April 12, 1979 Stasi analysis of Vatican Ostpolitik under John Paul II.
May 18, 1979 Further Stasi analysis of Ostpolitik under John Paul II.
June 2–10, 1979 John Paul II in Poland.
October 2, 1979 John Paul II defends religious freedom and other basic human rights at the United Nations.
November 13, 1979 Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union issues decree outlining operational initiatives for dealing with the threat posed by JohnPaul II.
August 14–31, 1980 Shipyard strike in Gdańsk gives birth to Solidarity trade union and movement.
October 24-November 10, 1980 Solidarity registration crisis.
December 5, 1980 Soviet government cancels planned Warsaw Pact invasion of Poland.
December 16, 1980 Pope John Paul II writes Leonid Brezhnev in defense of Polish sovereignty.
January 15–18, 1981 John Paul II receives Solidarity delegation at the Vatican.
March 1981 Bydgoszcz crisis leads to unrest throughout Poland.
April 2, 1981 Fears of losing control in Poland expressed at Soviet Politburo meeting.
May 13, 1981 John Paul II is shot in St. Peter’s Square.
May 28, 1981 Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński, Primate of Poland, dies.
September 5, 1981 First Solidarity National Congress opens in Gdańsk.
October 18, 1981 General Wojciech Jaruzelski is named First Secretary of Polish Communist Party.
December 12–13, 1981 General Jaruzelski declares “state of emergency,” imposes martial law throughout Poland, and orders arrests of thousands of Solidarity activists.
December 15, 1981 Cardinal Agostino Casaroli discusses martial law crisis with President Ronald Reagan and senior American officials.
December 17, 1981 Cardinal Casaroli discusses Polish crisis with Eugeniusz Wyzner, Poland’s ambassador to the United Nations.
John Paul II was keenly aware of being the first non-Italian pope in 455 years. So from the very beginning of his pontificate, he bent every effort to introduce himself to his new local flock in terms they could understand and appreciate.
Within an hour of his election on October 16, 1978, he stood on the loggia of the patriarchal Vatican basilica, St. Peter’s, gently brushed aside a fussy master of ceremonies, and, in a break with precedent, began to address the crowd in the square—most of whom were wondering who this “Voy-TEE-wah” was. Tepid in their response at the beginning, the throng began to warm to their new bishop as he told of his fear in accepting his election, and how he had overcome that fear by invoking the protection of the Virgin Mary, dear to both Italians and Poles. Then he won their hearts by asking for their help: “I don’t know if I can make myself clear in your … in our Italian language. Se mi sbaglio, mi correggerete! [If I make a mistake, you will correct me!]” A tremendous burst of applause rang throughout the square and echoed down the Via della Conciliazione toward the Tiber and the Castel Sant’Angelo, onetime refuge of popes. A moment before, he had been lo straniero, the foreigner. Now, he was a Roman among the Romans, even if he was, as he had put it in introducing himself, a “man from a far country”—a phrase intended as a subtle reference to the persecuted Church behind the Iron Curtain.
Continuing his campaign of introducing himself to his adopted home—for one of Karol Wojtyła’s new titles was “Primate of Italy”—he went on a brief pilgrimage to the Marian shrine at Mentorella on October 29, just a week after he had solemnly inaugurated his papal ministry by challenging the Church to fearlessness and asking the world to open its doors to Christ. It was a place he had visited often, for it was steeped in the history of both Poland and Italy: the priests who cared for the shrine, the Resurrectionist Fathers, had been inspired by the greatest literary figure of nineteenth-century Polish Romanticism, Adam Mickiewicz. When word of the Pope’s visit spread, a large crowd gathered and John Paul II apologized to the local officials for causing such a fuss; but he had often come to Mentorella to pray as a visiting Polish cardinal, and now he had to come and pray as Italy’s Polish primate.
