And often … I hear the answer that it was these times, times of great struggle between good and evil, times of the great struggle between Mary and Satan, that draw many … into the priesthood, so that they might participate in this great battle fully, decisively, in a defined manner.…
I will say even more: this battle runs through the heart of each of us. A priestly ordination, a priestly vocation, does not free us from the battle.2
During his twenty years as a bishop in Kraków, first as auxiliary to Archbishop Eugeniusz Baziak and later as archbishop in his own right, Karol Wojtyła turned himself into an extremely effective combatant in that battle. Doing so was something of a stretch for a man with a rich and complex interior life, a mystic who found it easiest to express his deepest intuitions about the human condition in poetry—a man not naturally given to raising his voice. Yet he learned to do precisely that, and to do it eloquently, because that was what his bishop’s vocation, his conscience, and his convictions about human rights required of him.
Wojtyła’s twenty years as a bishop in Kraków saw significant changes in the dynamics of the Catholic Church’s struggle against Polish communism, including the entry onto the stage of Vatican diplomats determined to play a role in the ongoing drama. Throughout those two decades, and in the face of growing communist opposition, Karol Wojtyła grew into the traditional Cracovian bishop’s role as Defensor Civitatis [Defender of the City]. At the end of those two decades, in October 1978, Poland’s communist rulers were terrified at the thought of Wojtyła, the articulate, charismatic, indefatigable defender of the rights of his people, as Primate of Poland. His twenty years’ experience as a bishop in Kraków, however, were preparing the way for a new, unexpected twist in the story of Karol Wojtyła and communism.
THE YOUNGEST BISHOP IN POLAND
Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński was not a man to waste time during his three years of internment, between 1953 and 1956. Rather, he used those years to think through a bold initiative aimed at maintaining a healthy moral tension between the Catholic Church and the communist masters of Polish politics. The year 1966 would mark the Polish Millennium—the one thousandth anniversary of the beginnings of what we now know as “Poland,” a country that took such anniversaries with great seriousness. Wyszyński knew his adversary’s mind well, and he anticipated that the communist regime would use the millennium celebration to rewrite Poland’s history to its ideological tastes, and to serve its future political purposes. Something had to be done.
That something would be the Great Novena—a nine-year program of preparation for the millennium of Poland’s baptism that would effectively recatechize the entire country. Its symbolic centerpiece would be a pilgrimage. Polish Catholicism had a great pilgrimage tradition, with hundreds of thousands of Catholics going by foot to such shrines as Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, which evoked the Holy Land in the hills outside Kraków, or to the Marian shrine at Piekary śląskie, which drew Silesian miners and industrial workers to a vast annual outpouring of male piety, or to the greatest of all Polish shrines, that of the Black Madonna on Jasna Góra, Częstochowa’s Bright Mountain. Wyszyński’s Great Novena pilgrimage would adopt the pilgrimage tradition but give it a dramatic new form: the Black Madonna, that most treasured of national icons, would herself go on pilgrimage throughout Poland, visiting every parish in the country.
