Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  9.Henri de Lubac thought of Paul VI when visiting the tomb of Hadrian VI, the Dutchman who was the last non-Italian pope before Karol Wojtyła; the inscription on the tomb reads Proh dolor! Quantum refert in quae tempora vel optimi cujusque virtus incidat!, which the French Jesuit translated, “Alas! What a huge difference it makes when a man of consummate virtue happens to live at the wrong time!” [de Lubac, At the Service of the Church, p. 159.]

  10.See “The Crisis of Pope Paul VI,” Catholic World Report, July 1998, pp. 58–60. In this interview, Father Walter Abbott, SJ, who worked in the Curia under Paul VI, suggests that, by 1973, the Pope was close to an emotional breakdown over dissent in the Church.

  11.See Hans Urs von Balthasar, Tragedy Under Grace: Reinhold Schneider on the Experience of the West (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997), p. 244.

  12.Author’s interview with Cardinal Franz König, December 11, 1997. On the night before his election in 1963, Montini had told König that he would refuse election because he was in “complete darkness” and didn’t know what he would do as pope. [Ibid.]

  13.See the memorial address to Paul VI on the centenary of his birth by Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, L’Osservatore Romano, November 24–25, 1997, pp. 6, 8.

  14.Ibid.

  15.That capacity for engaging modernity with both conviction and compassion was well-displayed on March 18, 1977, when Wojtyła delivered a philosophical lecture on “The Problem of the Constitution of Culture Through Human Praxis” at Sacred Heart University in Milan. The category “praxis” was, of course, central to Marxist theory; and Wojtyła, too, understood human action as “the most direct route to understanding the humanum in its deepest plenitude, richness, and authenticity.” But any theory of human action that thought of “the modification of the world as the sole purpose” of human effort was dangerous because it reduced the human being to “an epiphenomenon, a product.” Marxism thus did to human beings precisely what Marx accused capitalism of doing: reducing the person to a commodity. The answer to this, Wojtyła argued, was to reclaim the transcendence implied in human action, such that through the cultures that our action creates, people “become more human, and not merely acquire more means.” See Wojtyła, Person and Community, pp. 263–275.

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

  17.See Nights of Sorrow, Days of Joy, p. 36.

  18.Another ritual, less ceremonial and certainly less edifying, was also observed. The Pope’s longtime secretary, Monsignor Pasquale Macchi, was ejected from the Vatican and found himself living in a Roman guest house the day after Paul VI died.

  19.Details here are taken from Nights of Sorrow, Days of Joy.

  20.The text of the letter is in Boniecki, Kalendarium, “1978.” Father Szostek, who got his degree, told me that Wojtyła was the only one of the three readers to whom he had sent his dissertation, on the possibility of universal moral norms, who had read the whole thing. [Author’s interview with Andrzej Szostek, MIC, April 14, 1997.]

  21.Boniecki, Kalendarium, “1978.”

  22.Author’s interviews with Cardinal William Baum, November 5, 1996; Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, September 12, 1996; Cardinal Francis Arinze, November 9, 1996; Cardinal Franz König, December 11, 1997; and Cardinal Bernardin Gantin, December 13, 1997.

  23.Joseph Ratzinger, “On the Status of Church and Theology Today,” in Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, p. 370.

  24.Ibid., p. 377.

  25.Author’s interview with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, September 12, 1996.

  26.On the “foolishness of truth,” see Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, p. 393. Wojtyła and “truth” as the center of the Gospel: author’s interview with Tadeusz Styczeń, SDS, April 14, 1997.

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

  28.The geographic breakdown of the conclave was as follows: Europe, fifty-six (including twenty-seven Italians); Latin America, nineteen; Asia and Oceania, thirteen; Africa, twelve; North America, eleven. The youngest electors were Cardinal Jaime Sin, the archbishop of Manila, who would turn fifty on October 31; Cardinal Antonio Ribeiro of Lisbon, who had just turned fifty in May; and Cardinals Joseph Ratzinger of Munich-Freising and William Baum of Washington, who were both fifty-one. The oldest electors were Cardinal František Tomášek of Prague, who was seventy-nine, and Cardinal Joseph Trin-Nhue-Khuê of Hanoi, who was seventy-eight. Three cardinals could not participate in the conclave because of illness: Bolesław Filipiak of Poland, Valerian Gracias of India, and John Wright of the United States.

