It was not written on the watermarked, cream-colored stationery of official papal correspondence but on simple white paper with the papal crest in the upper left-hand corner—as if one friend were writing another, with no need for display. The typing suggested an old-fashioned manual typewriter and there were a few typos (reproduced here). What counted, of course, was the handwritten signature at the end:
January 19, 1996
Dear Professor Weigel,
Thank you for your letter of December 19, 1995. Of course my response to your kind offer to write my biography and the history of my pontificate was positive.
You are in a very good position to write it, since you have already studied one aspect of them in the “Final Revolution”, and then you have experienced the sadness of “The Biography that could have been”, while studying assiduously the more important Encyclicals—and also meeting me often.
I am awarewhat a demanding work this would be for you and how it would hamper your other important activities. Still, since you write you are ready to “give yourself to this work with wholehearted enthusiasm” and that it gives you joy, since your life “has been a preparation for this work”—I can only answer with my wholehearted thanks and encouragement.
I am very grateful for your prayer and that of your dear Family, and send my blessing to you, Professor Weigel, to your Wife and each child.
Joannes Paulus II
Msgr. Tim Dolan quickly dubbed this the mandatum scribendi, the mandate to write, playing on the mandatum docendi, the mandate to teach, that instructors in theology in Catholic universities are supposed to request. Whatever it might be called, it was the clear indication of John Paul II’s intentions that I had requested, a vote of confidence, and a pledge of John Paul’s cooperation. All of which was needed, I knew, if I was to get the support for the project I needed. I was not an unknown author, but walking into a publisher’s office and announcing that John Paul II had agreed to cooperate with me on a biographical project that would also be a comprehensive history of his pontificate would have raised editorial eyebrows, and with good reason.
I also needed a literary agent, and on Richard Neuhaus’s advice I settled on Loretta Barrett—who, in another providential coincidence, turned out to have been the founding editor of Doubleday Anchor Books, whose publications were staples in my undergraduate philosophy courses. Loretta brought me to HarperCollins and Diane Reverand, who bought the book for her Cliff Street Books list. Foreign rights went to Leonardo Mondadori, with whom I had already discussed the possibility of such a project.
The next order of business was to arrange an orderly succession at the helm of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, as I knew I couldn’t lead an institution and do this massive project in the time frame we had all tacitly agreed upon: the book was to be available in as many major European languages as possible in the months immediately preceding what John Paul II was already calling the Great Jubilee of 2000. So I spoke with my board chairman, Admiral Elmo “Bud” Zumwalt (the former Chief of Naval Operations), and the most influential of EPPC’s board members, Richard Neuhaus; both Bud and Richard agreed with my suggestion that my old friend Elliott Abrams would make a fine president of EPPC, and that I would become a senior fellow of the Center, which would remain my institutional base for the John Paul II project. And so it was.
“THAT’S OBVIOUS…”
ROME, MARCH 1996
I RETURNED TO ROME AT THE BEGINNING OF LENT 1996 TO DISCUSS procedures with John Paul II and see what resources and materials were available at the Polish Home on the Via Cassia: a kind of a warehouse of John Paul documents and memorabilia, including a huge collection of Black Madonna icons given to the Pope by visiting Polish groups over the previous seventeen and a half years.
The Pope was on his annual Lenten retreat when I arrived, so I spent my first days constructing a timeline of the pontificate, using back issues of the Vatican daily, L’Osservatore Romano, in the North American College library. Finishing the timeline took several months. My capable assistant, Ann Derstine, became the world’s foremost Mennonite authority on the late-twentieth-century papacy by turning the timeline into a seven-column, two hundred-page spreadsheet that allowed me to see what was going on in the pontificate, the Church, and the world on any given day since John Paul II’s election on October 16, 1978: what political leaders John Paul met, what teaching documents he issued and major speeches he made, where he went in Italy or the world, whom he canonized or beatified, and what bishops’ groups he saw, all set against the global events of the day. With this invaluable tool (regularly updated by Ann and her successor, Ever Horan) I was able, over the next two and a half years, to “see” the pontificate unfold in the multilayered yet linear fashion in which I wanted to describe it.
