Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  68.Nor did Cardinal Wojtyła complete the Provincial Synod for the Archdiocese of Kraków and its suffragan dioceses of Kielce, Tarnów, Katowice, and Częstochowa, which he formally launched in 1975 after two years of consultations and preparation. He received the final document of the Provincial Synod on June 22, 1983, on his second trip to Poland as Pope. [See Pierwszy Synod Prowincji Krakowskiej (Kraków: Archdiocese of Kraków, 1994).]

  69.The “Majority Report,” and a history of the process sympathetic to its perspective, may be found in Robert Blair Kaiser, The Politics of Sex and Religion (Kansas City: Leaven Press, 1985). For a different reading of the issues and the majority/minority “reports,” see Janet E. Smith, “Humanae Vitae”: A Generation Later (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1991), and Janet E. Smith, “Humanae Vitae at Twenty: New Insights into an Old Debate,” in Why Humanae Vitae Was Right: A Reader, Janet E. Smith, ed. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993).

  70.I use here the translation prepared by Janet E. Smith in “Humanae Vitae”: A Generation Later, p.282.

  71.Author’s conversation with Pope John Paul II, December 16, 1998. Tad Szulc’s suggestion that Wojtyła deliberately missed the crucial vote on the papal commission in June 1966 is without foundation in fact (see Pope John Paul II, p. 254).

  72.“Les Fondements de la Doctrine de l’Eglise Concernant Les Principes de la Vie Conjugale,” in Analecta Cracoviensia I (1969), pp. 194–230.

  73.See Szulc, Pope John Paul II, p. 255.

  74.Humanae Vitae, 7–10.

  75.Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi’s claim that “the sexual philosophy of Wojtyła and his flock of Polish Catholics became the rule for the universal Church” suggests a lack of familiarity with the argument of both the Kraków memorandum and Humanae Vitae, as well as with the processes by which documents such as the latter are developed; see His Holiness, p. 113.

  76.Henry Kissinger, White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), p. 54.

  77.John Paul II, Curriculum Philosophicum, p. 10.

  In 1963, in response to questions that had been raised, Bishop Wojtyła authorized an investigation of the remains of St. Stanisław with an eye to clarifying the circumstances of his death. The results of the examination by forensic specialists were congruent with the traditional story, that the bishop had been martyred by a blow to the skull.

  78.Author’s interview with Andrzej Połtawki, April 23, 1997.

  79.James Michener, Pilgrimage (Emmaus, Pa.: Rodale Press, 1990), p. 74.

  80.The letter of protest is in Boniecki, Kalendarium, “1967.” On Kotlarczyk, see Kazimierz Braun, A History of Polish Theater, 1939–1989: Spheres of Captivity and Freedom (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996), pp. 142–143.

  81.Boniecki, Kalendarium, “1974.”

  82.Author’s interview with Jerzy Turowicz, July 19, 1996.

  83.Ibid.

  84.Ibid.

  85.Author’s interview with Marek Skwarnicki, April 19, 1997.

  86.Author’s interview with Jacek Woźniakowski, April 11, 1997.

  87.Ibid.

  88.Author’s interview with Father Andrzej Bardecki, July 11, 1996.

  89.The two agreed to do a book together on this debate. Wojtyła wrote his essay, and then was elected Pope; Father Styczeń never got his essay done. Wojtyła’s essay was finally published in 1982 as a small book, Człowiek w polu odpowiedzialności [Man in the field of moral responsibility] (Rome-Lublin: John Paul II Institute, 1991).]

  90.Karol Wojtyła, “The Person: Subject and Community,” in Wojtyła, Person and Community, p. 220. The notes to this essay include a complete list of the papers presented at the 1970 KUL conference, and some (uncharacteristically) sharp criticism of several critics by the author, one of whom, he suggests, has simply “misinterpreted the basic idea in The Acting Person” [note 5].

  91.Author’s interview with Jerzy Gałkowski, April 14, 1997.

  92.Author’s interview with Tadeusz Styczeń, SDS, April 14, 1997.

  93.Precise numbers of Protestants are unavailable because the Polish government did not maintain statistics on religious denominations. See Polska (Warsaw: State Learned Publishing House, 1974), p. 367.

  94.Author’s interview with Father Andrzej Bardecki, July 11, 1996.

