Cardinal Wyszynski had a number of advantages in his contention with Gomulka and the government regime. One of the most important was the wholehearted and unwavering support given him by his Polish bishops and clergy—by and large, a group of men with unusual talents and with great and untainted Catholic faith; and by and large, as well, a group of men in whose selection the Primate had a chief hand. In the face of endless harassment, constant personal sacrifice and not a little bodily danger, they understood rather well the breadth and intent of the Cardinal’s policies; and they found resourceful ways to carry those policies out in practical terms.
Another summary advantage Wyszynski enjoyed—especially in view of the universalist geopolitical element in his thinking and his program—was the support he received from the heads of the Holy See. Four very different papal administrations—those under the aristocratic Pius XII, the gregarious John XXIII, the liberal-populist Paul VI, and the radical reformer John Paul I—all supported Wyszynski. Despite concerted government efforts to undermine Wyszynski’s standing with the Vatican, all refused to deal over the Cardinal’s head with Warsaw—something that would surely have been fatal for Wyszynski’s entire position and for his Church.
In this regard, it was as important as the Cardinal’s knowledge of how to deal with the Polish government that he also knew how to hold the loyalty of the Holy See to his policies. He understood as few others the careful distinction to be made between the Vatican bureaucracy and the Holy See. And this was not the least of the lessons Karol Wojtyla learned from the older man.
There was, by way of example, the case of one hardheaded Vatican emissary, Monsignor Luigi Poggi, who took just a little bit too long to understand the Polish game going on between Wyszynski and the Gomulka government. The Primate minced no words in the situation. “Monsignor Poggi’s status,” he said to his bishops, “is that of an employee of the Vatican Secretariat of State and not a representative of the Holy See.” That was the neatly cut phrase of one who knew what hands truly rested on the levers of power.
Within five months of release from his imprisonment, Wyszynski himself went down to Rome. On May 18, 1957, he at last received his scarlet-red cardinal’s hat from the ailing Pope Pius XII and spent some time in private talks with the Pontiff. The following year he was in Rome again, this time as Cardinal Elector in the Conclave that chose Angelo Roncalli as John XXIII.
Stefan Wyszynski had a special value in Papa Roncalli’s eyes. This was a cardinal primate from behind the Iron Curtain—the only cardinal in a Communist land—who had fought well and survived, along with his Church. Archbishop Josef Beran of Czechoslovakia, Jozef Cardinal Mindszenty of Hungary, Cardinal Stepinac of Yugoslavia, Cardinal T’ien of China, were either in prison or in exile, and their Church was orphaned of top-level leadership. Wyszynski’s ideas about how to deal with the Soviet Union met with great welcome, therefore, in John XXIII. The two men did differ on one chief topic—the timing of a spiritual assault on the Soviet Union. The Pope wanted to temporize, while the Cardinal wanted action immediately.
Despite that difference, Wyszynski was clearly more helped than hindered at home in Poland by Papa Roncalli’s Eastern policy. The Pope also protected Wyszynski from the “Marxizing” elements of the Vatican, who sought accommodation at any price with Moscow. In 1960, Pope John held a conversation in the Vatican with Nikita Khrushchev’s son-in-law, Aleksei Adzhubei, editor of Izvestia. In addition, John accepted an agreement with Khrushchev himself, by which a trade-off was made concerning the upcoming Second Vatican Council: The Council would issue none of the usual statements condemning the Soviet Union’s Leninist Marxism; and in return, two prelates of the Russian Orthodox Church, Metropolitans Borovoy and Kotlyrov, both with KGB status, would attend Vatican II as observers. Wyszynski privately saw no value for Rome in this exchange. But he respected the Pope’s decision. Only Wyszynski and Wojtyla realized that the “deal” between Khrushchev and this Pope entailed a grave decision whose consequences would come to haunt Wojtyla as Pope in the 1980s.
