Or the Samaritan woman whom Jesus meets at the well in Sichar, reflecting on the meaning of their encounter:
He suffused me without difficulty
burst my shame in me and the thoughts I’d suppressed for so long as if he had touched a rhythm in my temples
and all of a sudden carried that great exhaustion in me…
and with such care…118
Sometimes carefully crafted, at other times written hastily on the margins of official papers and then dispatched “as is” to Tygodnik Powszechny (where the editors ran them in the form in which they arrived119), Wojtyła’s poems were simply the way one wrote about a particular idea or experience. They were the appropriate medium of expression for a certain kind of reflection, even a form of prayer.120 The experiences that compelled this kind of expression could, for Wojtyła, be drawn from such personal encounters as being a confessor or confirming young people in a mountain village, or from great historical events like the Second Vatican Council or the millennium of Polish Christianity.
While Wojtyła’s poetry “fits” within the tradition of contemplative religious poetry, there are few exhortations in it, and even these are delivered in a thoroughly humanistic voice. The poet rarely praises or condemns; he most often describes. This is not, in other words, “Christian apologetics in verse.”121 Yet the poet’s optic on the lives on which he is reflecting is profoundly Christian. Against the temptation to see life as a relatively flat terrain in which decency is rather cost-free, Wojtyła almost relentlessly lays bare the dramatic tension to be found in every life. He does not scold, but suggests to his readers that the great choice posed to the human person in the modern world is the choice “between sanctity and the loss of [one’s] humanity.”122 To know this can be both fascinating and terrifying, for we are dealing here with the sacred. That encounter, Wojtyła insists, is unavoidable, if we want to live authentically and maturely, in touch with the dignity of our own lives and in fellowship with others:
…You had better walk the wave! Walk the wave, don’t hurt your feet—the wave will embrace you and in such a way that you would not feel that you are drowning.
And then will come He and his own yoke
will put on your shoulders. And feeling it you will awake trembling.123
THE ENGAGED ASCETIC
Father Karol Wojtyła lived an exceptionally rich experience as a young priest, rich in friends, activities, intellectual and literary creativity. Those riches stood in marked contrast to his personal asceticism.
He never had a bank account, never wrote a check, never had any personal money.124 He slept on the floor and practiced other forms of self-discipline and self-denial. Possessions meant nothing to him, with the possible exception of the skiing and hiking equipment he accepted from his Środowisko friends. Mieczysław Maliński, by now a fellow priest, once threw his friend’s rusty old razor away and gave him a new one for a name-day present. If he hadn’t thrown the old one out, he was sure Wojtyła would have given the new one away, as he did with most gifts.125 He always wore an old cassock and old shoes. Looking at him, Maliński remembers, you might think he was a beggar, a clochard, a nobody.126
Given the expectations of contemporary biography, a writer almost regrets the absence of detractors and critics of his subject. Perhaps even more striking is the fact that Karol Wojtyła’s intelligence, creativity, and pastoral success did not attract clerical jealousies. Priests sometimes say that envy is the besetting sin of the Roman Catholic clergy. According to Mieczysław Maliński, Wojtyła was “beyond discussion” in Kraków clerical circles, in part because “his extraordinariness wasn’t worn lightly—it wasn’t worn at all.”127 The one complaint about him was that he seemed to live according to a personal chronometer set to Wojtyła Standard Time and was almost always late for meetings and appointments, having gotten himself absorbed in his previous engagement or his voracious and incessant reading.
He loved his priesthood and yet spent the bulk of his free time, which turned into a different kind of ministerial time, with laypeople. Friends, once made, were friends forever, and he was always accessible to them. Jacek Woźniakowski remembers him as a great “intuitive” reader of souls.128 This trait might well have made him into a very dangerous personality, at the least a manipulator of others’ lives, at worst a rank demagogue. Disciplined by a life of intense prayer and asceticism, he became instead a great confessor and an accomplished poet and dramatist.
