Keys of This Blood

by Malachi Martin

  For John Paul, there is no personal glory attached to this ministry. There has already been hard labor and much hardship for him; and the future holds the promise of deep suffering and of trials by the fire of contempt and enmity. He accepted all that freely, it is true, and knowingly. Yet, no life of any past pope was more unitary in its thrust than Papa Wojtyla’s has already been. By race, in character, through training, and vehicled on the happenings of his life, he appears to have been custom-fitted, as the phrase goes, for this unique role. Like his Master, for this he was born and came into the world.

  · · ·

  Just a little over ten years ago, Karol Wojtyla walked onto the world stage as His Holiness, Pope John Paul II, and eyed each of his contentious globalist contemporaries from a geopolitical standpoint. For it was as a geopolitician he had been elected Pope. And he entered the ranks of world leaders as the Servant of a Grand Design he claimed was God’s will for the society of nations.

  Rife among his contemporaries, he found, was the persuasion of an imminent sea change in human affairs, and a competition to establish what many called a new world order on the back of that change. The society of nations, in fact, was starting to formulate a Grand Design of its own; but there were many competitors, each with his own ideas. One by one, he examined their proposals. He measured their behavior with the gauge of his Roman Catholic morality. He appraised their individual prospects for success. He knew, as they knew: There could be only one victor in that competition.

  He had already decided to join that competition. For he also had his ambitions in the vital matter of a new world order. Those papal ambitions had been formed and nourished in him by the Polishness of his ancestors, and in the hard school of Stalinist Poland under the tutorship of the greatest cardinal in modern Church history, Stefan Wyszynski. The historical pacts of that Polishness provided him with a geopolitical outlook on all things human, crystallizing that geopolitical instinct in Mary, the Mother of Jesus. In his school, Wyszynski taught him the perennial lesson Christians have always had to learn: to seek no exclusive territory in the City of Man, but to establish the City of God within the very walls of that City of Man. Hence, John Paul’s decision to enter into contention.

  From that Polishness and from Wyszynski he also came to realize that in the growing crisis between the Gospel and the anti-Gospel, the resolution of the crisis would begin in the historic home area of the Slavs. Logically, then, he launched his entry onto the geopolitical stage from that area. He began in the Poland of 1979. For, in his conviction, Poland was the keystone in the area out of which would come the forces of change that all globalists were counting on.

  Over a period of ten years, and among ninety-two nations across the length and breadth of five continents, he established himself as a world leader, one who was free of all disfiguring partisanship; as someone endowed with an all-embracing mind, a rare political savvy, a nimble diplomatic agility; and as the possessor of an international profile of perhaps the highest personal definition achieved by any one individual in recorded history. He became, on those terms, an acknowledged and accepted contender in the competition.

  Everywhere and to everyone he presented himself as the Bishop of Rome and the only lawful successor to Simon Peter the Apostle. Everywhere he claimed the authority and the duty to advise, admonish and exhort all men, regardless of creed, race or ideology, on their duties to God and their due place in God’s Grand Design for the society of nations. His own Catholics understood better than anyone that the Keys of Petrine authority he held were guaranteed by the sacrificial blood of Christ.

  As Pope, as embodiment of the Holy See, he presided over a steadily declining and decadent Church organization. The organizational institution of his Roman Catholic Church was honeycombed with the usual ecclesiastical defects and human deficiencies: heresy, schism, sexual immorality, greed, pride, wholesale lapse in religious belief and practice, breakdown of Catholic family life, corruption in the major religious orders of men and women. The Church has always known these, and has its remedies. But the lethal factor slowly killing off the soul of Catholicism was something other.

