Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  Two weeks later, on May 1, John Paul wrote Father Arrupe asking that he not resign and that he not call a General Congregation, for the good of the Society and the good of the Church. After his return from Africa, the Pope continued, they would establish a dialogue to resolve the problem. Arrupe’s general assistants assumed that this meant they were, at last, to get their meeting with the Pope, but this was, evidently, not what John Paul had in mind.

  On December 30, three of the general assistants, frustrated by their inability to arrange a meeting with the Pope for Arrupe or themselves, cornered John Paul in the Jesuit residence next to the Church of the Gesú, where the Pope had just finished his traditional year-end Mass with Rome’s Jesuit community. When Father Arrupe brought John Paul into the house to meet the younger Jesuits, three of the assistants interposed themselves, encircled the Pope, and said, “Holy Father, we are Father Arrupe’s council; we’re the ones who wrote to you, and we hope you’re going to have time to meet with him because we are in deep waters.” John Paul replied, “Sarà presto” [It will be soon]. As the papal party was leaving, Monsignor Dziwisz assured Arrupe that the meeting would indeed be soon. It took place on January 17, 1981, but was inconclusive.115 Meanwhile, the Italian press continued to speculate about a rift between John Paul and Pedro Arrupe, or between the Vatican and the Society of Jesus, or both.

  The two men met again on April 13, 1981. John Paul told Arrupe that he was concerned about what a General Congregation might do without Arrupe as superior. (The proposed 33rd General Congregation would have met to accept Arrupe’s resignation, elect his successor—widely assumed to be either Father O’Keefe or Father Jean-Yves Calvez, the French general assistant—and continue on with whatever business it chose.) Paul VI had been deeply concerned about the results of the 32nd General Congregation in 1974, the Pope said, and John Paul evidently believed that the situation might become even more difficult at a new, post-Arrupe General Congregation. Arrupe denied that the 32nd General Congregation had defied Pope Paul, and subsequently wrote John Paul a long letter defending its actions. The meeting closed with John Paul assuring Father Arrupe that their dialogue would continue.116 A month later, the Pope was shot.

  On August 7, on returning from a trip to the Philippines, Father Arrupe suffered a stroke at Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci International Airport, and was taken to Salvator Mundi hospital. A blocked carotid artery affecting the left side of his brain and the right side of his body was diagnosed. Father O’Keefe gave the stricken General the sacrament of the sick, sent cables to the Jesuit provincials informing them of Arrupe’s illness, and called Cardinal Casaroli to appraise him of the situation. Casaroli asked to see Arrupe. O’Keefe responded that the doctors had said that he must be spared any possible emotional distress for fear of another stroke. On August 10, three of the general assistants went to Salvator Mundi to consult the doctors. When they had been informed that Father Arrupe could understand what was said to him and that he could make a decision, they went to his room and asked whether he wanted to appoint a vicar general with full powers to lead the Society during his illness. Arrupe indicated that he did. “Do you have someone in mind?” he was asked. He pointed to Father O’Keefe. Cardinal Casaroli and the Jesuit provincials were then informed that Father Arrupe had appointed Father O’Keefe as vicar general for the duration of Arrupe’s illness, according to article 787 in the Jesuit constitutions.

  O’Keefe and the other assistants were called in by Father Arrupe’s doctors some two weeks later and informed that, in their medical opinion, Arrupe “should never again hold a responsible position.” The doctors said that Arrupe was in a condition to receive Cardinal Casaroli, who picked up Father O’Keefe at the Jesuit generalate, en route to Salvator Mundi. On the ride to the hospital, O’Keefe lobbied Casaroli for permission to call a General Congregation, because the Society could not be governed indefinitely by a vicar general. Casaroli deflected the request. When they got to the hospital, he had O’Keefe read Arrupe a personal letter from the Pope, expressing his sympathy, remarking that they were both convalescents, and wishing him well. On the ride back from the hospital, O’Keefe pressed Casaroli again, saying that he had to write the Pope about the need for a General Congregation. Casaroli said that O’Keefe should write to him, and that he’d keep John Paul informed.117

  The letter was ready by September 3. It explained Arrupe’s incapacity and argued that the vicar general should, in these circumstances, convoke a General Congregation. Since this was exactly what John Paul had asked Arrupe not to do, the letter tried to explain what was, from O’Keefe’s and the other assistants’ point of view, a new situation. A similar letter was sent to the Jesuit provincials.118 O’Keefe took the letter to Casaroli, who promised to take it to the Pope and said that everything would be resolved when the Pope returned from his convalescence at Castel Gandolfo, in October.

