John Paul’s entire daily routine, according to associates and collaborators, was punctuated by prayer, not simply when he was in the chapel for Mass or the recitation of the Liturgy of the Hours (to which he attached great importance), but constantly—in between meetings, en route to audiences, in a car, in a helicopter, even on the roof. Paul VI had installed a solarium atop the Apostolic Palace, to which John Paul II added a set of modern stations of the cross. He prayed the stations every Friday during the year and every day during Lent. Each week, he received the sacrament of penance and made his confession to a Polish priest. Once, the priest-secretary he had inherited from Paul VI and John Paul I, Father John Magee, couldn’t find him anywhere in the
papal apartment. It was suggested that he look in the chapel. He looked and didn’t see the Pope. It was suggested that he look again—down. There was John Paul II, prostrate before the tabernacle. Whatever the issue, he was, from the beginning, a man who made “all his major decisions…on his knees before the Blessed Sacrament,” as one of his senior curial aides put it.49
John Paul II received a daily news brief, culled from major world papers by the Secretariat of State, written in Italian, and arranged so that he could scan the headlines and then go deeper into a summary of a particular news story or read the story (or opinion column) himself, as he chose. As in Kraków, he learned far more from his ongoing and intense round of daily conversations than he did from what others had decided was “the news.” When he first began issuing personal invitations to his private Mass, and to breakfast, lunch, and dinner, the managers of popes were appalled; invitations to “the apartment” had always been managed by the Secretariat of State and the Prefecture of the Papal Household. One Curialist, disturbed by the flood of previously unknown people coming into the Apostolic Palace for audiences or meals with the Sovereign Pontiff, complained, “These halls were once a place of respect, of good taste. Now it’s become Campo de’ Fiori” (the great open-air market in Rome). That was, in fact, precisely John Paul II’s view of the matter. The Church is first and foremost a pastoral reality, and, of course, everything is going on in it at once, just like an open-air market.50
In addition to making it clear that Peter’s house was the Church’s house, John Paul II was determined to preserve a personal sphere of conversation and initiative. As he broke precedent by acting as master of his own chapel and table, he developed methods for maintaining a private correspondence with friends and intellectual interlocutors throughout the world. It was the old Kraków strategy of “creating facts,” now applied to a different kind of bureaucratic inertia. The Pope didn’t ask permission to keep in touch with the people with whom he wanted to be in personal conversation. He simply sidestepped the Secretariat of State.51 Similarly, he didn’t ask permission to invite Jerzy Janik and his family to Castel Gandolfo the first summer he lived at the papal summer villa there. He simply invited them, and the Janiks came.52
The man who made his life work as Pope was the same man who had made his life work as archbishop of Kraków, his longtime secretary, Stanisław Dziwisz. Dziwisz was born in 1939 in Raba Wyzna. The village was near Nowy Targ, on the way to the Zakopane ski resort, and Dziwisz became a first-class skier. Ordained in 1963 by Bishop Wojtyła, Dziwisz spent two years in parish pastoral work south of Kraków before becoming the second secretary (or “chaplain”) to Archbishop Wojtyła in 1966, and, shortly after, the principal secretary. Dziwisz later completed his doctoral studies in theology while serving as the Pope’s secretary.
The relationship between the two men is perhaps best described as that which every father wants from a son: love and duty without fear or sycophancy. Dziwisz brought complete loyalty, utter discretion, sharp judgment, a puckish sense of humor, and indefatigability to his job. He was by no means a carbon copy of Wojtyła. They came from different social backgrounds (Dziwisz was from a large family in a rural area), had different interests and different tastes, and sometimes read situations differently. When he moved into the Vatican with the newly elected John Paul II, Dziwisz brought with him a simple understanding of his task—to make happen what the Holy Father wanted to happen.
It is the unhappy lot of the papal secretary to have to say “No” to many important people, including many important churchmen, and the resentments that can build up are, if not edifying, at least understandable. Yet Stanisław Dziwisz has not drawn the resentment and wrath of men of rank in the Church the way some of his predecessors have. That is explained, at least in part, by the fact that this son of very humble conditions is a gentleman whose selflessness is known and respected, even by those to whom he has had to say “No.”
Within a few weeks of his election, John Paul II’s youthfulness, vigor, and confidence in the message he preached seemed to many a new model of the papacy. It actually involved retrieving a venerable concept of the episcopate from the first millennium of Christianity. Then, as one scholar has put it, “many of the Fathers were at one and the same time bishops, preachers, pastors of souls, theologians and spiritual leaders, to say nothing of mystics…Each facet of their personality and work interacted with the other dimensions, enriching them.”53 Given the Church’s and the world’s experience of the managerial papacy, John Paul’s evangelical and apostolic approach looked radical indeed. From his point of view, he was simply being what a bishop ought to be, according to the ancient tradition renewed by the Second Vatican Council.
