This planned penetration of Europolitics will go hand in hand with the Moscow-controlled “liberalization” and “democratization” within the Soviet satellites. Both “liberalization” and “democratization” will be introduced through the Communist parties, through the cooperation of particular individuals who are already “deep” Soviet plants in supposedly anti-Soviet bodies, and through the clandestine plans of the KGB. Any apparent “liberalization” and “democratization” within the Soviet Union itself will be vehicled by the same means—all the state institutions coordinated by the KGB.
John Paul, as well as some others, has learned that Western statesmen, politicians, analysts and thinkers find it almost impossible to imagine that dissident movements such as the 1968 Alexander Dubcek movement in Czechoslovakia, the Solidarity and KOR movements in Poland of the eighties, the Sakharov and other Russian dissident movements within the Soviet Union, have always been and still are shaped, guided and controlled by the CP apparatus. Very few moderns in the West are acquainted with the thoroughness that has always characterized the Leninist process.
John Paul, as of 1988, therefore, has had to live with the knowledge that both the United States and Western Europe are now caught in the beginnings of a political embrace whose only purpose is to control them both, and thus make inevitable the harnessing of their economic power to consolidate a veritable Leninist empire.
The third step in the papal gamble involves, of course, Gorbachev and his USSR, but not as the key element.
That is the mystery of divine providence, in which John Paul firmly believes and on which the brilliant success or the miserable failure of his papal gamble totally depends. Practically considered, the success of his papal participation in the endgame depends on an event whose timing and occasion he is powerless to determine, and the nature of which he cannot in any way influence or fashion. Without that event, he will be impotent just at the height of the endgame. Backed up by that event, he cannot but emerge as the most powerful man alive in his time.
But the price he has to pay is full of bitterness for him.
From the point of view of strict Roman Catholicism, it is a bleak outlook in the short run. The bulk of Churchmen (bishops, priests, cardinals) and vast masses of the laity in Europe and on the North American continent are already alienated from that strict Catholicism, calling themselves “Catholics without the Roman” and members of the “Church without the Pope.” The anti-Church, John Paul’s direct enemies within or without the Catholic fold, have developed a specifically Roman Catholic secularism, which will now enjoy a fresh fillip in the direction of an ever-greater panreligious feeling and mode of behavior. The “supermarket” (pick ‘n’ choose) Catholicism fostered or permitted by so many Churchmen, the “ecumenical” (all religions come to the same thing) egalitarianism of so many more, the blunted edge of Catholic education, the antipapalism of bishops and theologians—all of this provides an open and ready seedbed for the planting of a new and more thorough abandonment of Catholic essentials. And this situation, for the moment irremediable in John Paul’s estimation, will provide him with more frustration and annoyance than he could ever have bargained for.
For the moment, and until the new secularism registers some signal victories, the neo-Catholicism of the anti-Church will mingle with and not be clearly—and deliberately—separated and distinguished from the pockets of genuine traditional Catholicism. For authenticity is still sought by the anti-Church, Catholic authenticity. They want to appropriate the entire legacy of Rome. But inevitably the two will separate when the penetration is consummated.
John Paul’s Catholics, in that consummation, face the real possibility that for the first time since A.D. 315—1,675 years ago—their genuine Catholicism will lose all its precious footholds in the Western civilization it created and in all the cultures it brought forth in the nourishing and protective shade of that once mighty tree of apostolic and Catholic Christianity. It is now possible that the Roman Catholic Church in its Catholicism will become a socially negligible and a politically invisible entity; that it will become a cultural pariah as indeed it was for the first three hundred years of its existence.
The endgame par excellence.
The anomaly of the millennium will be provided by the sole figure of John Paul. His high international profile still invulnerable to the antiChurch, he will still hold the Keys of that Blood as the enviable source of unique authority, and on his back will rest the hope and guarantee Christ once and for all time made to Peter in a deserted spot near the Roman town of Caesarea Philippi in ancient Judea.
Not only are calm nerves of steel needed to play such a role, and not only must he have an unbreakable grasp on the intangibles of faith preserved in profound tranquillity. He must be clear in his own mind, must have thought it all through to the end, not in a series of abstract concepts but within a programmatic vision inwoven with the Tree of Good and Evil man once ate of, the death cry of the Man God on Calvary, the terrible raid on humanity by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and the ecstatic song of the thousands destined from all eternity to eat at the Banquet of the Lamb in the final Kingdom.
If his contemporary generation of men and women realized how fitted and equipped this one man, this Polish Pope, has been in order to have that vision and fulfill this role, they would already be blessing their destiny to live these Catholic times with him. A later and wiser generation surely will venerate him as his contemporaries have never dreamed of doing. For his is the vision. For his is that role, as Servant of the Grand Design.
