As Cardinal Wojtyła’s troubles with the regime intensified in the 1970s, he didn’t want to force the issue of a promotion in academic rank, which would have to be approved by the government. He retained the rank of docent, the lowest on the academic scale, even while holding the Chair of Ethics at KUL. In 1978, Father Krąpiec, who had been perhaps the most critical of Wojtyła’s colleagues in the Faculty of Philosophy, was the rector of the University. Despite their philosophical differences, he wanted to do something for the cardinal. Krąpiec found a loophole in the university statues that permitted the university to give Wojtyła the title of “Honorary Professor” without government approval. It was further discovered that one privilege of this title is that the scholar who holds it is never retired, so Karol Wojtyła remains “Honorary Professor” at the Catholic University of Lublin for life.92
Ecumenism, or inter-Christian dialogue, was yet another arena of conversation for Cardinal Karol Wojtyła. In overwhelmingly Catholic Kraków there were not many opportunities for extensive ecumenical conversation. The city had small Lutheran and Orthodox congregations, and there were a few Mariavites, members of a small group that had broken with Catholicism in 1906.93 In January 1963, Bishop Wojtyła participated in the first ecumenical service held in Kraków during the Chair of Unity Octave, an eight-day period of prayer for Christian unity observed in the West since the early twentieth century. In his sermon, he praised the Protestant monks from the ecumenical community at Taizé, France, whom he had met during Vatican II. At dinner that evening in the medieval refectory of the Dominican priory, Wojtyła was seated between a Lutheran pastor and an Orthodox priest, neither of whom had ever set foot in the priory before. The Dominican prior, eager to make his “separated brethren” feel at home, decided that historical reminiscence was in order. He began his welcoming remarks by saying, “The Inquisition quite probably met here once, and now here we are….”94 Wojtyła, for his part, used to chaff the Dominicans about being served chicken whenever he came to dinner: “Sometimes I get Thomistic chicken, sometimes I get ecumenical chicken….”95
Wojtyła’s commitment to Christian unity and his sensitivity to the position of the minuscule Protestant minority in Kraków expressed itself personally. As a priest and young bishop, Wojtyła always went to Jerzy Janik’s home for at least a part of Christmas Eve dinner. There he met another of Janik’s friends, a Lutheran lady who had been the physicist’s first tutor in English. When the old woman died at age ninety-three, Janik called the cardinal to let him know. Wojtyła said that he’d like to say Mass for her and asked if the Janiks could come on a certain day. The cardinal then asked Janik whether he would go to the Lutheran pastor on Grodzka Street to invite him to the Mass, so that the pastor wouldn’t feel pressured by an archiepiscopal invitation. Janik did, and the pastor came and sat with the Janik family in the first pew of the archbishop’s chapel at the appointed time. When the cardinal entered the chapel in his Mass vestments, he went straight to the pastor, before going to the altar, and embraced him as a brother in Christ.96
REMAINING Wujek
Środowisko flourished as Karol Wojtyła continued to live a pastoral strategy of accompaniment during his episcopate in Kraków. He said Mass for his friends and their families as often as his schedule permitted, always preparing a homily. He also gave one-day retreats to Środowisko and invited everyone to his residence for Christmas caroling each year. When big decisions had to be made, his friends still wanted to consult with him and he made himself available to them.97
He also stayed in touch by letter. Teresa Heydel Życzkowska had written him in the early 1960s with the news that she was finally able to sleep through the night, two years after the birth of her twins. Wojtyła’s response was a characteristic blend of the personal and the evangelical:
Dear Teresa:
You were afraid that I wouldn’t be able to read your letter to the end. Well, I not only finished it but I carried its meaning within me for several days, thinking about what to reply. Today, these thoughts crystallized when I was receiving the vows of some sisters. I sense tiredness in your letter, which is easy to understand, knowing your character and your nervous system. On top of this, you always wanted to plan and do everything rationally. And here is the kingdom of irrationality, where normal activity and energy aren’t enough; you need to wait things out, some time to do nothing, and, simply, patience—especially since there are two. I realized that, on the one hand, there is always a price we pay for love. On the other, thanks to God, love is returned in that price. What I mean is, the concrete challenge of love cannot be separated from Him; it is always in Him.
