Rather, he maintained with all his energy that the Church is “the builder of the world” and “the guardian of the nations … structuring the relationship between temporal progress and the supernatural cultivation of the human soul.”
Clearly, then, Hlond rejected any thought that the Church Universal should contemplate turning back to earlier temporal glories. “Erroneous is the attitude,” he argued vigorously, “that somehow the task of the Church is to turn back the present to the past forms—to the baroque, to a medievalism in the clouds. It is not the task of the Church to impede mankind’s movement into the future.”
Nevertheless, in Hlond’s view, the Church in the twentieth century had the same georeligious and therefore geopolitical mandate it had had since the first century, when Christ as its founder had charged it with its worldwide mandate. In one ringing sentence, Hlond summed up that geopolitical function of Rome. Its task, he said, was not “to be concerned that the epochs of world history be all alike in terms of the structure of social and political conditions, but rather that every epoch might live by the spirit of Christ.”
Long before Karol Wojtyla became a priest, he and all of Poland heard this local Polish bishop give clear definition to that universalist Catholic attitude, which bishops and priests in other lands have forgotten or never knew. It is an attitude that many bureaucrats in the Vatican now headed by Karol Wojtyla have a difficult time understanding in this consummately Polish Pope.
It is an attitude countered, in fact, by many bishops, who take it upon themselves to move in exactly the opposite direction as they retire into the regional parochialism of the “American Church” of the United States, or the “Hinduized Church” in India, or the “Liberation Theology Church” of Latin America.
The romanitas that Hlond fostered in his Poles—clergy and people alike—allowed for no trace of any such provincialism and for no ethnic bias or peculiarity, Polish or otherwise.
On the contrary. The Cardinal Primate admonished Poland in powerful terms that “when the smallest portion of the Church’s hierarchical form loses vital contact with the rest of the Church … it ceases to be an organism and a portion of the Church.” Moreover, he insisted that the balance is complex but important between the hierarchical element—the bishops—and the laity, which “is aware that it is the Church … having a part to play with the hierarchy in the mission of the Church.”
August Hlond lived what he preached. He was plainly no hothouse Cardinal Bishop, but a vibrant and effective leader who concerned himself and his nation with developing the classical Polish persuasion of a commonwealth of nations resting upon the ideals of the First Polish Republic. There was a difference, however. Times had changed, and Hlond enlarged even those advanced ideals, purging them of the Eurocentric traits that had undeniably been part of classical Poland.
The mind of August Hlond and the mind of Poland’s hierarchy were essentially one in all respects. Clustered around him, and creating a cohesive atmosphere in Poland, were all the ecclesiastical ancestors of Karol Wojtyla, prelates known for their piety and zeal, some of whom have since been proposed for canonization in the Church they served. Alexander Cardinal Kakowski of Warsaw, Latin Archbishop Eugeniusz Baziak of Lwów, Bishop Zygmunt Lozinski of Minsk and Pinsk, Bishop Jozef Sebastjan Pelczar of PrzemyŜl, Bishop Konstanty Dominik of Chelmno; Bishop Michal Kozal of Wloclawek, who would die in Dachau. The balance in that outstanding team of Polish ecclesiastics was rounded out by Churchmen of the caliber of Armenian Archbishop Jozef Teodorowicz of Lwów, Bishop Josef Felix Gawlina, head military chaplain, and Ukrainian Archbishop Andrzej Szeptycki of Lwów, in whose seminary a young Ukrainian, Josyf Slipyj, was rector and would later be the famous Cardinal Slipyj.
These and thousands more who worked with them were the men whose ideas and ideals always remained in complete cohesion with Catholic Poland’s distinctive history, but who nonetheless developed the ideas of polonicitas and romanitas beyond any scope that could have been entertained in Eurocentric Poland of the nineteenth century.
The first member of that Polish hierarchy who directly and personally affected the life and career of young Karol Wojtyla was Adam Sapieha, a man so extraordinary that his character seemed to embody the strength and the weakness—the hardiness and the pridefulness—of Polonia Sacra in its heyday as the third-largest power in Europe and as Roman Catholicism’s bastion against both military incursion and doctrinal attacks against its millennial faith.
