With the help of three capable translators—Paula Olearnik, Szymon Malecki, and Father John Rock, SJ—I was able to discuss with Grajewski the Polish and East German documents he’d culled from the relevant archives and shared with me. Those conversations did not alter the basic story line in The Final Revolution and Witness to Hope. But they allowed me to tell the story of communism’s war against Karol Wojtyła, and his victory over the comrades, in new depth and with numerous striking illustrations previously unknown or unreported. The details are in The End and the Beginning, but several key skirmishes and battles in what was all war, all the time stand out.
The first was the SB’s attempt to blackmail John Paul II during the negotiations over his second Polish pilgrimage in 1983. The plan involved a forged diary, said to be authored by a former employee of the Archdiocese of Kraków, Irina Kinaszewska, in which Mrs. Kinaszewska (deceased by 1983) claimed a sexual relationship with Cardinal Wojtyła. This tawdry caper was frustrated when the SB officer in charge of planting the diary in the apartment of John Paul’s old friend, Msgr. Andrzej Bardecki, got stinking drunk, crashed his car, and tried to talk his way out of a bad situation by blabbing to the police about who he was and what he was doing—from which point the whole plot unraveled. At first blush, this particular “active measure” looked like something out of the Keystone Kops. But when it turned out that the same SB officer who crashed his car, Grzegorz Piotrowski, was one of those who beat Fr. Jerzy Popiełuszko to death a year later, another lesson came into focus: the moral tawdriness of the communist effort to disintegrate the Church and the Pope went hand in (iron) glove with physical brutality.
Grajewski’s studies and our exploration of them also confirmed what I had long suspected: that the Ostpolitik’s search for a modus vivendi with communist regimes resulted in the Vatican’s being seriously penetrated by Eastern bloc intelligence services, beginning with covert operations and the suborning of moles during the Second Vatican Council.
The most interesting nugget from those days involved Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński. During Vatican II, Wyszyński, whose deep Marian piety was also an icon of Polish anticommunist resistance, urged the Council to issue a document on the Blessed Virgin Mary. Working with Catholic collaborators among theological specialists in Mariology (some of whom were even given SB code names), the Polish secret police sponsored a “Memorandum on Certain Aspects of the Cult of the Virgin Mary in Poland”: a putatively scholarly paper suggesting that Wyszyński’s Marian piety was heretical, which was distributed to all the bishops at Vatican II. The memorandum was accepted as authentic by virtually all the journalists covering the Council, in part because it fit neatly into the “good liberals versus bad conservatives” Vatican II story line beloved of the media. And it had an effect, if a temporary one, on the Polish primate’s standing among his brother bishops and in his contest with the curial officials pushing the Ostpolitik.
Andrzej Grajewski’s professionalism was displayed in the respect he showed for the competence of some of the SB’s most accomplished agents in and around the Vatican. The most striking of these was Edward Kotowski (code name PIETRO), who was sent to Rome in 1978 and over the next five years developed several levels of open and clandestine contacts through a combination of the skills that make for a superior secret intelligence operative: linguistic capabilities, personal charm, a tremendous memory, and a capacity to tell his superiors the truth. Thus while PIETRO was an especially capable opponent fully involved in the SB’s efforts to impede or blunt the effect of John Paul II’s 1983 pilgrimage to Poland, it was also Kotowski who, after returning to Poland, told General Jaruzelski in 1989 that the jig was up and that the regime had to recognize the legal personality of the Church—thus opening the door to the legal reemergence of Polish civil society from under the rotting carapace of the Communist Party state.
During the Cold War, the East German Ministry for State Security, the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, or Stasi, was generally regarded as the most competent, and thus the most dangerous, of the Warsaw Pact secret intelligence services. Grajewski’s documents and the information he gave me about Stasi penetration of the Vatican did nothing to diminish that reputation. These people, I quickly came to see, were quite professional and completely ruthless. Yet for all their professionalism, their worldview impeded their analysis. The reports to Stasi foreign intelligence chief Markus Wolf were full of accurate detail about what was afoot inside the Vatican, but the analysis was often skewed by the tendency to view everything about John Paul II through a political lens—such as his first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis, which was thoroughly misconstrued by the German moles in Rome. The Stasi reports grasped the reasons for John Paul’s insistence that the Church did not do politics, but they missed his larger strategic goal, which was to redefine the battleground between Catholicism and communism, shifting the contest from the realm of diplomacy to the realm of conscience, conviction, and cultural resistance. These Stasi memoranda thus illustrated a fundamental principle in Espionage 101: the data may be solid, but it’s only useful when the analysis through which it’s filtered is based on accurate premises and assumptions.