Because Khrushchev let his admiration for Pope John be known, and because John’s regard for Wyszynski was well understood, the circle was completed in a nervous Warsaw. The Cardinal’s Polish enemies feared that Wyszynski, too, would find favor in Khrushchev’s eyes. And then? Cyrankiewicz in particular must have shuddered at the possible answer to that question.
While there can be no doubt about the advantage to Wyszynski of policies that derived from direct papal support and the cooperation of his own Polish hierarchy, it is also true that his supreme advantage lay in the Polish people. Like Karol Wojtyla, and like Stefan Wyszynski himself, the people had been formed in the womb of Poland’s proud and terrible history. They, too, had been reared in the cradle of Polish romanitas and the Three Pacts of Polishness. As readily as birds take wing, they took to Wyszynski’s efforts to bring them to the best they were capable of. For in truth, they wanted nothing less than the Cardinal did for themselves and for their beloved Polonia Sacra.
The process that had been initiated by the government was their so-called “Polish Road to Socialism.” The counterprocess initiated by Wyszynski was calculated to guarantee that no ideology—not the Leninist Marxism he had to deal with at the moment, whatever it might be called, and not any other materialist ideology he knew to be waiting in the wings—could take over and infect the people confided by Providence to his care and guidance.
Further, even in these days of continuing struggle for their survival, Cardinal Wyszynski had one eye cocked for that future day he always seemed so certain would come, when Poles would again take over their own governance. He spoke about it, predicted it and aimed his policies at it.
With both of these motives undoubtedly balanced as part of his reckoning, Wyszynski set about welding a new unity among Poles, a unity based on three elements that were fundamental to his people, still vibrant as a nation in their faith.
The most basic of those elements was the traditional grass-roots Roman Catholicism of the Poles. That long-ingrained system of religious beliefs, moral principles and pious practices was anchored in their Three Pacts, with the Holy See as their true overlord, with Mary as their true Queen, and with the Primate Interrex as their true leader in the absence of a legally constituted government.
The second element, rooted in the first, was composed of the centuries-old sociopolitical characteristics of the Polish people: attachment and esteem for education and the arts, and an obstinate and unquenchable insistence on freedom—not least, as they so often demonstrated to the Communist authorities, freedom in the fields of labor relations and culture.
The third element was a consequence of their checkered history as a nation following on the brutal partitioning of their territory, and the repeated imposition upon them of alien and inimical rulers over an inhumanly long period of time. As a result of that experience, Poles had learned already to identify themselves as a people rooted and domiciled forever in one particular land—without their own government, yet distinct as a nation from any false “Poland” consisting of an odious political structure with an ideologically colored state and government.
The key factor in Wyszynski’s successful evocation of a community spirit was undoubtedly the untiring efforts he put into organizing his own collaborators among the clergy and the people. His prewar years as a sociologist and lecturer, his travels around Poland, his natural gregariousness, gave him an instinct for what people needed and how people thought about and understood public events. In general, he was very fortunate in the type of bishop to be found under his governance of the Church in Poland. By and large, it would have been difficult to find another group of bishops who were so attuned to their Primate that they could second all his efforts so efficiently and loyally. In particular, the young Bishop Wojtyla gradually worked his way into the counsels of Wyszynski by the sheer power of his acumen, his fearless methods of dealing with the bullying legal power in the land. Wojtyla also appealed very effectively to
the intelligentsia of Poland, for his scholarly qualifications and his literary accomplishments were undeniable and attractive. And yet he was a man of the people.
Sheltering all of this planned activity over the years like a great umbrella were the ongoing preparations for the 1966 formal declarations by Poles of their voluntary servitude as a nation to Mary. And Mary already seemed to be doing her part, for it turned out to be an effective cover.
To the thoroughly secularized minds of Wyszynski’s rabid Communist opponents in Poland, his preparations for the millennium anniversary of his nation’s baptism into Christianity seemed so removed from power politics and from the hard realities of life—and were in any case so useful in the pacification of the people—that they seemed never to guess at the ferroconcrete consensus the Cardinal was building in the Polish nation.