  29.Author’s interview with Bishop Stanisław Ryłko, February 21, 1997.

  30.Cardinal Luciani was better known in Latin America than in North America or even in parts of Western Europe, thanks to a visit he had made to Brazil in 1976. His host on that occasion, Cardinal Aloisio Lorscheider, OFM, may have played a significant role in attracting Latin American votes to the Luciani candidacy. One observer also speculates that Cardinal Confalonieri, while not present in the conclave itself, had been influential in building support for Luciani during the interregnum, when he presided over the daily meetings of the College of Cardinals. [See Peter Hebblethwaite, The Year of Three Popes (Cleveland: Collins, 1979).]

  31.“I announce to you a great joy: we have a Pope—the Most Eminent and Reverend Lord, Albino Luciani, Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church, who has taken the name John Paul the First.”

  The College of Cardinals is divided into three “orders.” The majority of the College is composed of “Cardinal Priests,” residential bishops around the world who become titular pastors of Roman parishes. Cardinals resident in Rome as heads of Vatican offices are styled “Cardinal Deacons” and are also given titular Roman pastorates, frequently of ancient centers at which the early Church dispensed charity, the responsibility of deacons. A small group of six cardinals, including the Cardinal Secretary of State and others whom the Pope particularly wishes to honor, are named “Cardinal Bishops” and are the titular heads of six “suburbican” dioceses in the vicinity of Rome. Since John XXIII, all cardinals are bishops (unless they have been dispensed from this requirement by the Pope, as some elderly theologians honored by John Paul II by being named to the College after their eightieth birthdays have been); the fact that the College is divided into these three “orders” has historical and honorific significance, but is of no serious practical import.

  32.Albino Luciani, Illustrissimi: Letters from Pope John Paul I (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978).

  33.See Nights of Sorrow, Days of Joy, p. 83; cited in ibid., p. 87.

  34.Cited in ibid., pp. 92, 95.

  35.For details of the illness of John Paul I and a persuasive refutation of the charge that he was assassinated by conspirators (variously alleged to have been Freemasons, the Mafia, the KGB, the CIA, his Vatican colleagues, or some combination thereof), see John Cornwell, A Thief in the Night: The Mysterious Death of John Paul I (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989).

  36.In an interview on RAI-TV in Italy on September 27, 1998, Bishop John Magee, who in 1978 was one of John Paul I’s secretaries, confirmed that it had been one of the household sisters who had found the Pope dead. Cardinal Jean Villot, thinking it unseemly that a dead Pope should be found by a nun, told the press that it had been Magee who had discovered that the Pope had died. Villot was also the source of the unsubstantiated story that the Pope had died while reading The Imitation of Christ, a classic of Catholic piety. Conspiracy theorists have made much of these inaccuracies. The truth is that Villot was reacting to an unprecedented crisis according to what Curialists call “the way we do things here.” His rearrangements of the facts were not meant to hide wicked or illegal behavior—there was none—but to protect an image he, and many other curial officials, thought essential to the papacy.

  37.Author’s interviews with Gabriel and Bozena Turowski, June 10, 1997; and Stanisław and Danuta Rybicki, April 19 and June 5, 1997.

  38.Boniecki, Kalendarium, “1978.”


  39.Ibid.; author’s interview with Father Stanisław Małysiak, April 18, 1997.

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

  41.Graham in Kraków: see Martin, William, A Prophet with Honor (New York: William Morrow, 1991), p.490. Wojtyła in Warsaw en route to Rome: author’s interview with Sister Zofia Zdybicka, April 14, 1997.

  42.Luigi Accattoli is mistaken in claiming that John Paul II has continued to write poetry as Pope. Asked in 1995 whether he still wrote poems occasionally, the Pope told his spokesman, Joaquín Navarro-Valls, “No, this is a closed chapter in my life.” John Paul II confirmed that “Stanisław” was his last poem in several conversations with the author. [See Luigi Accattoli, Karol Wojtyła: L’uomo di fine millennio (Milan: San Paolo, 1998), p. 159.]

  43.Author’s conversation with Pope John Paul II, March 20, 1997.

