Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  MAY 13, 1981

  Pope John Paul II is shot in St. Peter’s Square by Mehmet Ali Agca.

  MAY 28, 1981

  Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński, Primate of Poland, dies in Warsaw.

  JUNE 3, 1981

  John Paul returns to the Vatican from the Policlinico Gemelli.

  JUNE 20, 1981

  John Paul returns to the Gemelli for diagnosis and treatment of viral infection.

  JULY 7, 1981

  Józef Glemp is named Primate of Poland.

  JULY 22, 1981

  Mehmet Ali Agca is found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment after a three-day trial in Rome.

  AUGUST 14, 1981

  John Paul leaves the Gemelli to continue recuperation at Castel Gandolfo.

  SEPTEMBER 5, 1981

  First Solidarity national congress opens in Gdańsk.

  SEPTEMBER 14, 1981

  Laborem Exercens, John Paul’s first social encyclical.

  SEPTEMBER 25, 1981

  Formal written verdict in Agca’s trial suggests a plot to assassinate the Pope.

  OCTOBER 5, 1981

  John Paul II appoints “personal delegate” to govern the Jesuits.

  OCTOBER 18, 1981

  General Wojciech Jaruzelski becomes First Secretary of the Polish communist party.

  DECEMBER 8, 1981

  John Paul II blesses icon of Mary, Mother of the Church, the first Marian image in St. Peter’s Square.

  DECEMBER 11, 1981

  John Paul visits Roman Lutheran congregation.

  DECEMBER 12–13, 1981

  General Jaruzelski declares “state of war” in Poland, imposes martial law, and orders arrest of thousands of Solidarity activists.

  DECEMBER 18, 1981

  Papal letter to Jaruzelski urges end to violence and creation of a national dialogue.

  JANUARY 1, 1982

  John Paul’s message for the annual World Day of Peace denounces “false peace” of totalitarianism.

  MAY–JUNE 1982

  Papal visits to Great Britain and Argentina during the Falklands/Malvinas War.

  Mehmet Ali Agca, a twenty-three-year-old Turk, left the Pensione Isa on Via Cicerone, near the Piazza Cavour and the Castel Sant’Angelo on the Vatican side of the Tiber. It was May 13, 1981, a glorious spring afternoon, and like 20,000 others, he was going to St. Peter’s Square for John Paul II’s weekly general audience.

  Agca was not a typical pilgrim. Two years before, on February 1, 1979, he had assassinated Abdi Ipekçi, editor of the respected Istanbul daily Milliyet. He confessed to the crime, but retracted the confession during his October 1979 trial. On November 23, with his trial unfinished, Agca escaped from the maximum security Kartal-Maltepe prison dressed as a soldier. Three days later, he wrote a letter to Milliyet threatening to kill the Pope, if John Paul II should have the temerity to arrive in Turkey as scheduled on November 28. The threat was not carried out and Agca, a wanted man, disappeared into the dark underside of the modern world.

  A Turkish court convicted him in absentia and sentenced him to death in April 1980, but neither the Turkish authorities nor the international police could find him. Agca, a man from a poor family with no personal financial resources, was traveling extensively that year—Iran, Bulgaria, Switzerland, Germany, and Tunisia for certain, perhaps the USSR as well. In January 1981, he had come to Rome and then spent February in Switzerland and Austria. After returning to Rome for a few days in early April, he had gone to Perugia, registered in a university course, attended one class, and left for Milan, where he booked a two-week holiday excursion to Majorca. During their time on the island, his fellow vacationers almost never saw Agca. He returned to Rome in early May and checked into the Pensione Isa on May 9. A caller had reserved a room for him before his arrival. On May 11 and again on May 12, he went to St. Peter’s Square to study the venue.

  Along with thousands of pilgrims and Romans, he was back the next afternoon. Walking up the Via della Conciliazione, he crossed into Vatican territory and entered the square, strolling along the Bernini colonnade. The huge piazza was divided into sections by short wooden barricades that formed an impromptu motorway along which John Paul II would be driven in his open-air Popemobile to greet the crowd. Mehmet Ali Agca found a spot just behind a row of pilgrims pressed against one of the barricades, no more than ten feet from where the Pope would pass.

