Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  THE DEFENDER

  The confrontation between the Church and Poland’s communist masters was a constant war, not a sporadic set of skirmishes. It was always “we” and “they,” “us” and “them,” for as Pope John Paul II later put it, “the communists tried to be accepted, not just as a political authority, but as a moral authority, as an expression of the Polish nation.” The principal obstacle to that was the Church, which the regime “tried to pretend…did not exist.”137 The confrontation could not be understood in conventional Western political terms. This was a nonadjudicable struggle. Somebody was going to win and somebody was going to lose.

  Karol Wojtyła understood that individual communists may have been, in their own ways, Polish patriots, and he thought that there may have been grains of truths in Marxism’s theoretical critique of early industrial capitalism. That was not what was at stake in Kraków. There was no Christian-Marxist dialogue in Poland because Poland’s communists were “never sufficiently certain about their principles, or about the reactions of their Soviet masters, for a sustained debate to take place.” As the years wore on, they increasingly depended on “policemen rather than…philosophers” to sustain themselves in power.”138 And they did so in ways that the archbishop of Kraków, defender of religious freedom at Vatican II, found quite simply unacceptable. As he had said in Rome during the 1977 Synod on religious education, “One can understand that a man may search and not find; one can understand that he may deny; but it is not understandable that a man may have imposed on him the dictum—‘It is forbidden for you to believe’.”139

  The mid-1970s were a time of continuing harassment—usually petty, sometimes quite nasty—for the independent-minded in Poland. Students were forced to memorize ersatz poetry, such as “The individual is nothing, the individual is nil. The Party is everything.” Elections to student governments were rigged in favor of children whose parents were regime-acceptable. Nonsense holidays—the fortieth anniversary of the Polish-Soviet Friendship Society, for example, or the fortieth anniversary of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War—were substituted for ancient religious feasts. The incompetent were promoted over the deserving, if the latter were politically suspect. Qualified students were denied university admission because of the alleged ideological sins of their parents.140 The Church was not immune to the petulance and paranoia of the authorities. The archbishop’s residence at Franciszkańska, 3, was thoroughly bugged, Wojtyła’s car was constantly tailed, and when a more vigorous signal had to be sent, an elderly man, like Father Bardecki, was beaten up by SB goons.

  It was, as Václav Havel famously described it, a culture of lies, which Karol Wojtyła was well-positioned to challenge.141 In what presented itself as a “workers’ state,” he had been a manual laborer; he had maintained a longstanding interest in and relationships with workers; and he was steeped in the imagination of his favorite poet, Norwid, who had tried to understand the world of work and workers in spiritual terms. The friendships he had nourished over the years with his Środowisko had given him a detailed understanding of what things were like, day in and day out, for ordinary people in the Polish People’s Republic. This intimate knowledge of life within the culture of the lie fed Wojtyła’s intellectual challenge to communism and his activism in mounting a sustained cultural resistance against the regime. No adversary could accuse him of not knowing what was happening on the street. He could see, feel, and hear the assault on human dignity he had described to Henri de Lubac as “the evil of our times.”142 That was the issue. And it was nonnegotiable.

  He was also the custodian of a heritage, the bishop of Kraków as the defender of the people of Kraków. His regime opponents may have dismissed this as mythic twaddle. For him, it was a living, breathing tradition in which he was immersed in his home and his cathedral. As he lived that tradition, he helped provide symbols for his people’s rising dissatisfaction with the status quo. Events and struggles that, in other contexts, would have been mere matters of a zoning decision or a parade permit—like the building of new churches or the holding of great public processions—became emblematic of a rising cultural resistance to the communist monopoly on political power, the communist expropriation of Polish history, and the communist “pulverization of the fundamental uniqueness of each human person.”143

  While he was encouraging and leading that resistance, Cardinal Wojtyła also had to cope with a new set of diplomatic initiatives from the Vatican.

