Lessons in Hope

by George Weigel

  Without violating the “pontifical secret,” I can say that the extensive questionnaire—more than 120 questions—began with some throat-clearing about the witness (me) and then proceeded to more than sixty historical and biographical questions about the subject, which took me a bit aback. So I called Oder and asked, “Do you really want me to answer these biographical questions? I’ve already written a thousand pages on them.” He laughed and said that, in response to those questions, I could make reference to the appropriate pages and chapters in Witness to Hope—because “your book is the bible in this office.” That was reassuring, so I set to work on the rest of the questionnaire. It was a marvelous experience in that it compelled me to rethink John Paul II’s life and pontificate through a new prism: the virtues.

  I’d written a lot about Karol Wojtyła as a Christian disciple, because that dimension of his personality seemed to me the foundation of all the rest. But I had never “read” his entire life and pontificate through the optic of the theological virtues—faith, hope, and love—and the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, courage, and temperance. That was what the balance of the questionnaire asked me to do. I found the experience so intriguing that I adopted the “virtues” framework in the evaluative third section of The End and the Beginning.

  I submitted my testimony in December 2006 but my conversation with Msgr. Oder continued. In the course of several meetings, I learned that the Positio, the formal record of John Paul II’s cause, was composed of four massive volumes, the first of which was a “small biography” (to which Witness to Hope was appended). The second and third volumes of the Positio were compilations of testimonies from over a hundred witnesses, among whom were more than two dozen laypeople; their remarks, Oder observed, were frequently the most interesting. The first three volumes of the Positio would eventually be available for scholarly research. The fourth volume, Quaestiones Selectae (Special Questions), would remain under the pontifical secret.

  Which fact brought me back to the murky and sometimes brutal world of the secret intelligence services. In one conversation, Msgr. Oder told me of some recent nonsense in the Italian press to the effect that, during World War II, Karol Wojtyła had taken part in the assassination of two Gestapo agents. That struck me as impossibly out of character, to which Oder replied, “Obviously.” But the postulation office spent six months tracking down the story and preparing a rebuttal for inclusion under those “special questions.” Then an idea occurred to me about the possible origin of such a calumny and I said to Oder, “Markus Wolf?” He thought it quite possible. The worst of the bad guys never quit, it seemed.

  The formal investigative process included testimony from serious critics of John Paul II, including the schismatic followers of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. Their large dossier accused the Pope of just about everything in the Lefebvrist parade of horribles—but not, it seemed, liturgical abuses, thus confirming what John Paul II had said: the Lefebvrist rejection of Vatican II was primarily a matter of the Council’s endorsement of religious freedom, its openness to interreligious dialogue, and the new emphasis it placed on a Church engaging the world.

  Criticism from schismatics paled into insignificance, however, when our conversation about the opposition to the cause coincided with a discussion of exorcisms that could be attributed to John Paul II—a delicate subject I had raised with Cardinal Stanisław Dziwisz, appointed Archbishop of Kraków by Benedict XVI, in 2008. Dziwisz told me frankly that, in 1978, he thought that what Catholic tradition referred to as “demonic possession” was one form or another of mental illness. But after several experiences of situations in which a deep, calming change was worked in a highly disturbed person by an encounter with John Paul II that included the Pope’s praying with or over the afflicted person, he no longer thought of Satan as a metaphor; Satan was real and at work in the world. Msgr. Oder, a most measured man, agreed: “I can feel his power sometimes.… He hates him [John Paul II].” It was not the kind of comment one typically hears over lunch; I promised my Polish friend that I would pray for his protection.

  The catalog of “favors received” through the intercession of John Paul II was strikingly appropriate, in that so many seemed to reflect the late Pope’s pastoral priorities: couples enabled to conceive children; family reconciliations; “returns to God,” conversions, and recoveries of faith; difficult pregnancies brought to term. I smiled at the number of students who wrote the postulation office, reporting happy results on fearsome exams. Even more touching were the letters from those reporting that they found employment after praying for John Paul II’s help.

