Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  His was an office of service to a local Church that they must build together: “To be a pastor, it seems to me, one must know how to take what one’s flock has to offer; in order to take, one must know how to give; one must coordinate and integrate everyone’s gifts into a single common good….”

  Every episcopal act of coordination and integration had one solemn purpose—to witness to the truth about the human person, about humanity’s relationship to God, and about humanity’s noble destiny, all of which had been revealed in Jesus Christ. Those who thought themselves the masters of Poland in 1964 had their five-year plans. The archbishop of Kraków had no such scheme. What he had was something “simple and eternal.” Because “the things of eternity, the things of God, are the simplest and deepest,” there was no need to fret about programs. Rather, “what we must do is to show increased zeal and increased readiness in carrying out the eternal program of God and Christ and adapting it to the needs of our day….” The Second Vatican Council hadbegun that process of renewal, “but for many of us its decrees are merely written documents. I want to awaken the archdiocese of Kraków to the true meaning of the Council, so that we may bring its teachings into our lives….”

  Having defined his only “program” as the Gospel, ever ancient and ever new, the archbishop retired to the sacristy to vest for Mass. The golden chasuble had been given to the archdiocese by Anna Jagiełło, wife of King Stefan Batory. The miter came from Andrzej Lipski, a seventeenth-century predecessor as bishop. The bishop’s staff dated from the reign of Jan Sobieski. The chalice used at Mass was from the middle years of the Jagiellonian dynasty. The message of his vesture, like the message of his sermon, was unmistakable: You, the people of this venerable episcopal see, are the inheritors of a great tradition. That tradition is the truth about your past. From that tradition you can build a future worthy of your dignity as free men and women, born free in baptism with the freedom that no one can ever take from you—the freedom of the children of God.1

  UNEXPECTED CONSEQUENCES

  Sociologists of bureaucratic process might have said that a principle of unintended consequences was in effect. Whimsical theologians might regard it as evidence that the Holy Spirit has a wicked sense of humor. However one describes it, Karol Wojtyła’s appointment as archbishop of Kraków was influenced by men who quickly realized that they had made a serious mistake.

  Archbishop Eugeniusz Baziak died on June 15, 1962. Karol Wojtyła’s appointment as archbishop was signed by Pope Paul VI on December 30, 1963, and publicly announced on January 19, 1964. The eighteen-month delay was the result of yet another deadlock over the See of Kraków: this time, between the Primate, Cardinal Wyszyński, and the Polish government. According to the agreement that had been worked out in 1956, the Primate sent the government the names of episcopal nominees who had been chosen by the Holy See (presumably, with Wyszyński’s agreement). The government then had three months to cast a veto. If no veto was received during that time, the Primate made the public announcement of a nomination. The formal point of contact in the government was the prime minister, but the real power in such decisions was wielded by the Communist Party’s second-ranking figure, Zenon Kliszko. Kliszko was the marshal (or Speaker, in Anglo-American terminology) of the Sejm, the rubber-stamp Polish parliament. More to the point, he was the Party’s chief ideologist and the guardian of Polish communist orthodoxy.

  In the late fall of 1963, Father Andrzej Bardecki, the ecclesiastical assistant at Tygodnik Powszechny, had a visitor. Professor Stanisław Stomma, head of a five-member Catholic micro-party permitted in the Sejm, discreetly asked Father Bardecki if they could take a walk on the Planty, the greensward that surrounds Kraków’s Old Town and a pleasant place to talk while avoiding the secret police bugs in the Tygodnik Powszechny office. Once the two men were outside, Stomma told Bardecki that he had recently spoken with Zenon Kliszko about the logjam in filling the vacant archbishopric of Kraków. Kliszko, who did not lack ego, was very pleased with himself for having vetoed all seven names the Primate had proposed over the past year and a half. “I’m waiting for Wojtyła,” Kliszko said, “and I’ll continue to veto names until I get him.” Stomma had thanked the ideologist for sharing this confidence, but had had to work hard to keep himself from laughing. Wojtyła was precisely the candidate Stomma, his fellow Catholic parliamentarians, and priests like Father Bardecki were quietly hoping for.

