IN THE BELLY OF THE BEAST
MOSCOW, OCTOBER 1990
MOSCOW TODAY, OR AT LEAST THE PARTS OF IT IN WHICH WESTERNERS do business, is the bustling capital of the authoritarian kleptocracy that replaced communism after a brief democratic experiment. At the end of the Soviet period in 1990, however, it was showing the effects of decades of deferred maintenance: broken sidewalks and streets, nonpotable water, broken-down taxis, the fug of old tobacco and unwashed interiors everywhere. The most negotiable form of “currency” for basic consumer goods was a pack or two of Marlboros (each member of our CSIS group was advised to bring several cartons). The tourist rubles we bought were worth less than one-third of what the dollar brought on the ubiquitous black market. The work ethic was notable by its absence, especially in what Westerners thought of as the “service industry.”
We were housed in the Hotel Belgrad near the foreign ministry, a gargantuan structure of Stalinist provenance that looked vaguely like a sinister wedding cake. Members of our group decided to meet in the evening to review that day’s discussion and plan strategy for the next day. And as it was obvious that our rooms were bugged, we decided to get together in the hard-currency saloon in the hotel’s basement, which you could only enter by showing wads of US dollars or deutschemarks; its shrill rock music seemed likely to discourage any eavesdroppers.
The air in that dive was thick with smoke; East German prostitutes lined the walls, eyeing the clientele for potential business; one heavily made-up fraulein plopped herself onto the lap of Leszek Kołakowski and was promptly if politely batted off by the world’s leading intellectual historian of Marxism. The scene was not quite Hieronymus Bosch, but it was close enough to Edvard Munch.
Subsequent events demonstrated that the damage done by communism to Homo sovieticus was so severe that the kind of democratic political culture our group was sketching during conversations with our Russian colleagues couldn’t achieve critical mass quickly enough to prevent a return to authoritarianism. But if our mission to Moscow was a failure in that respect, I took away from that week two indelible memories that shaped my future thought and work.
The first involved Leszek Kołakowski, whom I was meeting for the first time, years after profiting enormously from his masterwork, Main Currents of Marxism. One morning, Leszek, Brad Roberts, and I took a walk through Red Square down to St. Basil’s; nearby, a squalid tent city had been erected by Russians who had come from the countryside to petition Mikhail Gorbachev for a redress of their grievances—which, by the look of things, included severe poverty. Leszek spoke fluent Russian from his days in Stalinist Poland, and as we walked through that sad village of the dispossessed, I was profoundly touched by the courtesy and kindness with which he engaged these poor people.
Leszek’s example reminded me of the empathetic capacities of another Pole, Karol Wojtyła. Here were two men of about the same age (Wojtyła was seven years older); both lived through the horrors of the Nazi occupation and both fought an intellectual battle against the communist usurpation of Poland’s liberties. Yet they were also men of a rare compassion, with an ability to engage others’ suffering that offered the sufferers a measure of hope. Kołakowski’s compassion was rooted in a philosopher’s finely etched perceptions of the human condition. Wojtyła’s compassion grew out of his cross-centered Catholic faith. Yet both were Poles, which suggested that there was something distinctive in Poland’s history of national suffering: it could engender fellow feeling and empathy rather than bitterness and hatred. This was a national experience worth exploring in greater depth.
The second Moscow experience that stuck with me resulted from some unpleasantness caused by the secret police goons lurking about our hotel lobby. The hotel staff was all surly, all the time, but the ferrets were the worst. Brad Roberts and I noticed that they constantly hassled a young man we kept meeting in the lobby, who obviously wanted to practice his English with Anglophones. Having several free hours one day, Brad and I decided to stick it to the goons, and do ourselves a favor, by hiring this young man as a tour guide after he assured us that he knew his way around the main sites in the Kremlin.
We got there on the Moscow subway—its famously elegant stations inaugurating my lifelong distaste for socialist realist sculpture—and walked around that vast enclave for a while before going into one of the three “cathedrals” inside the Kremlin walls. The building had been magnificently renovated for the 1988 millennium of Christianity in Rus’, and as we came up a stone staircase we found ourselves looking at a very large restored fresco of the Last Supper. It was obviously the Last Supper; it couldn’t have been anything else. Yet our young Russian friend turned to Brad and me and asked, with complete sincerity, “Please tell me: who are those men and what are they doing?”
