Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  The Archdiocese of Kraków under Karol Wojtyła was not burdened with an extensive bureaucracy.

  Four auxiliary bishops served under Wojtyła; Juliusz Groblicki had also been auxiliary to Archbishop Baziak, while Jan Pietraszko, Stanisław Smoleński, and Albin Małysiak were appointed while Wojtyła was archbishop. As a young priest at St. Anne’s collegiate church, Pietraszko, nine years older than the archbishop, had developed a following similar to what would become Wojtyła’s Środowisko. John Paul II remembered him as a “great preacher and teacher” and a “very deep man” his cause for beatification is under consideration.55 Smoleński had been spiritual director of the Kraków seminary when young Karol Wojtyła came to live in Archbishop Sapieha’s drawing room during the war. Like Pietraszko and Smoleński, the third auxiliary appointed under Wojtyła, Albin Małysiak, was older than the archbishop, having been born in 1917. Wojtyła’s auxiliaries were all vicars general, and under canon law his legal deputies in the governance of the archdiocese. There were two archdiocesan chancellors; one who dealt with matters of church law, and a second who was responsible for civil and legal affairs, finance, and administration.56

  His colleagues frequently said that Cardinal Wojtyła ran the Archdiocese of Kraków like a seminar. Open to new ideas, he wanted to hear what others had to say. He didn’t micromanage the archdiocese, and gave subordinates considerable freedom within their own spheres of responsibility. When policy had to be made, he listened carefully to different views and rarely imposed his own solution to a problem, preferring to let a consensus emerge from his colleagues—a consensus that he, of course, helped shape.57

  Wojtyła expected and accepted criticism from his subordinates, because he trusted them. They, in turn, felt they could be frank with him. In his later years as archbishop, he asked Father Andrzej Bardecki for a critique of a proposed document on secularization that had been prepared for the Polish episcopate. Bardecki read it and sent back a biting memo of criticism, which he later conceded might have been “a little rude” in its choice of vocabulary. Wojtyła read the memo, called the priest in, and said, “You’re right. It’s not good. But I think you ought to know, Andrzej, that I was the author of that draft; I did it when I was very tired.” Bardecki later reflected that virtually any other Polish bishop would have handed a subordinate his head for writing such a critique of a bishop’s work.58

  Wojtyła also knew how to defuse an argument with a staff member. There was occasional tension between the Primate’s office in Warsaw and the Pontifical Faculty of Theology in Kraków. On one such occasion, a junior member of the archbishop’s staff, Father Tadeusz Pieronek, urging a certain point, said, “Your Eminence, you have to do this.” The cardinal replied, “I can’t.” Father Pieronek began to get angry and said, “You can.” The cardinal replied again, “I can’t.” The priest, now quite agitated, said a third time, “You can.” At which point the cardinal took off his pectoral cross, held it out, and said, “Here, you rule…” Father Pieronek was dumbstruck; the argument was over.59

  Whenever possible, Wojtyła preferred to talk a problem out rather than issue an edict. Shortly after Vatican II, there was a meeting of the Kraków priests to discuss the question of whether, in the revised liturgy, Holy Communion would be received kneeling, as had been customary, or standing, as was now permitted. The debate, at first heated, eventually grew bitter. The cardinal listened to it all without saying anything. Everyone waited for him to declare himself. When the rhetoric and emotions were spent, Wojtyła got up, went to the podium, and said, “It seems that there are two positions….” He refused to impose a single solution that would have inevitably alienated one faction. His willingness to live with pluralism dissipated the anger and tension among his priests.60

  There were some things, though, that couldn’t be talked through, and they usually involved the regime. In these instances, Wojtyła tended to abandon his “seminar style” of management, acting first and talking later. The creation of de facto parishes to pressure the regime into granting building permits was one instance of this method. There were others. The regime had stalled for years in granting permission for erecting a bronze statue of Cardinal Sapieha, which Wojtyła had commissioned. The statue gathered dust in the Metropolitan Curia. Finally tired of waiting, Wojtyła decided to put it up across Franciszkańska Street opposite the Curia, and issued orders to erect it, explaining that, since it would rest on church property, no permission was needed. The statue was duly erected, draped, and an unveiling was scheduled for a Saturday in May 1976. On the Sunday before the ceremony, the regime’s censors cut the archbishop’s public invitation to the ceremony from Tygodnik Powszechny. The Curia then wrote asking permission of the city authorities for the statue to be set up (where it already was). The permission came in a few days.61

