“HUMILIATION AT THE HANDS OF EVIL” AND CRYPTO-LENIN
ROME, JANUARY 1997
I CONTINUED TO WORK THROUGH MY CATALOG OF QUESTIONS WITH John Paul II on my Roman work period in January 1997. But while the Pope began in good form during our dinner on January 16—enjoying some notes that Joan and the children sent to him and asking, in his pastor’s way, about a friend’s child for whom Joan had asked him to pray—our conversation that night was the least satisfactory thus far.
We talked in a scattered way about several things—his deep desire to go on pilgrimage to the Holy Land; the character of General Wojciech Jaruzelski and his motivations in putting Poland under martial law in December 1981; his relationship with Cardinal František Tomášek and the troubles of the Czechoslovakian Church under communism; the influence of the apostle of divine mercy, Sister Faustina Kowalska (whom he had been “thinking about… for a long time”), on his encyclical Dives in Misericordia; his authorship of the Vatican II text he frequently cited, Gaudium et Spes 24; his sense that the schismatic Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre’s real issues with Vatican II were not liturgical but involved the Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom and the aforementioned Gaudium et Spes, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (“His vision of the Church was quite different”).
The Pope’s most intriguing reflection came when I asked him at the beginning of dinner how he had come to the view that a crisis in the idea of the human person was at the root of so many modern evils. He began to answer at a rather abstract level, but then switched gears and talked about how his wartime experience had shaped his intuition of the source of so much of the world’s unhappiness. He hadn’t had, he said, that “radical” an experience of World War II: “I wasn’t put into prison or concentration camp.” But, he continued, “I participated in the great experience of my contemporaries—humiliation at the hands of evil.”
It was a striking, poignant comment, said without anger but conveying a lifetime’s experience that the world could be a very wicked place indeed—and that wickedness took its toll, not just on bodies but on souls. From then on, it became ever more clear to me that the experience of the war—“humiliation at the hands of evil”—was the formative experience of Karol Wojtyła’s life, a major factor in his vocational discernment, and the source of his profound commitment to human dignity and human rights.
Yet despite this moment of clarification, the Pope seemed a bit listless, giving very short answers to my questions. After an hour, Msgr. Dziwisz declared, “Basta per oggi!” (Enough for today!) so that was that. Dziwisz saw me out, took me down to the Cortile Sesto Quinto on the family elevator, noted that the Pope had had a very busy day, and then said that, on days like that, “he’s finished at eight.”
So I thought I would have to content myself, on this trip, with one great line about World War II, a few papal insights delivered in telegraphic form, some useful conversations with Cardinal Ratzinger and Cardinal Cassidy about matters theological and ecumenical, and a long discussion with Rocco Buttiglione about the intellectual genesis of Centesimus Annus. Then, on the day before I was to leave, Dziwisz called and said there was “an opportunity to meet with the Holy Father at lunch”—precisely when I ought to have been getting on a plane at Fiumicino. So I quickly rearranged my travel and found an entirely different John Paul II ready to greet me in the papal apartment on January 22. When I said I was afraid he might be getting tired of me, he took me by the arm and said, “No, I was very tired when we had dinner last week and I said, ‘Professor Weigel is working so hard he deserves to see me in the daytime’”—and then quoted Augustine to the effect that it’s easier to think in daylight. The lunch that followed was excellent and the conversation over ninety minutes was both deep and rollicking, with the Pope, Dziwisz, and Bishop Ryłko all chipping in.
We began by talking about some Polish history, a discussion triggered by my asking John Paul whether his given middle name, Józef, was in honor of Marshal Piłsudski—at which point Dziwisz broke in with a very loud “Franz Joseph!” After that moment of Habsburgian nostalgia, we discussed Piłsudski, the architect of modern Polish independence, and his difficult relationship with Archbishop Sapieha (who wouldn’t let Piłsudski be buried in Wawel Cathedral, the crypt being extended so that his place is technically outside the cathedral walls). When I mentioned that I’d just reviewed a book of Lenin’s correspondence in which the Bolshevik leader wrote that the Battle of Warsaw and Piłsudski’s defeat of the Red Army had been a terrible setback for the global communist cause, the Pope noted that the battle took place just after he was born and said he was glad Piłsudski’s victory was finally being recognized as decisive, not just for Poland but for the world. Bishop Ryłko mentioned that the only ambassador not to flee Warsaw in those days had been the papal nuncio, Achille Ratti, later Pope Pius XI; John Paul replied that he “was a great pope,” emphasizing his three encyclicals against fascism, Nazism, and communism.
