Father Wojtyła—now Dr. hab. Wojtyła—commuted to Lublin by train from Kraków, beginning with the 1954–55 academic year. In addition to his introductory undergraduate course in philosophical ethics, where he played to standing-room-only crowds in crammed lecture halls, he gave graduate-level lectures and directed doctoral students in their research and dissertation work. Wojtyła’s graduate or “monographic” lectures were an exercise in the ecumenism of time, as the young professor engaged in a conversation over the centuries with Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, and Max Scheler. In those lectures, he honed a set of convictions that he would deploy in his battle against communism.
Human beings, he insisted, had a natural instinct for the truth of things, a built-in inclination to the true, the good, and the beautiful. Yet men and women were free to make real choices, choices that we can know by reason to be decisions between what is objectively good and what is objectively evil, between what is noble and what is base. To reduce those choices, as communism did, to expressions of class interest or other economic forces was to dehumanize the human person. And if communism misunderstood human dignity and human freedom, it also misunderstood human community and society. The communist culture of the lie and the toxic social relations it created were nicely captured in a famous joke of the period: “Communist Party boss: ‘How much is 2 + 2?’ Polish worker: ‘How much would you like it to be?’ ” Communism was not just wrong; it was unnatural. It taught a false humanism, for men and women could only be free when they lived in the truth about themselves, their communities, and their destiny. The truth about the human person was thus the most powerful weapon of resistance that could be deployed—particularly in a situation in which the proponents of the lie had a monopoly on other forms of power.38
Karol Wojtyła’s work as a philosopher intersected with his vocation as a priest. He continued to be a magnet for the young, and his experience of helping his students and friends prepare for the responsibilities of marriage and family soon led him into a serious reflection on another aspect of human freedom: the freedom to love. Thousands of hours in the confessional and in spiritual direction had convinced him that the quest for love built into our natures as sexual beings is also a quest for a pure love, a love that expresses itself as the gift of oneself to another and the reception of that other as gift. Giving or using: that was the fundamental option in sexual love (and, indeed, in every other form of human relationship). Thus Wojtyła’s philosophical reflections on ethics, his pastoral experience, and his convictions about God’s ways with the world came together in what he would term the “Law of the Gift”: the truth of human freedom is found in the free gift of oneself to others, and, in marriage, the free reception of the spouse’s gift of self.39 This conviction, which he brought to a more complete expression in his first book, Love and Responsibility, cast a new light on classic Christian sexual ethics, giving the Church’s teaching on sexuality, marriage, and responsible family planning a new, richly humanistic texture.40
And here, too, Wojtyła’s thought and work was a form of countercultural resistance against the communist culture of the lie. Permissive abortion laws, communist youth camps that encouraged sexual experimentation, work schedules that separated husbands and wives, parents and children—all of these were tools in the communist campaigns against traditional Polish culture and against the Church and its moral teaching. Wojtyła’s work in the sphere of marriage and the family challenged the regime to battle on the question “Whose is the more humane understanding of freedom? Who takes more seriously the moral capacities of our people? Who treats them like adults, capable of mature decisions, and who treats them like children, mere packages of desires?”41
Karol Wojtyła’s KUL period, during which he maintained an intense program of pastoral work in Kraków, was a time of intellectual and pastoral maturation. The young man who had once imagined his adult life as a combination of theatrical work and academic life found a happy equilibrium in a combination of priestly ministry and intellectual activity, both of which fed his continued literary work in poetry and drama. As he approached forty, the pattern of his life seemed set. Yet there were changes in the offing, not least because of changes in the dynamics of the constant, relentless struggle between the Catholic Church and the Polish communist regime.
