by Tony Judt
What have our authors discovered that lay hidden before? According to their own claim, two things. First, a hitherto unknown alliance during the 1980s between Pope John Paul II and the Reagan administration, whose aim was to bring down Communism in Europe and prevent its appearance in Central America. Second, that the role of the pope in engineering the downfall of Communism in Europe was vastly more important than anyone had hitherto suspected. They also claim to have revealed for the first time the nature and extent of U.S. (covert) support for Solidarity after the imposition of martial law in Poland in December 1981, and to have shown that it was papal influence that shaped U.S. policy in other matters—notably the opposition of the Reagan and Bush administrations to international agencies that support and practice family planning.
Since the authors are cagey about some sources—“secret,” “confidential,” and “private” appear frequently in the rather unhelpful endnotes— and heavily dependent on interviews (over three hundred by their account), it is impossible to check or corroborate much of the information. 2 But it seems reasonable to believe them when they tell us that William Casey (director of the CIA) and Vernon Walters (“Presidential ambassador-at-large”) met regularly with the pope, briefing him on U.S. satellite information about Soviet troop movements and the like. It seems plausible to infer that the U.S. administration came to think of the Polish pope as a natural and powerful ally, treated him as such, and were in their turn favored by a pope whose objectives dovetailed well enough with those of the U.S. governments of the era—as they put it, “Wojtyła’s Church became the administration’s principal ideological ally in the struggle against the Sandinistas.” In the same way, the authors are probably right when they say that the minutes of the Soviet Politburo in the early eighties reveal a lot of nervousness over Poland and its friend in the Vatican. As the Polish Communists well knew, a change in the position of the Catholic Church, from compromise to resistance, could have a destabilizing impact on th e local regime and region.
Bernstein and Politi may therefore be said, giving them maximum credit, to have demonstrated convincingly the existence of mutual U.S.-Vatican interests and support as well as the fears aroused in Soviet circles by actual or anticipated papal initiatives.3 But they can hardly be said to have discovered things previously unknown. Thus the authors claim to have uncovered a “covert CIA operation, secretly authorized by Carter, to smuggle anti-Communist books and literature into Eastern Europe.” I am interested, though not surprised, to learn that these smuggling operations had CIA financial backing; but that books were being taken clandestinely into Communist countries during the decade prior to their liberation is old news, and not only to those of us who had a walk-on part in that drama. The same is true of American backing for Solidarity in its underground years; all that this book adds to our knowledge of that support is an estimate, based on confidential sources, of the amounts involved ($50 million) and the supposition that this support was part of a secret agreement with the Vatican. In neither case will this information come as a shock to contemporary observers, scholars, or other journalists.
It is thus absurd to describe as “essentially accurate” Richard Allen’s puerile and self-serving description of the Reagan-Vatican relationship as “one of the greatest secret alliances of all time.” It is a gross overstatement to suggest that the Vatican and Warsaw joined Moscow and Washington as the “essential coordinates” of the cold war. These and other hyperbolic claims reflect the authors’ own blinkered perspective, as well as their rather charitable attitude toward their sources, whose information is rarely questioned and whose motives pass uninvestigated. In any history of the last years of the cold war, or of the collapse and fall of the Soviet Union, the pope will obviously figure prominently, not least for the part played by Solidarity and the Polish opposition in the undermining of Communist credibility. In a similar vein, the story of the struggle for the soul of Latin America unavoidably entails consideration of the motives and interests of the Vatican at a time when those interests dovetailed with the overt and covert undertakings of conservative U.S. governments. But that is not the full story, and the incapacitating defect of this book is that it takes the part for the whole and believes that it has uncovered the hidden narrative of our time when it has in practice confirmed and fleshed out just one interesting chapter.