STORM SIGNALS IN MOSCOW
Not everything could be bent to his will. John Paul II thought the Pope should spend Christmas, and especially his first Christmas as Pope, in Bethlehem. The idea caused consternation in the Secretariat of State. Bethlehem was in the West Bank, which had been bitterly disputed territory since the Arab-Israeli war in 1967. The Holy See did not have full diplomatic relations with any of the relevant states. A pilgrimage to Bethlehem couldn’t be abstracted from the tangle of issues in which the Holy See was embroiled in the region. The visit would be a logistical nightmare—the Pope couldn’t simply arrive in Bethlehem like any other pilgrim. John Paul II finally withdrew the proposal, although he mentioned his desire to be in Bethlehem at his Christmas Eve homily in Rome. His desire to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, as he said to more than one visitor over the next two decades, intensified as the years went on.54
The idea of an impromptu pilgrimage to Bethlehem also suggested that John Paul II thought of the papacy’s relationship to world politics in rather different terms than his predecessors.
John Paul understood that the Holy See’s unique status in international law and diplomatic practice was to the Church’s advantage. It gave the Church a place at the table in international legal and political institutions and a forum for expressing its moral concerns. Similarly, the independence of the Vatican City micro-state protected the papacy from becoming dependent on any state power. Vatican City State guaranteed the Church’s freedom, and in that sense it was an embodiment of religious freedom. For John Paul II, though, the Holy See’s international legal status and the independence of the state of which he was sovereign were not ends in themselves, but means for achieving the real goal of the Office of Peter, which was to preach the Gospel and strengthen the brethren, wherever they might be. The rules of the game as understood in international politics could not be allowed to impede that evangelical and apostolic mission. Popes since Leo XIII had learned to engage world affairs through the moral force of their office. John Paul II pressed the Church’s disengagement from temporal power in new ways, in what amounted to a redeclaration of the Church’s independence to pursue its unique moral role in world affairs without fear or favor.
In their natural fascination with the mediagenic, non-Italian Pope, commentators often missed this deeper, “structural” point about the terremoto that was John Paul II. The Soviet leadership, or at least some of the more acute members of the Soviet leadership, understood—and grasped that much more was at stake than what the less-alert comrades thought was another passing episode
involving the religious fevers of the endlessly agitated Poles.
Initial Soviet reaction to the news of Karol Wojtyła’s election was muted, even somewhat upbeat. The new Pope would pursue the policies of John XXIII and Paul VI, the political weekly Novoe vremya suggested. “The lamentable experience of Pius XII shows that anti-communism is a dead end for the Church,” and Wojtyła’s election should be read as a defeat for the Italian cardinals who wanted to delay the implementation of Vatican II.55
This relative good cheer was a matter of publicly treading water. Behind the scenes, the Soviet leadership was in a state of shock. At the time of Wojtyła’s election, an “eminent Italian journalist” with good Soviet connections had told Jerzy Turowicz that “the Soviets would prefer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as Secretary-General of the United Nations than a Pole as Pope.”56 Yuri Andropov, head of the KGB, understood that things had changed—drastically and for the worse, from his point of view. Just as Andropov had understood the threat that Solzhenitsyn had posed to the Soviet regime, he quickly grasped that the election of Karol Wojtyła spelled serious trouble in the Soviet Union and its external empire.57 Shortly after the shock of October 16, 1978, Andropov called the chief KGB agent, the rezident, in Warsaw and demanded, “How could you possibly allow the election of a citizen of a socialist country as pope?” The rezident is said to have suggested that the Comrade Chairman make his inquiries in Rome, not in Warsaw.58 Andropov then ordered an analysis of the election from Section 1 (Reports) of the First Chief Directorate of the KGB. The report, which reflected the KGB spymaster’s view that history worked through plots, concluded that Wojtyła had been elected as part of a German-American conspiracy in which key roles were played by the Polish-American archbishop of Philadelphia, Cardinal John Krol, and Zbigniew Brzeziński, national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter. The goal of the plot was, presumably, the destabilization of Poland as the first step toward the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact.59 The analysis was almost comical, but the threat analysis was acute.
While Andropov was conducting his inquiry, the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party ordered up its own analysis of the political consequences of Wojtyła’s election. Prepared by the director of the Institute for the Economy of the World Socialist System, Oleg Bogomolov, and completed less than three weeks after Wojtyła’s election, the report described the former archbishop of Kraków as a “right-winger” who had made trouble in Poland while avoiding a frontal assault on communism. Bogomolov correctly identified one immediate problem: Wojtyła’s election would likely result in increased Vatican pressure for religious freedom in Warsaw Pact countries. One proposed countermeasure was a quiet warning to the Holy See that a “hostile” campaign for human rights would lead to more repression of religious institutions in central and eastern Europe. Bogomolov also suggested that “it is worth studying the possibility of improving relations with the Catholic clergy in Lithuania, Ukraine, and Belorussia,” in order to forestall the kind of moral (or, in Soviet terms, ideological) assault that Wojtyła was likely to launch.60
Bogomolov’s proposal suggests that Kremlin anxiety over the election of Pope John Paul II was not confined to the possible unraveling of the Soviet position in Poland. Poland was the geographic linchpin of the Warsaw Pact because it was the land bridge to East Germany, the most crucial strategic asset in the external Soviet empire. But if Poland was the linchpin of the external empire, Ukraine was the linchpin of the internal empire Lenin and Stalin had consolidated on its original czarist base. The repository of Ukrainian nationalism, especially in Western Ukraine (or Galicia) was the Eastern-rite Greek Catholic Church [GCC], which had been persecuted in an exceptionally harsh fashion from the Stalin period on.61 Nothing terrified the masters of the Kremlin more than the thought of renascent Ukrainian nationalism. No institution was more likely to be the base for such a renaissance than the GCC—and Wojtyła’s sympathies with the Greek Catholics of Ukraine were well-known. The Ukrainian-speaking John Paul II’s meeting with the exiled Ukrainian Cardinal Slipyi on November 20, 1978, had not gone unnoticed.
