John Paul II respected Mikhail Gorbachev as a man of principle, who was prepared to risk his power and his position for the sake of what he believed to be true—which was Karol Wojtyła’s acid test in measuring politicians.104 Yet, while Gorbachev was undoubtedly a key actor in the drama of the collapse of communism, his role was rather different from that played by John Paul II and Ronald Reagan, who truly were architects of the end of the Cold War. The Polish pope and the American president had “destinations in mind and maps for reaching them,” as John Lewis Gaddis points out.105 Gorbachev had no such map, and it seems likely that, until the end came in 1991, he still held firm to the possibility of reform communism, a hybrid that Reagan and John Paul deemed impossible. Gorbachev was not prepared to hold the “Socialist Commonwealth” together by armed force, a point he made to a Comecon leadership meeting in Moscow in November 1986. Yet as Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin put it, “though the east European regimes were, predictably, unwilling to share the secret with their subjects, it was only a matter of time before they discovered it”—and acted on it. Moreover, Gorbachev’s miscalculation of the possibilities of reform communism in the USSR seems to have been presaged by a similar misapprehension about what would likely unfold in the late 1980s in the Soviet external empire; as Andrew and Mitrokhin note, “It did not occur to Gorbachev … that he might be opening the way to the end of the communist era in eastern Europe. He expected the hard-liners, when they could hold out no longer, to be succeeded by a generation of little Gorbachevs anxious to emulate the reforms being introduced in Moscow. Few peacetime miscalculations have had such momentous consequences.”106
It may have surprised a Polish audience that Cardinal Agostino Casaroli would put it in such terms, but it should have been no surprise to those who knew his mind and his understanding of the way the world worked that in a lecture in Kraków on June 2, 1990, the Vatican secretary of state described Mikhail Gorbachev as “someone who ran to the rescue to repair by democratic means the mortal wounds on the socio-political, moral, and economic levels inflicted on peoples during the long dictatorship.”107 But there was no rescue, and no rescuer.
What difference, then, did John Paul II make, in the last phases of the Cold War? And what were the differences in John Paul II that made the John Paul II difference in the world?
In retrospect, it now seems likely that communism would have collapsed at some point because of its inability to compete in an international economic environment increasingly dominated by information technology. But why did communism collapse in 1989, rather than in 1999, or 2009, or 2019, and why did it collapse in the way it did—in the main, without mass bloodshed, which was the twentieth century’s normal procedure for achieving great social change? No account of the largely nonviolent collapse of communism in 1989 (rather than in 1999, or 2009, or 2019) will be complete or satisfactory unless it takes full account of the revolution of conscience that the Pope ignited in June 1979. The Nine Days of John Paul II were the trigger for all the rest. And, of course: no John Paul II, no Nine Days.
As for the differences inside John Paul II that account for the difference he made in the world, perhaps the crucial difference was that the Pope knew communism from the inside: he had taken the full measure of its theoretical flaws and practical failures; he had successfully resisted both its seductions and its brutalities; he was battle tested as a leader, in both strategy and tactics. He was an intellectual with deep convictions about the integrity and power of popular piety and the traditions of Polish culture. His nationalism, however, was not narrow, but rather of the sort that led him to appreciate other nations and their cultures. Thus he was a patriotic Pole who appreciated and could see possibilities for change inherent in the struggles to preserve national identity in Lithuania and Ukraine (which many Poles disdained), and who had a deep appreciation for the long-repressed spiritual culture of Russia (which many Poles loathed). He was a man who took decisions after much thought and even more prayer; still, he was willing to trust his own instincts and experience, even when those instincts collided with the caution of Vatican diplomats. He was shrewd, deploying those diplomats and taking advantage of an Ostpolitik with which he disagreed for whatever bits of tactical advantage those deployments might yield. Yet he insisted on continuing his own ministry of moral witness far beyond what the diplomats thought appropriate, or even prudent, even as he could be cautious when caution was required. He brought to the papacy a unique and formidable combination of insight, experience, and courage. Those qualities made him the pivotal figure in the defeat of European communism.