Westerners inured to this dimension of religious experience might dismiss the Great Novena and the pilgrimage of the Black Madonna as a bizarre if grandiose exercise in folk piety, something rather out of place in the second half of the twentieth century. Poland’s communist masters knew that it was a grave threat. For, if successful, Wyszyński’s catechetical program could undo whatever effects more than a decade of communist propaganda and indoctrination had had. As for the Black Madonna pilgrimage, it threatened to underscore, from city to town to village to farm, that real authority in Poland lay elsewhere than in the Polish Communist Party. (Eventually, the communists put the icon under a kind of house arrest at Jasna Góra and forbade its peregrination throughout the country; Wyszyński, undeterred, sent the icon’s frame instead.)3
Thus it was no surprise that the beginning of the Great Novena in 1957 should have been the prelude to a ratcheting up of communist pressure on the Church. The 1956 shake-up in the Polish internal security apparatus, aimed at giving the party stricter control of the secret police, had led to a new division of labor, in which Department III of the Ministry of Internal Affairs took the leading role in carrying out operations against the Catholic clergy. From June 1962 on, counter-Church surveillance, intelligence analysis, and operations were concentrated in Department IV of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, usually known as the fourth division of the SB. Department IV had provincial branches all over Poland, all of which had one purpose: to intensify SB surveillance of the Church and to increase secret police penetration of Catholic institutions.4
The security services took a much greater interest in Father Karol Wojtyła when, on July 4, 1958, Pope Pius XII named the thirty-eight-year-old priest-professor auxiliary bishop of Kraków. It was an unusual appointment, given Wojtyła’s youth and background; Cardinal Wyszyński had a well-developed nervousness about intellectuals, whom he feared would be unreliable in crises. Yet the appointment would not have been made without Wyszyński’s approval—and would not have been approved if the SB had suspected that it was about to gain a formidable new enemy. Indeed, SB files from the time of Wojtyła’s nomination as bishop suggest just how poor some of the intelligence coming to the secret police was: one informant reported, and the local SB passed on to headquarters, that Wojtyła’s nomination had been poorly received by the Kraków clergy, which was the precise opposite of the truth (although it was certainly true of the clerical agent ZAGIELOWSKI, whom the files suggest nursed a bitter grudge against Wojtyła for years).5
Wojtyła was ordained a bishop on September 28, 1958, in ancient Wawel Cathedral, hard by the tomb of St. Stanisław, the martyr-bishop who set the pattern of the Cracovian bishop as Defensor Civitatis. Bishop Wojtyła began to be referred to in SB internal communications as PEDAGOG and was kept under constant surveillance; for the next twenty years, his every move was followed and his residences were bugged; his friends and associates among the Kraków clergy became special targets for SB recruitment efforts. Most resisted; some did not. These efforts represented an intensified form of the TEOK [Technical Operational Evidence on Priests] effort, the building of files on every Catholic priest in Poland. In those files, the regime sought to record not simply such basic biographical data as the priest’s date and place of birth, parentage, education, and visits abroad, but also information on his character traits, hobbies, friendships, recreational activities, political views, medical history, drug and alcohol use, and criminal record. The Wojtyła files from this period stress the young bishop’s work with university students; the regime’s hatred for a Church that was poaching what communism regarded as its future is evident between, and within, the lines.6
An SB profile of Bishop Wojtyła from 1960, developed by the source WŁODEK, is instructive in that it demonstrates that the SB could, sometimes, get it (mostly) right. According to the more insightful parts of the report, Wojtyła displayed an “unusual combination of intellectual qualities with those of an active, practical, and organized man.” He had, according to the source, “a very active analytic-synthetic intelligence, astute at grasping the essence of a problem and being able to formulate it clearly and accurately, particularly in writing.” The young bishop was “sometimes less well formulated orally—much depends on his level of tiredness, the need to adapt material to a given audience, etc.” As for personality, Wojtyła was “very approachable, obliging, and responsible”; he was “not overly ambitious” and had “a very level-headed opinion of himself and his abilities.” He was “very unlikely to do anything rash,” being a “well-balanced individual” with “strong beliefs” and a strong will. In his interactions with others, WŁODEK reporte
d, Wojtyła was “not easily influenced” but was “willing to take advice.” He “can be obstinate,” but “he knows people well, can see their shortcomings, is serious but can see the funny side in events and people and has a sense of humor.” Above all, Bishop Wojtyła was “a man of integrity” who could “see his own mistakes and admit them to himself, at least.” An acute observer of men and events, “he is not at all superficial,” a “devout man in a more rational and ‘metaphysical’ way rather than an emotional one.”7
The SB’s intensified attempts to gather information about and to suborn the Polish clergy followed what the security service hoped would be a new and improved strategy of penetrating the Church, by seeking informants from within Catholic ranks who would exchange information for various favors, ranging from consumer goods to money to passports for foreign study and travel. Through its agents and provocateurs, the SB also attempted to foster divisions and factions within the ranks of Polish priests, especially in a tightly knit priestly fraternity like that of Kraków, with its history of resistance against oppression. In the early years of Wojtyła’s episcopate, the sources ŻAGIELOWSI and TORANO (who may in fact have been the same person) kept a close watch on the new bishop’s activities with young people, which were of particular concern to the SB. But it was Nowa Huta, and Wojtyła’s determination to support the townspeople in their quest for a church, that was a particular thorn in the SB’s toe.
