Keys of This Blood (83 page)

Here comes John Paul, striding among the “great ones,” speaking to
all the “little ones,” and the point of what he keeps saying incessantly about this geopolitics is strictly religious. His comments do not turn on a purely ethical or moral basis. It is religious and specifically Christian from a Roman Catholic perspective.

No one really suspects him of seeking territorial aggrandizement, gold, political power or personal pleasure. At his vaguest—and this is already specific enough to be disturbing to our secularist world leaders—he insists that just as no system of politics is viable unless it is based on the spirituality of genuine religious belief in God and in Christ, so no religious belief is viable unless it is deeply involved in political systems.

At his most specific, however, he insists that men have no reliable hope of creating a viable geopolitical system unless it is on the basis of Roman Catholic Christianity. “One can only regret the deliberate absence of all transcendent moral references,” he told all and sundry in his January 13, 1990, speech to the international diplomatic corps of Vatican Rome. “Christ is the sole strength of Europe and the king of all nations,” he asserted.

No one, individual or corporate body, has formally conceded him the right to act and speak as religious authority and moral monitor of the society of nations. He has assumed this mantle, and no one of consequence really disputes his assumption of it. No one except the present “touch-me-not” Leninist Marxists of Beijing resist him—and even they are now making what can pass for remotely conciliatory sounds. Why is it that a man from a backwater Polish town called Wadowice and now the head of a religious institution has come to be a respected commentator and successful participant in our geopolitics? The question becomes more acute when you consider what every informed world leader knows about John Paul.

It is widely known that the main personal emphasis in Karol Wojtyla's life has always been and still is on his relationship with Mary, the mother of Jesus. His personal motto—
Totus Tuus
(Entirely Yours)—concerns her and memorializes special acts of self-consecration to her, which he personally undertook years ago.

For the general mind and, particularly, for the minds of other world leaders, it is an arresting—if not somewhat disconcerting—thought that this intensely active man in all he does is consciously and expressly seeking to implement a mandate given him as Pope by a person he venerates as the mother of the God he adores. If he confined himself to the sacristy and the altar and the pulpit; if he looked and sounded like what literature and the worldly imagination depicts as “the holy man in his cell,” as the guru type, even as the otherwise harmless religious fanatic, they could understand him.

But they watch this man stalking the minds and hearts of millions across the world stage. They are closeted with him as movers and shakers of our present history. He discusses complicated and far-reaching issues of politics, economics, finance, war and peace, technology and ethics. They find themselves dealing with a genuine intellectual, mature, informed, aware, a person of stark realism and moving compassion for the bread-and-butter needs of ordinary men and women. On the diplomatic circuit, in the power plays between nations, he has shown an agility and a sensitivity second to none. He is a professional respected by professionals.

Yet, with all that, they have to take into account that John Paul is following a timetable he asserts has been established in Heaven; and he fully presumes that what he does and they do will succeed only if it conforms to the foretold sequence of historical events he confidently ascribes to a woman he, along with other millions, venerates under the symbol of her heart—they call it the Immaculately Sinless Heart of Mary.

The apparent anomaly, therefore, that Papa Wojtyla presents to the normally secular mind of his peers and contemporaries is this combination of hardheaded geopolitical perception and analysis with a religious devotion and world outlook based apparently on a deep religious and devotional persuasion. The choke point for the secular mind is that the geopolitical dovetails with the religious: One does not suppress, inhibit or disqualify the other. In fact, he is geopolitical in bent of mind because he is of this religious caliber. He is of this particular Marian religious mentality because of his geopolitics.

The ultimate question, then, about Karol Wojtyla reduces itself to this: Why is he so sure—as well as skillful—geopolitically, in view of his totally unworldly attachment to the unseen, intangible world of Mary and Christ and God? He commands and receives attentive hearing on the geopolitical plane; how come? What formed this geopolitical ability in him? What has all that to do with his ever-insistent Marian devotion? How do you explain this Pope in terms of background and heredity as well as papal office? That he should have a perfervid devotion to the Virgin Mary is not surprising in a very Catholic Pope. But a thoroughly geopolitical mind coming out of Poland—that would strike many as very unexpected, and for one capital reason: the history of Poland in approximately the last 195 years.

