Keys of This Blood (104 page)

The anti-Church forces had narrowly avoided having a pope who would end their hopes of success; they now had one whom they could manage. Those with a diametrically opposite ecclesiology still had grounds for hope. Montini, progressive in social and political matters, was known to be orthodox in theology and of deep personal piety.

So, the Cardinal Electors emerged with the crisis in full blast among them, and that fateful ambiguity hanging over a vital Church issue. In the event, Papa Montini would give the anti-Church its head. He would never resolve the ambiguity that now would reign: What is the Roman Catholic Church? An essentially hierarchic organization based on authoritarian rule? Or a loosely knit assemblage of churches in which all sacred functions and all temporal stewardship were democratized according to the choice of the “people”? That ambiguity cloaked the organization for all of Paul VI's pontificate.

As the two cardinals discussed and reflected upon that crisis of ambiguity, they saw clearly that there was no hope of resolving it within the coming Conclave. The two main factions proposing irreconcilable ecclesiologies were stronger, more deeply entrenched and more irreconcilable than ever. Another compromise candidate would be chosen—and quickly. The redoubtable Siri would be at this Conclave. He would garner many votes, if he were to announce his willingness to be considered. But, they both knew, he would not.

For them, living and struggling on the cutting edge of geopolitical power, this conclusion was gloomy. A compromise pope would not be free to exercise any geopolitical leadership. Nor could he be really effective georeligiously. The ambiguity would plague all his days as pope. Wyszynski must, at least once during that journey, have glanced at his junior colleague and wondered if his name would come up. Wojtyla was unwilling to enter the competition; that much was clear. Nor would Wyszynski advise him to do so if he was asked. Apart from being badly
needed in Poland, Wojtyla would be saddled with that ambiguity and be a target for the anti-Church. No, this was not Wojtyla's day.

In the Conclave, matters proceeded as expected. In one day, August 26, after three rounds of voting—one to eliminate possible runners-up, one to test the strength of the main candidate, and one to confirm his election by unanimous vote—that main candidate accepted his election.

The candidate was Albino Luciani, the sixty-six-year-old Patriarch of Venice, born the son of a socialist migrant worker on the Street of the Half Moon in the village of Forno di Canale; a priest at twenty-three, a bishop at forty-six, a cardinal at sixty; an outspoken opponent of Communism (although always on good terms with local Communist bosses); a humanist of some distinction, a conservative theologian, conversant with but not overly enthusiastic about ecumenists and their dreams; and with forty years of solid, undistinguished service as a prelate behind him. He chose his own papal name, John Paul, in honor of John XXIII, who made him bishop, and Paul VI, who made him cardinal, and he promised to continue their policies, while keeping intact the “great discipline of the Church in the life of priests and laity.” The “Smiling Pope,” as he was called, offended nobody but was nobody's man, apparently. The perfect compromise. The anti-Church settled down to wait. Their opponents prayed in hope.

Many of the Cardinal Electors, after the Conclave was over, described John Paul I as “God's candidate”; and at least on the lips of certain electors, the phrase would seem to have had a significance for them beyond the obvious and apparently pious meaning. His election foreclosed the chances of neither contending party. It merely delayed the day of confrontation.

We probably will never know in great detail what passed between John Paul I and the two Polish cardinals during their separate interviews with the new Pope. When a man sits alone on that peak of papal responsibility, he has what Italians call a “second sight”—meaning an extra dimension of perception—for the dangers of high position. Wyszynski had been to that high place in his own day and his own way. He understood the heroism required of a man to remain calm and serene—even if he is the “Smiling Pope”—while the ground beneath his feet starts to tremble.

The two Poles left Rome and returned to Poland with a rather accurate picture of the internal crisis in the Church of Rome. The transition from one pontificate to another had been too smooth to be true. Meanwhile, Wyszynski had an important rendezvous in Germany.

·   ·   ·

Wyszynski had prepared the ground for the German visit. His letter of 1965 to the German bishops was blunt: “We forgive and we ask for forgiveness.” Polish-German hatred had to end. Wyszynski could not conceive of a “Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals” without Germany and without Poland. In response, the chief bishops of Germany had come to Poland on what could be described as a visit of penitence and reconciliation. Suddenly, all the governing circles in Poland, Germany and the USSR saw the long-range effect of Wyszynski's letter. All this took place in the sixties.

