Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  The curtain had been run down on the drama of atheistic humanism. As a plausible proposal for the human future, it was finished. That was what Mikhail Gorbachev’s coming to the Vatican meant.

  ST. AGNES’S GENTLE REVOLUTION

  The unraveling of communism in Czechoslovakia began on Friday night, November 17–18, 1989, along Národní t?ída [National Avenue]—which runs from the Vltava River toward Wenceslaus Square in Prague’s Old Town. With the permission of the authorities, 50,000 students marched up Národní t?ída toward the square to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Jan Opletal, a student murdered by the Nazis. The connections between oppressors past and present could not be denied, however, and some anti-regime slogans were chanted. About halfway to their destination, the nonviolent students were confronted by the truncheons and white helmets of the state police and the red berets of a state anti-terrorist squad. Surrounded, the students tried to talk to the troops. Some handed out flowers to the red berets, while others lit candles, sat on the pavement, and with raised arms chanted, “We have bare hands.” After what seemed hours of mounting tension, the white helmets and red berets attacked without warning. Men, women, and teenagers were beaten unconscious. No one was killed, but hundreds were hospitalized.

  The masakr, as it was immediately dubbed, galvanized the nonviolent revolution that overthrew Czechoslovak communism. On November 19, Václav Havel convened the meeting that created the umbrella resistance organization, Civic Forum. Shortly after, a similar coalition, Public Against Violence, was formed in Bratislava under largely Catholic leadership. Massive evening demonstrations began in Wenceslaus Square, where Father Václav Maly, a thirty-nine-year-old priest who had stoked boilers in the basement of the Meteor Hotel when the government took away his license to live his vocation publicly, served as master of ceremonies. On the night of November 24, he read the enormous crowd a message from the aged cardinal whose name they cheered in the chilly evening air, using the familiar diminutive—“Frantši Tomášek! Frantši Tomášek!”

  Citizens of Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia:

  I must not remain silent at the very moment when you have joined together in a mighty protest against the great injustice visited upon us over four decades…. We are surrounded by countries that, in the past orpresently, have destroyed the [prison] bars of the totalitarian system…. We must not wait any longer. The time has come to act.

  …Let us fight for the good by good means. Our oppressors are showing us how short-lived the victories of hatred, evil, and revenge are….

  I also want to address you, my Catholic brothers and sisters, joined by your priests. In this hour of destiny for our country, not a single one of you may stand apart. Raise your voice again: this time, in unity with all other citizens, Czechs and Slovaks, members of other nationalities, believers and unbelievers. Religious liberty cannot be separated from other human rights. Freedom is indivisible….67

  Four days later, on November 28, the Czechoslovak Communist Party agreed to relinquish its monopoly on power. By December 7, Prime Minister Ladislav Adamec had resigned. On December 10, Gustav Husák was out as president, too. After three weeks of intense negotiations, Václav Havel was installed as President of Czechoslovakia on December 29. According to Václav Benda, a leading Catholic intellectual in Civic Forum, the regime contacted Cardinal Tomášek early in the negotiations to request that he act as mediator between the opposition and the government. Demonstrating that he was not only getting older and tougher at the same time but cagier, too, Tomášek refused. For him to act as mediator would split the opposition and give a kind of legitimacy to the regime. By putting the Church irrevocably on the side of the people, Tomášek sustained the opposition’s broad-based coalition.68

  In St. Vitus Cathedral, atop Prague’s castle promontory, Hrad?any, a “Te Deum” was sung on December 29 to celebrate Havel’s installation as president. One of the erstwhile playwright’s aides, still amazed at what had happened, said, “St. Agnes had her hand under our gentle revolution.”69 After the last six weeks, no one was inclined to disagree.

  A nonviolent revolution had swept away Stalin’s external empire in less than six months and had established democratic regimes rather than a new reign of terror. Conscience had proven stronger than coercion, once conscience had been rallied in sufficient numbers.70 Those who participated in the Revolution of 1989 knew that the key figure in creating that revolution of conscience had been Pope John Paul II.

  THE NEW DEAL

  Throughout the annus mirabilis of 1989, John Paul moved quickly to seize opportunities presented by the new deal in east central Europe and the USSR.