The mid-1950s were perhaps the most difficult years for the Catholic Church in communist Poland. The 1952 Constitution of the Polish People’s Republic decreed the separation of Church and state, by which the party meant the subordination of the Church to the state. The regime put increasing pressure on Catholic publications and shut down the junior seminaries. Large numbers of priests were again arrested (including Father Tadeusz Kurowski, Wojtyła’s old pastor at St. Florian’s); others were harassed by new taxes.129 A “patriotic priests’” association allied with “Pax” attacked the bishops and called for the Primate’s resignation. Bishop Czesław Kaczmarek of Kielce was arrested, tried, and sentenced to twelve years in prison after a classic Stalinist show trial.
The point of maximum confrontation came in May 1953, when the government announced that the state would henceforth appoint and remove bishops and pastors and require all priests to take a loyalty oath to the Polish People’s Republic. Led by Cardinal Wyszyński, the bishops drew the line. In a fiery sermon at St. John’s Cathedral in Warsaw, the Primate threw down the gauntlet: “We teach that it is proper to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God what is God’s. But when Caesar seats himself on the altar, we respond curtly: he must not.”130 The bishops then met under Wyszyński’s chairmanship in Kraków and issued an epic statement defending the independence of the Church, which concluded: “We are not allowed to place the things of God on the altar of Caesar. Non possumus! [We cannot!]”131 The regime labeled the memorandum high treason (the euphemism was “an attack on the Constitution”). On the night of September 25–26, 1953, Cardinal Wyszyński was arrested and interned, first in a former monastery in the northwest, later in a convent in the south.
He was released in 1956 when the regime, led again by Władysław Gomułka and facing a Soviet invasion in the wake of rioting and unrest, invited him back to Warsaw. Wyszyński demanded a repeal of the 1953 decree, Bishop Kaczmarek’s release from prison, the restoration of the Catholic press, the regularization of Church governance, and a new mixed commission of government and episcopate representatives. Gomułka agreed. Wyszyński—by now an international figure, profiled in Life magazine as a symbol of resistance to communism—returned to Warsaw and began to implement the “Great Novena,” a nine-year program of pastoral renewal he had devised during his internment to prepare the country for its millennium celebrations in 1966.
By all accounts, Father Karol Wojtyła continued to be utterly uninterested in what passed for “politics” in Poland in the 1950s. The only newspaper he read was Tygodnik Powszechny, and who was up or down in the party Politburo or among the local party apparatchiks didn’t concern him. But it would be erroneous to conclude that he believed in offering up the Church’s suffering to God while eschewing any form of resistance. Like many other Polish priests, he was creating de facto networks of resistance to communism by helping to raise up a generation of Poles who could resist the communist culture of the lie with the truth of their religious and moral convictions. His writing never attacked communism directly. He didn’t have to. It was perfectly clear to his readers that Wojtyła was giving expression to a vision of human life and human destiny utterly at cross-purposes with the official ideology.
He was a private man who kept a part of himself for himself—the part where he had his most intense conversation with his God. Yet he was becoming something of a public personality in a city he had come to love.132 He lived a singularly integrated priestly and personal life that was now sharply focused not on defending the insti
tution of the Church (others had that responsibility), but on defending the dignity of the human person, of whom the Church was a servant. Like Brother Albert, he believed that the Church was the defender of the human person against persecution and humiliation. And as Brother Albert had understood, that was why the Church was the true zone of freedom.133
Seeing Things as They Are
The Making of a Philosopher
SEPTEMBER 1, 1951
Father Karol Wojtyła begins two-year academic sabbatical.
OCTOBER 1953
Wojtyła begins to lecture on social ethics at the Jagiellonian University.
JANUARY 1954
The Jagiellonian University Faculty of Theology awards Wojtyła his second doctorate.
OCTOBER 12, 1954
Father Wojtyła is appointed to the philosophy department of the Catholic University of Lublin [KUL].
1954–1955 ACADEMIC YEAR
Wojtyła delivers upper-level lectures at KUL on “Act and Experience,” discussing the philosophical ethics of Max Scheler, Immanuel Kant, and Thomas Aquinas.