Then there was Lithuania, another intensely Catholic part of the Soviet empire where the Church had been brutalized since the country’s forced incorporation into the Soviet Union in 1940. Clandestine ordinations, an active underground network of clergy and nuns, and the longest-running samizdat publication in the USSR, the Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania (first published in 1972), had kept the Church alive under religious repression and cultural Russification. Now came a Lithuanian-speaking Pope, a cultural heir of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, who shortly after his election dispatched his red cardinal’s zucchetto clandestinely to the Marian shrine at Ostrabrama in Vilnius.62 Within months of John Paul’s election, a report to the Soviet Council on Religious Affairs warned that “extremist-minded priests of the Catholic Church” had been at work throughout the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, launching the Catholic Committee for the Defense of Believers’ Rights.63 Several of the priests involved were soon en route to hard-labor camps in Siberia and another would be murdered in a “road accident” in 1986.64
Formed primarily by their experience of Stalin’s purge trials, the men who ran the USSR during the Brezhnev era were less interested in the fine points of ideology than their predecessors in the 1920s and 1930s. Marxist-Leninist ideology remained important, though, because it legitimated their rule over the multinational Soviet Union and over its satellites. This was rule in the name of the Dynamics of History, and, according to the Brezhnev Doctrine (created to justify Soviet tanks crushing the Prague Spring of 1968) it could not be, and would not be permitted to be, reversed. This was the context in which the Soviet leadership thought about its relationship to the Roman Catholic Church and analyzed the pros and cons of the Ostpolitik of Paul VI. Men like Leonid Brezhnev, Andrei Gromyko, and Yuri Andropov did not believe in any historical “convergence” between a liberalizing communist world and an increasingly social democratic West. They appreciated the Ostpolitik because, by lowering the temperature of public confrontation between the Catholic Church and world communism, it permitted the consolidation of the Soviet position in both the internal and external empires, while weakening the hold of an institution they regarded as an implacable historical enemy.
Karol Wojtyła did not come to the papacy with a master plan for dismantling the Soviet Union or its external empire. It would never have occurred to him to think of his responsibilities in those terms. He was determined to give public witness to the truth about the human condition contained in the Gospel of Jesus Christ—and a deliberately evangelical papacy necessarily confronted the counterclaims about human nature, community, and destiny embedded in communism.
John Paul II’s refusal to accept the Yalta division of Europe as a fact of life was a frontal challenge to postwar Soviet strategy. That was bad enough, from the Soviet point of view. But a Slavic Pope, capable of addressing the restive peoples of the external and internal Soviet empires in their own languages, was a nightmare beyond the worst dreams of the masters of the Kremlin. Then there were the terms in which John Paul II was voicing his challenge. As he had done when archbishop of Kraków, he avoided direct condemnations of Marxism-Leninism, which would have opened him to the charge of being an ecclesiastical politician allied with the West. At the same time, by relentlessly focusing on human rights, and particularly on the fundamental right of religious freedom, he subtly attacked the heart of the communist project in history—communism’s claim to be the twentieth century’s true humanism and the true liberator of humanity.
The hopes the Kremlin had invested in the Vatican Ostpolitik of the late 1960s and 1970s had been dashed. The new Pope posed a serious threat, not simply to the Warsaw Pact, but to the Soviet Union itself—and did so precisely because he was a witness rather than a politician.
PUEBLA AND CHRISTIAN LIBERATION
At a Christmastime meeting with the College of Cardinals on December 22, 1978, John Pa
ul II announced his wish to travel to Mexico the following month to visit the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe near Mexico City and to participate in the Third General Assembly of CELAM, the council of Latin American bishops’ conferences.
This first of his pastoral pilgrimages abroad took the new Pope into the heart of one of the most intractable problems of modern Catholicism, the Church’s position in Mexico. Violently persecuted by Mexican revolutionaries during the first part of the century, the Church had eventually reached a modus vivendi with the government after World War II. But the state remained officially, indeed constitutionally, anti-clerical, Church-state relations were tense, and in public life “the Church did not exist,” as one Mexican churchman later put it.65 When the Mexican bishops invited John Paul to come to their country during the CELAM meeting at Puebla de los Angeles, there was predictable nervousness in the Vatican Secretariat of State. The Holy See had no diplomatic relations with the Mexican government, which had not issued its own invitation to the Pope. The problem was solved by means of some adroit personal diplomacy.
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