This, in turn, led to a lesson in the history of the papal villa at Castel Gandolfo. When the property was recovered in the 1929 Lateran Treaty, Pius XI, who apparently formed a real attachment to Poland during his brief service as Vatican ambassador there, had two scenes painted on the walls of the papal chapel: one depicted the defense of the Jasna Góra Monastery in Częstochowa against the invading Swedes in 1655; the other, complete with maps of troop movements, commemorated the “Miracle on the Vistula,” the Battle of Warsaw in 1920. The Częstochowa scene featured the Pauline prior at the time, Augustyn Kordecki, while the more modern incident was constructed around the figure of Father Ignacy Skorupka, a chaplain in Piłsudski’s army who was killed in the fighting that saved newly independent Poland in August 1920—and, according to some historians, kept the Red Army from charging straight across Europe to the English Channel. The paintings were covered with fabric by later popes, but John Paul had them uncovered and restored. Ryłko said they had been “waiting for a Polish pope”; John Paul said they were important because they were about “priests defending their people against tyranny.”
We then talked about his relationship with the world’s bishops since becoming pope. He explained how he had expanded the program for the ad limina visit that every bishop makes to Rome every five years, adding to the usual meetings a concelebrated Mass and a lunch together. When I asked whether he got a dossier on each bishop and diocese from the Curia’s Congregation for Bishops before he met a bishop one-on-one, he said, with a small chuckle, “Yes… even too much.”
When the conversation turned to his work with families in Kraków and the ways his family ministry tried to blunt the communist effort to disintegrate the family, John Paul stressed that this was a matter of “the co-responsibility of the laity” for the Church and society, which was why he had integrated lay experts into marriage preparation and family ministry. This turned the conversation to his old friend Jerzy Ciesielski, who had taught him the arts of kayaking and with whose widow, Danuta, he was still in regular contact. There was a beatification cause underway for Ciesielski as a model husband and father, and when I asked how that was going, Dziwisz cut in and said that, yes, Jurek Ciesielski was a fine man, but “the real saint in the family is Danuta” and it was a shame that they couldn’t beatify her. For some reason, I blurted out, “Well, the Holy Father can just dispense with the necessity of the candidate having died.” There was absolute silence for a moment, and then, to my relief, everyone laughed.
The Pope then urged me to get to know the people in Środowisko, the network of lay friends that began forming around him in the late 1940s and with whom he was still in as much contact as possible. “Środowisko,” he observed, is virtually untranslatable, but he preferred “milieu” to the more common translation, “environment,” because “milieu” had richer, more humanistic connotations that better captured “a very important chapter in my life.”
This got us back to the communist attack on the family, which led to a discussion of the ho
using in Nowa Huta—deliberately small apartments, meant to discourage large families—and Dziwisz described the whole business as “un metodo diabolico.” We talked a bit about the struggle for the Ark Church in Nowa Huta, the town deliberately build to exclude God, and after Dziwisz volunteered that the design of the Arka was “troppo Corbusier,” I proposed that building it was one of the three focal points of his struggle with the regime when he was archbishop, the others being the fight to return the annual Corpus Christi procession to the Main Market Square (from which it had been banned by the Nazis and then the communists) and the fight to restore the theology faculty to the Jagiellonian University. The Pope agreed that those three were the centerpieces of what was all war, all the time, but noted, with some chagrin, that he hadn’t been there to see the victory in the fight for the Corpus Christi procession: “I fighted, but the winner was my successor,” the communists having finally surrendered after the 1989 elections. This led into a discussion of that entire struggle being, at bottom, a matter of “place”: all these battles, Ryłko said, involved the question of whether the Church would have any place in society. And that in turn led to another aspect of the war between Wojtyła and the Polish communist regime: the battle to build new churches, permits for which were strictly controlled by the state, meaning the Communist Party. Here, the Pope said, he had bent Church law by erecting canonical parishes that didn’t already have a church building: “The community was more important” than the building, he said, and once the community had been formed and was functioning, there was leverage on the regime to concede the building permit—See, the people are here, the people want a church, why are you denying the people what they want and need?