I had read about the effects of state-sponsored atheism but here they were, right in front of me: a bright twentysomething, well-educated and open-minded, with absolutely no idea what one of the most familiar of Christian images was communicating. This young man had been culturally lobotomized by the hatred for religion deep in communism’s DNA; that lobotomy had denied him part of his patrimony. His simple yet somehow plaintive question undoubtedly shaped how I thought about Karol Wojtyła’s war against communism in Poland and his intuition that that war was best fought with the weapons of a revitalized national culture and identity.
ROOKIE VATICANISTA
ROME, MAY 1991 AND MARCH–APRIL 1992
I HAD BEEN TO ROME FOR A FEW DAYS AS A BOY AND RETURNED IN 1988 with Peter Berger, Michael Novak, and Richard John Neuhaus on a weeklong visit that taught me a lot about the touchiness of certain mid-tier Vatican officials when they encountered even friendly criticism of their work. That 1988 excursion was also the occasion for my first extended conversation with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who would prove unfailingly helpful when I was preparing Witness to Hope. It was in May 1991, however, that I began my career as a sort of Vaticanista while looking for Roman clues to John Paul’s role in the collapse of European communism.
The timing was determined by an academic seminar marking the centenary of Rerum Novarum, held at the Centro Nazareth and sponsored by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. The conference papers and conversation made it abundantly clear that the Vatican bureaucrats in the Roman Curia, who were responsible for disseminating Catholic social doctrine, and the Catholic social thought professoriate in the Roman universities hadn’t begun to understand, much less come to terms with, the dramatic developments in the social doctrine represented by Centesimus Annus.
The things that most engaged me about the new encyclical—its empirical sensitivity, its insistence on culture as the primary driver of history, its linkage of freedom and moral truth, its emphasis on civil society as essential to democracy, and its description of creativity as a principal source of wealth in the postindustrial world—went completely unremarked at the conference. That likely reflected the fact that not a single American had been invited to offer a paper, although the United States was arguably the place where Catholic social doctrine had been taken most seriously over the previous century and where the liveliest debate over Centesimus Annus was underway. This was disappointing, but it taught me two important lessons: the Church in the United States was not taken seriously as a source of ideas in the Roman Curia and the Roman universities; and in those universities, the exhaust fumes of liberation theology and its Marxist understanding of the dynamics of history were still befogging the atmosphere. From these lessons I drew a conclusion that stood me in good stead as I began to grasp the essentials of Vaticanology 101: Don’t assume that what we think is important in the US, or even what the Pope thinks is important, is necessarily going to be thought important by the curial bureaucracy or by the Roman academic establishment.
The two-day seminar ended with an official commemoration of the Rerum Novarum centenary in the Synod Hall inside the roof of what everyone in Rome called “the Nervi”: the hypermodernist audience hall built by Paul V
I inside the Vatican walls. At one point, the caterwauling of the Sistine Choir caused John Paul II to hold his head in his hands, to protect his hearing from the noise; and I thought, if he can cover his ears, so can I. So I did.
Over the course of eight days, I met a dozen or so major and minor figures in the Roman Curia and a bevy of Rome-based journalists. The most important conversation in shaping my perceptions of John Paul II’s role in the communist crack-up was with then-archbishop Jan Schotte. Schotte had helped draft John Paul’s bracing address to the United Nations in 1979, and his star had been rising in the curial firmament ever since. In 1991, he was General Secretary of the Synod of Bishops but still retained a keen interest in Vatican diplomacy, and the fact that he was not part of the Vatican diplomatic service gave him a certain critical distance from its default positions and idées fixes.