  Levying heavy taxes on priests was another favorite form of regime harassment. On one occasion, a priest simply didn’t have the money to pay his tax and asked the cardinal what to do. Wojtyła suggested that he report to prison. The day he arrived at the jail, the cardinal arrived in his parish, announcing to the thousands gathered outside the church that he was taking over as interim pastor and explaining what had happened. The pastor was released quickly.62

  In dealing with internal archdiocesan affairs and with the government, Cardinal Wojtyła struck his associates as a man singularly unconcerned about programmatic neatness and tying up loose ends. According to one set of criteria, this made him suspect as a manager. Judged by another standard, it made him a remarkably effective religious leader for whom management was simply one means to his pastoral ends. The ends were what counted.

  IMPLEMENTING VATICAN II: THE SYNOD OF KRAKÓW

  Having gone to Vatican II conscious of carrying Kraków and its history with him, Karol Wojtyła worked hard to foster a dialogue between the Council and his archdiocese as the epic events in Rome unfolded. In this respect, he began implementing the Council in Kraków long before it formally closed. But this was hardly sufficient payment on the “debt” he always said he owed Vatican II. Something grand was called for.

  The idea for the Synod of Kraków matured slowly in the archbishop’s mind. In 1966, he and the whole archdiocese were caught up in the nationwide celebrations marking the millennium of Polish Christianity. Nine years of preparation, the “Great Novena” Cardinal Wyszyński had planned during his house arrest in the mid-1950s, had recatechized Poland and had helped the country reclaim its past, rejecting the shame with which Stalinism had covered everything to do with Poland’s historic independence.63 The archbishop of Kraków now proposed to claim the future, through an ambitious effort at implementing Vatican II.

  In the latter part of 1970, as he finished writing Sources of Renewal, a guided tour of the Council’s texts, Cardinal Wojtyła came to a decision. The best way to deepen the Council’s implementation in Kraków was for the archdiocese as a whole to relive the experience of Vatican II through an archdiocesan Synod, a mini-Council on the local Church level. The ninth centenary of the martyrdom of St. Stanisław provided a ceremonial closing date, so the Synod would end in 1979. Stanisław had been bishop of Kraków for eight years, so the Synod should last that long and would begin its preparatory work in 1971.64 Diocesan synods were almost always juridical in character, legislative assemblies of the local clergy to provide legal statutes for a local Church. His would be different, as Vatican II had been different. This would be a pastoral Synod, an effort to share the experience of collegiality at Vatican II with the priests and people of the archdiocese. The Synod would do some program planning, but first and foremost, it would build Christian community. Cardinal Wojtyła wanted to turn the Church of Kraków into a vibrant evangelical and apostolic movement.65 That was how the Council could come alive in Kraków, and in concert with, not against, the history of Polish Catholicism he and his people had just celebrated.

  The cardinal broached the idea of a Synod to his closest associates in the latter half of 1970. Some of them told h
im bluntly that it couldn’t be done. The canon lawyers, for example, said that a local Synod would have to wait until Rome had completed the new Code of Canon Law. The cardinal explained that what he had in mind was a pastoral Synod, not a juridical one. Wojtyła was, as always, a patient listener, and the skeptics had their say. As his former spiritual director, Stanisław Smoleński, recalled, however, Karol Wojtyła was “very good at getting things done despite obstacles—including the obstacle that ‘it’s never been done before.’”66