In September of 1978, on his return from Rome, Wyszynski set out for a five-day visit to West Germany, accompanied by Karol Wojtyla and a delegation of Polish bishops. Now he had created a platform to broadcast his geopolitical views on that “Europe to come.”

“Our two nations,” he said in his first speech, “have been educated by the Roman Catholic Church. Providence has given us a basis for unity because we have not merely common borders but also a shared religious heritage.” At Fulda, West Germany, on September 20, he was more specific: “Many times we hoped that the day would come when we—Poles and Germans—could do what has been done in the past and as we are doing today: namely, build a Europe of Christ, a Christian Europe.” The next day, he warned that “our meeting … might even be an outrage in the eyes of politicians,” and then he brandished the source of his confidence: “We have worked for centuries in Central Europe to establish here the Kingdom of Christ.” Whether Marxists or Socialists or Christian Democrats liked it or not, “Europe must realize once again that she is a new Bethlehem—of the world, of peoples and nations.” Wyszynski's implied reservation, which today is John Paul II's reservation, was clear to all listeners: “Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals” is possible only if based on Christian civilization and motivated by Christian values—both finally depend on the millennial tutelage of the papacy.

When Wyszynski returned to Warsaw that week of September beginning on Sunday, September 24, he was given a piece of news that greatly, but strangely, disturbed him. Pope John Paul I had received a certain Russian Orthodox cleric, Metropolitan Nikodim of Leningrad and Ladoga, the second-highest-ranking clergyman in the Soviet-run Russian Orthodox Church, who enjoyed the status of colonel in the KGB. Nikodim, eleven times the object of KGB interrogations on suspicion of treason, the unofficial negotiator of the arrangement between Pope John XXIII and Nikita Khrushchev in 1960, had died of an apparent heart
attack in the papal study in Rome, receiving Absolution of Sins and Blessing for the Dying from John Paul I.

Wyszynski's sense of trouble was confirmed in the early hours of Thursday of that same week: a telephone call from Rome announced that John Paul I had been found dead in bed. The Primate knew the consequences: another Conclave, another pope, yes, but now, most probably, a confrontation. No other Albino Luciani was available for election. The College of Cardinals had already been polarized. A first-class hierarchical crisis hovered over the Polish cardinals' return journey to Rome, for which Wojtyla again packed a small overnight valise. Whatever happened would have to happen quickly, so few alternatives remained for the Cardinal Electors.

Down in Rome, during the days and hours immediately preceding the Conclave, there was no doubt among the future Cardinal Electors on two scores.

First, they were divided down the middle—almost evenly—with ostensibly no common plank to share between them in choosing a successor to the now dead “Smiling Pope,” John Paul I. That dreadful ambiguity, Paul VI's legacy, underlay their irreconcilability. Second, the one dominant figure among them was cut by Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski.

The “people of God” partisans, ecclesiastical “heavies,” all of them, wanted a candidate who would pursue the decentralization of Church administration, who would be a symbol of unity, not of jurisdiction. The papal Curia should become a local diocesan chancery. The bishops should act by general consensus. The laity should have full access to all posts in the Church. Unity of faith was to be forged with other religions as equals in possession of truth. Religion should become the handmaiden of men's efforts to create a one world order. The leaders of the bloc were formidable—Giovanni Benelli of Florence, Leo Suenens of Belgium, Jan Willebrands of Holland, Franz Koenig of Austria, Paulo Evaristo Arns of São Paulo, Brazil, Eduardo Pironio of Argentina, Basil Hume of England, François Marty of Paris. They had their preferred candidates: Hume, Marty, Benelli.

The opposing bloc grouped itself around Giuseppe Siri of Genoa, Josef Höffner of Cologne, Pericle Felici of the Vatican. The first was truly the ancient lion of Church politics, once a pope-elect in his own right, a formidable adversary in argument, and very influential in political circles. Höffner, aristocratic in outlook, intolerant of any idea about “democratization” of the Church, chief prelate of a very “well-heeled” province of the Catholic Church, respected creditor of Catholics in many Third World countries, was backed up by personal prestige and
towering political stature not only in West Germany, but in the countries of Central Europe. Felici was a veteran of the Second Vatican Council as its Secretary, an excellent canon lawyer who did his best, but failed to prevent the “hijacking” of that Council by the anti-Church party.

