The net result was that the idea of the Church in the world and of how the Church should function and of what it should achieve—all these vitally important ideas were changed. In the original Schemata, the traditional Roman Catholic point of view on all three questions was dominant. In the new Schemata, that traditional Roman Catholic view was replaced by a new standpoint, which had more to do with modern (particularly American) concepts of democracy and people’s power than with Roman Catholic teaching. Successfully sold to the bishops of the Council, adapted by them and incorporated into the official documents of the Council, these new ideas gave birth to a new ecclesiology, a new view of Catholicism, of the Roman Church and of the papacy.
The new ecclesiology could have been reconciled with the traditional ecclesiology, if great care and deliberate efforts were forthcoming. They weren’t. The net result was that an ambiguity floated through all the Council’s official statements. Wyszynski and Wojtyla both saw the danger. Wyszynski did not want to live with that ambiguity. Wojtyla thought the Church could live with it and that in time the reconciliation of the two viewpoints could be and would be effected. Actually, as it happened in the twenty years following the Council, that ambiguity wreaked havoc with the institutional organization of the Church that Wojtyla as Pope would inherit in 1978. But at the time of the Council, all that was hidden in the future; in the Council’s immediate aftermath, a false euphoria, expressed as the “Spirit of Vatican II,” successfully—because pleasantly, as most people judged—put the majority of bishops and others off their guard. Only when the high and rough winds of screeching dissidence starting blowing, and only when the central authority of the papacy under Pope Paul VI was ripped to pieces by the “democratization” of religious belief and practice, only then were Wyszynski’s warnings recalled. But by then it was too late to reconcile the old and the new Vatican II viewpoints.
Back in the Council days, 1962–65, however, Stefan Wyszynski’s Polish agenda was never absent from his thinking; and in that regard there were a few matters of particular importance he deemed it necessary to discuss personally with Pope John. In two private interviews, the longer of which lasted for fully an hour and three quarters, the two men reviewed such matters as the issue of the Western Lands disputed between Poland and Germany and the question of the nomination of bishops—Polish or German!—for that territory.
Mainly, however, Wyszynski wanted to urge upon Pope John that he dedicate the Council, the bishops of the Church, and the laity of the world, whose servants they were, to the same bond of servitude to Mary that the Cardinal was preparing in Poland.
It seemed to the Primate that there would never be a better moment in terms of opportunity, or a more urgent one in terms of need. All of the bishops were gathered in Rome at this moment, and they would be back again for succeeding Council sessions. And across the whole world, every continent was obviously suffering to one degree or another from the power meddling and totalitarian oppression exerted by the Soviet Union.
But more than that, just about the whole world was aware by now, as Wyszynski was, that two years before, Pope John had opened and read what was purported by credible investigators to be instructions taken down from the lips of Mary during a supernatural visitation to three peasant children in the remote district of Fatima in Portugal. Though the contents of those instructions were secret—in fact, they were referred to as the “three secrets of Fatima” by the increasing number of people who got wind of their existence—it was nonetheless widely known by now that Mary had called for a dedication of more or less the same kind Wyszynski was urging on Papa Roncalli; and that she had apparently done so for more or less the same georeligious and geopolitical reasons that had motivated Wyszynski.
Given such crucial events in Poland’s history as the Jasna Góra victory of 1665 over the Swedes, and the “Miracle of the Vistula” against Lenin in 1920, the little he knew about Mary’s purported request at Fatima seemed as reasonable to the Cardinal as it did to any Pole. In fact, taking into account the condition of the world in the early 1960s, and given the perfect occasion in the form of an assembly of the world’s bishops in Rome, why not just get on with it? Why not get things started?
Of course, Vatican protocol being what it is, the Primate didn’t put the matter in just those terms; but his meaning was clear enough.