A THAW OF SORTS
The death of Stalin in March 1953 set loose a power struggle within the USSR; one of its first casualties was the loathsome KGB chairman, Lavrenti Beria, a sadistic sexual predator executed in December 1953. Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s atrocities and cult of personality at the February 1956 Congress of the Soviet Communist Party sent shock waves throughout the Soviet bloc. The Polish Communist Party chieftain, Bolesław Bierut, a hard-core Stalinist, was sufficiently shocked by Khrushchev’s speech that he died of a heart attack a few weeks later. Hungarian resentments began to build toward the boiling point that would be reached in the Hungarian Revolution of October–November 1956—a premature effort at self-liberation ultimately crushed by Soviet tanks, but one that left a permanent scar of anti-Western and anti-Catholic paranoia on the Budapest KGB rezident, Yuri Andropov, shocked by the workers’ revolt against the workers’ state. Even before the abortive Hungarian revolt gripped the world’s attention, the unrest had taken hold in Poland; demonstrations in Poznań during a June 1956 general strike were crushed by tanks under the command of Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky of the Red Army, Poland’s defense minister. With Moscow demanding repression, the Soviet Army poised to invade, and Soviet warships sailing menacingly off Poland’s Baltic Coast, the new communist leader, Wladysław Gomułka (who had himself been rehabilitated in the post-Stalin turmoil) decided that only one man could calm the situation—short of the Soviet invasion that Gomułka, a thoroughgoing communist but also a Polish patriot, desperately wanted to avoid—Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński.
So Gomułka invited the Primate to return to Warsaw from his internment and take up his duties publicly. Wyszyński drove a hard bargain: the 1953 decree that had triggered the Non possumus! had to be rescinded; an ongoing mixed commission of governmental and Church representatives would have to be created; Bishop Kaczmarek was to be released from prison and other bishops allowed to return to their dioceses; the choke hold was to be taken off the Catholic press; and the normal patterns of Church governance were to be reinstated. Gomułka agreed, and by the end of 1956 Wyszyński’s requirements had been met: thus Archbishop Baziak returned to Kraków, and Tygodnik Powszechny was once again led by Jerzy Turowicz rather than by an editorial board of collaborators.42 In addition, optional religious education was permitted in the schools, the Church’s prison and hospital ministries were reestablished, Catholic intellectuals’ clubs were approved, and a small Catholic parliamentary group was permitted.
Things became better, but hardly normal. The regime persistently denied building permits for new churches; parishioners hid materials in their homes, prefabricated them in sections there, and then assembled the churches overnight, creating faits accomplis for the state. The deal on religious education in the state schools (which were the only schools there) was broken; the Church created thousands of catechetical centers. Taxes were raised on priests; bishops instructed their priests not to pay. Members of religious orders were ordered not to teach catechism; the instructions were ignored.
While these quotidian struggles were being played out across Poland, communist efforts to penetrate and disrupt the Church intensified. By 1956, the party leadership was exceedingly nervous about the power of the internal security apparatus, the secret police. It was too independent and might turn on its putative political masters; moreover, one of its senior officers, Józef Światło, had defected to the West in late September 1954 and become a commentator on the Polish service of Radio Free Europe, from which platform he was providing unprecedented details about secret police brutality and the character of his former colleagues, whom he described a
s a depraved, divisive, and power-grabbing clique.43 So the whole operation was brought under much stricter party control, the Committee on Public Security was rebranded as the Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa, or Security Service (universally referred to as the SB), and a thorough review of methods and operations, including operations against the Church, was conducted. This review, undertaken at the outset of what seemed, on the surface, to be the Gomułka “thaw,” led to the conclusion that the brutal methods of the past had not been successful; even those clerics who had signed agreements to cooperate with the secret police were providing unreliable information, more fluff than substance. Thus it would be better, the SB decided, to try more subtle methods: playing on clerical and lay resentments against Cardinal Wyszyński’s strict style of ecclesiastical governance; using passports for study abroad or publishing possibilities as bait to catch intellectually curious clergy; bolstering the meager salaries of Church employees by putting them on secret police retainers.
