Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  But the Polish Church, or at least some of its most active elements, had learned some things since 1991. The June 1997 pilgrimage was far better prepared than its predecessor. Thoughtful Polish spokesmen for the pontificate conducted a year-long campaign in the media, among intellectuals, and within the Church to prepare the ground for the Pope’s visit.13 In 1991 there was no Polish Catholic press agency. By June 1997 a highly efficient Katolicka Agencja Informacyjna was in place, guided by one of the rising leaders of the Polish episcopate, Bishop Józef Życiński of Tarnów, a forty-eight-year-old philosophical disciple of John Paul II. Prior to the visit KAI published an informative 114-page media guide, which described the current Polish religious situation with commendable candor and helped interpret the Pope’s thought to the local and foreign press. Throughout the eleven days of John Paul II’s June 1997 pilgrimage, a squadron of young media professionals, several of them Dominican priests, equipped with cellular phones and pouring out press releases on state-of-the-art computer equipment, helped get the story out much more intelligently than had been done six years before. The results were notable throughout the world press.

  The social psychology of 1997 in Poland was different, too. As the president of the Znak publishing house, Henryk Woźniakowski, put it, eight years of democratic and capitalist busyness had made the Poles eager to experience, once again, a “liturgical rhythm” in their lives. Poles had also been wrestling with precisely the kinds of public moral questions John Paul had identified in 1991. What were thought to be ominous and premature warnings in 1991 seemed, by 1997, strikingly prescient.14

  Those who expected another visit from that mythical papal scold were sorely disappointed. Between May 31 and June 10, 1997, John Paul preached a message of encouragement, affection, and challenge in more than two dozen carefully crafted major addresses. “Every return to Poland,” he said on his arrival in Wrocław on May 31, “is like a return to the family home, where the smallest objects remind us of what is closest and dearest to our hearts.”15 To Poles frustrated by the bitter political wrangling that had just produced a new constitution satisfying no one, the Pope urged taking a longer historical view. What Poles were living today—a free Church in a free and reasonably secure state—hadn’t happened in Poland for centuries. Make this the occasion, he suggested, to deepen the foundations of civil society, which is the precondition to sustaining democracy. Think of citizenship as a vocation to enliven every sphere of life, including politics and economics, with the leaven of the Gospel. Look to your roots as a source of the virtues necessary to make the free society work. Be proud of what your entrepreneurial spirit has accomplished.

  The June 1997 pilgrimage regalvanized the electric field of affection that had flowed with such potency between the Pope and his Polish audiences in 1979, 1983, and 1987. John Paul II in 1979—young, sonorous, taking steps two at a time—was one kind of heroic figure. John Paul II in 1997—older, moving far less easily, with a tremor in his arm, but still exuding both iron determination and goodness—was another, perhaps even more heroic, national icon. Whatever his physical difficulties, he had clearly not lost his sense of timing and delivery.

  At Gorzów Wielkopolski in the western part of the country, a crowd of 200,000 had been anticipated; 400,000 attended a Liturgy of the Word in a square beside the Church of the First Polish Martyrs. After his homily, John Paul spontaneously recounted Cardinal Wyszyński’s prediction that the newly elected Polish Pope would lead the Church into the third millennium. He was “getting more advanced in years,” he said, and hoped that those present would “ask God on your knees…that I am able to meet this challenge.” The crowd erupted into a chant of “We will help you! We will help you!” It was, ironically, the phrase used by workers answering a challenge from the newly installed Communist Party leader, Edward Gierek, in 1970. John Paul answered with a bit of papal whimsy—“I recognize the words, but I hope it will be better this time.”

  At Częstochowa on June 4, a congregation of half a million began chanting “Long live the Pope!” after the Gospel reading. To which John Paul replied, “He does, he does, and he grows older.”

  On June 6, Mass was celebrated in a splendidly decorated venue at the ski resort of Zakopane, in the Pope’s beloved Tatra Mountains. The mayor of the city, in traditional Polish highlander dress, knelt before the Pope to thank him for “freeing us from the ‘red slavery’ and for teaching us how to eradicate from our Polish homeland all that is degrading, humiliating, and all that enslaves us.” After the Mass, when the tough, craggy Polish mountain people began to sing John Paul an old folk song about a highlander going into exile (“Mountaineer, why do you leave your beautiful hills and silvery brooks?”), those present and those watching on television were hard put to find a dry eye among the half-million present, including the Pope.

