Continue it did, and along the usual lines of harassment, false accusations, denial of passports, aggression by the “Patriotic Priests” of the Communist-sponsored Pax organization, denial of building permits for churches and schools, attempts to replace the Sacraments of Baptism and Marriage with state-sponsored lay ceremonies; and by all the other means devisable by the Communist bureaucrats of Warsaw.
The Wyszynski-Wojtyla tactics continued: sustained attack in the Catholic press and in sermons on every violation of human rights; constant pressure through Rome on the government; constant diplomatic connections with West Germany and the United States brought to bear on the Polish scene.
A change started to manifest itself in the government’s attitude to the two cardinals. By 1976, Gierek went so far as to praise Wyszynski as “a great man and a great patriot,” but—as he told his Politburo colleagues—Cardinal Wojtyla was “the worst of all.” The truth was that Wyszynski had attained a position of moral superiority in the eyes of the people that was unassailable. But this young Cardinal Wojtyla, fiftyish and active, was the future danger. Obviously he was being groomed to succeed Wyszynski as Primate. Besides, in that year, 1976, Wyszynski was operated on for cancer. The Wojtyla danger was nearer than they had thought. During Wyszynski’s illness, Wojtyla was his replacement as spokesman and Church standard-bearer for all public issues; the government thus had a foretaste of what lay in store for them, should he become Primate.
The two successive Communist governments were not far off the mark when they read, first, Wyszynski and then Wojtyla as potential destroyers of the Leninist-Marxist system in Poland. The first internal Polish revolts among lay Poles were accurately read as a consequence of the example set by the Cardinal Primate and his fellow bishops. They had successfully challenged the totalitarian regime, had survived and were flourishing.
In the seventies, there was, therefore, the revolt of the Polish intellectuals. There followed the Committee for the Defense of the Workers (KOR) and the Committee for Social Self-Defense (KSS): The working classes in Poland found it necessary to defend themselves against the Party that claimed to vindicate their claims as workers. Later, the strike power of workers in Gdansk, Szczecin and Jastrzeb would lead to the social contract between the workers and the government and, later still, to the official registration of Solidarity.
By now, Cardinal Wojtyla was down in Rome, fulfilling his duties on special Vatican committees, deeply immersed in the negotiations of a Poland-Vatican Concordat, and preaching a spiritual “retreat” for Pope Paul and his papal household. The aging Paul and the young Polish cardinal developed a very close relationship, and the Pope saw in Wojtyla a future Pope for the Church—but quite a distance in years from the seventies. “Your Eminence,” he told Wojtyla, “will be shortly very much needed in Poland. God will provide after that.” Both men were obviously thinking of Wyszynski’s failing health; and both were aware of Paul’s own decline.
That was not the only vague hint of what the future might hold for Wojtyla. There was the venerable and saintly Josyf Cardinal Slipyj, the Ukrainian Catholic leader, survivor of eighteen years in the Soviet Gulag, now exiled in Rome but always dreaming of his beloved St. George Cathedral in Lwów, the Ukraine. Wojtyla’s reverence for Slipyj was as much for the physical tortures the Ukrainian had undergone as for what he represented—the Ukrainian Catholic Church. “Your Grace will bury me in St. George’s,” he told Wojtyla. “It is God’s will.” (Slipyj died in 1984 at the age of ninety-two, and his body waits in Papa Wojtyla’s Rome for the day of his homecoming—an event that became highly probable in 1990 after Papa Wojtyla’s meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev.)
It was one more straw in the winds of destiny ushering Cardinal Wojtyla to his near-future appointment, and it was of a piece with everything that had gone into the making of Wojtyla. In its heyday, the Polish commonwealth was closely bound to the Ukraine religiously and politically. Even when Poland’s enemies tore them apart and Joseph Stalin with the connivance of the Russian Orthodox Churchmen raped the Church in the Ukraine, the bond between Poles and Ukrainians persisted underground. By the late seventies, Wojtyla’s orientation was eastward to the Ukraine and to Russia.
