Keys of This Blood (105 page)

Whether they were “people of God” partisans or “hierarchic Church” partisans, all of them supported and shared the Second Vatican Council's document that presented the Virgin Mary as the Mother of the Church—“people” or “hierarchic.” Wyszynski played on this unity. “The whole constitution [of the Church],” he said, “is at once Christocentric and Marian. It is as if there are arms to embrace the Family of Man…. The [Vatican] Council brought Mariology together with ecclesiology.”

Wyszynski was implicitly invoking a spiritual force—Mary's all-powerful intercession with God—as Poles like him had done in all their vicissitudes. His was the same voice as Jan Kazimierz's, Jan Sobieski's, Primate August Hlond's. Wyszynski went even further than they; he called down Mary's blessing on his brother cardinals, using the title Poles had always conferred on her: Our Lady of Jasna Góra, the Bright Mountain. His plan to break the deadlock was, in its essential terms, as simple as that.

But no one listening to this man in a private conversation or in a public address could mistake him for a simple pious, devotional character with no realization of the hard facts of life. They knew otherwise about Stefan Wyszynski. They had seen him in action. Some of them had taken him on in an argument, only to find themselves outclassed.

“Nothing beats living” is an old adage. Wyszynski had lived it all: brainwashed prelates, apostate priests, ecclesiastical double agents, screaming commissars, bribe offers, calumnies, isolation, imprisonment, financial ruin, vindictive laws, boneheaded diplomats. If anyone like Giovanni Benelli or Eduardo Pironio decried papal leadership, he could tell them how the papacy and its Secretariat of State had saved Poland. To the ecumenical fantasies of a Jan Willebrands he could oppose the reality in Poland between Eastern Orthodox (under Moscow's thumb) and Roman Catholic. Whoever from the United States or Belgium or Holland spoke airily about female liberation or the mitigation of clerical celibacy was inundated with the lurid facts of the Polish experience with the Mariavite sect in Poland. (Mariavites had married bishops and priests, ordained wives. Aberrations in doctrine and behavior have blotched and marred the Mariavite history.)

Any attempt by a Paulo Arns to plead for compromise with Leninist Marxism was met with an array of facts and the cruel truth about the nature of Leninist deception. Any Marxist-inspired attack on capitalism was rebuffed by a careful explanation of what Leninist Marxism really meant in terms of malnutrition, miserable living conditions, fettering of the mind, corruption of the family. The grandiose generalities of a Basil Hume about democratizing the hierarchical structure of the Church were exposed by Wyszynski as the most vicious fallacy of the Anglo-Saxon mind. When anyone from the United States or France even hinted that the perennial Catholic devotion to Mary was a hindrance to Christian unity with Protestant churches and sects, he was told summarily that without Mary, there was no hope of Christian unity.

Wyszynski could back everything up from experience. He was not theorizing. He spoke from lived experience. No doubt about it: Many of those hardheaded Churchmen were overcome by Wyszynski's dialectical
skill, by his obvious kindness, and, yes, by the obvious superiority of a Churchman who was not indentured to any sociopolitical elite, and whose soaring vision of earth, of man's time and God's eternity, recalled many of his fellow cardinals to their duty to choose a
Catholic
pope.

Still, the sudden change in the pattern of voting during October 16, the quick leap of Karol Wojtyla's name to a small majority, then a comfortable majority, and quickly to that irresistible two-thirds-plus-one majority took most Cardinal Electors by surprise and left the diehards on both sides—a Basil Hume of Westminster, a Giuseppe Siri of Genoa—somewhat dazed. Wojtyla's election was miraculous.

Wyszynski, as was his wont, did not hesitate later to tell it as he saw it: “If people doubt there are signs and miracles in the world today, I say to them, ‘If anything is a miracle, what happened in the Sistine Chapel on October 16 is one.' … When I approached John Paul II to pay my first homage, he and I almost simultaneously pronounced the name of Our Lady of Jasna Gora; this was her work. So we believed, and so we decidedly still believe.”