  But the most moving of all were the letters Msgr. Oder showed me in a small cubbyhole next to his office. There, in a variety of languages, were letters addressed, “Pope John Paul II / Heaven.” I almost teared up, but then I laughed and said, “You mean the people who can’t get my electric bill from one side of the county to the other can manage to deliver these here?” Oder and I agreed that it was, like so many more serious and urgent “favors received,” a miracle.

  A PROMISE KEPT

  WASHINGTON AND POLAND, 2010–2012

  WRITING THE SECOND VOLUME OF MY JOHN PAUL II BIOGRAPHY occupied a considerable amount of my time in 2008 and early 2009, not least because of the challenges involved in helping readers traverse the twilight-zone world of communist secret intelligence services and their attempts to penetrate the Vatican and impede the Pope’s work. In structuring the book, I decided to follow the format I had adopted for Witness to Hope, beginning each chapter of the historical sections with a timeline of events and a tone-setting vignette from John Paul’s life, before proceeding to the narrative. The book opened with a prologue that summarized Witness to Hope in eighteen and a half pages and then continued in three parts. “Nemesis” retold the story of the battle between communism and Karol Wojtyła / John Paul II, now amplified by the Grajewski materials and other new documentation. “Kenosis,” the theological term for emptying oneself in imitation of Christ’s self-emptying (Philippians 2.7), took up the story where Witness to Hope left off and told the tale of John Paul’s last four and a half years. “Metanoia,” a biblical term for Christian conversion, was the lengthy evaluation of the man and the pontificate that could not be done in the first volume, for obvious reasons.

  I took the idea for the new book’s title, The End and the Beginning, from “East Coker,” the second part of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, in which the poet speaks of ends connected to beginnings: which seemed true of the arc of John Paul II’s life and reflective of the book’s somewhat odd structure—a revisiting of Wojtyła versus communism before the finale of the John Paul II story and the long evaluation. It was perhaps too clever and didn’t sharply signal that this was the sequel to Witness to Hope—which many people thought had already told the whole story. Published in the United States in the fall of 2010, The End and the Beginning: John Paul II—The Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy eventually appeared in Spanish, Italian, Ukrainian, Polish, and German editions, with a Chinese edition to follow.

  The Polish edition appeared in 2012, and I spent a week in Warsaw, Lublin, and Kraków promoting it at various media and public events. There were excellent discussions of John Paul II’s Polish legacy at the Dominican priories in Warsaw and Kraków and an engaging luncheon at the presidential palace in Warsaw, hosted by President Bronisław Komorowski and attended by the great Tadeusz Mazowiecki. Throughout the week, though, I was struck by how poorly John Paul II’s intellectual project had been received and internalized in Poland, with the exception of my Polish Dominican friends, a few other scholars in Lublin and elsewhere, and a scattering of journalists, politicians, and laypeople. Poland’s emotional attachment to the late Pope was massively evident the year before in Rome, at his beatification. But John Paul’s vision of a public Church that was not a partisan Church, a Church that shaped public life by forming culture through the evangelization and catechesis of the people, was not much in evidence in twenty-f
irst-century Poland, sadly. That impression was a portent of difficulties to come in Polish public life.

  Seeing The End and the Beginning was not quite the intensely emotional experience that opening the box with the first copies of Witness to Hope had been. It was a blessing and a satisfaction to have been given the time to keep the promise I made to John Paul on December 15, 2004. I was grateful for the cooperation I’d received from so many interlocutors and colleagues in preparing the book. I thought the first section, drawing on those hitherto unknown or unremarked Stasi, SB, and KGB documents, made a real contribution to the study of an important period of modern history—and were a useful reminder to the generations that knew not Joseph (Stalin) of what the Cold War had been about, why it had to be fought, and why it was so important that the forces of freedom won.

  Yet something was different, and the difference was obvious.

