Keys of This Blood (11 page)

The significance of those visits was another matter, however. Nobody raised publicly the interesting question as to why López Portillo, as president of constitutionally anti-Catholic and anticlerical Mexico, should have anything of substance to discuss for nearly two hours with this greatest of Catholic clerics. Or why López Portillo should have taken the personal trouble of escorting the Pope to what amounted to an audience for his mother and sister in a private chapel. At its most serious, the Mexican trip was taken as an exceptional and even overdramatic gesture by His Holiness; and López Portillo's behavior was taken as equally exceptional.

Still, offstage and away from the glare of the press, there were again those who were becoming alarmed over the Pope's ability to command and sustain a high level of world attention for far longer than had been foreseen.

Once back in the Vatican, John Paul was unperturbed by any carping criticisms that did begin to surface. He continued his pontificate with the same personal touch that was so natural to him. On February 24, 1979, in fulfillment of a spontaneous promise he had made to Vittoria Ianni, the daughter of a Roman street cleaner, John Paul solemnized that young woman's marriage to Mario Maltese, a Roman electrical worker. And he continued to step farther along that “new road” he had proclaimed for himself and his Church.

On March 8, he received a delegation of thirty Shintoists, together with their High Priest, a man called Nizo, from the famous Ise Shrine in Japan. No pope had ever done such a thing. Within the Vatican—a place
of venerable protocol and strict emphasis on religious priority—this extraordinary papal gesture was alarming to just about everyone. Here, without doubt, was an unexpected change in the rules everyone—friend and enemy alike—had thought they understood. The gesture was so extraordinary, in fact, that in Japan—which pays little even in the way of lip service to the religious side of Rome—and even in religious quarters elsewhere long noted for denunciation of Rome's traditional claim to religious exclusivity, eyebrows began to knit in puzzlement. They, too, had thought they knew the rules.

That same month of March saw the publication, with John Paul's permission, of a book of his poetry in Britain, another land not altogether easy in its ecclesiastical relations with the Holy See. In Italy, meanwhile, a translation was prepared of a two-act play that Papa Wojtyla had written in much earlier days,
The Goldsmith's Shop
, and it was broadcast over Italian radio.

As such a welter of papal interest and activity piled up for all the world to see, opinions about him in the media became almost schizophrenic in their confusion. At one extreme, there were emotional expressions of admiration for the versatility of his character. At the other, there was at least a growing distrust for what appeared to many to be his unpredictability. What there was not, was any publicly expressed understanding or analysis of John Paul's actions in the light of his own early, continuing and exceptionally clear announcements about his intentions. What made that lack of understanding more remarkable was the fact that John Paul was so insistent in his message and that phrases and sentences were turning up as “quotable quotes”—but as virtually no more than that—in Italian and foreign news coverage.

“The Church wishes to stay free with regard to competing systems….” “The inexorable paradox of atheistic humanism … the drama of men deprived of an essential dimension of their being, denying him his search for the infinite….” “Market forces alone should not determine the price of goods….” “We must clarify and resolve the problem of a more adequate and more effective institutional framework of worldwide solidarity … human solidarity within each country and between countries….” “The fundamental question of the just price and the just contract….” “The process [of remuneration for work done] cannot simply be left to … the dominant influence of small groups….”

Finally, by dint of repetition, as John Paul's conversations, addresses, discourses—even his off-the-cuff remarks—became more and more widely reproduced, the reaction to him began to take on a more cohesive
aspect. Early on, one English writer had taken it upon himself to dismiss this Pontiff as merely a Polish bishop elected Pope by “the ingrown minds of superannuated cardinals, and let loose on the complicated world of today.”

Increasingly, however, many of his own Churchmen, as well as many in government and power around the world, began to share Andrei Gromyko's far different assessment of the “Polish bishop” as “a man with a worldview.”

In reality, as some began to think, this was a man with a perspective so new and a goal so vast that it was far beyond the imagining of a whole array of political and financial leaders who had thought themselves immune in their separate and protected strongholds.

Meanwhile, the public at large appeared to have no such concerns. John Paul's personal appeal for ordinary men and women grew visibly from day to day. The crowds that came from nearby and from around the world to catch even a glimpse of him in the Vatican became so great and so unmanageable that the Pope ordered his regular Wednesday general audience to be shifted from the already vast space inside St. Peter's Basilica to the still vaster square outside his door.

John Paul chose his first Easter as Pope to clarify as deeply and as pointedly as it was possible to do the thoughts and considerations that lay at the heart of all his actions: everything from his marriage of a street cleaner's daughter and an electrical worker, to his meetings with Marxists and Shintoists in the Vatican, to his visit to Mexico, to his coming visit to Poland, already confirmed for the coming June, and the scores of papal trips still in store to every corner of the world.

In a 24,000-word document known, as papal documents generally are, by its now famous first words,
Redemptor Hominis
, John Paul displayed a depth of thought and consideration coupled with a message that was characteristically simple and startling.

No human activity escapes the religious dimension, he said; but especially important are the activities that constitute the sociopolitical life of men and women wherever they reside. Indeed, the note that dominated and animated that encyclical document was John Paul's insistence that the hard, intractable problems of the world—hunger, violation of human dignity and human rights, war and violence, economic oppression, political persecution—any and all of these can be solved only by acceptance and implementation of the message of Christ's revelation announced by the papacy and the Roman Catholic Church.

