“The Soviet president is a long-awaited guest,” Wojtyla continued, “a man whose words truly demolish the idols and remove the boulders along the path of the human caravan….” An elegant tribute, certainly, to Mikhail Gorbachev’s geopolitical savvy and superior skill. But, also, a momentary stab of light into his heart and the inmost councils of his mind. Once you demolish the idols, Wojtyla was intimating, there remains only the divinity those idols aped. Once you clear the boulders of fratricide from our road, there remains only love. “In the heart of man, there remains always a certain space which only God can fill, always a desire only God can satisfy.” It was both an analysis and a warning. Wojtyla the geopolitician bespoke the analysis. Wojtyla the priest issued the warning.
In franker terms, he could have said, “Your Lenin, in 1905, called religion ‘a kind of spiritual gin in which the slaves of capital drown their human shape, and their claims to any decent human life.’ And a little later, Lenin spoke of ‘the only idol we permit and maintain is godlessness.’ Even if your demolition of that idol is a temporary and temporizing proviso, Mr. President, beware of the one that idol was meant to supplant. You knew him once. You worshiped him once. It is terrible to fall into the hands of a living God. For he conquers all by love, because he is love itself. Even if your abandonment of fratricide is merely today’s ploy to buy tomorrow’s time and next week’s dollar credits, beware because you have given love a breathing space. And that love conquers all, including the death you might be reserving in your heart as the ultimate fate for your adversaries.”
These intimate resonances of Papa Wojtyla’s words do not echo from the printed text of newspaper reports. They were palpably present in his living voice as he spoke.
For the rest of his speech, Papa Wojtyla was sensible and moderate. He supported perestroika, “if it helps to protect and integrate the rights and duties of individuals and peoples so that peace may ensue in Europe and the world.” Of course, he remarked, “many believers in the Soviet Union had suffered painful lives since 1917…. On their behalf, whether they be Latin, Byzantine or Armenian, I nourish the firm hope that they will be able to practice freely their religious life.” John Paul was thinking of such situations as that of Leningrad’s venerable Cathedral of Kazan, now a Museum of Soviet Atheism, as well as of its congregation of believers. With some more remarks about the hopes he had for the full normalization of conditions in the Soviet Union, and a last word of thanks to the Soviet president, John Paul concluded.
There remained the exchange of gifts. Papa Wojtyla gave the Soviet man a three-foot-high reproduction of a mosaic from St. Peter’s tomb depicting Christ. “This,” he said, “is a memento of this historic event.” Gorbachev had a two-volume reproduction of a fourteenth-century Kievan Psalter for John Paul. “I believe,” he said to the Pope, “you will find this interesting.” For Raisa, John Paul had a Rosary with a gold cross and mother-of-pearl beads. His murmured words to Mrs. Gorbachev were not recorded. In Roman diplomatic parlance, the gifts were neither “neutral” nor “slaps in the face.” They were “tentative” and “positive” but “safe” expressions of genuine satisfaction and cordiality.
There finally was that last moment between the two men, the final final moment of leaving each other’s presence, a last meeting of the eyes, a parting gesture of the hands, when instinctively John Paul would say a “God speed you on your journey, Mr. President,” then turn away, breaking the delicate filament of person-to-person contact between them, and return to his papal study on the third floor, his head crammed with details, his heart pressured by wild hopes and deep apprehensions. From up there, he could only hear the powerful strokes of the escort helicopter leading the five limousines out of the Courtyard of St. Damasus. But, in his mind’s eye, he could see it all clearly.
More than any help John Paul had promised or could deliver to Gorbachev, there was the protection of the Archangel Michael, after whom Mikhail Gorbachev had been named, as his personal patron; and there was the protection of the Virgin of Tenderness, whose shrine stands within shouting distance of Gorbachev’s working desk in the Kremlin and without whose approval and favor this Soviet president could never succeed, could not survive the ravening wolves of dissension, hate and violence out there in Moscow’s streets, in Azerbaijan, in Georgia, in the Ukraine, on the Baltic Sea and over in China.
Was it Goodbye, until Heaven? Or Do Zwidanya, until once more on this earth? Was Gorbachev a temporary instrument of God’s providence, this day his finest hour, and soon to be cast aside? Or was he the one destined to preside over the coming unveiling of human fate back there throughout the ancient homeland of all the Slavs and all the “Europeans” between the Elbe River and the Caucasus Mountains? There remained for John Paul the crying words of the dying Pius VI, a man who had acquaintance with those ravening wolves: “May the sweet mystery of God’s love consume us all in his peace.”
The Soviet president left the Vatican at 12:57 P.M. He was off to lunch and an afternoon visit to the Colosseum, where he would, American style, “press the flesh” in the crowds of gusty Romans, as he had done in Washington, New York, Bonn, Paris and Beijing.
He had participated in what the Pope’s own Osservatore Romano had described as “a moment of singular intensity” and one Italian paper called “the summit of the century.” Vatican Vice-Secretary of State Archbishop Cassidy was more sober. “Our impression is that Mr. Gorbachev has a vision of a world not just in which conflict is missing, but a world in which there is a real decent cooperation … but Catholic communities will have to be normalized … bishops recognized and established in their sees … churches opened … a community able to worship in normal situations” before Gorbachev achieved full credibility. John Paul, through his Vatican aide Cassidy was stating his requirement that Gorbachev perform what columnist Cal Thomas aptly called “a conscious and public departure from the convictions of the German and Russian founders of Marxist Communism.”