  95.Author’s interview with Wojciech Giertych, OP, April 18, 1997.

  96.Author’s interview with Jerzy Janik, July 17, 1996.

  97.Author’s interview with Teresa Malecka, April 9, 1997.

  98.Author’s interview with Teresa Życzkowska, April 19, 1997. The letter just above was provided to the author by Teresa Heydel Życzkowska, November 9, 1998.

  99.Author’s interview with Jerzy Janik, July 17, 1996.

  100.Author’s interview with Stanisław Rybicki, July 17, 1997.

  101.See Blazynski, Pope John Paul II, p. 74.

  102.Author’s interview with Jacek Woźniakowski, April 11, 1997.

  103.Karol Wojtyła, “A Remembrance of Jerzy Ciesielski,” in Karol Wojtyła, I Miei Amici (Rome: CSEO Biblioteca, 1979), pp. 45–53. The cause for Jerzy Ciesielski’s beatification as a model Christian husband and father now lies before the Congregation for the Causes of Saints in Rome. In September 1998, Ciesielski’s ashes were reinterred in the Church of St. Anne in Kraków.

  104.See Taborski, “Introduction to Radiation of Fatherhood,” in Wojtyła, The Collected Plays, p. 323.

  105.Wojtyła, Radiation of Fatherhood, in ibid., p. 355.

  106.Ibid., p. 341.

  107.“Myśli o dojrzewaniu” [Thoughts on maturing], from Rozwazanie o śmierci [Meditation on death], in Wojtyła, Poezje i dramaty, pp. 91–92; translated by the author, Sister Emilia Ehrlich, OSU, and Marek Skwarnicki.

  108.“Nadzieja, któa sięga poza kres” [Hope reaching beyond the limit], from Rozwazanie o śmierci, in ibid.,p. 97; translated by the author, Sister Emilia Ehrlich, OSU, and Marek Skwarnicki.

  109.Boniecki, Kalendarium, “1964.”

  110.Ibid.

  111.Author’s interview with Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, February 14, 1997.

  112.Author’s interview with Cardinal Franz König, December 11, 1997.

  113.Wojtyła continued to wear a simple black cassock as cardinal, putting on his more elaborate vesture only for ceremonial occasions. After the ceremony in the Sistine Chapel, he told his secretary that he really wasn’t worried about having made a sartorial gaffe; “I watched all the other cardinals and two others had black socks.” [See Blazynski, Pope John Paul II, p. 71.]

  114.Boniecki, Kalendarium, “1967.”

  115.Ibid.

  116.During his eleven years as a cardinal, Wojtyła served on the Congregation for the Oriental Churches (1968–1973), the Congregation for the Clergy (1968–1978), the Congregation for the Sacraments and Divine Worship (1972–1978), and the Congregation for Catholic Education (1974–1978), and acted as a consultor to the Council on the Laity.

  117.Boniecki, Kalendarium, “1967.”

  118.Boniecki, Kalendarium, “1969.”

  119.Michael O’Carroll, Poland and John Paul II (Dublin: Veritas Publications, 1979), pp. 65–66.

  120.Cited in Jonathan Luxmoore and Jolanta Babiuch, “John Paul II and the ‘Praxis of the Cross,’” National Catholic Register, July 13–19, 1997, p. 6.

  121.The 1974 Synod was the first significant struggle within the Church’s world leadership over the theologies of liberation being developed in Latin America. Interestingly enough, it was the Latin Americans, representatives of a continent in which the Church had been long identified with political power of a conservative sort, who now argued for an evangelization linked to liberation movements of the left; the ideological focus had shifted, but the entanglement of the Church’s mission with political power continued. The claim that Wojtyła and others disagreed with this approach because their concept of evangelization was excessively otherworldly suggests a certain ignorance about the kind of cultural resistance in which Wojtyła was engaged in Poland: a form of activism tha
t oppressors took very seriously, but that preserved the integrity and unique mission of the Church. [For a view of the 1974 Synod favorable to the proponents of liberation theology, see Peter Hebblethwaite, Paul VI: The First Modern Pope (New York: Paulist Press, 1993), pp. 626–627.]

  122.Boniecki, Kalendarium, “1977.”

