Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  The charismatic Father Wojtyła continued to attract followers and Rodzinka expanded along family lines. Wojtyła would also suggest bringing in new people, especially youngsters he thought needed friends. The group’s friendliness, and the openness that characterized their discussions, were in sharp contrast to the atmosphere at the university and the polytechnic, where no one spoke freely for fear of informers. Without their thinking very much about it, the companionship of Rodzinka became an alternative to the hollowness of communist society.43 After the Easter Week 1952 trip to the crocus fields near Zakopane, Wojtyła’s young people all began to call him Wujek, “Uncle,” a kind of Stalin-era nom de guerre.

  Previously, the chaplain’s task had been to provide sacramental services to students. Wojtyła, who intensified the chaplaincy’s sacramental ministry and involved the students in it liturgically, thought of his chaplaincy as a ministry of “accompaniment,” a way to “accompany” these students in their lives.44 The chaplain’s presence couldn’t be limited to the sanctuary and the confessional. A really effective chaplaincy, he believed, had to be present to these young lives in the world as well as in the church.

  Rodzinka and other Wojtyła-led groups of young people were a de facto underground, a new kind of resistance movement creating islands of free space in a totalitarian sea. Wujek’s young people didn’t think of themselves as heroes or rebels, yet the freedom they had experienced with him and among their friends began to spill over into the rest of their lives. Danuta Skrabianka wasn’t allowed to study for her master’s degree because she had lived in a dormitory run by nuns. When the authorities seized the dormitory and tried to expel the nuns, Danuta and a friend, encouraged by Wojtyła, went to Warsaw to ask that the sisters not be expelled, even though their bachelor’s degrees could have been withheld as a result. And when Stanisław Rybicki, another student, wasn’t permitted to make further engineering studies because of his Catholicism, he came to Wojtyła, who told him, “You know, if someone likes science, the science will come to him.”45 As yet another member of Środowisko put it, “We could live more freely because we were free inside.”46

  Assigned to complete a second doctorate in the fall of 1951, Wojtyła moved from the parish house at St. Florian’s to a church residence at Kanonicza, 21, in Kraków’s Old Town. The networks that eventually became his Środowisko continued to expand. Many of the old members of Rodzinka accompanied him to St. Catherine’s Church in Kazimierz for the 6 A.M. Mass he celebrated there daily after his move to Kanonicza Street. The St. Florian’s link wasn’t entirely broken. Wujek said a Mass for students there on the first Friday of every month, preached an annual student retreat in the fourth week of Lent each year, and took Rodzinka or his “little choir” of Gregorian singers on excursions into the countryside.

  As the young people Wujek first met at St. Florian’s graduated from university and began their professional lives, the intellectual conversation within the Wojtyła network intensified. A physicists’ group formed around Jerzy Janik and provided Wojtyła a way to stay in touch with the world of hard science. For his part, the physicist was fascinated by Wojtyła’s explanation of a “way of thinking” he had never encountered before—philosophy, and especially metaphysics, “in which one could speak coherently and in a connected way about everything,” from the ski poles they were carrying to God.47

  After their January 1953 trip and a summer vacation excursion later in the year, they decided to keep the discussion going. Janik recruited the scientists, who began to meet regularly with Wojtyła. Their first project was to read Thomas Aquinas and discuss his concept of nature against the backdrop of what they were doing in their labs and classrooms every day. Wojtyła, who had no formal scientific training, had what Janik called an “instinctive grasp of physics,” and was able to “translate” the scientists’ ideas into his own vocabulary of philosophy. The physicists were interested in discussing theory, but Wojtyła could also appeal to minds of a more immediately practical bent. A second discussion group, composed primarily of engineers, was initiated by Stanisław Rybicki, an early Rodzinka member, and a young man named Jerzy Ciesielski.

