Wednesday, April 06, 2005
Karol Wojtyla, a poet, actor, and playwright, who had been a bishop in Poland for twenty years, was elected Pope by the College of Cardinals on October 16, 1978. Shortly afterward, Yuri Andropov, the head of Soviet intelligence, called the K.G.B.?s station chief in Warsaw and asked furiously, ?How could you have allowed a citizen of a Socialist country to be elected Pope?? The Warsaw rezident, who, during his time in Poland, had developed a knowledge of at least the rudiments of Church procedure, reportedly told Andropov that he would do better to direct his inquiries to Rome.
Andropov?s anxiety was existential and well founded. As a defender of the Soviet faith, Andropov had previously directed the expulsion of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn from Russia as a threat to the stability of the Union. Now he ordered the First Chief Directorate of the K.G.B. to analyze the potential of a new threat, who had given himself the name John Paul II. According to the Pope?s biographer George Weigel, the hurried analysis by Soviet intelligence determined that Wojtyla?s election had been backed by a German-American conspiracy led by, among others, Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter?s national-security adviser. Their goal, the document said, was nothing less than the undermining of the Communist regime in Poland and the ultimate disintegration of the Soviet Union and its satellites?an analysis as preposterous as it was prescient.
John Paul?s reign has been so long, and last week?s vigil so filled with the imagery of raw human suffering?his last, mute appearance at his window, the increasingly dire bulletins?that it was difficult to bring into focus the extraordinary and vital images of the first days of his papacy, days that helped to re-order the world. Not long after his ascension to the Chair of St. Peter, the Pope declared that he would make a ?pilgrimage? to Poland?an event that the Communist Party in Warsaw anticipated with dread. To counteract what it knew would be the destabilizing impact of the visit, the Party sent out a desperate, secret memorandum to the nation?s schoolteachers:
The Pope is our enemy. . . . Due to his uncommon skills and great sense of humor he is dangerous, because he charms everyone, especially journalists. Besides, he goes for cheap gestures in his relations with the crowd, for instance, [he] puts on a highlander?s hat, shakes all hands, kisses children, etc. . . . It is modeled on American presidential campaigns. . . . Because of the activities of the Church in Poland our activities designed to atheize the youth not only cannot diminish but must intensely develop. . . . In this respect all means are allowed and we cannot afford sentiments.
John Paul, who, in 1941, as a young man had seen his parish priests arrested by the Gestapo, and the Polish Church subjugated to Moscow after the Second World War, had come into his papacy telling all who would listen, ?Be not afraid!? As Andropov understood, in his own paranoid way, this was a message as potentially subversive as Solzhenitsyn?s ?Live not by the lie!? When John Paul?s Alitalia 727, named Città di Bergamo, landed in Warsaw on the morning of June 2, 1979, his reception from the Polish people was as fearless as his own unmistakable message, couched in theological language, that the Polish nation?s ?voluntary collaboration? with the Soviet empire could not continue. Over nine days, John Paul spoke to and performed Mass in front of millions in Warsaw, Kraków, Gniezno, Czestochowa, and the village of Oswiecim, the site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. The reception, as Weigel writes in his book ?Witness to Hope,? was so profoundly emotional, and so obviously political, that during his homily at Jasna Góra, at the shrine of the Black Madonna in the Silesian Basin, the Pope interrupted himself and jokingly wondered what the Italian priests in his entourage must be thinking: ?What are we going to do with this Polish Pope, this Slavic Pope? What can we do?? The crowd of more than a million burst into ten minutes of sustained applause. ?How many divisions has the Pope?? Stalin once asked, and now there was an answer. ?I beg you,? the Pope said later in Kraków, ?never lose your trust, do not be defeated, do not be discouraged.?
Adam Michnik, one of the leading dissidents in Poland, said that the Pope?s visit had brought hope, a challenge to ?dishonourable living,? and the revival of the ?ethos of sacrifice, in whose name our grandfathers and fathers never stopped fighting for national and human dignity.? On August 31, 1980, four hundred and forty-eight days after the Pope left Poland for Rome, at the Lenin Shipyard, in Gdan´sk, an electrician named Lech Walesa signed the agreement (his enormous souvenir pen bore the image of John Paul II) that created Solidarity, the first legal and independent union in the Soviet empire. In March, 1985, a provincial reformer, Mikhail Gorbachev, became General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. In 1990, another playwright-turned-politician, Václav Havel, welcomed John Paul to Prague after the fall of Communism, saying, ?I am not sure that I know what a miracle is. In spite of this, I dare say that I am participating in a miracle: in a country devastated by the ideology of hatred, the messenger of love has arrived.? And by Christmas night, 1991, Gorbachev, who had found an ally in the Pope, agreed to his empire?s dissolution.
