Three years after the “dry kayaks,” Krzysztof Rybicki, a veteran Środowisko member, was struck with cancer. The Pope called him for a long conversation prior to major surgery on January 6, 2003; and when Rybicki had to return to the hospital in early March, John Paul called him on the dying man’s cell phone: “Krzysiu, do you remember how we used to sing carols together? We can sing together even now.” And they did. Krzysztof Rybicki’s widow, Maria, took her children and grandchildren to see the Pope at Christmas 2003; when the dinner conversation one night turned to a vacation trip they had made in 1957, John Paul II, the man who cherished the memory of his friendships, described the trip in great detail, as if it had been a recent excursion, not something that had happened forty-six years before.
Stanisław and Danuta Rybicki, two more of the original members of what became Środowisko, met Wujek for the last time in January 2005, bringing along their granddaughter, Mela Rybicka, who was studying Hungarian philology. John Paul greeted the family and then said to Mela, “Praised be Jesus Christ!”—in Hungarian. During their conversation, the Pope had Mela sit next to him and started querying her: “Tell me what the kids are interested in today.”5
That same month, Cardinal Camillo Ruini, the Pope’s vicar for the Diocese of Rome, came to see the Pope on business and John Paul asked, “When are we going to visit the parishes?” Archbishop Dziwisz replied, “Holy Father, the cardinal visits the parishes now.” At which the Pope said, whimsically but jokingly, “But I’m the Bishop of Rome.…” It was, Cardinal Ruini remembered, another indication of how “terribly important” it was for John Paul II to be able to celebrate Mass with the people of his diocese.6 At the end of the pontificate, of the 336 parishes of the Diocese of Rome, there were only 16 he had not visited in person or invited to Mass in the Vatican.
On January 24, 2005, John Paul received a Spanish bishop on an ad limina visit. At the end of their conversation, the Spaniard began to get emotional and said something to the effect of “Your Holiness, this is probably the last time we will be seeing each other.” To which the indomitable John Paul II replied, “Why, what’s the matter? Are you sick?”7
THINKING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
In the summer of 1993, during his weeks at Castel Gandolfo, John Paul II had a lengthy series of conversations with the Polish philosophers Józef Tischner and Krzysztof Michalski, who with the Pope’s encouragement had launched the Vienna-based Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen [Institute for Human Sciences] in 1981.8 The conversations, which were taped, began with questions probing the Pope’s understanding of the meaning of the two twentieth-century totalitarian systems and their fall, but the discussion soon ranged widely over the modern and postmodern political and cultural landscape. The tapes were transcribed, with the thought that the conversations might eventually make a book.
After a lengthy and sporadic editorial process that further broadened the analytic lens beyond Nazism and communism, Memory and Identity: Personal Reflections, was published in February 2005 and strongly reflected the Pope’s concerns in the early to mid-1990s about the postcommunist situation in central and eastern Europe.9 Yet the book also returned to perennial issues in Karol Wojtyła’s intellectual work, and in that respect was the final movement in the unfinished symphony of Wojtyła’s philosophy.
During his years of teaching at the Catholic University of Lublin, Wojtyła had come to the view that the deficiencies of Enlightenment ethical theory were one root of the crisis of Western thought and culture. Putting moral theory on a firmer philosophical base was thus at the center of the intellectual project of Wojtyła and three other Lublin philosophers—Father Tadeusz Styczeń, S.D.S., Father Andrzej Szostek, M.I.C., and Dr. Wojciech Chudy. As the title of Chudy’s habilitation thesis put it, modern philosophy had been caught in the “trap of reflection,” thinking about thinking-about-thinking, rather than thinking through to the truth of things. This was a particularly urgent problem for philosophical ethics, which needed a secure foundation in the aftermath of the chasm caused by David Hume. As philosophical realists, the Lublin quartet was determined to get to the moral truth of things through a careful analysis of things as they are. “Oughts,” they were convinced, could indeed be discerned from a penetrating analysis of “is”—as when a careful study of the dynamics of human personhood discloses certain basic human rights that must be respected.