  This time, there would be no “good country dinner” at Castel Gandolfo, no reminiscence with my subject about the things we had been through together, no shared laughter, no silent bear hug or prayer in the chapel at the end. That reunion would have to wait for another dinner party, what the Book of Revelation calls the Wedding Feast of the Lamb, in another location: the New Jerusalem.

  Lessons in Hope

  THE CROSS BENEATH WHICH I WROTE WITNESS TO HOPE AND The End and the Beginning is a framed reproduction of Marc Chagall’s White Crucifixion. Slightly below it and to the right is an icon of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa. These two works of art watched over me during the decades of research and writing that led to the two volumes of my John Paul II biography. As icons do, they also make present spiritual realities: in this case, the lessons in hope I learned from the saint whose life changed mine, in ways I could never have anticipated during a dinner of consequence in December 1995.

  The White Crucifixion has long struck me as the most evocative religious painting of the twentieth century. Painted shortly after the Nazi Kristallnacht in 1938, its Christ is unmistakably Jewish, clothed on the cross in a tallith, a traditional prayer shawl, with Pilate’s inscription in Hebrew over his bowed head. Instead of the mourning angels common to renderings of the Crucifixion, he is surrounded by three Jewish patriarchs and a matriarch; beneath him is a ceremonial seven-branched candelabrum; and around him swirl the lethal ideological madnesses of the mid-twentieth century, symbolized by Jews fleeing burning synagogues and revolutionaries following the red flag.

  The great historian Jaroslav Pelikan read the White Crucifixion as, in part, Chagall’s rebuke to those Christians who imagined they were doing the will of God by persecuting Jesus’s people, the People of Israel. Yet Pelikan went on to note that this very Jewish Rabbi Jesus is also the Church’s Lord Jesus: a son of Israel who is the universal savior in his Jewishness, not outside of it. In that sense, the White Crucifixion, read through the prism of Easter faith, embodies the answer to the question so sharply posed at Auschwitz and the gulag camps, during the Ukrainian Holodomor, and in the killing fields of Cambodia: Where is God? To which the Christian reply is, God is here, in the person of his Son, bearing the world’s sin and overcoming it through obedient suffering undergone for love of the world.

  The Virgin Mary is not a figure in Chagall’s rendering of Calvary, which is one reason why I placed that icon of the Black Madonna beneath the White Crucifixion, as John Paul II had placed a similar icon beneath the cross in the chapel of the papal apartment. For John Paul, Mary was the preeminent disciple, the woman of faith whose articulated yes at the Annunciation, and whose silent yes in receiving the body of her Son in the familiar composition of the Pietà, is the model of all discipleship: the humble yet liberating acceptance of the divine will as one’s own. So to contemplate the Black Madonna beneath the White Crucifixion is to make an act of faith in the providential governance of history and an act of hope in the future.

  Where is God? God is here, in the midst of the human condition, redeeming his creation through radical, self-giving love. God is here, even when humanity is at its worst, so that fear and hatred and death don’t have the final word. God is here, even when, to human eyes, the Holy One seems silent or indifferent. God is here, and God’s creative and redemptive purposes are going to win the day, ultimately.

  John Paul II lived by that conviction, embraced his suffering because of that conviction, and died in that conviction. That is why his life was a witness to hope. And that is why the lessons he taught me were, above all, lessons in hope.

  In the days before his canonization, when it came time to try to say something fresh thing about him, it occurred to me that Karol Wojtyła was a man who refused to accept what I called, in the Wall Street Journal, the “tyranny of the possible.” His faith in the providential governance of history was so deep, and his belief in the power of human solidarity was so strong, that he could discern possibilities where others could only see fixed and unchangeable realities: like the Berlin Wall, or the seeming indifference of the young to the Gospel, or the irrelevance of the Catholic Church to an authentic liberation of humanity in the twenty-first century and the third millennium.

