Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (37 page)

            
We no longer understand ourselves. It is impossible without Christ to understand this nation with its past so full of splendor and also of terrible difficulties. . . .

                    
And I cry—I who am a Son of the land of Poland and who am also Pope John Paul II—I cry from all the depths of this Millennium, I cry on the vigil of Pentecost:

                    
Let your Spirit descend.

                    
Let your Spirit descend and renew the face of the earth, the face of this land.
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A cheer rose from a million throats, an enormous cathartic outpouring. Some of those present interpreted the pope’s call to the Holy Spirit as a call to individual action—a call to live life as it should be lived.
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The pope’s audience consisted of people who had spent the previous three decades concealing their private sentiments
while being forced to parrot allegiance to official ideology. They had spent much of their lives watching television broadcasts or attending public rallies where the only language to be heard was the ponderous idiom of Marxism-Leninism. And now, suddenly, they found themselves at a public event where the speaker was expressing heartfelt beliefs in words of poignant immediacy.

A Canadian journalist later recalled what happened next:

            
The crowd began to croon hymns. “Christ conquers, Christ rules,” they sang as yellow-and-white papal flags were unfurled—and some a lot more daring. Close by, a thin young man began furiously waving a banner proclaiming (in Polish) “Freedom, Independence, Human Rights!”

                    
It was startling. My first reaction was worry for the safety of the young man. I looked around for the public-security goons who, surely, would soon knock down his banner and cart him away.

Yet nothing happened. The man waved his banner and no one intervened. The crowd continued to serenade their pope for another eight minutes, as he stood in front of his giant cross. The reporter realized that he was witnessing one of those extraordinary moments. “Suddenly, the fear was gone,” he wrote. “Eastern Europe was beating its way back to civilization.”
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Each step of the pope’s itinerary had been chosen to illuminate a particular theme. The next day, in the ancient cathedral city of Gniezno, the pope broached a topic that was bound to upset the Communist rulers in Moscow as well as Warsaw. As a pope from Poland—a Slavic pope—he was, he suggested, uniquely qualified to address the issue of “the spiritual unity of Christian Europe.” He called attention to a banner held up in front of the church by visitors from Czechoslovakia: “Remember, Father, your Czech children.” He assured them he would: “We cannot fail to hear also . . . other Slavic languages” as well as our own, the pope said. And, he added, “these languages cannot fail to be heard especially by the first Slav pope. Perhaps this is why Christ has chosen him . . . in order that he might introduce into the communion the words and the languages that still sound strange to the ear accustomed to Romance, Germanic, English and Celtic tongues.”
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It was a message that resonated among the Christians of Eastern Europe who did not have the luxury of Poland’s stubbornly powerful Catholic tradition. The new pope was making good on his promise to promote the cause of the “Church of Silence.” And that church’s members did not only inhabit the countries of East Central Europe, many citizens of which—from Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany—were mingling
with the Poles in the crowd that heard his words. John Paul’s homily clearly also had the much-oppressed Christians of the Soviet Union in mind—above all his fellow Catholics in Ukraine and the Baltic republic of Lithuania. This was the first time since the start of the Cold War that a pontiff had addressed their plight so directly, thus vividly illuminating the dire lack of religious freedom throughout the East bloc (and not only for Christians).

