Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  LESSONS

  On June 14, 1948, Father Karol Wojtyła passed his doctoral examinations with high marks and his thesis was given eighteen marks out of a possible twenty by the examiners. His oral defense of the dissertation received the highest grade possible, fifty marks out of fifty. Despite these achievements Father Wojtyła did not receive the doctoral degree from the Angelicum, whose rules required that the dissertation be published before the degree could actually be conferred. The young Polish priest couldn’t pay for the printing, so on his return to Poland he resubmitted the dissertation to the Faculty of Theology of the Jagiellonian University, which, after appropriate review, conferred on him the degree of doctor of theology in December 1948.174

  Leaving the Angelicum in the summer of 1948 and returning to Poland marked the end of Karol Wojtyła’s preparation for the life for which he believed he had been chosen.175

  Events had chiseled him into an early maturity. Having come relatively late to his vocational decision after anticipating living his Christian life as a layman, he was a priest intimately familiar with the lives of ordinary people. He was a Polish patriot, but like his father before him, he was untouched by xenophobia. He knew the special cultural and intellectual connection between his country and the universal Church, even as he thought that his hard-pressed country might have something to offer the West that had betrayed it twice in six years. He had learned totalitarianism from inside. As he later said, “I participated in the great experience of my contemporaries—humiliation at the hands of evil.”176 Yet he had found a path beyond humiliation and bitterness. It had led him to the altar, where he had pledged to spend himself in service to his people.

  He was, his seminary confessor remembered, a man “who loved easily.”177 That capacity for love, and all his learning, would now be tested in the daily life of a parish priest in the Polish People’s Republic.

  “Call Me Wujek”

  To Be a Priest

  JUNE 15, 1948

  Father Karol Wojtyła returns to Poland from graduate studies in Rome.

  JULY 28, 1948

  Wojtyła arrives in Niegowić, his first parish assignment.

  DECEMBER 26, 1948

  Jagiellonian University Faculty of Theology confers the doctoral degree on Wojtyła.

  MARCH 6, 1949

  Karol Wojtyła publishes his first essay, on the French worker-priest movement, in Tygodnik Powszechny.

  MARCH 17, 1949

  Father Wojtyła is assigned to St. Florian’s parish in Kraków to begin a student chaplaincy.

  WINTER 1949–1950

  Wojtyła organizes courses for engaged couples and completes his play, Our God’s Brother.

  MAY 7, 1950

  Wojtyła’s poem-cycle, “Song of the Brightness of Water,” published pseudonymously in Tygodnik Powszechny.

  FEBRUARY 2, 1951

  Rodzinka, Father Wojtyła’s “little family” of students, begins to form.

  MAY 4, 1951

  Wojtyła’s “little choir” of university students sings the Gregorian “Missa de Angelis” for the first time.

  APRIL 1952

  Father Karol Wojtyła is dubbed Wujek, “Uncle,” by his young friends.

  AUGUST–SEPTEMBER 1953

  Father Wojtyła’s Środowisko [“milieu”] takes its first mountain trek and its first kayaking trip.

  NOVEMBER 1957

  Wojtyła’s poem-cycle, “The Quarry,” published pseudonymously in Znak.

  MARCH 23, 1958

  Wojtyła’s poem-cycle, “Profiles of a Cyrenean,” published pseudonymously in Tygodnik Powszechny.

  DECEMBER 1960

  Wojtyła’s play, The Jeweler’s Shop, published pseudonymously in Znak.

  The Sisters of Nazareth in charge of the Catholic women’s dormitory on Kraków’s Warszawska Street always locked their building overnight. At 10 P.M. on Easter Saturday, 1952, an accommodating nun opened the door and let five university students—Danuta Skrabianka, Ola Kobak, Danuta Motowska, Wanda Szczpak, and Elśbieta Jacuńska—out onto the dark street. Their friend, Teresa Skawińska, had invited them to Zakopane, in the Tatra Mountains south of Kraków, to see the fields of wild crocuses then in bloom—a Technicolor respite from the gray drabness of urban life in Stalinist Poland.

