With Brezhnev temporarily squared away and John Paul’s visit now a fait accompli, negotiations between the Polish Church and the government turned to the question of dates. In Poland’s liturgical calendar, the feast of St. Stanisław is celebrated on May 8. A papal visit on this date, with its unmistakable overtones of religious resistance to state power, was simply too much for the regime to contemplate. After months of negotiations, a compromise was finally reached. Rather than coming to Poland for two days in May as originally envisioned, John Paul II would come to Poland for nine days in June and visit six cities rather than just Warsaw and Kraków.
In announcing this agreement on March 2, 1979, the state-controlled media warned against the “illusion” that the visit would change the party’s leading role in any way or alter the “strictly secular” nature of the Polish People’s Republic.20 The regime may have convinced itself that, by deflecting the visit from the traditional date of Stanisław’s feast, it had won a considerable victory. In fact, the communists had lost a great deal. John Paul happily traded two days for nine, and two cities for six. Moreover, the change of dates from May to June supercharged the visit with religious symbolism. The Pope would arrive in Poland and celebrate his first public mass on the Vigil of Pentecost, the great feast marking the descent of the Holy Spirit on the apostles in the form of “tongues of fire” (Acts 2.1–4). As for the anniversary of St. Stanisław’s martyrdom and the closing of the Synod of Kraków, the Polish episcopate simply extended the anniversary celebrations for another month (culminating on June 10), and the Archdiocese of Kraków rescheduled the closing of the Synod until the Pope’s visit. The ostensible communist triumph in the battle over St. Stanisław turned out to be the very definition of a Pyrrhic victory.
Venues were another contested issue. The communists refused to have the Pope in Silesia, where John Paul wanted to revisit the shrine of the Virgin Mary in Piekary, a pilgrimage he had regularly undertaken as archbishop of Kraków. Silesia, however, was the political fiefdom of Edward Gierek, and the party leader, no matter how resigned to the papal visit, was not about to be upstaged on his home turf.21 The government also refused to let the Pope into Nowa Huta, an indication of just how stung the communists had been by the Ark Church and the battle for Mistrzejowice. Even with these sites off-limits, the Pope was about to undertake an extensive tour. The itinerary finally agreed upon included the national political capital, Warsaw; the cradle of Polish Catholicism and the country’s primatial see, Gniezno; the shrine of the Black Madonna, Częstochowa; and a series of events in Kraków and its environs—Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, Wadowice, Oswięcim (Auschwitz), Nowy Targ (in the highlands), and the Cistercian monastery at Mogiła on the outskirts of Nowa Huta.
The Church and the government also locked horns on how the Polish broadcast media would cover papal events. For thirty years, the regime had stubbornly refused the Church access to radio and television. The Polish episcopate, which had bitterly resented this exclusion from national life, argued that the papal events were of great public interest and ought to be extensively covered for that reason. The regime was being pressed by its comrades in neighboring countries, upset at the thought of their people being able to pick up the Polish broadcasts; the Lithuanian regime sent a fraternal delegation to Warsaw to plead for limiting their scope. Calculating that more extensive TV coverage might cut down on the crowds at certain papal venues, the Polish government finally agreed to national broadcasting of the arrival ceremonies, the papal visit with government officials at Warsaw’s Belvedere Palace, the Mass in Victory Square, the visit to Auschwitz and the Mass there, and the departure ceremonies in Kraków. Coverage of the Pope’s visits to Częstochowa and Gniezno was limited to regional radio and TV. None of the details of television coverage was settled until the very last minute.22
The organizational arrangements for the papal visit, including the enormous task of managing the crowds, were left entirely to the Church—another strategic error by the regime. People who had been told for thirty years that they were incapable of organizing themselves independently of the state or the party could now test that claim empirically. The testing went on in thousands of homes and churches where meals were prepared for pilgrims, marshals trained in crowd control, and decorations made and displayed. Weeks before John Paul arrived, the people of Poland had refuted the claim that only the “vanguard” of society could organize society properly.