My most important meeting that week was with John Paul II, over dinner on the night of March 7. Msgr. Dziwisz was present as usual, as was a new junior secretary, Father Mieczysław Mokrzycki. There were procedural matters to clarify before I started work on the biography in earnest in the fall and ground rules to get established. So after thanking the Pope for the mandatum scribendi, I said, “Holy Father, two things are necessary to make this work. The first is that I have to have access to you, your friends and associates, and to some documentation that might ordinarily be unavailable until long after your death—and I have to be the one to decide what those documents are. The second is that you can’t see a word of what I write until I hand you the published book.”
John Paul II looked at me and, without missing a beat, replied, “That’s obvious. Now let’s talk about something interesting.”
It was quintessential John Paul. He understood perfectly well that a vetted biography would rightly be regarded with skepticism. But this wasn’t just a matter of shrewd tactics on his part. He had spent his adult life challenging and encouraging others to moral responsibility and he wasn’t about to change that. The book was my responsibility. He would be as available and cooperative as possible. But I would make the judgment calls and no one would be looking over my shoulder making suggestions.
John Paul II’s openness in this matter was not universally appreciated in the Roman Curia, I would discover. I would also learn that the Pope’s wanting me to have what I thought I needed didn’t necessarily mean I was going to get what I needed without curial foot-dragging. So I had to develop my skills in Vaticanology, an exercise in which the double or triple bank shot is often more effective than the direct approach. Which was itself was an invaluable education, for it helped me understand problems that my subject had to solve to get done what he wanted to do.
The ground rules I insisted on, and to which John Paul readily agreed, meant that what became Witness to Hope and The End and the Beginning would not be an “authorized biography,” which in the usual parlance means a biography vetted (and edited) by the subject or his or her heirs in exchange for access to persons and materials. My biography would be as authoritative as unprecedented access to the Pope, and to previously unavailable and unpublished materials, could make it. But it would not be “authorized”—a point I would have to explain over and over again.
Having gotten the ground rules out of the way, our dinner conversation ranged over matters great and small. The Pope suggested that the book be pitched at the level of The Final Revolution, saying that he hoped my “gift for writing and explaining” would make his life, and especially his thought, accessible to others. He also urged me to look closely into his spiritual life as he had explored it in his poems and plays, and into his philosophical work, recommending that I get in touch with his chief philosophical disciple, Father Tadeusz Styczeń, and with his old friend and philosophical collaborator, Marian Jaworski, then serving as Archbishop of L’viv for Latin-rite Catholics.
John Paul was still enthusiastic about his October 1995 visit to the US and about the “strong Church” he had found in America. The UN speech came up, with Dziwisz winking at me and saying “it was a great speech” and the
Pope musing that he had felt more comfortable at the UN rostrum in 1995 than in 1979; he also said he was quite pleased with the response to the address and its emphases on the rights of persons and nations.
The Pope suggested that I work on document access through Joaquín Navarro-Valls, with Dziwisz agreeing that Joaquín would be the “better intermediator.” At the end, the good humor of the entire evening continued as we walked out of the papal apartment through the chapel, the Pope joking at the apartment door about his two secretaries’ names and their odd relationship in Polish history: “Stanisław was killed by Bolesław, the son of Mieczysław.” I said I didn’t think he had anything to worry about, despite his having been the successor of St. Stanisław, and when I said in parting that I thought he looked well, John Paul groaned and shot back, “I look good?”