Memory and Identity also revisited Wojtyła’s critique of both Kantian and utilitarian ethics as insufficient to provide a secure cultural foundation for the exercise of freedom. Freedom, John Paul insists, is both a gift and a task; thus freedom rightly understood is not willfulness, nor should free men and women be content with aiming for the greatest good of the greatest number. Rather, freedom is a gift (from God, believers contend) that is to be used to seek what we can know, objectively, to be good. That concept of freedom can be defended philosophically, John Paul argued. It is further illuminated, though, by the gift of faith, which helps us to see that God has given humanity a “particular mission: to accomplish the truth about ourselves and our world … [in order to] be able to structure the visible world according to truth, correctly using it to serve our purposes, without abusing it.”10
Memory and Identity also took up questions about the future of Europe. John Paul was at particular pains to emphasize that “Europe” is only Europe because of its evangelization:
Why do we begin our discussion of Europe by speaking of evangelization? Perhaps the simplest answer is that it was evangelization which formed Europe, giving birth to the civilization of its peoples and their cultures. As the faith spread throughout the continent, it favored the formation of individual European peoples, sowing the seeds of cultures different in character, but linked together by a patrimony of common values derived from the Gospel. In this way the pluralism of national cultures developed upon a platform of values shared throughout the continent.11
This was not to “devalue the influence of the ancient world” of Greece and Rome. Rather, it was to recognize how the Church had “absorbed and transformed the older cultural patrimony.” The result of that transformation was “the Christian universalism of the Middle Ages,” during which Europe’s evangelization “seemed not only complete, but mature: not just in terms of philosophical and theological thought, but also in sacred art and architecture, in social solidarity (guilds, confraternities, hospitals).”12 That universalism was overturned by the Reformation, the wars of religion, and the Enlightenment. And yet even the Enlightenment could not, and did not, invent “Europe” anew; its “positive fruits,” including “the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity,” were based on “values which are rooted in the Gospel.” By the same token, the Enlightenment compelled the Church to a “profound rediscovery of the truths contained in the Gospel,” which was accomplished by modern Catholic social doctrine from Leo XIII on.
The recovery of its moral culture would be essential if the Europe of the future were to avoid the lethal errors of the Europe of the twentieth century, in which, as John Paul reminded his conversation partners, Hitler had come to power through democratic means (which, to be sure, he promptly abrogated, albeit with the consent of a “regularly elected parliament”13). Poland, he believed, had something important to share with a Europe recovering from its twentieth-century wounds: the experience of a nation that had survived the totalitarian flail by moral and cultural conviction; the experience of a country that had not experienced the wars of religion in the sixteenth century; the experience of a country in which the state did not claim to be king of its citizens’ consciences.14
Memory and Identity was a powerful reminder that, for John Paul II, “philosophy … leads you to theology and Christology,” as the Italian scholar Rocco Buttiglione once put it.15 The proper “starting point” for understanding the human person, the Pope insisted, must always be creatureliness: “man’s creation in the image and likeness of God.” It is ultimately futile to try to understand the human world, it
s strivings, and its passions by reference only to “other visible creatures,” because such an approach neglects what is most distinctive about the human being: our being created according to “the divine Prototype, the Word made flesh, the eternal Son of the Father.” And so the “primary and definitive source” for getting to the truth “inside” the human person was, is, and always will be the Holy Trinity, that communion of self-giving love and receptivity in which the Law of the Gift is eternal reality.16 As in other writings, John Paul II was proposing that men and women raise, not lower, their sights. It is ultimately by looking up, not down and not simply around, that human beings come to know the full truth about our origins, nature, and destiny.