Tuesday, June 5, was the day that he dwelled upon another taboo subject: the bond between Polish national identity and the Catholic Church. In the pilgrimage town of Częstochowa, he spoke from an altar built on the ramparts of the Jasna Góra Monastery, home of the Black Madonna, the holy icon reputed to have saved Poland from a Swedish invasion in the seventeenth century. Given his surroundings, it is no surprise, perhaps, that John Paul’s homily became even more emotional than before. His audience responded exultantly, repeatedly interrupting him with applause and singing. (“To judge by the pope’s reception by ordinary Poles, he does not require saints’ anniversaries to boost his crowd,” noted a reporter from the
Economist
, alluding to the pope’s original plan to commemorate the martyrdom of Saint Stanisław, which Poles had observed the previous month.)
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This time the topics of his sermon acquired a more directly political character, as he argued the case for “the rights of each nation” with startling frankness. Among them he included the “rights to existence and self-determination, to its own culture and the many forms of developing it”—a clear reference to the oppressive cost of Soviet rule in Eastern Europe: “We know from our own country’s history what has been the cost to us of the infraction, the violation and the denial of those inalienable rights. Let us therefore pray with greater enthusiasm for
lasting reconciliation between the nations of Europe and the world
. May this be the fruit of recognition of and real respect for the rights of each nation.”
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After the mass he held a private meeting with seventy Polish bishops. The Vatican press office issued advance copies of his speech, then withdrew them, then reissued them without additional comment. Someone in the papal entourage was evidently feeling anxiety about possible diplomatic fallout from the pope’s remarks. Such fear was not entirely unjustified. John Paul II had chosen to indict the Communist regime’s handling of state-church affairs with brutal candor: “Authentic dialogue [between church and state] must respect the convictions of believers and ensure the rights of the citizens and also the normal conditions for the activity of the church as a religious community to which the vast majority of Poles belong. We are aware that this dialogue cannot be easy, because it takes place between two concepts of the world which are diametrically opposed.”
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His next theme was also politically delicate. John Paul had originally planned to devote a day of his trip to the miners and workers of the industrial region of Silesia, a locale that would provide a suitable background to a rumination on the value of labor and the worker’s place in society. But the party had barred him from going there—presumably because Gierek, who had spent much of his career there, regarded Silesia as his power base and did not wish to see the pontiff encroach upon it. So the pope extended an invitation to the workers of the region to come celebrate mass with him at Jasna Góra instead. On June 6 they came. The pope marked the occasion with a prolonged rumination on the ethics of work. Labor, he declared, was a foundation of family life and a medium of individual self-realization. Therefore, it was impossible to view work as a human activity that can be divorced from spirituality: “Dear brothers and sisters, hardworking people of Silesia, Zaglebie, and the whole of Poland, do not let yourselves be seduced by the temptation to think that man can fully find himself by denying God, erasing prayer from his life and remaining only a worker, deluding himself that what he produces can on its own fill the needs of the human heart. ‘Man shall not live by bread alone.’”
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Silesia, he said, was a “land of great work and of great prayer.” This allusion to the distinctive religiosity of the Polish working class would acquire particular resonance in the years to come. But for the moment it was enough for his listeners that John Paul had chosen to offer an individualist, Christian alternative to the Marxist depiction of workers as a homogeneous “class” marching toward a bright proletarian future.

The Polish authorities soon let it be known that they were not happy. In a news conference, a Polish Foreign Ministry spokesman openly expressed surprise about the number of political references in the pope’s sermons. Other officials assured reporters that the government was “generally satisfied” with the way the trip had gone.
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But it was clear that the Communist potentates could not be unaware of the damage the pope inflicted on their legitimacy with every remark.

In fact, John Paul’s language was frank but not incendiary. At no point did he question the Communist Party’s right to rule; nowhere did he suggest that he would prefer an alternate political order to the one that already existed. His remarks, in short, were not the stuff of revolution. They were couched in a strictly religious format; the political implications of what he was saying derived consistently and clearly from his fundamental emphasis on the redemptive message of Christ’s death and resurrection. Christ was the starting point. It has to be stressed, however, that John Paul II made it clear that the observance of religious freedom and the protection of human rights applied not only to Catholics, but to all humankind.