It is tempting to suppose that this might have been a better book had there been less Bernstein and more Politi. For Marco Politi is an expert on the Vatican, and it is the story of this pope and the hopes and disappointments surrounding him that offers a far more interesting clue to the history of our time than any number of energetic attempts to uncover secret alliances and hidden plots. The expectations aroused by the election of Cardinal Karol Wojtyła were unprecedented in modern times. In the Catholic Church he was regarded by some as a likely radical—open, imaginative, and young (just fifty-eight when elected pope in 1978), but already a veteran of Vatican II. Energetic, charismatic, and seemingly modern, this was the man who would complete the work of Popes John XXIII and Paul VI and who would lead the Church into a new era, a pastor rather than a Curial bureaucrat.
Many “liberation theologists” favored his election, and liberal cardinals and archbishops in South America and elsewhere campaigned for him. His conservative supporters took comfort in his reputation for unbending theological firmness and the moral and political absolutism deriving from his experience as a priest and prelate under Communism. This was a man who would not compromise with the Church’s enemies. Others still saw in him an “intellectual” pope, at ease in the company of scholars and himself well versed in at least some aspects of modern thought, notably the philosophy of Husserl. All supposed that at the very least they would have a pope of the center, modern enough to handle the Church’s new dilemmas, traditional enough to hold the line against too much innovation.
In some sense they were all wrong. Karol Wojtyła is not a man whose strong views cancel each other out or tend to equilibrium. He is, rather, a man of many extremes. He may have been the first non-Italian pope in half a millennium, but he was no outsider—perennially reelected to the Synodal Council of Bishops and a participant in Vatican II at the age of forty-two, he was a particular favorite of Paul VI and almost certainly that pope’s private choice to succeed him. Like Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the powerful head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith10 Wojtyła had been startled out of his early reforming enthusiasm by the radical aftershock of John XXIII’s reforms and was already an instinctive administrative as well as a doctrinal conservative at the time of his election. But his style belied his message.
From the outset, this was a pope devoted to Reconquista, to breaking with his predecessors’ Roman acquiescence in modernity, secularism, and compromise. His campaign of international appearances—complete with carefully staged performances in huge open arenas with oversized crucifixes and a paraphernalia of light, sound, and theatrical timing—was not undertaken without design. This was a Big pope, taking himself and his faith to the world; not the old, shrinking Western Catholic world of Italy, France, and Spain, but to Brazil, Mexico, the U.S., and the Philippines. There was something strikingly immodest about the ambitions of this new pope, visiting thirty-six countries in the first six years of his incumbency and openly proclaiming his goal, as the authors of this book rightly put it, of shaking “the Church out of its inferiority complex vis-à-vis the world.” Intuitively grasping a central feature of Catholicism’s popular appeal, John Paul II beatified and sanctified as no modern pope had done before him, virtually recasting the history of his Church in a hagiographic and martyrological vein.
The initial appeal of this energetic, messianic papal style was not confined to the non-European world. In Central Europe, too, the first Polish pontiff was no less adept at fulfilling his admirers’ expectations. Breaking with the “Ostpolitik” of his predecessors, he visited Poland in the year following his elevation to the papacy, attracting huge gatherings
of the faithful and the admiring and definitively throwing in the Church’s lot with the forces for change that would soon thereafter coalesce into the Solidarity movement. He also discouraged Catholics everywhere in Central and Eastern Europe from negotiating, compromising, or debating with Marxism, and thereby offered his Church not merely as a silent sanctuary but as an alternative pole of moral and social authority, a crucial if temporary ally for the political opposition in Communist lands.
The same charismatic self-confidence that was used to such public effect in the Philippines or Central America thus became a political weapon in Communist Europe, neutralizing the efforts of “reforming” Communist leaders to negotiate civic compromises with the newly emboldened local spiritual leadership. In the decade following his first visit to Poland, there can be no question but that John Paul II played a central part in the reduction and defeat of Soviet domination in Central and Eastern Europe. It was only after the initial wave of enthusiasm in Asia and the Americas had subsided, and Communism in Europe had been overthrown, that the contradictions of the new papacy began to emerge.