History, he concluded, is not only horizontal; history has a vertical dimension, because “it is not only we who write our history—God writes it with us,” and “the deepest meaning of history goes beyond history and finds its full explanation in Christ, the God-man.” We are embedded in time, and thus in memory. Yet “Christian hope projects itself beyond the limits of time.… Humanity is called to advance beyond death, even beyond time, towards the definitive onset of eternity alongside the glorious Christ in the communion of the Trinity. ‘Their hope is full of immortality’ [Wisdom 3.4].” In the time beyond time, memory and identity, purified, are one with the eternal.
Some critics found Memory and Identity excessively Polish; John Paul II, they argued, was suggesting that there was some special providential design at work in Poland’s history and national identity. It was a familiar complaint and echoed other such criticisms throughout the pontificate, criticisms that sometimes reflected cultural and ethnic stereotypes, and sometimes emerged from uncritical assumptions about modernity and its ways. Against such critics, Father Richard John Neuhaus, one of John Paul’s premier interpreters in the United States, described the book as “provocatively wise,” in an essay published shortly after the Pope’s death:
Against the airy abstractions of secular modernity, John Paul displayed a way of being in the world that is formed by keeping faith with the memories, sufferings, and aspirations of a particular people. He was that rare thing: a whole man. The many dimensions of his interests, energies, gifts, and inspirations were all of a piece. He refused modernity’s imperious demand to choose between the universal and the particular, the world and his place in the world. Critics referred to him as the “Polish pope,” implying that he was parochial. Far from apologizing for who he was, he invited others to be the best of who they are. It was as a son of Poland that he was a father to the world.17
“I THINK THEY’RE FINALLY BEGINNING TO UNDERSTAND HIM”
According to Stanisław Dziwisz, the suffering John Paul II endured during the last period of his life was not only physical, terrible as that was, but also spiritual: the suffering of a man compelled to suspend or even eliminate “activities that were part of his mission as universal shepherd.” Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger understood. In John Paul’s life, the dean of the College of Cardinals said, “the word ‘cross’ is not just a word.”18
Karol Józef Wojtyła, Pope John Paul II, began to walk the way to Calvary for the last time on Sunday, January 30, 2005. The Pope had difficulty breathing during the Sunday Angelus address from the papal apartment window and, at first, it was thought that he had contracted the flu. But the situation worsened and quickly deteriorated into what the doctors described as “acute laryngotracheitis aggravated by a laryngospasm”—in lay language, a throat infection that was causing spasms that made breathing very difficult. On January 31, the Holy See Press Office announced that the day’s audiences had been suspended. By dinnertime on February 1, the Pope was finding it harder and harder to breathe, and the decision was made to take him immediately to the Policlinico Gemelli, where a special tenth-floor suite was always available in case he needed it. Archbishop Leonardo Sandri, the Sostituto of the Secretariat of State, or papal chief of staff, met the struggling Pope in the Cortile Sesto Quinto at about 10 P.M., as John Paul was being led to an ambulance, and asked, “Holy Father, bless me.” Gasping for breath, John Paul couldn’t say the words of a blessing, but blessed Sandri silently.19
The international media erupted in a frenzy of speculation about the Pope’s imminent death, but John Paul’s condition seemed to improve over the next few days at the Gemelli, which, given his frequent stays there, he jokingly referred to as “Vatican III” (“Vatican I” being the Apostolic Palace and “Vatican II” being Castel Gandolfo). He returned to a modified official schedule, working from his hospital suite, and on February 5 received Cardinal Ratzinger for their weekly meeting to discuss the business of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Ratzinger later recalled the way in which John Paul conducted his office from the hospital:
The Pope suffered visibly, but he was fully conscious and very much present. I had simply gone for a working meeting, because I needed him to make a few decisions. In spite of his suffering, the Holy Father paid close attention to what I was saying. He explained his decisions to me in a few words, gave me his blessing, and addressed his parting words to me in German, assuring me of his friendship and trust.20
John Paul appeared at his hospital room window for the Angelus on Sunday, February 6; his message was read for him by Archbishop Sandri, with the Pope managing to articulate parts of the Angelus prayer and the sign of the cross. A flap ensued when some in the media suggested that what had seemed to be the Pope’s voice was in fact a tape recording. Joaquín Navarro-Valls denied the rumor that night, but the very fact that it spread so rapidly was an indication that at least some in the media were determined to follow their own story line—“the Pope is dying and the Vatican won’t admit it”—rather than the facts at hand. The abdication scenario, which seemed to have been at least temporarily buried, was resurrected the following day by some ill-conceived comments from the cardinal secretary of state, Angelo Sodano, who in off-the-cuff remarks to the press on February 7, said, when asked about the possibility of a papal resignation, “If there is a man who loves the Church more than anybody else, who is guided by the Holy Spirit, if there is a man who has marvelous wisdom, that’s him. We must have great faith in the Pope. He knows what to do.”21 The cardinal’s remarks were promptly, and not surprisingly, interpreted as meaning that resignation or abdication was on the menu of possibilities, which it manifestly was not.