  And waited.

  THE EYE OF THE STORM

  Popes do not have the luxury of putting the rest of the Church and its needs on “hold” while focusing on one set of problems for weeks or months on end. The pope is the eye of a hurricane of activity that never ends. Every day, something is happening, somewhere, that will eventually demand his close attention because of its impact on the life of the Church.

  The extraordinary complexity of the pope’s task and the exceptional demands it makes on a man’s resources of intellect, heart, and spirit were fully displayed in the period between John Paul II’s Polish pilgrimage in June 1979 and his twin pilgrimages to the United Kingdom and Argentina during the Falklands/Malvinas War of 1982.

  John Paul’s first globe-spanning attempts to revitalize Peter’s mission to “strengthen the brethren” and his initial efforts to renovate the Church’s response to the crisis of humanism in the late twentieth century took place while the nonviolent challenge to communism he had inspired was achieving critical mass in his native land. The beginnings of his Theology of the Body; his landmark UN and UNESCO addresses; his pilgrimages to Ireland, the United States, Brazil, Africa, France, West Germany, and East Asia; his historic meeting with the Ecumenical Patriarch of Orthodoxy; his initial efforts to revivify the Italian Church; the Synod on the Family and his second encyclical, Dives in Misericordia; the Synods of the Dutch and Ukrainian bishops; his opening attempts to close the breach between science and theology; dozens of episcopal appointments, including such major sees as Milan and Paris—all of this took place during the gestation of Solidarity and the first weeks of its tumultuous sixteen months of freedom.

  One day from that period graphically illustrates the multiple pressures operating on the papacy of John Paul II.

  December 2, 1980: As the Vatican watches with deepening concern, the United States, the European Community, and NATO warn the Soviet Union against an invasion of Poland that satellite reconnaissance and other forms of intelligence suggest is imminent. That same day, a Synod of Greek Catholic bishops from the Ukrainian diaspora reconvenes in Rome and adopts a formal resolution pronouncing null and void the 1946 “L’viv Sobor”—a canonically invalid meeting of Greek Catholic leaders in Ukraine, held under extreme Soviet duress, which had abrogated the 1596 Union of Brest and declared the Greek Catholic Church reincorporated into Russian Orthodoxy.1 The anti–John Paul II propaganda campaign authorized the previous November now intensifies in the Soviet press, linking the Pope to U.S. President Jimmy Carter and his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzeziński, in a plot to destabilize the USSR.2

  That same day, three American nuns and a lay worker are raped and murdered in El Salvador—the latest victims in a vicious civil war that had claimed the life of the archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Arnulfo Romero, assassinated while celebrating Mass, eight months earlier. Meanwhile, the situation in Nicaragua continues to deteriorate, with the Church’s leadership criticizing the human rights record of the new Sandinista regime.

  That same day, the encyclical Dives in Misericordia is officially published.

  December 2, 1980: For John Paul II, another day at the eye of the storm that was Roman Catholicism, fifteen years after the Second Vatican Council—a Church in which “dissenting” could mean dissenting for, and from, the truth.

  From the late summer of 1980 through the early summer of 1982, John Paul was confronted by an unremitting series of diplomatic, ecclesiastical, and personal crises. None of these crises could be temporarily shelved. In dealing with each, John Paul II remained the universal pastor of a world Church—an impo
rtant fact to keep in mind when trying to understand how the hurricane looked from within the eye.

  THE CRISIS OF SOLIDARITY

  The fuse that John Paul II lit in Poland in June 1979 burned slowly but steadily. Fourteen months later, on August 14, 1980, it set off a nonviolent explosion the result of which, over the next decade, would be the collapse of European communism.