To be sure, the preparations were impressive in their extent and their organizational effort. But it all seemed so “churchy” and so removed from the brute sociopolitical strength that was Gomulka’s primary concern, that he and his government were content to deal with it by their usual means of harassment and brutality.
Both in its intent to trash supernatural faith and religious devotion, however, and in its failure to discern even the slightest ray of intelligence behind it all, that government response was the clumsiest, most ill-begotten, fundamentally crass and thoroughly stupid mistake that the Communist regime could have chosen to make.
Fortunately for Wyszynski and for Poland, the Cardinal knew his people far better than did his “errant children” who were running the government. “There have been situations,” Wyszynski wrote to his bishops, “where we have lost with the government. And we may lose again with this or that government. But we can never lose with the Nation! Our sensitivity to what is going on in the soul of the Nation must always be acute.”
With that sensitivity as his watchword, and with their common faith always as a guide, Cardinal Wyszynski directed his bishops and clergy in the creation of one consolidated and strikingly efficient network of catechetical centers attached to local churches. It was this network that would prepare Poland for its vow to Mary. It was this network that would forge the unity without which Wyszynski knew that no later economic structuring of the nation could succeed and no political structuring would be possible. And it was this network that ultimately would see to the death of Leninist Marxism as the overlord of Wyszynski’s Poland.
Government harassment or no, four million children and young people were involved in the effort. Fully 88 percent of students at the elementary level attended 20,000 centers administered by 10,000 instructors, including 1,785 nuns and 700 lay people.
Diocese by diocese, Wyszynski’s organization supervised the pastoral activities of his priests, especially in the personal needs of their parishioners. Social assistance was provided at many levels: general advice and counsel, small loans, food and clothing, moral support—in the true sense of both words—in family difficulties, help in paying for medical costs and hospitalization. A special corps of chaplains occupied themselves with students, attending to their spiritual welfare, their academic performance, their social behavior and group spirit.
Aside from the practical aid provided, this nearness to the ordinary people in their homes and their workplaces, in their leisure time and their personal trials, bore the supernaturally handsome harvest of an increase in the already great loyalty of Poles to their Church and to their Primate. Wyszynski was seen as the national leader who stood foursquare for the good of the people and for the happiness of their families; and it was an accurate perception, which, of course, he aimed at evoking.
Over this churchly organization with which he clothed Poland parish by parish, street by street, home by home, always Wyszynski spread the extraprotective mantle of the preparations for the Marian devotional vow of national servitude set for August of 1966 and focused on Our Lady of Czȩstochowa. And, always, a part of those preparations was the explication of what this vow implied for Poland and Poles as a nation, for the Soviet Union with its nineteenth-century Leninist-Marxist mythologies, for Europe as a common home for all Europeans, for the society of nations as a whole, and for the Roman papacy as precisely what Cardinal Hlond had called it so many decades before: “the builder of the world” and “the guardian of nations … structuring the relationship between temporal progress and the supernatural cultivation of the human soul.”
Had Wyszynski made a serious procedural mistake in dealing with the unceasing government policies directed against himself, his clergy and his Church, or had he miscalculated the temper of the people and unintentionally sparked the kind of uprising that had been Hungary’s undoing in 1956, all his years of effort would have been derailed, and all his hopes for Poland’s future would have been sent spiraling into oblivion.
Though either of those scenarios was always a possibility in a climate that was frequently as explosive as a tinderbox, it was the first problem—dealing with the government—that was consistently the most demanding. For while Gomulka and his government cadres never appeared to grasp the full political or geopolitical significance of Wyszynski’s counterpolicies, they never let up on their pressure against him.
Though it cost him dearly in some ways, Wyszynski never did make such procedural mistakes. Indeed, he accepted willy-nilly such things as the nomination of certain priests he knew to be in the government’s pocket, if not in its employ. He continually received government agent Boleslaw Piasecki as a visitor to his residence, despite the fact that he regarded Piasecki as an arch-apostate and a double-dealing agent for Gomulka. And when the Marxist head of state, Aleksander Zawadzki, died, the Primate sent his condolences in the proper diplomatic manner.
