Lessons in Hope

by George Weigel

  During this dinner conversation, Ryłko gave me a manuscript fragment of some twelve double-spaced pages titled Curriculum Philosophicum, which may have been left over from Gift and Mystery because the subject matter didn’t fit into that memoir of the Pope’s vocational discernment. It was a boon to me, however, for it summarized in John Paul’s own words his philosophical journey, beginning with his struggles to understand metaphysics and epistemology by the dim light of the Solvay chemical factory when he was working the night shift during World War II.

  Among other things, Curriculum Philosophicum showed me the bridge between Wojtyła’s early theological studies and his later philosophical development. For, as he wrote in that fragment, it was his doctoral work in Rome on St. John of the Cross that unexpectedly “prepared… the passage from the [Neo-Scholastic] ‘theology of the object’ to [his explorations in] ‘the theology of the subject.’” The text also explained the Pope’s mixed reaction to Immanuel Kant: he appreciated the second categorical imperative and its insistence that persons must always be treated as ends and never as means, but Kantian ethics never seemed to him to get a secure foundation in reality: “The construction of the Kantian ethic was completely absorbed in the dimensions of subjectivism.” (That part of the fragment reminded me of a funny moment during our December 1995 dinner. Richard Neuhaus had raised the subject of Kant, and the Pope, who read German easily, nonetheless slapped his forehead and, remembering his difficulties grappling with the Sage of Königsberg, exclaimed, “Kant! Mein Gott! Kant!”)

  Curriculum Philosophicum also put paid to the silly assertion of one papal biographer that he had found a certain sympathy for Marxism in Wojtyła’s notes from the social ethics course he taught in Kraków. This was a grave misreading of early Catholic social doctrine’s criticisms of unregulated capitalism; in any event, the manuscript said quite clearly that the notes were “in large measure” the work of Father Jan Piwowarczyk.

  Then there was the fragment’s description of the genesis of Wojtyła’s first book on sexual ethics, Love and Responsibility, which he wrote had been “born above all from pastoral necessity”—from his work with students in Kraków and at the Catholic University of Lublin, who deserved better answers to their questions about marriage and the family than those on tap in traditional presentations of what the Sixth Commandment meant. The fragment also confessed, a bit sheepishly, that Wojtyła’s major philosophical work, Osoba y Czyn (Person and Act), had been “largely” written during the sessions of the Second Vatican Council, when not even a skilled listener like Karol Wojtyła could sit contentedly through hours of Latin rhetoric.

  This brought our dinner conversation about Wojtyła the philosopher to the vexed question of the English edition of Osoba y Czyn, which had been published under the somewhat misleading title The Acting Person. The manuscript fragment referred delicately to “ups and downs concerning the text of the translation” prepared by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. In our conversation, it was widely agreed that the Tymieniecka “translation” was “sbagliato” (mistaken) and that what was published in English was really an interpretation of the book, not so much Wojtyła’s thought itself. Yet the Pope, whose indifference to the fate of his philosophical and poetic texts was as striking as his charity, insisted that Tymieniecka should be “given credit” for getting the book—or at any rate her interpretation of it—into English. All of this eventually made for the longest explanatory footnote in Witness to Hope.

  As the conversation expanded, the Pope described his clandestine resistance activities during the war, which were meant, he said, “to salvage Polish culture while the Nazis were trying to destroy the intellectual class, pulling Poland up by its roots.” When I asked how dangerous all of that had been, he said, “Very dangerous” and that “of course” he’d have been shipped off to a concentration camp if his Rhapsodic Theater group had been caught performing the classics of Polish literature—which rather refuted the charge that Wojtyła had a tendency toward “quietism” and the “spiritualization” of all conflict. Dangerous resistance to the Occupation, it was clear, didn’t only mean stealing Schmeissers and spraying bullets around.