A year after giving me the initial cache of Polish and East German materials, Andrjez Grajewski and I met in Katowice to review another crucial document he had acquired: a November 1979 “Decree of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.” That decree and its appendix gave orders to various Soviet state organs about actions to be taken against Pope John Paul II. The document was interpreted in some quarters as a direct order to kill the Pope, which it was not (no such order would likely have been written down). Rather, it was a call for “active measures” against the Pope and the Church, including a full range of covert activities: spreading disinformation about John Paul as a “conservative” who threatened world peace (a trap in which many Western journalists and Catholic commentators were ensnared); provocations; and intensified efforts at information gathering from within Church circles, including the Vatican. The decree also called for closer cooperation with those Vatican circles in favor of “peaceful relations,” meaning those still pushing the old Ostpolitik.
The appendix went on to express grave concern about the effects of John Paul II’s election and program, not only in Poland and other Catholic areas of the Warsaw Pact but within the Soviet Union itself, explicitly identifying Lithuania, Latvia, western Ukraine, and Belarus as regions that could be destabilized. Poland was not neglected, however, for one part of the appendix described it as a Catholic salient from which “to carry out the strategic policies of the Vatican” against the Soviet bloc.
Perhaps the most striking thing about this document—which was labeled “absolutely secret”—was the threat analysis. The struggle for the future was still described in the old dyad of socialist social order versus Western imperialism. But the mortal threat to the former was not the ex officio leader of the “imperialists,” US president Jimmy Carter. The threat to the Soviet imperium was John Paul II.
While I was digging into these materials with Andrzek Grajewski, I got into contact with Martin and Annelise Anderson, then completing work on their book Reagan’s Secret War. The Andersons shared with me a previously classified White House memorandum of conversation on Reagan’s working lunch with Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, two days after martial law was declared in Poland in December 1981. It was a revealing document.
Casaroli initiated the conversation on the Polish crisis by accepting General Jaruzelski’s claim that he had acted under Soviet pressure and to forestall a Soviet invasion, claiming a “personal knowledge” of the Polish general as the basis of his judgments. A day before Polish troops killed nine striking workers at a mine in Katowice, Casaroli seemed confident that the Polish army would not take violent measures against nonviolent strikers.
Against Reagan’s argument that the forces of freedom should take full advantage of the attempt to crush Solidarity to underscore the case for freedom, Casaroli replied th
at “it was unrealistic to think that one East European country could be extensively liberalized on its own,” for “no country could be far ahead of the others”; the cardinal then claimed this was John Paul’s view, which it certainly was not. At one point, Casaroli even said that, while “the events in Poland were unfortunate,” they were also “predictable,” given what Polish officials had told him about “the lack of worker discipline” since the rise of Solidarity.
When Reagan spoke of a “terrible hunger” for God in the Warsaw Pact, Casaroli said that that might be true in some circles, but that young people were “insensible to God.” The cardinal then repeated twice that the time was “not ripe” for “major change” in Central and Eastern Europe (at which point Reagan’s personal representative to the Vatican, William Wilson, shrewdly observed that they would probably only know in retrospect when the time was ripe for real change). The memorandum, read between the lines, also suggested that Casaroli bought the caricature of Ronald Reagan as a warmongering cowboy, telling the president that the world relied “on his judgment and wisdom”—that is, Casaroli looked to the United States to cool tensions with the Soviet bloc in the wake of martial law in Poland.
Throughout a ninety-minute conversation, Ronald Reagan was the voice of John Paul II’s morally driven approach to world politics while Cardinal Casaroli played the role of the worldly-wise practitioner of realpolitik. The president believed in the power of moral witness to change things; the cardinal secretary of state took the measured, “realistic” view. The president wanted to help John Paul’s global campaign for human rights by condemning repression publicly; the Vatican diplomat argued for muted voices.