SETTING THE STAGE
Whatever the Polish government may have thought it had done in deflecting John Paul’s visit until June, the Church and the Pope were determined to honor St. Stanisław’s martyrdom according to ancient custom. On May 8, the martyr’s Polish feast day, John Paul II issued an apostolic letter, Rutilans Agmen, to Cardinal Wyszyński, Archbishop Macharski, and the entire Polish Church. The martyrdom of the bishop of Kraków, one of that “glowing band”23 of witnesses from which the Church had drawn its strength over the centuries, was still “at the root of the affairs, experiences, and truths” of the Polish nation, he wrote. It was a heritage of which Poland, in her present “peculiar situation,” wanted to “remind herself.” That act of memory was embodied in 6,000 Polish expatriates from around the world who, led by Cardinal Wyszyński, came to Rome on May 16 for a solemn commemoration of the Stanisław anniversary in the Paul VI Audience Hall. In his opening address, the cardinal pointedly noted that the forthcoming papal pilgrimage would be bracketed by the Pope’s visits to the relics of St. Adalbert in Gniezno and St. Stanisław in Kraków, the connecting tissue between them being the papal visit to the shrine of the Black Madonna in Częstochowa.24 John Paul’s itinerary had been built around the three icons that tied Polish national identity most closely to Catholicism.
Two days later, on May 18, John Paul and the Primate led a commemoration of the thirty-fifth anniversary of the decisive World War II battle for Monte Cassino in which the exiled Polish army (including the Pope’s classmate, Jerzy Kluger) had figured so prominently. Poland, John Paul said, continued “to live in the orbit of the consequences” of that conflict—an unmistakable reference to the Yalta division of Europe. The war should have taught that it was “only on the basis of full respect for the rights of men and the rights of nations—full respect!” that peace in Europe could be built. That meant the right of a nation “to social life in the spirit of its own national and religious convictions and traditions and to the sovereignty of its own territory.” There was no need to add that Polish sovereignty was infringed by Poland’s incorporation into a falsely described “alliance” meant to protect a regime deliberately constructed in opposition to Polish convictions and traditions.25
Back in Poland, the regime was attempting preemptive damage control. In March, the Polish Communist Party sent out a secret set of instructions to teachers in the country’s schools, which were later published in an underground periodical. The instructions suggest the mindset of the regime in the prelude to the Pope’s return home:
The Pope is our enemy…. Due to his uncommon skills and great sense of humor he is dangerous, because he charms everyone, especially journalists. Besides, he goes for cheap gestures in his relations with the crowd, for instance, puts on a highlander’s hat, shakes all hands, kisses children, etc…. It is modeled on American presidential campaigns….
He is dangerous, because he will make St. Stanisław the patron of the opposition to the authorities and a defender of human rights. Luckily we managed to maneuver him out of the date May 8…. Because of the activation of the Church in Poland our activities designed to atheize the youth not only cannot diminish but must intensely develop…. In this respect all means are allowed and we cannot afford any sentiments.26
The Polish regime wasn’t completely ham-handed. It refurbished sites the Pope would visit and cooperated with the Church in setting up the papal venues and arranging the necessary public health services for the huge crowds expected. The government also provided extensive communications facilities for the world press. It was ta
king no chances with its own media, however, and issued detailed censorship directives to Polish journalists, which were promptly leaked to the underground press.27
While all this was going on in the name of the Polish state, the Polish nation continued to make preparations for receiving its most distinguished son. Students in a Warsaw dormitory put up a large banner on their building that quoted the Pope on the world’s youth: “You are the hope of the world, the Church’s hope, my hope.” The authorities in charge of the dormitory tried to get the banner taken down. The students, unanimously, refused. Asked later who had told him to remove the banner, the dormitory manager said, “An older man from the Soviet Embassy.”28
In Kraków, volunteers were decorating the Pope’s old home at Franciszkańska, 3, with papal and Polish flags, working hurriedly on a makeshift scaffolding. The night before the Pope arrived, they were still at it late at night when the streetlights suddenly went out. As one participant later put it, “Nobody believed it was just bad luck since ours was the only block without lights.” Proving that “we” could be more resourceful than “they,” drivers parked their cars across from the archbishop’s residence so the volunteers could complete the decorations with the aid of their headlights. No one complained about the dead batteries afterward.29
NINE DAYS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD
The idea of “pilgrimage”—a journey to a sacred place for prayer, penance, and almsgiving—is deeply inscribed in the religious imagination of humanity. In biblical times pilgrimages to Jerusalem were common, particularly on the great feasts of Passover, Pentecost, and Tabernacles. Pilgrimages to the Holy Land were a staple of early Christian life, and as the Church expanded throughout the Mediterranean world, other pilgrimage sites emerged, often associated with the relics of the apostles.