Born in 1867, Sapieha inherited all the characteristics of a family of princes that had won its prominence in the First Polish Republic by sheer determination and grit. In war, they were fearless fighters, troublesome enemies, ungovernable prisoners and magnanimous victors. Faith, honor and freedom were the rules by which they lived and, not infrequently, died. Accustomed to command, skilled in battle, they became equally skilled at the niceties of leadership in a democratic monarchy. And in the multiracial Polish commonwealth, they acquired, as well, a style of diplomatic language and negotiation that seemed to die in the rest of the world, as it succumbed instead to the crude language and the industrialized slaughter of war that has blemished diplomacy and international relations since World War I.
By the time Adam Sapieha became Archbishop of Krakow, in 1912, his Polishness and his romanitas had been leavened and enriched by his studies at the Canisianum, the international college at Innsbruck, Austria, and by a stint at Rome, where he not only received diplomatic training, but became private secretary to Pope Pius X, whose lineage as the son of a Polish mail carrier in Riese so many had done so much to obliterate.
In intimate association with Cardinal Dalbor as Interrex, Sapieha saw the people of his region through the awful suffering and ruin of World War I. Moreover, because of his lineage, his papal and diplomatic associations acquired in Rome, and not least because of his indomitable personal bearing and prestige, he was often more influential than Dalbor himself in the complexities involved in forming the Second Polish Republic.
In 1938, as a youth of eighteen, Karol Wojtyla came under the direct influence of this proud, influential, highly experienced and articulate proponent of Polish romanitas. Wojtyla’s mother, Emilia, and his elder brother, Eduard, had died. He and his father moved into an apartment in the Debnicki sector of Krakow. As Sapieha was always on the lookout for vocations, and because it was his habit to visit widely and frequently among his people, it is sure that Sapieha and the young Wojtyla met soon after the move to Krakow.
By then, war was already on the horizon again. Pope Pius XII urged Cardinal Primate Hlond to leave Poland; and, in anticipation of that move, Archbishop Sapieha was given wider ecclesiastical jurisdiction. In effect, during Hlond’s World War II absence from Poland, Sapieha would function as Primate; and, in practical if not strictly legal terms, he would assume the function of Interrex as well.
On September 1, 1939, Adolf Hitler poured seventy armored divisions—a total of nearly a million men—across the Polish border in a blitzkrieg assault by land, sea and air. Once again, Poland became the prime Killing Field of Europe. And Poles themselves became the object of planned genocide.
On January 25, 1940, on the instruction of Nazi Field Marshal Hermann Göring, the provisions of the so-called Secret Circular went into effect in Poland. In the words of the German Governor General of Poland, Hans Frank—the “Pig of Poland,” as he was justly dubbed—the Secret Circular was the handbook for the German policy of “making certain that not one Polish man, woman or child was left alive to soil the territories now and forever a part of the Third Reich.” Under Frank, those policies reached an advanced degree of thorough ruthlessness and unmerciful cruelty.
Poles were divided into two classes. Those engaged in industries essential to the German war effort were to be kept alive on the barest possible rations. The rest—women, children, clergy, scientists, teachers, doctors, architects, merchants, unessential craftsmen—all were to be got rid of by execution, starvation and deportation.
The records are almost incredible. Six million Polish citizens were killed by the Germans, including 644,000 killed in combat and a million more deported to die in Siberia. The Nazis developed their efficiently brutal network of 8,500 concentration camps in Poland and organized them, as the industry they were, into thirteen administrative districts. Of the 18 million Europeans imprisoned in these camps, 11 million were killed—3.5 million Poles and 7.5 million from other nations.
The Roman Catholic Church and its hierarchy became a concentrated target for General Frank. All bishops were at least harassed. Some were only placed under house arrest. Others, however, were tortured; and many were deported or killed. One of the most notable cases was Father Anton Baraniak, who had been secretary to Cardinal Primate Hlond before Hlond had left Poland for France and Italy. During his imprisonment, Baraniak was made Bishop and so became the only Polish bishop imprisoned by the Nazis.
