decide.”
He has demonstrated the ability to rouse the passions of some of the largest crowds in human history, but he has never played the demagogue.
He is a disciple known for the intensity of his love, like the apostle John, who has bee
n called to exercise an office of authority and jurisdiction in the Church, like the apostle Peter.
These striking characteristics have given his life a remarkably rich texture. They reinforce the claim that one cannot get “inside” Karol Wojtyła, Pope John Paul II, if one insists on forcing his thought and action into the usual liberal/conservative categories. He can only be grasped and judged if one approaches him and accepts him for what he says he is: a man of faith, whose faith is who he is.
That faith has also given rise, in Karol Wojtyła, to a great hope for humanity.
On the edge of the twenty-first century, Pope John Paul II stood before the representatives of the nations of the world, and having looked into the heart of virtually every great darkness of his time over the course of his seventy-five years, offered an antidote to the fear that had driven his century mad:
It is one of the great paradoxes of our time that man, who began the period we call “modernity” with a self-confident assertion of his “coming-of-age” and “autonomy,” approaches the end of the twentieth century fearful of himself, fearful of what he might be capable of, fearful for the future. Indeed, the second half of the twentieth century has seen the unprecedented phenomenon of a humanity uncertain about the very likelihood of a future…
In order to ensure that the new millennium now approaching will witness a new flourishing of the human spirit, mediated through an authentic culture of freedom, men and women must learn to conquer fear. We must learn not to be afraid, we must rediscover a spirit of hope and a spirit of trust. Hope is not empty optimism springing from a naive confidence that the future will necessarily be better than the past. Hope and trust are the premise of responsible activity and are nurtured in that inner sanctuary of conscience where “man is alone with God” and thus perceives that he is not alone amid the enigmas of existence, for he is surrounded by the love of the Creator!13
To understand Pope John Paul II “from inside” is to understand that, for him, hope for the human prospect is rooted in faith. And that faith is not the assertion of one religious option in a supermarket of possible truths. It is, to his mind, the truth of the world. It is the truth that had seized him in his youth and had formed his adult life. It is the truth to which he is obliged to bear witness.
How Karol Wojtyła came to that understanding, how he deepened it and learned to express and defend it, how he has borne witness to it as Pope John Paul II, and what all that might mean for the Catholic Church and the world in the twenty-first century is the business of this study.
THE SUBJECT AND THE AUTHOR
This book is the culmination of twenty years of studying and writing about John Paul II. I began writing about the Pope shortly after his election, first in magazines and newspaper columns, later in books. One of those books, The Final Revolution: The Resistance Church and the Collapse of Communism,14 was the first sustained argument that John Paul II had played a crucial role in the collapse of European communism and the occasion for our first personal meeting. I was in Rome to lecture on the book’s themes and met the Holy Father when he invited me to Mass in his private chapel.
During the course of the next years I found myself in Rome for lectures or conferences numerous times, and the Pope often invited me to his morning Mass, to lunch, or to dinner, usually with other American or Polish friends. In the late spring of 1995, I was in Rome to mark my twentieth wedding anniversary, and in the course of that visit the question of whether I should write a biography of the Holy Father was first broached. In December of that year, when I was in Rome to give the keynote address at an international conference marking the thirtieth anniversary of the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom, the Holy Father invited me to dinner, along with another friend. That evening, in the course of the freewheeling conversation that John Paul’s openness invites, the question of a biography came up again. And over roast chicken and a good local wine, the Pope made it clear that he would be grateful if I would take on the task.
In March 1996, I went to Rome to discuss the mechanics and ground rules of the project with the Holy Father, his priest-secretary, and other officials of the Holy See. The Pope agreed that he would make himself available to me on a regular basis, and that in addition to our personal conversations he would answer questions I would submit to him in writing. It was also agreed that officials of the Holy See would be informed of the Holy Father’s interest in this work, so that I would have the access I needed to people and materials in order to tell the story adequately.
At the same time, it was clearly understood between us that this would be my telling of his story. The biography would be as authoritative as unprecedented access to the Pope and his closest associates would make it, but it would not be “authorized” in that the Holy Father retained no rights of approval. As I got to know him better, it became evident that John Paul II is too respectful of others ever to have thought of asking for editorial control over someone else’s work. Both he and I have understood this, from the beginning, to be a project in which he would cooperate, but for which I would bear full responsibility.