  The resolution was not what Father Arrupe or his general assistants had anticipated. On October 6, Father O’Keefe was running a meeting when Arrupe’s secretary came in and said that Cardinal Casaroli had called asking to see Arrupe, who was living in the infirmary at the Jesuit headquarters. O’Keefe asked whether the cardinal had asked to speak to the vicar general as well. The secretary replied, “No, not necessarily.” O’Keefe arranged to be called when Cardinal Casaroli arrived, and intercepted the Secretary of State in the infirmary before he could go into Father Arrupe’s room. Casaroli said that he wanted to speak to Arrupe privately. O’Keefe waited outside the closed door. After about fifteen minutes, Casaroli called O’Keefe in. The cardinal couldn’t understand what Arrupe was saying. O’Keefe, noticing some documents on the coffee table, listened carefully, and then told Casaroli that Arrupe wanted O’Keefe to arrange for the cardinal to meet with Father Paolo Dezza. O’Keefe said he would do that, made Casaroli comfortable in a downstairs parlor, summoned Dezza, and then went back to the infirmary. Arrupe pointed to the documents on the coffee table and told O’Keefe to read them to him. It was John Paul II’s letter appointing Dezza, who would be eighty in two months, as his “personal delegate” to lead the Society until further notice, with Father Giuseppe Pittau, SJ, the former rector of Sophia University in Tokyo and the Jesuit provincial in Japan, as his coadjutor or deputy.

  The normal governance of the Society of Jesus was suspended and there would be no immediate call for a 33rd General Congregation. O’Keefe was “kind of stunned” and asked Arrupe, “Where do you think this leaves this vicar general?” Arrupe said, “I don’t know, you go see Father Dezza.” O’Keefe went to see the other general assistants and met that afternoon with Father Dezza, who had known that the papal letter was coming. The immediate question was how to inform the Society. The Jesuit generalate and the Vatican agreed that the news would be embargoed until the end of October, by which point the Jesuits of the world would have been privately informed. A Spanish paper broke the story in the fourth week of October, the Italian press picked it up, and Father Dezza agreed with O’Keefe’s suggestion that the embargo be lifted.119 It was the greatest shock involving the Jesuits since Pope Clement XIV had suppressed the Society in 1773.

  The papal intervention infuriated those who were comfortable with the Society’s direction under Father Arrupe and who wanted it to continue under Arrupe’s successor. The claim that the whole affair was the result of a vast misunderstanding based on a misinterpretation of what had happened at the 32nd General Congregation is not persuasive, though. Life in religious orders was in crisis in the years after the Second Vatican Council, and while John Paul may not have thought that the Jesuits were worse off than others, he believed their influence was so great that a period of reflection was called for.120 If he had not thought highly of the Society’s unique charism and role and its potential for contributing to an authentic implementation of Vatican II, he would not have intervened, he told Fathers Dezza and Pittau.121

  The intervention was shock therapy, intended to break a pattern of confrontation within the Society, and
between the Society and the Church’s highest authorities, creating conditions for a new relationship of greater trust.122 John Paul II evidently believed that doing that would be impossible at a 33rd General Congregation led by Father O’Keefe. That Father O’Keefe and Father Arrupe’s other principal assistants did not see the need for such dramatic change is clear from their urgent efforts to secure papal agreement to a General Congregation while the reins of power in the Society remained in the hands they had been in for years—theirs. Given so fundamental a difference in the perception of the realities, some extraordinary remedy was required, and John Paul applied it in the form of a personal intervention in the Society’s governance.

  It remained to be seen how the Jesuits would react, and whether the remedy would be sufficient to the problems John Paul and others perceived.