  The plan was to walk quietly across town to the train station, where they would meet several young men, students at the Kraków Polytechnic, whom the girls had met at church activities. Together with a university chaplain, they would take the overnight train to Zakopane, enjoy a day in the crocus fields, and return to Kraków on the Sunday night train, in time for Monday’s classes. When they got to the station, though, the boys were nowhere in sight. The only person on the platform was a stranger they didn’t recognize until he came closer. It was the priest, their chaplain, dressed in battered old clothes, as they’d never seen him before. One of the Polytechnic students finally ran up and said that the boys weren’t going to be able to make it. An exam had been moved up and they had to stay home to study.

  The girls now had a serious problem. The dorm was locked so they couldn’t go home. And a priest on a train trip with five unmarried young women was clearly impossible. Beyond questions of propriety, the communist regime strictly forbade priests to work with groups of young people. When the train arrived, the chaplain simply said, “Let’s get in.”

  It was a quiet trip to Zakopane. The train was crowded. To talk to a priest without a cassock and call him “Father” would raise a lot of eyebrows—or the suspicions of whatever state security types might be ferreting about. On arriving at the mountain resort, they went to Mass in a small chapel and then walked to Teresa Skawińska’s home, where her father, an artist, took them out to see the crocuses.

  The flowers were as beautiful as they had hoped, but Danuta Skrabianka wondered how they could talk to their chaplain on the trip home without giving him away or compromising him. Gathering her nerve, she explained her concerns and asked him, shyly, whether they could call him by a fictional family name. The chaplain didn’t hesitate. Quoting the most famous line in Henryk Sienkiewicz’s trilogy, Father Karol Wojtyła answered the worried college girl: “Call me ‘Uncle.’”1

  HARD TIMES

  Karol Wojtyła began his pastoral work as a priest in historical circumstances unprecedented for even so ancient a diocese as Kraków. Nothing that the See of St. Stanisław had ever experienced was quite like the Stalinist period in post-war communist Poland.

  Day in and day out, the Church confronted the sneering question, first posed by Stalin at the Potsdam Conference, “How many divisions has the Pope?”2 The communist regime was not satisfied with dominating every aspect of Poland’s political and economic life. Its broader cultural agenda was to inculcate an atheistic ideology and a rereading of Poland’s national history that severed the link between Polish nationalism and Polish Catholicism.

  During his time in Rome, Father Wojtyła had missed the most chaotic months of the communist accession to power in Poland, which followed hard on the heels of the Red Army’s advance in the endgame of World War II. While the political engineers imposed the new Soviet order (by, among other tactics, torturing and murdering thousands of Polish patriots falsely accused of collaboration with the Nazis), the Polish people had to rebuild the country from the ground up. Kraków excepted, every city was in ruins. The rubble had to be cleared away; tens of thousands of corpses buried; the buildings rebuilt; electricity, water, and sewage reestablished; streets repaved. An immense population transfer took place, as a million and a half Poles from that part of prewar Poland now within the boundaries of the USSR were moved to the “Recovered Territories” in the west, from which the German population was largely expelled. Another 2.2 million Poles flooded back into the country from Third Reich labor and concentration camps. An anti-Semitic pogrom took place in Kielce in 1946, likely instigated by the communists. Meanwhile, a two-year-long civil war raged in the woods and mountains as various resistance movements refused to s
urrender to the new Soviet-controlled regime. World War II didn’t really end in Poland until mid-1947 or thereabouts.3 Shortly afterward, a classic Stalin-era “election” was stage-managed to demonstrate the new regime’s alleged popular support.4

  By July 1948, when Wojtyła was back in Kraków awaiting a parish assignment, a certain stability—of a Stalinist sort—had set in to Polish life. The twenty-eight-year-old priest had come back to a place “where the dawn knock on the door was still expected, where prisons were full and beatings many, where the secret policeman was still his brother’s keeper, and where the Great Teacher was neither Christ nor Buddha but the megalomaniac son of a Georgian shoemaker through whom millions had died.”5 This was the world in which Father Karol Wojtyła began his ministry.