Should anyone have chosen to take his remarks on a purely political level, they would have noted that he was merely admonishing the state to observe and enforce the freedoms specifically granted by the constitution of the People’s Republic, which guaranteed full freedom of religion and speech (though in practice these principles were honored in the breach). This insistence that the Communist regime live up to its own commitments dovetailed with the approach of the dissident movements that had emerged in East Central Europe in the wake of the Final Act of the 1975 Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (part of the Helsinki Accords). “We therefore welcome the fact that the Czechoslovak Soviet Socialist Republic has expressed adherence to these pacts,” wrote the members of the Czechoslovak human rights group Charter 77 in their founding document, two years before John Paul’s visit. “But their publication reminds us with new urgency how many fundamental civil rights for the time being are—unhappily—valid in our country only on paper.”
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KOR and other dissident groups had said similar things before; so, indeed, had Cardinal Wojtyła himself during his years in Kraków. What made the dramatic difference now was precisely that he was saying them publicly to the nation and the world, with the full authority of the global Roman Catholic Church. Despite the best efforts of the party-controlled media to play down the visit, the pope’s homilies were also being broadcast on national television. (The mass at Victory Square, on day one, marked only the second time since 1944 that national media had given air-time to a mass. The first was on the occasion of the pope’s inaugural, a few months earlier.) Never before had a Communist Party in the Soviet bloc endured such a direct public challenge to its ideological and informational hegemony. And it was not only the Poles themselves but also the rest of the noncommunist world, watching via satellite, that witnessed this extraordinary public rupture.

But there was something else as well: namely, the effect that this pilgrimage had on the animal spirits of those who experienced it. There was, above all else, the plain social fact of the millions who gathered to see their beloved John Paul II—and discovered each other in the process. The Communist rulers of Poland had always practiced a shrewd strategy of atomization. Every aspect of daily life—right down to the uniform design of housing blocks—reminded the individual human being of his or her subordination to the collective. Any larger public event had to be orchestrated, down to its smallest detail, according to the dictates of the party: its language, its symbols, its content. For nine days in June 1979, by contrast, Poles encountered each other in a setting from which the party and its doctrines were as
good as absent. No one had ordered them to be there; whether they came at all was entirely up to them.

And it turned out, millions of them—a visible and undeniable plurality—were determined to show up. For nine days running, John Paul II drew crowds numbering in the hundreds of thousands at each of his events. The roads, the meadows, and the cities were awash in a sea of people no matter where he went. Poles—among them quite a few nonbelievers—were determined to share in his pilgrimage. The mere fact of doing so was a liberating experience. “Those very people who are ordinarily frustrated and aggressive in shop lines metamorphosed into a cheerful and happy collectivity,” observed the dissident Adam Michnik.
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“Despite the enormous crowds, there was no hysteria or tumult in the field,” one American correspondent wrote wonderingly.
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The lack of hysteria and tumult presumably also had to do with something else: a taste, however modest, of actual power. Since 1944 the party had hammered into people’s brains that it was the only force capable of organizing social life in a manner that ensured justice and prosperity for all. According to Marxist-Leninist theory, the revolution ceded the control of society to the dictatorship of the proletariat, a small but enlightened avant-garde whose insight into the laws of dialectical materialism earned it the right to govern in the name of all. Those Poles born into the postwar order had never been exposed to an alternative. But seeing, as they say, is believing. And now Poles saw that they could organize their affairs—in this case, the biggest and most complex social event in the history of the People’s Republic—on their own. The lay volunteers who guided the crowds, managed transportation, and provided most of the logistical underpinnings for the papal visit pulled the whole thing off with nary a complaint. In the wake of John Paul’s visit, this theme would assume far-reaching significance. It is one thing to theorize about self-governance. It is quite another to practice it. “It was the first assembly that wasn’t ordered by the state,” one woman who attended John Paul II’s mass on Victory Square later recalled. “Earlier there had been all sorts of marches that were organized by the government and protected by the militia. Here the militia wasn’t even needed.”
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The party had always presented itself as indispensable; now Poles saw that they could get along just fine without it. “For nine days the state virtually ceased to exist . . . ,” wrote historian Timothy Garton Ash. “Everyone saw that Poland is not a communist country—just a communist state.”
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