  On July 17, full diplomatic relations between Poland and the Holy See were announced.

  On July 25, Father Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz was named the Apostolic Administrator of Minsk in the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, with responsibilities for the pastoral care of Roman Catholics throughout Byelorussia. Bishop-elect Kondrusiewicz’s curriculum vitae illustrated the trials of Polish families expelled eastward during World War II. He had been born in 1946 in Grodno, in what would soon be known as “Belarus,” but had grown up in Kazakhstan. At the time Kondrusiewicz was named bishop, he was a priest of the Archdiocese of Vilnius in Lithuania, where he had studied for the priesthood during the 1970s.

  On October 5, the Ukrainian Catholic bishops’ Synod met in Rome. Two weeks later, the Vatican “foreign minister,” Archbishop Angelo Sodano, was in Moscow for negotiations over the future of the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine. The Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church proposed a de facto dissolution of the Ukrainian Catholic Church. Those valuing their eastern liturgy more than their communion with Rome would become Orthodox, and those valuing communion with Peter over their Eastern-rite liturgy would become Roman Catholic. This was clearly unacceptable. In meetings with President Gorbachev, Foreign Minister Shevardnadze, and chairman of the Council for Religious Affairs Yuriy Khristoradnov, Archbishop Sodano reiterated John Paul’s insistence that the new Soviet law on freedom of conscience recognize the legality of the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine. The Soviets finally agreed, but insisted that the “practical aspects” of the legalization be worked out through a tripartite negotiation involving the Holy See, the Moscow Patriarchate, and the Soviet government. This negotiation was to take place “in the context of closer ecumenical dialogue” between the Russian Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches.

  If past history were any measure, the Patriarchate of Moscow would use the threat of a fracture in that “context” to prevent too many concessions to the Greek Catholics of Ukraine. Given what they evidently assumed to have been the durability of the Gorbachev regime and the USSR, the Holy See and the Pope agreed to this formula, which was not received happily by the Ukrainian diaspora or by the Ukrainian Catholic Church in situ. By late October 1989, the Greek Catholics of Ukraine were conducting massive demonstrations in L’viv, and on October 29 they peacefully took over the largest church in the city, the Church of the Transfiguration.71

  The reemergence of the underground Greek Catholic Church in Romania went more smoothly. On December 30, Archbishop Francesco Colasuonno, a veteran Vatican diplomat, began a nine-day mission there, during which he attended the first meeting of the country’s Latin-rite and Greek Catholic bishops since 1950. On January 6, 1990, Romania’s interim government confirmed that the decree of December 1, 1948, forcibly uniting the Greek Catholic Church of Romania with the Romanian Orthodox Church, was abrogated, and that the Greek Catholics of Romania would enjoy full religious freedom.72

  In the wake of Archbishop Sodano’s October 1989 meeting in Moscow and President Gorbachev’s visit to the Vatican in December, a joint Roman Catholic–Russian Orthodox conference met in Moscow from January 12 to 17, 1990, to try to resolve the situation of the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine. The Holy See delegation was led by Cardinal Willebrands, President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, and the Orthodox dele
gation by Metropolitan Filaret of Kiev, an implacable foe of the Ukrainian Catholics. Although official announcement of the meeting’s results stated that “substantial agreement” had been reached on the situation of the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine, the results of the January meeting were again unsatisfactory to the Ukrainian Catholics.

  The Russian Orthodox had played their ecumenical ace and insisted on a statement that “Uniatism” (on the model of the 1596 Ukrainian Catholic “Union of Brest”) was not the way to reunite the Churches. The Ukrainians took this as an indirect repudiation of their experience. Although the meeting agreed that the Greek Catholics could recover some of their churches, it also tried to confine their activities to the “canonical territory” of the Roman Catholic Church, an ambiguous formulation the Ukrainians regarded as a brake on their freedom of action. Moreover, the Orthodox refused to recognize the existing underground Greek Catholic hierarchy and insisted that any hierarchical structures for the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine (such as dioceses and parishes) only be established by consensus agreement between the Holy See and the Moscow Patriarchate—which for the Ukrainians was another Vatican infringement of the freedom, guaranteed by the Union of Brest, they had suffered grievously to defend. Despite the Ukrainians’ unhappiness, John Paul ratified the agreement. In what seemed an attempt to meet at least some Ukrainian Catholic concerns, though, he added formal reservations about the “historical judgments” the agreement had made about the Union of Brest, and noted the danger of misinterpreting certain aspects of the agreement.73