  Marriage was the most important transition in these young lives, and couples within both Rodzinka and the widening circle of young friends who would become Środowisko soon began falling in love. Six of the young men and women who climbed into the St. Florian’s choir loft and formed the core of Rodzinka later married. Wojtyła celebrated all their wedding Masses, after holding individual days of prayer and reflection for each couple. And he didn’t hesitate to challenge when he thought that appropriate. When Teresa Mięsowicz told Wujek that she wanted to marry Piotr Malecki (“mystery play” veteran, Wojtyła’s first altar boy at St. Florian’s, and, by this time, a research physicist who called himself the “enfant terrible of Środowisko”), Wojtyła pressed her on the question of whether, at twenty, she wasn’t too young. They talked it out, and she persuaded him.48

  Love, for Karol Wojtyła, was the truth at the very center of the human condition, and love always meant self-giving, not self-assertion. In December 1956, he explored this in a letter to Środowisko member Teresa Heydel:

  Dear Teresa,

  People like to think that Wujek would like to see everyone married. But I think this is a false picture. The most important problem is really something else. Everyone…lives, above all, for love. The ability to love authentically, not great intellectual capacity, constitutes the deepest part of a personality. It is no accident that the greatest commandment is to love. Authentic love leads us outside ourselves to affirming others: devoting oneself to the cause of man, to people, and, above all, to God. Marriage makes sense…if it gives one the opportunity for such love, if it evokes the ability and necessity of such loving, if it draws one out of the shell of individualism (various kinds) and egocentrism. It is not enough simply to want to accept such love. One must know how to give it, and it’s often not ready to be received. Many times it’s necessary to help it to be formed…. Wujek49

  A month later, Wojtyła was still thinking out loud, in another letter to Teresa Heydel, about the nature of love:

  Dear Teresa:

  Before I leave for Warsaw I have to tell you a few things (think together with you): 1) I don’t want you ever to think this way: that life forces me to move away from the perspective of something that is better, riper, fuller, to something that is less good, less mature, less attractive. I am convinced that life is a constant development toward that which is better, more perfect—if there is no stagnation within us. 2) After many experiences and a lot of thinking, I am convinced that the (objective) starting point of love is the realization that I am needed by another. The person who objectively needs me most is also, for me, objectively, the person I most need. This is a fragment of life’s deep logic, and also a fragment of trusting in the Creator and in Providence. 3) People’s values are different and they come in different configurations. The great achievement is always to see values that others don’t see and to affirm them. The even greater achievement is to bring out of people the values that would perish without us. In the same way, we bring our values out in ourselves. 4) This is what I wanted to write you. Don’t ever think that I want to cut short your way. I want your way. Wujek50

  When children began to arrive, Wojtyła gave each expectant mother a day of recollection before her delivery. He baptized the babies and came to bless their homes afterward, a practice he continued as long as he lived in Kraków, whatever his responsibilities. “He always had time,” Teresa Malecka recalled. “He understood that to baptize means to come home, to be with the family, to bless the baby sleeping in the bed. We didn’t have to ask him to do this; he wanted to do it.”51

  Wujek taught his young couples that the sexual expression of their love within the bond of marriage was a beautiful thing, a holy thing, even an image of God. At the same time, he had a very high view of marriage, formed in conversation with “serious people, who gave themselves time to thin
k.”52 What others might regard as heroic decisions and sacrificial commitments (e.g., in observing periodic abstinence according to the rhythm of natural family planning), he saw as logical, or simply right. As his letters to Teresa Heydel suggest, this did not make him an insensitive or authoritarian interlocutor. It did make him a challenging and demanding friend.

  THE GOSPEL IN KAYAKS

  Wojtyła’s Środowisko was also noted for its outdoorsmanship, another pastoral innovation in a time and place where priests simply didn’t take vacations with young adults and young married couples. Wujek, a veteran hiker from his youth in Wadowice, was thoroughly at home in nature. His young friends were avid skiers and kayakers. And so the pastoral method of “accompaniment” frequently took them to Poland’s mountains and lakes together.

