Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

When we are strong with the Spirit of God, we are also strong with faith in man…. There is therefore no need to fear….

  So…I beg you: never lose your trust, do not be defeated, do not be discouraged…. I beg you: have trust, and…always seek spiritual power from Him from whom countless generations of our fathers and mothers have found it. Never detach yourselves from Him. Never lose your spiritual freedom…. Never disdain charity, which is “the greatest of these” and which shows itself through the cross….

  All this I beg of you: recalling the powerful intercession of the Mother of God at Jasna Góra and at all her other shrines in Polish lands; in memory of St. Adalbert who underwent death for Christ near the Baltic Sea; in memory of St. Stanisław who fell beneath the royal sword at Skałka.

  All this I beg of you.

  Amen.63

  LESSON IN DIGNITY

  Before leaving Poland on June 10, John Paul met briefly with the journalists who had covered his pilgrimage in the world press. At the end of his formal remarks, delivered in French, his voice was trembling and he had to fight back the tears as he said, “I hope, I hope, I hope to meet you again in this country. I hope…” The airport farewell ceremony at Balice, outside Kraków, followed a last motorcade through packed streets. At the airport, President Jabłoński tried to salvage something from the wreckage by stating that uncritical allegiance to the heritage of Poland’s history and culture would not serve the modern Polish state well. Since the Pope had not suggested any such Polish fundamentalism, the president’s remarks, aimed at an audience in Moscow as well as in Poland, evaporated into the late spring air. John Paul listened respectfully and acknowledged, with unintended irony, that the government’s agreement to his visit had been an “act of courage.”64 When Primate Wyszyński spoke—“You comforted our hearts with your living faith….”—the Pope, standing on the airport tarmac, could be seen brushing away tears. Then, kissing “the ground from which my heart can never be detached,” he boarded a LOT Polish Airlines jet for the return flight to Rome.65

  Thirteen million Poles, more than one-third the national population, had seen the Pope in person. Virtually everyone else had seen him on television or heard him on radio. In nine days, the country had lived through what political scientist Bogdan Szajkowski described as a “psychological earthquake, an opportunity for mass political catharsis.”66 Things that people had believed for decades, but could not affirm publicly, John Paul had affirmed. Things they had wanted to say, he had said. Even the way he had said it made a difference, for the Pope had spoken in “a beautiful, sonorous Polish, so unlike the calcified official language of communist Poland.”67 He had always insisted that this was a pilgrimage, though, so its primary effects should have been evident in the realm of the human spirit.

  As they were.

  People felt and acted out the change before they could articulate what had happened to them. Without thinking much about it, they began behaving differently. As Adam Michnik, one of the country’s most prominent dissidents and a non-Catholic, wrote, “those very people who are ordinarily frustrated and aggressive in the shop lines were metamorphosed into a cheerful and happy collectivity, a people filled with dignity…Exemplary order reigned everywhere.”68 Communism had promised solidarity among the masses and had produced atomization, ill-humor, and distrust. John Paul II had delivered what the comrades promised but had no means of delivering, and had begun to heal the divisions they had deliberately fostered.

  Prior to June 1979, it had been quite clear who “they” were: the regime, the petty communist bureaucrats, the thugs of the SB. But it was not clear who “we” were, how many of “us” there were, and whether “we” could trust one another. For tens of millions of Poles, the experience of the papal pilgrimage supplied the answer: “we” are the society and the country is ours; “they” are an artificial crust. By giving his people an experience of their individual dignity and collective authority, John Paul II had already won a major victory from which there could be no retreat. He had begun to exorcise the fear, the anomie, and sense of hopelessness that had previously kept the “we” of society from coalescing.