  The unifying element in that worldwide institutional organization—his own apostolic authority as Holder of the Keys Christ confided only to Simon Peter—that element had been bypassed, diluted, explained away, neglected or denied outright by a solid half to two thirds of the Church’s bishops by the time Karol Wojtyla became Pope in 1978. By that time, the big, dirty secret in the Roman Church was that it now consisted of regional and local communities, all giving more or less guarded lip service to their unity with and under the Pope, but really hard at work creating a series of Catholic churches molded and fashioned on the various cultures and politics of the differing regions. John Paul’s day as Pope was the day of the great illusion. Catholic unity was gone, but the facade of unity was still maintained.

  Complicating his position as Pope and head of the Holy See was another and more sinister element: the presence of a committed anti-Church faction among his ecclesiastical officials throughout his Church, and its embodiment in his own Vatican household. In a true sense, John Paul is a pope at bay in his own Vatican. The lethal-minded opposition to him as’ Pope had been likened by one of his immediate predecessors to “the smoke of Satan invading the Sanctuary and the Altar.”

  Nevertheless, John Paul’s concentration and febrile activity were directed almost exclusively to the geopolitical issue in human affairs. He did not undertake a serious and professional attempt to restore the former unity or to extirpate from the Church the known sources of its inner decadence. At one early moment, he even asserted that his Church structure could not he reformed. Anyway, his all-absorbing interest lay in the emergent geopolitical outline of the nations.

  On this capital point, he did not—perhaps could not—imitate his beloved mentor, Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski.

  Now, after those ten years of unremitting travel and labor, he was provided with a golden opportunity to reexamine the globalist scene. It was at the opening of the decade of the nineties—the last decade of Christianity’s second millennium of existence and, by anybody’s count, a watershed decade in world history. Specifically, this opportunity came during the first week of February 1990. Representatives and spokesmen for the most potent globalist currents—some 1,350 captains of industry, finance, politics, government, the media and telecommunications—trekked up 4,400 feet above sea level to the Swiss winter resort of Davos, the “Magic Mountain” of Thomas Mann’s masterpiece, there to participate in the annual congress of the World Economic Forum.

  This was no paltry meeting of theoreticians or academicians, or even of second-level personnel from finance, government and industry. The assembly included seventy government ministers—giants such as Helmut Kohl of West Germany, along with Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher; Hans Modrow, prime minister of East Germany; President François Mitterrand of France; Austrian Chancellor Franz Vranitzky; Italy’s Foreign Minister Gianni de Michelis; Japan’s Deputy Foreign Minister Koji Watanabe, with Eishiro Saito; Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew; France’s Philippe Gerard d’Estaing and Edward Heath of England—both former prime ministers; Jean-Pascal Delamuraz, president of the Swiss Confederation; Indonesia’s Finance Minister Johannes Sumarlin; Mexico’s President Carlos Saunas de Gortari; and a list of high officials from the European Economic Community—the European Commissions vice-president, Sir Leon Brittan; the European Commissioner for External Affairs, Frans Andriessen. This list was topped off by the active presence of an impressive Soviet delegation: Deputy Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov, Deputy Prime Minister Leonid Abalkin, Nikolai Shmelev of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, along with six Soviet vice-ministers. They were flanked by Vitali Korotich, editor of the powerful Oganyok, and Oleg Bogomolov of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Clara Hills and Michael Farren, U.S. Secretary and Under Secretary of Commerce, were the two most active and vocal officials of the Bush administration who were present.

/>   World banking and finance had its greats at Davos: the Federal Reserve’s Wayne Angell; World Bank head Barber Conable; Otto Poel, finance minister of West Germany’s Bundesbank; West Germany’s Finance Minister Max Waigel and Economic Minister Helmut Haussmann; East Germany’s Central Bank president, Horst Kaminsky, and Economic Minister Christa Luft; Daimler-Benz chairman Edward Reuter; Robert Jaunich of the multinational Jacobs Suchard; Rand Araskog, chairman and CEO of ITT Corporation; Robert Hormats, vice-chairman of Goldman-Sachs International; Henry Kaufmann, former vice-chairman of Salomon Inc.; Renault’s vice-president for international affairs, Jean-Marc Lepeu; officials of GATT; and a slew of bankers, industrialists, finance and science experts from Europe, Asia and the United States.

