Keys of This Blood

by Malachi Martin

  The session with interpreters using a mélange of Polish, Russian and Italian will get down to the details on which the two leaders wish to establish a protocol of agreement. Prior consultations between Vatican and Kremlin people have located the general areas in which the two leaders can form a public agreement: the establishment of a permanent channel of official communication between Kremlin and Vatican; full diplomatic relations; the passage of an effective freedom-of-conscience and religious-liberty measure through the Soviet Parliament; the demands of the Holy See on behalf of its faithful in the Baltic States, the Ukraine, Byelorussia, and elsewhere in the Soviet Union; Soviet policy in Latin America and the Middle East; an official visit by Pope John Paul II to the Soviet Union in response to Gorbachev’s official invitation; and, lastly, the present and future relationship between the Holy See and the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate of Moscow.

  Who, even from among all our current world leaders, could have usefully joined in that transaction—for transaction it was—at this geopolitical summit? That question is greeted by the same silence of unknowing that cloaks the Vatican meeting.

  Essentially, that transaction between the two consisted in identifying the similarities, parallels and coincidences between their individual geopolitical minds and intentions. The agreement between the two was reached by matching up and measuring mind to mind, intention to intention. The disagreement between them was evident where mind did not meet mind, where intention flew in the face of intention.

  But always, as should be the rule between the two sole participants in a genuine and tense endgame in which both are gambling all in order to win all, there was no clash and no infringement upon the individual differentials between them. Knowledge of those, and mutual acknowledgment of them, this was all that the success of the meeting required. This was no battlefield, no competition—all that belonged outside, on the open terrain of living millions, competing ideologies, governments, armies, and the stuff and matter of economics and industry.

  Between these two players, it is to be “all cards face up.” John Paul knows that the Soviet leader is a hard-core Leninist. “I am a Communist, a convinced Communist,” he proclaimed publicly some days previous to the meeting. “For some that may be a fantasy. But for me it is my main goal.” As for the Pope he is about to meet: “We [Marxists] do not conceal our attitude toward the religious mind. We look down on it as deficient because it is nonmaterialistic and unscientific.”

  Mikhail Gorbachev knows, and John Paul knows Gorbachev knows, that this Polish Pope does not see any chance even of survival—let alone success—for Gorbachevism unless Russians convert to religion, renounce, denounce and execrate Leninist Marxism. “No political system and no ideology built on a materialistic concept of man and human life can do anything more than plunge man into deepest misery and send him into darkest exile from his true destiny.” This was one of John Paul’s earliest excoriations of Leninist Marxism, while he was still a Polish cardinal. He still thinks so.

  Between these two men, therefore, no camouflage, no deception, no playacting, in this mutual estimation as well as in the reading of the other’s “face up” cards.

  Obviously, some cards on both sides of the table are identical—those, for instance, that picture the elements both men agree are major in the endgame now being played for the formation of the new world order: Western Europe, Central Europe, the USSR, the U.S.A. and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). All the other elements—Japan, Latin America, Africa, the subcontinent of India and Pakistan, Southeast Asia, Korea and the remaining members of the society of nations—will be drawn willy-nilly into that play of major elements.

  Of those major elements, there is mutual agreement that the PRC is the one that dominates the arrangement of all the others. It is the basic reason that dictates Mikhail Gorbachev’s moves within the USSR and Central Europe, and those moves in turn have decided the direction in which Western Europe and the U.S.A. will move.

  On each side of the table, there is one card always lying beneath the right hand of the players: it identifies the overall and ultimate geopolitical goal of its owner. The hand gesture is merely that, a gesture, to indicate inviolability, not to conceal its message. For each one has already read the other’s hole card; that is why they have come together as endgame players.

  As Gorbachev knows, John Paul’s goal is a geopolitical structure for the society of nations designed and maintained according to the ethical plans and doctrinal outlines of Christianity as taught and propagated by the Roman Pontiff as the earthly Vicar of Christ. He is neither for Gorbachev’s “East” nor for capitalism’s “West,” for neither can create the needed structure of the nations. There can, finally, be no compromise with the dialectical materialism of that “East” or with the capitalist materialism of that “West.”

