Keys of This Blood (106 page)

Karol Wojtyla was elected Pope on October 16, 1978, by what eventually became the virtually unanimous vote of his brother cardinals. His election was firmed up on three main planks. He would, like his two predecessors, continue on the work of the Second Vatican Council, started by John XXIII. He would not, by simple papal fiat, decide that divisive ambiguity. He would specifically attend to what had to be done in the light of the predicted change in the Soviet “East.”

Undeniably, he was no traditionalist. Equally, he was no liberal-progressive. Quite clearly, he was stalking an international stature. Undoubtedly, he was immersed in the outcome of the struggle in Poland between the Stalinist Polish government and the budding strength of the Solidarity movement, urban and rural, which Cardinal Wyszynski and he had laboriously nourished.

It seems certain now, in retrospect, that both he and Wyszynski configured the rise of the Solidarity movement in one definite geopolitical light. If, as they judged to be possible in the last years of the seventies,
Solidarity achieved acceptance in one strategically important unit of the Soviet empire—Poland—it could provide a model for a peaceful change within the Soviet system that would be acceptable to the Soviet masters of the Kremlin. For the original Solidarity proposal left all political, military and security issues untouched and in the hands of the Soviets and their surrogates in the various units of the system. The Kremlin masters could be reassured of their domination. There was to be no challenging it.

The Church's gain would be a welcome freedom in the religious and cultural fields. The Soviets' gain would be, or at least should be, a genuine cooperation of the subject populations in solving the already horrendous problem of an utterly failed economy.

This was Wyszynski's—and Wojtyla's—geopolitical thrust at the heart of the Soviet system. And seemingly, at its inception, their proposal was received at least permissively by the Soviets and their supreme leader, Leonid Brezhnev. It was an adaptation of the policy developed by successive Polish bearers of the
Interrex
responsibility. Wyszynski had learned it from his predecessor, August Hlond; and he from his predecessor, Edmund Dalbor, and so on back through the unending line of tough-minded Polish Church primates through the long night of Poland's entombment since 1795. The policy principle was simple: Cohabit with the opposition, fight it with the weapons of faith and culture; vivify the Poles as a people even though they had no land of their own and no national sovereignty; eventually outlive the foreign occupiers. This was the meaning of the refrain in the Polish national anthem: “as long as we live, Poland lives.”

There was one very constant characteristic of the Wyszynski-Wojtyla geopolitical outlook and program: the function of Mary, the Mother of Jesus. This was not merely because of the Polish Pact concluded centuries before with her as the Queen of Poland. The high point in the Wyszynski-Wojtyla assault on the then impervious Stalinist government of Poland had come in 1956, when Wyszynski, a prisoner at Komancza, organized his plan to have the whole Polish nation dedicate itself in submission to Mary as her nation of slaves. On August 26 of that year, the act of dedication was accomplished throughout Poland and at Mary's shrine at Czestochowa, with the open consent of literally a vast majority of the millions of Poles.

It is difficult for the secularized minds of the West to realize that this official act of dedication to an invisible person—Mary—was meant not merely as an act of public piety and devotion, but explicitly as a geopolitical strategy with which to encompass relief for Poland from the lethal
throttling of its spirit by the geopolitical giant the USSR was. It is most accurate to state that both Polish devotion to Mary as Queen of Poland and Mary herself were, for Poles, geopolitical in meaning and in function.

Wyszynski and Wojtyla, together with their fellow countrymen, expected Mary's action in their favor not only to aid their souls and minds and wills with graces interior to each individual. They fully believed her action would effect their sociocultural—and, eventually, their political—liberation. Marian devotion was not merely a private affair of an individual. It was public, communal. All was geopolitical, since Poland's fate was tied to the geopolitical stance of the West and the geopolitical system of the Soviets. Liberation through Mary from that fate would be a geo-political event. So the Polish Church leaders configured their future.

