THE WAR OVER THE MILLENNIUM
Karol Wojtyła was solemnly enthroned as metropolitan archbishop of Kraków on March 8, 1964. Two months later, an updated profile of the new archbishop was prepared by Department IV of the SB for the Polish Communist Party Politburo and described Wojtyła in these terms: “He … has a sense of realism and is willing to compromise in certain situations … Modest and direct. Reads a great deal and works at perfecting himself … Material things are of little importance to him. He specializes in socio-philosophical problems.”27 It was an interesting report, in that other SB profiles of Polish bishops from this period tend to focus on putative or actual negative qualities such as cupidity, financial greed, allegations of alcoholism, and so forth—aspects of a personality that, accurate or not, could be used against a man.28 There is none of that here, which suggests a certain degree of respect for Wojtyła, but also a lack of dirt to be used against him. Wojtyła’s virtues would soon enough prove a major threat to Polish communism; at about the same time Department IV was revising its profile of the man Zenon Kliszko had been determined to get as archbishop of Kraków, the exasperated warden of a prison in Gdańsk told one of his more distinguished inmates, a Camaldolese monk, that “Wojtyła has swindled us!”29
The “swindle” would get worse as Archbishop Wojtyła settled into his new responsibilities. Kliszko and the comrades may have imagined him something of a political naif, unable to play the game the way the tough men played it. They were soon disabused of any such fantasy. Determined not to let a millimeter of separation appear between himself and Cardinal Wyszyński, Archbishop Wojtyła became a stalwart support to the Primate in two Wyszyński initiatives that drove the Polish communist leadership into virtual apoplexy.
The first took place in late 1965, toward the end of the fourth session of Vatican II. Poland’s relocation westward as a result of the Yalta agreement had never been recognized formally by the West German government, and so was not recognized formally by the Vatican, which defers to governments in matters of defining territorial sovereignty. Thus the situation of the Catholic Church in Poland’s “recovered territories” was canonically irregular, the appointment of residential bishops was impeded, and the Church in western Poland would remain in a kind of canonical limbo until a formal Polish-German agreement on borders was reached. Wyszyński and the Vatican were both determined to resolve the matter after twenty years; but both the Primate and the Holy See understood that the ground would have to be prepared. So as the Council was drawing to a close, the Polish bishops, under Wyszyński’s leadership and with the strong encouragement of Pope Paul VI, prepared a bold gesture: two decades after a war in which Germany had devastated Poland, the Poles would take the initiative in forgiving and asking forgiveness. Thus, as the Poles were sending letters to other episcopal conferences around the world, inviting their brother bishops to the celebrations of the Polish Millennium in 1966, the letter to the German hierarchy would include a plea for reconciliation. Word of this plan, which Wojtyła strongly supported, inevitably leaked, and the SB bent every effort to monitor the drafting of the letter and derail it if possible. SB reports indicated that Wojtyła had been assigned the delicate work of negotiating the drafts of the letter through the Vatican bureaucracy, working with Paul VI’s close associate, Giovanni Benelli.30
The letter was published on November 18, 1965. After a lengthy evocation of the difficult history of relations between the two countries, the Polish bishops recalled the immense suffering of their people during World War II, while acknowledging that Germans had also suffered at Polish hands. It was the letter’s conclusion—“We forgive, and we ask your forgiveness”—that sent the Polish Communist Party into a rage. A campaign of vilification against the Church was immediately launched, under the rubric “We shall not forgive, we shall not forget,” and the bishops were accused of betraying the national interest, which amounted to a charge of treason.31
It was a bizarre reaction in a way, in that securing legal sovereignty over the “recovered territories” was certainly in the interest of the Polish People’s Republic—and the letter, as any astute observer would have understood, was a step toward that end. But the Polish communist leadership, in whose minds “forgiveness” was not a term with much meaning, saw an opportunity to drive a wedge between the bishops and their people and seized it. By stressing that Poles had no reason to ask forgiveness of Germans for anything, the communist campaign against the Church appealed both to patriotic sentiment and to the scars many Poles still carried from the days of the Nazi occupation. Even some of the members of Archbishop Wojtyła’s Środowisko were puzzled, even disturbed, by the bishops’ initiative and Wujek’s role in it.