  Nor will any compromise be necessary even in the short range. John Paul is convinced neither “East” nor “West” can succeed of itself in creating a geopolitical structure; and this is so mainly because, before any definitive moves in such an effort are made, the condition of all the major players will be severely modified by an act of God. That act will have as its epicenter precisely that Central European area between the Oder River in the west and the Caucasus Mountains in the east.

  As John Paul knows, Gorbachev’s goal is a geopolitical structure corresponding to the Leninist ideal: the Marxization of the entire Eurasian landmass from the Atlantic to the China Sea as the first step, then the Marxization of the Western Hemisphere. It is presumed as axiomatic by John Paul that the much touted Sino-Soviet falling out is a long-range tactical move designed to facilitate Soviet rapprochement with the West, while keeping intact pure Leninism in the raw among China’s billion-plus population. Now more than ever, since Gorbachev’s thrust at some form of integration with the nascent Europe 1992 +, this double-headed policy has become of capital importance.

  John Paul has followed all the moves that his Soviet opposite number has made in the last two years. Indeed, the first of those moves—the liberalization of Poland, key territory and nation of Central Europe, which set all the satellite dominoes toppling—was largely made possible by the policies of Archbishop Karol Wojtyla and Polish Primate Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski. He can predict, without being told by their chief author, what the subsequent moves will be. He has read Gorbachev’s words at the Student Forum on November 5, 1989: “We are carrying forth a Marxism-Leninism freed from layers of dogmatism, staleness and shortsighted considerations…. We are returning to its roots and creatively developing it in order to move ahead.”

  But those two hole cards remain outside all discussion. There is a certain element of “See you in Central Europe” between the two men, not so much in the challenge of “See you tomorrow in the O.K. Corral” of Wyatt Earp fame, but certainly in the spirit of Thomas More addressing the executioner who is about to chop off his head: “Pray for me, as I for you, that right merrily we meet in Heaven.”

  All the other cards are available for examination and for the play, even the trump card, the ace each man is counting on. There is John Paul’s reliance on a heavenly intervention, the evocation of an utterly new state of consciousness in all of mankind. There is Gorbachev’s almost servile belief in the coming of “Leninist socialism” as “the inevitable result of civilization’s development and the historical effort of the working class and all working people,” as he told the Moscow students on November 5.

  John Paul knows it does not matter in Gorbachev’s long-range view that he has had to loosen the control reins over the Central European satellites. The Soviet president knows that schools of Marxist and para-Marxist thought and persuasion have been born throughout the claimant intellectual elites of the West—at Stanford University, among Critical Legal Studies Groups (the “Crits”) of Harvard Law School, in Frankfurt’s School Critical Studies Group, among France’s “Structuralists” and “Deconstructionists,” in the leftist Black Studies movements, the World Council of Churches,
the Third World Studies groups, among the radical feminists, and throughout the art departments of a majority of major universities. On the top of that Marxist-colored wave, there are scores of clergymen and nuns, seminary professors, intellectuals, writers, all from John Paul’s Roman Catholic Church and all translating Marxism into hallowed Christian terms so that basic Marxist thought can become palatable for the hundreds of millions of Catholics in Third World countries, particularly Latin America.

  No, Gorbachev need not fear. Marxist theory and enthusiasm will never die as long as such elites carry them forward. Wasn’t that the basic twist Antonio Gramsci gave to classical Leninism? And isn’t he, Gorbachev, the prize pupil of the dead Sardinian theorist? Nor need John Paul fear. He knows that the fate of Marxism—theory, theoreticians and practitioners—and of Gorbachev’s structural plans for Europe and Asia will be decided not on the earth but in the Heaven.

