Keys of This Blood

by Malachi Martin

  In a similar manner, John XXIII’s rare forays out of the Vatican—a pilgrimage to the holy shrine of Loreto, a visit with the convicts in Regina Coeli, Rome’s central prison—were wholly and traditionally ecclesiastical in nature.

  Paul VI did break one mold: He was the first to travel overseas. But it was almost a technical change that did not alter the basic pattern; for his intent and his every action on those trips were entirely governed by the ancient ecclesiastical tradition. From the papal point of view, in fact, the travels of Paul VI were not to cities or to nations at all. They were to a shrine here, to a devotional exercise there, to an international organization elsewhere.

  To effect a reconciliation between Catholics and Greek Orthodox Christians, for example, he went to the Holy Land and to Turkey. It was for Eucharistic celebrations that he went to Uganda, India, Colombia, the Philippines and Australia. Even his stopovers in Iran, Indonesia, Samoa, Hong Kong and Sri Lanka were taken as what they were—necessary stepping-stones along an ecclesiastical journey. A major speech—a highlight in Paul VI’s life—took him to the United Nations headquarters in New York. It was to honor the Virgin Mary that he went to Portugal’s famous shrine at Fatima. Though there was the appearance of innovation, in other words, and though he occasionally adopted the description of himself as the “Pilgrim Pope,” Paul VI set no new pattern, at least in this area of papal tradition and observance.

  When seen against the backdrop of so long, so consistent and compelling a record of papal travel, the more patient members of John Paul’s inner council argued that it was fair to expect a certain resistance to change; to expect a lag time for understanding to catch up even with John Paul’s traveling ways, not to mention his remarkable outlook on the world he was coming to know so intimately.

  Moreover, it was pointed out, for anyone who understood the very nature of the Vatican, it would not do for long to argue that John Paul was just a publicity seeker or craved simple pastoral work. It made no sense to argue that a proven media magnate such as John Paul would not bother to set foot out of the Vatican, if all he wanted was a high publicity profile. Or that the two to three million visitors who came to the Vatican each year would not serve even the deepest pastoral urge to press the flesh.

  In point of fact, the Vatican has long been the one place in the world where nothing is treated as off limits by the most intricate, ever-watchful, sometimes irreverently curious and incompassionate network of global communications. The Vatican has always been what one veteran hand described as “a place where every corridor is a whispering gallery and every office an echo chamber.” The eighteenth-century French diplomat Joseph de Maistre doubted “that even the Holy Spirit could fly through it without being buffeted by the winds of gossip and the stentorian breathing of secrets.” And things had not changed a bit two hundred years later when Frank Shakespeare, posted as United States ambassador to the Holy See, observed that “the Vatican is unrivaled as a listening post.”

  Within that atmosphere, a swarm of international journalists, reporters and commentators—not to mention embassy and consular officers whose business it is to monitor this Pope and his Vatican—spend entire careers wiring themselves into vast networks of “confidential” Vatican sources.

  On top of that, it is an open secret—especially since the 1981 attempt on the Pope’s life—that not only the Italian secret services but at least three other governments participate in the most minute monitoring of John Paul: his comings and goings; his staff; his food; his clothes; who reaches him by letter and by phone, and whom he reaches; who sees him and why and for how long and what transpires between them. Always someone is watching, someone is listening, someone is probing and noting and reporting.

  It is well understood by all, moreover, that no matter who is involved in any Vatican conversation or discussion, and no matter at what level of importance or secrecy, or what the subject at hand may be, matters finally turn to what the Pope may think about this, or what he may or may not do or say about that. Finally, in other words, whether he is personally present or not, the Pope is at the center of every confidence, every informal chat, every speculation and rumor.

  In short, if John Paul were to be dismissed as merely a master of public relations, then by the same inexorable logic it had to be admitted that in the Vatican itself he had the ideal bureaucratic weapon for making news. He needed only to stir any pot of speculation with the papal stick of rumor to make headlines whenever he might choose. If all he wanted was publicity, why bother to log hundreds of thousands of miles in scores of supremely exhausting papal trips to something approaching a hundred countries to get it?