  After a year of preparation, the Synod was solemnly convened on May 8, 1972, at Wawel Cathedral, with representatives of the entire archdiocese attending. For the next seven years, the Synod was governed by a Central Commission, chaired by Bishop Stanisław Smoleński and staffed by Father Tadeusz Pieronek. It met 119 times, assuming ongoing responsibility for the Synod in between its thirteen plenary meetings. All the Synod’s major decisions were made in the plenary meetings, in which the delegates included clergy and laity. As the Synod developed, an editing commission began work preparing Synod documents. These were reviewed by the plenary meetings, which could vote “Yes,” “No,” or “Yes-with-changes,” just as at Vatican II. (A local difference in Kraków was that the Central Commission, in reviewing every suggested emendation, addition, or correction, publicly explained why it had accepted, rejected, or modified the proposal.) The Synod of Kraków eventually produced some 400 pages of documents, covering every aspect of the Church’s life in the archdiocese. These documents, in turn, were organized under three headings, reflecting the three “offices” or roles of Christ as priest, prophet, and king—three offices in which, Gaudium et Spes had taught, the people of the Church who were Christ’s Body in the world participated.67

  The Synod’s method of dialogue made the experience of Vatican II come alive for tens of thousands of Catholics throughout the Kraków area. Unlike other Church bodies, the Synod of Kraków did not begin by writing documents. It did not even begin the drafting process for two years, during which some 500 study groups were formed to read through the texts of Vatican II with Cardinal Wojtyła’s Sources of Renewal as a commentary. These study groups (some fifty of which were still meeting in 1997) were the heart and soul of the Synod of Kraków. They came in all shapes and sizes. Some were located in cloistered convents, others in the seminary; the vast majority of them were parish-based. In them, priests and laypeople, intellectuals and workers, men and women, old people and young people met together to pray, to study the Council’s teachings, to compare those teachings with their daily lives, and to suggest applications of the Council’s thought in the various ministries of the archdiocese. These reflections and recommendations were brought to the plenary sessions of the Synod by representatives of the study groups.

  The study groups were the venues in which the Synod built Christian community according to Vatican II’s concept of the Church as a “communion” (communio) of believers. In these groups, the archdiocese met the documents of Vatican II organically, as a coherent whole. When it came time to make archdiocesan-wide applications of the Council’s teachings, no outside experts were necessary. The people of the archdiocese knew the Council documents themselves, and had learned through years of intense effort to apply Vatican II’s teachings to their own particular circumstances. Thus the Kraków Synod helped the archdiocese avoid many of the post-conciliar tensions experienced in other parts of the Church. In Kraków, Vatican II was relived as a religious event aimed at strengthening the evangelical and apostolic life of the Church, not as a political struggle over power within the Church bureaucracy.

  Karol Wojtyła left Kraków before the Synod completed its work (although he presided at the Synod’s solemn closing on June 8, 1979, as Pope John PaulII).68 But before his move to Rome, Karol Wojtyła, as archbishop of Kraków, made every effort to help his people relive the experience of Vatican II so that the Council became, as John XXIII had intended, a new Pentecost for the Church—a deepening of faith that led to a revitalization of mission. As a result, Kraków experienced neither anti-conciliar reactionary movements of the Lefebvrist sort nor the deconstruction of Catholic belief and practice that attended Vatican II’s reception in other cultures and countries.

  The experience of the Synod also taught the people of the archdiocese some things about themselves as citizens. They learned that they could organize and carry out a massive program of study and action, independent of permission from the state. They learned that they could think through the situation of their society, independently. Priests and laity, intellectuals and factory workers learned that they could work together. This experience of communio, as Vatican II called it, was also an experience of what anti-communist dissidents in east central Europe later called “civil society.” It would have repercussions beyond the imaginings of the communist apparatchiks who kept wondering why all those people were spending so much time talking about Church documents.

  THE Humanae Vitae CONTROVERSY

  First established by Pope John XXIII, the Papal Commission for the Study of Problems of the Family, Population, and Birth Rate was reappointed by Pope Paul VI to advise him on the tangle of issues indicated in its title. For much of the world, though, this was the “Papal Birth Control Commission” and the only issue at stake was whether Catholics could “use the pill.” In the highly politicized atmosphere of the immediate post–Vatican II Church, “birth control” became the litmus-test issue between theological “progressives” and “conservatives,” even as the issue got entangled in ongoing arguments about the nature and scope of papal teaching authority. When one adds to this volatile ecclesiastical mix the cultural circumstances of the sixties in the West, including the widespread challenge to all established authority and the breakout into mainstream culture of the sexual revolution, it becomes apparent that a thoughtful public moral discussion of conjugal morality was going to be very difficult at this point. In 1968, Paul VI, who thought himself obliged to give the Church an authoritative answer on such a highly charged question, issued Humanae Vitae, which instantly became the most controversial encyclical in history and the cause of even further disruption in the Church, particularly in North America and Western Europe. The controversy was inevitable, but it might not have been so debilitating had the Pope taken Cardinal Wojtyła’s counsel more thoroughly.

