Keys of This Blood (20 page)

On the contrary, nothing of what could be seen from the outside seemed to serve anything in John Paul's pontificate that could be identified as a cohesive grand policy. No consistent strategies seemed visible. At least, not unless you could label as a strategy the sort of papal conduct for which any subordinate in an earlier papacy would have been condemned and punished.

And yet, because strategy is always the very fuel with which great wars are driven forward, so immense a blind spot having to do with papal strategy was regarded as a crisis of intelligence by more than a few.

Public coverage and pettier critics notwithstanding, there could be no doubt that—far from seeking publicity or running from administrative burdens—John Paul was deeply conscious of his innovations. For, slowly but surely, as those innovations multiplied with his travels over the decade of the 1980s, John Paul was building for himself as Pope an unrivaled personal status as the most visible and well-known human being of the twentieth century. Not only was he seen in the flesh by hundreds of millions of people in the so-called civilized world; he was seen as well by men and women in the unlikeliest backwaters one could imagine. Alone—and certainly with no help from anti-Church or superforce—this Holy Father was making his very own a truly central spot on the world stage.

Of course, anti-Church adherents and superforce members had their own considerable publicity arsenal; and they were not bashful about using it. The well-founded rumor, the well-timed leak, the word from a well-placed “unnamed source”: all these had been efficient weapons over twenty-five years of effort to separate the Pope from the traditional means of the governance of his Church. However—and owing in some part to those innovations that drove everyone so crazy—this Pope became the centerpiece even of the interest generated by the anti-Church. More often than not, the publicity that came as a result of their efforts centered around John Paul. Admittedly, that fact was always incidental to the main goal of the anti-Church publicity seekers. But it was nonetheless a fact, and a concrete result.

In their bafflement about him, a few world leaders of the less careful variety sometimes underestimated the enigmatic John Paul, or even counted him out as a player in the rush of world events. One such leader, a Western head of state noted in the Vatican more for his cynicism than for his wisdom, made the mistake of going in like a lion for a private and “frank” discussion with His Holiness. When he came out, he was not merely defanged; he seemed at once both incredulous and rueful that he had not been forewarned. “There is something else here,” he commented about John Paul. “He is more than they said, and more than he seems to be. Surely! He is more than that.”

Not long ago, the story of a different sort of encounter made the rounds at a certain level of gossip on the world stage where John Paul had chosen to stride as no pope before him.

The year 1988 was the one thousandth anniversary of the birth of Christianity in the Ukraine. Mikhail Gorbachev—fairly recently and still only partially emergent from the time warp that is the Soviet Union—decided to appropriate this millennial anniversary; to claim it as a banner of
glasnost
; and, by means of a propaganda event to which he gave the
meaningless name “Moscow Celebration Service,” to co-opt it as a Soviet achievement.

To this “Celebration” Gorbachev invited just about every living religious leader from just about every Christian church. In his by now well-known take-charge manner, the Soviet Chairman jumped in with both feet tied in one shoe, communicating an invitation through intermediaries to John Paul II: Would His Holiness care to join the many other prelates who would on this occasion dutifully trundle off to Moscow in search of reconciliation?

Back to Gorbachev, again through intermediaries, went the response of His Holiness, who had made plain in many ways his awareness that despite its seventy-year relegation to the catacombs of the Soviet system, religion had never left the mainstream of Soviet life. His Holiness, the reply informed Gorbachev, would accept the invitation on condition that, on the same occasion, the Pontiff would be equally welcome to visit his Catholics in Lithuania.

Gorbachev categorically refused. How could he do otherwise? A papal visit would only stir up new troubles—might set fire to the dry tinder of Lithuanian nationalism, for example. It might even ignite the smoldering resentment of fifty million very Christian-minded Ukrainians, who were already angry at having their once-in-a-thousand-years anniversary filched from them by a Russian who was a professional atheist in their eyes.

