She had “no doubts” that the KGB concocted the assassination attempt of May 13, 1981, and convinced the Soviet politburo to buy into it. Thus there was no Henry II / Thomas Becket scenario, with Leonid Brezhnev saying, in effect, “Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?” The instigator was Yuri Andropov, the Bulgarians were the instrument for running Mehmet Ali Agca, and strong political pressures might have caused the Italian government to cut short its investigation. As for John Paul, who obviously thought Satan had a hand in the affair, what did he think? “I think he knows,” she said—not in the sense that he had evidence that could stand up in a court, but that he knew who Satan’s likely agents were.
She was also quite clear-eyed about the Russian politics of Vatican statecraft and ecumenism, locating the trouble, not only in the diplomatically genteel Secretariat of State but in the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, where the French bishop Pierre Duprey had set the Russophile default positions decades ago. He was “an appeaser” in communist times and “he is an appeaser now,” she told me, insisting that this pusillanimity (or whatever it was) had done serious harm to Russian Orthodoxy.
She was not uncritical about the Pope she revered and with whom she shared a Slavic-mystical sense of the dynamics of politics and history. She didn’t share John Paul’s view of Gorbachev as “providential,” saying that the Pope couldn’t get completely “outside” his Polishness politically, even though he had done so culturally and spiritually. Thus John Paul thought of Gorbachev as the man who allowed Poland its freedom in 1989, while she believed Gorbachev had no choice. But that analytic difference was minor compared to the depth of understanding between this remarkable woman and the Pope she served as an informal secret agent.
I was completely taken with Irina Alberti, a woman of high intelligence, deep faith, shrewdness, and historical insight who had obviously gotten the signal from John Paul and Msgr. Dziwisz to tell me everything. I was also aware that Mrs. Alberti raised hackles in various Vatican offices, but I gave full marks to John Paul II for ignoring the clerical jealousy while keeping her close as a trusted source of information on Russian affairs.
“YOU ARE GETTING GREY”
POLAND AND ROME, JULY–DECEMBER, 1998
THE FINAL PUSH TO COMPLETE WITNESS TO HOPE TOOK ME TO both Poland and Rome twice in the last half of 1998. There were loose ends to tie up and further questions to get answered. As things turned out, what later seemed to me some of the most interesting things in the book were the product of these four working trips.
My friendship with Piotr and Teresa Malecki had deepened over the course of several Środowisko interviews, and while I was in Kraków in July for the 1998 Centesimus Annus seminar, they invited me to their flat for dinner. They told a few more Wujek stories from their rich trove of memories, and the Maleckis agreed to set up a Środowisko meeting for me in November to discuss the relationship of the women in the group to Wojtyła’s Love and Responsibility. That convivial dinner brought a new character into the Wojtyła drama: the great Polish composer Henryk Mikolaj Górecki, whose Third Symphony—the “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs”—had become a surprise bestseller in the West.
Teresa was Vice Dean of the Kraków Academy of Music and had met Górecki after the Third Symphony, which seemed to sum up the Polish experience of late modernity, made him a national musical hero. To mark the nine hundredth anniversary of the martyrdom of St. Stanisław, at which the archdiocese would conclude the Synod he called to implement Vatican II, Cardinal Karol Wojtyła commissioned Górecki to write a piece of his choosing. Then Wojtyła was elected pope, and Górecki called the Maleckis that night. He was “completely crazy,” Teresa remembered, saying that he had intended to write a piece for St. Stanisław, but now he had to write a piece for the Holy Father, so he had to come to Kraków from his base in Katowice, meet the people, sense the atmosphere, etc., etc. Teresa got him invited to an upcoming academic conference at the Academy of Music and Górecki went around the city “absorbing atmosphere.” The Maleckis later invited him to their apartment to hear stories of the papal inaugural Mass in Rome from Piotr’s sister and her husband. Piotr also loaned Górecki the Latin-Polish daily missal that Father Karol Wojtyła had given him years ago, so that the composer could find texts for his composition: Górecki chose several psalm fragments, taking the title of the work from Psalm 34.8: Beatus vir (qui sperat in eo) (Blessed is the man [who trusts in Him]).