Similar qualities of intellect and spirit would, over the remaining decade and a half of his pontificate, allow him to offer the world a singularly powerful witness to the human truths he believed were most fully captured in the faith of the Catholic Church: truths about living and, finally, truths about dying—truths about beginnings and ends, and about ends and beginnings.
Witold Pilecki as a prisoner and resistance organizer at Auschwitz. (Institute of National Remembrance, Warsaw)
Witold Pilecki, prisoner of Poland’s postwar communist regime. (Institute of National Remembrance, Warsaw)
Exhumation of the bodies of Polish officers murdered by the Soviet NKVD at Katyn in 1940. (Institute of National Remembrance, Warsaw)
Father Karol Wojtyła and young friends, June 1952. (Stanisław Rybicki)
Father Karol Wojtyła in Zakopane, April 1953. (Danuta Ciesielska)
Cardinal Karol Wojtyła preaching in defense of human rights during the 1970s. (Archives of the Archdiocese of Katowice)
Confrontation at Gdańsk, 1970. (Institute of National Remembrance, Warsaw)
The men’s pilgrimage to Piekary śląskie, May 27, 1973. (Archives of the Archdiocese of Katowice)
“Be not afraid!”: St. Peter’s Square, October 22, 1978. (L’Osservatore Romano)
Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński, October 23, 1978. (L’Osservatore Romano)
Lech Wałęsa and Mieczysław Jagielski sign the Gdańsk Accords, August 31, 1980. (Institute of National Remembrance, Warsaw)
The Three Crosses Monument in Gdańsk, December 1980. (Institute of National Remembrance, Warsaw)
John Paul II celebrates Mass for Solidarity delegation in the papal apartment chapel, January 18, 1981. (L’Osservatore Romano)
John Paul II exchanges gifts with Solidarity delegation, January 1981. (L’Osservatore Romano)
PART TWO
KENOSIS
The Last Years of Pope John Paul II
2000–2005
CHAPTER FIVE
The Great Jubilee of 2000
Up to Jerusalem
November 10, 1994 Pope John Paul II issues apostolic letter, Tertio Millennio Adveniente, “On Preparation for the Jubilee of the Year 2000.”
November 29, 1998 John Paul II issues Mysterium Incarnationis, Bull of Indiction of the Great Jubilee of 2000.
June 29, 1999 John Paul II publishes Letter Concerning Pilgrimage to
the Places Linked to the History of Salvation.
December 24, 1999 Pope John Paul II opens the Holy Door of St. Peter’s Basilica and solemnly inaugurates the Great Jubilee of 2000.
December 25, 1999 Opening of the Holy Door at the Basilica of St. John Lateran.
December 31, 1999 Te Deum celebrated in St. Peter’s; papal midnight blessing at the turn into the new year.
January 1, 2000 Opening of the Holy Door at the Basilica of St. Mary Major.
January 2, 2000 Jubilee of Children.
January 18, 2000 Ecumenical opening of the Holy Door at the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls.
February 2, 2000 Jubilee of Consecrated Life.
February 11, 2000 Jubilee of the Sick and of Health Care Workers.
February 18, 2000 Jubilee of Artists.
February 19, 2000 Jubilee of Permanent Deacons.
February 23, 2000 John Paul II’s jubilee pilgrimage to the holy places begins in Rome with the C
ommemoration of Abraham, Our Father in Faith; Jubilee of the Roman Curia.
February 24–26, 2000 John Paul II’s jubilee pilgrimage continues at Mount Sinai in Egypt.
February 25–27, 2000 Jubilee Convocation to Study the Implementation of Vatican II.
March 12, 2000 Jubilee “Day of Pardon” in St. Peter’s Basilica on the First Sunday of Lent.
March 19, 2000 Jubilee of Artisans.
March 20, 2000 John Paul II looks into the Holy Land from the Memorial of Moses on Mount Nebo.
March 21, 2000 John Paul visits one of the traditional sites of Jesus’s baptism in the River Jordan, then flies to Israel.