At Pope Paul’s suggestion, Cardinal Wojtyla established contact with other Church leaders in the world, and visited the United States on an extended tour throughout the land. It was a simple project to let the world outside the Gulag know of the young Polish cardinal’s character and ability. It also allowed Wojtyla to experience firsthand the secularism of Harvard, the provincialism of American bishops, and the dynamism of New York and California. For, as Paul used to say, “nothing beats living.”
Despite every attempt to put Cardinals Wyszynski and Wojtyla in opposition to each other—this was the explicit aim of the Gierek government in the late seventies—the two men were absolutely loyal to each other. No one could tamper with the stature of Wyszynski in Poland, in Rome and in Europe. No one could breach the confidentiality Wojtyla maintained toward Wyszynski or even touch on his personal relationship with the aging Primate.
In those last years of the seventies, Wyszynski sometimes spoke about matters that still escaped the watching observers of the West. Very few realized that already by early 1976, the inner-council discussions of the Moscow Politburo no longer turned on the well-worn opposition of capitalism-proletariat. This for the Kremlin was antique language and thinking. Instead, as Wyszynski expressed it in an earlier letter to one of his Polish bishops, in February 1976: “Today the question moves significantly away from the level of ‘capitalism-proletariat’ to another level, not foreseen by Karl Marx—establishment of ‘neocapitalism’ in a collective economy, exercised by a Communist state in the name of the primacy of export production over the working man.” Only in hindsight do we today know that this is as neat a definition as any of what Mr. Gorbachev has in mind.
It was advance notice of a slowly evolving mentality among the Kremlin masters that oriented the minds of these two concerned Poles toward the USSR as a seedbed of change for Europe and the world. What was distinctive—and, for non-Catholic and secular minds, severely offputting—was the Marian coloring these Polish cardinals gave to what, after all, was a geopolitical viewpoint.
Wyszynski bridled at any suggestion that this so-called Marianism of the Church in Poland was a matter of subjective feelings. It was a West German historian and commentator, Brigitte Waterkott, who analyzed that Marianism accurately in its geopolitical significance.
“It would be,” she commented, “a complete misunderstanding to treat Polish Marianism as exclusively a matter of feelings…. The Polish Church affirms the affirmation of its national history, which finds its peak in the idea of the Polish nation’s special calling in relation to the universal Church, to Europe, and to the world, in devotion to the Blessed Virgin of Jasna Góra…. Czȩstochowa is the central point of a historical image of messianic lineaments…. When the nation, after the Three Partitions, came together before the Altar of the Virgin, the external unity of the state was succeeded by an internal, mystical one.”
It is quite an extraordinary fact about the Catholic Church in the twentieth century that one of its cardinals—and a Polish cardinal, at that—was the first Churchman we know of who intuited where the gaze and interest of the Church would be directed at the end of the second millennium. Moreover, that this latest orientation to Europe and to the USSR in particular should be channeled through an all-pervading presence of Mary, the Mother of Jesus—this is the most surprising element. And Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski was the chief instrument in the redirection of that gaze and interest. He did and does belong among the great men of the age.
In the Catholic optic, and indeed in any optic that is unbiased, it appears sure that the effective conclusion of the act of “national servitude” of Poles to Mary in 1966 brought on inevitably the liquidation of the Polish Communist government in 1989; but, more immediately, it merited that out of Poland would come the Polish Pope. At a
particularly dangerous moment in the history of the papacy, for Roman Catholics the outstanding fact is that God chose a Pope from the Slavic nations. Wyszynski had tutored Karol Wojtyla in churchcraft and statecraft and in Polishness. Wojtyla became a cardinal in June 1967, and was thus eligible for a papal election. Long before the wide world learned that international equilibrium depended on a Russian Slav, Mikhail Gorbachev, it had to get used to a Slavic Pope.
In churchcraft, Wyszynski was without a peer among his twentieth-century colleagues either in the College of Cardinals or throughout the Roman Catholic episcopacy worldwide. In another age and under less straitened circumstances for Poland, he would have been elected pope. He was of that rare timber epitomized by Winston Churchill in describing Pope Innocent XI: “In manner gentle, in temper tolerant, in mood humane, in outlook broad and comprehending, he nevertheless possessed and exercised an inflexible will and an imperturbable daring.”