  The Ostpolitik of Pope Paul VI

  Four days after the Second Vatican Council opened, an American U–2 reconnaissance aircraft returned photographs of nuclear-capable Soviet medium-range ballistic missiles at San Cristóbal in southwest Cuba, some fifty miles outside Havana. Pope John XXIII and the tactically brilliant curial diplomat who was his de facto foreign minister, Agostino Casaroli, were deeply shaken by the ensuing Cuban Missile Crisis. In its wake, they began to redesign the Ostpolitik, the “eastern politics,” of the Holy See vis-à-vis the communist regimes of east central Europe. That process intensified and expanded during the pontificate of Paul VI.144

  John XXIII, Paul VI, and Archbishop Casaroli were not simply reacting to events. They believed that Pope Pius XII’s ban on dealing with communists had exhausted the diplomatic statute of limitations and become imprudent. Attempts to create a new dialogue with the Soviet government actually preceded the Cuban Missile Crisis, as the Holy See sought permission to have Catholic bishops and Russian Orthodox representatives from the USSR attend Vatican II. John XXIII’s April 1963 encyclical on world peace, Pacem in Terris, was well-received in the Soviet bloc. On his accession to the papacy several months later, Pope Paul VI tried to build on the foundation of conversation his predecessor had laid.

  The new Ostpolitik was first seriously tested in Poland by Paul VI’s eagerness to participate in the millennium celebrations of Polish Christianity in 1966. Casaroli, dressed in a business suit and tie, made a secret trip to Poland to try to negotiate acceptable terms for a papal visit. The government did not flatly refuse, but it set impossible conditions. The regime first proposed that the Pope could go to Wrocław (thus ratifying the post–World War II Polish-German border) but not to Warsaw. And it insisted that Cardinal Wyszyński not have a large role in the visit. When Casaroli explained that these terms were unacceptable, the government’s next bid was for a visit of less than twenty-four hours, during which the Pope could fly into Częstochowa for Mass in the evening and leave the next morning. Such furtiveness was also unacceptable. The regime blocked the visit by making it impossible for the Pope to come honorably.145

  Casaroli, however, was not a man to take “No” for a permanent answer. With the ice broken, he began to visit Poland openly in 1967, consulting local bishops, including Cardinal Wojtyła in Kraków. The Polish government had suggested to the Holy See that the Vatican was only getting Wyszyński’s view of matters and encouraged Casaroli’s conversations with other bishops. Casaroli came away from these conversations convinced that the picture the Holy See was getting from the Primate and the situation as viewed by the other members of the episcopate was “substantially the same,” even if “some aspects of the analysis” were different. With that clarified, and after a pause due to the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Gdańsk shipyard massacre in 1970, and the subsequent change of Polish regime from Gomułka to Gierek, Casaroli and his lieutenants settled down in 1971 to years of shuttling between Rome and Warsaw in search of a legal agreement to regulate the relations between the Holy See and the Polish People’s Republic. Since Cardinal Wyszyński was the obvious Polish interlocutor for Vatican officials in this effort, Casaroli did not see Wojtyła again until 1974.146

  The Ostpolitik of Paul VI was based on an analysis of the world situation and a vision of the European future, according to which the division of the continent was a permanent feature for the foreseeable decades ahead. The Soviet Union was a formidable regional hegemonic power, and as long as it remained that, the Berl
in Wall was not going to crumble. The Holy See had to be realistic.147 Realism meant downplaying the role of ideological conflict in international relations, and it was within a state-to-state model of international relations that Archbishop Casaroli was operating. Reform in the communist world would come gradually, and stability was the precondition to reform. The Holy See had to acknowledge the status quo in order to set a baseline for a new relationship with the countries of the Warsaw Pact. As for the future, perhaps a gradually liberalizing East would converge over many decades with a West gradually becoming more social-democratic in its politics and economics.