A week after his visit to Mentorella, John Paul II went to the heart of Italian Catholic piety by going on a brief pilgrimage to Assisi, the home of one of Italy’s patrons, St. Francis. He was there, he told the vast throng, because he felt the need for a “spiritual birth” in his new home. And so he had come to the town of Francis, the man who had written “Christ’s Gospel in incisive characters in the hearts of the men of his time,” to ask for the prayers of Il Poverello. Assisi draws pilgrims from all over the world, so it was not surprising that there were emigrés from behind the Iron Curtain present that day, eager to greet the new pope. One of them shouted out, “Don’t forget the Church of Silence!” evoking the persecuted local Catholic Churches of central and eastern Europe. “It’s not a Church of Silence anymore,” replied John Paul II, “because it speaks with my voice.”
The KGB was not happy with any of this. It had already been aggravated by several of John Paul II’s gestures that it regarded as “anti-Soviet” in character. The new pope had sent his red cardinal’s zuchetto to the Marian shrine of Ostrabrama in Vilnius, Lithuania (a city once located in Poland). He seemed likely to give a significant Vatican post to Msgr. Audrys Backis, the Paris-born son of the last ambassador of free Lithuania to France. He was known to be sympathetic to the Greek Catholic Church of Ukraine, the largest underground Church in the world and the repository of Ukrainian national identity. And then there was that business about “opening the doors to Christ”—could that be anything other than a direct challenge to the Marxist-Leninist order? Moreover, there were the Poles to worry about: some members of the Polish Communist Party seemed quite happy about the election of their fellow Pole as pope. Black humor was making its way back from the SB in Warsaw to Moscow Center, the KGB headquarters in the Lubyanka: right after his election, the story went, the Pope had contacted the Polish interior minister (the SB’s overseer) and said, “Comrade Minister, your important instructions have been carried out!”1
There would be nothing humorous about the reaction of the KGB, the SB, other Warsaw Pact intelligence agencies, and indeed the entire communist apparatus in central and eastern Europe in the months immediately ahead. The election of John Paul II, the more astute communist leaders recognized, posed a mortal threat to the post-Yalta European order, and perhaps even to the Soviet Union itself. These, after all, were men who could bring themselves to believe that the Vatican during the Ostpolitik of Paul VI was in fact plotting to dismember the USSR—a risible thought, but one that fit without too much difficulty into the paranoid cast of mind that had long characterized communist analysis of the Catholic Church.
Karol Wojtyła had always understood himself as a priest and a bishop, not a politician; that sense of his vocation did not change when he assumed the Chair of Peter as pope. As priest and bishop, however, he had frequently spoken in defense of the dignity of the human person and in defense of religious freedom. He would not—could not—change those convictions as pope. Moreover, if he took his election as an act of Divine Providence rather than as simply the result of papal electoral arithmetic, he had to conclude that his distinctive life experience had brought him to the papacy at this moment in history for a reason.
There are no coincidences, he used to tell his Środowisko friends; what seems coincidence is actually a facet of God’s providence that we don’t understand yet. That a man from behind the Iron Curtain was now pope must mean something, not just for the man but for the Church and the world. He now had a global megaphone with which to teach the truth about freedom. So he would not hesitate to use it.
A determined pope, who would neither seek nor avoid confrontation; an equally determined enemy, which sought confrontation precisely in order to prevail. The stage was set for one of the epic struggles of modern history—made all the more compelling because, despite its surface appearances and what might seem its similarities to other contests for power, it was ultimately a struggle in
the realm of the human spirit.
“BETTER SOLZHENITSYN AS UN SECRETARY-GENERAL THAN A POLISH POPE …”
At the death of Paul VI on August 6, 1978, the Vatican’s Ostpolitik was fifteen years old and could count a number of accomplishments, as diplomatic achievement is normally calculated. Agreements of various sorts had been reached with several communist governments, including those of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia; the Yugoslavs had even reestablished full diplomatic relations with the Holy See. Cardinal Mindszenty had been coaxed out of his self-imposed internment in the U.S. Embassy in Budapest and a successor appointed. Archbishop Beran had agreed to leave Czechoslovakia for Roman exile and a cardinal’s red hat; the government had agreed to his being replaced by an apostolic administrator. Archbishop Agostino Casaroli, architect of the strategy of salvare il salvabile—saving what could be saved—had traveled several times to Poland for official discussions and had secured the first formal Vatican diplomatic contacts with the Soviet Union in half a century. In 1975, Casaroli had signed the Helsinki Final Act, with its “Basket Three” guarantees of human rights, on behalf of the Holy See. The winds of history seemed to be blowing a bit more freely across what Casaroli had perceived in the early 1960s as the “vast immobile swamp” behind the Iron Curtain.