I’m sorry you weren’t on the kayak trip but we can speak anytime.
For me, the most burdensome things are not our “chores,” but our “burdens.”
I kiss you and Michael and the twins—especially the one who has my name, who is such a challenge for his parents. Wujek
A tradition Wojtyła had begun for the children of Środowisko at the house on Kanonicza Street—a pre-Lenten Kinderbal, or children’s party—eventually moved to the archbishop’s residence. When the children became teenagers, Wojtyła told their parents that they had to give them a “real party,” so the annual Kinderbal, now with dancing, moved to the home of Teresa Życzkowska. The cardinal archbishop came and wrote in the ?yczkowskis’ guest book, “Not much has changed since their parents were doing this—except the music. Wujek.”98
The children, of course, were not the only ones getting older. Jurek and Jasią Janik were celebrating their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary in 1977, and Wojtyła had promised to say Mass for the couple and a small number of friends in the archbishop’s chapel. When the group arrived at the residence the cardinal’s secretary, Father Dziwisz, met them and said that he was sorry but the cardinal had come down with the flu and was running a high fever. Janik wished the cardinal a speedy recovery and turned to go. Dziwisz said, “No, no, no, the Mass will not be in the chapel but in his private apartment.” So the secretary led them to Wojtyła’s three-room suite. The cardinal came out of his bedroom in his vestments, said Mass, gave a sermon directed at the anniversary couple, and at the end of Mass said, “I’m sorry, but I’ve got a fever and I’ve got to get back to bed.”99
As Środowisko aged, its people became even more intensely prayerful. Once they had discussed C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters, an insightful yet humorous exploration of temptation and sin, while kayaking. Now, in 1975, there were long discussions around the campfire about evil and the Christian mystery of suffering. Gapą Turowski had been arrested again that year for declining to participate in the regime’s May Day festivities, age and experience had brought pain as well as pleasure, how did suffering fit into God’s plan for the world? The regime’s increasing anger with the cardinal also began to touch Środowisko’s summer holiday. In 1977, at the end of the annual kayak trip, the SB arrived at the campsite soon after the cardinal had left in his car and started checking the identity papers of the Środowisko members who had remained: “What was that big car?” they demanded. “Well, it arrived, and then it left,” was the reply—no lie, but no information, either. The following year, during what would be Wujek’s last kayaking trip, the arrangements were changed. Wojtyła’s car drove along the main road toward the kayaking site, followed by his now-regular SB “tail.” At a prearranged point, the cardinal’s driver sped up, briefly lost the tail, and then quickly turned off onto a small side road that wove back and forth through the fields. Stanisław Rybicki was waiting. Wujek jumped into his car, and off they went, the cardinal’s car and driver returning to Kraków along the main road, still followed by the SB. The same procedure was used in reverse at the end of the trip, during which state security wasn’t seen again.100
(The regime’s security paranoia could have its amusing aspects. Cardinal Wojtyła was skiing once in the Tatras near the Czechoslovak border and was stopped by the border patrol. The cardinal handed over his papers, but the militiaman, not r
ecognizing him, began to berate Wojtyła: “You moron, do you realize whose identity papers you’ve stolen? This is going to put you away for a long time.” When Wojtyła protested his innocence, the militiaman shot back, “A skiing cardinal? Do you think I’m crazy?” Wojtyła, who was once asked whether it was becoming for a cardinal to ski and answered that it was unbecoming for a cardinal to ski badly, finally sorted things out with the militiaman’s superior.101)
Cardinal Wojtyła and his friends suffered a tragic, shattering loss in 1970. Jerzy Ciesielski, who had become a docent at the Kraków Polytechnic, accepted a three-year visiting professorship in engineering at the University of Khartoum. He went to Africa alone in 1969–1970, but at the beginning of the 1970–1971 academic year he brought his wife, Danuta, and their three children to Sudan with him. On the night of October 9–10, 1970, he and the three children were en route to the Sixth Cataract of the Nile, on a tour ship that had been made available for visitors from abroad; Danuta had remained ashore in their apartment. Ciesielski had gone below decks to sleep with the two younger children in their cabin while teenage Marysia remained on deck. In a terrible accident, the boat sank and Ciesielski, his son and younger daughter were all drowned. Marysia alone was saved.