II
The
Geopolitics
of Faith
Six
The Vision of the
Servant
26
Polishness and Papacy
Since the start of his pontificate in October 1978, Pope John Paul II has conducted papal affairs and behaved himself in such a way that there really are only two plausible readings of him by his contemporaries. Either he is a prime example of the classic “straw man,” with a very good “act,” to boot. Or he heralds a new and as yet unrecognized force in the geopolitics of the nations, a force that, as he actually claims, will be the ultimate and decisive factor determining the new world order. In the final analysis, there are no other feasible ways of rationalizing this Pope’s performance on the world stage.
The straw man at English country fairs was decked out as king or queen or noble lord or governor or rich man. The clothes, jewels, diadem, money and features were painted straw, animated by a circus performer wearing the straw and following the script of an act that inevitably ended in the total discomfiture of the straw man amid the hoots and catcalls of an audience delighted at the unmasking of a pretender. All the panoply was shredded. All the gestures of the act turned out to be ludicrous. The end was always the same: a pile of discarded straw, and the total indifference of the crowd, which moved on to other attractions.
The most outstanding “straw man” in modern times was surely dictator Benito Mussolini, who in the thirties claimed to have founded the Third Roman Empire, to have an unbeatable army, air force and navy, and to be the arbiter of Europe’s fate. Army, air force and navy were completely, rapidly and devastatingly destroyed by the Allies. His “Third Roman Empire” fell to pieces—like straw—overnight. He was betrayed and killed ignominiously by his own people. It all ended in discarded ruins and derision. The empire, the invincible armed forces, the new Rome—it was all a sham: a straw man’s act.
His Holiness, since 1978, has assiduously carved out for himself an international profile. Precisely, he himself has done it—not press agents, not an international team of zealous partisans, not a clever propaganda machine, but he himself in person. And he has done it as if it was his right as well as his duty. No pope ever did this on a like scale. Nor has any human being in known history even attempted it. This papal gambit is unique.
By February 1990, he had spent 8 percent of his pontificate—a total of 326 days—
on 45 papal trips to 91 countries, giving a total of 1,559 speeches in 32 languages, being seen and heard in the flesh or on audio-video circuits by over 3.5 billion people, and logging enough international miles to have flown 17 times around the circumference of Earth. Within Italy, he has made 85 trips up and down the boot-shaped peninsula (in mileage, the equivalent of 34 times up and down the whole country), thereby consuming 23 percent of his pontificate’s time.
A straw man’s clever act? Hardly. The governments involved have not treated him as a passing show, nor have the watching media or ordinary people. The hundreds of thousands who thronged to meet and hear him, and the extensive media coverage (which other visitor to the United States has had 16,000 journalists assigned to cover his visit?), were the stuff of many a politician’s fond but vain dreams.
Nor has John Paul ever gone anywhere as a mere tourist or even as a distinguished visitor or famous character. With few exceptions, every visit to those 91 countries was formally a state visit or was treated as such by the host government, even if in an anticlerical Mexico, a Protestant England, a Stalinist Poland, efforts were made to avoid any appearance of acknowledging him in his claim to moral and religious leadership of the whole human race. All realize, seemingly, that he is in a category superior to the Dalai Lama, the Patriarch of Constantinople, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Billy Graham, any renowned itinerant Indian swami, or any other religious leader who travels.
Above and apart from all religious leaders and all current heads of state of major or minor powers, John Paul has established personal relationships with the governmental leaders in all 91 countries. They have discussed the serious business of government and world affairs with him as with an equal who talks to all of them about religion and morality.
At home, around his Vatican, are 120 diplomatic missions, sent there by their governments. When he comments on their affairs, he passes sober judgment, and the nuances are noticed. They noted that he did not, in 1989, join the general euphoria at the meltdown of the Berlin Wall and say “the Cold War is over”; he said only that “the year 1989 could well signal the decline of what has been called the ‘Cold War.’” He speaks as somebody to whom major powers appear responsible. “U.S. and Soviet leaders have assured me of their desire to place international relations on a more secure foundation, and to regard each other even more as partners instead of competitors.” The tone is paternal, not paternalistic. And it is authoritative. This man speaks as if he had the right to do so—in the eyes of those who are the subjects of his commentary. No government has bridled at him.
There is no way, in all realism, that John Paul II and his international behavior can be put down as a “straw man” engaged in an amusing “act.” When Mikhail Gorbachev addressed John Paul as “the world’s highest moral authority” on December 1, 1989, in the Vatican, surely he was merely acknowledging the reality of how he and other government leaders, East and West, see and treat this Pope.
If the world is not dealing with a straw man in this Pope, there remains only that other alternative. But the mere idea that John Paul embodies or represents a force to be reckoned with in the current geopolitical trend of global affairs is very distressing and unpalatable to many; for many more it is unintelligible, and by still more, totally unrecognized. There are solid reasons for these reactions.
The newest game in the City of Man is the building of a geopolitical structure. Everyone who is anyone in terms of sociopolitical and economic power is engaging in it, some deliberately, some willy-nilly; and ultimately, it is conceded, all nations, great and small, will be involved. It is the millennium endgame.