Some of the cardinal-electors who gathered in Rome to choose a successor to Paul VI were not enthusiastic about the Ostpolitik, however.2 Various cardinals knew that the four new bishops Casaroli had ordained in Czechoslovakia in 1973 were of dubious loyalty and were openly acquiescent to the most hard-line regime in the Soviet bloc; at the same time, the underground Catholic Churches in Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia flourished, suffered, and—as Paul VI had feared—produced aberrations such as a married bishop. Yes, what some regarded as the Mindszenty logjam had been broken in Hungary; but the Church there was now completely under the thumb of the Kádár regime and was withering away as a result. Stefan Wyszyński believed that the Holy See was on the verge of making a catastrophic mistake by putting an apostolic delegate or nuncio into Warsaw, who would function as a kind of on-site Vatican overseer for central and eastern European affairs while undercutting the Polish primate’s position with the Polish government. Cardinals who were directly affected by the Ostpolitik (such as Wyszyński) or who were indirectly affected by it (such as the Germans) believed that, while Casaroli was a man of great diplomatic skill, he had been far too accommodating in his negotiations. The issue of the Ostpolitik must have been rather broadly discussed in Rome during the interregnum; bits of the conversation eventually found their way back to the Stasi, the East German secret intelligence service.3
These worries—which, for a man like Wyszyński, were matters of ecclesiastical life and death—were one facet of the broader concern that quickly surfaced during the post-Paul VI interregnum: the fear that the Catholic Church was losing its edge and that the Church’s higher leadership was losing its grip. That fear was not confined to what the international media always called the “conservative” party in the College of Cardinals; cardinals such as Vienna’s Franz König, a major progressive force at Vatican II and an early agent of the Ostpolitik, were also worried.4 Thus the Ostpolitik came in for more criticism than it had likely ever received before, during the daily meetings of cardinals after Pope Paul’s death and in the prattiche, the “exercises” or informal discussions among the electors about papal candidates, in late August 1978.
To what degree Albino Luciani, who was elected pope on August 26, 1978, would have stiffened the Ostpolitik will never be known; the man who took the unprecedented papal double name of John Paul I died after only thirty-three days in office. But it seems unlikely, given the criticisms during the interregnum, that there would have been no changes. In any event, John Paul I’s brief pontificate was marked by one moment of high drama in the Catholic contest with communism. On September 5, 1978, the new pope received Metropolitan Nikodim of Leningrad, one of the six presidents of the World Council of Churches and a man who struck many Westerners as deeply pious. The KGB knew Nikodim as ADAMANT, as it knew his secretary, Nikolai Lvovich Tserpitsky (code name VLADIMIR). At the end of his private audience with John Paul, ADAMANT suffered a massive heart attack and died in the Pope’s arms. John Paul I later remarked that Nikodim had spoken “the most beautiful words about the Church I have ever heard” during their meeting; his last words, as the Pope held the fallen bishop, were said to have been “I am not a KGB agent.” But he was.5
Three weeks after losing the services of ADAMANT, KGB headquarters issued a secret order, #00122: “Measures to Strengthen Agent Operational Work in the Struggle with the Subversive Activity of Foreign Clerical Centers and Hostile Elements among Church People and Sectarians.” That gloriously Stalinist title notwithstanding, the order offers a window into the mind-set of Moscow Center the day before John Paul I died; according to Vasili Mitrokhin’s notes, it included the following analysis in which concerns about the Vatican certainly played a role:
Under the pretense of concern for the freedom of belief and the rights of believers in the USSR, imperialist intelligence services and foreign anti-Soviet centers are organizing ideological sabotage, aimed at undermining the moral and political unity of Soviet society and undermining the basis of the Socialist system; they sought to discredit the Soviet state and social order, incite religious organizations towards confrontations with the state and stimulate the emergence of an anti-Soviet underground among sectarians. With encouragement from abroad, hostile elements have launched active organizational and provocational activity aimed at forming illegal groups and organizations within the sectarian milieu, setting up printing presses and establishing contacts with foreign clerical centers.6