Being appointed to one small province of the universal Roman Catholic Church, and of sheer necessity engaged personally in an all-absorbing and dangerous combat with narrow and localized minds—“pygmies on stilts in high place,” he called them—for life itself, Wyszynski knew how to transform it all with a greatness that as yet escapes many.
Wyszynski’s life and actions testify to the chasmic difference between him and many Churchmen today. Under his guidance, the Church of Poland was transmuted into a paradigm of the Church Universal. The nasty little infighting with homegrown Marxists was translated into a phase of the Church’s worldwide struggle with the evil abroad among men since the Creation. The beloved motherland of Poland was promoted as a front-line element in the beginning geopolitical gamble of the nations. The essentially simple religious intimacy of Catholic Poles with the divine was channeled for a cosmic purpose—indeed, was used with childlike daring to wrest from the Almighty a singular grace capable of softening the hearts turned to Marxist stone, and promising to put living flesh back on the arid bones of Western man’s judgment desiccated by reason left to its own treadmill devices.
“Today,” Wyszynski remarked to an American visitor at Czȩstochowa in 1966, “we have been granted the favor of a power beyond all the powers that be, around us.” He made no secret of the cause of his success. Yet it must always remain a mystery.
31
The Politics of Faith
Pope Paul VI died on Sunday, August 6, 1978, at 9:40 P.M. Within that same hour, a telephone call from Rome to Cardinal Wyszynski’s residence in Warsaw gave the news, thus effectively halting him and Cardinal Wojtyla in the middle of complex Church-State negotiations in Communist Poland and intergovernmental discussions with West German authorities. The Pope was dead. The Holy See was without a legitimate leader. The vast georeligious institution of the Roman Catholic Church lacked its geopolitical guide. Better than most other cardinals, the two Poles understood: The most important business now was to remedy that lack. A new pope had to be chosen.
Of course, for the Church Universal that was important; all authority and religious authenticity depended on the approval of the Pope. But in the perspective of those Polish cardinals, the selection of the next pope was weighted with a new gravity at that precise moment of history.
These two, living and working within the confines of the Soviet Gulag Archipelago, had between them waged a relentless struggle in Poland—Wyszynski for thirty years, Wojtyla for nearly twenty—with the Polish surrogates of the Leninist Moscow masters. They had waged it and won it. As had been Poland’s lot for nearly four hundred years, so in mid-twentieth century her internal state was conditioned by geopolitical factors; and these two had always made their plans and executed them in that geopolitical perspective. They could consider the choice of a pope only in that same perspective. This was their Churchmen’s mode. This, too, was their advantage.
More attuned than anyone in the West to the enigmatic heartbeat of the Soviet Party-State, better informed than most Western intelligence analysts about conditions in the Soviet satellites and captive republics, these Poles had become convinced, at the opening of 1978, that, deep within the Party-State, a profound change was under way. Not a change of heart in the sense of a conversion from malignity to benignity toward the capitalist West. Rather, a growing conviction that the Cold War could not be won by Moscow, and that a new approach to the West was called for. “This,” Wyszynski reported to Paul VI in late 1977, “is the underlying feeling. Stalinist politics even when modified by Khrushchev and Brezhnev are leading the USSR nowhere … the same obsolescence in the captive nations … just hardening pockets of increasingly inept local Parties….”
Paul’s Vatican, of course, had seen in this a vindication of the Ostpolitik inaugurated by John XXIII, intensified by Paul VI and particularly championed by the Vatican Secretariat of State. Wyszynski, though, regarded that Ostpolitik as a dark tunnel without any lights at its end. “Quiescence in the status quo,” he called it bluntly.
Now, change was coming in the Soviet Union. Paul VI was dead. Whoever succeeded him would have to—or, at least, should—steer the Church into that change. For, quite predictably, if the foreign policy of the USSR changed, if the Kremlin masters chose another pathway toward their cherished geopolitical goals, the whole of international life would be caught in a flurry of changes—changes planned by those masters but unexpected by the West and bypassing the dead-end tunnel of the Vatican’s current Ostpolitik.