  It was a world in which the Church’s resistance would be led for more than thirty years by the former underground chaplain code-named “Sister Cecilia,” Stefan Wyszyński. Father Wyszyński had returned to the seminary in Włocławek in 1945, hoping to pick up the threads of his teaching career, but the Holy See had other plans. In March 1946, Pope Pius XII named Wyszyński the bishop of Lublin. He left the Włocławek seminary on the same day that five of his priest-colleagues returned from Dachau, and was consecrated bishop at the Jasna Góra monastery in Częstochowa on May 12, 1946. His time in Lublin was brief. Just over two years later, on November 12, 1948, Pius XII named Bishop Wyszyński, age forty-seven, archbishop of Gniezno and Warsaw and Primate of Poland.

  The new Primate brought a carefully thought-out view of the Church’s current situation to his responsibilities. During World War II, he believed, the Polish Church had proven that it knew how to suffer and die. Its task, now, was to show that it knew how to live. The unprecedented shock the Church had suffered during the Occupation meant that it could not withstand a direct confrontation with the new communist regime. Conflict was inevitable, but it had to be managed subtly and in the firm conviction that the Church, not the Party, was the true guardian of Poland’s identity. His first tasks, Wyszyński believed, were the full restoration of the Church’s pastoral ministry and the spiritual renewal of the country as a whole, which he identified with a deepening of Poland’s traditional Marian piety. Wyszyński was dubious as to whether intellectuals, particularly Polish intellectuals influenced by western European currents of thought, could contribute to this process of ecclesiastical renewal. But for all his suspicions of those who lived in a world of abstractions, Wyszyński, a longtime student and exponent of Catholic social doctrine, was himself a social and economic reformer. He was also a Polish patriot and a close student of history whose primary political goal was to prevent the absorption of his country by its gigantic neighbor to the east.

  Polish Catholicism in the late 1940s could look back on almost a thousand years of national and ecclesiastical history. The Church knew the transient nature of political regimes. It was also beginning to suspect that its position had been strengthened by its mortal enemies, Hitler and Stalin. The sacrifices and heroism of its clergy during the Nazi Occupation had given the Church immense moral credibility. Stalin, by “moving” Poland westward on the European map, had created the most Polish and Catholic Poland in national history. In the first years of Poland’s communist regime, the Church and its leaders came to understand that the Church’s immediate tasks were to survive and to revitalize itself, mounting a resistance whenever the communist authorities encroached on nonnegotiable issues of Church identity or ministry. A frontal challenge to the regime would have to wait until later.

  All of which, it seemed to Father Karol Wojtyła, required a new pattern of relations between Poland’s Catholic clergy and the Polish laity. Poland’s priests bore a special responsibility for the Church, but they were not the Church. To survive, to revitalize itself, and to assume an independent role in the new Poland, the Church was going to have to make clear that sanctity and vocational commitment were for everyone, not just for the clergy.6

  COUNTRY CURATE

  Father Wojtyła’s first pastoral assignment in 1948 was as curate (assistant pastor, or, in the local terminology, “vicar”) at the Church of the Assumption of Our Lady in Niegowić, a village in the foothills of the Carpathians, about fifteen miles east of Kraków, past the salt mine at Wieliczka. Although Cardinal Sapieha usually sent priests returning from studies to a small parish, to immerse themselves immediately in direct pastoral work, the choice of Niegowić seems not to have been random; the pastor, Father Kazimierz Buzała, was a man in whom Cardinal Sapieha reposed much trust.7 Perhaps the Prince Cardinal also thought that a rural diet would fatten up the newly minted doctor of theology, who had come back from Rome thinner than ever.8

  Father Wojtyła walked into his assignment. Having gotten as far as Gdów by bus, he hitched a ride in a cart to another village, Marszowice, where the cart driver showed him a shortcut through the fields to Niegowić. It was harvest time, and the new curate “walked through the fields of grain with the crops in part already reaped, and in part still waving in the wind.”9 On reaching the parish’s territory, he knelt down and kissed the ground, a gesture he had learned from his reading about the Curé of Ars. After making a visit to the Blessed Sacrament in the wooden church, Father Wojtyła went to the parish house and introduced himself to his pastor, who welcomed him with kindness and showed him to his quarters.10