In the context of that analysis, historian Andrzej Paczkowski’s characterization of Karol Wojtyła’s election on October 16, 1978, is not exaggerated: the election of a Pole as pope was “an event … whose consequences [were] difficult to overestimate”—for Poland, for the future of the Catholic contest with communism, and for the Cold War.7 The KGB had targeted Wojtyła for surveillance under its PROGRESS operation since 1971; PROGRESS used the infiltration of “illegals”—foreigners often masquerading as businessmen—to monitor the activities of those suspected of subversion. On October 17, the day after Wojtyła’s election, the KGB rezident in Warsaw, Vadim Pavlov, sent Moscow Center an SB assessment of the man who had just become Pope John Paul II. The assessment suggests that the SB’s agents and informers at the Kraków Corpus Christi processions and the Marian pilgrimages to Piekary śląskie had been taking careful notes:
Wojtyła holds extreme anti-communist views. Without openly opposing the Socialist system, he has criticized the way in which the state agencies of the Polish People’s Republic have functioned, making the following accusations: that the basic human rights of Polish citizens are restricted; that there is an unacceptable exploitation of the workers, whom “the Catholic Church must protect against the workers’ government;” that the activities of the Catholic Church are restricted and Catholics treated as second-class citizens; that an extensive campaign is being conducted to convert society to atheism and impose an alien ideology on the people; that the Catholic Church is denied its proper cultural role, thereby depriving Polish culture of its national treasures.8
Jerzy Turowicz, Wojtyła’s longtime friend and editor at Tygodnik Powszechny, got a pithier reaction to John Paul II’s election from a distinguished Italian journalist who, Turowicz knew, had good Soviet connections: Moscow, the journalist told Turowicz, “would prefer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as Secretary-General of the United Nations than a Pole as ope.”9 Solzhenitsyn himself was convinced that something important had happened. When the news of Wojtyła’s election reached the Nobel laureate in his exile in Cavendish, Vermont, he threw out his arms and exclaimed, “It’s a miracle! It’s the first positive event since World War I and it’s going to change the face of the world!”10 Solzhenitsyn, who admired Stefan Wyszyński, did not know Karol Woj
tyła personally, but he knew what his election meant: the Catholic resistance to communism would be rooted in religious conviction and expressed through the instruments and symbols of culture, which Solzhenitsyn believed were the strongest and most effective weapons available.11
The tremendous outpouring of joy in Poland when Wojtyła’s election was announced was described to the East German Stasi in some detail by CLEMENS, an agent who happened to be in Kraków on October 16, 1978, and who padded his report with speculations on a new axis of power involving Wojtyła as pope and the Polish-born Zbigniew Brzeziński as U.S. national security adviser.12 Whatever it may have thought of CLEMENS’s geopolitical analysis, its own acute sense of self-preservation made it advisable for the Polish communist government to observe the proprieties and send an official delegation to Rome for the great outdoor Mass in St. Peter’s Square on October 22, 1978, which marked the solemn inauguration of John Paul II’s service as pope. During the course of the lengthy service, the Soviet ambassador to Italy leaned over to Henryk Jabłoński, the Polish president, and acidly remarked that “the greatest achievement of the Polish People’s Republic was to give the world a Polish pope.”13 Whatever modest hopes the Soviets may have entertained of controlling this new menace through pressures on the Polish Church were quickly dispelled during the ceremony. The masters of the Kremlin may have missed the significance of a typical gesture of loyalty and gratitude from Karol Wojtyła: John Paul II rearranged the normal order of precedence among the cardinals paying him homage in order to give pride of place to communism’s old enemy, Stefan Wyszyński, whom the new pope stepped down from the papal throne to embrace. But they would have had to have been completely deaf to miss the challenge contained in the Pope’s homiletic appeal to fearlessness and openness:
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