  Birth Pains

  The occasion for the explosion was another attempt by the tottering Polish regime to shore up its Alice in Wonderland economics. On July 2, 1980, price increases of thirty percent to one hundred percent on beef, pork, and high-grade poultry other than chicken were announced. A wave of strikes followed, with the workers’ demands focused on economic issues, including the recision of price increases and a cost-of-living wage increase. Local authorities were gradually rolling back the price increases when, on July 9, Communist Party leader Edward Gierek reintroduced the new prices and refused to increase wages. On July 16, train operators in Lublin blocked the railways connecting Poland to the Soviet Union and were joined on strike by other railway workers and by local bakery and dairy employees. The workers now added demands more political in nature. In addition to rollbacks of the price increases, they wanted the government to acknowledge a right to strike, legal immunity for those who had struck, new elections to the official trade union chapters, and direct talks with the government authorities. The Lublin strikes were settled in four days, but a new element had entered the volatile mix. For the first time, workers were beginning to articulate demands for a measure of real freedom. Better-fed servitude would no longer suffice—as a Solidarity poet later put it, “The times are past/when they closed our mouths/with sausage.”3

  The Lublin demands began to be echoed throughout the country. On August 7, Anna Walentynowicz, a crane operator and veteran of the independent trade union movement, was fired from her job at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk. She had been collecting the remains of graveyard candles to make new candles for a memorial to the workers shot down during the 1970 demonstrations in Gdańsk—and was fired for stealing.4 On August 14, the 17,000 workers at the yard declared an occupation strike. They were led by an unemployed electrician named Lech Wałęsa, who had climbed the twelve-foot-high perimeter fence to get into his old workplace. The shipyard strike committee issued an eight-point program that dramatically raised the political stakes. In addition to economic relief, the workers demanded the creation of a free trade-union movement. They also required a moral accounting from the regime—the erection of a memorial to workers shot down during the 1970 strike at the shipyard.

  Attempting to mediate with the local party and government officials, the bishop of Gdańsk, Lech Kaczmarek, suggested that it might help keep things calm if pastoral care were available to the workers. The authorities agreed. On August 17, the first open-air Mass was celebrated in the Lenin Shipyard by Father Henryk Jankowski, Wałęsa’s pastor, and attended by 4,000 strikers, with 2,000 friends and family gathered outside the locked gates. At the end of the Mass, Father Jankowski blessed a large cross made by shipyard carpenters. It was immediately raised next to Gate No. 2 as an interim memorial to the victims of the 1970 shootings.5

  The first strikers’ Mass and the raising of the memorial cross gave the Gdańsk strike its distinctive iconography, soon to be familiar all over the world—the workers who defied the so-called workers’ state behind barricades decorated with the Black Madonna and other religious symbols. Icons of faith were now the symbols by which Poles could best express the truths John Paul II had preached in June 1979, demonstrate their reignited sense of human dignity, and make clear their yearning for freedom. The Madonna on the shipyard gates, the daily strike Mass, and those rows of strikers queued up to visit open-air confessionals also symbolized the different kind of political struggle in which they were engaged. This was going to be a nonviolent and self-regulating revolution—one that proved Robespierre, Lenin, and the other violent men in the modern revolutionary pantheon wrong.

  Many Polish bishops, including Primate Wyszyński, were slow to grasp the significance of what was unfolding in Gdańsk. Bishop Kaczmarek, on the scene, seems to have been an exception. The Primate’s sermon at Częstochowa for the feast of the Assumption, August 15, did not directly allude to the Gdańsk strikes but celebrated Marshal Piłsudski’s great victory over the Red Army in the 1920 “Miracle on the Vistula.” On August 17, in a sermon at Wambierzyce, a Marian shrine in Lower Silesia, the Primate did refer to the nation’s “torment and unrest,” and to “those workers who are striving for social, moral, economic, and cultural rights.” A bowdlerized version of the sermon, eliminating the references to the unrest and highlighting the call for “calm and reason,” was broadcast on Warsaw television on August 20. By that time, John Paul II had made his first interventions in the drama, having been briefed on the situation in Gdańsk by his secretary, Monsignor Stanisław Dziwisz, on his return from a well-timed two-week vacation in Poland.6 At the general audience on August 20, the Pope asked for prayers for “my Poland” and later that day sent a message to Cardinal Wyszyński.7 Made public three days later, the papal message unmistakably aligned the Church with the Gdańsk strikers’ demands: “I pray that, once again, the Episcopate with the Primate at its head…may be able to aid the nation in its struggle for daily bread, social justice, and the safeguarding of its inviolable right to its own way of life and achievement.” Similar messages were dispatched to Cardinal Macharski in Kraków and to Bishop Stefan Bareła of Częstochowa.8 On August 21, Bishop Kaczmarek traveled to Warsaw to brief Cardinal Wyszyński and the bishops’ conference secretary, Bishop Bronisław Dąbrowski, and to assure them that the strike leaders truly represented the workers.9