  STATE OF WAR

  Two weeks after Cardinal Casaroli’s visit to the Jesuit generalate, Poland’s crisis intensified again. On October 18, 1981, Stanisław Kania was ousted by the party Central Committee and replaced as First Secretary by the premier, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, who now had all the levers of power in his hands as leader of the military, the government, and the party. The crisis deepened in November as wildcat strikes spread throughout northern Poland, protesting the rapidly deteriorating economic situation. On November 21, Leonid Brezhnev wrote Jaruzelski, arguing that there was “no way to save socialism in Poland” unless “a decisive battle with the class enemy” was engaged.123

  John Paul II agreed with the first half of Brezhnev’s proposition. Meeting in Rome in early November with a group of Solidarity-supporting Polish intellectuals, he had given them hope by telling them that the freedom movement in Poland was irreversible. People who had regained a sense of their dignity would not be mutely acquiescent in public life. Communism was finished. They were in the endgame, for however long that took to play itself out.124 John Paul and his visitors all intuited that something ugly was in the wind, however, and the meeting broke up earlier than expected. The Solidarity leaders felt they had to get back to Poland before the storm broke, and they left the Pope sharing their sense of foreboding.125

  While Poland approached what everyone sensed was a dramatic crossroads, John Paul maintained his breakneck pace of work. Between Jaruzelski’s appointment as First Secretary on October 18 and the second week of December, the Pope met with thirteen different groups of bishops—from Angola and São Tome, the Sudan, Ghana, Ivory Coast, North Africa, Mali, and five regions of Italy—each making their quinquennial ad limina visits to Rome. On November 11, he started his third series of general audience catecheses on the theology of the body, which had been interrupted by the assassination attempt. The first address in the series began with some papal irony: “After a rather long pause, we will resume today the meditations….”126 John Paul made another attempt to rally the Hungarian Church with a November 12 letter marking the 750th anniversary of the death of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, and signed Familiaris Consortio, the apostolic exhortation completing the 1980 Synod on the Family, ten days later.

  On December 8, the feast of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, John Paul celebrated Mass at the Basilica of St. Mary Major and renewed the act of consecration by which the bishops celebrating the 1,550th anniversary of the Council of Ephesus in June had commended the world and the Church to Mary. Earlier that day, at the noon Angelus, John Paul had blessed a mosaic icon, Maria, Mater Ecclesiae [Mary, Mother of the Church], which he had had affixed to a corner of the Apostolic Palace overlooking St. Peter’s Square. It was the first image of Mary among the 153 statues atop St. Peter’s Basilica and its flanking colonnades.127 Three days later, John Paul visited the Lutheran church in Rome to pray with its minister and congregation.

  Meanwhile, the economic situation in Poland continued to decay as the tension between Solidarity and the government increased. The currency was virtually worthless; medicines were unavailable; milk and infant formula were difficult to come by.128 On November 28, the Central Committee of the Polish Communist Party instructed the communists in the parliament to introduce legislation giving the government emergency powers, including the authority to ban strikes. To a Solidarity leadership already stretched to the breaking point between government pressure and its membership’s restlessness, this could only appear as an attempt to reverse the gains of August 1980. The leaders deployed the only weapon they had left, threatening a twenty-four-hour general strike if the legislation were introduced, and a general strike of indeterminate length if it were passed. Attempting to get some sort of dialogue going again, Archbishop Glemp sent letters to every member of the Sejm, to General Jaruzelski, to Lech Wałęsa, and to the Independent Student Union urging moderation on all parties.129 It was too late. Indeed, it had probably been too late on November 4, when Jaruzelski met with the Primate and the Solidarity leader to broach the possibility of a new forum for ongoing dialogue, a “Front of National Accord.”

  On December 11 and 12, the Solidarity National Coordinating Commission met in Gdańsk to consider its options. Those who tried to make phone calls or use the telex around midnight discovered that that was impossible. General Wojciech Jaruzelski’s coup against the nation had begun.