  We also discussed the touchy subject of the clandestine ordinations of priests and bishops in Kraków in the 1970s, which was, strictly speaking, done in defiance of the Vatican Ostpolitik of the time. Dziwisz said that Pope Paul VI “probably” knew what was going on but never intervened. Both the Pope and Dziwisz stressed that these ordinations of Czechs and Slovaks were always done with the written permission of the candidate’s superiors, and Ryłko mentioned one security measure they adopted: a torn-card system in which the two halves of the card came to Kraków by different routes (one with the candidate), and their match validated the candidate’s claim to be the real thing. All of this, Dziwisz insisted, should be understood not as defiance of Rome but as a work of solidarity with a persecuted neighbor. True enough; but it was also a clear indication that, long before he was elected pope, Karol Wojtyła thought that the deals the Vatican made under the Ostpolitik were choking the Church to death, at least in Czechoslovakia.

  On a more literary note, the Pope said that he appreciated the recent award of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Polish poet Wisława Szymborska, whose poems he said he had read and liked; but he wished the prize had gone to Zbigniew Herbert, whom he obviously regarded as the superior poet. The problem, he thought, was that Herbert was even more difficult to translate than poetry usually is, and thus his true stature had never been recognized outside the world of Polish-speakers.

  As I was leaving, Msgr. Dziwisz gave me two large shopping bags with four boxes of beautiful Polish Christmas ornaments. “You have a wife and three children,” he said. “There is nothing for you!” I said I’d just gotten dinner, which was quite enough. I promised to give the gifts to Joan and the children and guarded them like the crown jewels on the flight home.

  TUTOR, TRANSLATOR, LIBRARIAN, NUN

  ROME, FEBRUARY–OCTOBER 1997

  THANKS TO BISHOP RYŁKO, I MET AND BEGAN TO WORK WITH ANOTHER fascinating character in John Paul II’s informal papal family: Sister Emilia Ehrlich, an Ursuline nun who was the Pope’s English tutor, his personal librarian, and the woman with whom I retranslated some Wojtyła poems for Witness to Hope.

  We eventually became friends, but it wasn’t easy at first. On February 21, 1997, Ryłko drove me to an Ursuline convent on the Via Nomentana, saying that Sister Emilia would feel easier if he were along as “chaperone.” When we arrived I met a tall, somewhat heavy-set, and large-boned woman in her early seventies who walked with some difficulty. She looked me straight in the eye and said, in a flat voice, “I am your reader”—meaning, I think, that she read whatever I sent to John Paul and then passed it along. I expect she was also my correspondent, so to speak, and it wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that she was the typist of the mandatum scribendi. But even suggesting such a thing would, I thought, make her even more nervous about speaking and working with this unknown (albeit “read”) American. I finally got her talking about her own life—which was dramatic in the extreme—and when I pulled out a notebook she immediately said, “Oh, this looks dangerous.” But Ryłko and I finally convinced her that I was on the side of the angels, and the conversation began to flow more easily.

  She was born in 1924 in Lwów and baptized Constance Krystyna. Her Polish father, Ludwig Ehrlich, was a distinguished professor of international law. Her mother was a native of Newport, Rhode Island, which explained Sister Emilia’s fluency in English. She was fifteen and living on her family farm when World War II came crashing into Lwów. Her mother, a “spirited woman” who hated Germans because of her brothers’ experiences with them in World War I, decided that they weren’t going to flee, so they stayed on the farm for the next two years.

  The area was bitterly contested by the Germans and the Russians. Her father was arrested by the former and tortured, escaped from prison, and hid in the forest. The Nazis expropriated the farm an
d Constance, her mother, and her brother subsisted on carrots and apples, foods previously used for fodder. Her mother was arrested in December 1941 as an alien: she invited a Gestapo man to carry her valise (“And my bag?…”) and, according to her daughter, charmed a killer Gestapo Alsatian into submission. Mrs. Ehrlich was eventually released when it became clear that ransom money wasn’t forthcoming from America. After further adventures, including a three-week term in the Majdanek concentration camp, Constance was reunited with her mother and brother in Warsaw and lived in an Ursuline convent there. She finished high school in an underground academy in July 1944; the Warsaw Uprising broke out a few weeks later.