March 22, 2000 John Paul II in Bethlehem.
March 23, 2000 John Paul II, in Jerusalem, celebrates Mass in the Cenacle, visits the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, and addresses an interreligious meeting.
March 24, 2000 In Galilee, John Paul II celebrates Mass on the Mount of Beatitudes, visits Tabgha, and prays at Peter’s house in Capernaum.
March 25, 2000 John Paul celebrates Mass in the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth, prays at the Garden of Gethsemane in Jerusalem, and visits the Greek Orthodox patriarch of Jerusalem.
March 26, 2000 John Paul II’s Holy Land pilgrimage concludes with prayer at the Western Wall of the Temple, Mass at the Holy Sepulcher, and prayer at the Twelfth Station of the Cross.
On the afternoon of March 26, 2000, Pope John Paul II had a favor to ask of his Israeli hosts.
It was his last day in Jerusalem, the conclusion of a pilgrimage that had riveted the world’s attention and fulfilled a spiritual and pastoral ambition the Pope had nursed for a quarter century—to walk where Jesus had Wal ked. The universal pastor of the Church, he believed, should embody the truth about the Church: that it is always a Church in via, a Church “on the way” to the New Jerusalem and the fulfillment of God’s saving purposes. How better to embody the pilgrim Church than for the chief shepherd to go himself to “the places where God chose to pitch his ‘tent’ among us,” as John Paul once put it?1
The Pope had begun that brilliant spring Sunday morning in Jerusalem by praying at the Western Wall, the sole surviving part of Herod’s Temple, after which he celebrated Mass at what tradition regards as the tomb of Jesus. It had already been a full day, especially for a man two months shy of his eightieth birthday who walked with difficulty because of a form of Parkinson’s disease and a not altogether successful hip replacement. But the cup was not yet full for John Paul II. So he asked his Israeli hosts, whose security forces had code-named him OLD FRIEND, if they would allow him to return privately to the Basilica of the Holy Sepulcher, so that he could pray at the place where Jesus had died, which he had not had an opportunity to visit earlier in the day.
Having regathered their wits after the shock of the Pope’s request, the security forces did the best they could to clear the warren of streets around the basilica so that OLD FRIEND could do what he believed he must do. The traditional site of the crucifixion, the Twelfth Station of the Cross, is on the second floor of the basilica. So seventy-nine-year-old Karol Wojtyła, Pope John Paul II, returned to Christianity’s holiest site, and then, slowly and in pain, walked up the narrow spiral of a stone staircase so that he could spend a half hour in prayer at the place where the Lord he had served throughout his life had laid down his life.
John Paul II had been Bishop of Rome and universal pastor of the Catholic Church for twenty-one years, five months, and ten days when he walked the last steps of the Via Crucis, the Way of the Cross, to the Twelfth Station in Jerusalem. On October 16, 1978, the day of his election as pope, the Primate of Poland, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński, had told Karol Wojtyła that he had been chosen by the Holy Spirit to lead the Church into the third millennium. Since 1994, John Paul had led a sometimes reluctant and sometimes uncomprehending Church in an extensive preparation for celebrating the two thousandth anniversary of the Incarnation—the moment when, according to Christian conviction, “God chose to pitch his ‘tent’ among us” in a definitive way. The Pope had come to think of the Great Jubilee of 2000 and the turn into the new millennium as the “key” to his pontificate, which was already one of the most consequential in history. But what kind of key was this?
John Paul II had become the most visible man in human history, having been seen live by more people than anyone who ever lived. Yet he had always tried to make his visibility into a transparency: for in his mind, his task was not to point to himself but to make himself a pointer, directing the people of the Church and the world to Jesus Christ. “Don’t look at me, look at Christ; don’t look to me, look to Christ”—that had been his message in an extraordinarily diverse array of settings throughout the world.
And why look to Jesus Christ? Because, as the Pope had said in many variations on the same great theme, Jesus Christ is the answer to the question that is every human life.