In the weeks following the meeting, there were many reflections on it, many analyses of its meaning and many practical decisions taken as a consequence. Gorbachev, in his New Year’s message, declared that “the world is now forging ahead in pursuit of happiness, freedom and democracy.” We now have, he asserted, “the goal of a humane, democratic socialism, and a society of freedom and justice…. Everyone in the Soviet Union must now shoulder part of what the entire country is experiencing in the complexities and passions of the Soviet Union….” Give me, he appealed over television, “a practice of reason, kindness, patience and tolerance.” You almost expected him to end with a “God bless you all, my fellow Soviet citizens!” sniped journalist Yves de la Coste.
In his New Year’s message, Czechoslovakia’s writer, saint and president, Vaclav Havel, urged John Paul to visit his country (John Paul went in April). In his annual address to the vast diplomatic corps of Rome, on January 13, he announced the coming birth of a “Europe of the Spirit,” the “common home” of all Europeans; and he congratulated the U.S.A. and the USSR for their new approach to “peace and unity.”
Each one of these men returns to his own habitat fully persuaded that, under the circumstances, he has taken the wisest step toward his ultimate goal and won the best possible conditions from his counterpart. Each hopes the other will fulfill his part of the agreement. Each one in his own way hopes the other will have the strength and time to do so. For each one, in his own way, is tied to a rather inevitable schedule, already running out along the passage of the minutes, hours, days and weeks that slip by. That schedule is the monkey on each man’s back, continually screeching about the unavoidable deadline he has undertaken to meet by entering the colossal gamble of geopolitics.
Mikhail Gorbachev must preside daringly but prudently over the process of disaggregating the huge and ailing Soviet giant, already palsied in its extremities, anemic in its internal arteries and deeply disturbed in what has passed for its soul, all these years. What has already happened to it can be accurately vie
wed as disintegration, even if it is an allowed disintegration governed by a principle of Lenin that Gorbachev has learned well: “Do not put what is transitory above what is essential.” The former pacific unity of all parts of the hybrid USSR was and is transitory compared to the essential of preserving the “Revolution.” That union represented merely immediate and here-and-now interests. In the continuing “Revolution” lie the external interests of “the world’s working class as a whole.”
But the monkey will scream its alarm more and more loudly, as the fitful palsy shakes more and more parts of Gorbachev’s USSR; and the fateful deadline will draw nearer, according as the troika of Central Committee, KGB and Red Army finds its strength more and more diluted while, over in the East, along a border of 4,000 miles, the other partner in preserving the “Revolution” waxes stronger and more palpably Leninist than the stricken USSR. How far should the new permissiveness go? Surely not so far that Gorbachev or his successor presides over something resembling the tiny Duchy of Moscow five centuries ago. That would be the point of no return. But how far? In principle: as far as is required for the integration of the Party-State in the “common European home.” But what about the in-between time?
In that “in-between” lies Gorbachev’s gamble: that, before the point of no return, he effectively occupies the living room and bedroom of that “common European home.” A full marriage. Then he will have actual or potential power over a union greater than the former USSR’s. He can confidently face eastward and purify the Chinese “socialist fraternity” from its terrible deviation in substituting a modern version of its very ancient “warlordism” for the pure Leninist internationalism, and in mistranslating Lenin’s universal victory of the worldwide proletarian revolution as the paltry “territorialism” always claimed by the ancient and hateful Middle Kingdom. Capitalist corruption can be tolerated—even used. But the “Chinese deviation” destroys the soul of Leninism.
John Paul, too, must go on presiding daringly but prudently over the disintegration of his Roman Catholic institutional organization. He, in his way, just as the Soviet president in his way, is committed to that course of action—and inaction. But how far is too far?
He must go on with his mission as he has understood it to be ever since he became official Holder of the Keys. He does believe those Keys are guaranteed by the human blood of the man he worships as God. He does also believe that this geopolitical mission he has chosen to fulfill as Pope will be crowned with a success never registered in the life of any preceding pope. That, in effect, in the sight of all nations, his authority by right of those Keys will be declared in the skies above every nation so that across the face of Earth all men and women will see clearly where they stand in relation to the one who shed his blood to make those Keys perdurable until the end of all human time.
But the more his institutional organization descends into the shameful shambles of disintegration; and the fewer become the number of those who are Catholic in belief and practice; and the greater the number and power of those within his Church who are no longer genuine Roman Catholics, the more that monkey on his back screams in alarm at the approaching deadline, the point of no return, beyond which it will not be truthful or accurate to speak of a visible Roman Catholic Church.