Yet, the only other institutional organization on the face of the globe that measured up to the geopolitical reach of the Soviet Party-State was the Roman Catholic Church. It would have to adapt itself to whatever changes were introduced—not merely react to the changes, but foresee them, prepare for them, and assimilate them to its own provisos. That, in brief, would be the task of Paul VI’s successor. Rarely in the long history of papal elections had the choice of pope held such portentous consequences for the decision to be taken shortly by 111 Cardinal Electors in Rome at the next Conclave.
Within days of Paul VI’s death, Wyszynski and Wojtyla each received from the papal Camerlengo, Jean Cardinal Villot—now chief executive in charge of the Vatican caretaker government and all Conclave matters—his personal summons to come and participate in the Conclave that would elect a successor pope. Opening hour for the Conclave was preset precisely for 5:00 P.M. on Friday, August 25. But it was advisable to arrive in time for pre-Conclave discussions with their brother cardinals—all 111 of them, each with the same personal summons in his pocket, hurrying to Rome from the four quarters of the globe—before being immured in the heavily guarded isolation of the Conclave.
When the two Polish cardinals eased themselves into their seats for the Warsaw-Rome journey on August 18, they were traveling light. Each man carried a small valise, really an overnight bag containing the usual personal necessities for a short stay away from home. In his pocket each had an open ticket. Wyszynski could reasonably expect this to be the last Conclave he would attend. In three years’ time, at age eighty, he would be ineligible to vote in a papal election. He expected now to discharge his normal functions as a Cardinal Elector and then go on his way tranquilly toward oncoming eternity. His younger colleague, Cardinal Wojtyla, was configured differently. Poland needed him. Especially when Wyszynski passed on.
This journey southward would be just long enough to allow them both to adjust their minds to the issues of the forthcoming election; but, together with a quick Conclave, it should impose only a short stay away from home matters. In no time, they both would be back and take up where they had left off. Indeed, in that August of 1978, the fact was that neither of them nor, for that matter, the Camerlengo himself expected a long-drawn-out Conclave. All three were realists. They and most of the Cardinal Electors knew the bottom line: At this particular juncture, a protracted Conclave was ruled out by the condition in which Pope Paul VI had left his Church and by the almost irreconcilable factionalism among the Cardinal Electors as an electoral body.
Sitting side by side on
that journey to Rome, chatting together, napping occasionally, reading and discussing Conclave-related documents, Wyszynski and Wojtyla had the great advantage of their already very close association. Ever since Wojtyla’s appointment as auxiliary Bishop of Krakow in 1958, and more intensely since he became a cardinal in 1967, the two men had worked together hand in glove, Wyszynski as the guiding hand, Wojtyla as the quick-learning and resourceful secondo. Ecclesiastically senior and junior cardinals, personally they were more like father and son.
Between the two of them, they had successfully driven the desperately confused Stalinist government of Warsaw into a diplomatic and political corner, making the first breach ever in the rigid control exercised locally by Moscow. They could, in 1978, look forward confidently to a possible break in Marxist control of Poland’s work force. The Solidarity of the eighties was on the drawing boards. Poland, as the geopolitical pawn it had been for so long, might be in the vanguard of the huge change both men sensed was under way. Wyszynski and Wojtyla were a matchless combination.
But with that close association and personal bond between them, there remained the inevitable differences arising from age and seniority. Wyszynski himself, seventy-seven, had been formed in a world that had literally passed away by the time Wojtyla, now fifty-eight, was born. Already, Wyszynski was a veteran of two capital papal Conclaves (of 1958 and 1963, respectively), had lived under six popes, and was personally acquainted with four of them. What there was to be known about Rome’s Vatican and the vital issues of the Church Universal, Wyszynski knew. All of that still lay in the future for Wojtyla. What Wyszynski could communicate to his younger colleague he had done, and particularly now on this journey was doing.
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