Keys of This Blood (101 page)

Even in cohabiting with their most lethally intentioned enemies, Wyszynski urged the Poles, they should be true to every aspect of their Polishness, harboring neither fruitless dreams of returning to past fortune nor baneful plans for future retribution: “The Church in Poland … must educate Poles not to nurture any idea of revenge or a complete restoration of their past. Polish Catholics in whatever circumstances—even in those that are adverse for the Communists—will not raise their hand against them…. Catholics will respect an accomplished social evolution…. The present reality shows bold signs of social changes. … God has placed us in the condition in which we must live.”

Such was the attitude constantly displayed by Wyszynski and his clergy; and to a surprising degree as well by the populace at large, as the Primate continued to network Poland with his endless organizational efforts. By 1963, the effect of Wyszynski's minutely planned and faithfully executed arrangements for the millennium celebrations at last began to daunt the Gomulka government. In response, the first secretary trotted out every tactic he and his underlings could come up with.

Sharp personal attacks on the Cardinal Primate surfaced yet again. It was charged that Wyszynski had received gifts from that incorrigible Fascist, General Francisco Franco of Spain. He was accused once more of tampering with state affairs in seeking a reconciliation between Poles and Germans. In fact, as the Cardinal was leaving a church where his policy of forgiveness of the Germans for their war atrocities was proclaimed, he was confronted by a gang of government-hired toughs, who chanted, “We won't forgive!” True to his own lights, Wyszynski chose to pass directly through the rough bunch, answering one of them pointedly and sincerely, “Brother, that doesn't matter.” Another, who was hassling a woman in the crowd, he chided, “Brother, be decent.”

By 1965, the year before the ultimate national celebration and dedication, the preparations had taken on such a vigor of their own that they became one continual celebration, complete with constant processions everywhere, in anticipation of the millennium vow that would be led by the Cardinal at Mary's shrine at Czȩstochowa on the Bright Mountain of Jasna Góra.

Accordingly, so too did the government step up its activities of harassment. Its tactics ranged from the hyperbureaucratic to the sleazy and the physically dangerous. Permits were refused for religious processions carrying reproductions of the Czȩstochowa icon. Other processions were diverted from their routes or were prohibited from entering certain zones. In one incident, the police stopped a car displaying the Czȩstochowa icon, wrapped the picture up in a tarpaulin and tied it securely with rope, and only then allowed the automobile to continue on its way.
On another occasion, sham reports of an outbreak of smallpox forced would-be pilgrims to return home. Time and again, military vehicles would be driven dangerously along roads frequented by priests on their way to icon celebrations, forcing clerics off the road in “accidents” that disabled their cars, and that sometimes caused serious injury. Pilgrims who were not physically roughed up were continually under surveillance by the “sad people,” as Gomulka's secret service agents were called. Regularly, gangs of toughs took to disturbing even normal liturgical celebrations. And, in a pointed and threatening move, a permanent militia guard was placed around Jasna Góra itself.

By then, however, it was already far too late to stop what Wyszynski had begun, not only with respect to the millennial celebration and vow of “national servitude” to Mary, but with respect to the sociopolitical element of his agenda. For in 1965, the first signs of that organized element of the Cardinal's agenda popped to the surface when thirty-four prominent intellectuals issued a declaration of freedom for artists and writers as a basic right. What Wyszynski was counting on was thus beginning to happen. Segments of the population, such as groups of intellectuals and people who were not Catholic or had long since abandoned any practical belief in their original Catholicism or had lapsed into complete nonobservance of Catholicism's laws, were now attracted at least to the point of supporting Wyszynski, because his general goals were for the betterment of Poland's dire economic and social conditions.

By the time that much prepared date August 26, 1968, rolled around, there was nobody in Poland who was unaware of what would be transacted at the monastery at CzÈ©stochowa on Jasna Góra—the Bright Mountain—with Mary as Queen of Poland. It is very difficult for those who have known life only in Western democracies to realize that the great majority of Poles thought about that forthcoming celebration as an event affecting not merely Poland but Poland's neighbors in Europe, Poland's Europe in its entirety, “from the Atlantic to the Urals,” and, farther afield, the wide world in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. That familiarity and facility of identifying one's local cause with a universal cause is absent to a large extent in Western democracies.