  Why did Kliszko and, according to Father Bardecki, the entire Politburo of the Polish Communist Party, take this line on Wojtyła? How could they mis-read him so dramatically?

  Wojtyła’s age may have had something to do with it. The graybeards of the Polish communist leadership would have thought him, at forty-two, a boy, unseasoned, someone who could be manipulated. Then there was his utter lack of interest in politics, as they understood politics. He was an intellectual, a bit abstract, not very knowledgeable about the nitty-gritty of public life, a man who would be satisfied with vague assurances. Kliszko and his comrades must have concluded that this combination of age, intellectuality, and inexperience made Karol Wojtyła the perfect pawn for achieving their longstanding strategic goal—dividing the Polish hierarchy in order to marginalize the Primate and diminish the Church’s public influence.

  From a distance of thirty-five years, there certainly seems to have been enough counterevidence to have given the comrades pause. There was Wojtyła’s demonstrated capacity to attract the loyalty of the young and his links to the Rhapsodic Theater, a suspicious group. He had shown impressive negotiating skills in talking the local authorities out of seizing an archdiocesan seminary building in 1962. A year later, he had successfully called the authorities’ bluff when they tried to evict seminarians and faculty from one wing of the Silesian seminary in Kraków, threatening to stand publicly with the faculty on the day of the eviction if the order was carried out; it wasn’t.2 His Christmas midnight Masses at Nowa Huta should have suggested that this was not a man to accept a fait accompli. Then there was his sermon in January 1963 on the centenary of the January Uprising against the Russians—what was this business about the “inner freedom of man”? And his sermon at the unveiling of the memorial to Kalinowski and Chmielowski at Wawel Cathedral, five months later—shouldn’t his reference to the holiness of these conspirators, and his reminder to Poles that they had often had “to break through to freedom from the underground,” have raised caution flags in the comrades’ minds?

  If these sermons didn’t faze Zenon Kliszko—and if Wojtyła’s other experiments in cultural resistance, far from bothering the communists, in fact commended Wojtyła to them—the explanation must be that Kliszko and his colleagues were deluded by their own ideology and propaganda. “Cultural resistance” made no sense to them. In the orthodox Marxist jargon, ideas were “superstructure,” ephemera, not the real stuff of power. Let the boyish vicar capitular preach sermons about the “supernatural episcopal responsibility for the people of God” in service to which St. Stanisław had surrendered his life. Let him urge college students to think about their lives vocationally and go to confession regularly. All of this was opium, not only for the masses but for the restive Kraków intelligentsia. Let Wojtyła keep doing what he had been doing, with the authority of the metropolitan archbishop. He would, at the very least, help keep the lid on. Beyond that, there was the delicious possibility that this naïf would let himself be maneuvered into fracturing the unity of the episcopate, by taking positions the regime could manipulate against Wyszyński.

  Did Cardinal Wyszyński think that Karol Wojtyła was a vague, abstract intellectual whom the communists could manipulate? That Wojtyła was eighth (or, by some accounts, seventh) among Wyszyński’s nominees for Kraków suggests at a minimum that the Primate regarded Wojtyła as too young and inexperienced for the position. In his few years as a member of the Polish episcopate, Wojtyła had never crossed the Primate. But the vicar capitular of Kraków was a great defender of Tygodnik Powszechny, and the Primate had had his difficult
ies with the paper and its independent-minded editors. Wojtyła’s sympathy for the reform-minded bishops at Vatican II might also have raised questions in Wyszyński’s mind, not so much because of the reforms themselves, but because the Primate thought that Western reformers didn’t understand his situation and were absorbed with issues of little relevance to the Polish Church. In any case, Wyszyński clearly didn’t know Wojtyła very well. Asked shortly after Wojtyła’s appointment what the new archbishop of Kraków was like, the Primate paused, and then said, “He is a poet.”

  In December 1963, Professor Stomma returned to Tygodnik Powszechny and, once again, took Father Bardecki for a walk along the Planty. Zenon Kliszko, he said, had just told him that he had received a nomination letter from Cardinal Wyszyński with Karol Wojtyła’s name on it. Stomma was delighted. So was Bardecki. And so, we may assume, was Zenon Kliszko.