The tradition of pilgrimage, reflecting the biblical conviction that God had acted decisively in history at certain specific times and in certain real places, readily transferred to other cultures as the Christian movement grew. Poland was no exception, as the great pilgrimages to the shrine of the Black Madonna at Częstochowa and to Kalwaria Zebrzydowska attested throughout the centuries. From his boyhood days, Karol Wojtyła had actively participated in the Polish pilgrimage tradition. Now, he set out on what one commentator would later call “the most fantastic pilgrimage in the history of contemporary Europe.”30
In announcing the final itinerary for the Pope’s visit in a communiqué dated May 4, the Polish bishops stressed that the Pope was coming at their invitation, and that “the Holy Father’s journey has the religious character of a pilgrimage to his native country in the year dedicated to the ninth centenary of the martyrdom of St. Stanisław, Bishop of Kraków. The pilgrimage will traverse the principal places of the saints, sanctified by the blood of martyrs.”31 This insistence on “pilgrimage” as the leitmotif of what was about to happen was not a sop to the government, but an accurate description of John Paul II’s conception of his world travels. From the beginning, he was determined that his visits would be structured to convey their pastoral purpose.
The “iconography” of the Pope’s trips abroad was established in the Dominican Republic and Mexico in January 1979 and has been maintained ever since. On arriving in a country, the Pope knelt and kissed the ground to express his conviction that God was present in this particular place and with these particular people. The diplomatic formalities were observed but kept to a minimum, as he met with the local head of state and other officials of the government. In traveling through any country, he was never accompanied in his “Popemobile” by political figures, but only by the local bishop and/or the head of the national episcopal conference, who were his hosts. The principal events of any pastoral visit were always liturgical, not political, in character. The impact of any given visit on public affairs was something John Paul II was content to leave to the people of a country, to their religious leaders—and, he insisted, to the Holy Spirit.
June 2—Warsaw
At 10:07 A.M. on Saturday, June 2, 1979, John Paul II walked vigorously down the stairway from the Alitalia 727 Città di Bergamo, knelt, and kissed the ground of Poland. Church bells began tolling throughout a country electric with anticipation. Polish President Henryk Jabłoński and Primate Wyszyński made brief statements of welcome. John Paul’s response deliberately set the context for the next nine days. The Polish Pope had come home to return to his people their authentic history and culture.
There were proprieties to be observed. John Paul thanked President Jabłoński for the courtesy of his reception and reiterated his hope that his visit would serve “the great cause of rapprochement and collaboration among nations.” He praised Cardinal Wyszyński and said that the program for the days ahead would be his response to the Primate’s welcome.
Then he addressed his “beloved brothers and sisters,” his “dear fellow-countrymen,” whom he greeted on this special day “with the same words I used on October 16 last year to greet those present in St. Peter’s Square: ‘Praised be Jesus Christ!’” That was how he had learned to greet fellow Poles during his life among them, and that was how he came to them now. Poland had been denied its history and its culture by five years of Nazi occupation and thirty-three years of communist hegemony. Now he, a son of Poland, would give his people back what was theirs by birthright.