In the end, therefore, it was not the iron will of the power brokers, and not the political savvy of crafty Churchmen, but the childlike simplicity of a few great men relying on the truth of Catholicism's central mystery—God's entering the womb of a human mother—that obtained the saving grace for an institution racked in its essentials by a malignant cancer. His American brother cardinals, many Europeans and not a few media commentators had gently—and sometimes not so gently—mocked and lampooned the childlike simplicity and trust of seventy-four-year-old John Cardinal Carberry of St. Louis. The ten chocolate bars he took into Conclave as provisions, and his quite obvious and childlike reliance on an actual revelation from the Holy Spirit to guide the final choice of this October Conclave, were lumped in one category: irrealism and the “out-of-touch” attitude of an old man with passé ideas.

But it was the power of such faith in a Carberry, as in the
Ave Marias
of millions of obscure Catholic believers during those three days, and as in the hearts of the two Polish cardinals with their personal dedication to that human Mother of God, that moved the mountain of difficulty threatening the Roman Catholic institutional organization that autumn of 1978. Canny Cardinal Confalonieri's remark after the Conclave was heard by many as merely an evasive truism. But he told the absolute truth of that Conclave: “
Abbiamo un Papa cattolico!
” he said. We have a Catholic Pope! He surely implied that the opposite had been possible.

There are many still alive today who know now that during the sixty-four hours of this Conclave, the huddled but confused leaders of the
Roman Church peered more than once over the edge of the abyss between mortal flesh and divine spirit, realizing that in the final count of affairs, they and they alone would be held accountable by the tremendous, sacred God of Heaven and earth for what would happen yet to literally billions of human souls.

Some of these 111 men had not said a Rosary for years; some had identified the glory of God with all their own petty ambitions; and some had worked silently for the liquidation of the Petrine Office of Pope. But, in that hour, they all became willy-nilly the instruments of providence. In their fears, in their nescience of the future, and relying on the saving grace of Mary's divine Son, two thirds plus one of them gave the world a Slavic Pope anointed under the seal of the human Mother of God.

Doubtless, at a later moment and a more tranquil time for Poland, for this Slavic Pope, and for his Church, Stefan Wyszynski will be declared to have been a Servant of God—the first step in the long process of being declared a Saint of the Church. In the meantime, and in the immediate aftermath of the October Conclave, there were two scenes of this great man's life that are indelibly etched on human memories as memorials to his greatness and signposts of the Slavic Pope, Wyszynski's protégé and pride, his gift to the Church Universal.

On Sunday, October 22, there was the Obeisance. It took place at the solemn investiture of the new Pope with a single symbol—the pallium, an embroidered woolen stole placed around his shoulders. The ceremony was witnessed by a live audience of some 75,000 and an estimated television audience of a billion and a half people. One high point of the ceremony came when the cardinals walked forward one by one to perform in public their personal obeisance to this new Vicar of Christ.

John Paul II sat on a low thronelike chair, wearing his pontifical vestments and the pallium. Each cardinal came up to him, knelt at his feet, kissed the Ring of the Great Fisherman on the Pope's fourth finger, whispered a few words of blessing and congratulation, and retired. There were variations with this or that particular cardinal. The Pope might take the cardinal's hands between his, he might exchange a few quiet words with him; with a few he exchanged the Christian kiss of peace.

But with Wyszynski, there was a different exchange. Onlookers could see, between these two, an interchange that was at one and the same time breathtaking and heartrending. In ceremonial, and in ritual symbol, they were Pope and Cardinal. In the reality of spirit and in ultimate truth, they were son and father, friend and friend, comrade and comrade.
They were all of that, and something else besides, something too deep even for the sudden, unbidden salt of tears we cannot explain, and too intangible for any image of the fantasy or thought of the mind. It could only be witnessed.

In that obeisance of Wyszynski, it was the gesture of their hands and the movements of figures—the Pope seated, the Cardinal kneeling—that spoke. Wyszynski did ritually kiss Papa Wojtyla's ring, and then the Pope took the Primate's hands between his and kissed them. For brief seconds as they embraced, Papa Wojtyla seemed to be kneeling also. Doubtless, neither of them could utter many words. It was what they did that said all. About Poland. About the pain of the years they had worked together. About the ineffable sweetness of having together served the beautiful Christ they both adored as God and Master. And about the shadow of the Great Fisherman that now cloaked one of them for all his days, and amply consoled the other for having upheld the authority of those Keys Simon Peter received from an exultant Christ on one distant day at Caesarea Philippi in ancient Judea.