The SB immediately went into action against Wojtyła, using popular resentments at the bishops’ initiative to fabricate an open letter to the archbishop from the workers at the Solvay chemical plant, where Wojtyła had once been a robotnik. After excoriating Wojtyła and the other bishops for suggesting that there was something for which Poles should seek forgiveness from Germans, the letter (which was published in Gazeta Krakowska on December 22, 1965) made its ideological pedigree and geopolitical purpose unmistakably clear by claiming that “the direct guilt for bringing on the Second World War and its bestial course falls exclusively on German imperialism and fascism, and its successor, the Federal Republic of Germany.”
Archbishop Wojtyła responded calmly but forcefully in a letter dated December 24 and read in Kraków’s churches, as it was initially refused publication in the press. The archbishop recalled with affection his days at Solvay and what they had taught him about life, and then noted that the text and spirit of the bishops’ appeal to the German bishops had been a key moment of preparation for the Polish Millennium, rooted in the “deepest principles of Christian ethics contained in the Gospel.” Wojtyła also told the workers that the bishops’ letter was clearly in the national interest, in that it would help pave the way for a conclusion of the legal controversy over the “recovered territories,” a point which the German bishops had acknowledged in their response. (The German acknowledgment had, of course, been ignored in the SB-concocted open letter.) Finally, Wojtyła wrote,
I respond to this letter, above all, as an individual who has been wronged.… When we worked together during the occupation, a lot of things united us—and among these, the first and foremost was a respect for the human being, for conscience, individuality, and social dignity. This is what I learned in large measure from the workers at Solvay—but I am unable to find this fundamental principle in your open letter.… Not only do I have a right to my good name, but all of the people whom I represent and for whom I am a shepherd as the archbishop of Kraków have a right to my good name.32
The SB’s clumsy attempt at intimidation thus gave Wojtyła an opportunity to define the line of battle on which he would fight communism for as long as he was archbishop of Kraków: the defense of the dignity of the human person. As the celebration of Poland’s Millennium unfolded—the second Wyszyński initiative the communists were determined to undermine—there would be further skirmishing along that line.
The Millennium commemorated the baptism of the Piast prince, Mieszko I, in 966—the event from which the history of what the world knows as “Poland” is dated. Cardinal Wyszyński intended the Millennium celebrations to be both a reminder to the nation of its Christian origins and a moment of consecration for the future—for the celebrations would conclude with a great act of national rededication to the Virgin Mary, Queen of Poland, on the feast of Our Lady of Częstochowa, August 26. Wyszyński’s plan thus challenged Poland’s communist rulers to a battle over the nation’s future as well as its past, a battle that also involved questions of national identity and regime legitimacy. The gauntlet was picked up by the authorities, with the SB playing a crucial role.