  Within the arena of global competition where lay the real reason for John Paul’s gargantuan travel agenda, there were a certain number of leaders who did begin to understand in a general way that they were watching and listening to a pope who was saying and doing things that were entirely new. But even they were unable to span the quantum leap between the traditional papal mind as they had always known it and the mind of this once Polish Pope.

  To be sure, he had come out of provincial Krakow. In the words of one doorman there who had known him for years, Papa Wojtyla “had left … for Rome with an overnight bag, a toothbrush and a couple of bread rolls to eat.” Perhaps so. But quickly enough he seemed to have been transformed by the papacy. And now he was returning the favor. That much, at least, seemed clear.

  Nevertheless, even his adversaries in the geopolitical arena—men who saw themselves as the very embodiment of a bright and totally new future for the world—displayed in John Paul’s regard all the parochialism of which they habitually accused so many others. Like the skeptical Nathanael who asked on first hearing about Jesus, “Can any good come out of Nazareth?” such papal critics wondered, “Can any good come at the hands of an archbishop from provincial Krakow in retrograde Poland, who fancies for himself certain worldwide and internationalist aims?”

  Lurking beneath the surface of such doubts, however, was the dawning realization for some that, fitted for combat or not, John Paul regarded their competition, and had entered into it, as the most important struggle of our age. And there was the dawning realization, as well, that he had entered it over their heads by thrusting himself and the papacy he embodied into the forefront of the transnational mind that was being formed so swiftly and surely among his contemporaries.

  “Holy Father,” John Paul was asked toward the end of a private audience for visiting dignitaries in 1983, “can we expect Your Holiness to undertake many more of these papal visits to different parts of the world?”

  John Paul replied with candor. “Until as many men and women and children as I can reach have seen the face and heard the voice of Christ’s Vicar; for I am their Pope, and this is what the Blessed Mother wishes her Son’s Vicar to do.”

  That was anything but the voice of someone seeking publicity as an escape, or a high international profile because he enjoyed the razzle-dazzle. It sounded the authentic tones of a man led by a commanding vision and intent upon a definite goal.

  The trouble was that the more John Paul traveled in the world and the more he spoke to leaders and citizens in the countries and the cities and the wide places in the road where they lived, the more he seemed to be taken in some quarters as a living, traveling enigma. And as surely as nature abhors a vacuum, so do leaders in political, economic and social power abhor an enigma loose in their territory.

  Even among John Paul’s more observant and careful adversaries, some seemed truly at a loss to know what it was this Pope saw abroad in their world that was so dire as to have plunged him into what many in his own Church were criticizing as a perilous course, and possibly the most disastrous one any pope had ever set for himself. The most careful watch on this most public of popes, and the most searching analyses of his moves, did not seem to reveal to John Paul’s secular adversaries—or to most of his allies—what lay behind the vast array of odd and seemingly contradictory aspects of his behavio
r as world leader, or as Vicar of Christ.

  On the contrary, nothing of what could be seen from the outside seemed to serve anything in John Paul’s pontificate that could be identified as a cohesive grand policy. No consistent strategies seemed visible. At least, not unless you could label as a strategy the sort of papal conduct for which any subordinate in an earlier papacy would have been condemned and punished.

  And yet, because strategy is always the very fuel with which great wars are driven forward, so immense a blind spot having to do with papal strategy was regarded as a crisis of intelligence by more than a few.

  Public coverage and pettier critics notwithstanding, there could be no doubt that—far from seeking publicity or running from administrative burdens—John Paul was deeply conscious of his innovations. For, slowly but surely, as those innovations multiplied with his travels over the decade of the 1980s, John Paul was building for himself as Pope an unrivaled personal status as the most visible and well-known human being of the twentieth century. Not only was he seen in the flesh by hundreds of millions of people in the so-called civilized world; he was seen as well by men and women in the unlikeliest backwaters one could imagine. Alone—and certainly with no help from anti-Church or superforce—this Holy Father was making his very own a truly central spot on the world stage.