On Monday, October 23, there was the Adieu. Again, it took place in public, before the eyes of the Polish pilgrims who had come with the Primate to greet the new Holy Father in the Nervi Hall of Audiences. In this scene, it was the two faces, the Pope's and the Primate's, that electrified the onlookers in the hall and the distant millions gazing on the scene through the eyes of a satellite hovering far out of sight above Roman skies.

Both were faces already made according to that saying: After the age of fifty, you deserve the face you have. Wyszynski's seventy-eight-year-old craggy, weatherbeaten face was drawn in that unmistakable calm of a man who, having been tried and tried a thousand times, then worn out by the harshest human adversity for another thousand times, still was able to survive and to come back intact, only because he would not let go or give up. The calm that meets no more surprises. The calm that permits a smile of humor but rarely the belly laughter of amusement.

The fifty-eight-year-old Pontiffs face had features that were still rounded and sleek, with that sheen of freshness and physical fitness remaining only in a man not yet devastated in his own flesh by the rack of physical assault and, as yet, not oldened by the inner anguish of knowing how deeply he was hated and wished to death.

“We Poles know what a high price Your Holiness has to pay”—this was the theme of Wyszynski's speech of greeting—“in leaving the motherland in order to obey the command of Our Lord: Go forth and teach all nations.” Papa Wojtyla's answer was simple: “On the Throne of Peter
today, there would not be a Polish Pope … if it had not been for your unceasing belief in the Mother of the Church, or if there had not been Jasna Gora and … your ministrations as bishop and primate.” The words were true, but it was the expressions of their faces that told all.

Wyszynski fell to his knees in a last act of homage. Without hesitation, Papa Wojtyla fell to his knees, the two men holding each other in a long embrace, Wyszynski's face bowed over the Pope's encircling right arm, his eyes closed, his left hand lightly touching the Pope's wrist. Wyszynski was suffering the worst of pains—the irremediable stab of human loneliness, for he was returning home without his right-hand man, his alter ego, his support. Wojtyla's face in the reality and in photographs has an unwonted expression. He is looking at the inclined face of his mentor and friend, and every line of his features is speaking of compassion and understanding, of regret for Wyszynski's pain, and of strength offered the older man so that he may carry on. “I understand,” Wojtyla was saying. “We both understand. It is you who are paying the highest price. But we both know for whose sake you do it.”

That wordless embrace, the momentary brokenhearted look suffusing the old Primate's face, the strength and distress evident on Wojtyla's mouth, around his eyes and his arms holding the Primate—the scene left no dry eyes in that audience. For all were Poles, and some soundless instinct of their commonality made each and every one a momentary participant in the ache of that Adieu.

In any other age of the Church but the present one, those scenes—the Obeisance and the Adieu—would have set Christian imaginations on fire and entered into their art and folklore. Depicted by artists and icon masters, chanted in hymns as sacred events, dramatized in the theater, perpetuated in marble or bronze or stained glass, they would have typified the faith in things unseen and the substance of things to come by which Christians have always lived and died in order that they might live forever.

Unfortunately, we have no inclination to celebrate. We do not feel it is the time for celebration. Ours is the age of the Roman Catholic anti-Church, with its Hell-bent purpose of desacralizing Catholicism, no matter what the target—the once venerated Office of Peter the Apostle, the Sacred Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, or the towering identity of Catholic Poland as a wellspring of grace for the Church Universal. And many of our contemporaries are convinced they are living in the slowly passing, uneasy twilight hours before the Day of the Man dawns in a blood-red sky engraved with the bizarre Sign of the Upside-Down Cross, reminding us: “In this sign, you will die.”

So the age has shrunk our possibilities of human greatness, deprived us of the freedom to be noble. Our deepest regrets are not for the extinction of goodness, of purity, of compassion, of trust, of personal honor, of love and, finally, of all reason itself—our most precious faculty. Our brooding expectation is of unnamed catastrophe. Our wild hope is in an eleventh-hour salvation from beyond the rim of our human horizon. But we have no margin of mental ease to dwell on obeisance as greatness, no leisure time of the heart to marvel at martyrdom offered and not refused, no humility to kneel and kiss the hem of holiness's robe as it passes us by. We have shed so many tears that we have few, if any, left for the adieu of saints or for the last words of heroes.