  On February 6, 1990, John Paul appointed Ján Chryzostom Korec, SJ, the Bishop of Nitra in the Slovak portion of Czechoslovakia. The Vatican newspaper blandly stated that “until now he has been rector of the seminary in Bratislava”—a bit of bureaucratese that masked one of the great personal dramas of the resistance Church in east central Europe. Korec had been secretly ordained a bishop in 1951 at age twenty-seven, while working in a Bratislava warehouse wrestling oil barrels. He managed to function as a bishop clandestinely until 1960, when he was arrested and sentenced to twenty-seven years in prison. Released during the Prague Spring of 1968, he was shipped back to jail in 1974. International protests forced his release. He then worked in Bratislava as an elevator repairman, night watchman, and factory hand while continuing his underground ministry as a bishop and writing numerous small books of theology and spiritual reflection. In an attempt to assuage the Husák regime, Paul VI had asked him in 1976 to cease his underground episcopal activity, and particularly his clandestine ordination of priests. Korec obeyed—and watched the repression continue. In the late 1980s, he had emerged as one of the key leaders in the Slovak Catholic resistance. His appointment to a residential bishopric was a sign of confidence and gratitude on the part of a Pope who, as archbishop of Kraków, had had his own reservations about Vatican Ostpolitik in Czechoslovakia and who had done his share of clandestine ordinations to the priesthood.

  On February 14, the Holy See and Hungary established full diplomatic relations, immediately after Cardinal Mindszenty’s remains had been returned to his country and reburied during an enormous funeral Mass in Esztergom, the primatial see. In his letter to Hungarian Cardinal László Paskai for the occasion, John Paul wrote of Mindszenty that “he wore the crown of thorns.”74

  On March 1, the Holy See established full diplomatic relations with the USSR. Archbishop Franceso Colasuonno was named the Holy See’s first nuncio in Moscow.

  And on March 14, John Paul named twelve new bishops—seven for the Latin-rite Church and five for the Greek Catholic Church—in Romania.

  What It Was About

  While commentators in the West scrambled for an explanation of what had happened in east central Europe so rapidly and unexpectedly—the majority settling on economics as the cause of the Warsaw Pact’s collapse—John Paul tried to bring these events and their implications for the future into clearer focus. On January 13, 1990, at his annual meeting with the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See, John Paul gave the assembled diplomats a challenging reading of the history they had all just witnessed. “The irresistible thirst for freedom,” he said, had “brought down walls and opened doors.” The diplomats would also have noted that the “point of departure” for the Revolution of 1989 “has often been a church.” Step by step, “candles were lit, forming… a pathway of light, as if to say to those who for many years claimed to limit human horizons to this earth that one cannot live in chains indefinitely….”The great capitals of the region—Warsaw, Moscow, Budapest, Berlin, Prague, Sofia and Bucharest—had become “stages on a long pilgrimage towards freedom”: a freedom made possible, in the final analysis, because “women, young people, and men have overcome their fear….”75

  The next task, he proposed, was to secure the victory of conscience in the rule of law, which must recognize human dignity as the source of rights. Law should build the kind of home worthy of men and women who were free moral agents, and that required “respect for transcendent and permanent values.” When man made himself “the measure of all things,” he “became a slave to his own finiteness.” The rule of law in the new Europe had to be built with “reference to him from whom all things come and to whom this world returns.”76

  On February 14, the Pope began a series of brief prayer meditations at his general audiences, intended to help prepare for a pilgrimage to Poland the following year, called the “Jasna Góra Cycle.” The February 21 meditation recalled King Jan III Sobieski’s message to Pope Innocent XI on winning the Battle of Vienna in 1683: “I came, I saw, God conquered.” That, John Paul suggested, was precisely what had happened in east central Europe: Deus vicit, “God conquered.”77 On March 28, he gave thanks “for the fact that the precariousness of lies has been manifest,” and he thanked Mary, Queen of Poland, “for all those for whom truth has become strength”—the truth that triumphed over lies.78 Later meditations in the series would link 1939 and 1989 more closely, reflecting on the betrayal of Poland by the USSR and its Western allies, the anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising, and the extermination camp at Auschwitz. The imperative of social solidarity, and the capacity to “differ nobly,” were lessons to be drawn from the present and the events of a half-century ago.79