  John Paul, who seemed to observers to get stronger as the visit unfolded, continued to work the crowds masterfully. When hundreds of thousands of youngsters in Poznań began to chant Sto lat! [May you live a hundred years!], he retorted, “Don’t flatter the Pope so much; you’d better think about Paris [and the upcoming World Youth Day]!” At Kraków’s collegiate Church of St. Anne, on June 8, John Paul spent forty minutes walking through a packed crowd of Poland’s intellectual and cultural leaders, greeting old friends (often by nickname, like Gap? Turowski), inquiring after wives, husbands, children, and grandchildren. The proper, middle-aged academics stood and applauded the entire time.

  Kraków was determined to welcome the Pope grandly. The city’s streets were filled with red-and-white (Polish), yellow-and-white (papal), and blueand-white (Kraków) banners. Stores sported papal flags and portraits of the Pope. The churches remained open all night for confessions before the June 8 canonization of Blessed Queen Jadwiga, which took place on the Kraków Commons, the Błonia Krakowskie, to which somewhere between 1.2 million and 1.6 million Poles walked that Sunday morning through streets closed to cars and buses, singing and carrying banners announcing every conceivable Catholic organization. The massive, spontaneous procession was a reminder of how colorful Catholicism can be. In addition to laity in all modes of dress, ranging from teenage grunge to highlander formal (complete with furtrimmed black hats), there were black-robed Benedictines; white Dominicans and Camaldolese; brown Franciscans; gray Albertines; prelates, priests and seminarians displaying scarlet, violet, purple, green, and black sashes; and nuns in a variety of elegant, full habits. It was the second largest gathering in Polish history, topped only by the papal Mass on the same spot in 1979.

  The June 1997 pilgrimage, like its historic predecessor eighteen years before, was much more than spectacle. John Paul had a proposal to make, and in his addresses he spelled out his distinctive vision of the priority of culture over politics and economics, while developing his vision of the “public Church” as the shaper of culture.

  The June pilgrimage was deliberately filled with images of Poland’s Christian past. Rather than pious nostalgia, this was remembering in the service of the present and future. “Fidelity to roots,” John Paul insisted, “does not mean a mechanical copying of the past. Fidelity to roots is always creative…. Fidelityto roots means, above all, the ability to create an organic synthesis [between] perennial values, confirmed so often in history, and the challenge of today’s world: faith and culture, the Gospel and life.” The Jadwiga canonization, which Karol Wojtyła had sought for decades, afforded the greatest temptation to forget present and future in a binge on Poland’s glorious past. The Pope, instead, focused his June 8 canonization homily on the fourteenth-century queen as a model for the Poland of tomorrow: Jadwiga the queen, for whom power was a matter of public service; Jadwiga the diplomat, working to build a community of nations in east central Europe; Jadwiga the patroness of culture, who endowed the university that bears her dynastic name with her golden scepter; Jadwiga, born to wealth and privilege, whose “sensitivity to social wrongs was often praised by her subjects.” The message to Poland’s new dem
ocracy could not have been clearer. You have inherited a great cultural tradition, and it is that tradition which will enable you to build a genuinely free society worthy of the half-century of sacrifice you made in the name of freedom.

  At the commemoration of the Jagiellonian University theology faculty’s 600th anniversary that same afternoon, John Paul sent another signal about the Church’s relationship to politics. The Pope minced no words about the “dramatic struggle for existence” that the Faculty of Theology had gone through under the communists. Fighting this battle was a defense of the integrity of the intellectual life, a defense of culture, and a defense of the nation. By contending for theology’s place in the academy, the Church was defending a form of inquiry that had made its “contribution to the development of Polish learning and culture” for centuries. A culture cut off from transcendent reference points could not serve the human good, because it could not know the truth about the human person.