All of which confirmed that, whatever else was misguided about the Stasi, SB, and KGB analyses of life inside the Vatican, the claim that there were “Vatican circles” deeply disturbed by John Paul II and his approach to world politics was well founded. I got a further sense of just how well founded from an unexpected source.
Achille Silvestrini, Cardinal Casaroli’s longtime deputy for the Ostpolitik, was one of the two curial cardinals who refused to speak with me when I was preparing Witness to Hope. I thought I understood Silvestrini’s reluctance. As principal keeper of the Casaroli flame, he was likely unhappy with the analysis of the Ostpolitik in The Final Revolution, thought that I would propose more of the same in my papal biography, and thus played hard to get. It was all the more surprising, then, when, during the October 2003 Polish television broadcast for John Paul II’s silver jubilee, Cardinal Silvestrini greeted me like a long-lost friend and invited me to meet with him. I took him up on his offer and we met twice in 2008.
The parlor in his apartment was a memorial to the Italian sub-tribe to which he belonged: the denizens of Brisighella, near Ravenna, which had produced two other modern-day cardinals in addition to Silvestrini, the brothers Gaetano and Amleto Cicognani. Near a large picture of the two prelates and the walled medieval town was a bookcase featuring all five volumes of the canonical progressive account of the Second Vatican Council, edited by Giuseppe Alberigo. That, and the fact that Silvestrini wore the bishop’s ring that Paul VI had designed for the Council fathers rather than the cardinal’s ring given him by John Paul II, readily positioned the cardinal on the ecclesiastical map.
Our meetings were entirely friendly—although the follow-up session in November 2008 was only possible because Hanna Suchocka sat me at the same table with Silvestrini at a dinner party and he could no longer evade my reminders that he’d agreed to meet a second time. Despite the cordiality, I had the sense at both our meetings that he was playing Mr. Magoo, effecting an innocence and diffidence belied by his experience and by his constantly thumbing through a well-marked copy of Cardinal Casaroli’s memoir and defense of the Ostpolitik, Il Martirio della Pazienza (The Martyrdom of Patience).
There were, however, moments in our conversations that were genuinely helpful. In my writing I had occasionally noted the striking fact that the Cuban Missile Crisis coincided with the opening days of Vatican II: a conjunction of events I thought might have badly shaken John XXIII and Casaroli. When I asked him about this, Silvestrini confirmed that the 1963 encyclical Pacem in Terris (Peace on Earth) “had its origins” in the experience of those days, when the Vatican judged that a “new voice was needed.” Further, he tacitly conceded the extreme cautiousness of the Casaroli approach to communist governments and the Solidarity movement by saying, with the hint of a smile, that John Paul II had “less prudence” in such matters—meaning more willingness to push for change. He agreed with my suggestion that the Soviets regarded John Paul II as a threat to their entire enterprise, not just to their grip on Poland: a view Silvestrini may well have formed at the outset of the pontificate through his contacts in the Italian Communist Party. And he described John Paul’s 1980 letter to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev as a “personal initiative” that would have been discussed with Cardinal Casaroli but didn’t emanate from him—another important indicator of John Paul’s independence and boldness.
Practiced diplomat that he was, he complimented me on my books and asked me to sign his copies of the Italian editions of The Final Revolution and Witness to Hope. Yet Achille Silvestrini remained the true Casaroli acolyte. John Paul II’s election, he claimed, was only possible because of the Ostpolitik; but he never acknowledged the cardinals’ criticism of that policy during the interregnum after the death of Paul VI. Despite the massive documentary evidence I had seen that the Ostpolitik led to the serious penetration of the Vatican Secretariat of State by Warsaw Pact secret intelligence services, Silvestrini never conceded that the Vatican tried to deal with moles and leaks, saying only that there were “concerns” but “no concrete evidence” of penetration (and this despite admitting that he and others were warned about agents in place by Western intelligence). He persistently defended the work of his own deputy, Luigi Poggi, whom the Grajewski documents showed to be one of the most gelatinous Vatican diplomats in dealing with the hardball players in the Polish communist leadership. Moreover, he still insisted that the idea of putting a papal nuncio into Poland in the mid-1970s—Poggi—was a sound one, despite the virtual certainty that this would have cut the legs out from under Cardinal Wyszyński in his dealings with the Polish communist regime.