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“New Architecture”
Whether it was a tacit perception that the Wojtyla-Gorbachev summit at the Vatican outclassed the Bush-Gorbachev summit in Maltese waters, or whether the guesses and estimates about that Maltese summit had already and accurately forecast the results of Gorbachev’s short meeting with President Bush, the fact is that no noticeable excitement surrounded the American and Soviet flotillas for those few days at the beginning of December 1989. The ugly winter waters, the annoyance of the Soviet president at being kept waiting, the critiques of Gennadi Gerasimov, these and suchlike details were what created news. It was taken for granted by all observers that the two presidents were going to put their final stamp on the “new thinking.”
So it came as no great surprise when Mr. Bush, in the immediate aftermath of the Malta summit, summed up the results by saying: “We stand at the threshold of a brand-new era in U.S.-Soviet relations.” The President was thus announcing the official American entry into the millennium endgame. Its basis? The “new thinking” was carried to its logical conclusion: “I, the President of the United States, will kick our bureaucracy and push it as fast as I can,” on trade and credits, on two arms control agreements—both treaties to be finished and ready for signing at the next summit meeting, in June 1990. Mr. Bush did not explicate in so many words, but it was part and parcel of the “Malta understanding” that the United States would exert great circumspection in its words and actions so as not to make Mr. Gorbachev vulnerable at home to the attacks of the new Russian “Patriots” and of those who were already screaming out loud about Gorbachev’s “caving in” to the Yankees.
Doubtless, the Soviet president acquainted Mr. Bush with his December-February program as well as with his planned schedule for the remainder of 1990, thus getting himself confirmed as “our man in Moscow.” The “we must help Mr. Gorbachev” rule went into full vigor. It would be some weeks yet before Vaclav Havel, new president of Czechoslovakia, would gently but pointedly criticize this Western attitude. “In the West, there is a tendency to personalize history,” Havel told journalist Lally Weymouth. “It seems to me that no matter how big Gorbachev’s share in this [the changes in the USSR], this is something that doesn’t exist and fall with his person.” But Western leadership proceeded on that principle. “You have a love affair going with Gorbachev,” one Lithuanian activist told an American visitor, “but we do not love him as you do.”
Loved or unloved, Gorbachev went ahead with the propaganda value of a promised papal visit to the Soviet Union and John Paul’s help in calming Catholics in the Baltics and in the Ukraine as the palpable results of the Vatican-Moscow meeting on December 1; and, following Mr. Bush’s post-Malta resolutions, the “new thinking” was definitely “in.” The Soviet leader had been assured of Western cooperation in his domestic struggle for those czarlike powers he needed for complete control of his situation. Gorbachev had now become the key element in the millennium endgame as Western leaders planned it.
But the contrast in aims between Western leaders and John Paul was clear to the Pontiff. The West’s cooperation was granted in view of the “Wise Men’s” ultimate aim of the “new world order.” John Paul was carrying on Christianity’s perennial tradition of accepting forced cohabitation with evil, knowing that, in general, no new world order could successfully emerge that was not based on the rule and kingship of Christ; and that in this particular historical situation, the final solution of the world’s difficulties would be effected through the intervention of the Queen of Heaven.
In the meantime, he could once more have written the veritable scenario of Gorbachev’s achievements between December 1989 and February 1990. The achievements were phenomenal, the “new thinking” they generated so exhilarating for the West that an almost Alice-in-Wonderland atmosphere pervaded the international atmosphere for a while.
“Moscow feels immeasurably more comfortable in the international arena than ever before,” Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze crowed on December 5. Well he and all his colleagues might crow. President Bush had undertaken: to have the two treaties—strategic nuclear arms, conventional forces—ready for the June summit meeting; to facilitate the economic reforms in the Soviet Union; and—most important—not to embarrass the Soviet Union’s adventurism in Afghanistan, Syria, Cuba, Nicaragua, Ethiopia and El Salvador.
The events following up these beginnings took on the air of the inevitable.
By the end of December’s second week, U.S. Secretary of State Baker had sketched out a “new architecture” built on the “old foundations” of NATO, the European Security Conference (CSCE) of 1975–76, and the European Community (EC). The U.S., the EC and the USSR would meet in June at a
CSCE thirty-five-nation assembly to map out the place and function of a unified Germany in that “new architecture.” For a Germany reunited will be the capstone of the inmost circle in that “architecture”—the Western community of nations. The second circle will include the Soviet Union and its former satellites. The third and outermost circle will embrace all in a wide sweep from Helsinki to Vladivostok on the Pacific Ocean. Mr. Baker was planning as an Internationalist, of course. True to that mentality, he had now presented his so-called two-plus-four framework: Within this arrangement, the two Germanys would agree on a path to be followed, leading them to unification; then the four powers—the U.S., Britain, France and the USSR—would sit down with the all-Germany delegates and negotiate the delicate issues of new and old borders and of international security.
Rightly, Mr. Gorbachev spoke rambunctiously about it all. “No one has the right to ignore the negative potential formed in Germany’s past.” He added that “the Soviet Union has an inalienable right to expect, and the capability to exert efforts to ensure, that our country should not sustain either moral or political or economic damage from German unification.” The fine combination of saber rattling and righteousness showed that Gorbachev saw in this “new architecture” the fresh outlines of his geopolitical plan. “Our Leninism,” he told Moscow cadres, “is now purified and capable of reaching its destined goals.”
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