In this respect, John Paul said, the battle to build a second church in Nowa Huta, in the Mistrzejowice neighborhood, “could have been even more important” than the struggle for the Ark Church, because it illustrated his method of creating social “facts” to which the regime had to respond. A priest who lived in Mistrzejowice came to Cardinal Wojtyła, telling him that the people there needed a church and that he was prepared to go to prison getting them one. Wojtyła backed him to the hilt, replicating the tactic of saying Christmas midnight Mass at the site where the church ought to be built (a key annual moment in the battle for the Ark Church) and keeping the pressure on the government—which finally caved in, so that John Paul could consecrate the church in Mistrzejowice, dedicated to St. Maximilian Kolbe, on his second pilgrimage to Poland in 1983. It was a serious discussion of some serious business, but throughout it the Pope would laugh at this or that, relishing the memory of the fight with the regime.
We then talked about the Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Zanussi, who was making a movie of the Wojtyła play about St. Albert Chmielowski, Our God’s Brother, which would premiere in Poland during the upcoming papal visit in June. The Pope chuckled at the thought of Zanussi’s cinematic exploration of his pre-papal life, From a Far Country, saying “It is not entirely accurate,” which led both Dziwisz and Ryłko to start chaffing me about the importance of accuracy. But then we got back to From a Far Country, and Dziwisz, having a hard time keeping a straight face, said, “Oh, yes, there is this scene of piccolo Carlo, è scandalizzato perché Gesù a bevuto una birra!” (little Charlie, who was scandalized because Jesus was drinking a beer)—in the film, young Karol blundered into the tent where the actors were relaxing after the first day’s performance of the Passion Play in Kalwaria Zebrzydowska. I took the Pope’s laughter as confirmation of the story.
On a more substantive point, I got John Paul to answer a question that had puzzled students of his literary work. In Our God’s Brother, the counterpoint to Albert Chmielowski, the avant-garde artist seeking a vocation to serve the poor, is called “The Stranger”: a political theoretician and agitator who also claims to serve the poor but by means of revolutionary violence. The Stranger and Brother Albert debate their respective approaches to seeking justice, neither persuading the other. Readers and critics had wondered whether The Stranger might be a portrait of Lenin. I asked the Pope outright and he said yes, “it is crypto-Lenin.” We then discussed the possibility that Lenin and Chmielowski might have met in Zakopane, the town in the Tatras where Lenin was known to have lived for some months. The exiled Bolshevik leader had been arrested there by the Austro-Hungarian police, and I said, “Things would have been easier if they’d just held on to him.” No one disagreed.
Dziwisz then declared that “la lezione per oggi è finita,” so we prayed grace after meals and the Pope walked me out. He said, wistfully and leaning on his cane, “I used to be a sportsman, you know.” I said that I had played some baseball but that I was getting too old for that. The Pope informed me, “You aren’t too old for anything,” but Ryłko chimed in that, by American standards, I was “already over the hill.” Ryłko then gave me a ride back to the North American College and said, on the way, “There is a special feeling between you and the Holy Father.”
A PRIDE OF CURIALISTS
ROME, 1996–1999
WRITING THE STORY OF JOHN PAUL II NECESSARILY INVOLVED DESCRIBING his interactions with the Roman Curia, the papal bureaucracy that exists to give effect to the will of the Pope. That’s the theory, at least. And it’s true that the Curia of John Paul II’s era included men whose only purpose was to serve a pope they revered. But there is also no question that the election of the first non-Italian pope in 455 years was a terremoto, an earthquake, at the higher altitudes of the Roman Curia.
