It was impossible to return Poland to the status quo ante August 1980. The country had gone through a moral and psychological trap-gate from which there was no turning back. But it was not impossible for the regime to make life miserable. Poland, during the martial law period (which formally ended in July 1983) and the years immediately following, was in a state of decomposition. Frustrated in its efforts at “Kádárization,” the regime slowly lost its grip, “like the slow retreat of a plague.” The economy deteriorated even further and life was hard.73
By conviction and necessity, much of the Church in Poland during this period adopted a strategy of “resistance through cultural independence,” not unlike what some Poles, including Karol Wojtyła, had done during the infinitely worse Nazi Occupation. If Poland, the nation, had been invaded by the Polish state by the imposition of martial law, the Polish Church would tacitly invoke a claim of “moral extraterritoriality.” Just as embassies in a foreign country enjoy “extraterritorial” legal status and are considered the sovereign territory of the country represented, the Catholic Church in Poland became a virtual embassy from the Polish nation to itself.
A young Warsaw priest, Jerzy Popiełuszko, became a national symbol of this strategy of cultural resistance. His parish church in Warsaw, St. Stanisław Kostka, was in the Żoliborz district, just off the “Square of the Defense of the Paris Commune,” a traditionally left-wing, bohemian neighborhood and one of the few places in Poland where one could find an intellectually respectable Marxist.74 In January 1982, Father Popiełuszko, thirty-five, initiated a “Mass for the Fatherland” at the Kostka church. It soon was drawing a packed house, with several thousand workers, widows, students, intellectuals, aristocrats, peasants, black marketeers, and even Communist Party members jammed inside, and perhaps 10,000 more congregants outside, often in cold or inclement weather, listening on loudspeakers to Popiełuszko’s quiet eloquence.75 The young priest’s message drew out the implications of John Paul’s challenge to vanquish evil with good. Popiełuszko insisted on both nonviolence and resistance. Resistance was a moral obligation in the face of “the power,” and nonviolence was the Christian way of resistance.76
Father Jerzy Popiełuszko confronted his congregants and the thousands who came to hear him from all over the country with choices: “Which side will you take? The side of good or the side of evil? Truth or falsehood? Love or hatred?”77 The New York Times’s Warsaw bureau chief, Michael Kaufman, recognized moral dynamite when he saw it: “Nowhere else from East Berlin to Vladivostok could anyone stand before ten or fifteen thousand people and use a microphone to condemn the errors of state and party. Nowhere, in that vast stretch encompassing some four hundred million people, was anyone else openly telling a crowd that defiance of authority was an obligation of the heart, of religion, manhood, and nationhood.”78
There were divisions in the Polish Church during and after martial law. Cardinal Glemp had a different set of priorities and a different understanding of the clergy’s role than Father Popiełuszko and other activist Solidarity priests. A lawyer, the Primate seems not to have shared John Paul II’s view that communism was essentially finished, and acted as if he expected to be negotiating with the likes of General Jaruzelski for perhaps decades to come. Cardinal Glemp was dubious about Solidarity’s internal pluralism and uncertain about the Church’s responsibilities to non-Catholic dissidents.79 He had inherited the Wyszyński tradition of the Primate as sole and unquestioned spokesman of Polish Catholicism. Lacking the old Primate’s history of heroic resistance, he did not have the personal moral authority to act in that role—which was, in any event, virtually impossible, given the forces that had been let loose in the clergy and among activist lay Catholics during Solidarity’s fifteen months of freedom.
Thus the situation in June 1983, when John Paul II arrived in Poland for his second pastoral pilgrimage, was one of sadness, compounded by division. The rebirth of Solidarity was being impeded not only by the regime’s thuggery, but by a breakdown of the vibrant solidarity among Poles he had ignited four years before.
