Wyszyński threw down the gauntlet in a historic sermon at Warsaw’s St. John’s Cathedral: “We teach that it is proper to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God that which is God’s. But when Caesar sits himself on the altar, we respond curtly: he may not.” The Polish bishops then met in Kraków under Wyszyński’s chairmanship and told the Polish communist Caesar that “he may not” in no uncertain terms: the peace of Poland, the bishops declared, depended solely on “the government’s forsaking its radical, destructive hatred towards Catholicism, and abandoning its aim of subjugating the Church and turning it into an instrument of the State … We are not allowed to place the things of God on the altar of Caesar. Non possumus! [We cannot!]”27 The communist government charged the bishops with treason or, in the communist euphemism, “an attack on the constitution.” On the night of September 25–26, 1953, Cardinal Wyszyński was arrested and began three years of internment, first in a former monastery in the northwest of the country, later in a convent in the south. By the end of the year, eight bishops and 900 priests were in prison for the faith. Their numbers would increase to 2,000 over the next two years, while theological faculties were closed, parents threatened, religious education stopped in the schools, and onerous taxes laid on the Church.28
CREATING ZONES OF FREEDOM
On his return from Rome in the summer of 1948, Father Karol Wojtyła was assigned by Cardinal Sapieha to the Church of the Assumption of Our Lady in Niegowić, which was then a rural village in the Carpathian foothills, some fifteen miles east of Kraków. The young curate’s primary responsibilities involved the religious education of the local children, who were spread over five villages, which he visited regularly by horse cart. Back at the Church of the Assumption, the young curate spent hours in the confessional and began a lifelong immersion in youth ministry, starting a theatrical group and a Living Rosary circle; both activities gave him expanded opportunities for forming young souls, who were being regularly exposed to communist propaganda, even in a relative backwater like Niegowić. Told by one of his youngsters that communist ferrets had been seeking information on the parish youth ministry, Wojtyła brushed the young man’s concerns aside with the reassurance that “they’ll finish themselves off.” Showing early that he was a man of no small ambitions, at least where the life of the Church was concerned, Father Wojtyła convinced the parishioners to build a new brick church in honor of their pastor’s golden jubilee of ordination.29
Cardinal Sapieha did not intend that his most promising young priest should spend much time in a rural ministry, however, and after eight months in Niegowić, Wojtyła was transferred to a much different assignment: curate at St. Florian’s parish near the Kraków Old Town, a center of the city’s Catholic intellectual and cultural life. There, Wojtyła was to initiate a new student chaplaincy for the young men and women attending the Kraków Polytechnic and the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts, both of which were within a good stone’s throw of St. Florian’s.
Wojtyła did so, and in the process defined a new style of ministry to university students. He taught his young charges Gregorian chant and gave them missals so that they could participate actively in the Mass—a radical innovation in the early 1950s. He organized off-campus seminars where students could read Thomas Aquinas and the other greats of Catholic intellectual life as an antidote to the Marxist intellectual rubbish to which they were subjected at school. He used the drama as a means of catechesis at St. Florian’s, where he also launched the first marriage-preparation program in the history of the archdiocese. He led retreats and days of recollection for students, often timed to help them prepare for their exams. And in another startling innovation for the time—one that challenged both traditional Polish clerical culture and the communist regime’s restrictions on youth ministry by priests—he traveled with groups of young men and women, sharing their enthusiasm for hiking, skiing, and kayaking in the brilliant Polish countryside, beyond the dour, gray, soot-filled environs of the city.
Young people were attracted to Father Karol Wojtyła for many reasons: his intelligence, his friendliness, his human sympathy—his “permanent openness,” as one member of the network that came to call itself Środowisko put it: “While he was among us, we felt that everything was all right.… We felt that we could discuss any problem with him; we could talk about absolutely anything.” Those conversations were serious, sometimes funny, and often pointed. Wojtyła, who was already a master of the art of listening, would pose sharp questions; but, at the end, he would always tell his young friends, both in campfire conversation and in the confessional, “You must decide.” As these young people moved from their undergraduate studies into graduate work, they occasionally ran into political difficulties and conundra; rather than arguing grand political theory, Wojtyła and his students would discuss the quotidian moral challenges of life in the communist culture of the lie. Yet Środowisko was not the kind of “conspiracy” feared by Poland’s communist masters—it was something far more dangerous. Father Karol Wojtyła’s sharp mind, spiritual depth, openness to others, and insistence on personal moral responsibility—“You must decide”—created zones of freedom in which the students who became his friends could forge their own decisions to live as serious Christians. And that meant, de facto, to live in opposition to the alternative construction of society and the alternative idea of human goods being relentlessly promoted by communist propaganda.30
At the same time as the first threads of the rich tapestry of Środowisko were being woven, Father Wojtyła was taking his initial steps as a public personality: preaching intellectually demanding sermons at St. Florian’s, meeting regularly for discussion of religion and science with a group of young physicists, getting to know the habitues of some of Kraków’s Catholic intellectual salons, and contributing essays to Poland’s most important newspaper, Tygodnik Powszechny—the Kraków-based weekly to which serious Poles turned for truth amidst Stalinist lies. Poland’s communist regime denied posts in state-run universities to rising young Catholic scholars; Tygodnik Powszechny eagerly hired such academic exiles for its staff. The young writers, in turn, were guided by the firm, competent hand of editor Jerzy Turowicz, who quickly recognized in Karol Wojtyła a rare clerical talent—an essayist, poet, and playwright who could speak effectively outside the sanctuary and the pulpit.