  44.“Stanisław,” in Wojtyła, Poezje i dramaty, pp. 103–106; translated by the author, Sister Emilia Ehrlich, OSU, and Marek Swkarnicki.

  Pope John Paul II dedicated this poem to his successor, Cardinal Franciszek Macharski, on appointing him archbishop of Kraków on December 29, 1978, and gave Macharski the autograph copy. [Author’s conversation with Pope John Paul II, October 23, 1998.]

  45.Author’s interview with Bishop Stanisław Ryłko, March 20, 1997.

  46.Conclave I in 1978, by contrast, had opened on the last date possible.

  47.Author’s interview with Marek Skwarnicki, April 19 and June 4, 1997. Skwarnicki’s complete account of this encounter may be found in his book, Podróze po Kościela, 2d ed. (Paris: Editions du Dialogie, 1990), pp. 234–235.

  48.Boniecki, Kalendarium, “1978.”

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

  50.John Paul II, Gift and Mystery, p. 59.

  51.Author’s interview with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, September 12, 1996.

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

  53.Author’s interview with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, September 12, 1996.

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

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

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

  57.Author’s interview with Father Stanisław Małysiak, April 18, 1997. According to Father Małysiak, Pope John Paul II mentioned this comment to a group of Poles with whom he was dining shortly after Conclave II.

  In his April 8, 1994, homily at a Mass marking the completion of the restoration of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes, John Paul II recalled that Cardinal Wyszyński had said to him, in that same chapel during Conclave II, “If they elect you, I beg you not to refuse.” [See L’Osservatore Romano/English Weekly Edition (hereinafter OR [EWE]), April 13, 1994, p. 9.] The two renderings, of course, are not incompatible; the Primate may have said both.

  58.Cited in Hebblethwaite, The Year of Three Popes, p. 156.

  59.Jerzy Turowicz, “Habemus Papam,” in The Shepherd for All People, ed. Bolesław Wierzbianski, translated by Alexander P. Jordan (New York: Bicentennial Publishing Commission, 1993. The citation is from Turowicz’s first report on the conclave to Tygodnik Powszechny.

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

  61.Villot’s sermon “for the election of the Pope” was given on October 14, 1978, just before the cardinals were sealed into the conclave. [See OR (EWE), October 19, 1978, p. 1.]

  62.John Paul II recalled the words by which he accepted his election in his homily at the Mass celebrating his twentieth anniversary as Pope: see OR [EWE], October 21, 1998, p. 1.

  63.See Szulc, Pope John Paul II, p. 281.

  64.The original text may be found in Insegnamanti di Giovanni Paolo II, 1978. The details of the announcement of Wojtyła election are taken from the author’s interviews with Cardinal Franz König, December 11, 1997; Sister Emilia Ehrlich, February 21, 1997; Monsignor Edward Buelt, January 14, 1997; and Jerzy Turowicz, July 19, 1996. See also Turowicz, “Habemus Papam,” pp. 3–4.

  65.Author’s interview with Father Stanisław Małysiak, April 18, 1997.

  66.Author’s interview with Stanisław and Danuta Rybicki, June 5, 1997.

  67.Author’s interview with Teresa Życzkowska, April 19, 1997.

  68.Author’s interview with Jerzy Gałkowski, April 14, 1997. Five days after the election, the “liberal” communist journal, Polityka, opined that the new Pope came from a country “which is building a socialist system… on the basis of cooperation between Catholics and Marxists” and saw the election as “a special example of a creative and fruitful co-existence between non-believers and Catholics.” [Cited in Karolak, John Paul II, p. 146.]

  69.Author’s interview with Maria Swiezawska, April 7, 1997.

  70.See Oram, The People’s Pope, p. 182.

  71.Karolak, John Paul II, pp. 133–134.

  72.Author’s interview with Father Kazimierz Suder, July 14, 1997. Father Zacher’s insert reads, “Elected Supreme Pontiff on 16 October 1978 and took the name John Paul II.”

  73.Author’s interview with Cardinal Miloslav Vlk, December 5, 1997.

  74.Author’s interview with Cardinal Francis Arinze, November 9, 1996.

  75.Frossard and John Paul II, “Be Not Afraid!,” p. 8.