WORSE THAN SOLZHENITSYN
KRAKÓW, JULY 1996
THE BEST DECISION I MADE IN PREPARING WITNESS TO HOPE WAS the first: I wouldn’t write anything for a year and a half. I had been writing about John Paul II for more than seventeen years, and rather than just taking off from that platform I thought I should talk to as many people as I could and read as much as I could until the end of 1997; then I’d see what Jamesian figures in the carpet began to emerge. The result of eighteen months of full-immersion research came to more than a thousand pages of interview notes and eight full-size file drawers of materials. Out of that mass of paper, patterns did come into focus even as new questions emerged.
During the July 1996 Centesimus Annus seminar in Kraków I extended my range of contacts in Karol Wojtyła’s city and deepened the conversations begun while I was working on The Final Revolution.
The most striking of the new acquaintances was Monsignor Andrzej Bardecki, then a robust eighty years old, who had been Cardinal Wojtyła’s liaison to Tygodnik Powszechny and the ecumenical officer of the archdiocese: Wojtyła’s link to the Cracovian intelligentsia of all theological persuasions and none. Bardecki told me that Mehmet Ali Agca had asked John Paul II who this “goddess of Fátima” was who had saved the Pope’s life; John Paul had assured the crazy Agca that this was Mary, the mother of Jesus, and that she was not coming through the walls of Rebibbia Prison to do unpleasant things to him, as the would-be assassin feared. Agca also believed he was the triggerman in a well-organized plot that would get him away from Rome, according to Bardecki’s recollection of the Pope’s conversation with the Turk; that suggested that the “lone gunman” or “fundamentalist Muslim” explanations of what happened on May 13, 1981, were not very persuasive.
Just as intriguing was Bardecki’s story of how he had been beaten up by thugs from the Służba Bezpieczeństwa, the Polish secret police, who couldn’t get at Wojtyła and brutalized one of his closest associates instead. Why did they fear Wojtyła so much, I asked? Because they thought he had “swindled” them, Msgr. Bardecki replied—and then told me how the communists waited and waited for Wojtyła’s name to appear as a nominee for Archbishop of Kraków because they thought he was something of an airhead, a poet and intellectual they could manipulate against the primate, Cardinal Wysziński. Then Bardecki smiled and indulged in a little schadenfreude: all in all, it had been a good example of how “the Holy Spirit can work his will by darkening as well as enlightening minds.”
As for Wojtyła’s management style as archbishop, Bardecki said he had been a “fantastic” boss in that he trusted his subordinates and let the people he appointed do their jobs without a lot of micromanaging or interference.
Bardecki also explained how Wojtyła and a group of Kraków theologians had tried to help Pope Paul VI craft an encyclical on family planning that was neither the “stupid conservatism” of some Roman theologians nor the German progressivism that would have eviscerated Catholic moral theology—a clue that sent me hunting in the dusty stacks of the Dominican priory library in Kraków for a copy of the document that had been sent to the Pope and later published in an obscure journal, the Analecta Cracoviensia. Ever Horan translated the document from the original French; excerpts from it were published in English for the first time in Witness to Hope and shed new light on one of the most contentious periods in contemporary Catholic history.
Another new acquaintance that summer was the distinguished nuclear physicist Jerzy Janik, who had known Karol Wojtyła since the young curate’s early days at St. Florian’s parish in Kraków, and who had been Wojtyła’s primary link to the worlds of hard science ever since. John Paul II’s biennial humanities summer seminars at Castel Gandolfo were reasonably well known by 1996, but few knew that, on the years that seminar didn’t meet, John Paul met with a group of physicists, biologists, and medical doctors organized by Janik so he could keep abreast of developments in their fields. Janik emphasized that Wojtyła was a man of “endless discussion” who not only wanted to know what was going on in physics but who had helped a scientist like Janik see, through Thomas Aquinas and his metaphysics, that there was a “way to speak coherently of everything ranging from this”—he pointed to a vase on his desk—“to God.” Yet he was also “an extremely good listener” whose influence on others came from close, careful listening “and then making a few comments that were crucial.”