  Even more interesting and significant than this roster of truly important personages was the theme around which they gathered: Where were the emergent lines of the expected sea change leading them all? The question uppermost in all minds: How best could they facilitiate and pursue those lines? The concluding question, which nobody at Davos dared to examine too closely, much less answer: When the sea change was over and past, in what shape or form would the society of nations be?

  For John Paul, the first and most unsurprising lesson to be learned at this globalist meeting in Davos was the confirmation of his initial analysis, ten years before.

  His evaluation of globalists at that time had been starkly realistic. All of them claimed to be globalist, and, at least in general intent, they were that. But for a large proportion of them—Angelists, for example, as well as the historically frozen Eastern Orthodox, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Jewish community—their globalism was at most a regionalism, if not a provincialism, that they yearned to establish on a global scale or, at least, to place in a secure and dominant position.

  A few others—New Agers and Mega-Religionists—had elaborated global outlooks but lacked any obvious means for establishing those outlooks globally within the concrete order of things. Their sustaining hope and strategy was that they might piggyback a ride to the ultimate success of their ambitions.

  A restricted number of those globalists, Internationalists and Transnationalists, did have within their grasp the means—government and corporate institutions, organizational capability, financial sinews, social standing, drive and inspiration—with which to network the society of nations. But, as was clear again in Davos in 1990, the farthest that these were capable of reaching was what one member of the Davos congress called “global localization.”

  For both Transnationalist and Internationalist were products of Western capitalist democracy and therefore dependent on that democratic egalitarianism for the legroom they needed in order to succeed in their transnationalist/internationalist ventures. They could not lift their eyes beyond the towers of the sociopolitical institutions and structures inherent in democratic egalitarianism. Globalism in its purity—a geopolitical structure—requires that greater overview.

  Nothing therefore had changed in John Paul’s initial classification. The “movers and shakers” present at Davos were almost exclusively transnationalist or internationalist in bent of mind and intent of will and choice of means to their preferred goals. The other claimant globalists had not really mattered geopolitically then, nor did they ten years later.

  In his classification of his contemporaries begun ten years before, John Paul could ultimately classify only one of them as a genuine geopolitician, a man with a mentality, an intention, an organization and an overview that were geopolitical. This was Mikhail Gorbachev. He arrived on the world stage a few years after John Paul, but immediately assumed top place among contemporary globalists in John Paul’s critical assessment.

  This initial choice of Gorbachev was confirmed by one predominant characteristic of all the multiple discussions and proceedings and conclusions of the Davos congress: Although Mikhail Gorbachev was not present in the congress halls, he was invisibly and effectively there throughout. For the meat and substance of all discussions, and the overhanging assumptions of the common mind manifest in all the delegates, had been conditioned—one could say predetermined—by the geopolitical strategy and tactics of that one man, the Soviet president.

  This invisible domination of Transnationalists and Internationalists by Gorbachev in the Davos discussions was highlighted by the presence of the newly chosen leaders from the East European countries, the former Soviet satellites: East Germany’s Prime Minister Hans Modrow; Czechoslovakia’s President Vaclav Havel, Finance Minister Vaclav Klaus, Prime Minister Marian Calfa and Deputy Prime Minister Valtr Komarek; Yugoslavia’s Prime Minister Ante Markovic; Bulgaria’s Prime Minister Andrei Lukanov; Hungary’s Deputy Prime Minister Peter Medgyessey; and Poland’s President Wojciech Jaruzelski. As a sign of a complete reversal of things past and a new orientation to the sea change, Solidarity’s veteran Adam Michnik was present; he even had a very fruitful breakfast meeting with the man who kept him in jail for six years, Jaruzelski. “If we do not adapt the people who led the old system into the transformation we are making, we would have to fight them,” Michnik commented.

  These newly chosen officials represented a potential new market of 113.5 million people. Mikhail Gorbachev had made their presence here possible.