One of these set-in-stone defaults (especially among Italian papal diplomats) was that 1989 was the cash-out of the accommodating, soft-spoken Ostpolitik (Eastern policy) that Pope Paul VI and his chief Eastern bloc diplomatic agent, Agostino Casaroli had adopted toward the communist nations of the Warsaw Pact. Schotte was having none of that and at the outset of our discussion gave me an important piece of information: the first thing John Paul II did on assuming the papacy was to ask for the archives on the Ostpolitik. That review, Schotte suggested, helped convince John Paul to follow his instincts and to be more forthright and “undiplomatic” in his defense of religious freedom and his unmistakable challenge to communism from the very beginning of his papacy.
Schotte also told me a great story about John Paul’s shrewdness in turning the Vatican and its sometimes inscrutable ways to his purposes. Poland’s communist leaders knew that their state-run television could not ignore the inaugural public Mass of the first Polish pope, so they allotted four hours for coverage of the events of October 22, 1978. The ceremony would normally take two and a half hours, which would give communist spin doctors ninety minutes to explain that all of this meant nothing. John Paul called in the papal masters of ceremonies and told them to devise an inaugural Mass program that would last exactly four hours, thus outwitting the communist spinmeisters at their own game.
Schotte seemed to have intuitively grasped John Paul II’s culture-driven approach to historical change, in which the truth, spoken clearly and winsomely enough, has the power to forge cultural tools of resistance to oppression. Thus Schotte understood how the Helsinki-CSCE process and its capacity to link human rights activists behind the iron curtain to their Western counterparts had helped set the stage for John Paul II’s revolution of conscience. Schotte also recognized how important the two US radios aimed behind the iron curtain, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, were in providing real information amid the communist culture of the lie.
I next spoke with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then in his ninth year as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and John Paul II’s chief theological collaborator. When I first met Ratzinger in 1988, he subtly indicated, during an hour’s conversation with Peter Berger, Richard Neuhaus, Mike Novak, and me, that he agreed with some of our criticisms of the Curia’s way of thinking about Catholic social doctrine. Now, he spoke forcefully about the “moral and human incredibility” of communism and about the damage that communism had done to the human ecology of Central and Eastern Europe. The most serious, near-term challenge for postcommunist countries, he insisted, would be rebuilding a “culture of conscience” capable of sustaining democracy and the free economy.
The journalists I met during this period were more inclined than many curial officials to recognize that, with John Paul II, things had changed dramatically in the Vatican approach to communist countries, and less inclined to accept Team Casaroli’s claim that speaking softly without carrying any sort of stick was the prudent modus operandi behind the iron curtain. Time’s Wilton Wynn and Rome’s longtime Associated Press bureau chief, Victor Simpson, were also more willing than the Vatican bureaucracy to credit John Paul with highly developed political skills. Wynn understood that John Paul II could have “lifted a finger” in Poland in June 1979 and “the regime would have been overthrown.” But the Pope also knew that would have brought in the Soviet tanks. So he opted for working through the Solidarity movement, the kind of movement for social renewal he intuited might come out of his June 1979 pilgrimage to his homeland. It would have been nice to have heard these acknowledgments from the Vatican diplomats, but as Victor Simpson pointed out, the Italians in the Curia were still in shock over the election of a non-Italian pope, and “to protect Casaroli is to protect the Italian link to the papacy,” which to some Italians seemed a matter of divine right—a crucial fact to remember in analyzing the pontificate of John Paul II in greater depth.
The points made by Wynn and Simpson were echoed by John Paul’s press secretary, Joaquín Navarro-Valls, with whom I began to forge a friendship. Navarro, a Spanish layman and medical doctor, had practiced psychiatry before turning to journalism: his psychiatric background, he often suggested, was the perfect preparation for dealing with swarms of Vaticanisti—some of whose grip on the difference between fact and fiction was not altogether secure—in his role as papal spokesman. Navarro pointed out that John Paul II’s election not only “changed the cards on the table” in Poland; it also had a dramatic effect in Czechoslovakia. Navarro also emphasized the sharp difference between Paul VI and John Paul II in their readings of the Yalta accords, which divided Europe at the end of World War II: Paul VI saw Yalta and its division of Europe as a political fact, while John Paul II rejected Yalta and all it represented on ethical, historical, and cultural grounds—which was why his method turned out to be “much more subversive” in undermining the Yalta system than an overtly political approach would have been.