From the start of the pre-Conclave discussions in Rome in preparation for the Conclave now set to begin at 5
P.M.
on Saturday, October 14, 1978, one cardinal, Wyszynski of Poland, stood out because of one impressive trait in his behavior—his unique flexibility—and because he quite obviously did not speak in terms, partisan or other, of the divisive ecclesiology alienating the two blocs. Wyszynski's focus of interest was elsewhere. He was speaking of the near future, and in geopolitical terms. The superpowers—the United States and the USSR; the major powers—Germany, France, Japan, Europe from “the Atlantic to the Urals” as a unit; the grinding poverty of the Third World; the Westernization of African and Asian nations through trade and industry; these constituted the substance of his comments.

Furthermore, this Pole, his brother cardinals realized, had been to Hell and back, so to speak. And he came bearing his permanent scars of mind and will as trophies of a strength beyond the strength of all human cleverness. He came furnished with rare lessons and insights; rewarded for his genuine heroism with a deep sense of what the Church is; ready with unbeatable skills for close combat; enlightened in ultimate truth about the Petrine Office beyond the capacity of any other in Conclave to gainsay him. He was, for all, venerable.

Clothing this personality was a unique and attractive flexibility, a genuine ability to enter the other man's mind, understand it and find whatever common ground there might be between them. He had only one limit: no compromise on essentials. In one who always spoke with the “big picture” of human affairs in view, this flexibility made him unique. He had no match, and everybody knew it, curial cardinals and “home” cardinals alike, although all had to acknowledge their impasse before they turned seriously to him for a way out. And no other Cardinal Elector was able to tackle the crisis with an ability matching his. Bureaucrat cardinals, “pastoral” cardinals, academician cardinals, “limousine” cardinals, cardinals
de salon
, saintly cardinals, politician cardinals, de-Catholicized cardinals, aristocratic cardinals, “popular front” cardinals, reactionary cardinals, apostate cardinals—none of them walked into Conclave with the indwelling power of spirit that Wyszynski had earned in the killing fields of Poland, adjacent to the Leninist Gulag Archipelago. The volatility of a Benelli was stabilized into reverence in Wyszynski's presence. The tawdriness of a Hume, the raw ambition of a Pironio,
the fecklessness of a Willebrands—all were muted when faced with the well-known Wyszynski stare and the knowledge of the Polish Primate's firsthand experience on the front lines.

By the time they entered Conclave on October 15, two elements went with them: the impossibility of a genuine compromise candidate of Albino Luciani's kind; and the dependence of the Conclave outcome on Wyszynski's stance in the actual voting. The first day was ritually devoted to putting each of the blocs on notice officially—by successive and issue-less voting sessions—that neither bloc could muster the required majority of two thirds plus one to put a candidate over the top. Wyszynski's greatest hour came on the following day, Monday, October 16.

From the memories of those who were actively concerned with the choice of a candidate pope—for a certain number were more passive than anything else—it is clear that the Wyszynski mental mold became a fixture in the Cardinal Electors' minds. They came to see the world around them as he did, although they did not all share his assessment of that world.

There were Wyszynski's three Internationals: the Red International of Leninist Marxism, the Golden International of Great Money, and the Black International of the Clerical Church. Those elders who had made their compromises with Marxism or with the Lodge winced, of course, at his strictures. But they had to agree with his structuring of the society of nations.

Then there was the Wyszynski policy of “no more catacombs” and of actively dealing with Leninist Marxism—cohabiting with and defeating it on its own ground and aboveground in the sociopolitical fields. Finally, there was his very sober, very vibrant, authentic-sounding forecast about the fate of the Church organization in the remaining years of this millennium. The USSR, with its Gulag Archipelago of oppression and its gaggle of captive nations and “republics,” was on the way to dissolution—a dissolution deliberately engineered by the wise architects of the Party-State. The key territory and focal area of the change would be Central Europe. The “mover and shaker” of the change would be Russia. The whole society of nations would inevitably be influenced by that gargantuan change.