  Wojtyła’s ski trip with Jerzy Janik in January 1953 was the first in an annual series that continued to the end of his Kraków years. Wojtyła loved skiing, was good at it, and could be something of a daredevil. In August of that year, Stanisław Rybicki, Zdzisław Heydel, and Jerzy Ciesielski organized Środowisko’s first summer trek, to the Bieszczady Mountains in southeastern Poland, once the stronghold of interwar Poland’s Ukrainian population, where in 1945–1947 thousands of its villagers had paid with their lives for their belief, as they put it, in “neither Hitler nor Stalin.”53 Sixteen young people participated in the trek. The newcomers were told to call Wojtyła “Wujek,” since the regime still didn’t permit priests to go out with groups of young people. They took an eight-hour train trip to Ustrzyki Dolne, in the far southeast corner of the country, where Wujek celebrated his first Mass “in the field” with members of Środowisko. The next day they hiked up to Ustrzyki Górne, which had once been a Ukrainian sheep-grazing region. The group stayed overnight in abandoned, one-room shepherd’s huts, because they didn’t have good tents or sleeping bags; old blankets and rucksacks were the extent of their camping equipment. Passing some of the overgrown cemeteries and burned-out villages that bore mute witness to the bitter struggle that had taken place in the region six years before, they stayed the next night in a barn that had once been a Ukrainian church. Some wanted to skip the usual group evening prayer around a campfire and turn right in, saying their prayers lying comfortably in the straw. It was Stanisław Rybicki, not Wujek, who replied that “Whoever prays lying down, God hears while sleeping.” Later in the trek, during a rough hike over difficult terrain, Zdzisław Heydel cracked, a bit sourly, “Wujek, one day when you’re pope, people will get indulgences for walking this trail with you on a moonless night.” For all the youthful camaraderie, though, they allowed Wujek his solitude when, toward the end of a day of hiking and conversation, singing and jokes, he would drift back to the end of the line of hikers for an hour or two of prayer alone.54

  The next month, September 1953, was the first Środowisko kayaking trip, the beginning of an annual tradition that Wojtyła cherished and that would continue until August 1978. Kayaking together was the inspiration of Jerzy Ciesielski, an engineer of boundless energy who had first met Wojtyła at St. Florian’s and with whom he soon struck up a close personal friendship. Everyone recognized, and accepted, the special bond between Wujek and Jurek Ciesielski. A certified instructor in skiing, kayaking, and swimming, Ciesielski, because of his infectious enthusiasm and his willingness to teach anyone anything he knew, was the kind of organizer and leader others didn’t resent.55

  The annual kayak trip was a “vacation-plus” for Środowisko and Wojtyła. After Ciesielski had taught him to manage a kayak, Wujek always had a two-person boat, and others would join him during the day for conversation or spiritual direction. Mass was celebrated using an overturned kayak as an altar, with two paddles lashed together to form the altar cross.56 Once, in 1955, the kayakers took part in an international competition on the Dunajec River, which runs through a magnificent gorge along the Polish-Slovak border. Wujek’s kayak was punctured at Sromowice Ni?ne and sank at the finish line in Szczawnica. According to one pious report, only his breviary didn’t get soaked.57

  When the children of Środowisko became old enough to join the kayak trip, Wujek took each meal with a different family every day, working his way around the entire group. Soccer games were organized between the “married team” and the “youth team,” Wujek, the former goalie of Wadowice, playing for whichever team was shorthanded. Around the campfire in the evening, the adults would discuss books or, years later, John XXIII’s encyclical Pacem in Terris.

  When he left St. Florian’s in late 1951 to work on his philosophy doctorate, Karol Wojtyła left parish life as the term is usually understood. To his mind, though, a priest without a parish was a vocational absurdity. Środowisko was his nonterritorial parish. “Wujek was one of us,” his friend Gabriel Turowski remembered, “but at the same time he was a pastor for the people who rested with him.”58

  Whether to smooth troubled clerical waters over his unconventional lay interactions, or to recruit others to the ministry of “accompaniment,” Wojtyła accepted the offer of the editor of Homo Dei [Man of God], a Polish priests’ magazine, to write an article in 1957 explaining what he and his young friends were up to in the mountains and along the rivers of Poland. But he gave his acceptance an interesting twist by inviting Jerzy Ciesielski to share the platform with him.

