Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (15 page)

Wojtyła continued his studies through the hazards of wartime. He would later be credited with helping to protect many Polish Jews from the Nazis. In February 1944, a German truck ran him over—but officers in the truck jumped out and brought him to the hospital. In the wake of the second Warsaw Uprising in 1944, he evaded a Gestapo search by hiding behind a door when they came to the house where he was living. He spent the rest of the war in hiding in the archbishop’s palace. After the Germans abandoned the city in January 1945, he helped save a teenage Jewish girl named Edith Zierer who had escaped from a nearby concentration camp.

In 1946 he was finally ordained as a priest and soon earned popularity for the openness of his pastoral approach. He was deeply involved in the lives of his parishioners. He did not believe in restricting his faith to the confines of church, often accompanying members of his congregation on camping trips or ski outings. In public they developed the habit of referring to him as
wujek
, “uncle,” to avoid the unwanted attention that the word
father
might have earned from the authorities. He was not your usual priest. In a sharp departure from the stuffy practice of the times, he even counseled his parishioners on the joys of sex—within the bounds of marriage, needless to say. (He later put his thoughts on the subject into a book,
Love and Responsibility
, published in 1960.)

When the war was over, the new Communist rulers of Poland were not more favorably disposed toward the church than the Nazis had been. The Soviet forces who had occupied half of Poland in September 1939, after the Molotov- Ribbentrop Pact, had arrested and shot many priests. Now the Polish government installed by Moscow did whatever it could to beat back the power of the church. The authorities accused priests of everything from sedition to violations of tax law, mocked them in the media, or threw them in jail. But somehow Wojtyła managed to navigate these treacherous waters. He succeeded not only in anchoring himself firmly in the hearts of his congregation but also in maintaining a demanding schedule of
academic work, studying for his doctorate in philosophy at the Catholic University of Lublin, the only nonstate university allowed by the authorities in the People’s Republic of Poland. In 1958, when he became the youngest bishop in the country at age thirty-eight, the Polish secret police opened up its first permanent file on him.
⁷

I
n the first decades after World War II, the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church faced harsh choices as they surveyed the geography of the faith. Millions of believers now lived behind the Iron Curtain, under the rule of Communist governments that had little tolerance for religion, however strongly they insisted the opposite. Officially, East-bloc regimes ascribed to full religious freedom; in reality, they viewed organized religion with intense suspicion, since its existence implied institutional alternatives to the official atheism that undergirded Marxist-Leninist doctrine.

Relations between the Vatican and the Soviet government had never been good. In the first phase of the Cold War, relations between Moscow and the Holy See were mutually hostile. The Yalta agreement, which granted the USSR control of Eastern Europe, had dramatically expanded the number of Catholics under Communist control, and in the 1940s and ’50s, Stalin’s minions had done their best to crush the church by persecuting priests and harassing churchgoers.

But by the early 1960s, both sides saw reason for compromise. The Kremlin wanted to advertise a spirit of tolerance, and the church was worried that continued confrontation could lead to the complete destruction of the Catholic communities who lived within the Soviet empire. So in the early 1960s Agostino Cardinal Casaroli, as cardinal secretary of state of the Holy See, signed agreements on mutual diplomatic recognition with Hungary and Yugoslavia—the first step in the Vatican’s version of what would later come to be known as
Ostpolitik
. He was striving to do the same with Poland. His reasoning was understandable enough: the Soviet Union was not going anywhere, and a deal would give the Vatican at least some sort of diplomatic leverage for protecting Catholic rights.

The leaders of the Polish church tended to be skeptical about the extent to which the Soviets could be expected to honor the terms of any such agreement. They believed, based on their own experience of the Communist system, that the best way to defend the community of believers was by insisting on their rights to worship as they pleased. There could be no compromise on this essential point. Wojtyła agreed. But his philosophical investigations increasingly led him to a conclusion that the church had not always defended human rights as aggressively as it should have: namely, that the teachings of Christ demanded that the church defend the rights of all human beings, not just those who happened to be Catholic. The integrity of
the individual stood at the core of Christian ethics. To be sure, there could be no real freedom without freedom for the church. But neither was it possible to imagine a free church in an unfree society. Of course, one might have argued that such questions were moot in a country as tightly controlled as the People’s Republic of Poland. Wojtyła, however, was not willing to concede the point.