MAY 28–30, 1955
Karol Wojtyła participates in an international kayaking competition on the Dunajec river.
1955–1956 ACADEMIC YEAR
Wojtyła’s upper-level lectures at KUL on “Goodness and Value” consider the ethics of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Kant, and Scheler.
MARCH 5–10, 1956
Father Wojtyła preaches his annual student retreat at St. Florian’s in Kraków.
1956–1957 ACADEMIC YEAR
Wojtyła’s KUL lectures on “Norm and Happiness” confront the philosophical ethics of David Hume and Jeremy Bentham.
DECEMBER 1, 1956
Karol Wojtyła is appointed to the Chair of Ethics at the Catholic University of Lublin.
1957–1958 ACADEMIC YEAR
Wojtyła’s upper-level lectures focus on sexual ethics, a series that will continue in the 1958–1959 academic year.
1960
Karol Wojtyła’s book, Love and Responsibility, is published by the KUL press.
1960–1961 ACADEMIC YEAR
Wojtyła’s last upper-level lectures treat the “Theory and Methodology of Ethics.”
One fall day in 1955, a priest in his mid-thirties walked into the seminary at 3 Mickiewicz Street in Kraków to teach his class in Catholic social ethics. He was not dressed in the usual manner of academia. He wore a leather cap rather than a more formal black hat. His threadbare cassock was covered by a worn, dark green coat, which seemed to have been made from material originally intended for the manufacture of blankets.
Entering the recreation hall where his class was held, he tossed his overcoat over the back of a chair and began to pace back and forth behind the podium, not so much lecturing as unraveling a skein of argument in which theology and everyday life were woven together. He never seemed to tire of looking at an issue, first from this angle, then from that, always trying to get the question just right. Sometimes he would stop, pause, and look out at his students—seminarians from Kraków, Częstochowa, and Silesia—to make sure that they had gotten a point. They were mesmerized by him. He not only dressed like no one else on the faculty, he taught like no one else on the faculty. This was not the transmission of information. This was intellectual exploration.
On this particular day, the professor was reprising some material they had recently covered—perhaps something on the relationship between the individual and the good of society, or the question of social class. In these review periods, called “colloquia,” his habit was to press the students to talk freely about what they had heard in his lectures. Since the conventions of the day dictated student reticence, he sometimes had to press hard. In this instance, he wasn’t disappointed.
Twenty-year-old Romuald Waldera started to give the professor an earful. He had just come to the seminary from the Law Faculty at the Jagiellonian University, where he had been successfully propagandized by the Marxist theoreticians then riding high. Full of the certainties of adolescence and crammed with Marxist vocabulary, he attacked the professor’s ideas and the Church’s social teaching so vehemently that several classmates, appalled, started kicking him on the ankle and whispering, “Stop it, they’ll expel you.” During young Waldera’s tirade, the professor kept pacing back and forth on the platform at the front of the hall, his hands behind his back and his head down.
The youngster finally fell back into his chair, sweating, the pent-up frustrations of the past months spent. The room was filled with a heavy silence. Father Karol Wojtyła stopped his pacing, stood at the center of the platform, and proceeded to flabbergast everyone in the room, especially Romuald Waldera: “Gentlemen, if you please, your attention. What your colleague has just said here is evidence that he is beginning to think theologically….”
He then met every one of Waldera’s points, never raising his voice, answering each question that had been raised. Other students then got involved, each with his own frustrations: frustrations about the human condition, frustrations about the state of Poland, frustrations with God. Once again, the priest-professor walked back and forth, listening. After each eruption, he calmly suggested a Catholic way of thinking about these problems.