  More than a decade after his death, with his hope for a “springtime of the human spirit” being frustrated in world politics and his call for a Church of missionary disciples being ignored by Catholics still litigating the Sixties, it can seem that this refusal to accept the tyranny of the possible was itself quixotic, a reflection of Polish romanticism. But such cynicism would be a betrayal of the lessons in hope that he taught.

  The Church and the world may be heading for a difficult patch in the middle decades of the twenty-first century. Recognizing that is a requirement of Christian realism. But submitting to those difficulties as something inexorable and irresistible is a betrayal of Christian hope. To know both those things and to try to live responsibly in the tension between them is to have learned something important from Karol Wojtyła, Pope St. John Paul II.

  Acknowledgments

  MANY FRIENDS HELPED ME CHECK MY RECOLLECTIONS WHEN I didn’t have a written record of an event or needed counsel in tracking down a stray piece of information. It’s a pleasure to acknowledge their kind cooperation: Clare Duffy, Andrzej Grajewski, Archbishop Thomas Gullickson, Ed Gund, Judith Dwan Hallet, Candice Hughes, Father Tomasz Jaklewicz, Fr. Roger Landry, Joan Lewis, Luis Lugo, Teresa Malecka, Piotr Malecki, Bishop James McCarthy, Ed Meese, Keith Miller, Zbigniew Nosowski, Cardinal Edwin O’Brien, Msgr. Sławomir Oder, Mario Paredes, Rodger Potocki, Father Ronald Roberson, CSP, Brad Roberts, Gwyneth Spaeder, Father Tomasz Szopa, Joan Weigel, John Weigel, Tracy Wilkinson, Henryk Woźniakowski, Catherine Wyler, and Fr. Maciej Zięba, OP.

  Stephen White excavated boxes of my materials from the archives at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and kept its Catholic Studies Project humming while I was writing. EPPC is the best possible professional home for a project like this, or indeed any other, and I thank my colleagues for their support and friendship.

  I should also like to thank the board and staff of the William E. Simon Foundation, which sponsors my chair at EPPC, for their stalwart and generous support. Best thanks, too, to the other philanthropic partners of EPPC Catholic Studies.

  This is my sixth book with Basic Books and the third I’ve done while Basic has been led by the wonderful Lara Heimert. My gratitude to Lara and the Basic staff, an author’s dream team, is longstanding and most sincere.

  It’s a pleasure to dedicate this book to my wife, Joan, in abiding gratitude for helping make much of what’s recounted here possible, and to our grandchildren—William, Claire, and Lucy Spaeder—so they’ll have an idea of what their Papa was up to before they came on the scene.

  G. W.

  North Bethesda—Kraków—Allumette Island—Rome February–November 2016

  George Weigel is a New York Times bestselling author and one of the world’s leading authorities on the Catholic Church. Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William
E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies, and lives in North Bethesda, Maryland.

  Index

  Abel, Sister Rebecca, 202

  Abrams, Elliott, 99

  Adler, Mortimer, 19

  Afghanistan, 277, 297

  Agca, Mehmet Ali, 5, 6, 103–104, 158, 208, 286

  Alberigo, Giuseppe, 329

  Alberti, Irina, 192, 204–209

  Aleksii II, 140, 236

  Alicastro, Joe, 237, 312

  Alongi, Phil, 239–240, 306, 309, 310, 312, 315

  Alton, David, 264

  Ambrose, John, 307

  Analecta Cracoviensia, 104

  Ancilla a Maternitate Mariae, Sister, 288

  Anderson, Annelise, 327

  Anderson, James, 10

  Anderson, Martin, 327

  Andreotti, Giulio, 229, 230

  Andrew, Christopher, 320

  Andropov, Yuri, 37, 180, 208, 323

  Appeal for Religious Freedom in the Soviet Union on the Occasion of the Millennium of Christianity in Kievan Rus’, 35–36

  Appointment in Rome (Neuhaus), 186–187