On August 26, Wyszynski himself presided over the ceremonies at Czȩstochowa. Over a quarter of a million pilgrims gathered on the hillside around the monastery and again responded to the words of the national dedication. True, the militia was present. Extra government troops, police battalions and teams of Zomos—bully boys—stood by
watchfully, but not daring to make any move. While the voices of that quarter million rang out again and again—“Yes! We swear it!”—in response to ritual requests for their assent to the dedication, the same ceremony was being performed at literally thousands of locations throughout Poland.

Wyszynski had successfully tied the goals of democratic liberty in Poland to the celebration of a Roman Catholic belief, and both of them were now held in the minds of Poles to be linked with supranational goals and with the well-being of the society of nations.

It was Archbishop Wojtyla's function to piece all of it together in words. He spoke of the “supernatural current” let loose by the millennial celebrations of Jasna Góra and irresistibly overcoming the “totalitarian threat to the nation” and “the atheistic programs supported by the Polish United Workers Party”—the Communist PZPR. He quickly transposed Poland's harassed and embattled position to the international plane: “Poland faces biological destruction … as does the entire world of man. … As Poland, so the rest of the world is in absolute danger.” Then he hammered home the supreme lesson: “Our temporal theology demands that we dedicate ourselves into the hands of the Holy Mother. May we all live up to our tasks.”

There was no doubt in his listeners' minds about the “tasks.” “The Archbishop,” one visiting expatriate Pole told newsmen, “was reminding us Poles that, if we fulfill our destiny, it will be a European destiny, a worldwide destiny.”

The next twelve years were to be a concrete fulfillment of Wyszynski's undertaking as Cardinal Primate and as
Interrex
. “In accepting the duties assigned to me by the Church—the episcopal sees of Gniezno and Warsaw—I also accepted a moral and civil duty to undertake appropriate discussions on the requirements of Polish state interests.” This was as bold a statement as Wyszynski could make to the faithful gathered in the Warsaw basilica. “This is a dictate of my conscience as a bishop and as a Pole.”

In brief terms, Wyszynski now saw his role as
Interrex
coming to the fore in a very explicit fashion. He was to be the defender of the people's rights, of Poland's rights, and the supplier of their needs. He would do this under the sign of Solidarity—
Solidarnoś
ć—with them as Poles, as Catholics, as human beings.

But in taking up this stance, he was not in any sense saying that his own difficulties as Primate were over. In actual fact, until December 1970, the usual pressures exerted by the regime on him and his colleagues were more intense than ever before. His seminaries, his schools,
his priests, his own status in Poland, the ordinary function of his churches—all were again the object of frenzied attacks. Wyszynski's immersion in national and labor problems was his way of carrying war into the enemy's camp. Constantly criticizing the government, constantly defending the workers, constantly underlining the mistakes of the regime, using public opinion at home and abroad, he was finally instrumental in the liquidation of the Gomulka regime in December 1970.

To the new Communist government, under Edward Gierek, Wyszynski said plainly: “We cannot forget that we have been sent to lead the Nation to the Gospel…. We must fulfill our obligation to the Church in such a way that we are able to assist the country in difficult circumstances.” He was putting the government on notice that the fight would continue.

On May 28, 1967, Pope Paul conferred the Cardinal's hat on Karol Wojtyla. For the next eight years, Wojtyla's figure began to loom over the national scene with a newly authoritative voice. “The Primate of Poland,” he wrote in an article of May 1971, “bases his position within the universal Church on his roots in that part of the Christian community to which Providence has linked him, the Church in Poland. The very existence and activity of the Church becomes a fundamental trial of strength.” He too thus put the Gierek administration on notice that the fight would continue and that Gierek's fight was with the Church Universal.

Continue it did, and along the usual lines of harassment, false accusations, denial of passports, aggression by the “Patriotic Priests” of the Communist-sponsored Pax organization, denial of building permits for churches and schools, attempts to replace the Sacraments of Baptism and Marriage with state-sponsored lay ceremonies; and by all the other means devisable by the Communist bureaucrats of Warsaw.