It was obviously Baraniak’s close association with Cardinal Primate Hlond that interested Hans Frank. There were sensitive Vatican secrets to be had; and beyond that, if Baraniak as a cleric closely associated with the redoubtable August Hlond could be forced into a public endorsement of the Nazi presence, Frank’s life would be easier in Poland. Despite the torture to which he was subjected, however, Baraniak became a disappointment for the “Pig of Poland,” and a symbol of resistance for the Poles.
By 1942, well over 7,500 Polish priests had been deported to the especially infamous concentration camps of Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg, Buchenwald, Radogoszcz and Opausa. All diocesan offices were closed. All Polish seminaries and all secondary and higher educational establishments were shut down. All Polish libraries that were not destroyed were transported to Germany, and no new books or periodicals could be published. The historic primatial palace in Gniezno was destroyed, and the Gniezno Cathedral became a German concert hall.
As Governor General, the “Pig of Poland” decided to make his residence and headquarters in Archbishop Adam Sapieha’s Krakow and to make that city a special example of his thorough Nazi brutishness.
Frank took Wawel Castle, a gorgeous and priceless antiquity, for his private residence. The Mining Academy of Krakow became his official headquarters. The “Institute for German Labor in the Fast”—the hateful euphemism for those who masterminded and directed this concerted genocide of Poles—was housed in the buildings of the Jagiellonian Library, whose collections and contents were shipped to Germany. The venerable Jagiellonian University was closed, and its professors were deported to two of the most feared concentration camps, Fort VII and Lawica, where all prisoners were degraded, vilified and tortured, and where many of them joined the toll of the dead.
Krakow’s street names were all changed to German ones. The German officer corps took up residence in the comfortable houses on what had been the proud avenues of Krasinski, Mickiewicz and Slowacki. But worst of all was the prison on Montelupi Street, where night and day anyone passing by could hear the noises of the charnel house that place became—the screams of the tortured, the moaning cries of the starved and the dying, the maniacal laughter of prisoners driven insane and, not infrequently, the staccato sounds of firing squads.
From the outset, the German occupation, in general, and the presence in Krakow of the “Pig of Poland,” in particular, were to Adam Sapieha as red flags are to a bull. In the frigid interviews that took place between the two men, it is doubtful if Hans Frank’s brutishness and Nazi arrogance were a match for Archbishop Sapieha’s haughty, calm and superior dignity, which had always served Cardinal Dalbor so well.
In his daily life as functioning Interrex of Poland, however, Sapieha was anything but calm. Rather, he was the living, breathing example of Cardinal Hlond’s dictum that the Church cannot deal with its lethal enemies by “running into the shadows,” nor can it be “occupied solely by staving off attacks.” The call instead was one of “carrying off and establishing the victory that overcomes the world.”
In one sermon at his residence, Sapieha spoke of the need to purify Polonia Sacra of “the filth of these swine”—but “intelligently done,” he said, “for we are Poles.”
In his cold, hard way, the Archbishop meant every word; and he found many and varied ways of doing exactly what he said. As early as 1939, seeing the handwriting on the wall, he had already established underground seminaries and universities. Now, in an unremitting labor of fine judgments and practical decisions upon which depended his own life and the lives of thousands of others, Sapieha entered into what was nothing less than a Polish national conspiracy against the Nazis. He kept the Vatican informed about the actual state of affairs in Poland; and, through the Vatican and the Polish government in its London exile, he collaborated with the Polish partisans. He issued false baptismal certificates to Jews, and organized networks to feed and conceal those who could not be got out to freedom.
Undoubtedly, Adam Sapieha was the most prominent, influential and capable Churchman left free in Poland. And, for the Polish Roman Catholic mind, his active presence as functioning Interrex during those bloody and waning years of the Second Polish Republic was yet another clear indication of God’s providence over Polonia Sacra.