These new methods of recruitment had some success. ARES, a longtime lay employee of Tygodnik Powszechny, worked for the SB for almost a quarter century, reporting on the financial situation of the Kraków curia, the antigovernment comments of curial employees, and the local ecclesiastical gossip. ERSKI, another lay mole who earned a regular salary from the SB, bugged the offices of Tygodnik Powszechny and gave the office keys to his SB handlers so they could conduct clandestine searches of the premises.44
And then there was the usual harassment. In 1956, Father Karol Wojtyła was invited by the authorities to what turned out to be a rather boring, even banal, conversation about his academic activities in Kraków (where he was teaching in the seminary) and Lublin. Attempts to drag the young professor into a discussion of politics were unsuccessful, according to the file on the conversation kept by the SB.45
The Gomułka “thaw” led to a period of what historians describe as “maturity” for Polish communism. The mass murders of 1945–47 were a decade in the past. The “brutal, open, and mass coercion that had characterized the period of ‘full Stalinism’ ” was over.46 Marshal Rokossovsky and most of the other Red Army officers serving in the Polish military were back in the USSR; Cardinal Wyszyński was restored to authority as primate; and Gomułka had shown sufficient political skills and flexibility to forestall a Polish repeat of the Hungarian revolt that had led to draconian repression in that unhappy country. The stifling world of “socialist realist” culture cracked and then shattered; once-forbidden books could be printed, Western films could be shown, avant-garde art was tolerated, and Poland became “the liveliest barracks in the camp.”47 Yet it was still a camp, and the regime remained determined to bring the Church to heel while weaning the Polish people from their traditional religious loyalties. The opening gambits had been played. The war had entered a different, more subtle, and in some respects more dangerous, phase.
CHAPTER TWO
Defensor Civitatis
July 4, 1958 Father Karol Wojtyła is named auxiliary bishop of Kraków.
October 28, 1958 Cardinal Angelo Roncalli is elected pope.
January 25, 1959 Pope John XXIII announces the Second Vatican Council.
December 24, 1959 Bishop Wojtyła begins celebrating Christmas Midnight Mass in Nowa Huta.
June 1962 Department IV is formed within the Polish secret police to combat the Church.
July 16, 1962 Bishop Wojtyła elected temporary administrator of the Archdiocese of Kraków.
October 11, 1962 The Second Vatican Council opens.
October 22, 1962 World learns of Cuban Missile Crisis.
Spring 1963 Msgr. Agostino Casaroli visits Budapest and Prague; John XXIII issues Pacem in Terris, encyclical on world peace.
December 30, 1963 Karol Wojtyła is named archbishop of Kraków by Pope Paul VI.
November 18, 1965 Polish bishops’ letter to the German hierarchy, forgiving and asking forgiveness, is published.
December 8, 1965 Solemn closing of the Second Vatican Council.
June 28, 1967 Karol Wojtyła is created cardinal.
July 4, 1967 Archbishop Agostino Casaroli becomes Vatican foreign minister.
August 1968 Prague Spring is crushed by Soviet tanks.
December 14, 1970 Strike at Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk leads to widespread social unrest throughout Poland and many worker deaths.
November 19, 1973 “Independent Group D” of the SB’s Department IV is formed with the aim of “disintegrating” the Catholic Church in Poland.
April 16, 1974 Cardinal Wojtyła defies Czechoslovak communist regime at funeral Mass of Cardinal Stefan Trochta.
July 1974 “Permanent Working Contacts Group” established by the Holy See and the Polish People’s Republic.
December 1, 1977 Polish Communist Party leader Edward Gierek is received in private audience by Pope Paul VI.
May 15, 1977 Consecration of the Ark Church in Nowa Huta.
March 3, 1978 Paul VI agrees to defer resolution of the question of a permanent Vatican diplomatic representative in Warsaw until October.
May 25, 1978 Cardinal Wojtyła defends human rights of all Poles, believers and unbelievers, at annual Corpus Christi procession in Kraków.