  123.For these meetings and Wojtyła’s election to the Synod Council see ibid.

  124.Author’s interview with Archbishop John Foley, December 12, 1996.

  125.Ibid.

  126.See ibid.

  127.Boniecki, Kalendarium, “1974” memorandum to the author from Dominik Duka, OP, March 21, 1998.

  128.Boniecki, Kalendarium, “1973.”

  129.Wojtyła, Sign of Contradiction, p. 6.

  130.Ibid., pp. 142–143.

  131.Author’s interview with Stanisław Rodziński, April 11, 1977.

  132.Letter to the author from Thomas Crooks, January 17, 1998.

  Wojtyła’s visit to Harvard certainly increased his exposure among Western intellectuals, but it hardly constituted his introduction to the world intellectual scene, as Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi suggest in His Holiness.

  133.Author’s interview with Zbigniew Brzeziński, February 7, 1997.

  134.Author’s interview with Archbishop John Foley, December 12, 1996.

  135.Author’s interview with Marek Skwarnicki, June 4, 1997.

  136.These remarks are cited on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, November 9, 1978, and attributed to Wojtyła’s “last speech in the U.S. in September 1976, as quoted in the New York City News (an interim strike newspaper).”

  137.Author’s conversation with Pope John Paul II, September 10, 1996.

  138.Davies, Volume II, p. 553.

  139.Cited in Blazynski, Pope John Paul II, p. 120; the citation is from an article of Wojtyła’s in the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, in February 1976.

  140.These examples are taken from Sikorski, Full Circle, pp. 39–41, 44, 145.

  141.See Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” in Havel et al., The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1985), pp. 23–96.

  142.Cited in de Lubac, At the Service of the Church, p. 172.

  143.Ibid.

  144.Author’s interview with Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, February 14, 1997.

  145.Author’s interview with Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, February 14, 1997; author’s interview with Andrzej Micewski, November 14, 1998.

  146.Author’s interview with Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, February 14, 1997.

  147.Author’s interview with Cardinal Luigi Poggi, September 19, 1997.

  148.As in fact it did. Author’s interview with Cardinal Miloslav Vlk, December 5, 1997.

  149.For more detail on the Ostpolitik, its historical background, and the situation in Czechoslovakia, see my book, The Final Revolution, pp. 59–76, 85–90, 96–102, 159–190.

  150.Wyszyński, for example, worried about the “credulity” of Casaroli in his first encounters with Poland’s communist leaders, according to the Primate’s official biographer. See Micewski, Cardinal Wyszyński, p. 278.

  151.I am indebted to Rocco Buttiglione for drawing this telling contrast, in an interview on January 21,1997.

  152.Author’s interview with Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, February 14, 1997.

  153.Ibid.

  154.I am indebted for this point to Jacek Woźniakowski, in our interview of April 11, 1997. Woźniakowski, an intellectual of impeccable credentials who was often on the other side of arguments with Wyszyński, nevertheless agreed with the Primate that too many Polish intellectuals had “behaved dreadfully” during the communist takeover of the universities in the late 1940s, by their acquiescence to the imposition of the regime’s ideology and the subsequent corruption of university life.

  155.Cardinal Franciszek Macharski, Wojtyła’s successor as archbishop of Kraków, observed once that his old friend and predecessor, a remarkably photogenic man, had only become so after his election as Pope, when he was not deliberately keeping himself in the background of great public events. The cardinal’s observation was borne out by a survey of the photographs in Franciszkańska, 3, where Wojtyła, in pictures in which the Primate is also present, looks very unphotogenic indeed.

  156.Author’s interview with Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, February 14, 1997.

  157.Ibid.

  158.See Blazynski, p. 91.

  159.This judgment was shared by Cardinal Casaroli, when I proposed it to him in our interview on February 14, 1997.

  Wojtyła’s friend, Dr. Stanisław Rybicki, who was working in the public water supply office in the mid-1970s, remembers a political-education lecturer saying, “We have to fight Wyszyński, but we’re not afraid of him. But we’re afraid of Wojtyła; who knows how to deal with him?” Rybicki’s wife, Danuta, had a similar experience in 1976. A lecturer from the Warsaw Institute of Marxism-Leninism came to the school in Kraków where Mrs. Rybicka was teaching to speak about “the battle against the Church and religion.” The lecturer made a striking concession that Danuta Rybicka remembered more than two decades later: “Sometimes we have to admit that we think in six-year plans and the Church thinks in millennia… but [in this instance] we want Wyszyński to live as long as possible because we don’t know how to deal with Wojtyła.” [Author’s interview with Stanisław and Danuta Rybicki, June 5, 1997.]