John Paul had wanted to come in August 1982 for the 600th anniversary of the Black Madonna of Jasna Góra, but martial law made that impossible.80 Nor was the Jaruzelski government overly cooperative in making arrangements for the June 1983 visit. The regime wanted to set up the venues so that it would be difficult for the Pope to work the crowds (the argument was that the American CIA would organize an incident and then blame the Polish government). The government also insisted on controlling access to the venues with layer upon layer of security controls; the clear intent was to keep the crowds down, if at all possible. Perhaps the most controversial point was the Pope’s desire to meet with Lech Wałęsa. The minister of internal affairs, General Czesław Kiszczak, argued this with papal trip planner Father Roberto Tucci without ever mentioning the Solidarity leader’s name. Wałęsa was “that guy” or “the man with the big family.” “Why,” the interior minister demanded, “does the Pope want to meet with a man who doesn’t represent anybody in this country?” During these negotiations, and to the Pope’s surprise, Tucci managed to convince the authorities to provide enough radio circuits so that people all over the country could listen to John Paul’s addresses simultaneously.81
The Pope arrived in Warsaw on June 16, and the contrast between his demeanor in 1979 and 1983 was immediately apparent. As the Pope stood with head bowed and a somber expression on his face during the welcoming ceremonies, an older woman commented to a reporter, “He is sad. You see, he understands.” President Henryk Jabłoński didn’t. He greeted the Pope saying that “His Holiness’s visit testifies to the gradual normalization of life [in] our country.” Later that day, at St. John’s Cathedral, John Paul made clear what he had signaled nonverbally at the airport, saying that he had come to Poland to “stand beneath the cross of Christ” with all of his countrymen, “especially with those who are most acutely tasting the bitterness of disappointment, humiliation, suffering, of being deprived of their freedom, of being wronged, of having their dignity trampled on.” He then thanked God that Cardinal Wyszyński had been spared having to witness “the painful events connected with the date December 13, 1981.” The censors cut the phrase from the papal text printed in secular and Catholic newspapers.82 Tens of thousands of Poles marched from the cathedral past Communist Party headquarters chanting, “So-li-dar-ność, So-li-dar-ność,” “Lech-Wa-łę-sa, Lech-Wa-łę-sa,” “De-mo-kra-cja, De-mo-kra-cja….”83
The pilgrimage rapidly became the occasion for public, nonviolent political catharsis, but that was not the Pope’s primary purpose. He had come, as always, as an evangelist—this time, to break the fever of despair that had weakened the nation since December 13, 1981, and to teach a lesson about the personal moral foundations of cultural resistance. One of the pilgrimage’s greatest sermons on this theme came at Częstochowa during a meeting with young people. It began with the Pope loosening the tension in the crowd of more than half a million with an impromptu papal skit. When he appeared on the platform that had been erected on the monastery ramparts, he simply couldn’t speak. The crowd’s chants of “Long live the Pope!” and “The Pope with us!” made it impossible to hear anything else. After minutes of this, his unmistakable voice finally carried over the din: “I want to ask you if a certain person who came today from Rome to Jasna Góra may be allowed to speak?” A new chant started: “Go-a-head, go-a-head,” changing to “Clo-ser-to-us, clo-ser-to-us!” John Paul boomed out again, “Do you hear me? I’m coming closer”—and he started to walk down from the platform along the red-carpeted steps, a Pauline monk staggering behind him with the portable microphone. When he stopped, he was still fifty yards from the first row of the crowd. Yet this little piece of theater reignited the current that had run between him and the crowds in 1979. Now, they were silent; now, he could teach them.84
He spoke as one who had known the experience of degradation and humiliation during the Occupation. No one could accuse him of n
ot knowing what his countrymen were experiencing now. And so the Gospel message could be preached in the power of its simplicity: the love of Christ was more powerful “than all the experiences and disappointments that life can prepare for us.” Every Pole could live in that love, no matter what the political circumstances, by choosing the “greater freedom” to be found in reforming one’s own life, which was the precondition to reforming society. They must “call good and evil by name.” That was the way to build “a firm barrier against demoralization.” Then he quietly said the unsayable word, speaking of the “fundamental solidarity between human beings” as the basis of society and the principle of its “moral and social renewal.” “Mother of Jasna Góra,” he prayed in conclusion, “…help us to persevere in hope.” As he walked slowly back up to the platform and into the monastery, the crowd began a last chant, “Stay-with-us, stay-with-us….”85