  After that brave effort was crushed, she and the Ursulines were shipped to Germany and put to work in a thread factory in Heilbronn, a city in northern Baden-Württemberg. There, they worked eleven hours a day on a daily ration of three slices of sausage, a five-centimeter-square of bread, and a minute smudge of margarine, supplemented by apples from a nearby orchard: “The apples saved our lives. We had raw apples for breakfast, apple soup and baked apples for dinner.” Appeals to German sisters and the Vatican finally got them released—two days before Allied bombers leveled the factory.

  Returning to Kraków, she entered the Ursulines, took the religious name Emilia, did a divinity degree at the Pontifical Faculty of Theology there, tutored Cardinal Wojtyła in English, and was working on a degree in biblical studies in Rome when the two conclaves of 1978 happened. On the night of John Paul II’s election she was standing in St. Peter’s Square: “Everyone was praying for their cardinal to be elected; I was praying that they wouldn’t take ours.” When Wojtyła was presented on the central loggia of the basilica as Pope John Paul II, “I got very pale,” she remembered. “Isn’t he good?” someone nearby asked. “He’s much too good,” she replied.

  Two days later, a functionary at the Pontifical Biblical Institute tracked her down and said, “I don’t understand it but they’re telephoning and saying that the Pope wants to see you.” So she took the notoriously crowded Number 64 bus, a favorite hunting ground of Roman pickpockets, to the Vatican, presented herself at the Porta Sant’Anna, and announced that the Pope wished to see her. “They were quite scandalized. They gave me two Swiss Guards, like I was a prisoner, and walked me for quite a distance, and at last we arrived. I had a color shock. He came in all in white, and I had never seen him that way.”

  They both stood there for a minute, thinking. Then Sister Emilia began to cry, at which point John Paul said “Let’s not go soft” and got down to business. The phone had been ringing off the hook with publishers wanting the rights to John Paul’s poetry. He asked her to take care of it and to “see the Secretariat of State.” “I didn’t know who or where that was,” she remembered, but off she went, somewhat like Miss Marple, to do the new pope’s bidding. After getting various bits of useless advice from the Secretariat of State about consulting lawyers, it was suggested that she go to the Vatican press, the Libreria Editrice Vaticana, where she was told to put her request in writing and come back in a month or two. It all got sorted out eventually; she finished her degree at the Biblicum and stayed on as “a kind of sub-secretary,” doing the back-channel correspondence (like mine) in English and sorting out the Pope’s private library of books, journals, and newspapers: “I try to put some order into it” so that the Pope could readily access what he wanted.

  Our first interview ended with her informing me that “you’re not very photogenic” and that I was handsomer than she’d thought from my pictures. It was a fitting end to a striking conversation with someone who was, like her mother, a spirited woman.

  At our second meeting, a month later, she gave me some recently published books in Polish about Wojtyła’s poetry and family ministry in Kraków. The latter had a cover photo of the cardinal with a very young Stanisław Dziwisz, full of curly blond hair. “He was very beautiful,” Sister Emilia observed, with that curious combination of wryness, insight, and innocence that characterized her conversation. She insisted that I not mention her in my book: “I am just a private person helping the Pope and I do not want to be a second Pascalina”—a reference to Pope Pius XII’s powerful housekeeper, Mother Pascalina Lehnert, who was ejected from the Vatican the day Pius XII died and took refuge in the convent at the North American College, bringing the late pontiff’s pet parakeets with her. “I have no influence,” Sister Emilia insisted. “I just help with the library.”

  I must have treated her with the diffidence she wanted because we remained friends after Witness to Hope was published, and until her death in 2006, I saw her regularly in Kraków (to which she had returned for health reasons). On March 21, 1997, though, I let her ramble through her memories of life with Karol Wojtyła in Kraków, which were punctuated with sharp comments on various personalities from a nun who obviously had a mind of her own—and who would have happily taken a bullet for John Paul II, thinking her life fulfilled by doing so.