In response to Gorbachev's refusal of his request, His Holiness declined to appear in Moscow, adding that he would, of course, send the General Secretary a written message with a lower-level papal delegation to the “Celebration.”

Surprised, confused and offended by such an uncompromising rebuff of an offer he had thought would be irresistible for a Roman Pope, Gorbachev belatedly looked for a reading of this stubborn Pole. For him as for all Russians, Poles have always been either overlords or serfs. Which was this Karol Wojtyla? What better man to consult for the answer than General Wojciech Jaruzelski, Moscow's man in Poland, a Pole himself and a Catholic, a man who had stood toe-to-toe with John Paul on more than one occasion in recent years?

As gossip had it, Jaruzelski's reading was unsettling for the Soviet leader. Gorbachev, the Polish general said, had already made two mistakes. The first was to have invited the Pope in the first place. The second, once the invitation had been made, was to have refused the Pontiff's condition.

“Why mistakes?” Gorbachev is said to have asked. “He's just a figurehead.”

“That's what we thought when he arrived in Krakow, back in 1978.”

“Ah!” Gorbachev apparently drew an obvious conclusion. “You know his game.”

“That's just it.” The Polish general confused the matter still further. “We don't.”

“So?” Gorbachev was getting nowhere.

“So.” Jaruzelski made the political point that had already become so obvious to so many. “He's dangerous. If you go along with him; if you oppose him; if you have any truck with him.
Wóz albo przewáz
. It's Hobson's choice.”

“Yes,” Gorbachev is said to have agreed. “That's dangerous.”

John Paul had made his point. Gorbachev was learning the lesson, many a leader was taking to heart. And when the “Moscow Celebration Service” did take place, the General Secretary doubtless took cold comfort from the words of Archbishop Runcie of Canterbury. “Under Mr. Gorbachev, religion has entered the mainstream of Soviet life.”

The late Franz Josef Strauss of West Germany best expressed the view of John Paul that began to take hold at last among the wiser of the world's more experienced “huskies.” “For all we know,” said Strauss, “he seems to follow one vision, have one supergoal in view, to which all these diverse interests of the nations are tending, each in its own separate way.”

And that was the nub. Try as they might, neither Strauss in his wisdom nor his peers on the world stage were able to fathom what that supergoal of John Paul's might be. In their efforts to understand what in the world this Pope was doing, they were always stopped short by the sight of a Church filled to capacity with decay and disobedience, left untended, and by strange contradictions in John Paul's own behavior. It almost seemed as though, in the Pope's hands, bafflement had taken on the dimensions of a weapon in this modern warfare he was engaged in. And it almost seemed he was deploying confusion the way a general deploys armies.

Take even the most visible level of John Paul's activities as an example. The level of his many and varied travels. Even here, deep and troubling uncertainties could not be resolved.

Surely he had something more in view than such specifically religious problems as, say, the spread of Liberation Theology that was so deadly for Catholic faith and dogma? But what? How were his adversaries in the global competition to deal with a politician—even if he was a pope—who stood face-to-face one day with one or another of the power-thirsty generals and totalitarian strongmen in Haiti, Chile, Guatemala or Uruguay, and on another day confused the pattern by an official visit to
Benin in West Africa—to take but one possible case in point—where he addressed a cheering crowd of thousands as he stood beneath a gigantic banner that exhorted, “God Bless Our Marxist Revolution and John Paul II!”?

On another level, what sense could anyone, East or West, make of this Pope's staggeringly patient policy that emerged, even after his Polish trip, toward the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites?

What glimpse into his hidden strategy could be gleaned from John Paul's hands-on/hands-off attitude toward authoritarian governments in Latin America?

Who could make head or tail of his versatile and ever-adaptive treatment of Communist China, on one side of the world? Or his steady input into the gathering forces of a united Europe, set to emerge in 1992 on the other side of the world?