After class was over, Father Wojtyła invited Romuald Waldera to the seminary parlor for a conversation. He had sensed a disturbance in the young man, and he wanted to help. A quarter-century later, Romuald Waldera remembered his professor’s kindness, and tried to emulate it whenever he had to deal, as a priest, with the revolutionary hotheads of another generation.1
A CHANGE OF PLANS
Cardinal Adam Stefan Sapieha, the unbroken prince, died on July 23, 1951. He was laid out in Wawel Cathedral in a coffin surrounded by candles. His priests came to keep vigil with the mortal remains of the bishop who had led them through the long, dark night of Occupation. Looking into the face of the man who had ordained him and had been one of his models of priestly service, Father Karol Wojtyła might have thought that he had been orphaned, once again. Sapieha was buried in the marble pavement in front of the sarcophagus of St. Stanisław, another defender of the rights of the Church against violence.
Cardinal Sapieha had no immediate successor as archbishop of Kraków. According to the agreement that had been worked out between the Polish episcopate and the communist government, the episcopate (which, for all practical purposes, meant Primate Wyszyński) would consult with the Holy See in Rome and submit the names of proposed appointments to the government. The state could not impose a bishop but it retained veto power. That power was exercised in Kraków after Sapieha’s death. The Holy See wanted to appoint Archbishop Eugeniusz Baziak as Sapieha’s successor. The government refused to agree. When the Holy See dug in its heels, the Kraków see went unfilled for the next twelve years. From the Church’s point of view, however, Archbishop Baziak was the de facto Archbishop of Kraków, no matter what the government thought of the legal situation.
Pope John Paul II remembered Eugeniusz Baziak as a man who had “lived a dramatic life,” not untinged by the tragic.2 Born in 1890, he had been named the Latin-rite archbishop of Lwów on November 22, 1945, just as the historic Galician city was being renamed L’viv and incorporated into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. First interned, and then expelled from his see by the Soviet government, Archbishop Baziak had been invited to come to Kraków by Cardinal Sapieha.
Baziak was destined to follow Sapieha at the height of the Stalinist pressure on the Polish Church. One of his priests remembered the time as “the period of most radical oppression, a very difficult period,” in which, among other things, the communists were trying to appoint assistant pastors in order to penetrate and control the Church.3 In these grim circumstances, Archbishop Baziak concluded that his job was simply to “stand there,” to protect the institution from penetration by maintaining a position of rocklike intransigence. Unhappily, this precluded the friendly relations that Sapieha, who, as John Paul II said, “found
it easy to be a prince,” enjoyed with his priests and his people.4 Eugeniusz Baziak, the Pope recalled, was “a good man with a good heart” who adopted what another contemporary called a “severe, strict” attitude only because he wanted the regime to think that he was not to be trifled with. And he decided that the best way to demonstrate that was to be tough with the people immediately around him.5 It must have cost him personally. Colleagues who had never seen him relax in his residence or in his chancery office remember the close and warm relationship he had with visitors who came to see him from L’viv.6
Archbishop Baziak decided that the vicar of St. Florian’s should return to academic life and seek a second doctoral degree by writing a “habilitation” thesis, which would qualify him to teach at the university level.7 Father Karol Wojtyła disagreed with the plan, which Baziak may have discussed with Cardinal Sapieha before his death. Wojtyła’s student chaplaincy at St. Florian’s was flourishing, and he had just added to it a ministry to health-care workers. Baziak insisted, and on September 1, 1951, the archbishop gave Wojtyła a two-year academic sabbatical to complete the habilitation thesis. To facilitate the work, and, one suspects, to enforce his decision, he ordered Father Wojtyła to move from the priests’ house at St. Florian’s to a Church-owned building known as the Dean’s House at Kanonicza, 21. Located on one of the Kraków Old Town’s most splendid streets, the house took its name from the fact that the members of the cathedral chapter, the “canons” of Wawel Cathedral, once lived there. Wojtyła’s old mentor at the Kraków seminary, Father Ignacy Rózycki, also lived at Kanonicza, 21. Father Marian Jaworski, a fledgling philosopher who had formerly been assigned to St. Florian’s as an assistant pastor, was another resident. In the “Dean’s House,” Karol Wojtyła had a second-floor bedroom that doubled as his study. The twenty-foot-square room was heated by a tile stove, against which Father Wojtyła stacked his skis. A Remington portable typewriter sat on the marble-topped desk where Wojtyła worked.
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