  On August 22, the strikers’ position was strengthened when a group of intellectuals organized by Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the editor of the Catholic monthly Więz [Link], arrived in Gdańsk to act as advisers at the strikers’ request. This was an important example of the class-free social solidarity that John Paul II’s 1979 pilgrimage had helped engender, and a by-product of the open conversation between Catholic and non-Catholic intellectuals that Cardinal Wojtyła had fostered in Kraków.10 The next day, Bishop Kaczmarek, back in Gdańsk, issued a public statement in support of the workers, urging only that the negotiations to begin that day be conducted “with understanding and without hatred.”11

  The talks between a government commission and the Inter-Factory Strike Committee, representing workers all along Poland’s Baltic coast, had moved into a particularly delicate phase when, on August 26, the feast of Our Lady of Częstochowa, Cardinal Wyszyński preached his customary sermon at the Jasna Góra monastery. With the situation still unresolved in Gdańsk, the threat of a Soviet intervention weighing on everyone’s mind, and pressure increasing on the Gdańsk negotiators to accept a government-proposed “compromise” that would return things to the status quo, the nation waited to hear what the Primate would say.

  The cardinal’s sermon bitterly disappointed the strikers. They might have appreciated his appeal for “calm, balance, prudence, wisdom, and responsibility for the whole Polish nation.” But they could not understand why, at this moment, he went to such lengths to criticize Polish workers’ productivity and to stress everyone’s responsibility for the economic catastrophe in which Poland found itself. The sermon’s insistence on sovereignty as the absolute precondition to social and economic progress suggested that the Primate’s principal concern remained the danger of a Soviet invasion. He simply did not seem to have sensed that a special moment—in biblical terms, a kairos—had arrived in Gdańsk.12

  Once more, John Paul II gently but firmly intervened. At his general audience address the following day, with the world press, the Polish and Soviet governments, and the strikers at Gdańsk all listening to Vatican Radio, he entrusted “the great and important problems of our country” to Our Lady of Częstochowa, whose feast Polish pilgrims and Poles resident in Rome had celebrated the day before. He defended the str
ikers, arguing that the problems they were forcing onto the agenda were real and could only be resolved by bringing “peace and justice to our country.”13 That same afternoon, the Main Council of the Polish episcopate, meeting in emergency session in Warsaw, took decisive action and issued a lengthy communiqué that strongly endorsed the strikers’ demands for an independent trade union, citing the teaching of the Second Vatican Council on the “fundamental rights” of workers to organize.14 The message was clear—the bishops’ conference believed that the strikers should not settle for a return to the status quo, but should hold firm to the demand for independent, non-regime-dominated unions as an essential part of national self-renewal.15

  In the wake of the Pope’s cautious but clear indication of support and the unambiguous statement by the bishops’ conference, the strikers held to their position and the government negotiators finally gave in. The agreement signed on August 31 provided for independent self-governing trade unions. The workers’ revolt in Gdańsk had refuted the communist doctrine that workers needed a vanguard party to show them their own interests.16 The terms of settlement, embodied in that single phrase, “independent self-governing trade union,” also meant some form of power sharing. And power sharing meant the end of the totalitarian system.

  The Solidarity movement had been born.

  The Fall 1980 Crisis

  The Gdańsk accord was a triumph for the strikers and, at a distance, for John Paul II. But it did not lead immediately to the legal establishment of the “independent self-governing trade union” that had been agreed to. Strikes were spreading throughout the country among steelworkers, miners, and workers in dozens of other state industries.17 The government and the Polish Communist Party were also in turmoil. Edward Gierek was ousted as party leader on September 5, after suffering a heart attack in the wake of a furious debate in the Polish parliament on the failures of his administration. His replacement as First Secretary, Stanisław Kania, was a former internal security chief who promised the Polish Politburo to “return to Leninist norms” and to implement more effectively the essentially correct policy line of the party.18