  Similar themes marked John Paul’s dramatic pilgrimage to a newly free Czechoslovakia in April 1990. The two-day visit, during which the Pope also visited Velehrad and Bratislava, began on April 21 in Prague. St. Vitus Cathedral was packed with bishops, priests, and laity, many from the underground Church. Hundreds of those present, especially among the older clergy, had suffered years of imprisonment in labor camps. All of them, the Pope said, had won a “victory of fidelity”: “fidelity to Christ crucified in the moment of your own crucifixion” fidelity to the Holy Spirit “who led you through darkness” fidelity to “Peter’s successors and to the successors of the apostles, the bishops” and “fidelity to the Nation, which is particularly expressed in solidarity with the persecuted and in frankness with those who seek the truth and love freedom.” Their task, now, was to build a free Church “on the basis of what you have brought to maturity during the years of trial.” 80

  John Paul was not the only man in Prague that day who thought that 1989 should be read in a different way than statesmen were accustomed to reading history. The Pope’s fellow playwright, Václav Havel, now President of Czechoslovakia, put it brilliantly in his welcoming address to the Pope at the Prague airport on April 21:

  Your Holiness,

  My dear fellow citizens,

  I am not sure that I know what a miracle is. In spite of this, I dare say that, at this moment, I am participating in a miracle: the man who six months ago was arrested as an enemy of the State stands here today as the President of that State, and bids welcome to the first Pontiff in the history of the Catholic Church to set foot in this land.

  I am not sure that I know what a miracle is. In spite of this, I dare say that this afternoon I shall participate in a miracle: in the same place
where, five months ago, on the day in which we rejoiced over the canonization of Agnes of Bohemia, when the future of our Country was decided, today the head of the Catholic Church will celebrate Mass and probably thank our saint for her intercession before him who holds in his hand the inscrutable course of all things.

  I am not sure that I know what a miracle is. In spite of this I dare say that at this moment I am participating in a miracle: in a country devastated by the ideology of hatred, the messenger of love has arrived; in a country devastated by the government of the ignorant, the living symbol of culture has arrived; in a country which until a short time ago was devastated by the idea of confrontation and division in the world, the messenger of peace, dialogue, mutual tolerance, esteem and calm understanding, the messenger of fraternal unity in diversity has arrived.

  During these long decades, the Spirit was banished from our country. I have the honor of witnessing the moment in which its soil is kissed by the apostle of spirituality.

  Welcome to Czechoslovakia, Your Holiness.81

  VARIANT READINGS

  Cardinal Agostino Casaroli was not persuaded by this talk of miracles, and in the spring of 1990, he set out to analyze the events of 1989 from the perspective of the architect of the Vatican’s Ostpolitik.

  In a lecture on March 17 in Parma, Casaroli argued that the “Helsinki process”—the negotiations leading up to the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, the Final Act’s human rights provisions, the subsequent compliance-review meetings, and the dynamics this process had set loose in communist countries—had been primarily responsible for the changes in east central Europe. It was an intriguing argument, but it was striking that the Secretary of State never suggested that the purpose of the whole Helsinki exercise, from the Soviet point of view, had been to ratify the boundaries of the external empire acquired by Stalin at the Tehran and Yalta Conferences during World War II. John Paul II’s basic metaphor for the post–World War II Europe—“Yalta”—was noticeably absent from the cardinal’s lecture. Casaroli also proposed that the Helsinki process had introduced the notions of the “human person” and “peoples” as “principles” of international relations, giving traction to the claim that human rights matters were not “internal affairs” but the legitimate concern of all. Yet even as he made these important points, Casaroli described Soviet and Warsaw Pact countries’ behavior during the Helsinki process almost clinically, as if profound moral issues were not at stake throughout.82