Karol answered, “Amen.”149
November 2 in the Roman Catholic liturgical calendar is the solemn feast of All Souls, the Church’s most intense day of prayer for the dead. Priests are permitted to say Mass three times on All Souls’ Day, so Father Karol Wojtyła had not one, but three, “first Masses” on the day after his ordination. He celebrated them in the Romanesque crypt of St. Leonard in Wawel Cathedral. This small crypt-chapel near the royal tombs is one of the oldest and most hallowed parts of the cathedral, dating to the turn of the eleventh century. The newly ordained priest chose it for his first Masses “to express my special spiritual bond with the history of Poland,” and to pay tribute to the deceased kings and queens, the bishops, cardinals, and poets, all buried nearby, “who were extremely influential in my education as a Christian and a patriot.”150
In the presence of a few friends and the mortal remains of King Jan III Sobieski, King Michał Korybut Wiśniowiecki, Prince Józef Poniatowski, and Tadeusz Kościuszko, and wearing the black vestments prescribed for the day, Father Wojtyła offered three Masses for the repose of the souls of his mother, his brother, and his father. The master of ceremonies (the “manuductor,” or “guider of hands,” as he was called in those days) was his old priest-hero, Father Figlewicz, who led him through the ritual. The altar server was his friend Mieczysław Maliński, who also represented Jan Tyranowski, confined to the hospital in the ninth month of the illness that would take his life the following year; Father Wojtyła was the first of ten priests formed in the tailor-mystic’s Living Rosary. The only relative present was Maria Wiadrowska, Emilia’s elder sister and the ordinand’s godmother. There was no way to print the traditional ordination cards distributed to friends and family. On each holy card Father Karol Wojtyła wrote by hand, Fecit mihi magna…Kraków Nov. 1, 1946—“He has done great things for me,” a verse from Mary’s Magnificat (Luke 1.46–55).151
In the hectic days that followed, Father Wojtyła celebrated Mass at St. Stanisław Kostka in Dębniki and at his home parish in Wadowice. At the Confession of St. Stanisław in the nave of Wawel Cathedral he said Mass for his friends and colleagues in the Rhapsodic Theater and for some of the surviving members of UNIA, whose leadership was under intense pressure from the new communist authorities. Then, on November 11, he baptized his first child: Monika Katarzyna Kwiatkowska, the infant daughter of his friends Halina Królickiewicz and Tadeusz Kwiatkowski. He also found time to attend a Rhapsodic Theater production, but couldn’t make an anniversary gathering of his old troupe. His letter of apology to Mieczysław Kotlarczyk was a window into the new ordinand’s conception of the priesthood: “Maybe it’s God’s design that I can’t come to this anniversary meeting. That’s how I understand it—I should be present in your activity, just as a priest should be present in life in general, should be a hidden driving force. Yes, despite all appearances that is the main duty of the priesthood. Hidden forces usually produce the strongest actions….”152
LEARNING ROME
Wojtyła and Starowieyski left Kraków on November 15 and traveled to Katowice, where they boarded a train for Paris. It was the young priest’s first time outside Poland. He stared out the windows at places he had known before only from geography books: Prague, Nuremberg, Strasbourg, and finally Paris itself, where the two Poles were guests of the Polish Seminary on Rue des Irlandais. They left almost immediately for Rome on another train, arriving toward the end of November. For several weeks they stayed with the Pallottine priests on Via Pettinari, while arrangements were being completed for their permanent residence at the Belgian College, where the Prince Cardinal wanted them to live. On their first Sunday in Rome, they went to St. Peter’s, where Pius XII, carried into the vast basilica on a portable throne, the sedia gestatoria, was completing a beatification ceremony.153
The rector of the restored Kraków seminary, Father Karol Kozłowski, had told the young priest that it was as important to “learn Rome itself” as to study, and Wojtyła took his advice. Life in Rome could be short on creature comforts in the aftermath of the war, but the city, in those days, was tailor-made for tourists. Today’s endless traffic jams were unknown and one could walk or bike everywhere with ease.154 After getting settled at the Belgian College, Wojtyła explored the catacombs, churches, cemeteries, museums, and parks of the capital of Christendom with fellow students who knew both the sites and their history.155
The Belgian College where Wojtyła lived for two years was an intellectually lively environment, full of arguments about the nouvelle theologie, the “new theology” associated with the Dominicans Marie-Dominique Chenu and Yves Congar and the Jesuits Jean Daniélou and Henri de Lubac, which would later play a significant role in the Second Vatican Council. There were also debates about the worker-priest experiments being conducted in France and Belgium. The cardinal archbishop of Paris, Emmanuel Suhard, had just described his country as mission territory, and pastoral experimentation was in the wind. Wojtyła would meet and talk at the college with Father Jozef Cardijn, founder of the Young Christian Workers movement in Belgium, an attempt to evangelize the workplace that had been launched in the 1920s.156 Wojtyła’s rector was Father Maximilian De Fürstenberg, who, like Cardijn, would later be named a cardinal by Pope Paul VI.