John Paul was entirely aware of this, and while he was determined to remain himself, he also knew that getting things done meant getting the Vatican bureaucracy to cooperate with him. This he did by appointing men in whom he had confidence and then letting them get on with their jobs without micromanaging. Msgr. Dziwisz was also a broker between Pope and Curia and calmed ruffled feathers at times, while laying down the law in his gentlemanly way when required.
As a general rule, the curial figures who were helpful when I was preparing The Final Revolution were cooperative during my papal biography project. There was also residual gratitude in certain curial circles for what I had done in helping prepare the Pope’s trip to the United States and the United Nations in October 1995. Most important, there was Msgr. James Harvey: my guide through the labyrinth, my instructor in the m.o. that got me what I wanted, and a close friend with whom I could blow off steam when “the system” was fraying my nerves.
In the recollections below, the curial figures who taught me the most, directly or inadvertently, about John Paul II and the challenges he faced governing the Church are identified by the ecclesiastical title they held when we met between late 1996 and early 1999.
Cardinal Francis Arinze was one of my favorite Roman interlocutors, a man of insight and charm and a first-generation Christian who seemed overwhelmingly grateful for the gift of faith he had been given as a boy. Arinze knew Cardinal Wojtyła from their work together at the Synods of 1969, 1971, and 1977, and told me that, when he first heard of the Pole’s election as pope, he immediately said to some Irish priests in Belfast with whom he was staying, “We’re going to have a bit of clarity in the Church. Now, we are going to know where we stand, clearly, without being aggressive, but clear.”
That word, “clarity,” came up frequently in his descriptions of John Paul, as did adjectives like “positive,” “optimistic,” “courageous,” and “dynamic.” In Arinze’s view, the John Paul II Effect was to make “a Catholic who is a serious Catholic happy that he is living at this time in history.” He also understood why John Paul II was such a vocation magnet: “How can young people join a group of permanently confused people who don’t know where they’re going? The Holy Father is just the opposite. People who see him know that he is happy in his vocation. His general style has encouraged vocations, because young men see that he is happy.”
When I asked the cardinal what John Paul’s constant attention to the young Churches of Africa had accomplished, he said it had helped Africans �
�realize that we are the Church.… We count [and] that feeling of belonging… is very important, because in world politics Africa doesn’t even rank as second-class but third-class. He’s helped people understand that it’s not when you become a Christian that counts, it’s that all are in the Father’s house.” Arinze also stressed that John Paul’s teaching had been helpful to women in what remained very patriarchal societies. Documents like the apostolic letter Mulieris Dignitatem “on the dignity and vocation of women” and the papal “Letter to Women” may not have impressed Western feminists, but “for a continent like Africa” these documents were “good news, and the women of Africa are grateful,” because they stressed the absolute equality of men and women in terms of human dignity.
By the time we came into serious conversation, Cardinal William Baum had been in the Vatican for almost two decades and was the senior American there, a quiet but powerful force behind the scenes. The more aristocratically inclined Italians thought him what they deemed a rarity among Americans, a true gentleman. At the same time, Baum had a very good idea of what was right and what was wrong about the Roman Curia.
Both of the 1978 conclaves, he told me, were marked by the sense that something had gone awry since Vatican II: “Many of us did think that the hopes and expectations of the Council had not been realized, that there had been mistakes along the way, that we needed to step back, take stock, and see what we should do to meet this. The problem wasn’t with the Council but [with] how we had received and applied it, including in our pastoral practice.” Then, without violating his conclave oath of secrecy, Baum helped me appreciate the human dynamics of the second conclave of 1978. The death of John Paul I after only thirty-three days as pope, he said, had been a psychological and spiritual shock to the College of Cardinals; they thought they had done God’s will, yet God had taken the new pope quickly: “We saw it as a message from the Lord.” Thus the human conditions for doing the unthinkable—going outside Italy for a pope—were set by the shocking death of John Paul I.
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