Karol Wojtyła needed a measure of solitude in his life. Yet Professor Janik gave me a first hint that Wojtyła, who had no close living relatives after his father’s death in 1941, also cherished his friendships and worked hard to keep them green. Janik and his wife had gone to the cardinal’s residence for a Mass marking their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary but were met by Fr. Dziwisz, who told them that the cardinal had the flu and a high fever. The Janiks wished their archiepiscopal friend a speedy recovery and began to go when Dziwisz stopped them and said, “No, no, no, the Mass will not be in the chapel but in his private apartment.” So Dziwisz led them to the sitting room next door to the cardinal’s bedroom, where the cardinal offered Mass, preaching a homily personally directed to the Janiks, and then said, “I’m sorry but I’ve got a high fever and I’ve got to get back to bed.”
Jerzy Turowicz, by then a smiling gnome of eighty-five, told me about Karol Wojtyła’s relationship with Tygodnik Powszechny, which had begun in 1949, and spoke of his old columnist as a man of constant reading who had a small desk and lamp installed in his car so there were no wasted moments on the road. Did I know, Turowicz asked, about Wojtyła’s habit of doing his serious writing in the chapel of the archbishop’s residence, on a desk set up before the tabernacle? Yes, I replied, and I understood that that habit continued in Rome during his years as pope: the papal chapel was where the serious intellectual work got done. All of this, Turowicz observed, was “interesting from a literary point of view.” Most authors write in their studies, surrounded by books, but Wojtyła wrote “from his thinking, his experience, his conversations.” He was, in other words, unfootnoted; but that didn’t make him less serious.
For all that he cared deeply about friendships, there was also a certain formality or courtliness about Wojtyła, in Turowicz’s experience. He always used the formal “you,” except with children and perhaps other priests; it was always “Pan Jerzy” or “Pan Dr. Jerzy”—a pattern replicated with me, for in a dozen years I never succeeded in getting John Paul II to call me “George”; it was always “Professor Weigel.” Turowicz acknowledged that there had been disagreements between his newspaper and the archbishop but also insisted that “there was no censorship; we may have asked his advice but he never intervened on his own initiative” to alter the content or analysis of the paper—a unique relationship in Poland between bishop and journalists.
Turowicz also made the trenchant observation that, during his last years in Kraków, it was Wojtyła whom the Polish comrades hated and feared more than Cardinal Wyszyński. The old primate hadn’t lost his edge, but everyone knew the dance steps in that polonaise. With Wojtyła, the Polish communists never knew what was coming next. Their fears had obviously been reported to Moscow, for an Italian journalist with good Moscow c
ontacts had told Turowicz, on Wojtyła’s election, that “the Soviets would prefer Solzhenitsyn as Secretary General of the United Nations than a Pole as pope.”
“IT WAS ALWAYS ‘THEM’ AND ‘ US’”
ROME, SEPTEMBER 1996
MY FIRST CONVERSATION WITH JOAQUíN NAVARRO-VALLS AFTER the project got rolling took place on September 4, 1996.
By 1996, Navarro had spent twelve years as the first lay head of the Holy See Press Office, becoming the most effective papal spokesman ever, in part because everyone knew that the Pope (and Msgr. Dziwisz) had his back and in part because he had learned how to handle what I began to call “the traditional managers of popes.” Thus he was full of good advice about how to deal with this, that, or the other curial personality who might not be instinctively enthusiastic about another papal biographer, and an American layman at that.
There was, for example, Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, who was “crucial” but who was not very happy with The Final Revolution and my criticism of his Ostpolitik; the way to secure his cooperation was to tell him that I had learned a lot from his remarks at the 1995 conference at which he tried to demolish my analysis of the Revolution of 1989 and to stress that understanding his views was crucial to my understanding of the pontificate—then he’d be “very open.” As it was true that I’d learned a lot (if not substantively) from Casaroli’s December 1995 remarks and that I wanted to get Casaroli’s take on the first decade of John Paul II’s papacy, I had no hesitation about following this advice.
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