From the perspective of Wojtyła’s early wrestling with the challenge of communism, perhaps the most intriguing of his literary works during his first years as a priest was the play Our God’s Brother, which he completed in 1950. Its main character is the Polish artist-turned-monk Adam Chmielowski, who left the world of avant-garde painting to become an advocate for the poor and the founder of a small religious community. A partisan in the 1863 Polish insurrection against czarist rule, Chmielowski lost a leg in battle and, after recovering, moved to Munich and Paris, where he established a reputation as a serious modernist painter. Returning to Poland, he grew increasingly dissatisfied with the artist’s life and increasingly angry at the municipality of Kraków’s neglect of the downtrodden and homeless. Adopting a sackcloth habit and styling himself “Brother Albert,” Chmielowski began a personal ministry to the poor that eventually grew into two religious communities, the Albertine Brothers and the Albertine Sisters. His funeral, in 1916, was attended by thousands of people from every stratum of Cracovian society.
Wojtyła had become intrigued by the figure of Brother Albert while he was a student, and used Chmielowski’s vocational struggles as the dramatic device for working out his own thinking about the challenge of Marxist theory and practice. In the play, the Chmielowski character, “Adam,” debates the cause of the poor with a character called “the Stranger”—“crypto-Lenin,” as the playwright himself once called him, for Wojtyła had adopted, for his dramatic purposes, the local legend that Chmielowski had met Lenin in Zakopane, in the south of Poland, during the latter’s pre–World War I exile from Russia. Wojtyła’s dramatic art was subtle: the Stranger/crypto-Le
nin is not an unattractive character, and he debates Adam/Chmielowski over both strategy and tactics—which is the more effective program for the poor: the work of Christian charity and social reform or the work of revolutionary violence? Yet where Adam sees real human beings, the Stranger can see only categories: the impossible lumpenproletariat, workers ripe for revolution, and so forth. At an even deeper level, Our God’s Brother explores the meaning of freedom. Adam, fully aware of the injustices in the social order, nonetheless comes to believe that the only true freedom is the Christian freedom that passes through the redemptive suffering of the cross, transforming evil into good and liberating men and women for genuine social transformation. Politics, by itself, could not liberate. Converted hearts and minds, giving birth to a truly humanistic culture, would eventually transform politics in a more humane direction.31
PRESSURES INCREASE, AND PLANS CHANGE
The political masters of the moment were not unaware of this dynamic young priest with a penchant for attracting students, intellectuals, artists, scientists, and young professionals. In 1948, Wojtyła’s connections to the Rhapsodic Theater were noted in secret police records, as was his friendship with Tadeusz Kudliński, a fellow actor who had once tried to talk Lolek out of entering the underground seminary and who had been arrested because of his membership in UNIA (from which Wojtyła had had to resign on entering the seminary).32 A November 1949 report from ZAGIELOWSKI, a secret police informer who was a Cracovian priest, noted that, in the Kraków archdiocesan headquarters, “Wojdyła” (as he misspelled the name) was regarded with esteem as a comer, a man to watch.
The Polish communist authorities were intensely interested in the goings-on in the Kraków curia for several reasons. They feared that Cardinal Sapieha had documentation that identified the Soviet NKVD as the perpetrators of the Katyń Forest massacres (which the Soviets insisted for decades was the work of the Nazis). They knew that Sapieha was doing everything he could to maintain the rudiments of civil society, by creating, for example, a Catholic charitable organization, Caritas Poland, which the communists had subsequently shut down. And they wanted any information they could get on who might succeed the aging cardinal.
Sapieha had no immediate successor as archbishop—at least formally. The cardinal died on July 23, 1951. According to the 1950 agreement Primate Wyszyński had hammered out, when a bishop died, the Polish Church (which, in practice, meant Wyszyński) would consult with Rome and then propose a name to the government to fill the vacancy; the government could veto a candidate but could not impose its own substitute. On the death of Cardinal Sapieha, the Church proposed that his successor be Archbishop Eugeniusz Baziak, the Latin-rite archbishop of L’viv in Ukraine, who had lived in Kraków since he had been expelled from Ukraine by the Soviets. The Polish government would not accept Baziak (who would have been anathema in Moscow because of his post in Ukraine); the Church would not back down; so, technically, the archbishopric of Kraków remained empty for the next twelve years, although the Church in Kraków considered Baziak its archbishop, as did the Church throughout Poland.
Eugeniusz Baziak was a reserved, formal man who took the view that his task, at the apogee of Stalin-era repression, was to stand firm, rocklike, without ever lowering the mask of severity he thought essential to keeping the communists at bay. Because of that severity, Baziak never became the popular figure that Sapieha had been. But he protected the Church as best he could under the most difficult circumstances—and at no small personal cost, as he was a man of warm affections on those rare occasions when he could take off the mask, behind closed doors with old friends from L’viv.