  The Pope’s anniversary address at St. Anne’s, which did not mention the politics of the present moment once, seemed to be saying to all concerned, inside and outside the Church, that while politics was undoubtedly important, the nurturance of culture, especially in the life of the mind, was far more important. Some may have thought that the upcoming parliamentary elections would decide Poland’s future. John Paul suggested that his country’s future really depends on “a lively awareness…that man does not create truth; rather, truth discloses itself to man when he perseveringly seeks it.” That is what universities are supposed to do. That is why universities are, over time, of more consequence to a nation than parliaments. And that was why the Church, embodied in her universal pastor, was reflecting with Poland’s intellectual and cultural leaders on the meaning of true humanism, the “integral notion of the human person” that was so important for the life of the mind, rather than telling them for whom to vote.

  In Gniezno, five days before, John Paul had delivered a similar message about the free society’s dependence on a vibrant and morally serious culture to the presidents of Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Germany—all new (or newly united) democracies. Politics, he reminded them, was not just a matter of winning elections. Realpolitik, imagining politics to be a realm of amorality, had given Europe “this sorely-tried century.” The birth of a new Europe capable of responding “to its age-old vocation in the world” depended on a European rediscovery of the continent’s ancient “cultural and religious roots.”16

  Pre-pilgrimage seminars had explored the question of what kind of Poland the Pope would visit. The pilgrimage also addressed the question, “What kind of Church should succeed the Wyszyński Church, the Church of anti-communist resistance, in democratic Poland?”17

  The kind of Church John Paul II proposed in June 1997 was not reticent about Poland’s historic Catholicism. In the Pope’s vision, Catholicism and the public virtues it inculcates are the best, and perhaps the only, available cultural foundation for a Polish democracy that is prosperous, free, and virtuous. This, in John Paul’s mind, should also be a Church that has learned Vatican II’s teachings on the lay vocation in the world, on the Church as a public (not partisan) actor, and on the priority of culture over politics and economics in the dynamics of a free society. In the vigorous, culture-forming Church John Paul sketched in June 1997, there is no clericalism, in the sense of priests or bishops usurping political judgment. The Polish episcopate functions as a public conscience, not as a collection of political bosses delivering votes to a particular party. Ecumenism and interreligious dialogue are seen as goods in themselves and essential to nurturing civil society. And the realm of culture, not the maneuverings in the Sejm, is where the Church’s leadership focuses its primary attention.

  The alternative Church, which is more aptly described as nationalist rather than “conservative,” is exactly the opposite. Intensely clerical, it longs for a national political party tied to the hierarchy, and a large, paternalistic state. Ecumenism and interreligious dialogue have only one purpose: the conversion of the wayward. The most visible embodiment of the nationalist Church in the Poland of the late 1990s was Radio Maria, which attracted some 3 million daily listeners (primarily women over sixty) and took the view that democratic Poland after 1989 was worse off than at the height of Stalinist persecution. Radio Maria provided a useful foil for Polish secularists who pointed to its broadcasts and said, “Here is the real Polish Catholicism”—narrow, bigoted, anti-Semitic, xenophobic, authoritarian.

  In twenty-six formal addresses during his June 1997 pilgrimage, John Paul had a word of encouragement or praise for virtually every Catholic movement or initiative in Poland. He simply ignored Radio Maria, not mentioning it once. On June 5, after a particularly offensive Radio Maria analysis of one of the Pope’s texts, his spokesman, Joaquín Navarro-Valls, issued an official statement that the head of Radio Maria, Father Tadeusz Rydzyk, spoke only for himself, not for the Pope, the Holy See, or the Polish bishops. For those with eyes to see and ears to hear, nothing could have been clearer. Whatever his pastoral sympathies for Radio Maria’s listeners, John Paul II was determined that his vision of the Polish Church of the future not be compromised by any hint of accommodation to the nationalist Church’s agenda.

  Prior to the Pope’s arrival in Poland, the scent of a valedictory had been in the air. Eleven bracing days later, speculation had already begun about another papal pilgrimage, to the Baltic Coast and the lakes where Karol Wojtyła used to kayak. The pilgrimage had made clear that the Church of John Paul II and Vatican II—a Church living as the conscience of a national culture—was the only viable Church for Poland’s future.18 So the great Polish experiment would continue. Could a democratic polity and a free economy be built and sustained on the basis of an intact Catholic culture? By giving Poles and Poland a living past rather than a nostalgic past during his June 1997 pilgrimage, John Paul II had not only kept the question alive, he had given impetus to a positive answer.