The science of geopolitics is being formulated now for the first time. The first faltering steps on the geopolitical plane are being essayed by the infant Internationalism and Transnationalism of the last few decades. For the vast majority of actual and would-be participants, geopolitics appears as a new way, the “millennium” way, of rearranging the distribution of wealth, political power and human freedom across the face of the globe. The subject of geopolitics is the whole material universe. The molding and fashioning force of our geopolitics is the combined will of millions of men and women co-opted into the creation of a new world order. The instrument for building a geopolitical structure is organization on a new and unprecedented scale because it is intended and planned to be more international, more than supranational. It will be, in the minds of its planners, geopolitical. And no one but a fool would suggest that the major “movers and shakers” of this organization are acting primarily or even secondarily out of purely religious motives.
Here comes John Paul, striding among the “great ones,” speaking to all the “little ones,” and the point of what he keeps saying incessantly about this geopolitics is strictly religious. His comments do not turn on a purely ethical or moral basis. It is religious and specifically Christian from a Roman Catholic perspective.
No one really suspects him of seeking territorial aggrandizement, gold, political power or personal pleasure. At his vaguest—and this is already specific enough to be disturbing to our secularist world leaders—he insists that just as no system of politics is viable unless it is based on the spirituality of genuine religious belief in God and in Christ, so no religious belief is viable unless it is deeply involved in political systems.
At his most specific, however, he insists that men have no reliable hope of creating a viable geopolitical system unless it is on the basis of Roman Catholic Christianity. “One can only regret the deliberate absence of all transcendent moral references,” he told all and sundry in his January 13, 1990, speech to the international diplomatic corps of Vatican Rome. “Christ is the sole strength of Europe and the king of all nations,” he asserted.
No one, individual or corporate body, has formally conceded him the right to act and speak as religious authority and moral monitor of the society of nations. He has assumed this mantle, and no one of consequence really disputes his assumption of it. No one except the present “touch-me-not” Leninist Marxists of Beijing resist him—and even they are now making what can pass for remotely conciliatory sounds. Why is it that a man from a backwater Polish town called Wadowice and now the head of a religious institution has come to be a respected commentator and successful participant in our geopolitics? The question becomes more acute when you consider what every informed world leader knows about John Paul.
It is widely known that the main personal emphasis in Karol Wojtyla’s life has always been and still is on his relationship with Mary, the mother of Jesus. His personal motto—Totus Tuus (Entirely Yours)—concerns her and memorializes special acts of self-consecration to her, which he personally undertook years ago.
For the general mind and, particularly, for the minds of other world leaders, it is an arresting—if not somewhat disconcerting—thought that this intensely active man in all he does is consciously and expressly seeking to implement a mandate given him as Pope by a person he venerates as the mother of the God he adores. If he confined himself to the sacristy and the altar and the pulpit; if he looked and sounded like what literature and the worldly imagination depicts as “the holy man in his cell,” as the guru type, even as the otherwise harmless religious fanatic, they could understand him.
But they watch this man stalking the minds and hearts of millions across the world stage. They are closeted with him as movers and shakers of our present history. He discusses complicated and far-reaching issues of politics, economics, finance, war and peace, technology and ethics. They find themselves dealing with a genuine intellectual, mature, informed, aware, a person of stark realism and moving compassion for the bread-and-butter needs of ordinary men and women. On the diplomatic circuit, in the power plays between nations, he has shown an agility and a sensitivity second to none. He is a professional respected by professionals.
Yet, with all that, they have to take into account that John Paul is following a timetable he asserts has been established in Heaven; and he fully presumes that what he d
oes and they do will succeed only if it conforms to the foretold sequence of historical events he confidently ascribes to a woman he, along with other millions, venerates under the symbol of her heart—they call it the Immaculately Sinless Heart of Mary.
The apparent anomaly, therefore, that Papa Wojtyla presents to the normally secular mind of his peers and contemporaries is this combination of hardheaded geopolitical perception and analysis with a religious devotion and world outlook based apparently on a deep religious and devotional persuasion. The choke point for the secular mind is that the geopolitical dovetails with the religious: One does not suppress, inhibit or disqualify the other. In fact, he is geopolitical in bent of mind because he is of this religious caliber. He is of this particular Marian religious mentality because of his geopolitics.
The ultimate question, then, about Karol Wojtyla reduces itself to this: Why is he so sure—as well as skillful—geopolitically, in view of his totally unworldly attachment to the unseen, intangible world of Mary and Christ and God? He commands and receives attentive hearing on the geopolitical plane; how come? What formed this geopolitical ability in him? What has all that to do with his ever-insistent Marian devotion? How do you explain this Pope in terms of background and heredity as well as papal office? That he should have a perfervid devotion to the Virgin Mary is not surprising in a very Catholic Pope. But a thoroughly geopolitical mind coming out of Poland—that would strike many as very unexpected, and for one capital reason: the history of Poland in approximately the last 195 years.
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