  She was a linguist of considerable accomplishment and told me that because of Wojtyła’s undergraduate studies in Old Church Slavonic, the basis of all Slavic languages, he could read Croatian, Slovenian, Czech, and Slovak. “No pope has ever had this preparation,” she insisted. “No pope could speak Slav to the Slavs.” Paul VI tried but “had a lot of trouble.” Cardinal Casaroli tried but the Poles “tended to snicker at his pronunciation.”

  Her most telling comment involved the constant winnowing of Wojtyła by Providence:

  There is an odd regularity to his life. Whenever he has a big religious experience, someone dies or is stricken. His mother died while he was preparing for his first Holy Communion. His brother died when he was preparing to be confirmed. His father died while he was considering the seminary. His great friend, Father [Marian] Jaworski, lost an arm just before he became a bishop or cardinal, I can’t remember which. Then there was Bishop [Andrzej] Deskur, who had his stroke just before he was elected pope. What would be great moments for anyone else also [involve] tragedies for him. It is almost as if he were being orphaned again and again.

  She also remarked on how difficult it was to give Karol Wojtyła anything. The household nuns in Kraków, she said, would get him new coats and other bits of apparel and he’d turn around and give them away. “This got them upset, because they were only trying to take care of him, which was their duty. Fortunately, he can’t give white cassocks away, or he would.”

  As for the man who was always being orphaned, she said that “he was a faithful friend and once you were his friend, you were always his friend.” People loved him because “he loved people,” kept promises, said what he thought and didn’t speak until he had something serious to say: something rare among intellectuals, she shrewdly observed. She also remarked on his exceptional ability to make people in vast crowds think he was addressing them personally. In June 1979, for example, one Silesian coal miner, standing beside another in a throng of over a million in Częstochowa, started to say something and the second miner cut him off: “Damn it, don’t talk while the Pope’s speaking to me.”

  The stories and observations were fascinating, but we had to work on Wojtyła’s poetry, so at the end of our March 1997 conversation I asked her about that. She said that Bolesław Taborski had done a good job translating Wojtyła’s plays into English (and could have added that he did a superb job in writing introductions to them), but that Jerzy Pietrkiewicz’s translations of the poems into English missed a lot of their grittiness. He got the job, evidently, because he was the first to apply to the commission the Libreria Editrice Vaticana finally set up to settle the question of foreign rights to Wojtyła’s poetry—another indication of curial incompetence in dealing with a new situation. In any event, these comments gave me the opening to ask her if she would help me with new translations, which she agreed to do.

  So when I returned on October 1, 1997, Sister Emilia met me at the door with two huge Polish-English dictionaries and the opera omnia of Wojtyła’s poems in Polish. I brought th
e Pietrkiewicz translation for comparison, and we set to work. As I was only going to use excerpts from the poems, getting them licked into shape was not too difficult. But we took a long time translating the entirety of what everyone then thought was Wojtyła’s last poem, “Stanisław,” his valedictory to Kraków. I hoped to publish the new translation of this lengthy and important poem in full in Witness to Hope, but space considerations allowed me to use only parts of it.

  Sister Emilia helped me see John Paul II “from inside” in many ways. One of the most striking was her entirely natural, unaffected description of the intense loyalty Karol Wojtyła drew from very bright people—and their constant concern that he might be hurt somehow: “He’s too good.” And the intriguing observation that he had been “orphaned” many times shed new light on a Wojtyła sermon that had been ignored by other biographers: his remarkable homily on October 8, 1978, at the Church of St. Stanisław, the Polish parish in Rome, eight days before his election as pope. There, he reflected on the Risen Christ’s three questions to Peter in the twenty-first chapter of John’s gospel— “Do you love me?” “Do you love me?” “Do you love me more than the rest of these?”—as a call to complete self-abandonment, “a summons to service and a summons to die” at which “the human heart must tremble.” In that sermon, he was referring overtly to the experience of the recently deceased John Paul I when the call had come to him a month earlier. But the more I thought about it through the filter that Sister Emilia suggested, the more it seemed he was thinking out loud about his own possible future.