In February 1966, a special “party-state commission” to deal with Wyszyński’s Millennium was established; its membership included representatives of t
he security services as well as officials from the ministries dealing with transport, culture, education, radio, television, tourism, and sports. Efforts to penetrate and subvert the Church were increased. A counter-program was developed so that various sports and cultural events would compete with the Church’s Millennium program. A “Parade of the Millennium” was scheduled for July 22, the anniversary of the Lublin Committee Manifesto. When Wyszyński came to Gniezno and Poznań to lead religious commemorations of the Millennium, “patriotic” events featuring the party chieftain, Gomułka, and the defense minister were mounted. Józef Cyrankiewicz, the prime minister (and the man who had betrayed Witold Pilecki), was intended to be the alternative to the Primate during the Millennium celebration in Kraków. The closing Mass in Warsaw ended with crowds clashing with the armed militia, the ZOMO, which blocked the streets leading to communist party headquarters. The most serious disturbances were in Lublin, where 290 people were arrested. As historian Andrzej Paczkowski writes, “in all these disturbances, organized groups of ‘worker activists’ took part alongside regular security forces; some of them were actually SB officers, whose behavior toward the public was aggressive and on occasion simply provocative.”33
Pope Paul VI became a player in the Millennium drama. He had a great personal affection for Poland, where he had spent a few months as junior diplomat, and he was eager to accept Wyszyński’s invitation, tendered in 1965, to come to Poland and receive the nation’s Millennium vows of consecration at Częstochowa. The communist authorities might have been expected to be open to such a papal pilgrimage, for part of their strategy, during and immediately after Vatican II, was to set the man they imagined to be the “progressive” (Paul VI) against the well-known enemy reactionary (Wyszyński), as a means of splitting the Polish hierarchy and the Polish laity while creating a separate line of communication between the Vatican and the Polish communist authorities. The Polish government’s rage over the bishops’ letter to the German episcopate, and Paul VI’s strong support for the Polish initiative at reconciliation, overrode these strategic considerations, however. Despite a secret negotiating mission to Poland by Agostino Casaroli (dressed in suit and tie), the regime set conditions for the visit that the Pope was certain to reject: the pontiff could come for only a day; he would visit Wroclaw, the former German Breslau, rather than Warsaw (thus tacitly ratifying Polish sovereignty over the “recovered territories”); Cardinal Wyszyński would play no significant role in the papal visit.34 The conditions were clearly impossible, and the Pope reluctantly had to decline Wyszyński’s invitation. At the Mass of national reconsecration in Częstochowa on August 26, the hundreds of thousands of Poles who managed to attend, despite the regime’s efforts to keep them away, saw the Pope’s framed portrait on an empty chair. The chair was decorated with red and white roses—the Polish national colors.35
Paul VI would not undercut Wyszyński by visiting Poland under circumstances bound to diminish the Primate’s authority. But Wyszyński was not without highly placed critics in the Roman Curia, especially among some of the diplomats charged with devising and executing the Ostpolitik. In part, this reflected the typical curial resentment against “little popes,” local churchmen who controlled local Catholic affairs closely and were not afraid to rebuff curial initiatives; in the case of Wyszyński, this touched directly on the Primate’s determination that he, and he alone, would be the Catholic interlocutor with the Polish government. The resentments against Wyszyński also reflected the tensions of the late 1940s, when the Primate, now thought inflexible and intransigent, had been too flexible for the tastes of some of Pius XII’s diplomats. Roman officials were aware of Wyszyński’s skills; Casaroli, who battled him for years, once described him as a “real prince” and a man with an admirable and acute political sense of just where the edge of the cliff was located.36 On the other hand, those same officials quite understood that Wyszyński thought them ill prepared for dealing with communists, whom he believed he understood far better than they did. From the SB’s point of view, curial resentments against Wyszyński, and the well-propagated charge that the Primate was out of sympathy with the reforms of Vatican II, proved to be quite useful in recruiting clerical collaborators who resented what they regarded as Wyszyński’s authoritarian style, or who had a different theological view of the Catholic future. A senior member of the philosophy department at the Catholic University of Lublin, Father Mieczysław Albert Krąpiec, O.P., was an SB collaborator of the first sort; Father Mieczysław Malinski, a seminary classmate of Karol Wojtyła whom the SB knew as DELTA, was a collaborator of the second sort, as was Father Michał Czajkowski, whose work with the SB at Vatican II has already been noted.37
Paul VI, who had a great respect for Karol Wojtyła’s work at Vatican II, wanted to create the young Polish archbishop a cardinal in his first post–Vatican II consistory, in June 1967. The Polish government likely acquiesced to the nomination in order to advance its divide-and-conquer strategy against the Church: two cardinals might well lead to two factions in the hierarchy and—who knew?—two camps in the Polish Church, one “progressive” and one “conservative,” in a split that could be exploited to the regime’s advantage. The newly created Cardinal Wojtyła, for his part, refused to play according to the comrades’ script. He bent every effort to defer to Primate Wyszyński when the two were at public functions together, while defending the older prelate with both restless Catholic intellectuals and resentful Roman officials. Even behind the closed doors of the Polish bishops’ meetings, Wojtyła deferred to the older man, waiting to express his opinions until the Primate noted that “we have not yet heard from Cardinal Wojtyła on this question.”