Thus the initial stage of John Paul's papal policy took form within a geopolitical mold. As head of a georeligious organization, as someone personally consecrated to Mary, and as the Pope from a Poland likewise dedicated to Mary, he would enter the arena of international life via the narrow corridor of Communist Poland, proving there that he was nimble-footed and mentally too agile to trip over the obvious traps. He would inspire and guide the first steps of Poland's Solidarity and with its success pursue its extension into other units of the Soviet empire. He would critique both the Soviet “East” and the capitalist “West” from the strict standpoint of Christian morality. He would seek an international profile of the highest definition possible, nourished by a fixed policy of papal travels, and a voracious appetite for and genuine concern about every main issue involving the society of nations. He would essay an end run around the Soviets by establishing personal relations between himself and the authorities of the Greek and Russian Orthodox churches.

This papal policy was pure Wyszynski-ism transposed from the confines of Poland to the boundless plane of the globe, taking in all nations and all religions. The same basic confidence behind Wyszynski's strategy animated Wojtyla: belief in the geopolitical action and power of Mary as Queen of the world.

In only one respect did he deviate from Wyszynski's strategy and tactics. No matter how caught up Wyszynski was in matters of state—Poland and the USSR, Poland and the Holy See, Poland and the West, the Polish people versus the Polish Communist government, Poland and West Germany—he constantly paid minute attention to the Church in Poland. His contemporaries marveled at the versatility and attention to detail he applied to priestly formation, an intricate network of catechetical centers, social help-and-aid organizations, religious orders of priests
and nuns, universities and institutes, the Catholic media and trade book publication, pilgrimages, devotions, sermons, parochial visits, convents, monasteries, wayside shrines—the list was unending.

Wyszynski did this as a leader because he knew his only strength against the enemy was a people with a vibrant faith grounded in regulated practices and supervised by competent ecclesiastical authorities. If he looked over his shoulder, he could see phalanxes of Catholic Poles, well instructed, well informed, unified and inspired.

Papa Wojtyla, in his wider field of jurisdiction over the Church Universal, has acted in almost the opposite manner. By the time he became Pope, in 1978, the deterioration of his churchly institution was striking. Every statistic pointed downward—Mass-goers, priests, nuns, communicants, confessions, Catholic schools. There was no longer any unity of doctrine among theologians. Over half the bishops of the Church wanted no papal control. The traditional philosophy, piety and devotional practices were in disfavor. Abortion, contraception, homosexuality, extramarital sex were on the rise. Ever since he became Pope, all statistics still continue to pursue the downward plunge.

Apart from now and again repeating traditional doctrine, he did nothing and is doing nothing to halt that deterioration. Isolated words not followed by concrete application have done nothing effective to correct it. John Paul has, in sum, not even attempted to reform the very obvious deformations afflicting and finally liquidating his churchly institution. One cannot imagine a Wyszynski as Pope behaving in this way. John Paul has acted as if reform was a lost cause from the beginning of his papacy. This is one of the most enigmatic traits of his reign as Pope. It must finally be explained in a Pope who is Catholic in his bones and in his soul.

What has guided his papal undertakings and required all his attention has been the geopolitical calculation he and Wyszynski formulated so well.

The small but significant inaccuracy in that geopolitical calculation was perhaps inevitable. It concerned time. Poles were already schooled in waiting; and to outwait the impregnable strength of the Leninist-Marxist system would, Wyszynski and Wojtyla calculated—as indeed most others in the West were thinking then—surely take time.

It had already taken Wyszynski almost thirty years of incredible effort to arrive at 1978, with the promise of Solidarity's existence more or less assured from Moscow's point of view. The Polish Pope could watch over
the further development that in their calculations at the time of his election could easily stretch over the twenty to twenty-five years that, the actuarial tables predicted, remained to him. This calculation was, perhaps unavoidably, inaccurate. The error lay in the acceptance of a carefully built myth of Soviet impregnability. Wyszynski and Wojtyla did believe that the Soviet system would eventually implode, but that this disintegration would be slow in coming to a head.

It was an inaccurate calculation because of a sudden change in circumstances in Poland and Moscow, a change no one could foresee.