In Kraków, on June 22, he gave Poland two new icons of the “greater freedom” to be sought through moral and cultural resistance when he beatified the “two rebels” he had preached about in 1963, the Carmelite Rafał Kalinowski and “Brother Albert” Chmielowski. The Pope also continued the kind of spontaneous evening dialogue with the Kraków crowds that had been a feature of the 1979 pilgrimage. He was late in returning to the archbishop’s residence one evening from an extraordinary, previously unscheduled meeting with General Jaruzelski at Wawel Castle. Cardinal Macharski, as host, told Cardinal Casaroli, Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger of Paris, and other dinner guests to begin supper. John Paul eventually came to the table, ate some soup, and then heard a crowd of students calling to him from outside. He got up, went to the window, and had a lengthy back-and-forth with the crowd. After fifteen minutes or so of this, Cardinal Casaroli remarked to the dinner company, “What does he want? Does he want bloodshed? Does he want war? Does he want to overthrow the government? Every day I have to explain to the authorities that there is nothing to this.”86
John Paul II knew exactly what he wanted and precisely how far he could go. In his formal remarks before meeting privately with General Jaruzelski at the Belvedere Palace in Warsaw, he avoided the point of maximum concern to the Soviet Union—the Christian basis of Europe’s cultural unity and the historic travesty of the Yalta division of the continent. But there was no backing off on the message to Poland’s rulers. “Social renewal” (a favorite communist slogan) could only begin, he told Jaruzelski and the others, with the “social accords” that had been reached in 1980. Later, those outside the room where the two men met privately heard raised voices, as the Pope pressed Jaruzelski to open a dialogue with the Solidarity leaders he had imprisoned.87 At a Mass in Warsaw, he returned to the theme of dialogue, insisting that a social order “in which man’s fundamental rights will be respected” could be created only on the basis of a dialouge between the governors and the governed.
It was a sharp message to men who claimed that they had been acting to protect Poland’s sovereignty from Soviet intervention. As Timothy Garton Ash observed, John Paul was telling General Jaruzelski and his colleagues, “You never tire of proclaiming your sovereignty—okay, then behave like a sovereign power.”88 The message was not that of a man who thought that Jaruzelski had no choice but to do what he did in December 1981.
In his meetings with Jaruzelski and with the Polish episcopate, John Paul made clear that he would not accept a solution in which the Church, in return for its independence, would cooperate with the state through officially recognized Catholic unions or an officially sanctioned Catholic “opposition” party. Some in the Polish Church favored this, and it certainly was an appealing prospect for the regime. The Pope wasn’t having any of it. Solidarity had its own integrity and its right to independence. There could be no genuine dialogue, and thus no genuine social renewal, without genuinely independent workers’ associations. The Church would not cut a deal with the regime behind Solidarity’s back.89
As if to drive this point home symbolically, John Paul had insisted on seeing Lech Wałęsa. The regime finally agreed on a “strictly private meeting” at a cabin in the Tatras, to which Wałęsa was helicoptered by his captors. Father Józef Tischner, the former Solidarity congress chaplain, exploded the myth of the “strictly private meeting” with a single, blunt sentence—“There are no private meetings with the Pope.”90 For his part, Wałęsa stressed the language of dialogue in his future public statements. For theirs, the authorities stated that “There will be no dialogue…with the former leadership of ‘Solidarity.’”91 The slow-motion decomposition of the regime, and the Polish economy, would continue.
John Paul II could not persuade Jaruzelski and the regime to talk to the opposition, but his eight days in Poland in June 1983 had strengthened the resistance Church, made clear that there would be no deals over or around Solidarity, and given his countrymen a measure of hope and something to think about for the immediate future. The question, as in Central America, was authentic Christian liberation. The heaviest chains human beings could wear, he had told the Poles, were “the fetters of hatred….” Authentic liberation was cruciform, in the Christian view of the world: “Forgiveness is love’s might, forgiveness is not weakness. To forgive does not mean to resign from truth and justice.”