Thus a few months after Bishop Wojtyła began celebrating Christmas Midnight Mass in an open field in Nowa Huta in December 1959, a new clerical recruit, a source called MARECKI, began reporting to the SB on Wojtyła’s intense interest in the “godless” new town. MARECKI, ironically, was transferred by the archdiocese from pastoral work in Nowa Huta to an assignment in the Kraków curia, from which he stole documents for the SB, photographed the inside of the curia, and made duplicate imprints of the archdiocesan seal. On April 27, 1960, there was a riot in Nowa Huta, following the removal of a cross erected by the townspeople as a reminder of their missing church. The authorities asked Wojtyła to write a letter to the townspeople, instructing them to keep the peace and renounce violent protests. Wojtyła complied, but with a twist, beginning his letter by noting that, as the cross would not be removed in the future, there would be no reason for protest. When the local authorities, shown the letter, refused to accept Wojtyła’s condition, he raised the stakes by proposing to add to the letter the statement that the only way to keep peace in Nowa Huta would be to build the church that had long been denied to the people. The cross was restored, as was peace in Nowa Huta.8
SB Department IV’s new approach—seduction rather than threat—had a degree of success in penetrating Cracovian Catholicism; by 1967, some 270 active informants had been recruited from among the local clergy and active laity. One of the latter, ARES, was the administrative director of the weekly newspaper Tygodnik Powszechny and an archdiocesan bureaucrat; his self-congratulatory reports touched on a number of matters, including a battle between the archdiocese and the local government over use of the archdiocesan seminary building—a battle Wojtyła won by an adroit compromise that maintained the Church’s position while giving the government a reasonably graceful exit from the confrontation.9
The formation of Department IV of the SB and the intensification of its efforts to penetrate Polish Catholicism coincided with, and may have reflected, a new and vicious bout of religious persecution in the Soviet Union under Nikita Khrushchev. Many churches, monasteries, and seminaries that had been reopened in the wake of the post-Stalin “thaw” were shut down again; at the same time, according to Vasili Mitrokhin and Christopher Andrew, the Soviet regime’s “ferocious anti-religious campaign” saw the dismantling of “half the [Russian] Orthodox parishes” in the USSR.10 This persecution coincided with another KGB initiative aimed at global Christianity: the Russian Orthodox Church was permitted to join the World Council of Churches [WCC], whose operations and pronouncements the Soviet secret police believed it possible to influence. Russian Orthodox representatives at the Geneva headquarters of the WCC duly denied for decades that there was any repression of their community in the Soviet Union. A leading Orthodox figure in these ecumenical affairs, both within the Orthodox-Protestant world of the WCC and between Russian Orthodoxy and Catholicism, was Metropolitan Nikodim of Leningrad (known to his KGB controllers as ADAMANT), whose ordination in 1960 at age thirty-one as the youngest bishop in the Christian world “was in itself unmistakable evidence of KGB approval,” according to Andrew and Mitrokhin.11 ADAMANT/Nikodim would eventually rise in WCC ranks to become one of the organization’s six presidents.
Ironically, the renewed persecution of Christian churches and communities within the USSR in the early 1960s took place at precisely the same time that Pope John XXIII and the diplomats of the Roman Curia decided to initiate a new approach of their own to the problem of communism—the so-called Ostpolitik.
VATICAN II AND THE EARLY YEARS OF THE OSTPOLITIK
When seventy-seven-year-old Cardinal Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, patriarch of Venice and veteran Vatican diplomat, was elected pope on October 28, 1958, he was expected to be a transitional figure, bridging the gap between the nineteen-year reign of Pius XII and an indeterminate papal future. Roncalli had other ideas. Less than three months after his election he announced his intention to summon the Second Vatican Council, which would become the most important event in Catholic history since the sixteenth-century Reformation and Counter-Reformation.