  For Maciej Zięba, a twenty-five-year-old physics student at the time, the pilgrimage was a moment in which “the artificial world around us,” the world of lies created by communism, simply collapsed. When he heard John Paul II, playing on the fact that, in Polish, “earth” and “land” are the same word, proclaim in Victory Square, “Come Holy Spirit, renew the face of the earth…of this land,” Zięba knew that something had to change. And that change would begin with himself: “We might have to live and die under communism. But now what I wanted to do was to live without being a liar.”69

  The Pope’s old friend and philosophical colleague, Father Józef Tischner, thought that Zięba’s experience had been replicated many times over. According to Tischner, people had come to a fundamental decision during the papal pilgrimage: “Let’s stop lying.” This was at least as much reflexive as conceptual. But instincts are important, and according to Tischner, one result of the papal pilgrimage was a mass, instinctive understanding that moral renewal among “us” had to be the basis for any serious challenge to “them.”70

  There was another, simpler, even primitive, reason for the overwhelming emotion the Pope evoked. It was nicely articulated by an anonymous Polish miner who, when asked why anyone should be religious in a communist state, replied, “To praise the Mother of God and to spite those bastards.”71 No doubt there was a lot of that going on in June 1979. Yet when John Paul said in Kraków that “the future of Poland will depend on how many people are mature enough to be nonconformist,” the key word was “mature.”72 And, in fact, there was no contradiction between the desire to “spite those bastards” and John Paul’s call to maturity, as demonstrated by the dignified way in which millions of people who very much wanted to “spite those bastards” behaved during the pilgrimage. Under the spell of a different kind of leader, such mass demonstrations of disaffection with a regime could have easily turned into riots. Instead, the character of a pilgrimage was retained, and the result was not bloody cataclysm but a profound experience of social solidarity and community.

  The sense of “we” created during the pilgrimage was all the more striking in that one of the more remarked-upon phenomena of the papal homecoming was John Paul’s uncanny ability to make individuals think he was talking to them personally. Two miners from Katowice were attending one of the Pope’s Masses at Częstochowa, surrounded by a million fellow Poles. One began to make a remark during John Paul’s homily when his friend quickly interrupted, “Damn it, don’t talk when the Pope’s talking to me.”73 Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a leading Catholic intellectual, had a similar experience. He had arranged with a friend whose apartment faced onto the Nowy Świat portion of Warsaw’s Royal Way that his elderly aunt could watch the papal motorcade from the friend’s balcony. Afterward, the aunt’s recollection was that the Pope had stopped to bless her personally.74 This remarkable sense of one-on-one connection had its own public impact. When John Paul said in Victory Square that Poles had a right to think of their nation as the “land of a particularly responsible witness,” millions of Poles, who heard him as if he were speaking to them personally, said to themselves, “Am I being as responsible as I should?”75

  It was, as Adam Michnik summed it up, a great “lesson in dignity.”76

  The government, Michnik wrote, “heaved a sigh of relief ” when John Paul finally left. But, as the Pope had kidded the young people at Skałka in another context, the horse was already out of the barn.77 The regime had fulfilled its commitment to televise certain of the papal events in typical communist fashion—by showing bits and pieces of the event but not the Pope. It was, a French journalist said, like the telecast of a soccer game in which the cameras showed everything but the ball.78 The broadcasts also avoided showing the masses of ordinary Poles in attendance; from the way the cameras played over the crowd at Gniezno, one would have thought that the o
nly people attending the Pope’s Mass were nuns and pensioners.79

  Measured by the standards of the previous decades, the government had behaved rather reasonably. Communist rhetoric was kept to a minimum, although there was something almost pathetic about the meeting at the Belvedere Palace, with party leader Gierek talking about Leonid Brezhnev and John Paul talking about God. There were no mass arrests of dissidents, although KOR leader Jacek Kuroń, with a security detail larger than John Paul’s, was under virtual house arrest during the visit, presumably to keep him away from the world press. The state-controlled print media published the texts of the Pope’s sermons and addresses with a minimum of censorship.80 Occasional complaints about the number of allegedly political comments from the Pope were voiced publicly by lower-level Communist Party or government bureaucrats. The official line, though, was that the party and the government were “generally satisfied” with the visit.81 It was a strategy of “grin and bear it,” contrived in a fantasy world. The authorities “made believe that those millions of people with radiant faces crowding around John Paul II did not constitute proof of the total fiasco of their thirty-year rule, that they did not constitute proof of the utter collapse of their moral claim to power.”82