Górecki kept working on the composition until the very end, getting up at all hours of the night in the Maleckis’ apartment to try harmonies on the piano. Then he had to rehearse the piece with the Kraków Philharmonic during the Cracovian portion of the Nine Days of June 1979; the woodwinds interrupted the rehearsals by rushing to the windows to play “Sto Lat” (May you live a hundred years) to John Paul whenever the Popemobile drove by. Beatus Vir was finally premiered in the Basilica of St. Francis, where Karol Wojtyła had prayed the Stations of Cross regularly, on June 9, 1979. Górecki conducted, and after the performance, with tears running down his cheeks, he walked to the back of the church to greet John Paul. Three days after the papal visit, he returned to Katowice, where communist repression was harsher than in Kraków—and was continually hassled by the regime until the changes in 1989.
The Maleckis had spent some time in Castel Gandolfo the previous summer; every morning they could hear the Pope, a floor above, pounding about with his cane. He asked them at breakfast one day whether he was disturbing them, and they said no, they were getting up for Mass anyway, but “why do you get up so early, Wujek?” Because, he said, “I like to watch the sun rise” over Lake Albano.
And there it was, wholly unexpectedly: the perfect last sentence for Witness to Hope.
After two weeks of vacation with my family and Fr. Neuhaus at his cottage on the Ottawa River, during which Richard gave me some very helpful editorial advice about my ever-growing manuscript, I was back at the desk in mid-August and stayed there through September, leaving for Rome on October 2. I had been adopted by the Class of 1999 at the North American College and wanted to attend their diaconate ordination on October 8—three days before the canonization of Edith Stein, where John Paul preached one of his greatest homilies. I continued my interviewing, filling in various gaps, and attended the Mass for the twentieth anniversary of John Paul II’s pontificate (which coincided with his fortieth anniversary as a bishop) on October 18. Two further meetings with Fr. Tadeusz Styczeń, in Rome for the anniversaries, clarified a few loose ends about the Pope’s Lublin period and philosophical projects.
Msgr. Dzwisz called on Friday morning, October 23, and asked me to come to the papal apartment for dinner at 7:40 that evening. I was taken up on the family elevator and, after a few minutes of chat with Msgr. Mokrzycki in one of the apartment parlors, John Paul II came in, looking tired but in good spirits, and when I congratulated him on his double anniversary, he mused wistfully, “Twenty years the pope… forty years as bishop…” When we sat down at the table, I told him that I had written something a little short of two thousand double-spaced pages since January, to which he replied, eyebrows raised, “Due mille? Mein Gott! Mein Gott!” I said that it was all his doing, as he’d been rather busy for seventy-eight years; he then looked across the table and informed me, “You are getting grey.”
After suggesting that he might have had something to do with that, I asked him about the reform of conclave procedures that he’d introduced two years before in the apostolic constitution Universi Dominici Gregis (The Shepherd of the Lord’s Whole Flock). He said he’d consulted several canon lawyers about it, and those conversations convinced him to make the changes he did: proscribing election by inspiration (a cardinal proclaims that he believes God has chosen X as pope and a two-thirds majority vocally agree—the method of election in the novel The Shoes of the Fisherman) and election by delegation (two-thirds of the cardinals agree on a committee and agree to abide by its choice), and, perhaps most controversially, permitting electi
on by a simple majority after dozens of ballots had failed to produce a two-thirds majority. The latter provision, I suggested, would help prevent an intransigent minority from blocking the election of a clear favorite who fell just short of two-thirds, and the Pope seemed to agree. Dziwisz interjected that a conclave couldn’t be understood on the analogy of democratic politics, and the Pope vocally agreed. As for election by inspiration and delegation, those seemed to John Paul a diminution of the moral responsibility of each cardinal-elector, and as he had long taught the human capacity for moral responsibility, I imagine he thought eliminating those options was compatible with the approach to moral decision-making he had developed in Veritatis Splendor, his encyclical on the reform of moral theology, and in his Theology of the Body.