During the last years of Leonid Brezhnev, in the inner councils of the all-powerful Central Committee, the new mind of the Party-State was evinced in a Yuri Andropov—KGB chief as of 1967, Politburo member as of 1973—and in a Mikhail Gorbachev, his protégé, whom Andropov appointed as Secretary of Agriculture, and to membership in the Central Committee of the Party, in 1978. This new mind was a persuasion that the Stalin-founded Cold War policy was coming to a dead end, and that the Soviet Union was being successfully matched militarily by the Western alliance, while economically the USSR was falling way behind the capitalist world.

This new mind had no confidence in the “Polish model” as proposed by the Poles and permitted by Brezhnev. The anti-Brezhnev thinking of these men in the Moscow Politburo recognized the Wyszynski-Wojtyla tactic for what it was: a slow erosion of the Marxist system among the subject peoples. We can be sure that the name of the Polish Pope found a significant place in the discussions of the Party-State. With this disciple of Wyszynski in charge of the Roman Catholic institutional organization, there loomed a real danger for the European holdings of the Party-State.

The second change was in Poland. In a new momentum, Solidarity altered its carefully planned course. Wyszynski had once warned its leaders: “Do not let yourselves be drawn into alliances with those who would use you for aims that are alien to our Polish dignity and heritage.” To reinforce that warning, both John Paul and Cardinal Wyszynski were thanked by the Polish Prime Minister, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, in March 1981, for their help in bringing about a peaceful solution between the Communist government and the Solidarity workers who were on a crippling strike. The danger had been that the strike could have encroached upon the political and security preserves of the government.

Wyszynski and Jaruzelski had their eye on the developing affiliation between the Solidarity movement and two radical organizations: the Committee for the Defense of the Workers (KOR) and the Conference for Workers' Self-Government (KSR). Both carried within them the seeds of political and military revolt.

As long as both Churchmen, Primate and Pope, were actively in control, Solidarity may well have continued to function within the Communist system, restricting its ambitions and activity to the fields of culture and labor relations.

But by 1980 Wyszynski was mortally ill with stomach cancer. By March 1981, the illness had become acute. Actually, he had barely two months to live. Perhaps the radicalization of Solidarity was inevitable. Some have suggested it was a deliberate scenario guided by the hidden hand of the Party-State in order to liquidate the whole idea of Solidarity. In any case, the removal of Wyszynski and John Paul from active, day-to-day participation greatly facilitated the radicalization of Solidarity.

May 1981 was a month of double tragedy. By May 3, Wyszynski was confined to his bed at his Warsaw residence on Miodowa Street. He was dying. On May 13, contract killer Mehmet Ali Agca pumped bullets into John Paul II in St. Peter's Square, in full view of 75,000 people and a television audience of some three and a half million. Bullets entered his torso. The two bullets aimed at John Paul's head missed their target, because just in time the Pontiff, standing erect on the “popemobile” circulating among the crowd, bent down to greet a little girl who had a picture of Mary pinned to her blouse. He was rushed to the wrong hospital, the Policlinico Gemelli, where he was given transfusions of tainted blood, thus adding to his body wounds the complication of hepatitis.

Cardinal Wyszynski could follow all this only from his deathbed, far off in Poland. By May 24, he was obviously entering into his agony, and there was very little time left to him in this life. His dead body would be cold within seventy-two hours. Papa Wojtyla lay in Rome's Policlinico Gemelli, his body still in shock from the brutal attack on May 13. Wyszynski and John Paul had to speak before the Cardinal departed. They had words of farewell for each other.

Wyszynski's cup of pain was almost filled on May 24. The convalescent Pope placed a call from Gemelli; the phone rang in Wyszynski's Warsaw bedroom; his attendant answered it, told the dying man the Pope was on the line; Wyszynski turned his head weakly and raised his hand to take the receiver. No use. The telephone cord was too short, and the Primate could not get up. By the next day, the cord had been lengthened, so the two could speak together one last time.

Both were extremely weak. Both were in pain. Both knew it was the end for one of them and, perhaps, for the other. Both, in other words, felt the ultimate sting of being mortal, felt the whip of punishment bite across their backs. It was not so much the number of words used on such an occasion or what was said that mattered now. What counted was
rather the overtones of the voice, the message of the deepest self communicating its existence and its feelings.