The Wyszynski-Wojtyla tactics continued: sustained attack in the Catholic press and in sermons on every violation of human rights; constant pressure through Rome on the government; constant diplomatic connections with West Germany and the United States brought to bear on the Polish scene.

A change started to manifest itself in the government's attitude to the two cardinals. By 1976, Gierek went so far as to praise Wyszynski as “a great man and a great patriot,” but—as he told his Politburo colleagues—Cardinal Wojtyla was “the worst of all.” The truth was that Wyszynski had attained a position of moral superiority in the eyes of the people that was unassailable. But this young Cardinal Wojtyla, fiftyish and active, was the future danger. Obviously he was being groomed to succeed Wyszynski as Primate. Besides, in that year, 1976, Wyszynski was operated
on for cancer. The Wojtyla danger was nearer than they had thought. During Wyszynski's illness, Wojtyla was his replacement as spokesman and Church standard-bearer for all public issues; the government thus had a foretaste of what lay in store for them, should he become Primate.

The two successive Communist governments were not far off the mark when they read, first, Wyszynski and then Wojtyla as potential destroyers of the Leninist-Marxist system in Poland. The first internal Polish revolts among lay Poles were accurately read as a consequence of the example set by the Cardinal Primate and his fellow bishops. They had successfully challenged the totalitarian regime, had survived and were flourishing.

In the seventies, there was, therefore, the revolt of the Polish intellectuals. There followed the Committee for the Defense of the Workers (KOR) and the Committee for Social Self-Defense (KSS): The working classes in Poland found it necessary to defend themselves against the Party that claimed to vindicate their claims as workers. Later, the strike power of workers in Gdansk, Szczecin and Jastrzeb would lead to the social contract between the workers and the government and, later still, to the official registration of Solidarity.

By now, Cardinal Wojtyla was down in Rome, fulfilling his duties on special Vatican committees, deeply immersed in the negotiations of a Poland-Vatican Concordat, and preaching a spiritual “retreat” for Pope Paul and his papal household. The aging Paul and the young Polish cardinal developed a very close relationship, and the Pope saw in Wojtyla a future Pope for the Church—but quite a distance in years from the seventies. “Your Eminence,” he told Wojtyla, “will be shortly very much needed in Poland. God will provide after that.” Both men were obviously thinking of Wyszynski's failing health; and both were aware of Paul's own decline.

That was not the only vague hint of what the future might hold for Wojtyla. There was the venerable and saintly Josyf Cardinal Slipyj, the Ukrainian Catholic leader, survivor of eighteen years in the Soviet Gulag, now exiled in Rome but always dreaming of his beloved St. George Cathedral in Lwów, the Ukraine. Wojtyla's reverence for Slipyj was as much for the physical tortures the Ukrainian had undergone as for what he represented—the Ukrainian Catholic Church. “Your Grace will bury me in St. George's,” he told Wojtyla. “It is God's will.” (Slipyj died in 1984 at the age of ninety-two, and his body waits in Papa Wojtyla's Rome for the day of his homecoming—an event that became highly probable in 1990 after Papa Wojtyla's meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev.)

It was one more straw in the winds of destiny ushering Cardinal Wojtyla to his near-future appointment, and it was of a piece with everything
that had gone into the making of Wojtyla. In its heyday, the Polish commonwealth was closely bound to the Ukraine religiously and politically. Even when Poland's enemies tore them apart and Joseph Stalin with the connivance of the Russian Orthodox Churchmen raped the Church in the Ukraine, the bond between Poles and Ukrainians persisted underground. By the late seventies, Wojtyla's orientation was eastward to the Ukraine and to Russia.

At Pope Paul's suggestion, Cardinal Wojtyla established contact with other Church leaders in the world, and visited the United States on an extended tour throughout the land. It was a simple project to let the world outside the Gulag know of the young Polish cardinal's character and ability. It also allowed Wojtyla to experience firsthand the secularism of Harvard, the provincialism of American bishops, and the dynamism of New York and California. For, as Paul used to say, “nothing beats living.”