Danuta Ciesielska had to wait in Khartoum for the recovery of the bodies, which took some time. She sent a telegram to friends in Kraków, asking them to break the news gently to her father, who had a bad heart. One of these friends got word to Cardinal Wojtyła, then in Rome. When the bodies were finally recovered from the river and cremated, Danuta and Marysia brought the ashes home for burial, a journey which took them through Rome. Wojtyła met them at the airport with a car and driver, celebrated Mass for them, and asked them to delay the funeral services until he could come back to Kraków and celebrate the funeral Mass. Danuta agreed, and the ashes remained in Wojtyła’s chapel at Franciszkańska, 3, until their burial at the cemetery in Podgórze, just outside Kraków. The cardinal led the procession into the cemetery. Ciesielski’s ashes were carried by his best man, Stanisław Rybicki, Zdzysław Heydel, and two other friends. Jerzy Ciesielski, a “born teacher with a mystic core,” was forty-one when he died.102 As would happen often in Karol Wojtyła’s life, a great friend had been taken away.
Cardinal Wojtyła paid tribute in a memorial essay published in Tygodnik Powszechny’s last 1970 issue. Jerzy Ciesielski, he wrote, was a living anticipation of the Second Vatican Council and its teaching on the universal call to holiness. If he was an unusual man, it was because for him, his faith “was the normal measure of his duty”—which, he once said, was “to advance toward sanctity.” There “was not a lot of ‘slippage’” in Jerzy Ciesielski’s life, the cardinal recalled. He accepted “all the things that he had been given to do and to experience” as the elements or “materials” of his vocation to holiness.
Within this happy, outgoing man who loved nature and was an accomplished athlete “there was something like a deep underground stream…and his life never overflowed beyond its banks.” He never doubted that marriage was his vocation. The way he lived that vocation and helped others live theirs had taught his friend, the archbishop, much of what he knew about the experience of married life as a sacrament. In his work at Vatican II on the lay vocation in the modern world, it was his friend, Jurek Ciesielski, whom he had in mind.103
In his relationship to his Środowisko, Karol Wojtyła lived the instinct for paternity he had learned from his own father, and which he, as a consecrated and faithful celibate, could live only through such friendships. As his experience of paternity within the family of Środowisko deepened, he turned to poetry and drama to express his insights into this profound human mystery. The result was his last play, Radiation of Fatherhood (never published while he lived in Kraków) and a brief “quintessence” of this play-poem’s thought, the meditative essay, “Reflections on Fatherhood,” published pseudonymously by “A.J.” (that is, “Andrzej Jawień”) in the May 1964 issue of Znak. The play and the essay are explorations, at once poetic and theological, of the depth meaning of Środowisko.