Two years into this planned desolation of his homeland, young Karol Wojtyla made his decision to enter clerical life. He applied to Archbishop Sapieha for permission to study for the priesthood. He had already spent a year studying linguistics at the Jagiellonian University; and when the university had been shut down by the Germans, he had spent another year as a boiler-room helper at the Solvay Chemical Works.
After Sapieha accepted him into the underground seminary, there was no outward sign to the Germans that Wojtyla’s life had changed. That would have been fatal, in all likelihood. He continued to live at home with his father, and he put in his hours at the chemical plant. But in his off hours, along with the other underground seminarians, he followed philosophy and theology courses at the Archbishop’s residence. And he came under the close personal direction of Adam Sapieha, the first of two extraordinary archbishops who would be most responsible for his own formation as the Churchman he was to become.
In his two years under Sapieha’s direction, Wojtyla was the recipient of many of the older man’s reflections and of much of his experience. At the Archbishop’s hand, he received his first schooling in how a true Churchman deals with a mortal enemy of the Church’s faith. As another of Sapieha’s underground seminarians later recalled, when the Archbishop of Krakow set forth from his official residence in his carriage, he created an immediate atmosphere of respect. “Not a mere man but a whole, grand institution—the Church—was passing by you.”
Suddenly, on September 7, 1944—Black Sunday—German squads fanned out through Krakow. They were preparing to leave in the face of the Soviet armies advancing under Marshal Ivan Koniev. All adult Poles were to be rounded up and deported to Germany. Karol Wojtyla’s name was on their list.
Whether in their haste the squads failed to comb the Debnicki section of town, where he lived, or whether Wojtyla eluded them is not clear. At any event, they did not take him. A later message from Sapieha told him and other underground seminarians to make their way to the Archbishop’s residence and hide there.
By January of 1945, the Germans were gone. But the Allied agreements of 1945 and 1946 at Yalta, Teheran and Potsdam “assigned” Poland and its people to the Soviet zone of influence, and to their second dark night of entombment as a nation. Now the Stalinists were in charge.
There can have been no doubt in Sapieha’s mind what was to come; he was too much of a realist to play mind games with himself or anyone else. With that same foresight and acumen that marked so much of what he accomplished as a Churchman, he singled out Karol Wojtyla from among his seminarians and arranged for him to leave Poland in 1946 to pursue doctoral studies in Rome.
Already ordained a priest by then, for the next two years Father Karol Wojtyla lived in Rome at the Belgian College, which was not run by the Resurrectionist Fathers, but
was still imbued with the same spirit of Polish romanitas that had furnished the Church in Poland with its indomitable clergy for nearly a century now.
Wojtyla pursued his studies, meanwhile, at the Angelicum—in that day still hands down the best school anywhere in the Church, and still run by such Dominicans as Garrigou-Lagrange, who were hands down among the best minds anywhere.
By the time Wojtyla returned to Poland in 1948 to take up his own post as parish priest, Poland was a one-party Communist state under Stalin’s quisling Boleslaw Bierut. Adam Sapieha, now a cardinal, had three years to live. August Hlond had died, and Poland’s Primate and Interrex was the “Fox of Europe,” Stefan Wyszynski.
There can be no doubt that the brutalization of the Polish nation by the Germans, followed by the Allied betrayal of the Second Polish Republic and the ruthless Stalinization of all things that ensued, dispelled any aery-faery romanticism that may have lingered in the Poles.
Like many of his generation born between the world wars, Karol Wojtyla had been influenced by the Messianist poets of the nineteenth century. Mickiewicz, for one, had acquired world status; and images he and the others had used, their genuine lyricism, the language they fashioned, the concepts they evolved, had easily entered the people’s consciousness as part of their Polish heritage during their emergence into the brief daylight of the Second Polish Republic after more than 120 years of enslavement.
Now, however, the great world had once more offered Poland as a non-nation into the total control of a merciless power. And once more, it was a power that aimed precisely at eviscerating and cremating classical Polishness.
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