A
s a rule, the management of world affairs tends to demand certain mental skills and crowd out others. Intense ambition, shrewdness, and focused practicality tend to outweigh gifts of contemplation, poetic language, or metaphysical abstraction. A capacious memory—a characteristic common to Thatcher and Deng—goes a long way. Most presidents and prime ministers are monoglot; in rare cases they might know a second language, but usually little more than that. And you will rarely see them consuming philosophy or exploring noncanonical art.

John Paul II was such a dramatic exception to this rule precisely because he did not set out to be a politician. He became a priest because he wanted to serve God. He never lost sight of that fundamental calling until the end of his days; it was the onlookers, especially non-Catholics, who tended to look at him as a statesman. Even as he hobnobbed with the presidents and the general secretaries, it was never quite possible to deny his otherness.

It was partly his range of experience that made him unique. There were very few twentieth-century heads of state who had been on the receiving end of both Nazism and Stalinism. But it was also a peculiar combination of intellect and accessibility that made Wojtyła extraordinary. This was a pope who bantered with his flock in a dozen languages. As a young man he acted in experimental theater productions of a type that probably would have left Margaret Thatcher sniffing in scorn, and he continued to write poetry well into his old age. At the same time—thanks to his long immersion in the daily affairs of the parishioners to whom he devoted so many years—he never lost his touch with the joys of ordinary life and the reality of everyday suffering.

He was also a professional academic philosopher. Wojtyła actually earned two doctorates—the first, in theology, in 1948 (after two years of study in Rome) and the second, in philosophy, in 1954.
⁸
He wrote his second doctoral dissertation on the German thinker Max Scheler, who extended the teachings of the great pioneer of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, into a discourse that placed love at the center of moral action. Phenomenology, which seeks to root insights about the world in the fact of human experience, can be rather forbidding stuff. But in Scheler’s emphasis on the authenticity and primacy of individual experience, Wojtyła found
a powerful tool to combat what he saw as the crisis of twentieth-century ethics, which had undercut the centrality of moral choice. His work led him to the conclusion that the philosophy of the Enlightenment had, at its worst, spawned materialist ideologies that ran roughshod over individual freedom and responsibility, and in so doing opened the way to totalitarianism.

Wojtyła’s interest in personalism emerged, of course, directly from his own confrontation with the radically depersonalizing (and secularizing) ideologies of Nazism and Stalinism. His radical insistence on the rights and responsibilities of the individual thus represented an important step toward a philosophical stance that directly challenged the central claims of these systems. For the Marxist-Leninists who ruled Poland at the time he was writing, Wojtyła’s writings could only be regarded as profoundly counterrevolutionary. Little did they suspect that his philosophical explorations were indeed preparing the ground for a fundamental challenge to their ideological hegemony.

Scheler had found a way to make a critique that avoided the solipsism and pure subjectivity of other defenders of individuality, and Wojtyła would develop a similar line of thought in his work
Person and Act
, which he intended to be the authoritative statement of his own inquiry but never quite managed to complete (though a version of it was finally published, in Polish, in 1969). In the book, which combines traditional Thomist ethics with a stark new phenomenological sensibility, Wojtyła argues that human subjectivity is defined precisely through its dialogue with society. There is an irreducible specificity and uniqueness to each individual—yet no human being can exist in isolation. Individuality is defined by social interaction. By the same token, the exploitation or violation of the dignity of an individual’s rights represents a repudiation of the most fundamental principle that binds society together. There should be no contradiction between the interests of the collective and the individuals who make it up. A society cannot be free if some of its members are not.

The secret police could not fail to notice such heresy. While the SB continued to keep Wojtyła under surveillance, there was little that they could do to silence him as long as he enjoyed the protection of the church establishment. And, indeed, his brilliance did not go unnoticed in Rome, either.