The story of those remarkable years carries with it the temptation of mythmaking and, perhaps, Western self-satisfaction. The Pope?s critique of materialism did not end with his opposition to Communism; it carried over to his critique of the Western world, of consumer culture, and of the decline of the Catholic Church in Europe. His papacy has lasted twenty-six years, and his legacy?as a spiritual leader, a cultural critic, a thinker, a politician, a performer in the media age, and, in his last days, a man determined to provide an example from his own visible demise?is so encompassing that no obituary will make complete sense of it. The Pope?s awareness of his own consistency provoked in many people contradictory reactions. Even as he supported liberation in Eastern and Central Europe, campaigned against the death penalty, attacked the inequalities of capitalism, and condemned both of America?s Iraq wars, the Pope forcefully opposed the leaders of liberation theology in Latin America, and appointed Church leaders who almost uniformly followed his conservative lead on women priests, homosexuality, birth control, and many other issues. Some Catholics, excited by the early euphoria of the papacy, were hoping that John Paul II would follow in the line of John XXIII, the Church liberal who initiated the Vatican II reforms, in 1962. These Catholics have been gravely disappointed, and not a few of them have drifted from the Church.
John Paul II was formed by the twin dramas of twentieth-century European history?Fascism and Communism?and yet, to his sorrow, he watched the Church in Europe lose ground. In Great Britain and France, the number of churchgoing Catholics has declined by fifty per cent since the Second World War; in the United States, bishops are deeply divided over the Pope?s absolutism on so many issues and the dispiriting effect it has had on the number of churchgoers and young men seeking the priesthood. The growth in the Catholic Church, and perhaps its dominant future, has been in Africa and Asia. In recent years, the Pope has tried to make historical amends?asking forgiveness, for example, for the Church?s failure to speak out against the persecution of the Jews. And yet some critics, such as the biographer John Cornwell, have written that the Pope, by not stepping down when he became ill, left power in the hands of Vatican neo-conservatives, who failed to act persuasively on crises ranging from aids to sexual abuse by priests.
Last Friday, as the magazine was closing and the news from Rome grew more grave, we talked with Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete, a physicist who decided to study for the priesthood in the early seventies as he sought to understand the political and spiritual upheaval of the time. Albacete, who was born in Puerto Rico and now lives in New York, met Karol Wojtyla in 1976, and the two men became friends.
?I was a parish priest in Washington, D.C., for a very short time and a secretary to the Archbishop when I was told that the Archbishop of Kraków was coming for a visit,? the Monsignor said. ?The thought that this guy would become Pope was absurd. I was told to take good care of him. He was an intellectual, they?d heard, and they thought I could engage him somehow. We met over breakfast, over cornflakes, and we quickly started talking about the truly big questions. I was just so impressed by the intensity of his humanity, an energy, that, if tapped, could power the whole world. I was seeing him without the props of the papacy. We spoke in Italian, but he joked with me that unless I could speak Polish and read his favorite poet, Cyprian Norwid, in the original, well, then I was culturally underprivileged. And, as I am thinking about it now, I remember how he told me about Norwid?s poem ?Chopin?s Piano,? about Chopin?s death and how the end of life is so pregnant with meaning.
?I eventually came to teach a course on the plays that he had written,? Monsignor Albacete went on. ?I especially liked ?Our God?s Brother,? ? which Wojtyla wrote when he was still a seminarian. ?It?s the story of the life of Adam Chmielowski, a nineteenth-century Polish intellectual and painter, who accidentally encounters poverty on the streets of Kraków. He has to ask himself, ?How do I respond to this suffering? Charity? The revolutionary path?? He finally sees that these are all superficial responses and joins the poor, a kind of Franciscan path.? In fact, Chmielowski eventually changed his name to Brother Albert, and devoted his life to the poor, founding the Albertine Brothers. ?When Wojtyla became Pope, he canonized his own character,? the Monsignor said. ?There are still some of his plays that remain unpublished. Most of them were written during the Nazi-Communist period, when he was in the cultural resistance.?
Monsignor Albacete spent three years in Rome under John Paul in the nineteen-eighties, working on issues of Catholic education around the world, and afterward the two men stayed in contact. As the Monsignor was speaking on the telephone, CNN issued a report?premature, as it turned out?that the Pope had died. ?It?s very sad but a relief, too,? Albacete said. ?Lately, when you would see him, his Parkinson?s was such that he couldn?t respond to you with the intensity he wanted. To take away the ability to talk and move meant that he was losing the means to express his personhood. The last conversation we had was in Rome. I was there because he was beatifying a Puerto Rican, Carlos Manuel Rodríguez. I said, ?I protest, Holy Father! I want to be the first Puerto Rican saint!? He smiled, said nothing. Then I said, ?You know, Holy Father, I?m feeling a little guilty. I?ve agreed to go on television after you?ve died to say something or other about you.? He smiled again. Then he said, ?How do they know that I will die first?? He was able to joke. He was not afraid.?