  The Western press gave the Pope extensive coverage, much of it favorable but some of it insisting, remarkably enough, that the Pope was strengthening détente with the communist world. Adam Michnik, speaking from the secular left, thought that the Westerners made far too much of what the Polish dissident regarded as a bizarre analogy: between the Pope’s return to Poland and the Ayatollah Khomeini’s return to Iran. “One can hardly imagine a greater misconception,” Michnik wrote.83 It would not, however, be the last time that the press tried to draw analogies between the “white mullah” and the “black mullahs.”

  What struck Adam Michnik most forcefully was the Pope’s ability to appeal to the consciences of believer and nonbeliever alike. In challenging “dishonorable living,” he was reviving an ancient Polish cultural tradition that had lain fallow under communism—“the ethos of sacrifice, in whose name our grandfathers and fathers never stopped fighting for national and human dignity.”84 It was a call to national moral renewal addressed to everyone, and John Paul had done it without sneering at the opposition. For, at the deeper moral level to which he constantly tried to direct his people’s reflections, the opponent wasn’t communism but their own lethargy, which permitted, by tacit or overt consent, the continued imposition of an alien form of political control on their country.85

  It was the analysis of Person and Act, retooled for a mass audience. Solidarity and opposition were essential dynamics of a mature human life, and freedom to think for oneself should lead to a commitment to the good of others. One thoroughly secular Western correspondent put it simply: “Inescapably, the word for all this is love. [The Pope] receives it from the nation, as only liberators and dictators have taken it in history, but somehow he gives the dangerous gift back again, leaving on one side an intact man and on the other millions of people who go home with a better respect for themselves.”86

  John Paul, though never descending to partisan argument or maneuver, was in fact conducting a kind of national referendum. Before his pilgrimage had barely begun, the results were in.

  A revolution of the spirit had been unleashed.

  FROM SOLIDARITY TO SOLIDARNOŚĆ

  Four hundred forty-eight days after John Paul II flew out of Balice airfield on the outskirts of Kraków, a formerly unemployed electrician named Lech Wałęsa, using a huge souvenir pen topped by the picture of a smiling Pope, a relic of the June 1979 papal pilgrimage, signed an agreement at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk. In it, Poland’s communist government agreed to recognize the legality of the first independent, self-governing trade union in the communist world. Its name was Solidarność—“Solidarity.” Did the experience of solidarity during John Paul’s nine days in June 1979 make Solidarność possible in August 1980?

  Edward Gierek’s strategy of “practical materialism,” as former Wojtyła student Halina Bortnowska once described it, was an economic fantasy that would have eventually crashed in ruins. Trying to salvage the unsalvageable through price increases in July 1980, Gierek managed only to hasten the day of reckoning as worker protests spread throughout the country, culminating in the epic Gdańsk shipyard strike in August 1980—and the birth of Solidarność. But the way things happened in the summer of 1980—the workers’ new sense of their own dignity, their patience, their newfound ability to hold a coalition together with dissident intellectuals, their nonviolence, their rhetoric of national moral renewal, the widespread support throughout the population—all this was new in the history of communist-era labor unrest in Poland.87 According to those who were there and those who have studied the matter since, none of it was imaginable without John Paul II’s nine days in June 1979. A moral revolution then had set the foundations for a social and political revolution later.88

  A new sense of self-worth, a new experience of personal dignity, and a determination not to be intimidated any longer by “the power” were by-products of the papal pilgrimage, for nonbelievers as well as believers. If, as historian Norman Davies contends, the pre-Solidarność “essence of Poland’s modern experience is humiliation,” it was John Paul II who lifted that burden from his people.89 In doing so, he made a broad-based, nonviolent movement of social self-defense possible.