  Then there was the warden at the prison in Gdańsk, who at the time had a distinguished prisoner. Father Piotr Rostworowski, abbot of the Camaldolese monastery outside Kraków, was doing time for helping smuggle Czech citizens across the Czech-Polish border. When Karol Wojtyła’s nomination as archbishop was publicly announced, the warden paid his prisoner a visit and gloated over the nomination. This was “very good news,” he told the abbot; Wojtyła was exactly the man the comrades wanted. Four months later the warden, on another visit to the abbot, took a different line. “Wojtyła has swindled us!” he cried.

  All of which, Father Bardecki concluded, was evidence that “the Holy Spirit can work his will by darkening as well as enlightening people’s minds.”3

  “MY BELOVED KRAKÓW”

  Karol Wojtyła lived in Kraków for exactly forty years, including four years as auxiliary bishop, two years as de facto leader of the archdiocese, and fourteen as its archbishop. From the outset, there was a remarkable fit between the city and the man, between the ancient see and the young bishop.

  He was a Polish intellectual and Kraków was an intellectual center as well as Poland’s longstanding cultural capital. He was a Polish patriot in a city where the nation’s history was enshrined in the cathedral church and where he could read the story of Poland’s struggle for freedom off the palaces, streets, colleges, churches, and houses he walked by every day. He was a writer living in the cradle of Polish publishing, the city where the first book in Polish had been published. He was, by adoption and conviction, a Cracovian, which meant that he was a European living at the heart of Europe.

  He was a priest and bishop in a city of great witnesses to the faith: Stanisław, the model for his successors in the Kraków episcopal line; Piotr Skarga, sixteenth-century preacher of national renewal through spiritual revival; Dunajewski and Puzyna, rebels in 1863 who became bishops and cardinals. This was the city of Brother Albert and the self-sacrificing religious communities he had founded, and the home of Sister Faustina Kowalska, the mystic of divine mercy. It was the episcopal see of Adam Stefan Sapieha, the unbroken prince, and the diocese in which Father Maximilian Kolbe had offered himself in the starvation bunker at Auschwitz. All of this was alive in Kraków in an almost palpable way. And it was alive in Karol Wojtyła, who believed that popular devotion to the saints and a serious Catholic intellectual life reinforced each other.

  The man who seemed born to be archbishop of Kraków laid out the basic themes of his episcopate in a pastoral letter to the archdiocese written for Lent,1964. (Like his other pastoral letters over the years, this one could not be printed but was typed by relays of nuns using six sheets of carbon paper per typewriter, and then hand-delivered to each parish; the mails could not be trusted.4)

  To be the archbishop of Kraków, he wrote, was to know a “profound sense of responsibility,” deepened by the “great and eloquent memories of the past” that were alive in the archdiocese. If that sense of responsibility did not engender fear, it was because he had “total confidence in Christ the Lord and in His Mother” and a “sincere trust” in the people he served. Life was not an absurdity, for “God wants all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of truth. (1 Timothy 2.4)” That was both the Church’s faith and its mission: to help men and women realize the dignity of their nature and the nobility of their destiny. And in carrying out that mission, he, as their bishop, “the first servant of [the] common good,” expected everyone to take “responsibility for that part which the will of God has given him.”5

  Karol Wojtyła, who was created a cardinal in 1967 by Pope Paul VI, at the exceptionally young age of forty-seven, was the first bishop of Kraków in the thousand-year history of the see who was not born to the gentry class. That proved no barrier to his becoming one of the most effective diocesan bishops of his time, and in any place.

  PRIORITIES

  According to those who worked with him, Cardinal Wojtyła had a distinctive way of approaching problems and decisions. In each instance, he would pose two questions to his collaborators. “What is the truth of faith that sheds light on this problem?” was first. Then, after that had been discussed, “Whom can we get—or train—to help?”6 Wojtyła was running a very large organization as archbishop of Kraków, but this was an organization with a difference. This was the Church, and he would govern it like the Church, not like some other kind of institution.