  At precisely 11:57 P.M. on December 12, all 3.4 million private telephones in Poland went dead simultaneously. Roadblocks were set up throughout the country and tanks rolled through the streets of Warsaw. Virtually the entire Solidarity leadership was arrested at their Gdańsk hotels. Wałęsa was seized at his apartment, having declined to hide despite warnings of his impending arrest. Jaruzelski, worried that in a slow-motion crackdown the outraged workers would turn their factories into fortresses, had decided to decapitate the movement’s leadership, and the Gdańsk meeting of National Coordinating Commission had given him the opportunity to implement it swiftly. Poles waking up early on Sunday morning, December 13, discovered that their country had been invaded and occupied by its own army, assisted by the SB, whose computer at Gdynia had the last known address of every Pole. Four thousand men and women had been arrested overnight.130

  Since there was no provision for martial law in Poland’s communist legal code, what had just been done was technically known as the introduction of a “state of war.” That was the phrase General Jaruzelski used when he broadcast to the nation at 6 A.M. Sunday morning, announcing the formation of a governing Military Council of National Salvation. Poles thought that he had gotten that much, at least, right. “The power” had declared war on “the society.”

  The Primate was informed at 5 A.M. on Sunday morning that Jaruzelski would announce martial law an hour later. Archbishop Glemp was told that he would be free to move around the country, and that if he needed a telephone, he might have the use of one at the office of the Council of Ministers, a mile and a half away from his residence. John Paul had been given the news some four hours earlier, at about 1 A.M., when the Polish ambassador to Italy called with word that Jaruzelski had decided upon “temporary emergency measures.”131 With the phones cut off in Poland, the Pope was unable to reach his bishops or anyone else.

  The next evening, a prayer vigil for Poland was held in St. Peter’s Square. John Paul addressed the thousands present from the window of his study and used the word “solidarity” six times in thanking them for their concern for his homeland. On Wednesday, at his weekly general audience, John Paul invoked the now-banned union’s name twice more, and alluded to Solidarity’s informal motto (“So that Poland shall be Poland”), stating that Poland’s struggle was for “the right to be itself.”132 The Sunday and Wednesday statements were broadcast on Vatican Radio, now one of Poland’s few links to the outside world.

  Violence broke out in different parts of the country; Silesia maintained its resistance the longest, and the repression there was the worst. Near Katowice, 1,300 coal miners had barricaded themselves inside the “Piast” mine, where they held out until after Christmas. An attempted assault on the mine on December 16, using tear gas and rubber bullets,
had cost the lives of nine miners and four security police personnel. More than forty people were injured.133 John Paul wrote directly to General Jaruzelski with an “urgent and heartfelt appeal…a prayer for an end to the shedding of Polish blood.” He concluded with “an appeal to your conscience, General, and to the conscience of all those who must decide this question.”134

  It seems that it was indeed General Jaruzelski who had decided the question. There is no evidence that the Soviet Union was planning military action against Poland in December 1981. Instead, the Soviet leadership declined Jaruzelski’s requests for a small contingent of Soviet troops to come into the country after the imposition of martial law (Jaruzelski, no fool, was evidently eager to have the odium spread to his allies in Moscow). Poland was put under martial law in December 1981 not because that was the only way to prevent a Soviet invasion, but because Jaruzelski failed to do what Władysław Gomułka had done in 1956: call the Soviet bluff, which in this instance had been going on throughout the year.

  General Jaruzelski was not a traitor. He did not seek Soviet intervention, which hard-liners in the Polish Communist Party would have welcomed, nor did he liquidate the Solidarity leadership when he had them under his control, as the Soviets surely would have done in December 1980 and as Polish party hard-liners likely wanted to do in December 1981. He misread the threat of Soviet military action, and he missed an opportunity to accelerate the process of Poland’s freeing itself from the Soviet orbit. The Soviet Union was in no position to intervene militarily in Poland in December 1981. Jaruzelski had a firm enough grip on power that he could have faced down his own hard-line comrades, if it came to that. The only plausible explanation for why he took the course he did, rather than exercising real leadership by facilitating a national dialogue aimed at real change, is that he was what the Pope, the Polish Church, and the Solidarity leadership all thought him to be—a convinced communist.