  An even more evident influence of the Soviet president on the thought processes and methods of procedure in the minds of this company of capitalism’s greats at Davos was clear in what the London Economist described as “the very strong sense at Davos of the centre of gravity of Europe moving east, of the European Community becoming the foundation of a larger and all-embracing East and West.”

  The very idea that the East—meaning at least some of the former Soviet satellites, if not the USSR itself—should be considered a candidate for membership in the contemplated Europe of 1992+ was once an unmentionable subject in Western political and financial circles. Mikhail Gorbachev brought that outcast idea back abruptly into the light of day in 1988 and 1989. “Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals” is the common home of East and West—this was his assertion. Now, less than a year later, the dyed-in-the-wool “Europeanizers” had accepted the idea and proposal. Why?

  Quite simply because in the intervening time, the master player had shifted some geopolitical building blocks, rejected others, placed still others in a new configuration. He had “liberated” the Eastern European satellites, liquidated the Berlin Wall, allowed local Communist parties to declare themselves independent of Moscow’s CP—even to change their name and stop calling themselves Communists. He had allowed free elections in the Soviet Union; put Fidel Castro and Daniel Ortega on notice that he was cutting the leash and they would be on their own, more or less; allowed massive Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union; and even tolerated the beginning of autonomy and independence in the three Baltic States.

  Thus, from the beginning there glistened on the horizon of the minds united at Davos a near-future possibility of a powerful new bloc of twenty-five European nations (some 500 million people). This was regarded as the inner circle of the future structure of nations. “If the Soviets go ahead with reforms,” stated West Germany’s Economic Minister Haussmann, “we should guarantee they are part of the European space.” That would be an enlargement of that inner circle—a second circle concentric with the first. Mr. Gorbachev, one can be sure, felt and still feels quite confident that he can satisfy the West’s demand for reforms. Besides, he along with the other leaders now could see the outlines of their Grand Design for a new world order. And that was the object of John Paul’s closest attention and scrutiny.

  For John Paul, there were two facts about that Grand Design of the Western nations that indicated the watershed character of this decade of the nineties and the historic importance of the Davos congress in February 1990. First, it is carefully gridded on reality. Second, it will be largely the supreme achievement of Mikhail Gorbachev.

  There is, first, the reasoned and humanly well-balanced grid on which its planners have laid out what app
ears to them to be the feasible evolution and realization of their Grand Design in successive concentric circles.

  Despite some ineffectual objections from East Germany’s Hans Modrow, and some doomsday reactions of a few U.S. investment bankers attending Davos, it was assumed by the vast majority that, come the end of 1990, the two Germanys would have achieved the political and economic unity of one Germany. Mikhail Gorbachev had made it known before Davos that he had no real objections to German reunification—“if pursued with care.” German reunification was taken for granted. Monetary union might even precede that reunification; but united once again the two Germanys will be. And that Germany will be integrated into the European community.

  Everyone admitted that in this European community, the leading socioeconomic force—the critical mass—will be a reunified Germany. It will be a “European Germany” in a strongly “Germany-colored” Europe. For no one could dispute the giant economic stature of Germany.

  Nor could John Paul or Mikhail Gorbachev cavil at the sentiments of the Germans. “We are not an island,” Helmut Kohl said, “we’re not in a corner of Europe. We’re in the heart of Europe.” Wolfgang Berghoffer, mayor of East Germany’s Dresden, went even further in his remarks. “We [East Germans] were standing on a moral threshold, and someone had to break out and say: This [unification] is the way.” Furthermore, “the two German states have a responsibility for the process of democratization” in the East European nations.

  But integration of a reunified Germany into Western Europe is only one major segment of the new circle. A second and necessary one is the integration of the former East European Soviet satellites into that Europe. They must become working parts of the new “European economic space,” part and parcel of the “new European architecture.” Their accession to that integration, all agreed, must be facilitated; they all need safety nets in order to palliate the effects of their economic reform from centralized to market economies.