The college was small, with twenty-two resident student-priests and seminarians, among them five Americans. In this polyglot environment Wojtyła could improve his French and practice the German he had learned at home, while beginning to study Italian and English. The good company was a useful distraction from the physical difficulties of life. The college was then located in a handsome four-story building with garden, but its interior left a lot to be desired. It was freezing cold in the winter, blazing hot in summer, and each student’s room had only a desk, chair, bed, and sink. Showers were not installed until 1947. The first indoor bathrooms had been put in by the British army at the end of the war. The food, a fellow resident recalls, “was very poor and not so tasty.”157
The location on the Quirinale was perfect, though. It was a brief walk to the Angelicum, and en route to class Wojtyła often visited the church of Sant’ Andrea del Quirinale, which housed the relics of St. Stanisław Kostka, the sixteenth-century Jesuit novice and patron saint of Polish youth for whom his Dębniki parish had been named. Wojtyła was struck by the number of German seminarians in their bold red cassocks who prayed at the tomb of the Polish saint: “At the heart of Christendom, and in the light of the saints, people from different nations would come together, as if to foreshadow, beyond the tragic war which had left such a deep mark on us, a world no longer divided.”158 While getting his first taste of the internationality of the Church, he stayed in touch with his roots, reading the Gospels in Polish every day and often reciting St. John’s account aloud, as if it were a rhythmic poem.159
During academic breaks, Wojtyła traveled through Italy with colleagues from the Belgian College or with Stanisław Starowieyski. They visited San Giovanni Rotondo in the south during the 1947 Easter vacation and went to confession to the famous Capuchin stigmatic, Padre Pio, who was “a very simple confessor, clear and brief.” The greatest impression Padre Pio left on the young priest was at Mass, during which the stigmatic, as the Pope later recalled, “physically suffered.”160 Naples, Capri, Monte Cassino, Assisi, and Subiaco, birthplace of the Benedictine Order and thus of Western monasticism, were other destinations. Later, when they visited Paris, Wojtyła stunned Starowieyski by observing that the overcrowded Paris Metro was a “superb” place for contemplation.161
During the summer of 1947, Starowieyski and Wojtyła traveled around Europe with funds provided by Cardinal Sapieha. They met Parisian worker-priests in the French capital and discussed their efforts to evangelize the post-Christian French proletariat—an experience that Wojtyła later remembered as “enormously important,” and the occasion for his first article in Tygodnik Powszechny, some time later.162 The two young Poles spent ten days in the Netherlands, admiring “the vigor of the Church…
its active organizations and lively ecclesial communities.”163 Most of the vacation was in Belgium, where Wojtyła took charge of a mission to Polish Catholic miners near Charleroi for a month. In addition to saying Mass, hearing confessions, and conducting catechism classes, he visited the mines and the miners’ families, whose welcome reminded him of his days in the quarry at Zakrzówek and the Solvay chemical plant.164
They started back to Rome in late October 1947 and stopped at Ars, home of St. John Mary Vianney, the legendary nineteenth-century curé. Ordained despite his deficiencies as a Latinist and a scholar, the Curé of Ars became the most sought-after confessor of his era, spending up to eighteen hours a day in the confessional counseling souls who came to him from all over France. Convinced that the sacrament of penance was an indispensable part of the drama of a Christian life, Karol Wojtyła came away from Ars determined that, in his priesthood, he, too, would make himself a “prisoner of the confessional.”165 It was a conviction strengthened by his observations on the growing gap between the Europe of gothic cathedrals through which he was traveling and the rapidly de-Christianizing Europe that was emerging, either freely or by communist fiat, in the aftermath of the war. The gap, he was convinced, could only be filled by a much more pastorally and evangelically engaged laity.166