  Of course, anti-Church adherents and superforce members had their own considerable publicity arsenal; and they were not bashful about using it. The well-founded rumor, the well-timed leak, the word from a well-placed “unnamed source”: all these had been efficient weapons over twenty-five years of effort to separate the Pope from the traditional means of the governance of his Church. However—and owing in some part to those innovations that drove everyone so crazy—this Pope became the centerpiece even of the interest generated by the anti-Church. More often than not, the publicity that came as a result of their efforts centered around John Paul. Admittedly, that fact was always incidental to the main goal of the anti-Church publicity seekers. But it was nonetheless a fact, and a concrete result.

  In their bafflement about him, a few world leaders of the less careful variety sometimes underestimated the enigmatic John Paul, or even counted him out as a player in the rush of world events. One such leader, a Western head of state noted in the Vatican more for his cynicism than for his wisdom, made the mistake of going in like a lion for a private and “frank” discussion with His Holiness. When he came out, he was not merely defanged; he seemed at once both incredulous and rueful that he had not been forewarned. “There is something else here,” he commented about John Paul. “He is more than they said, and more than he seems to be. Surely! He is more than that.”

  Not long ago, the story of a different sort of encounter made the rounds at a certain level of gossip on the world stage where John Paul had chosen to stride as no pope before him.

  The year 1988 was the one thousandth anniversary of the birth of Christianity in the Ukraine. Mikhail Gorbachev—fairly recently and still only partially emergent from the time warp that is the Soviet Union—decided to appropriate this millennial anniversary; to claim it as a banner of glasnost; and, by means of a propaganda event to which he gave the meaningless name “Moscow Celebration Service,” to co-opt it as a Soviet achievement.

  To this “Celebration” Gorbachev invited just about every living religious leader from just about every Christian church. In his by now well-known take-charge manner, the Soviet Chairman jumped in with both feet tied in one shoe, communicating an invitation through intermediaries to John Paul II: Would His Holiness care to join the many other prelates who would on this occasion dutifully trundle off to Moscow in search of reconciliation?

  Back to Gorbachev, again through intermediaries, went the response of His Holiness, who had made plain in many ways his awareness that despite its seventy-year relegation to the catacombs of the Soviet system, religion had never left the mainstream of Soviet life. His Holiness, the reply informed Gorbachev, would accept the invitation on condition that, on the same occasion, the Pontiff would be equally welcome to visit his Catholics in Lithuania.

  Gorbachev categorically refused. How could he do otherwise? A papal visit would only stir up new troubles—might set fire to the dry tinder of Lithuanian nationalism, for example. It might even ignite the smoldering resentment of fifty million very Christian-minded Ukrainians, who were already angry at having their once-in-a-thousand-years anniversary filched from them by a Russian who was a professional atheist in their eyes.

  In response to Gorbachev’s refusal of his request, His Holiness declined to appear in Moscow, adding that he would, of course, send the General Secretary a written message with a lower-level papal delegation to the “Celebration.”

  Surprised, confused and offended by such an uncompromising rebuff of an offer he had thought would be irresistible for a Roman Pope, Gorbachev belatedly looked for a reading of this stubborn Pole. For him as for all Russians, Poles have always been either overlords or serfs. Which was this Karol Wojtyla? What better man to consult for the answer than General Wojciech Jaruzelski, Moscow’s man in Poland, a Pole himself and a Catholic, a man who had stood toe-to-toe with John Paul on more than one occasion in recent years?

  As gossip had it, Jaruzelski’s reading was unsettling for the Soviet leader. Gorbachev, the Polish general said, had already made two mistakes. The first was to have invited the Pope in the first place. The second, once the invitation had been made, was to have refused the Pontiff’s condition.