Roncalli listened with interest and indulgence. He respected Wyszynski, and admitted that, if he had heard Wyszynski out before he had made and implemented his decision, he might have acted differently. But his attitude to Wyszynski’s urgings was the same as it had been when he had first read the secret instructions of Fatima in 1960. The purpose of such an act of dedication, as the Poles themselves had emphasized, would be to end the Soviet Union’s lethal mischief-making in the world. To ask for such an intention would be to incur a face-to-face confrontation between the Roman Church and the USSR at precisely the time when Pope John had decided to leaven the Soviets instead through the spirit of his Council, which would spread throughout the world as his bishops returned to their dioceses.
The Pope’s answer to the Cardinal, therefore, and almost in so many words, was that this time, “our time as Pope,” was not the time for such an act of dedication. Had the Cardinal been privy to the full contents of the “three Fatima secrets,” he might have wondered if there would be another time. Still, while Poland’s choice was a matter confided to his hands, the choice for the world lay in the hands of his Pope. Wyszynski would not cavil at the Holy Father.
Anyone who knew Wyszynski would not have expected him to let the matter rest there. He saw Papa Roncalli again in May of the following year, during the second session of the Council. By then, Pope John knew that the Council was out of his control; his agenda for a deep renewal of activist faith in the Church had been set on a course the Pontiff had not foreseen, and it would serve someone else’s agenda instead. And he also knew that he would have no time to alter that fact. On June 3, Angelo Roncalli died in his faith and his regrets.
Wyszynski finally persuaded John’s successor, Pope Paul VI, at least to proclaim Mary as Mother of the Church. Paul did so solemnly on November 21, 1964, in front of the whole Council of Bishops. The Cardinal would have to be content with that; for Papa Roncalli’s decision to politicize the idea of any wholesale dedication of the Universal Church to Mary, and his companion decision to temporize with reference to the Soviet Union, were to remain principles of Vatican policy for many years to come in this century.
Nearly twenty years later, those twin decisions by Pope John would almost literally have a stunning effect on the policies of Wyszynski’s protégé, Karol Wojtyla, in his role as Pope John Paul II.
Meanwhile, the decision to so honor Mary had deep implications. It meant that explicitly the officials of the Church transposed the already great importance of Mary (as an active participant in Christian life) from the merely devotional and purely religious to the georeligious plane on which the Roman Church operates. Mary was now, whether one liked it or not, recognized as a geopolitical element in Christian salvation. It was a capital point in the formation of a prepapal mind in Wojtyla.
Wyszynski and Wojtyla and the rest of the Polish hierarchy were not much slowed at home by the Council going on in Rome. If anything, it almost appeared that Wyszynski’s failure to change the mind of the Holy See concerning the dedication of the Church and the world to Mary caused him to redouble his concentration on Poland as a paradigm of the world, and on the Church in Poland as a paradigm of the Church Universal in its worldwide struggle with the evil abroad among men since the creation of the world.
Such a view was not a fanciful thing, for Wyszynski was a practical man; a doer. And he had expressed just such a view as far back as 1952. In that year, before Prime Minister Cyrankiewicz had so rudely removed him to imprisonment, the Cardinal had written to his hard-pressed Catholics with advice and instruction he never failed to keep in mind himself and never failed to impress upon Wojtyla and his other bis
hops.
“As a background for your perseverance,” the Primate had written them, “let me remind you of the fundamental position of the Church in the face of our Polish condition. In the course of 2,000 years … the Church has faced various situations; but she was never surprised by those situations. The wide world was [surprised] when it found itself Arian, Albigensian, humanistic, Protestant, rationalistic, capitalistic…. She [the Church] faces Communism with serenity … because she is compelled to exist with that reality … and, today, that relationship must be maintained even with her enemies—and they are not only the Communists but the Freemasons and pagan capitalism.”