Critics suggest that Radiation of Fatherhood is the most technically accomplished of Wojtyła’s dramas. Most readers will agree that it is his most difficult. The playwright’s blending of the medieval European mystery play and Mieczysław Kotlarczyk’s inner theater receives its fullest realization here, as the play’s field of action is entirely “inside” the souls of its three characters and its chorus.104
Radiation of Fatherhood continues Wojtyła’s literary meditation on the Law of the Gift built into the human condition. Thus the character Adam meditates on the hard road to selflessness: to become a father, Adam suggests, is to be liberated from the “terrible” freedom of self-centeredness and to be “conquered by love.”105 Only in the “radiation of fatherhood…does everything become fully real.”106
As always, there is a biblical and theological dimension to Wojtyła’s “inner theater.” In the Garden of Eden, the playwright suggests in “Reflections on Fatherhood,” the biblical Adam “became lonely of his own free will.” That act of self-exile, that choice for loneliness over self-giving, is the original sin, the wound in every human heart. Yet original sin is not the whole of the human story, for even in our self-imposed loneliness we want to be redeemed. And that is what “entering the radiation of fatherhood” means—overcoming the choice for loneliness by exercising one’s freedom in self-giving love and thus transcending oneself. We can overcome, Wojtyła the philosopher-poet-playwright suggests. We shall overcome, Wojtyła the Christian disciple believes, because God has overcome in Christ. That radiation of fatherhood and that reconstitution of sonship save us from the terror of absolute loneliness.
The harshest face of human loneliness is death, to which Karol Wojtyła was no stranger. As he matured in the 1970s, he deepened his reflection on the inevitability of death poetically. Maturity, he wrote, was a circumstance in which “the surface reaches the bottom,” as in a seabed; maturity meant “the soul more reconciled with the body.” Maturity was also fear, and “the love that transforms fear.” But maturity was also tension:
When we find ourselves at the banks of autumn,
awe and love explode in a contrary desire,
awe in a desire to return to what had already been existence
and still is yet—
love in a desire to go to Him, in Whom being finds its whole future.107
For the Christian believer, death means entering into the Paschal Mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection. Because we see it all the time, we know what it means to pass from life to death. What will it mean to reverse “the order of passing,” to go from death to life? That is a mystery, a “deep script/that has not been read to the end yet.” Christ, however, had read that script, tested it on himself, and passed over. And so, while death had in it “something of annihilation,” Christian hope beyond annihilation rests in Christ’s “passing-over,” by which death is not eliminated but conquered. That is the hope inscribed in a Christian soul in the course of a lifetime. Wojtyła’s meditation on death thus ends in prayer:
And so I am written in You by hope.
apart from You I cannot exist—
if I put my own “I” above death,
and tear it out of the ground of annihilation,
that is because,
it is written into You…108
TESTING THE WORLD STAGE
During the 1970s, Karol Wojtyła became one of the best-known churchmen in the world to his peers in the higher leadership of Roman Catholicism.
Wojtyła’s election to the College of Cardinals in 1967 intensified his involvement in international Catholic affairs, which had begun at the Second Vatican Council. During the Council, Pope Paul VI had developed a deep admiration for the young Polish bishop. That admiration eventually grew into a feeling of paternal affection that was reciprocated by Wojtyła, who said on several occasions that Paul VI had “been like a father” to him. At an audience on Novembe
r 30, 1964, the archbishop of Kraków presented the Pope with an album of photos detailing the crowning of Our Lady of Ludzmierz; the Pope, visibly moved by the masses of people in attendance, murmured to his secretary, “This is Poland. Only there is this possible.”109 Earlier in the year, Pope Paul had sent a gift of three bells to St. Florian’s in Kraków. The authorities had initially locked them up, but after some discussion they were released as “musical instruments.”110
In the mid-1960s, the Polish government had indicated to the Holy See that it would be interested in the appointment of a second cardinal in Poland. Polish communist diplomacy was not noted for its subtlety, and the intention to pursue a divide-and-conquer strategy, splitting the Polish Church between Cardinal Wyszyński and a new cardinal, was not missed in the Vatican. The communists, who had already come to the conclusion that Wojtyła had “swindled” them, did not have the young archbishop of Kraków in mind.111 Paul VI, however, did, and on May 29, 1967, Wojtyła’s nomination to the College of Cardinals was officially announced. After protesting the liquidation of the Rhapsodic Theater, attending the doctoral defense of his student and teaching assistant, Jerzy Gałkowski, and spending a quiet day of prayer at Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, Cardinal-elect Wojtyła left for Rome via Vienna, where he visited with that city’s archbishop, Franz König (who, at the Council, had thought Wojtyła “a clever boy”112).
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