Poland as a separate country, an independent people and a sovereign nation literally ceased to exist in 1795.

With a brief twenty-one-year interlude (1918-39) of relative freedom for Poles, that period of nearly two hundred years constitutes an appalling
litany of natural entombment, demographic enslavement, linguistic persecution, bloodshed, economic impoverishment, religious oppression, a general connivance among powerful nations to obliterate Poland as a nation-state from human memory, two world wars, a true genocide attempted by the Nazis with the scientific thoroughness of the German mind, a further attempt by the Soviets to eradicate Polishness with the ruthlessness achieved only by Stalinism. Poles as a race should have been demoralized beyond recovery, and their Polishness should have been mongrelized beyond repair by that sustained brutalization.

If any ethnic group in the society of nations today has an absolutely unassailable bill of indictment to urge at the bar of human justice, it is the Poles. But more important than the quest for a justice that is not available is the double question about Poland's survival. How, out of that crippling maelstrom, have the Poles emerged as the one Eastern-bloc country capable of forcing the iron hand of imperial Leninism? And how is it that the grandiose figure of the “Polish Pope” comes striding tranquilly and carefully out of the same destructive obscurity, with rancor for none, not hobbled with parochialism, and with a spirit ranging over a geopolitical plane so all-inclusive and so universalist that he finds few genuine peers there?

Given those antecedents, this “Polish Pope” should not have so emerged, and Poland should have no real identity, unless, as has always been implied by “
Polonia Sacra
” the Poles are assigned a special role in our history by the sacralizing hand of the Lord of history. For
sacra
in that phrase means precisely “set apart,” “consecrated,” “specially appointed,” by the All-Holy.

Deepening this conclusion is the most glaring fact about the “Polish Pope.” Polishness made him.

The men and women who as role models, mentors, instructors, advisers and exemplars formed the character of Karol Wojtyla as the “Polish Pope” are all known to us. His parents, foster mother, brother; his priests, teachers, professors, personal friends; the bishops and cardinals who from early on had a say in his formation, the popes and politicians who overshadowed his days; the thinkers, philosophers, writers who took his mind by storm. We know their names and their occupations, where and how they lived, and how they died. And he is genuinely their child, the product of their highest ambitions and their deepest desires. We are not talking of predecessor Poles as distant as Archbishop Nicholas Traba of Gniezno or Stanislaw Cardinal Hosius of Warmia, each of whom was nearly named pope in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

John Paul's fashioners in Polishness were in their majority Poles who
were themselves without exception formed in that period of history that was admittedly the worst for Polishness—a matter of about six quite recent generations. Karol Wojtyla belongs to them; he is no Melchizedek, without pedigree, without ancestors; nor is he some “troubled” integrist, breaking away from the tradition that made him and seeking a new identity, wider than that into which he was born and fitted by his fashioners. His spiritual heritage came into his hands from them. His politics and his Polishness, his geopolitics and his faith, are their gifts to him. What transformations he has wrought in the meantime are merely a function of his larger-than-life destiny as presiding Pope of the millennium endgame.

If any of those now dead men and women were to walk the earth today, they would readily recognize this “Polish Pope” as theirs. His challenge to Poland's Stalinist government in 1979 would be the same as the challenge they flung at equally godless destroyers in their own day. The prime victims of “sinful structures” imposed on them by the malicious consensus of Austrians, Germans and Russians, they would identify immediately with John Paul's excoriation of the “sinful structures” evolved from the consensus of East and West and imposed on East European nations during the 1945–85 period. The materialism of Leninist Marxism and raw capitalism was no worse than the materialism of Poland's captors during her long night of entombment, the evil of materialism they knew firsthand; and more than two generations of them felt the Soviet whip across their backs.