One such layman lay gravely ill in Poland. Jan Tyranowski had spent exactly one year in the hospital, suffering from what was first diagnosed as tuberculosis, then as a generalized infection, and what may in fact have been a widespread cancer. He had lost an arm to amputation, and he had been unable to attend his mother’s funeral. Living Rosary members divided up visiting time, and a priest saw him every day. He took his illness without complaint, spent much of his time consoling others, and in his last hours asked the forgiveness of all whom he might have somehow offended. By all accounts his death, in March 1947, was exemplary: he died smiling at his friends and holding a crucifix to his breast.167 Distance, budgets, and Karol’s responsibilities in Rome made it impossible for his disciple, who was even then pursuing the Carmelite studies to which the tailor-mystic had first introduced him, to come home to Poland for the funeral.
Back in Rome, Father Karol Wojt?ya’s primary task was to complete his doctoral dissertation. He had passed the licentiate (master’s) exam in theology in July 1947, with forty marks out of a possible forty. The dissertation, which he had begun sketching in Kraków under the tutelage of Father Rózycki, was the final requirement for his doctoral degree.
Father Wojtyła prepared his doctorate during a time of considerable ferment in Catholic intellectual circles. In many European seminaries and graduate schools, efforts were under way to put the Church’s classic philosophy and theology, drawn from St. Thomas Aquinas, into dialogue with modern currents of thought. By contrast, the Dominican-led Angelicum, where Wojtyła studied, had positioned itself as the defender of a rigorous neo-scholasticism, a form of Thomism that had been developed from the mid-nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries as an alternative to modern philosophical methods. The intellectual climate at the Angelicum was certainly less adventurous than at other European centers. But if its professors were not so speculative as others, they gave their students a solid foundation in the basics of the Church’s theology. Angelicum graduates like Karol Wojtyła, who would later carry out original and creative philosophical and theological work, did so on the basis of having mastered the fundamentals of theology. They knew the tradition they would later engage critically and try to develop. That knowledge was a useful barrier against the temptation to criticize before they had understood.168
The leading figure on the Angelicum faculty during Wojtyła’s doctoral studies was Father Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, OP, the undisputed master of traditional neo-scholasticism. After Wojtyła had completed his work and returned to Poland, Garrigou would become embroiled in the fierce theological controversies of the late 1940s, which ultimately led to Pius XII’s 1950 encyclical Humani Generis and its sharp criticism of some of the exploratory theologies of the time. The temptation to read Garrigou’s entire career through the prism of this bitter controversy should be resisted, though. Father Garrigou-Lagrange was a strict traditionalist in his philosophy and his dogmatic theology, but he was also intensely interested in the mystical tradition, and particularly in St. John of the Cross. Deeply concerned about the Church’s situation after the war, he tried to develop a new priestly spirituality for a post-Christian Europe, bringing the mystical tradition to life in the world. In this respect, at least, Garrigou was something of a reformer. Moreover, Garrigou’s intellectual combativeness was not always mirrored in his personality. His students respected his encyclopedic knowledge. Unlike others in the professoriat, he was accessible to students, who were eager to get into his Saturday afternoon seminar on spirituality. Some of the young priest-students took him for their confessor, perhaps the highest compliment that one priest can pay another.