  The accommodations in Niegowić made the spartan Belgian College seem almost luxurious. There was neither electricity nor running water nor sewerage in the region. Recent floods had seriously damaged the district’s roads and fields.11 Cows and chickens wandered among the lime trees. Father Wojtyła unpacked his meager belongings, met the other assistant pastor, Father Kazimierz Ciuba, and got to work.

  His primary responsibility was religious education. Traveling by horse cart to the five nearby village schools, he taught religion to elementary school–age youngsters. His parishioners remember him reading books in the cart en route to giving his lessons. The children, evidently, varied from village to village and school to school. As he later wrote, “some were well behaved and quiet, others very lively.”12 The people were friendly, and their willingness to provide his transportation during their own work hours tells something about their commitment to the religious formation of their children. That the new curate had arrived with almost nothing formed another bond with his impoverished parishioners. So did the house-to-house visits he made during the Christmas season for carol singing, tromping through the snow in his cassock and well-worn overcoat.13

  In addition to celebrating Mass for the parish, Father Wojtyła began to hold himself to the promise made during his visit to Ars, that he would become a “prisoner of the confessional.” The confessional, he told a visiting Mieczysław Maliński, was where priests encountered their people in the depths of their humanity, helping the person on the other side of the confessional screen to enter more deeply into the Christian drama of his or her own unique life. If priests stopped doing this, they’d become office managers or bureaucrats.14 (Shortly after arriving in Niegowić the young curate was supposed to give a talk on what he had seen in France and Belgium to a group of local clergy. Father Wojtyła was late, being detained in the confessional. His priestly elders were off-put by this tardiness, thinking it bad form. They came around when Wojtyła gave a talk several cuts above the usual post-dinner clerical fare.15)

  The new curate’s personal charity soon became apparent. Determined to live simply, he gave away what he thought he didn’t need. When an old woman complained that she had been robbed, he gave her the pillow and comforter some parishioners had just given him, somewhat to the donors’ disgruntlement.16 As for Father Karol, he went back to sleeping on a bare bed.

  The parishioners of Niegowić also discovered that their new assistant pastor was a man of no small plans. In the spring, when the parish was discussing what it might do to mark Father Buzała’s fiftieth anniversary of ordination, some rather modest ideas were bruited: paint the fence around the church, t
idy things up a bit, and so forth. Father Wojtyła suggested that the best possible present for the pastor would be an entirely new church, which the parishioners could raise the money for and build. Stunned at first, they finally agreed to the proposal. The brick church remains today, the first built at the suggestion of Karol Wojtyła.17

  The young curate also took his first steps in ministry to engaged couples and newlyweds in Niegowić. During his months there he officiated at thirteen weddings and baptized forty-eight babies.18 And if the people of Niegowić were simple, their new priest didn’t treat them like simpletons. He organized a drama club and directed them in a play, The Expected Guest, in which he played the title role of a beggar who turns out to be Christ.19 Faithful to the memory of Jan Tyranowski, he also organized a Living Rosary group in the parish and formed its young leaders. But this was Poland in 1948, and nothing was simple. The curate’s work with the parish young people—including songfests in the fields, discussion groups, and sports—drew the attention of the local communist ferrets. When they tried to intimidate one of Father Wojtyła’s youngsters, the priest told the teenager not to worry—“they’ll finish themselves off.”20

  Niegowić, he thought, was a “wonderful community,” but a rural post was not the kind of ministry Cardinal Sapieha had in mind for Father Wojtyła over the long haul.21 In March 1949, eight months after his arrival, the curate of Niegowić was transferred to St. Florian’s parish in Kraków, a very different kind of setting. There, Karol Wojtyła would develop a pastoral method and form a set of friendships that would endure for more than half a century.