  Agreeing to disagree on ultimates, agreeing to agree about several interim measures and conditions affecting the Catholic Ukraine, Lithuania and Latin America, both these men cover the U.S. concept as developed by President Bush and Secretary of State Baker: the three concentric spheres of international unity—the European Economic Community, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (now assigned a political role) and Greater Europe (the Western European states, the former satellites, the Soviet Union and the United States). In sum, a first geopolitical structure housing some 800 million souls from the Urals in the USSR to the coast of California, washed by Pacific waters. Theoretically rounded and finished as a working concept, there is no way it can be reduced to a practical working system, unless the ominous promise of the PRC to be the spoiler is not offset and diverted.

  Some cards, finally, are discarded: the anomaly of Albania, sour and inimical and bitter, in the middle of the European euphoria; the devilment of Castro’s Cuba, which has ceased to be of use to Moscow; the PR gyrations of Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega; the prostitution of the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate of Moscow to the policies of the Leninist Party-State.

  Ranging over all these issues, securing agreement where possible, underlining irremovable differences, emphasizing further steps in a gradual rapprochement between Holy See and Kremlin, each man has sized up the other and determined as of now how far he can be trusted and where the points of utter divergence may provoke open hostility, even warlike reactions. This mutual review, essentially completed before they met, is now reflected in how they, together with their aides, conduct the actual discussions at the meeting: point by point and, at times, word by word.

  Methodically and deliberately, sometimes with difficulty, the two men ratified in mutually agreeable terms their understanding and commitments on those subjects.

  When you have gone over all the details of that meeting, there is one conclusion that allows you a mere glimpse of its geopolitical function. No agreement reached by the two men during the sixty-eight minutes they were together with aides and interpreters (11:10 A.M. to 12:18 P.M.), and no agreement hammered out by the parallel meeting running concurrently for some fifty-seven minutes between Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze and Secretary Agostino Cardinal Casaroli, supplemented by their aides, could have been achieved without the person-to-person meeting of the Pope and the Soviet president.

  Why, then, that meeting? What was the element only these two men in a personal get-together could and had to contribute, if the Vatican-Kremlin rapprochement was to succeed?

  Quite simply expressed, the Vatican meeting concerned a welter of procedural and permanent arrangements—the stuff and matter of the agreement. Only John Paul and only Mikhail Gorbachev could take the general trends and principles (all to be practiced) of the proposed agreement and together place those details within the framework of their geopolitical intentions and ambitions. This was a special process, which the two leaders were capable of carrying out satisfactorily only in each other’s presence.

  Something proposed from the Kremlin side during the pre-December meeting preparatory talks may have been incorporated into the proposed text of agreement as worthy of consideration and as a possibly acceptable point by the Vatican. Likewise, from the Vatican side, there may have been something advanced by John Paul’s agents and it, too, incorporated as a possibly acceptable point by Gorbachev’s agents.

  But, during the actual meeting, when one leader proposes such a point for mutual agreement, and goes on to explain that point from his geopolitical point of view, only then will it be clear to the other leader that the point is acceptable or unacceptable from his geopolitical point of view. For the two of them are discussing each point against the backdrop of geopolitics, and only within that framework are all points incorporated into the general agreement.

  Hence, the need for interpreters on both sides, to ensure verbal understanding of each key term used—it may be as simple as “and” in place of “or”—and hence, also, the need for specialized aides for on-the-spot information. Hence, above all else, the need for the direct, face-to-face, voice-to-ear meeting of the two leaders. For there is more to language than the dictionary meaning of words. There is the connotation of a word for its user. And there is his intention in using it. Both connotation and intention are best perceived in a viva voce exchange. So much depends on the geopolitical mentality that the two leaders can use language understood by all present but what those two understand and mean can escape all others. They are literally talking over the heads of all present.

  The term “peace” is a case in point. Politically, for those listening to the two leaders, the term meant an absence of conflict and an agreement between possible or actual enemies to forgo conflict. Geopolitically, the term meant and means something else for John Paul and Gorbachev: not the conflictless arrangement of their duo, but the unitary condition of a new order between them. Will promoting the Ukrainian Catholics fit in with that unitary condition? It may well meet all current political requirements by John Paul, the Ukrainians, or Gorbachev. But it may damage the process of unitary development. What, therefore, does John Paul mean when he speaks of “peace” as his goal? And Mikhail Gorbachev? Each one of them is aware of what the other means geopolitically when he speaks of “peace.”