  CHAPTER 8

  “Be Not Afraid!”: A Pope for the World

  1.Details of the inauguration are taken from Nights of Sorrow, Days of Joy. An English translation of the inaugural homily may be found in Origins 8:20 (November 2, 1978). The original is in Insegnamenti di Giovanni Paolo II, 1978. I have modified the NC News Service translation for greater accuracy.

  The phrase “Open the doors to Christ!” is another echo of St. Louis de Montfort, Karol Wojtyła’s mentor in Marian piety, whose work he first read on the night shift at the Solvay chemical plant during World War II; see Benedetta Parasogli, Montfort: A Prophet for Our Time (Rome: Edizioni Montfortane, 1991).

  2.The analysis is from Hans Urs von Balthasar; see “Rome—The Ministry: The Office,” in Tragedy Under Grace, pp. 206–220; the quotes are from this text.

  3.Cited in Patrick Granfield, The Limitations of the Papacy: Authority and Autonomy in the Church (New York: Crossroad, 1987), pp. 62–63.

  4.On the distinction between the “authoritarian” and the “authoritative,” see Neuhaus, The Catholic Moment, pp. 126–130.

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

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

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

  8.Author’s interview with Joaquín Navarro-Valls, December 18, 1997.

  9.Author’s conversation with Pope John Paul II, March 20, 1997.

  10.Quoted in Hebblethwaite, The Year of Three Popes, p. 195.

  11.Jacques Martin, Heraldry in the Vatican (Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire: Van Duren, 1987), p. 258. John Paul II did agree to lighten the blue field on his arms and to change the color of the cross from black to gold. The Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, reflecting the curial, rather than papal, view of this symbolic contest of wills, noted that the design “does not conform to the customary heraldic model.” [OR (EWE), November 23, 1978, p. 4.]

  12.Cited in Andrew M. Greeley, The Making of the Popes 1978: The Politics of Intrigue in the Vatican (Kansas City: Andrews and McMeel), pp. 230–231.

  13.At the end of this itinerant press conference, a former staff member of the L’Osservatore Romano, Lamberto De Camillis, who was blind because of diabetes, was introduced to the Pope and said, “Your Holiness, I offer you my blindness so that you may see the needs of humanity.” The Pope embraced him. [OR (EWE), November 2, 1978, pp. 4, 8.]

  14.Author’s interview with Joaquín Navarro-Valls, December 18, 1997.

  15.Every Sunday, when the Pope is in Rome, Deskur (confined to a wheelchair)
has lunch with John Paul II, who always visits his old friend for lunch on his name-day, November 30. [Author’s interview with Bishop Stanisław Ryłko, January 18, 1997.]

  16.John Paul II, “Urbi et Orbi Message,” OR [EWE], October 26, 1978, pp. 3–4. This is one of the last discourses of John Paul II to be published with the Pope’s voice speaking in the traditional papal “we.” Evidently, the word went out from the papal apartment that this practice was now banished—another declaration of independence by the neophyte Pope.

  17.John Paul II, “To the Cardinals,” OR [EWE], October 26, 1978, p. 5.

  18.John Paul II, “Il servizio della Chiesa all’umanità,” Insegnamenti di Giovanni Paolo II, 1978.

  19.The telegram of congratulations from party leader Edward Gierek, Polish President Henryk Jabłoński, and Prime Minister Piotr Jaroszewicz was a classic example of late-communist rhetorical style:

  For the first time in ages, a son of the Polish nation—which is building the greatness and prosperity in its Socialist motherland in the unity and collaboration of all its citizens—sits in the papal throne…

  [the son] of a nation known throughout the world for its special love [for] peace and for its warmest attachment to the cooperation and friendship of all peoples… a nation which has made universally recognized contributions to human culture… We express our conviction that these great causes will be served by the further development of relations between the Polish People’s Republic and the Apostolic Capital. [Cited in Szulc, Pope John Paul II, p. 287.]

  20.Cited in Bernstein and Politi, His Holiness, p. 186.

  21.On denial of passports, see Christopher Bobinski, “Polish prospects,” The Tablet 232:7217 (November 4, 1978), p. 1060. The subornation of petty espionage was related to me by a close friend of Wojtyła’s.