In other words, Wyszynski never violated the code of public conduct in dealing with these or thousands of other issues that had constantly to be fielded. For none of those issues, nor all of them together, were more than trivialities in comparison with the swelling volume of awareness among the people concerning the universal significance of their coming vow of national servitude to the Queen of Poland.
Nevertheless, Wyszynski was not about to become a passive, wimpish whipping boy, helpless against government onslaughts or their base calumnies. He protested every inimical government move. To one nonplussed government representative who had gone too far by half in his abusive threats, Wyszynski vowed, “We will talk about this issue from the pulpit, and we will talk about it with the Party. I will talk to everyone, with the first secretary and the prime minister, if need be.”
Without a doubt in the world, he would have done just that. Public rules and decorum were one thing, but in closed-door meetings Wyszynski was always prepared to give as good as he got—and a little bit more if the situation called for it. In one such meeting—a marathon conference in June of 1958 that lasted from five in the afternoon to four o’clock the next morning—he made that point ringingly clear.
First Secretary Gomulka and the Cardinal’s old enemy Prime Minister Cyrankiewicz had beseeched Wyszynski to come to the meeting. As always, they needed his help to keep popular discontent in check.
The unstable Gomulka threw all caution out the window at one point and began shouting at Wyszynski at the top of his voice. The Primate understood the situation and managed first to stop the shouting and then to calm the first secretary.
When Cyrankiewicz started to play his old games again, however, attempting to control Wyszynski by accusing him of unlawful procedures, it was an entirely different matter. The Cardinal turned the full blast of his personality and fearless authority on the prime minister. More, he hit him in the face with a brazen counterthreat. “I did not come here as an accused person … I came here to present the facts. I do have an unsettled account with you, sir. The fact that I haven’t brought up personal grievances doesn’t mean that I’ve forgotten them. If you want to take up accusations, I will first of all accuse you … and demand a public rehabilitation, which will disgrace you in the eyes of
Poland and the world.” Wyszynski had driven his point home; there can have been no doubt in the prime minister’s mind that the Cardinal was talking not only about his own illegal arrest and imprisonment but about Cyrankiewicz’s personal corruption and his participation in certain sordid actions of Joseph Stalin.
There were no more such threats from Cyrankiewicz. At least, not in that meeting. But years of contention still lay ahead. And more often than not, success or failure for the Poles depended on the ability of the Primate and his bishops to maintain balanced judgment and to keep the people calm in what sometimes seemed a madhouse run by the criminally insane.
· · ·
In October of 1962, the opening session of Pope John XXIII’s much publicized Second Vatican Council drew virtually every Roman Catholic bishop—there were 2,500 in all—in the world to Rome, and any number of non-Catholic observers, as well.
With Bishop Karol Wojtyla at his side as his closest protégé, Cardinal Wyszynski led the Polish bishops as delegates to this extraordinary georeligious and geopolitical event, which was to have deep and lasting effects not only on the Roman Catholic Church but on the configuration of world politics for the remainder of the twentieth century. Among the Polish bishops present at the Council, Wojtyla was to achieve a prominent place in the eyes of his fellow bishops and of those who would one day elect him Pope. The unison and the differences between the two men came out in clear relief—not that those differences made a whit of difference to Wojtyla’s devotion to Wyszynski or to Wyszynski’s belief in Wojtyla’s star as one destined to ascend in the firmament of the Church and the broad expanse of human skies.
Wyszynski had been part of the Preparatory Commission appointed by Pope John XXIII to draft the official agenda of his Second Vatican Council. The Commission’s work resulted in what were officially called Schemata; each of these dealt with some important topic the Commission judged should be discussed by the Council. When the Council went into session as of October 1962, it quickly became clear that a very well-organized faction among the bishops and the assistant theologians was bent on abrogating the Commission’s Schemata. Although a minority, this faction succeeded by excellent parliamentary maneuvers to encompass their purpose.
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