  160.Michnik’s 1977 book, The Church, the Left, and Dialogue (which could only be published in Paris), was a major break with the tradition of left-leaning intellectual anti-clericalism in Poland. See Adam Michnik, The Church and the Left, edited, translated, and with an introduction by David Ost (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

  161.Author’s interview with Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, February 14, 1997.

  162.During the 1978 Corpus Christi procession, for example, Wojtyła issued his sharpest challenge to the regime on the question of the Church’s public presence in society while being accompanied by Vatican negotiator Archbishop Luigi Poggi. See Boniecki, Kalendarium, “1978.”

  163.Author’s interview with Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, February 14, 1997.

  164.Author’s conversation with Pope John Paul II, December 11, 1996; author’s interview with Bishop Stanisław Ryłko, January 18, 1997.

  165.On “baffling unreality,” see Davies, Volume II, p. 625; the phrase “practical materialism” was used by Halina Bortnowska in her interview with the author on April 7, 1997.

  166.Cited in Oram, The People’s Pope, p. 113.

  167.Author’s interviews with Halina Bortnowska, April 7, 1997; Father Stanisław Małysiak, April 18, 1997; and Bishop Stanisław Smoleński, April 9, 1997.

  168.Author’s interview with Bishop Stanisław Ryłko, December 12, 1996.

  169.Author’s interview with Father Józef Tischner, April 23, 1997.

  CHAPTER 7

  A Pope from a Far Country: The Election of John Paul II

  1.Author’s interview with Stefan and Maria Swiezawski, April 7, 1997.

  Wojtyła’s lecture at the International Thomistic Congress, “The Personal Structure of Self-Determination,” may be found in Wojtyła, Person and Community, pp. 187–195.

  2.The “Holy Office,” charged with safeguarding the purity of doctrine, had long been premier among the departments of the Roman Curia. In the revised organization chart of Paul VI, it, too, was now subordinate to the Secretariat of State. Paul VI was, of course, a product of the Secretariat of State (in which he had served for thirty years) and his reform of the Curia certainly rationalized its functions according to a more modern style of management. But it was not without interest that the Curia was now led by an operational bureaucracy rather than by a theological agency.

  The revision of the Holy Office went beyond the issue of nomenclature to the question of function. As Pope Paul put it in his document on curial reform, “Since charity banishes fear, it seems more appropriate now to preserv
e the faith by means of an office for promoting doctrine. Although it will still correct errors and gently recall those in error to moral excellence, new emphasis is to be given to preaching the Gospel.”

  3.See Hebblethwaite, Paul VI, pp. 670–674, on Paul VI viewing Lefebvre as his greatest cross; the reporting is based on the Pope’s conversations with Jean Guitton.

  4.Boniecki, Kalendarium, “1964.”

  5.See the comment of Cardinal John Wright in National Catholic News Service, Nights of Sorrow, Days of Joy (Washington, D.C.: NC News Service, 1978), p. 36.

  6.Author’s interview with Cardinal Franz König, December 11, 1997. The suggestion that Paul VI was the “first modern pope” is certainly not true in terms of Montini’s intellectuality. He was the first pope to have read modern philosophy and theology seriously. But his own intellect was decidedly classical, as his constant references to Augustine illustrate. [See Hebblethwaite, Paul VI, p. 697.]

  7.Author’s interview with Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, February 14, 1997.

  8.Author’s interview with Cardinal William Baum, November 5, 1996.

  When one of his secretaries, Father John Magee, said that the aging pope, who had been lamenting the loneliness of having had virtually all his friends predecease him, could look forward to a grand reunion with them in heaven, Paul VI suddenly became serious and said, “Caro, we must never presume on the mercy of God, we have to pray for it. It is not certain that I will go to Paradise. I have to ask God’s forgiveness and mercy—and so do you. Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” [Hebblethwaite, in Paul VI, p. 695; the incident is taken from a memoir by Magee.]