  In the meantime, the hard-pressed Church behind the iron curtain had to survive. To Pope Paul VI and Casaroli, “survival” meant the survival of the Church’s sacramental life. That meant priests, and above all, it meant bishops. A medium-term tactical goal of the Ostpolitik was to reach legal agreements with Warsaw Pact governments allowing the Church (after a minimum of consultation with the governments involved) to appoint bishops. This strategy, referred to in Italian as salvare il salvabile—saving what could be saved—was intended to create what Casaroli referred to as “breathing space” for the Church. Operating that strategy required such tactical concessions from the Church as lowering the temperature of Catholic anti-communist rhetoric, disentangling the Holy See from the West in international politics, and, perhaps most controversially, reining in the underground Church that had been created in east central Europe during the first two decades of the Cold War. Most specifically, this meant stopping the clandestine ordination of priests by underground bishops, which was a thorn in the side of communist governments, particularly in Czechoslovakia.

  The underground clergy in Czechoslovakia protested, sometimes bitterly. They were convinced that the Vatican’s diplomats, who had no direct experience of communism, were vulnerable to communist manipulation, and they believed that the attempt to get bishops through deals with the communist regime in Prague would end up yielding bishops who were puppets.148 But the Czechs and Slovaks, among the most hard-pressed Catholics behind the iron curtain, were in no position to carve out an independent path. The Poles were, and they did.149

  Cardinal Wyszyński’s strategy was one of surviving, and ultimately prevailing, by rebuilding and unity. Having lived with it since World War II, the Primate had a rather different view of “real existing socialism” than Archbishop Casaroli, and he feared that the Vatican diplomat’s lack of experience with communists would cause exactly the kind of problems he had successfully avoided for two decades.150 Wyszyński’s was not a strategy of endless confrontation. Unlike Cardinal Mindszenty in Budapest, a major figure in the abortive Hungarian revolution of 1956, Wyszyński was moderate in his demands, but extremely immoderate in defending them. His demands were the minimum consistent with the Church’s integrity and the dignity of conscientious people: he asked that the Church be allowed to contribute to building Polish society without compromising its principles. The Hungarian prelate, in contrast, made maximum demands, chose direct confrontation—and was crushed. Wyszyński was no less a Catholic and no less devout an anti-communist than Mindszenty. But he was a strategically wiser man. For after Mindszenty was crushed, the Hungarian Church took the road not of compromise, but of surrender.151

  As a matter of sound strategy, Cardinal Wyszyński was determined to be the gatekeeper in any dealings between any agency of the Church, including the Holy See, and the Polish regime. There could only be one point of reference for Church-state issues or the communists, experts at manipulating cracks into fissures, would gain an advantage. What had worked for two decades internally shouldn’t be compromised by the Holy See. Casaroli, for his part, thought that the Polish Primate was a “real prince” and a “great man of the Church” who possessed formidable political skills, including the crucial skill of knowing just where the edge of the precipice was.152 But he and Paul VI were determined to reach whatever legal agreements could be reached with the Polish government as part of their more comprehensive Ostpolitik. The stage was set for continuous chafing between Rome and Warsaw.

  Wyszyński and Wojtyła

  From the moment his appointment as archbishop of Kraków was announced, Karol Wojtyła was determined not to let a millimeter of distance open between himself and the Primate on Church-state affairs. After he received the cardinal’s red hat, Wojtyła intensified his efforts to remain the number two man in the public eye. The two cardinals had, to be sure, differences of style and of analysis. Wojtyła, for example, was more interested in Marxism as an intellectual problem than Wyszyński. But there was never a serious conflict between the two.153 Which raises the question, was Cardinal Wyszyński a mentor to the younger man he once described, perhaps somewhat dismissively, as “a poet”?