After a triumphal entry into the capital through streets packed with hundreds of thousands, John Paul was driven along Warsaw’s Royal Way to the Old Town. He went first to the Cathedral of St. John, rebuilt after its destruction during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, in which the Polish Home Army had fought the Wehrmacht hand-to-hand and pew-by-pew, the fighting spilling down into the cathedral’s crypt. Once again, he began with a confession of faith: “Praised be Jesus Christ!” And once again, he summoned up the historic memory of his people, whose presence in the cathedral confirmed “the thousand-year right of citizenship that this Church has in the present-day life of the capital, of the nation, of the State.” To be in this rebuilt cathedral, he said, was to be reminded of “what Christ once said: ‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up’ (John 2.19).” Salvation history was not something that had happened in the past, he claimed; salvation history was the dramatic context in which Poland continued to live out its national life. For did not Polish tradition have it that St. Stanisław, whose martyrdom he had come to Poland to commemorate, once said to King Bolesław, “Destroy this Church, and Christ, over the centuries, will rebuild it ”? It was in the context of this history, charged with signs of God’s purposes, that he was meeting his countrymen today—“the first Pope from the Polish race, on the threshold of the second millennium of the nation’s baptism and history.”32
The reclamation of Polish history continued at the Belvedere Palace, official residence of the Polish president, where John Paul and Cardinal Wyszyński met with President Jabłoński and Communist Party leader Edward Gierek. The Pope’s formal remarks were polite but firm. He had come, he said, at the invitation of the Polish episcopate, “which expresses the will of the Catholic society in our motherland.” He was grateful to the authorities of the Polish People’s Republic for having “also opened to me the gates of my native land.” Then, after acknowledging what had been done to rebuild the capital and its royal palace from the ruins of the war, he challenged the moral premise of the totalitarian system.
Poles knew that the state was not an end in itself. Rather, “the raison d’être of the State is the sovereignty of society, of the nation, of the motherland.” This was “the terrible historical lesson” of Poland’s nineteenth-century history, which had become, in the aftermath of World War I, “a new forge of Polish patriotism.” The present Polish state frequently asserted its commitment to “peace [and] co-existence,” a communist mantra. That commitment, John Paul insisted, had a “profound ethical meaning,” touching the “objective rights of the nation,” which included the right “to the formation of its own culture and civilization.” The authen
tic history of Polish culture was one in which there was no place for forced ideological conversions.33
As for the present international situation, “peace and co-existence,” he said, required an end to “all forms of economic or cultural colonialism.” This meant that any alliances into which a state entered had to be engaged on the basis of “voluntary collaboration.” The Warsaw Pact was not mentioned; it did not have to be. As for the Church, it did not “desire privileges” but only the freedom to carry out its evangelical and moral mission. That had been the program for thirty years of “a man of rare quality, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński, Primate of Poland.” He had shared the Primate’s aspiration when he was archbishop of Kraków, and he would continue to share it. Appealing to the “responsibility” that fell on each of his communist hosts “before history and before your conscience,” this “son of the same motherland” made it unmistakably clear that he would be watching: “Permit me to continue to consider [Poland’s] good as my own, and to feel my sharing in it as deeply as if I still lived in this land and were still a citizen of this state…Permit me to continue to feel, to think, and to hope this, and to pray for this.”
It was a hope, and a warning, addressed to men in Moscow as well as in Warsaw. There can be no doubt that it was taken as such.
By the end of the day, the great cross in Victory Square had been dismantled.
June 3—Gniezno
After staying overnight at the Primate’s residence, John Paul attended a Mass celebrated Sunday morning, the Solemnity of Pentecost, for tens of thousands of university students, many of whom had kept overnight vigil at Warsaw’s collegiate Church of St. Anne and in an adjacent square. In his address, the Pope asked his “young friends” to consider the great question, what is a human being? It was, the Pope suggested, life’s most fundamental query, and it raised another, deeper question: “What is to be the measurement for measuring man?” His physical capacities? His technical expertise? The Scripture readings for that day’s feast of the Holy Spirit proposed a richer answer: the true measure of the human heart and spirit was “the measurement of conscience,” the “measurement of the spirit open to God.” The young people of Poland knew that theirs was a country in waiting, but for what? Poland was waiting, the Pope reminded them, as St. Paul had reminded his Romans, “for the revealing of the sons of God.” It was waiting for future “doctors, technicians, jurists, professors…in order that in each one of us God Himself should to some extent be revealed.”34
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