That was why he had to go to the Twelfth Station. Karol Wojtyła’s rich and complex spiritual life had been formed in part by more than a half century of reflection on the great sixteenth-century Spanish Carmelite mystics, St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Ávila. For these Spanish Carmelite reformers, as for so many other saints, kenosis, the outpouring of self in conformity to the self-sacrifice of the crucified Christ, was the key to the spiritual life—and thus the key to the world and its story. So Karol Wojtyła had to go to the Twelfth Station to fulfill a desire of his heart and soul. Yet his slow walk up those stone stairs to Calvary was more than a personal matter, for he had long since ceased to belong to himself. It was a matter of his vocation, for a Catholic priest is ordained to bring his people ever more closely into the paschal mystery of Jesus Christ, crucified and risen.
Karol Wojtyła, Pope John Paul II, lived in the conviction that Christ had taken the world’s fear upon himself at Calvary and, in a perfect act of obedience to the will of God the Father, had offered himself and the world’s fear in a perfect sacrifice—to which God had given the perfect answer on Easter Sunday, by raising Jesus from the dead. At Calvary, John Paul II believed, Christ had conquered fear and the world had been empowered to live, not without fear, but beyond fear.
“Be not afraid!” had been the antiphon of his pontificate since that glorious autumn morning of October 22, 1978, when he had challenged the Church to fearlessness and the world to a new openness to the person and message of Jesus Christ. “Be not afraid!” could be a compelling challenge rather than a trite slogan because Christ had taken all the world’s fear upon himself on the cross. That was why Pope John Paul II had to go to Calvary: for the fearlessness he preached and embodied in a world-changing pontificate all began there.
THE YEAR 2000
Viewed conventionally, the pontificate of John Paul II divides roughly into two parts. From October 1978 through August 1991, the pontificate’s focal point was John Paul’s challenge to communism, vindicated by the Revolution of 1989 in east central Europe and the collapse of the Soviet Union in August 1991. After the May 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus, in which John Paul reflected on the epic events of the recent past and scouted the social, political, economic, and cultural terrain of the postcommunist future, the pontificate pivots so that from 1992 until the end of the story in 2005, the focal point is the Great Jubilee of 2000. There is something to be said for this neat periodization, but the deeper truth of the matter is that John Paul II was acutely aware of the coming new millennium from the day of his election—a point not readily grasped by some of the Catholic Church’s bishops and cardinals.2
To more than a few senior churchmen, as to much of the world, the year 2000 was a calendrical happenstance of no particular significance. No one really knew when Jesus had become incarnate of the Virgin Mary (as the Creed put it) and born in Bethlehem (as Scripture and tradition held). Many scholars believed that, thanks to medieval dating errors, Jesus of Nazareth was likely born in what we call 7 B.C. So why bother celebrating 2000? Then there were the mathematicians, who reminded everyone that,
as there had been no year “0” between what the conventions called “B.C.” and “A.D.,” the year 2000 was the last year of the second millennium, not the first year of the third. Indeed, the people who seemed most interested in “2000” were the world’s apocalyptics, among whom ancient millenarian expectations were given a new, technological twist: fear of a “Y2K” computer glitch that would shut down the world.
The dubieties of the churchmen and the apocalypticism of the millenarians made little sense, and no difference, to Karol Wojtyła. His immersion in Polish culture and its reverence for anniversaries had taught him something about the spiritual rhythms of time and the perennial human need to acknowledge those rhythms—which was an important way of acknowledging that the human story could not be reduced to a sequence of random accidents with no inherent meaning or direction. Moreover, his life as a philosopher had convinced him that the post-Enlightenment Western intellectual world’s disdain for any notion of purpose in nature could, and did, have dramatic effects on the way human beings think about themselves, their historical responsibilities, and their possibilities in shaping the future. In some corners of the popular imagination, a random world led to random human beings who were, at best, congealed stardust. That self-image, John Paul II thought, had a lot to do with the twentieth century’s moral confusions, which had had horrific consequences: they had turned the twentieth century into an abattoir. Restoring a sense of historic trajectory and historic possibility to the human story was essential, he was convinced, to the rescue of civilization itself.
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