  Italy

  No Pope in centuries has taken the titles “Bishop of Rome” and “Primate of Italy” as seriously as the Polish Pope. By the end of 1996, John Paul II had undertaken 127 pastoral visits throughout Italy to more than 250 different locales, and had delivered 858 addresses, homilies, and reflections while traveling almost 43,000 miles inside the country. In addition, he had made 249 pastoral visits to Roman parishes, in each of which he had preached, celebrated Mass, and visited with local congregants.

  In March 1994, John Paul concelebrated Mass at St. Peter’s tomb with the Permanent Council of the Italian Bishops’ Conference to open the nine-month “Great Prayer for Italy” in December of that year, at the shrine of Loreto, he closed the novena at another concelebration with the bishops of Italy. The entire nine-month program of intensified prayer for the new evangelization of the country was built around the theme of the Pope’s March 16 homily in the crypt of St. Peter’s: that the history of Italy for the past 2,000 years could not be understood without understanding the country’s heritage of Christian faith and culture. The new, post–Cold War Italy, he proposed, should take its rightful place in the new, post–Cold War Europe in fulfillment of this heritage.19 In 1995–1996, his vicar for Rome, Cardinal Camillo Ruini, launched a reevangelization “Mission to the City,” which began with young people distributing the Gospel of Mark, door-to-door, throughout Rome. On September 27, 1997, the Pope spoke to thousands of young Italians at a National Eucharistic Congress in Bologna. After a warm-up by singer Bob Dylan, John Paul picked up the theme of the folk artist’s most famous song, telling the young people that what was “blowing in the wind” was the Holy Spirit: “You asked me,” he said, “How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man? I answer you: one! There is only one road for man and it is Christ, who said, ‘I am the way.’ He is the road of truth, the way of life.”20

  This papal participation in the new evangelization of Italy paralleled John Paul’s efforts to “broaden the Tiber” bet
ween the Vatican and the Quirinale, between the Church and the Italian State. According to one knowledgeable analyst, Italian high culture had been dominated by Marxism since the Second World War, despite the fact that the levers of government were controlled by the Christian Democratic Party. In helping to bring down European communism, John Paul had not only removed a political threat, but had destroyed an alternative “Church” and had broken its grip on the imagination of the young. Statism’s demise in Italy had also had its effects on the religious situation. In a society in which the state takes all the risks, a secular cast of mind flourishes; by emphasizing prudent risk taking and personal responsibility, the market economics favored by most major political parties in the Italy of the 1990s, had helped create a social situation open to reevangelization.21 The net result of these two trends was a new openness to Catholicism in Italian culture, which John Paul had tried to seize. As one prominent Italian businessman put it, John Paul was showing a new Italy how it is possible to be a proud, practicing Catholic in the modern world, where many Italians had assumed for decades that secularism was synonymous with success.22

  That John Paul II should have forged a friendship and collegial working relationship with an intensely Catholic Italian philosopher (and, later, political leader) like Rocco Buttiglione was not surprising. John Paul was also raising questions that the Italian secular left could not ignore. Massimo D’Alema, General Secretary of the Democratic Party of the Left, the more mainstream of the two parties that had emerged from the collapse of the Italian Communist Party, told reporters in 1997 that the one book on his bedside table was Crossing the Threshold of Hope. D’Alema, the one-time Wunderkind of Italian communism, claimed to have been impressed by John Paul’s analysis of communism’s collapse and by the Pope’s insistence that the society of the future had to be built around “a quest for values…a spirituality.” In Italy, D’Alema believed, and indeed throughout the world, John Paul had “an influence greater than the Church,” because he articulated universal values in a way that “moves beyond the borders of the Catholic Church.” That, he suggested, was particularly interesting to men and women of the left who were looking for a way beyond “the borders of a class culture” and a class-driven or economic analysis of history. It was an analysis that avoided the fact that John Paul had emerged from the heart of the Church and understood himself to be teaching the Church’s doctrine. It was, however, a step beyond the instinctive anti-clericalism of the Italian left’s past.