  There could, in other words, be no really solid agreement between John Paul’s Holy See and Mikhail Gorbachev’s Kremlin unless both met in person and, laboriously communicating through interpreters and aides, arrived at a mutually acceptable understanding consigned to written language they would both accept.

  At 12:18 P.M., the two leaders emerged from the papal library. Raisa Gorbachev, seated in a chair in the hallway outside the library, had been waiting for some time. A microphone flanked by two chairs had been arranged beneath a painting of Christ’s Resurrection by Renaissance artist Pietro Vannucci (“Perugino”), known in his day for his profession of atheism and simultaneously for his religious devotion. Like the icon of the Virgin on that easel in the library, the choice of location for Mikhail Gorbachev’s post-meeting remarks was John Paul’s.

  Gorbachev characterized his meeting with John Paul as “a truly extraordinary event…. We had much to discuss. I felt that my thoughts and concerns have been duly appreciated, as well as my explanations of the problems that now exist … including problems between the state and various churches, which we are addressing in a spirit of democracy and humanism.”

  The Pope and he had reached an agreement in principle to establish diplomatic relations; and “we announce that we have invited the Holy Father to visit the Soviet Union.” Gorbachev reiterated the changes taking place—“within the framework of perestroika”—in the status of believers in the Soviet Union, and he thanked “the Holy Father” for making his visit possible.

  Then it is the Pontiffs turn to conclude this meeting, with some remarks in Italian. Gorbachev sinks into a plush white high-back chair, glancing at a Russian translation of Wojtyla’s speech, half understanding the Italian, nodding in silent assent now and again, throwing an odd glance at the small r
ing of dignitaries and aides around them. The deep basso tones of this Priest, the smell of the Sanctuary hanging in the air, the icons of saints and mysteries on the walls, even his half understanding of the spoken words, all are powerfully evocative. “This meeting will be interpreted as a sign,” John Paul is saying, “as singularly meaningful, as a sign of the times that have slowly matured, a sign rich in promise….”

  There is no way this Soviet man, with his mercury-fast intelligence streaking back and forth over all the details, can escape the voice of deepest remembrance in him. Signs have abounded in his life. Once upon a time, when all was fresh in him—his early teenage years—indelible and unspoken convictions were imprinted on his soul and imaged by the lively sensations experienced only in raw youth. He lived those early impressionable years amid an abundance of such signs.

  The Easter Days and Holy Days at Russian Mass in his native Privolnoye. Standing between his father and mother, facing the iconostasis that hid the priest from view as he consummated the Mystery, listening and trying to join in the rising and falling cadence of the old Slavonic hymns, half understanding the words but fully understanding the meaning of it all. Surrounded by signs that cozened the Mystery and its meaning—the flickering candles of adoration; the sweet smell of the incense of prayer; the privileged taste of Holy Communion bread tinctured in the consecrated wine; the blue and gold and silver and red of the sacred icons on the walls from which his patron saint, the Archangel Michael, together with saints and angels, with Christ and his Mother, gazed down on him; the oneness of himself with parents, with the other worshipers, with the priest, with the Mystery—their sobornost. That child of Privolnoye was “father of the man” now listening to another priest in another Sanctuary embodying the same Mystery.

  Nothing in the fugitive years since that springtime of life had erased those profound imprints of his soul. No, not the youthful, dutiful avowals of atheism in the Komsomol, not the solemn professions of Scientific Atheism in the Party, not all the oaths of office up along the ladder of hierarchy, not even the craven submission to the diktat of the Council of Elders required for admission to the leadership of the Party-State. Nothing had changed, really, in him. Merely the choice of his will, and his outward behavior. Both could be changed in an instant. “There are no atheists in foxholes,” was a comment of one soldier returning from the trench warfare of World War I in Flanders. This day, in the Vatican, no atheist is listening to Pope John Paul II.