August 6, 1978 Pope Paul VI dies.
The weather could have been more cooperative on May 15, 1977.
All morning long, rain poured down on Nowa Huta, the new town built outside Kraków as a model communist city—a city without God. Yet it would have taken nothing less than a Category V hurricane, and perhaps not even that, to keep the people of Nowa Huta from walking through the downpour to the Bienczyce neighborhood to participate in something that was never supposed to happen: the consecration of a Catholic church in Nowa Huta.
As the hour for the consecration ceremony approached, the local people were joined by fellow Catholics from all over Poland, and indeed from all over Europe. For one day, it seemed, the Iron Curtain had fallen. Delegations came from Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the oxymoronic German Democratic Republic. A flock of West Germans came. Pilgrims came from the Austrian diocese of Sankt Pölten, which had donated the new church’s tabernacle, sculpted to evoke the cosmos; in its center was a piece of moon rock given to Pope Paul VI by an American astronaut. The Dutch came to hear the bells they had donated. There were delegations from France, Belgium, Portugal, Great Britain, the United States, Finland, and Italy—there was even a guest from Japan.
It was a striking building, this Church of Our Lady, Queen of Poland, and the rain that attended its consecration was strangely fitting: for the church had been built along modernist architectural lines to evoke the sense of an ark, within which the Queen of Poland, Mary, Mother of God, was protecting her children from the storms outside. In addition to a large replica of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa, its chief interior decoration was a gigantic figure of Christ crucified, forged by the steelworkers of the Lenin Steelworks. The church had taken ten years to build, with volunteer labor coming to Nowa Huta from all over Europe. Its cylindrical exterior, covered with two million stones polished in the riverbeds of Poland, was now being baptized from the skies, even as Cardinal Karol Wojtyła, the metropolitan archbishop of Kraków, proceeded with the lengthy ceremonies of consecration inside.
The fight for the Ark Church had been the symbolic centerpiece of Wojtyła’s personal war with communism for almost two decades, from the time he was first named auxiliary bishop of Kraków in 1958. He had tenaciously and skillfully defended the rights of the workers of Nowa Huta to have a church in their new city, celebrating Christmas Midnight Mass in a freezing, open Nowa Huta field during the years in which the Polish communist regime refused a building permit. Then, on October 13, 1967, the authorities finally budged, and permission was given for construction. The very next day, October 14, Cardinal Wojtyła drove to Nowa Huta and turned the symbolic first spade of earth, preparing the ground for the cornerstone, which was donated by Paul VI and taken from a fragment of Constantine’s ancient basilica of St. Peter in Rome.
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Now, after a decade, the Ark Church was ready to receive its pilgrim people. And Cardinal Wojtyła was ready to speak his mind, in cadences long honed in public defense of the rights of those people:
We want this temple, which has a Mother as its patroness, to be our mother. We also want this temple, whose patroness is the Queen of Poland, to reign over us. Most of all, however, we long for the Mother. We feel such a strong need for her presence at this turn of history where mankind now finds itself, where Europe and our homeland find themselves.…
This city is not a city of people who belong to no one. Of people, to whom one may do whatever one wants, who may be manipulated according to the laws or rules of production and consumption. This is a city of the children of God [and] this temple was needed so that this could be expressed, [so] that it could be emphasized.…
We still have among us those who … began to build [this church] with their suffering. We pay them the highest respect.… Was it not possible—is it still not possible—to take another path as we continue to struggle to build other houses of God which are so necessary in Poland?
… Let us hope that, in this our homeland, which has a Christian and humanitarian past, these two orders—light and the Gospel, and respect for human rights—come together more effectively in the future.1
Nine days later, Cardinal Wojtyła gave a sermon at a reunion of priests whom he had ordained three years earlier, in 1974. He told these young men of his experience with others like them over the past two decades, especially when he asked each seminarian why he had come to the seminary:
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