  According to the familiar telling of this complex tale, Pope Paul’s Papal Commission was divided between a majority that argued for a change in the classic Catholic position that contraception was immoral, and a minority that wanted to affirm that teaching. A memorandum sent to the Pope in June 1966—and journalistically dubbed the “Majority Report”—argued that conjugal morality should be measured by “the totality of married life,” rather than by the openness of each act of intercourse to conception. In this view, it was morally licit to use chemical or mechanical means to prevent conception as long as this was in the overall moral context of a couple’s openness to children.69 Another memorandum, dubbed the “Minority Report,” reiterated the classic Catholic position, that the use of contraceptives violated the natural moral law by sundering the procreative and unitive dimensions of sexuality. In this view, and following the teaching of Pope Pius XII, the morally legitimate way to regulate conception was through the use of the natural rhythms of fertility, known as the rhythm method.

  Pope Paul VI spent two years wrestling with these opposed positions and with the pressures that were being brought to bear on him to take a side. Proponents of the “Majority Report” (which was leaked to the press in 1967 to bring more pressure on the Pope) argued that the Church would lose all credibility with married couples and with the modern world if it did not change the teaching set forth by Pius XII. Some opponents argued that adopting the “Majority Report” position would destroy the Church’s teaching authority, as it would involve a tacit admission of error on a question of serious moral consequence. Paul VI eventually rejected the conclusion and moral reasoning of the “Majority Report,” and on July 25, 1968
, issued the encyclical letter Humanae Vitae, section 14 of which began as follows: “Thus, relying on these first principles of human and Christian doctrine concerning marriage, we must again insist that the direct interruption of the generative process already begun must be totally rejected as a legitimate means of regulating the number of children.”70 A maelstrom of criticism followed, as did the most widespread public Catholic dissent from papal teaching in centuries.

  Archbishop Karol Wojtyła, well-known to the Pope as the author of Love and Responsibility, had been appointed by Paul VI to the Papal Commission, but had been unable to attend the June 1966 meeting at which the majority of the commission took the position later summarized in its memorandum. The Polish government had denied him a passport, on the excuse that he had waited too late to apply.71 Wojtyła played an important role in the controversy over contraception and in the development of Humanae Vitae, nonetheless. The encyclical, however, was not crafted precisely as Wojtyła proposed.

  In 1966, the archbishop of Kraków created his own diocesan commission to study the issues being debated by the Papal Commission. The archbishop, soon to be cardinal, was an active participant in the Kraków commission’s deliberations, which also drew on the expertise he had begun to gather in the nascent archdiocesan Institute for Family Studies. The Kraków commission completed its work in February 1968, and a memorandum of conclusions—“The Foundations of the Church’s Doctrine on the Principles of Conjugal Life”—was drawn up in French and sent to Paul VI by Cardinal Wojtyła.72

  According to Father Andrzej Bardecki, one of the participants in the Kraków process, Wojtyła’s local commission had seen two drafts of a proposed encyclical on the subject of conjugal morality and fertility regulation. One draft, prepared by the Holy Office, the Vatican’s principal doctrinal agency, struck some members of the Kraków commission as “stupid conservatism,” stringing together various papal pronouncements on the subject while neglecting to mention Pius XII’s endorsement of the rhythm method of fertility regulation, or “natural family planning.” The alternative draft, which Bardecki remembered as having been sponsored by German Cardinal Julius Döpfner, took the position of the “Majority Report” of the Papal Commission, which involved a serious error in its approach to moral theology, in the judgment of the Kraków theologians. By arguing that conjugal morality should be judged in its totality, and each act of intercourse “proportionally” within that total context, the “Majority Report” and the German draft misread what God had written into the nature of human sexuality, and did so in a way that undermined the structure of moral theology across the board.