Finally, it was Joaquín who planted the first seeds of my conviction that, while communism would have collapsed from its own implausibility at some point, the fact that the crack-up came in 1989 (rather than 1999 or 2009 or 2019), and that it came nonviolently, was largely due to the John Paul II Effect during the 1980s. The Pope wasn’t the only one preaching the imperative of living in the truth, or “living as if one were free,” in those days; I would meet some of the Polish, Czech, and Slovak exponents of that strategy of anticommunist resistance later in the year. But John Paul had the biggest megaphone, and without him, Navarro suggested, what happened during the 1980s, and the way 1989 unfolded, would have been impossible.
I left Rome confirmed in the conviction that John Paul II had played a singular role in the collapse of European communism, the final act of which would be played out in the USSR in a few months. And while it was clear that the Pope had political skills that he had deployed with considerable dexterity, I had also come to understand that his primary impact on what became the Revolution of 1989 would be found in the realm of the human spirit.
That first extensive foray into the curial maze also made me deeply skeptical of the widespread assumption that the Vatican operated like the US Marine Corps: the commandant (pope) issues an order and everybody down the chain of command staples a salute to their forehead and gets with the program. It clearly didn’t work that way along the Tiber. The lesson that the Curia had its own ways of doing business was an important one for the future, both for understanding John Paul II’s way of governing the Church and for getting my biographer’s work done.
That week in Rome intensified my eagerness to get to Poland and Czechoslovakia to explore the Revolution of 1989 on the ground. Before I could do that, though, I had to go to Denver, where my friend Archbishop J. Francis Stafford had invited me to address an archdiocesan convocation. I was staying in the archbishop’s home and his dinner guest the first night was Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago, another convocation speaker whom I had first met in the run-up to the US bishops’ peace pastoral of 1982. In the course of dinner, Stafford mentioned that I had been in Rome investigating John Paul II’s role in the events of 1989, which I was prepared t
o argue was quite important. “What do you think, Joe?’ the archbishop asked Bernardin—who answered, “I think Gorbachev had more to do with it.”
That was the conventional view at the time, and perhaps the cardinal ought not be blamed for sharing it. But Bernardin’s lack of interest in what I had unearthed thus far was a harbinger: certain prominent Catholics were not going to abandon their disinclination to give John Paul II much credit for anything, or to see him in something other than the liberal/conservative terms in which they analyzed everything. This meant missing a lot of the story of a man who, I was becoming convinced, could only be understood as a genuine Christian radical.
Another trip to Rome in the spring of 1992 deepened the conversations I had begun the previous year and gave me further insights into the complexities of the Vatican, the intricacies of John Paul II’s task, and his approach to his work.
It was my first time in Rome with Richard Neuhaus since his reception into full communion with the Catholic Church and his ordination as a priest by Cardinal John O’Connor. The high point of the visit for Richard was a Mass with the students of the North American College in the old Matilda Chapel of the Apostolic Palace, at which John Paul was the principal celebrant and Richard concelebrated and read the Gospel. There was a brief moment of greeting after the Mass, but the serious conversations with the Pope would begin later that year.
The most curious encounter during that Roman work period was with the Father General of the Jesuits, Father Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, SJ, which had been arranged by Fr. Avery Dulles. Richard and I spent the hour before our lunch appointment with Kolvenbach at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, speaking with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger about the ecumenical initiative that Richard and I were just launching with Chuck Colson and Kent Hill, “Evangelicals and Catholics Together.” Ratzinger encouraged us in this work. More than most Vatican officials, Ratzinger understood that there were different kinds of evangelical Protestants and that the fierce criticism of “the sects” by Catholic bishops in Latin America was crudely undifferentiated and an obstacle to serious ecumenical conversation with the growing end of world Protestantism. As we were leaving Ratzinger’s office to walk the few blocks up the Borgo Santo Spirito to the Curia Generalizia of the Jesuits, one CDF official murmured, “You’re going into the heart of mission territory.”
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