Some took this for unexpected mildness, even accommodation. Calling good and evil by name was an explosive force in the world, however. John Paul did not doubt that a Poland mature enough to be nonconformist, confronting the communist culture of the lie with the power of truth, would eventually achieve its liberation—and in a manner worthy of a Christian nation, witnessing to the truth about the dignity of the human person. It was a question of time.
BISHOPS AND THE BOMB
John Paul II’s distinctive moral-cultural approach to world politics set the context for the Holy See’s intervention in the pastoral letter on war and peace being prepared by the bishops of the United States in 1981–1983.
The proposal for such a pastoral letter was a by-product of the nuclear freeze movement, many advocates of which believed that human rights issues should be subordinated to the great goal of reaching arms control agreements. Those agreements, in turn, would lessen the danger of nuclear war, it was argued. This uncoupling of human rights and arms control was evident in the first two drafts of the U.S. bishops’ pastoral letter. After the second draft, the Holy See summoned the American bishops and experts responsible for preparing a third draft to the Vatican for an international consultation on January 18–19 with officials of the Curia and bishops and specialists from France, West Germany, Great Britain, Belgium, Italy, and the Netherlands. Cardinal Ratzinger (who chaired the consultation) and Cardinal Casaroli participated for two days. It was an indication that there were theological issues as well as questions of prudential judgment to be sorted out, and that the Pope was seriously concerned about the line the American bishops were developing.
The participants decided that the consultation’s results would be synthesized by Father Jan Schotte, CICM, the Secretary of the Pontifical Justice and Peace Commission, and published as “a point of reference and a guide to the U.S. bishops in preparing the next draft of their pastoral letter.” John Paul II intended that the synthesis be sent directly to each bishop of the United States without commentary. The President of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Archbishop John Roach of St. Paul-Minneapolis, and Cardinal-elect Joseph Bernardin of Chicago, the chairman of the bishops’ drafting committee, unilaterally attached to the Schotte synthesis a cover letter explaining that the Vatican consultation had not raised grave questions about the second draft and that serious substantive changes would not be required in the third draft.
This was not an interpretation supported by a careful reading of the document. The synthesis clearly suggested that the pastoral letter’s second draft had confused the different levels of teaching authority in the Church, and was apt to promote confusion among Catholics while diminishing the Church’s credibility. The Schotte synthesis also suggested that t
he bishops, as “teachers of the faith,” should not “take sides” in policy matters “when various prudential applications are possible.” The synthesis urged that a third draft make clear the distinction between the peace of the Kingdom of God and the peace that was possible in this world, and suggested that the bishops’ document had erred in proposing two normative traditions of moral reasoning about war and peace in Catholic moral theology, pacifism, and the just-war tradition. Pacifism had been accorded a greater respect in contemporary Catholic theology, but the normative tradition guiding decisions about war and peace remained the just-war tradition.
The consultation and the Schotte synthesis had a considerable effect on the bishops’ third draft, which became the basis of the May 1983 pastoral letter, “The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response” [TCOP]. Even in its final, revised form, though, “The Challenge of Peace” did not come to grips with the culture-driven understanding of history that John Paul II had been proposing to the Church and the world since his election. The document quoted copiously from various statements of the Pope’s, but the analysis of TCOP drew far more from the conventions of American political science and international relations theory than from John Paul’s vision of the depth dimension of late twentieth-century history. Even more strikingly, the Americans had not even begun to reckon seriously with what the new human rights resistance in east central Europe meant for both that captive region and the Soviet Union. In contrast to the approach the Pope took in Poland in June 1983, the American bishops’ pastoral letter of a month before—hailed at the time as a great challenge to U.S. foreign and military policy—reflected a much less adventurous view of the Church’s relationship to the worlds of political power. The U.S. bishops were determined to be “players” in the game. John Paul II wanted to change the game.92
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