Even in cohabiting with their most lethally intentioned enemies, Wyszynski urged the Poles, they should be true to every aspect of their Polishness, harboring neither fruitless dreams of returning to past fortune nor baneful plans for future retribution: “The Church in Poland … must educate Poles not to nurture any idea of revenge or a complete restoration of their past. Polish Catholics in whatever circumstances—even in those that are adverse for the Communists—will not raise their hand against them…. Catholics will respect an accomplished social evolution…. The present reality shows bold signs of social changes. … God has placed us in the condition in which we must live.”
Such was the attitude constantly displayed by Wyszynski and his clergy; and to a surprising degree as well by the populace at large, as the Primate continued to network Poland with his endless organizational efforts. By 1963, the effect of Wyszynski’s minutely planned and faithfully executed arrangements for the millennium celebrations at last began to daunt the Gomulka government. In response, the first secretary trotted out every tactic he and his underlings could come up with.
Sharp personal attacks on the Cardinal Primate surfaced yet again. It was charged that Wyszynski had received gifts from that incorrigible Fascist, General Francisco Franco of Spain. He was accused once more of tampering with state affairs in seeking a reconciliation between Poles and Germans. In fact, as the Cardinal was leaving a church where his policy of forgiveness of the Germans for their war atrocities was proclaimed, he was confronted by a gang of government-hired toughs, who chanted, “We won’t forgive!” True to his own lights, Wyszynski chose to pass directly through the rough bunch, answering one of them pointedly and sincerely, “Brother, that doesn’t matter.” Another, who was hassling a woman in the crowd, he chided, “Brother, be decent.”
By 1965, the year before the ultimate national celebration and dedication, the preparations had taken on such a vigor of their own that they became one continual celebration, complete with constant processions everywhere, in anticipation of the millennium vow that would be led by the Cardinal at Mary’s shrine at Czȩstochowa on the Bright Mountain of Jasna Góra.
Accordingly, so too did the government step up its activities of harassment. Its tactics ranged from the hyperbureaucratic to the sleazy and the physically dangerous. Permits were refused for religious processions carrying reproductions of the Czȩstochowa icon. Other processions were diverted from their routes or were prohibited from entering certain zones. In one incident, the police stopped a car displaying the Czȩstochowa icon, wrapped the picture up in a tarpaulin and tied it securely with rope, and only then allowed the automobile to continue on its way. On another occasion, sham reports of an outbreak of smallpox forced would-be pilgrims to return home. Time and again, military vehicles would be driven dangerously along roads frequented by priests on their way to icon celebrations, forcing clerics off the road in “accidents” that disabled their cars, and that sometimes caused serious injury. Pilgrims who were not physically roughed up were continually under surveillance by the “sad people,” as Gomulka’s secret service agents were called. Regularly, gangs of toughs took to disturbing even normal liturgical celebrations. And, in a pointed and threatening move, a permanent militia guard was placed around Jasna Góra itself.
By then, however, it was already far too late to stop what Wyszynski had begun, not only with respect to the millennial celebration and vow of “national servitude” to Mary, but with respect to the sociopolitical element of his agenda. For in 1965, the first signs of that organized element of the Cardinal’s agenda popped to the surface when thirty-four prominent intellectuals issued a declaration of freedom for artists and writers as a basic right. What Wyszynski was counting on was thus beginning to happen. Segments of the population, such as groups of intellectuals and people who were not Catholic or had long since abandoned any practical belief in their original Catholicism or had lapsed into complete nonobservance of Catholicism’s laws, were now attracted at least to the point of supporting Wyszynski, because his general goals were for the betterment of Poland’s dire economic and social conditions.
By the time that much prepared date August 26, 1968, rolled around, there was nobody in Poland who was unaware of what would be transacted at the monastery at Czȩstochowa on Jasna Góra—the Bright Mountain—with Mary as Queen of Poland. It is very difficult for those who have known life only in Western democracies to realize that the great majority of Poles thought about that forthcoming celebration as an event affecting not merely Poland but Poland’s neighbors in Europe, Poland’s Europe in its entirety, “from the Atlantic to the Urals,” and, farther afield, the wide world in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. That familiarity and facility of identifying one’s local cause with a universal cause is absent to a large extent in Western democracies.