These can perhaps be seen most clearly in his misleading reputation as a “pope of ideas.” From his early days as Archbishop of Kraków (a position to which he was appointed in 1958), Wojtyła had evinced a taste for intellectual companionship, inviting theologians and other scholars for frequent discussions and showing a disarming capacity to listen to views very different from his own. During his papacy he has been the host of a regular series of “conversations” at his summer residence in Castelgandolfo, where sociologists, philosophers, and historians have been invited to discuss problems of the modern world in the papal presence. The participants tend to be predominantly Polish or German, with a generous sprinkling of North Americans, but they have included some of the best-known names among contemporary scholars—Leszek Kołakowski, Edward Shils, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Ernest Gellner, Ralf Dahrendorf, Charles Taylor, Bernard Lewis, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, and Paul Ricoeur, among others. Topics for discussion have included “Europe and Civil Society,” “On Crisis,” “Europe and its Offspring,” “Man in the Modern Sciences,” “Liberal Society,” and so forth.4
To judge from the most recent of these conversations—on “The Enlightenment Today,” held at Castelgandolfo in August—intellectual exchange with the pope is not the main object of the encounter. The pontiff listens for three days to a series of papers of varying quality. He takes no direct part in the ensuing discussion, but “summarizes” the proceedings at their completion. His summary is not so much a contribution to the subject as an occasion for accommodating the broader theme of the meeting to his own concerns. It is not clear how it could be otherwise. This is a man whose central contention about the modern world, as expounded in his many writings, is that it has undertaken for three hundred years a war against God and Christian values, a conflict in which he has now sought to engage himself and his Church to the full. The dilemmas and paradoxes of Liberalism, Enlightenment, Science, and secular philosophical speculation interest most of his guests at these meetings for their own sake. For the pope, however, while discussion of such matters may variously inform, depress, or even on occasion divert him, they serve above all to confirm what he already knows and believes.5
As a committed Thomist the pope derives his understanding of basic moral truths from his Faith.6 The labors of Reason need to be heard and understood, but they have their place and must be kept in it. Bernstein and Politi are wrong to suppose that when he invoked words like “alienation” to describe the condition of working people, Wojtyła was, as they put it, “using Marxist language.” The papal vocabulary of moral interrogation and condemnation has its own sources, and if modern social theories have adopted or adapted similar language this does not suggest that they mean the same thing, much less that a conversation is taking place. If we are to understand this pope and his practices we must first take him seriously on his own terms. His notions of absolute truth, of the unacceptability of “relativism”—whether in values or explanations of behavior, of good and evil, right and wrong—are founded upon the rock of Catholic fundamentalism, and it is upon that rock that the waves of ecumenicalism, “liberation theology,” and modernization of Church liturgy, government, and practice have crashed in angry disappointment.