  Wojtyła admired Wyszyński’s rocklike stance, his incorruptibility, his devotion to duty, and his longstanding commitment to social justice. Bred in the Sapieha tradition, Wojtyła was naturally impressed by Wyszyński as another pater patriae in hard times. At the same time, Wojtyła did not hesitate to make his own distinctive sorts of criticisms of the regime, or to pursue his program of cultural resistance through instruments (like Tygodnik Powszechny) that Wyszyński sometimes found hard to appreciate. Wyszyński’s passion for a unified front sometimes led him to silence dissenting views prematurely; Wojtyła was a man who instinctively tried to hold people of different views together. Wyszyński didn’t trust intellectuals and thought that the repository of national honor was the faith of simple people; Wojtyła, who knew full well that intellectuals could and did behave badly at times, was nonetheless committed to a Polish Church that had room in it for both critical intelligence and popular piety.154 But Cardinal Wojtyła consciously decided, out of both loyalty and tactical prudence, to remain in the Primate’s shadow whenever the two appeared together.155

  At the same time, Karol Wojtyła had his own way of being a bishop, his own reading of the dynamics of contemporary history, and his own sense of the tactics appropriate in the local Church for which he was responsible. Curiously, the cardinal archbishop of Kraków impressed Archbishop Casaroli during the diplomat’s visits to Kraków as more of a “theoretician” of the struggle “between communism and the Christian reality” than as a man “interested in concrete political problems,” a reticence Casaroli ascribed to Wyszyński’s dominance of the Polish Church-state scene.156 What Casaroli perceived as Wojtyła’s “reticence” in fact reflected a different approach to the whole question of the Church’s relationship to the world of political power.

  Casaroli remembered being impressed by the fact that Wojtyła had never met Edward Gierek, the Polish Communist Party First Secretary “who held the real power.” The implication seemed to be that anyone interested in being a real player would have met the other real players. Karol Wojtyła had a different sense of who the “real players” in the Polish drama were. He was far more interested in getting to know the dissidents of KOR, the Clubs of the Catholic Intelligentsia (KIK), the editorial staffs of Tygodnik Powszechny and Znak, and Poland’s leading philosophers, poets, and musicians than in spending time making useless banter with communist leaders, no matter how exalted. Casaroli had noted the difference between Wojtyła and other Polish bishops, in that the Kraków cardinal was “always interested in conversations and contacts” with laypeople. Spending time on these, Casaroli thought, was a “restraint” on “political conversations.”157 In Wojtyła’s mind, this hardly constituted a painful tradeoff.

  Years later, Cardinal Casaroli remembered being struck by three things: that Poland was the only place in his extensive travels where he had ever heard bishops talking in the blunt realist métier of “reasons of state” that this rationale—fear of a Soviet intervention—was invoked by Cardinal Wyszyński in appealing for worker restraint during the riots of 1970 following the Gdańsk shipyard shootings; and that Cardinal Wojtyła didn’t think in these terms. Which was, of course, precisely the point. Wojtyła did not approach Church-state issues
through a form of “realism” that deemed politics a realm of amorality, because he believed that moral judgment, as the distinctively human characteristic, could not be excluded from politics.

  On Cardinal Wyszyński’s part, one can discern a growing respect for Karol Wojtyła. The Primate appreciated Wojtyła’s role as mediator with the intellectuals, and knew that the younger man had shown himself a deft negotiator in several local crises in Kraków. He also appreciated Wojtyła’s deference to him, which was personally authentic as well as politically essential. Wojtyła’s first move, on being named a cardinal, had been to visit Wyszyński. Later that same year, he helped foil yet another government attempt to split the two men, this time using a presumably unwitting Charles de Gaulle as the wedge. When de Gaulle came to Poland on an official visit in 1967, he agreed, under Polish regime pressure, to remove a visit to the Primate from his agenda. When, later in his trip, the General arrived in Kraków, he found Cardinal Wojtyła “otherwise engaged.” Le Grand Charles was greeted at Wawel Cathedral by the sacristan.158 This pattern of deference to the Primate held for more than a decade. During one of Wyszyński’s greatest triumphs, the Polish hierarchy’s visit to West Germany in September 1978, Wojtyła remained so far in the background that it is difficult to find photographs of him on that historic occasion. Wojtyła even joked about it. Asked what percentage of Polish cardinals skied, he replied, “Forty percent.” The reporter said, “But, Your Eminence, there are only two Polish cardinals.” “In Poland,” Wojtyła replied, “Wyszyński counts for sixty percent.”