What gave him the ability, on the one hand, to escape a head-on collision with the international Jewish organizations that lobbied for an opportunistic papal recognition of the State of Israel; and, on the other hand, to avoid any close identification with the Arab Mideast cause without being branded as its enemy?

And on the broadest level of the geopolitical competition under way, how were the shifting, crumbling and realigning secular power centers to understand a visionary—even if he was a pope—who spoke about a future condition of the nations that would be free of socialism and Marxism but equally free of the baneful “superdevelopment” John Paul had taken to criticizing so roundly and pointedly as the curse of democratic capitalism?

These were but some of the bafflements that were so important for John Paul's secular rivals in the grand-scale competition. But in place of any answers, there remained only an abiding and uneasy sense that, if there was, as Franz Josef Strauss had said, “a single-track purposefulness in all this Pope is doing,” and if he did “follow one vision … have one supergoal in view,” no one might be able to figure it all out in time to make any use of the information.

In truth, Karol Wojtyla was not transformed by the papacy. Rather, he was practically tailored for the roles of priest and bishop within a Poland that was a microcosm of the troubled twentieth-century world around it, as well as for the role of Pope within the Church whose divinely mandated obligation was to be a source of eternal salvation within that world, come what may.

As a young cleric in the late forties and quickly as a bishop, in that Poland he was heir to a very specific ecclesiastical tradition. Preceding him and molding that tradition, men like Cardinals Stefan Wyszynski and Adam Sapieha insisted that the Church not flee to catacombs. It had to be everywhere in Polish life and society, even in the teeth of brutal repression. Nor had that Church made any of the compromises so disastrous to the Church in the United States, Latin America and Western Europe. Wojtyla inherited a thoroughly Roman Catholic tradition, unadulterated and vibrant.

Besides, the Church in Poland, in its thousand-year history, had developed an outlook that was genuinely global; and this globalism was faithfully reproduced in its political institutions, which, though serving Polish nationalism, were imbued with a genuinely geopolitical sense. This, too, he inherited.

The great difference between the Karol Wojtyla who entered the papal Conclave on October 14, 1978, and the man who emerged from it two days later was that he had walked in as Archbishop of Krakow, and had walked out as Bishop of Rome. He had become the 263rd successor to Simon Peter the Apostle, monarchic head of Vatican City State, religious leader of some 900 million Roman Catholics spread over virtually every nation of the five continents. He held in his hand the ancient Keys
of Peter. He now possessed a georeligious power and a geopolitical role to play.

Now he was the sole legitimate head of the only georeligion the world has ever known—a living, active, multicultural, multinational, multiracial institutional organization, an institution structured so that the local and national norms of its members could be accommodated in harmony and union with the global aims of the universal organization now confided exclusively to Wojtyla's leadership and care.

Moreover, he emerged from the Conclave as the personal embodiment of the global political entity known as the “Holy See.” In that capacity, he was accepted immediately—and, in a certain sense, as more than a peer—in the rambunctious world of international politics and diplomacy with which the Vatican is inextricably linked.

Hardly a day passes in that political world without some incident, large or small, that underscores the constant and intimate intertwining of the georeligion John Paul came to head with the geopolitical nature of the world arena. And each such incident, large or small, links the Roman Pontiff himself to the international life and political activity in what has come to be regarded as the secular world.

Even the briefest glance at a pair of such incidents from recent history is sufficient to illustrate how interesting a match had been made in Conclave between the papacy and the Pope who had learned so well at the feet of Sapieha and Wyszynski.

In the early 1940s, when young Wojtyla and his Poland were deeply and tragically caught in the connivances of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, and in the weak-kneed policies of Western governments, Archbishop Amleto Cicognani was posted to Washington, D.C., as Pope Pius XII's Apostolic Delegate in the United States.

During his service at that post, Cicognani struck up a friendship of sorts with Maksim Maksimovich Litvinov, the best-loved and most large-minded Soviet ambassador the Kremlin has ever sent to Washington. Litvinov served there for three years, from 1941 to 1943.