Karol Wojtyła is Polish. His Christian vision is not only rooted in the peculiarly messianic style of Polish Catholicism, but Poland itself is for him part of that Christian story.7 He sees (or saw) in Poland not only the embattled eastern frontier of the True Faith, but also a land and a people chosen to serve as the example and sword of the Church in the struggle against Western materialism—the authors of this book quote a wartime colleague of Wojtyła who recalls him announcing that Poland’s sufferings, like those of ancient Israel, were the price of its failure to realize its own ideal, to bear witness for Christ. This outlook, and his decades-long isolation from Western theological and political currents, probably accountfor his insensitive tendency to baptize anything and everything into a very particular Polish-Christian vision—witness his initial enthusiastic support for the projected Carmelite convent at Auschwitz, later withdrawn in the face of international protest. His thoughtless description of Poland under martial law as a “vast concentration camp” reflects a similar limitation.8
His Polish origins and his tragic early life also help to explain a marked inclination to Mariolatry—which in turn offers an indirect clue to his obsession with marriage and abortion. Karol Wojtyła lost his mother when he was eight (he would lose his only sibling, his older brother Edmund, three years later; his last surviving close relative, his father, died during the war when Wojtyła was nineteen). Following his mother’s death he was taken by his father to the Marian sanctuary at Kalwaria Zebrzydowska and made frequent pilgrimages there in following years—Zebrzydowska, like Częstochowa, is an important center of the cult of the Virgin Mary in modern Poland. By the age of fifteen he was already the president of the Marian sodality in Wadowice, his home-town. He has always placed great store in apparitions of the Virgin and has visited sites all over the globe—in Guadeloupe (the Black Madonna), Argentina (Virgin of the Apparition), the Philippines (Virgin of Perpetual Help), Lourdes, and elsewhere. He has brought to the Vatican statues, icons, and depictions of Mary from all over the world. That Mehmet Ali Ağca should have shot (but failed to kill) him in Rome on May 13, 1981, merely confirmed his commitment—May 13 being the date of the Virgin Mary’s reported appearance in Fátima (Portugal) in 1917. The pope’s response was to have the bullet that was removed from his body installed in a golden crown and placed on the head of the Shrine of Our Lady of the Rosary at Fátima.9
This devotion to Marian symbols makes many Western Catholics, and not only among the laity, distinctly uneasy, and has generated resentment at pope John Paul II’s imposition of a Polish partiality upon the universal Church. His mysticism, while also marked, is less characteristically Polish and has occasioned less debate. For all his bulk and energy and charisma, this is not a worldly pope. Wojtyła wrote his thesis on Saint John of the Cross, the sixteenth-century Spanish contemplative, and shares many of his subject’s propensities—a taste for deep meditation,an unconcern verging on contempt for the things of this world, and an attraction to the “dark night of the soul,” in which some hear a laudable call to Catholic soul-searching but which others find morbid. Wojtyła at first wished to become a monk (he was discouraged by his priest), and his longtime lack of interest in political resistance, whether against Nazis or Communists, reflects a remoteness that is echoed today in his utter unconcern with the widespread offense given by his moral pronouncements.
The combination of the Pole and the mystic in this pope may help explain why he has taken so aggressive a stand against “Western materialism and individualism,” and thus against much of contemporary capitalism. It is of course the business of the Catholic Church to inveigh against material idols and the sin of pride. But Karol Wojtyła has gone much furt
her. In his 1975 Lenten Exercises at the Vatican, three years before becoming pope, he explicitly announced that of the two threats to the Church, consumerism and persecution, the former was by far the greater danger and thus the worse enemy. Indeed, his criticisms of Marxism, both as a system of thought and as a political practice, derive from his broader condemnation of the worship of material progress, capitalist profit, and secular self-indulgence. Like Václav Havel and other opponents of Communism during the seventies and eighties, he believes that it is modernity, and the modern faithless West, that have been the source of our present crisis. Communism and its attendant evils, including environmental pollution, are but a secondary symptom and were anyway exported east from their Western sources.
It should be said that one consequence of this way of thinking is that pope John Paul II, like Havel, has an instinctive grasp of some of our current dilemmas—and he is, after all, as the authors of this book conclude, the only surviving international spokesman for some sort of system of universal values. There is much agreement today that we lack not only a broadly acknowledged moral compass but also any vision of the public space in which shared ideas of good and bad might have an effect. Lacking a common “community of destiny,” so to speak, we are all too frequently tempted to fall back on communities of origin, the besetting sin of nationalism and “multiculturalism” alike. But the pope, characteristically, goes further. His own origins and trajectory have affordedhim virtually no experience of life in a democracy, and he is given to conflating “soulless capitalism” with “selfish liberalism” in ways that suggest that he is insensitive to the complexities and costs of open societies. In his last years he has given way to the temptation to believe the worst of what he hears of post-Communist societies (Poland in particular)—hence the newly authoritarian note in his pronouncements, where attacks on selfish hedonism have merged with a dislike of freedom in many other forms as well.