The Pope asked about the reaction to his most recent encyclical, Fides et Ratio, in the United States. When I said that his friends had framed their presentation of it in terms of its continuity with the very beginning of the pontificate—the twentieth anniversary of “Be not afraid!” had been marked with “Be not afraid of the truth”—John Paul agreed that Fides et Ratio was “in a line of continuity with Redemptor Hominis,” his first encyclical (and the first ever) on Christian humanism, which he had begun writing “right after I was elected.” That remark strengthened my conviction that Redemptor Hominis was deliberately crafted as the “program notes” for the entire pontificate.
Back in Poland, I had a conversation with Bohdan Cywiński, a former Solidarity leader turned professor, to clarify some points about John Paul II’s role during the martial law period in Poland. Fr. Maciej Zięba, an old comrade of Cywiński’s from the heyday of Solidarity, arranged a meeting at the Dominican priory in Warsaw’s Old Town on November 14.
As I suspected, another papal biographer who had tried to portray the pope as a new Gandhi vastly overplayed John Paul’s role as the alleged mastermind of the “Solidarity underground,” with St. Martin’s Church in Warsaw acting as a clandestine supply depot for contraband snuck into Poland from the Vatican. Cywiński had been in Rome when martial law was declared and met with the Pope several times in the week immediately following the clampdown, trying to analyze the situation with what little information they had. But the question of an underground railroad, or anything else about “what to do,” didn’t come up, Cywiński said; the Pope had been “shocked” by martial law, communication with Poland was cut off, and their entire discussion was an exchange of driblets of sparse information, plus some talk about what Cywiński, the senior Solidarity leader outside the country, should do—stay in Rome or return to Poland?
During the martial law period, the Pope was not involved with clandestine relief shipments to Poland, which primarily involved food, clothing, medicine, and ink and spare parts for copiers—some of which did go through St. Martin’s. As for the idea that there was some secret, Vatican-run financial conspiracy behind this, that was “nonsense,” Cywińksi said; Solidarity wanted the world to know it had financial support from the West. Cywiński’s summary: “One thing is positive and certain—the Pope had nothing to do with this. If he had, it would have happened through me, and I made sure he wasn’t dragged into it.”
Bohdan Cywiński was full of interesting comments on personalities and events: Cardinal Wyszyński had been “a little slow to grasp what was going on” with Solidarity; Solidarity itself had underestimated Polish communism’s staying power; the 1983 papal visit during martial law was a big risk for the Pope (who might have been manipulated by the regime), but he played his part spectacularly well, “restored hope,” and denied General Jaruzelski even a modest victory; Cardinal Józef Glemp, Wyszyński’s dour successor, was a shrewder tactician than was generally appreciated; Poland was still burdened by the fact that it was “first” in 1989, when no one knew that Gorbachev had no cards left to play and fear of a possible Soviet intervention led to a power-sharing agreement between Solidarity and the communists. All of which raised interesting questions about the Church and strategies of “dialogue” with dictators; but with a book to finish, there was no time to pursue those questions further.
In Kraków that month, I finally met the other surviving member of the original Rhapsodic Theater, Halina Kwiatkowska, who as a schoolgirl in Wadowice had bested Karol Wojtyła in a poetry-reading contest. Her husband was seriously ill but she kindly received me in her apartment on November 8, and we talked of the war and what the Rhapsodists tried to do to resist the decapitation of Polish culture.
Interestingly enough, she used the same word to describe Mieczysław Kotlarczyk’s devotion to his dramatic ideas—“fanatic”—as Danuta Michałowska the year before. The young Kotlarczyk, she told me, was a “striking-looking man, almost Greek: sharp, penetrating eyes; an expressive mouth and hands; very black hair.” Curiously, “he didn’t have a colorful voice.” Yet he could make them hear afresh things they all knew by heart, like the first sections of the national epic poem Pan Tadeusz, because he articulated them in an “absolutely distinctive” way.