  He lived this approach to leadership and problem solving every day. Each morning, after Mass and breakfast, the archbishop disappeared into his chapel, and it was known that he was not to be disturbed. There, alone, a few yards from the spot where Cardinal Sapieha had ordained him a priest, he spent two hours writing at a small desk, facing the Blessed Sacrament in the tabernacle on the altar. It is said that there are theologians who do theology at their desks and theologians who do theology on their knees; the same might be said about bishops and the governance of dioceses. Karol Wojtyła was a bishop who governed his diocese (and did his philosophy and theology) “on his knees”—or at a desk in the sacramental presence of his Lord.7

  The archbishop often took his most difficult decisions to the shrine at Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, where he would frequently be found walking the grounds, rosary in hand, thinking through a problem in prayer. Every Friday, he left the archbishop’s residence (in which his office was also located) and walked across Franciszkańska Street to the Franciscan basilica, where Władysław Jagiełło had been baptized before his marriage to Queen Jadwiga. Walking beneath stained glass designed by his fellow playwright, Stanisław Wyspiański, he went into a side chapel where he prayed the fourteen stations of the cross.

  The inspiration for Karol Wojtyła’s style and method as archbishop was the Prince Cardinal, Adam Sapieha, whose simple gold pectoral cross Wojtyła wore over a plain black cassock. Photos of Sapieha were prominent in the archbishop’s large study.8 If Sapieha was the model, though, his approach had to be adapted to new circumstances. Twelve years after the Prince Cardinal’s death, Kraków was a huge, sprawling diocese of 1.5 million Catholics, including 1,500 priests (771 diocesan and 749 belonging to religious orders), 1,500 nuns, 1,500 brothers (professed members of men’s religious orders who were not priests), and 191 seminarians. In fourteen years as leader of this complex community, Karol Wojtyła pursued seven priorities, which disclose a lot about his understanding of the Church and its mission.

  Religious Freedom

  Thanks to the demographic realities and Cardinal Wyszyński’s leadership, Poland’s Catholics enjoyed a measure of liberty in practicing their faith that was the envy of their Lithuanian, Czechoslovak, and Ukrainian neighbors, who were actively persecuted. No citizen of a free society would have recognized the Polish situation as one of religious freedom, however, and the modus vivendi that had been worked out with the communist regime did not come close to satisfying the criteria of religious freedom defined by the Second Vatican Council.

  The Kraków episcopate had a special historic texture in matters of religious freedom. To be the successor of St. Stanisław was to be the heir of an ancient tradition in which the bishop was the defensor populi, t
he “defender of the people,” and the defensor civitatis, the “defender of the city” of last resort.9 Cardinal Sapieha had fulfilled these roles magnificently during the Nazi Occupation and in the first years of Polish communism. Now it was Karol Wojtyła’s turn to defend the people and the city, not so much against public persecution (although there were instances of that) but against a state determined to uproot the Polish nation from the soil of Christian culture in which it had been planted. During Wojtyła’s episcopate, the struggle for religious freedom centered on two issues: building churches, and the public display of Catholicism, symbolized by the annual Corpus Christi procession.

  From 1962 (when Wojtyła was chosen vicar capitular) until 1978, the Archdiocese of Kraków created eleven new parishes and ten new “pastoral centers,” transitional units on the way to being fully erected parishes.10 Every one of these initiatives involved a struggle with the regime.

  Parishes could not be legally established or church buildings constructed without the government’s permission; according to canon law, no parish could be created without a church building. By denying permits to build churches, the government could effectively choke off the Church’s development, which required the formation of new parishes. Wojtyła developed a sophisticated, assertive resistance strategy in the face of regime intransigence and canonical difficulties. An average of thirty requests for building permits were filed with the government in each year of Wojtyła’s episcopate, and every year the backlog grew, as previous years’ unsatisfied requests were kept pending. While the archdiocese kept pressing the authorities to resolve this growing roster of permits denied or delayed, Wojtyła adopted a parallel strategy of “creating facts” to which the government had to respond. Bracketing the issues in canon law, he and courageous priests would form a parish-without-a-church through the dogged, often door-to-door evangelization of a neighborhood, over a period of months or years. Then, when a living parish had been created, the government would be presented with a fait accompli—“Look, the people want a church, society needs a church.”