  Wojtyła’s essential point was that the priest’s duty to help make God present in the world was not satisfied by his daily celebration of Mass. In addition, “the duty of a priest is to live with people, everywhere they are, to be with them in everything but sin.” That was the context for looking at vacations as a pastoral opportunity. Daily Mass took on a special texture on a vacation trek: “Nature, not only human art, participates in the sacrifice of the Son of God.” At Mass, a thought for the day could be proposed, then be returned to in the evening, during communal prayer. An excursion, he wrote, had to be a “well-prepared improvisation” in which the priest was ready and willing to talk about everything, “about movies, about books, about one’s own work, about scientific research, and about jazz bands…” Was this kind of pastoral work, built around vacations with young men and women, a “compromise” of the priesthood (as some were, evidently, suggesting)? Doing it like this might not be for everybody. It certainly was a form of ministry, a way of leading others to Christ, for the man who signed himself, simply, “Priest.”

  The “Young Engineer” (as Ciesielski pseudonymously signed his piece) described the growth of what would later be called Środowisko, and suggested that, in the atheistic-secularist environment in which they found themselves, priests had a special responsibility to help those who want “consciously to create the lifestyle of a modern Catholic.” These were men and women who were living busy professional, intellectual, and family lives. They knew one another through church and through meetings in the city. “But we live fully during excursions. They help us look at our problems from a different perspective.” He then concluded with a moving tribute to the unnamed Wujek, who taught them “to look at all things in the spirit of the Gospel.”59

  In Poland as elsewhere, communism deliberately fostered the fragmentation of society and the atomization of its members, the better to maintain political control and the easier to form “new socialist man.” If Jurek Ciesielski and Wojtyła’s other young friends found that they were “living fully” when they were with him, it may well have been because Wujek’s pastoral strategy of “accompaniment” and his invitation to “look at all things in the spirit of the Gospel” was a compelling communitarian alternative to the artificially created and rigorously enforced anti-community that was being pressed on them in communist Poland.

  PERMANENT OPENNESS

  Two characteristics constantly recur in Środowisko members’ descriptions of Wujek. The first is what Teresa Malecka describes as his “permanent openness”: “We felt completely free with him, without any burden. His presence led us to express ourselves. While he was among us, we felt that everything was all right…. We felt
that we could discuss any problem with him; we couldtalk about absolutely anything.”60 That openness was complemented, indeed built around, the second prominent characteristic in Wojtyła’s priestly personality: “He had mastered the art of listening,” as Stanisław Rybicki puts it. No matter what the subject introduced—religion, daily life, work, children—“he was always interested.”61

  Openness and a seemingly endless capacity for listening were completed by a deep respect for the freedom of others. Dr. Rybicki recalls that, while “I talked to him for hours and hours [I] never heard him say, ‘I’d advise you to’…He’d throw light on [a problem]. But then he would always say, ‘You have to decide.’”62 He was, in a word, gently forcing judgments and choices.

  Wujek’s interaction with his Środowisko unfolded in a dialectic of intimacy and reserve. No subject was off-the-board. His friends respected him as a priest and experienced him as a priest wholly devoid of clericalism. On treks and kayaking trips, he shared in all the chores, down to lugging kayaks and burying garbage. Yet there was a reserve about him that his friends honored. He was not a “buddy,” although he was a close friend, and neither he nor they pretended to a false familiarity. They all called him Wujek, but used the more formal form of “you” in speaking with him; he would use the more informal form of “you” after getting to know someone. Stanisław Rybicki summed up this dimension of their relationship, and Wojtyła’s style, by observing, “Today, many priests try to be like the kids. We were trying to be like him.”63

  Although Wojtyła seems to have been wholly free of the intellectual’s tendency to domineer, his capacity for posing the sharp-edged question made him the center of gravity of a discussion. Środowisko conversations were serious, but rather than discussing politics or political philosophy, they would talk about the quotidian moral dilemmas of living under a communist regime: theft from work, petty cheating on stupid bureaucratic regulations, and so forth, discussions in which his friends tended to be harder on their colleagues than he was.64 There were arguments but rarely major disagreements.