  “Why mistakes?” Gorbachev is said to have asked. “He’s just a figurehead.”

  “That’s what we thought when he arrived in Krakow, back in 1978.”

  “Ah!” Gorbachev apparently drew an obvious conclusion. “You know his game.”

  “That’s just it.” The Polish general confused the matter still further. “We don’t.”

  “So?” Gorbachev was getting nowhere.

  “So.” Jaruzelski made the political point that had already become so obvious to so many. “He’s dangerous. If you go along with him; if you oppose him; if you have any truck with him. Wóz albo przewáz. It’s Hobson’s choice.”

  “Yes,” Gorbachev is said to have agreed. “That’s dangerous.”

  John Paul had made his point. Gorbachev was learning the lesson, many a leader was taking to heart. And when the “Moscow Celebration Service” did take place, the General Secretary doubtless took cold comfort from the words of Archbishop Runcie of Canterbury. “Under Mr. Gorbachev, religion has entered the mainstream of Soviet life.”

  The late Franz Josef Strauss of West Germany best expressed the view of John Paul that began to take hold at last among the wiser of the world’s more experienced “huskies.” “For all we know,” said Strauss, “he seems to follow one vision, have one supergoal in view, to which all these diverse interests of the nations are tending, each in its own separate way.”

  And that was the nub. Try as they might, neither Strauss in his wisdom nor his peers on the world stage were able to fathom what that supergoal of John Paul’s might be. In their efforts to understand what in the world this Pope was doing, they were always stopped short by the sight of a Church filled to capacity with decay and disobedience, left untended, and by strange contradictions in John Paul’s own behavior. It almost seemed as though, in the Pope’s hands, bafflement had taken on the dimensions of a weapon in this modern warfare he was engaged in. And it almost seemed he was deploying confusion the way a general deploys armies.

  Take even the most visible level of John Paul’s activities as an example. The level of his many and varied travels. Even here, deep and troubling uncertainties could not be resolved.

  Surely he had something more in view than such specifically religious problems as, say, the spread of Liberation Theology that was so deadly for Catholic faith and dogma? But what? How were his adversaries in the global competition to deal with a politician—even if he was a pope—who stood face-to-face one day with one or another of the power-thirst
y generals and totalitarian strongmen in Haiti, Chile, Guatemala or Uruguay, and on another day confused the pattern by an official visit to Benin in West Africa—to take but one possible case in point—where he addressed a cheering crowd of thousands as he stood beneath a gigantic banner that exhorted, “God Bless Our Marxist Revolution and John Paul II!”?

  On another level, what sense could anyone, East or West, make of this Pope’s staggeringly patient policy that emerged, even after his Polish trip, toward the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites?

  What glimpse into his hidden strategy could be gleaned from John Paul’s hands-on/hands-off attitude toward authoritarian governments in Latin America?

  Who could make head or tail of his versatile and ever-adaptive treatment of Communist China, on one side of the world? Or his steady input into the gathering forces of a united Europe, set to emerge in 1992 on the other side of the world?

  What gave him the ability, on the one hand, to escape a head-on collision with the international Jewish organizations that lobbied for an opportunistic papal recognition of the State of Israel; and, on the other hand, to avoid any close identification with the Arab Mideast cause without being branded as its enemy?

  And on the broadest level of the geopolitical competition under way, how were the shifting, crumbling and realigning secular power centers to understand a visionary—even if he was a pope—who spoke about a future condition of the nations that would be free of socialism and Marxism but equally free of the baneful “superdevelopment” John Paul had taken to criticizing so roundly and pointedly as the curse of democratic capitalism?

  These were but some of the bafflements that were so important for John Paul’s secular rivals in the grand-scale competition. But in place of any answers, there remained only an abiding and uneasy sense that, if there was, as Franz Josef Strauss had said, “a single-track purposefulness in all this Pope is doing,” and if he did “follow one vision … have one supergoal in view,” no one might be able to figure it all out in time to make any use of the information.