Karol Wojtyła, she said, would play a role “from inside the character,” with each repetition becoming “more ascetic and deeper,” and in this sense he was “very mature” as an actor—the opposite of those who strove for “external effects.” When I brought up that high school poetry-reading contest, she laughed and said the Pope still chaffed her about it, waving a finger and saying “You beat me!”
When I speculated that their culture-based resistance to the occupation might have been the seed from which John Paul’s “culture-first” strategy of resisting evil and forcing historical change had grown, and that Kotlarczyk’s theater of the “living word” reflected the Christian notion that the Word, incarnate, drives history, she “fully” agreed and told me that there were echoes of both themes in letters from Wojtyła to Kotlarczyk in 1939–40.
As for Wojtyła’s decision to become a clandestine seminarian and his friends’ reaction to that, she said it was a “complicated business, because everyone thought he would be an actor, but we also knew his piety and devotion”—so they “understood it.”
She was an impressive personality, and despite being obviously drained by her husband’s condition, there were moments when I could see flashes of the highly successful actress she had been—in her expression and articulation, and in the way she spoke with her hands.
On Teresa Malecka’s advice, I had written four of the women who had been among the earliest members of Środowisko, asking that we meet on my last research trip to Poland to talk about their relationship to Wojtyła’s book Love and Responsibility. Teresa warned me that Poles didn’t talk easily of these matters, so when we met in the Maleckis’ apartment on the night of November 9, I began by saying that I wanted to dispel the myth of John Paul II, misogynist, and to challenge the feminist critique that the Pope didn’t understand or empathize with women. None of these women had encountered the harder forms of Western feminism, but they were all well read, most were professionals, and their unanimous reaction to the suggestion that Wujek was somehow anti-woman was astonishment: Teresa Heydel Życzkowska said, “I can’t understand it,” and Teresa Malecka, who had probably had the most contact with Western feminism, said, “It’s completely crazy.”
There didn’t seem much point in pursuing that discussion further. But as I began to try and steer the conversation toward Love and Responsibility, Teresa Życzkowska altered the course of the evening by opening a leather satchel containing dozens of letters and notes she had received from Wojtyła over the years. She then plucked out several of these, and we spent the next ninety minutes or so deciphering Wojtyła’s spidery handwriting and translating these remarkable notes, with Paweł Malecki, the youngest of Piotr and Teresa’s three sons, doing the heavy translational lifting.
After some further translation-polishing by Rodger Potocki and his wife, Magda, I was able to insert all three of these previously unknown letters at appropriate points in the almost-completed manuscript of Witness to Hope. They illustra
ted the warmth, openness, and candor of Karol Wojtyła, spiritual director and friend, in a unique way. In one of the letters, from 1956, Wojtyła was reflecting on marriage and said that those who thought Wujek wanted to see all his young friends married were wrong. What was important was love: “Everyone lives above all for love. The ability to love authentically, not great intellectual capacity, constitutes the deepest part of a personality.… Authentic love leads us outside ourselves in affirming others, devoting oneself to the cause of man, to people, and above all, to God. Marriage makes sense, above all, if it gives one the opportunity for such love.”
When Paweł Malecki finished reading out the translation, each of the woman present said this was exactly how Wujek would have talked with a man. There was no difference in how he talked with women. Love, he thought, was a human problem, not a “man or woman problem.”
The letters that didn’t quite fit the book were nevertheless revealing. They weren’t ethereal: Wojtyła the correspondent always remained in touch with the quotidian, asking for someone’s children, sharing a couple’s happiness at finally getting an apartment amid the chronic housing shortage in communist-era Poland. Thus his counsel, which he didn’t hesitate to share with these close friends, was always “informed by reality,” as Teresa Malecka put it.
He was constantly on the alert for ways to show kindnesses. Danuta Rybicka wrote him after her first childbirth, complaining that she was still confined to bed. He wrote back in a letter “so in touch with my feelings that my own father couldn’t have written it” more intimately. When Teresa Malecka’s mother was ill, the first instinct of the cardinal archbishop of Kraków was to say, “I’ll come to the house and say Mass”; it was Christmastime, and his gesture of friendship enabled the family to have something of a real Christmas celebration, with tea and cakes following the Mass.
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