After more than three years of preparation, Vatican II opened on October 11, 1962, with all the bishops of the Catholic Church present in St. Peter’s Basilica—save for those forbidden by communist mandarins to come to Rome. Five days later, on October 16, McGeorge Bundy, national security adviser to the president of the United States, showed John F. Kennedy reconnaissance photographs of offensive Soviet missiles being installed in Cuba. On October 22, after six days of deliberations with his advisers, President Kennedy announced to the nation and the world that the United States would implement a naval quarantine of Cuba in order to compel the removal of Soviet missiles from the island. For a week, as the Council got itself organized, the world stood on the brink of nuclear war.
This largely unremarked historical coincidence—the opening of Vatican II and the Cuban Missile Crisis—had a profound effect on John XXIII and an even more profound effect on Vatican diplomacy. From the time of his election, Pope John, an old-fashioned diplomat who believed that human contacts could change seemingly intractable situations, had tried to defrost the Vatican’s relations with the communist world. Thus he invited Russian Orthodox representatives to attend Vatican II as observers, while bending every effort to see that Catholic bishops from behind the Iron Curtain could attend the Council. After the nuclear showdown in the Caribbean abated, the shaken Pope determined to write an encyclical on world peace, which was published six months later, in April 1963, as Pacem in Terris [Peace on Earth]. He also intensified his personal diplomacy, welcoming Khrushchev’s son-in-law, Alexei Adzhubei, to the Vatican in March 1963; this contact may have helped the Pope arrange for the subsequent release from the Gulag of the leader of the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine, Metropolitan Iosyf Slipyi.
The principal agent of John XXIII’s new Ostpolitik, which would continue under Pope Paul VI when John died in June 1963, was the Italian curialist and diplomat Agostino Casaroli. His early career in the papal diplomatic service had been spent on Latin American issues, but in March 1961, after being named vice-secretary of the Congregation for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs (as the Vatican foreign ministry was then called), his portfolio was broadened to include European questions, and he began to lead Holy See delegations to various UN negotiations being conducted in Vienna. From there, in 1963, he began to probe behind the Iron Curtain, making quiet trips to Budapest and Prague in order to test the diplomatic waters.
In his memoirs, Casaroli described the Soviet bloc in 1963 as a “vast, immobile swamp” that
had “finally begun to ripple, though only lightly, under the wind of history.”12 In Casaroli’s view, the immobility was not simply the communists’ fault; it was also caused, at least insofar as the Catholic Church was concerned, by the confrontational policies of Pius XII, whose polemics were such that any contacts with the Holy See by citizens of the Soviet bloc—such as bishops and cardinals—were considered acts of espionage by communist authorities. Moreover, Casaroli believed, the 1949 Vatican condemnation of Catholic participation in communist parties, which remained in force, was regarded by the communists as an ongoing “declaration of war.”13
Yet with the election of John XXIII, Casaroli thought, things had begun to change, if slightly; thus it was taken as a sign of a new openness to serious dialogue that Nikita Khrushchev sent greetings to the Pope on his eightieth birthday in November 1961.14 Casaroli was clear, in his own mind, on communist intentions: “squeezed and suffocated by the coils of a hostile power … religious life and the Church would have had to succumb to a ‘natural’ death.”15 As there seemed no possibility of a dramatic or even significant change in the division of Europe into two contending blocs, Vatican diplomacy’s task was to prevent that “natural death” by a counterstrategy of salvare il salvabile, or saving what could be saved—which meant, in practice, ensuring the ongoing sacramental life of the Church by giving the Church behind the Iron Curtain bishops, who in turn could ordain priests.
In addition, John XXIII’s Ostpolitik had several immediate, practical goals. The Pope wanted to make it possible for Catholic bishops from Soviet-bloc countries to attend Vatican II. He also wanted to see if there was any possibility of resolving the situations of two senior churchmen: the Hungarian primate, Cardinal József Mindszenty, who had been living in the American Embassy in Budapest since the abortive Hungarian Revolution in 1956; and the Czechoslovakian primate, Josef Beran, a hero of the Catholic resistance in World War II who had survived three Nazi concentration camps only to be jailed in communist prisons or detained under house arrest since 1949. Thus it was no accident that Casaroli’s first two sallies behind the Iron Curtain were to Budapest and Prague.
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