An open and determined attack on the Church in Kraków began in earnest in 1952 with the arrest of two local priests, Msgr. Tadeusz Kurowski and Father Mieczysław Noworyta. A year later, in 1953, Archbishop Baziak was put under house arrest outside the archdiocese, and his auxiliary bishop was also expelled from the city. When Stalin died in March 1953, Tygodnik Powszechny refused to run the required, laudatory obituary and was closed down, to be reopened months later under a new editorial board linked to the PAX association, committed to collaboration with the regime. That same year also saw the demise of Karol Wojtyła’s beloved Rhapsodic Theater, banned by the regime as too independent-minded.33
By this time, the local Ministry of Public Security section dealing with religious affairs had expanded considerably, to include separate offices dealing with virtually every aspect of Catholic life. Section One spied on and attempted to penetrate the Kraków archdiocesan curia and the curia in the neighboring diocese of Tarnów. Section Two dealt with Catholic religious orders, with subsections for male monasteries and convents of nuns. Section Three’s target was the diocesan Catholic clergy, while Section Four worked on other religious communities, including Jehovah’s Witnesses (whose minuscule numbers throughout the Soviet bloc were in inverse proportion to the viciousness with which they were persecuted). Tactics during this period tended to be brutal: clergy (like ZAGIELOWSKI) were blackmailed with threats of sexual scandal or charges (true or false) of collaboration with the Nazi occupation during the war. Arrests and interrogations were also tools by which the secret police attempted to recruit in-house Catholic sources. The yield was not much, in terms of either intelligence or agents. But the effort was relentless and intensified in 1953 as the struggle against the Church took on a new urgency in light of the bishops’ Non possumus!
Cardinal Sapieha and Archbishop Baziak were agreed that the battle with communism had to be fought on every front, including intellectual life. Thus, six weeks after taking over from the deceased Sapieha, Baziak (who must have discussed the plan with his predecessor) removed Father Karol Wojtyła from his work at St. Florian’s and gave him a two-year academic leave during which he was to prepare his habilitation, the second doctoral thesis that would qualify him as a university professor. Wojtyła moved into the Dean’s House, a Church property in Kanonicza Street near Wawel’s Royal Castle, and settled down to analyze the ethical theory of the German philosopher Max Scheler and Scheler’s possible utility as a philosophical basis for contemporary Christian moral theology.
It was a bold question to ask at this moment in Catholic intellectual life, for Scheler’s phenomenological approach to ethics was far removed from the abstract scholastic categories of philosophical and theological analysis in which Wojtyła had been trained in the seminary and during his graduate studies in Rome. Scheler was also a philosophical world removed from the Kantian formalism that tended to dominate the field of philosophical ethics at the time. In the end, Wojtyła decided that Scheler’s account of the moral life, while illuminating certain aspects of our decision-making, was incomplete, inadequate, and too focused on the emotions. Yet he also argued that Scheler had things to teach Catholic thinkers, for his emphasis on the subjective states of persons making moral decisions was an important complement to the traditional Catholic insistence that there was an objective truth of things that we can know by moral reason. This both/and strategy—subjectivity and objective truth; passion and reason—would be the hallmark of Karol Wojtyła’s intellectual work for the next half century, and would give him powerful conceptual tools with which to continue the battle against a communist tyranny that claimed, as its ultimate legitimation, a firm grasp on the scientific truth of things.34
In November and December 1953, the theology faculty of the Jagiellonian University accepted Karol Wojtyła’s dissertation and awarded him the habilitation doctorate early the following year. But before he could take up a position as a docent, the lowest rung on the Polish academic ladder, the communists shut down the Jagiellonian faculty of theology. This act of cultural vandalism, which was yet another facet of the regime’s war against the Church, nevertheless made it possible for Wojtyła to accept a position at the Catholic University of Lublin—“the only place between Berlin and Seoul where philosophy was free,” as his colleague, Stefan Swiezawski, neatly put it.35
The survival of the Catholic Univer
sity of Lublin—“KUL” as it was usually called—was one of the achievements of Cardinal Wyszyński’s 1950 modus vivendi with the Polish communist government. There was irony here, for the 1944–45 “Lublin Committee,” the Soviet-manipulated and indeed Soviet-manufactured alternative to the legitimate Polish government-in-exile in London, embodied everything that was false and despicable about Poland’s geopolitical situation. Fully aware of this, the communist regime substituted July 22, the day the Lublin Committee published its political manifesto in 1944, for the traditional May 3 national holiday in honor of Poland’s 1791 Constitution, the first written, democratic constitution in Europe.36 As for KUL, the regime tried its best to marginalize it by building another, larger institution, the Marie Curie–Skłodowska University, virtually next door. Stefan Swieżawski believed that the communists did not openly persecute KUL because “they couldn’t believe that something new could happen in such a medieval place,” which the regime imagined to be the Catholic version of “a Hasidic ghetto.”37 Yet while the university maintained its independence, it was also subject to relentless surveillance and penetration efforts by the secret police, some of which were successful at the highest levels of university administration.
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