Two days after this unnecessary controversy, John Paul II presided over a concelebrated Mass of Ash Wednesday and received ashes from Archbishop Dziwisz, who nonetheless recalled that he felt “extremely happy” at how well the Pope seemed to be recovering. The doctors evidently agreed, for John Paul returned to the Vatican the next night. Gemelli patients lined the Pope’s path applauding as he left; the Pope waved, climbed into the Popemobile, and was escorted during the five-mile trip back home to “Vatican I” by a motorcade and security guards on foot. The Romans by the thousands lined the streets between the Gemelli and the Vatican, and another crowd was waiting in St. Peter’s Square to welcome him back. Prior to the motorcade, Navarro-Valls told the press that the “acute laryngeal tracheitis” had been cured and that all the tests that had been administered, including a CAT scan, were negative.22
The Pope was back in the papal apartment window on Sunday, February 13, for the weekly Angelus, his message being read by Archbishop Sandri; John Paul managed a wave, a blessing, and a few brief words before giving way to the Sostituto. The Papal Lenten retreat began that day, preached by Bishop Renato Corti of Novara in the Italian Piedmont, on the theme “The Church at the Service of the New and Everlasting Covenant”; it had been almost three decades since Karol Wojtyła had preached the papal and curial retreat on the theme “Sign of Contradiction.” As per the usual custom during the retreat, audiences were suspended.23 Prior to the retreat, important papal business continued: John Paul accepted the resignation of the archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, appointing Archbishop André Vingt-Trois of Tours as Lustiger’s successor.24 On the d
ay after the retreat began, the Pope sent a message of condolence to Portuguese bishop Albino Mamede Cleto of Coimbra on the death of Sister Lúcia dos Santos, the last of the Fátima visionaries, who had died on February 13 at age ninety-seven. “Sister Lúcia,” the Pope wrote, “bequeaths to us an example of great fidelity to the Lord and joyous attachment to his divine will.… I have always felt supported by the daily gift of her prayers, especially during the most difficult moments of trial and suffering. May the Lord reward her for her great and hidden service to the Church.”25
John Paul managed to lead the praying of the Angelus and to deliver his own Angelus message on Sunday, February 20, looking relatively robust to the crowds in St. Peter’s Square. The day before, he had resumed holding audiences, receiving the seventy-seven-year-old Emmanuel III Delly, Patriarch of Babylon of the Chaldeans, whose people continued to suffer persecution from Islamist terrorists in Iraq; and Bishop Renato Corti, whom he thanked for preaching the Lenten retreat. Yet the Pope’s breathing difficulties continued, as the stiffening of his chest muscles due to the Parkinson’s disease made it difficult for him to inhale. Another crisis struck on Wednesday evening, February 23. At dinner that evening, as Stanisław Dziwisz recalled later, “the Pope’s body was convulsed by a new crisis; he was almost asphyxiating.” Cardinal Marian Jaworski, Karol Wojtyła’s old housemate and fellow philosopher, now the Latin-rite archbishop of L’viv in Ukraine, was a dinner guest that evening and immediately gave his old friend the Sacrament of the Sick, anointing him in the papal apartment.26
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