In 1960, shortly after his appointment as archbishop of Kraków, Wojtyła received a letter from the commission that was organizing the recently summoned Second Vatican Council called by the new pope, John XXIII. The letter asked for his recommendations about the agenda. He responded with an impassioned plea for a council that would directly confront the ethical emergency of twentieth-century
society. The church, he wrote, should formulate a renewed emphasis on Christian humanism that placed the inviolability of the individual human being at its center. It was an emphasis that emerged from a philosophical and theological trend known as “personalism,” which aspired to counter the mechanistic schemes of modern thought that subordinated the fates and choices of individuals to the dictates of history, economics, national identity, or realpolitik. His experience as a priest in a society that denied freedom of confession had made Wojtyła particularly sensitive to the need for a clear statement of the centrality of human rights.

Vatican II proved a watershed in the life of the newly anointed bishop, Wojtyła. Though often portrayed as a doctrinal conservative, John Paul II is perhaps better seen as a somewhat idiosyncratic traditionalist with a decidedly vernacular sensibility. He strongly believed that the church needed to renew and revive the message of the Gospel in order to resist the dehumanizing tendencies of modern culture—a threat he saw as much in the rampant modernizing capitalism of the West as in the atheistic materialism of the East. Bishop Wojtyła became a member of the committee that composed
Gaudium et Spes
(Joy and Hope),
⁹
one of the key documents of the Second Vatican Council promulgated in 1965, and his own thinking finds intriguing reflection in it: “This council lays stress on reverence for man. . . . [T]here is a growing awareness of the exalted dignity proper to the human person, since he stands above all things, and his rights and duties are universal and inviolable.” One sentence in the document strikingly expresses the paradox that had already preoccupied Wojtyła in his earlier writings: “Man . . . cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.”

Wojtyła’s beliefs in the primacy of individual freedom governed his behavior toward the state as his responsibilities grew. In 1964 Pope Paul VI appointed him archbishop of Kraków, the position that had been held before him by the charismatic Sapieha. Kraków is both the cultural and the spiritual center of Poland, the home of many of the country’s greatest artists, thinkers, and priests, and Wojtyła engaged in a rich and multilayered dialogue with the city and its residents for forty years of his life. He was well acquainted with its workers, its intellectuals, its university students. In 1967 he was created cardinal. His new status necessarily brought him into direct confrontation with a state that brooked no rivals to its spiritual hegemony. It was a job that required less in the way of theological subtlety than practical political guile. In his relations with the Communist Party, Wojtyła focused from the very beginning on a strategy of holding and broadening the space available to the church in the public sphere. Every year, for example, he dueled with the party hierarchy over the city’s traditional Corpus Christi procession. Over the years the
functionaries had worked to restrict the procession, which followed the Stations of the Cross around the city’s most prominent religious landmarks, to a barely visible minimum. Wojtyła fought back, marshaling the support of his parishioners in a variety of maneuvers to win back as much symbolic terrain as possible.
¹⁰

The most famous duel with the powers that be, however, focused on the suburb of Nowa Huta, a Communist “model town” built around the Lenin Steelworks. From start to finish the steel town was conceived as a showcase of socialist values—right down to the thousands of indistinguishable apartments in rows of modular high-rise apartment buildings. The party’s planners, however, did not trouble to include a church. Why would the enlightened working class need a place of worship? The workers, and the diocese of Kraków, came up with their own solution to the oversight: they would build it themselves. The workers contributed their own labor, donating their spare time to the construction. Wojtyła leveraged his prestige and political astuteness. When the bureaucracy proved reluctant to issue the necessary permits, the archbishop took to conducting Christmas midnight mass under an open sky at the spot where the Church of the Ark was to be built, attracting thousands of worshipers who gave the lie to the official party propaganda that the “masses” had turned their backs on the church. Wojtyła broke ground at the construction site of the church in 1967. Ten years later he was finally able to celebrate mass in the finished building.