Not unlike Cardinal Casaroli in his December 1981 lunch conversation with President Reagan, Silvestrini conveyed the impression that the chief operators of the old Vatican Ostpolitik regarded the Solidarity movement as a distraction, a gaggle of pious, idealistic amateurs making trouble for the diplomatic professionals—which was, of course, a world removed from John Paul II’s notion of Solidarity as a unique embodiment of Catholic social doctrine. And, again like Casaroli, Silvestrini was willing to cut Wojciech Jaruzelski a lot of slack over the imposition of martial law, even after it was clear that there was no serious threat of a Soviet invasion of Poland in December 1981.
I was grateful for Cardinal Silvestrini’s time and courtesy but frustrated by his unwillingness to engage me robustly or to deal seriously with the accumulating scholarly consensus that the Ostpolitik had few accomplishments and in fact had done a lot of damage. My conversations with the main protagonist of the Casaroli heritage confirmed me in the judgment that the default positions in the Vatican diplomatic service, especially among the Italians, were not materially changed by the pontificate of John Paul II and its powerful demonstration of the potency of papal moral witness.
BEATIFICATION AND A LIFE RECONSIDERED
ROME, 2006–2008
POPE BENEDICT XVI’S DECISION TO WAIVE THE NORMAL FIVE-YEAR waiting period for opening a beatification and canonization cause for John Paul II was a wise response to the calls that rang out across St. Peter’s Square on April 8, 2005—“Santo subito!” There would be no instant canonization, but the process of investigating the case for John Paul II’s beatification and eventual canonization could begin immediately. For the process to be credible, however, a certain kind of postulator (in effect, a pro
ject manager) was needed: someone who understood the late Pope and appreciated his thought and his virtues but who wouldn’t be stampeded or rushed; someone familiar with the new method of assessing possible saints’ causes that John Paul created; someone who knew Polish and Italian, the two languages in which most of the extensive documentation in this cause would be found. As it happened, the right man was at hand.
Monsignor Sławomir Oder, a priest of the diocese of Toruń, had stayed in Rome to work for Cardinal Camillo Ruini and the Vicariate of Rome after completing doctoral studies in canon law at the Pontifical Lateran University. I found him very impressive as we got to know each other. He was smart and precise; he had a good sense of humor and wasn’t overawed by what Vatican wags call the pezzi grossi, the big shots; he had worked on a previous cause, so he knew the procedural ropes. Above all he was a good priest who insisted on serving as pastor of a Roman parish because, he said, too many Roman priests are merely bureaucrats.
We first met in 2006, when Oder wrote and asked me if I could share with him a copy of the memoir fragment, Curriculum Philosophicum, that John Paul II had given me in 1996—a first indication of the postulation’s meticulousness, as the only reference to that document was buried in the dense forest of endnotes at the end of Witness to Hope. I’d been given Curriculum Philosophicum on the understanding that it was for my eyes only, so I thought it best to check with Cardinal Dziwisz; he encouraged me to cooperate fully with Oder, so I sent a copy along to my new correspondent with apologies for its somewhat tattered and annotated condition.
Some months later, Msgr. Oder got back in touch and asked me to be an official witness for the beatification/canonization cause. This was unexpected. So I went to Oder’s office in the Lateran Palace, former home of popes, to discuss the matter during a December 2006 Roman work period. He explained that he wanted to solicit opinions from a wide range of knowledgeable sources, that I would be sworn to confidentiality under the rubric of the “pontifical secret,” and that I should be prepared to put aside several hours for oral testimony before a canonical judge, whose questions would be based on a questionnaire developed for the cause. That seemed fair enough. Then, after reviewing the questionnaire, I asked whether it wouldn’t make more sense for me to offer my testimony in written form, after having sworn the required oath. Oder readily agreed.
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