More important than any other gift to Karol Wojtyla, those predecessors and ancestors were forced by historical circumstances to adopt a geopolitical attitude of mind and outlook when all around them and among them there reigned an arrogant set of nationalistic, parochial-minded emperors and kings and governments. Peculiar to the Poles was the deep-set conviction that geopolitics implied georeligion, and that their georeligion—Roman Catholicism—implied geopolitics. On top of all that, each of those ancestors of Wojtyla could have chosen—many did—Karol Wojtyla's personal motto,
Totus Tuus
. For the Virgin Mary was their chosen icon of hope during a long, dark night.

For all of that is the patrimony, the spiritual heritage of Karol Wojtyla specifically as a son of Poland; and it came into his hands from his Polish ancestors and mentors. In their majority, they were themselves formed in the period that was at once the worst and the most miraculous time for a nation of people whose singular history is based on improbabilities and miracles. They were the bearers and the embodiment of the Poland that has always been and still remains the geopolitical
plaque tournante
of “Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals.” This is the Poland that has long been called
Polonia Sacra
, a people certain that its nationhood is guaranteed not by any government or state but by a sacred undertaking of God, with whom they have, as a nation, made a series of three solemn pacts. Poland might be crucified as a nation-state; but Poland would not die. God would not fail the Poles.

Still, there are deep questions about the policies and actions of Pope John Paul II to which even some of those who understand him best cannot find the answers. What precisely does he envisage for his present world by way of geopolitical structure? Why has he not undertaken a thorough reform of his crumbling Roman Catholic institutional organization? He justly abhors Marxism, and he holds socialism to be merely the anteroom of spiritual decadence that prepares the way for Marxism. He sees and has said in unexceptionable terms that capitalism of itself has no human solutions, only human skills and techniques for material advantage and economic aggrandizement. What, then, does he think should be the economic-political character of a viable new world order? At times, both in Church and in state questions, he seems to be waiting, to be preparing, to be temporizing. What is he waiting for? Why does he hesitate or temporize?

The roots of his geopolitical and georeligious outlook are already discernible in the history of his beloved Poland; half the enigma John Paul presents to the world outside him can thus be solved. But the other half is all the more enigmatic and the more important for ordinary men and women. At a time when many are convinced that the dawn of ultimate world peace has already started by 1990, John Paul II manifestly disagrees. Clearly, he is convinced that the world as a family and the nations as a society face the same danger of extinction that Poland once faced. Yet he is no pessimist. What is the basis of his negative reading of our human chances? And, then again, why the apparent optimism? For the answer to that half of the enigma, we have to do more than understand his Polish heritage. For the solution, we have to look outside Poland to the georeligious and geopolitical event par excellence.

The geopolitical idea so often expressed by Pope John Paul and Mikhail Gorbachev that the world, or at least a good part of it, comprises “one family” is not farfetched. There is a broad consensus among anthropologists, linguists, agrospecialists and cultural experts that some relatively short time after the last glaciers receded from the Eurasian landmass—about twelve thousand years ago—there flourished the remote ancestors of almost all the peoples now occupying “Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals,” and North America, as well.

“Caucasians,” as this ancient race is called, are identified by scholars as possessing the “Kurgan culture” and as speaking the mother tongue that is considered the root of all Western languages of today. They hunted and fished and foraged for food in the steppe lands between the Caspian and Black seas on the northern side of the Caucasus mountain range, that three-hundred-mile-long bastion that blocks passage south into the fertile plains of what we know as central Turkey and the Middle East.

In the west of that mountain range, Europe's highest peak, the 18,841-foot dormant volcano of Mount Elbrus, brooded down upon them, capped with its clouds, cloaked in its winds, its mists, its gods and its imagined mysteries. To the north, green expanses rolled into the heartland of Russia, all the way to the Ural Mountains and the Siberian lowlands.