Father Garrigou-Lagrange became the director of Karol Wojtyła’s doctoral thesis, which examined St. John of the Cross’s understanding of faith. The Carmelite mystic was the obvious first bond between the venerable French Dominican and the young Polish priest. Wojtyła would also have been attracted to Garrigou’s work on priestly spirituality, with its emphasis on contemplation in the world. Garrigou and Wojtyła thought about St. John of the Cross differently, however. For Wojtyła, as for Jan Tyranowski, the Spanish Carmelite’s writings mapped the terrain of mystical experience. For Garrigou, John of the Cross was a speculative theologian whose doctrine of faith had to be reconciled with the Church’s theology as articulated by Thomas Aquinas.169 The creative tension between these two approaches was evident in Wojtyła’s dissertation, written in Latin and titled Doctrina de fide apud S. Ioannem a Cruce [The Doctrine of Faith According to St. John of the Cross].170
In his dissertation, Wojtyła emphasized the personal nature of the human encounter with God, in which believers transcend the boundaries of their creaturely existence in such a way that they become more truly and completely themselves. This encounter with the living God is not for mystics only. It is the center of every Christian life. The mystical experience reveals important things about the road to God and about the nature of our communion with God. It teaches us, for example, that the highest wisdom we can achieve is to know that we cannot “objectivize” our knowledge of God, for we do not come to know God as we come to know an object (a tree, a baseball, an automobile). Rather, we come to know God as we come to know another person, through mutual self-giving. As two persons in love come to live “within” each other without losing their own unique identities, God comes to live within us, and we come to dwell, in a sense, “within God,” without the radical difference between Creator and creature being lost. This is how Wojtyła interprets St. John of the Cross’s dramatic teaching that the goal of the Christian life is to become Dios par participación: “God by participation.”171
Wojtyła’s dissertation drew three other conclusions. First, because God cannot be known the way we know an object, there are limits to rationality as an approach to the mystery of God. Reason can know that God exists, but natural reason cannot tell us all the attributes of the God of the Bible. Second, faith is a personal encounter with God. Faith does not allow us to “grasp” who God is intellectually, for that would mean that faith enjoys a position superior to God. Rather, the encounter with God in faith teaches us that this “non-objectifiability” of God is a dimension of God-in-himself. It is the reason we can speak of God as “person” and of a personal encounter with God. Third, Wojtyła concludes that mystical communion, rather than an emotional “high,” is an experience of communion, of “being-with,” which utterly transcends the conventions of our creaturely existence.172
Wojtyła’s dissertation also reinforced his convictions about the inalienable dignity of the human person. Given the intensely personal nature of the encounter with God, the human person must enjoy freedom, for an authentic relationship of mutual self-giving can
only be entered freely. The certainty that emerges from that relationship is not the kind achieved by completing an algebraic equation. It is the certainty that emerges from the human heart, which can be given intellectual expression but which, ultimately, has its distinctive language of prayer and praise. But it is certainty, nonetheless.173
Mysticism, the interior dialogue with a personal yet ineffable God, is not something peripheral to the human condition. It is central to knowing the human person, and the tensions built into the human encounter with the infinite are the key to the drama of human life. We cannot really know others unless we know them as persons called to communion with God. God is part of understanding the human person, and whoever takes God away from human beings is taking away what is deepest and most truly human in us. In drawing these conclusions, Karol Wojtyła, while thinking theologically, defined the line of battle on which, for forty years, he would contest with communism for the soul of Poland.
In his review of the dissertation, Garrigou criticized Wojtyła for not using the phrase “divine object” of God. One assumes that this was an issue between dissertation director and student during the preparation of the dissertation and that Garrigou did not persuade Wojtyła of his point. Whatever the process involved, the fact remains that, in his insistence on not treating God as a divine “object,” even by way of analogy, Wojtyła was moving beyond the vocabulary, formulas, and intellectual categories that dominated the Angelicum during his two years there. The Thomism he had learned in Kraków and at the Angelicum—and its core philosophical conviction that the human mind could grasp the truth of things through a disciplined reflection on the world—had given him an intellectual foundation. But it was precisely that, a foundation. And foundations were meant to be built upon.
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