The infallibility with which Catholics believe the Holy Spirit endows the Bishop of Rome in making binding judgments on matters of faith and morals is no guarantee of preservation from errors in matters of personnel, strategy, and tactics, nor is it a warrant of sanctity. John Paul II would be the last to claim that his every judgment has been vindicated by subsequent events. Like every other leader, he deserves to be understood in terms of how he understood the issues and the options available at the time he took a decision. Unlike some others, John Paul II deserves great respect for the painstaking and prayerful way in which he has exercised the exceptional powers of his office. At a time in history when the world historical stage came to be populated largely by leaders who seemed smaller than their responsibilities demanded, he has been a large figure indeed, and not simply because of the power at his disposal, but because of the integrity with which even his most implacable critics concede he has wielded that power.
Melchior Cano, the great Dominican theologian at the sixteenth-century Council of Trent, got it just right when he said, referring to the office of the papacy, that “Peter has no need of our lies or flattery. Those who blindly and indiscriminately defend every decision of the supreme Pontiff are the very ones who do most to undermine the authority of the Holy See—they destroy instead of strengthening its foundations.”15
That has been the watchword of this project.
A Son of Freedom
Poland Semper Fidelis
MAY 18, 1920
Karol Józef Wojtyła is born in Wadowice and baptized on June 20.
AUGUST 16–17, 1920
Red Army invasion of Europe is repelled at the “Miracle on the Vistula.”
SEPTEMBER 15, 1926
Karol Wojtyła, “Lolek,” begins elementary school.
APRIL 13, 1929
Emilia Kaczorowska Wojtyła, Lolek’s mother, dies.
MAY 1929
Lolek’s first holy communion.
SEPTEMBER 1930
Lolek enters secondary school.
DECEMBER 5, 1932
Edmund Wojtyła, Lolek’s older brother, dies.
FALL 1934
Lolek begins to perform in local theatrical productions.
FEBRUARY 1936
Karol Wojtyła begins intense work with avant-garde theatrical director Mieczysław Kotlarczyk.
MAY 3, 1938
Karol Wojtyła is confirmed.
MAY 27, 1938
Wojtyła graduates from high school and is class valedictorian.
AUGUST 1938
Lolek and his father move to Kraków, where the younger Wojtyła begins an active undergraduate life at the Jagiellonian University.
SPRING 1939
Wojtyła completes unpublished volume of poetry, “Renaissance Psalter.”
JUNE 1939
Lolek successfully passes matriculation exams for further studies in P
olish philology.
JULY 1939
Karol Wojtyła completes military training with the Academic Legion.
The Marne, Tannenberg, and Verdun; the Battle of Britain and Midway; Stalingrad and D-Day’s Omaha Beach—according to the conventional wisdom, these were the decisive battles of the twentieth century. Only Poles and professional historians remember the August 1920 Battle of the Vistula, or, as pious Poles insist, the “Miracle on the Vistula.” Yet much turned on this, including the destiny of a three-month-old infant named Karol Józef Wojtyła, born in the small provincial city of Wadowice the previous May 18.
In the summer of 1920, Polish history seemed set to repeat itself in a particularly ugly way. The Second Polish Republic, the first independent Polish state since 1795, was about to be strangled in its cradle as the Red Cavalry of General Semën Budënnyi drove westward out of Ukraine, sweeping all before it. For Poles, it brought back memories of other invasions from the steppes and other preludes to national disaster. For Lenin, who wanted to “probe Europe with the bayonet of the Red Army,”1 the infant Polish Republic was of no moral or historic consequence. It was simply the highway along which Trótsky’s Red Army legions would march to Germany, triggering a revolutionary uprising across all of Europe. To make sure that any resistance would be summarily crushed, the Provisional Polish Revolutionary Committee, the puppet regime to be installed in the wake of the Red Army’s inevitable victory, would be led by Feliks Dzerzhínskii, head of the Cheka, the Soviet secret police, the most feared man in Bolshevik Russia.
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