The SB further intensified its surveillance of Wojtyła from the time he was created cardinal. A detailed questionnaire dispatched to SB informants, collaborators, and agents, including ARES and ERSKI, suggests just how obsessed the security services were with dredging up every potentially useful detail on the new cardinal. The four-page-long “character profile” was divided into seven sections. The section on “daily routines” queried everything from Wojtyła’s shaving habits to the questions of who bought his underwear and who polished his shoes, while not ignoring how often, with whom, and what the cardinal drank, and whether he smoked cigarettes (the precise brand being also of interest). The second section, on “audio-visual equipment,” asked, among many other things, his opinion of current radio and television programs, with particular attention to whether he listened to Radio Free Europe. The third section, on the cardinal’s health, posed a number of expected questions while also inquiring as to how often Wojtyła went to the dentist. Section four, on “interest in technology and collectibles,” asked whether Wojtyła collected stamps or coins, and how well he typed. Section five was on “sports, travel, and leisure,” perhaps not surprisingly since the cardinal was a well-known hiker, kayaker, and skier; here, the SB was interested in knowing about the quality of his skis and the extent of his recreational apparel, both winter and summer. The sixth section of the questionnaire, on his “family situation,” would have brought a meager haul, as the cardinal had few second cousins and all his direct relatives were long dead; nonetheless, the security services wanted to know if he was involved in any family conflicts and, if so, what were the causes and present circumstances. The final section, the seventh, was an attempt to build a roster of the cardinal’s “personal contacts,” including his “closest professional contacts” and his “closest friends.”38
Despite this intense surveillance, which included the thorough bugging of Wojtyła’s residence as well as increased spying on those friends and contacts identified in the character profile, the SB continued to misread their man with regularity. In 1967, French president Charles de Gaulle, pursuing his own Ostpolitik, made a state visit to Poland and, under pressure from the communist authorities, decided not to meet with Primate Wyszyński. When he came to Kraków and wished to visit the cathedral, he was guided by the sacristan, having been informed t
hat Cardinal Wojtyła was otherwise engaged. SB documents reported this snub as an expression of Wojtyła’s poor judgment and fear of Wyszyński, when in fact it was a clear indication of Wojtyła’s loyalty and of his determination not to be used, even by Le Grand Charles, against the Primate.
EVENTS OF CONSEQUENCE
Karol Wojtyła’s first year as a prince of the Church coincided with two events that would bear profoundly on his personal future, and on the dynamics of the Polish Church’s war with communism.
On July 4, 1967, Agostino Casaroli, who had succeeded in maneuvering the Czechoslovak primate Josef Beran out of house arrest and into a Roman exile and had arranged for the Vatican’s first exchange of diplomatic envoys with a communist state (Yugoslavia), was appointed Vatican “foreign minister” by Paul VI and ordained a bishop. From this point on, Archbishop Casaroli had the formal authority to develop the Vatican Ostpolitik, of which he had long been the driving force. No one, least of all Cardinal Wyszyński, doubted that this would mean ever more energetic efforts by Casaroli to maneuver the Holy See into a position as intermediary between hard-pressed local Catholic Churches behind the Iron Curtain and local communist governments.39 The complications attendant upon such efforts would be great—in part because they would coincide with a new, bloc-wide assault on the Church, led by the KGB. For within three weeks of Casaroli’s appointment, Moscow’s spymasters brought together in Budapest intelligence services from throughout the Soviet bloc in order to “discuss work against the Vatican,” “measures to discredit the Vatican and its backers,” and “measures to exacerbate the differences within the Vatican and between the Vatican and the capitalist countries.” Senior KGB officials addressed the conference, describing “hostile activity” by the Vatican and the Catholic Church in the USSR and the work of the KGB in countering these alleged aggressions. Attention was also paid to “agent operational work against Vatican institutions.” Work against the Vatican was to be intensified, “in close relation with the work against the Main Adversary [the United States].”40
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