  Józef Tischner suggested at the time of its founding that Solidarność was “a huge forest planted by awakened consciences.”90 Those personal moral compasses had first been formed under very difficult circumstance through the labors of parents, catechism teachers, and clergy. As the Pope’s old friend Mieczysław Maliński once put it, the men of the Gdańsk strike were once the children to whom he and countless other Polish priests had given their first religious and moral instruction in freezing churches during Cardinal Wyszyński’s Great Novena.91 The awakened consciences of the Solidarity movement had many fathers and mothers. But it was John Paul II, in June 1979, who sharpened those consciences to a particularly fine edge of purposefulness and gave them permission to exercise the right of moral judgment in public. French political scientist Alain Besançon put it well when he said that, in Solidarity, the people of Poland had regained “the private ownership of their tongues.”92 Those tongues said what they did because they were expressing the convictions of reborn consciences determined to live in the truth.

  That commitment to conscience also explains the nonviolence that was a hallmark of the Solidarity revolution. In its sixteen months of freedom, the Solidarity revolution, unique among all the revolutionary upheavals of modernity, killed precisely no one. This was not simply a matter of tactics, the regime having all the guns; it was a matter of principle. The men and women of Solidarity knew the truth to which Adam Michnik gave elegant expression when he said, some years later, that those who start by storming bastilles end up building their own.93 The revolution that John Paul II inspired reversed a bloody pattern that had gotten itself fixed into European politics in 1789, to the endless anguish of the peoples of Europe.

  Another great Slavic moral opponent of communism, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, had argued in his 1970 Nobel lecture that the communist culture of the lie and communist violence were closely linked, such that when the lie was dispersed, the violence “will come crashing down.”94 In June 1979, John Paul II, by dispersing the lie, had helped make possible something unprecedented in postwar east central Europe. Poland now had a genuine citizenry, capable of building independent institutions whose very existence would demonstrate the hollowness of the communist system and its dependence on violence for survival.

  10

  The Ways of Freedom

  Truths Personal and Public

  APRIL 8, 1979

  Pope John Paul II issues his first “Holy Thursday letter” to Catholic priests throughout the world.

  JUNE 30, 1979

  Fourteen new cardinals are created at John Paul II�
��s first consistory.

  SEPTEMBER 5, 1979

  The Pope begins four years of audience addresses on the “theology of the body.”

  SEPTEMBER 29–OCTOBER 1, 1979

  History’s first papal pilgrimage to Ireland.

  OCTOBER 1–7, 1979

  The Pope makes his first pilgrimage to the United States.

  OCTOBER 2, 1979

  John Paul II addresses the 34th General Assembly of the United Nations.

  NOVEMBER 5, 1979

  The Pope assembles the College of Cardinals for its first consultative meeting in four hundred years.

  NOVEMBER 10, 1979

  John Paul urges a re-examination of the Galileo case by the Church and by science.

  NOVEMBER 13, 1979

  The Soviet leadership approves a plan of action to “work against the policies of the Vatican in relation to socialist states.”

  NOVEMBER 26, 1979

  Mehmet Ali Agca threatens to assassinate John Paul II.

  NOVEMBER 29–30, 1979

  John Paul II visits Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios I in Istanbul.

  DECEMBER 15, 1979

  The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith declares that Father Hans Küng cannot be considered a Catholic theologian; John Paul II addresses the Pontifical Gregorian University on theology’s contribution to the Church’s prophetic mission.

  DECEMBER 28, 1979

  John Paul names Carlo Maria Martini, SJ, rector of the Pontifical Gregorian University, as Archbishop of Milan.

  Father Jan Schotte was worried.

  As Shepherd One, Pope John Paul II’s TWA 727, flew from Boston to New York on the morning of October 2, 1979, Schotte, a former Belgian missionary working in the Vatican’s Secretariat of State, had been reviewing the address the Pope would give to the UN General Assembly. Since the complete address was too long to be delivered in its entirety, there would be two texts: a “speaking text” in which certain sections would be bracketed and skipped during delivery, and a full, official text that would be released to the press and published.