On August 26, Wyszynski himself presided over the ceremonies at Czȩstochowa. Over a quarter of a million pilgrims gathered on the hillside around the monastery and again responded to the words of the national dedication. True, the militia was present. Extra government troops, police battalions and teams of Zomos—bully boys—stood by watchfully, but not daring to make any move. While the voices of that quarter million rang out again and again—“Yes! We swear it!”—in response to ritual requests for their assent to the dedication, the same ceremony was being performed at literally thousands of locations throughout Poland.
Wyszynski had successfully tied the goals of democratic liberty in Poland to the celebration of a Roman Catholic belief, and both of them were now held in the minds of Poles to be linked with supranational goals and with the well-being of the society of nations.
It was Archbishop Wojtyla’s function to piece all of it together in words. He spoke of the “supernatural current” let loose by the millennial celebrations of Jasna Góra and irresistibly overcoming the “totalitarian threat to the nation” and “the atheistic programs supported by the Polish United Workers Party”—the Communist PZPR. He quickly transposed Poland’s harassed and embattled position to the international plane: “Poland faces biological destruction … as does the entire world of man. … As Poland, so the rest of the world is in absolute danger.” Then he hammered home the supreme lesson: “Our temporal theology demands that we dedicate ourselves into the hands of the Holy Mother. May we all live up to our tasks.”
There was no doubt in his listeners’ minds about the “tasks.” “The Archbishop,” one visiting expatriate Pole told newsmen, “was reminding us Poles that, if we fulfill our destiny, it will be a European destiny, a worldwide destiny.”
The next twelve years were to be a concrete fulfillment of Wyszynski’s undertaking as Cardinal Primate and as Interrex. “In accepting the duties assigned to me by the Church—the episcopal sees of Gniezno and Warsaw—I also accepted a moral and civil duty to undertake appropriate discussions on the requirements of Polish state interests.” This was as bold a statement as Wyszynski could make to the faithful gathered in the Warsaw basilica. “This is a dictate of my conscience as a bishop and as a Pole.”
In brief terms, Wyszynski now saw his role as Interrex coming to the fore in a very explicit fashion. He was to be the defender of the people’s rights, of Poland’s rights, and the supplier of their needs. He would do this under the sign of Solidarity—Solidarność—with them as Poles, as Catholics, as human beings.
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nbsp; But in taking up this stance, he was not in any sense saying that his own difficulties as Primate were over. In actual fact, until December 1970, the usual pressures exerted by the regime on him and his colleagues were more intense than ever before. His seminaries, his schools, his priests, his own status in Poland, the ordinary function of his churches—all were again the object of frenzied attacks. Wyszynski’s immersion in national and labor problems was his way of carrying war into the enemy’s camp. Constantly criticizing the government, constantly defending the workers, constantly underlining the mistakes of the regime, using public opinion at home and abroad, he was finally instrumental in the liquidation of the Gomulka regime in December 1970.
To the new Communist government, under Edward Gierek, Wyszynski said plainly: “We cannot forget that we have been sent to lead the Nation to the Gospel…. We must fulfill our obligation to the Church in such a way that we are able to assist the country in difficult circumstances.” He was putting the government on notice that the fight would continue.
On May 28, 1967, Pope Paul conferred the Cardinal’s hat on Karol Wojtyla. For the next eight years, Wojtyla’s figure began to loom over the national scene with a newly authoritative voice. “The Primate of Poland,” he wrote in an article of May 1971, “bases his position within the universal Church on his roots in that part of the Christian community to which Providence has linked him, the Church in Poland. The very existence and activity of the Church becomes a fundamental trial of strength.” He too thus put the Gierek administration on notice that the fight would continue and that Gierek’s fight was with the Church Universal.
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