With the delivery of that encyclical, Pope John Paul seemed to mark a turning point. From that time forward, he did not go out of his way to
explain his mind further than he had already done. He did not pause to smooth the ruffled feathers of those who felt he was clearly poaching now on the preserves of others. It was as though he no longer considered it productive to try endlessly to correct wrong impressions, or to widen views narrower than his own.

If there were those who could or would not understand that, even in his simplest statements, he was saying something entirely new, they at least were learning that they were listening to a Pope who had taken it upon himself to break ancient customs. If few could yet know that he had arrived in Rome with a mind already filled with a new and wider and hitherto unimagined role for the successor to Peter, John Paul himself could not afford to wait for the rest to catch up with him. Friends and critics and all interested parties alike could read his Easter encyclical letter. And they could read his actions.

If there were many, whether of good will or ill, whether opposed to Rome or devoted to it, who couldn't deal with the papacy turned inside out by John Paul's innovations, he could only promise much more of the same. And if, finally, as often happens with the greatest of the world's events, the real confrontation John Paul said was already taking place had escaped public notice, then time and great events would make everything clear even to those most unwilling to acknowledge it.

If the secular reaction to Pope John Paul II in the early days of his reign was strewn with misunderstanding, concern and confusion, it has to be said that most of those within the Roman Catholic Church itself were still more astonished and baffled.

Here, however, the consternation centered around the bare fact, visible to everyone everywhere, that John Paul's Church was in shambles.
And the confusion centered around the fact that this Pope's conscious decision, unbelievably enough, was to refuse to halt the process of decay.

For the faithful in his Church, and arguably for the millions who had left it in pain and dismay during the long pontificate of Pope Paul VI, John Paul was more than an ordinary public figure, more than a man, more even than a religious leader. For them, he had become the personal representative of God on earth. His was the ultimate voice of authority about how the world should be governed by men. He was the court of last resort for all human doubts. He was supposed to fix the Church. Or at least to run it.

It was all very well for John Paul to stride forward as a pope whose mind was filled with a new and wider and hitherto unimagined role for a successor to Peter, the Great Fisherman. It was all very well for him to attend, as some said even then, to a strange and alien light that only he could see, but that certainly seemed to illumine his actions as he touched the rarely reached acme of worldly exposure and recognition. But what about touching power within the Church itself? There seemed to be plenty of worldly leaders, the complaint went. But what about John Paul's irreplaceable role as Peter?

For those who treasured the amber-encased papacy that John Paul had already put behind him forever, it was too much by far to see a pope who allowed himself to be touched and greeted and addressed and, yes, even rebutted by millions of ordinary men and women. That he had already been appropriated in some sense by millions of very different people, baptized and unbaptized, and that he obviously intended to travel the world in order to continue that overdemocratic process, shattered the fragile mold within which large numbers were convinced the papacy—the real and Catholic papacy—must ever remain.

That wasn't to say, however, that there weren't plenty of Roman Catholics and others besides on the other side of the fence; people to whom the shambles of John Paul's Church were a welcome sight; people who would have been more than content to see the papacy remain sealed away from the rough-and-tumble of the world's scramble toward its future. In such quarters as these, the strong desire to see the Pope mind his Churchly business was not sparked by deep faith. Rather, the hope was simply that the papacy would truly wither to nothing; that it would no longer be a central unifying factor of universal Catholic life.

For these people, who not only nourished that hope but had, many of them, labored daily for the death of the papacy as the unifying force of Catholicism, John Paul threatened a dream. They found his behavior and his appeal so distressful, in fact, and so maddening, that some in this
group could not keep from an early and open display of their dislike for the Pontiff, and of their contempt for his highly publicized actions.

Milwaukee's Archbishop Rembert Weakland, arguably no stranger to notorious behavior, stepped far beyond the normal bounds of public comment for high Churchmen when he characterized John Paul II as “a ham actor whose speeches don't make sense unless you dramatize them.”

In a tone of loftier disdain, the English Cardinal, Basil Hume, Archbishop of Westminster and onetime willing papal candidate, held John Paul up to that discreetly disguised contempt once favored by the English upper classes for the ill-bred and lowborn. After listening to the newly elected Pontiff address all his cardinals in the Consistory Hall of the Apostolic Palace, Hume complained, “I became increasingly flabbergasted and amazed at the pace it [the Pope's address] went on, especially since the weather was quite warm.” The barb that no true gentleman would subject another needlessly to suffer through such a meeting when the weather was disagreeable made Hume's deeper implication clear to all who heard him: John Paul could not possibly have anything of importance to say.

Such a lack of discretion and extreme feelings aside, it was not long before just about everyone within the Roman Catholic Church had some complaint to make. And though the complaints were varied and covered a wide spectrum, all of them focused in some way on one remarkable trait of this new Pope. Wherever they might stand on the ever-widening range of action, of faith and of loyalty to the papacy; and whatever rung they might occupy in the Church's structure, from lay person to activist to priest to cardinal, the seeming tranquillity of Pope John Paul in the face of the decay that was eating at the vitals of his Church was cause for uncertainty and for downright bafflement.

From the very beginning of his pontificate, it was clear that John Paul was acutely aware of his Church's disarray. And it was equally clear that his conscious decision was to refuse to halt the process of decay.

So consistent was this mystifying attitude on John Paul's part that a somewhat later incident came to symbolize the apparent fruitlessness of any attempt to change the papal mind on that score. Early in his pontificate, one of John Paul's most invaluable allies and servitors, the powerful Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, who heads the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, underlined for the Pope just one festering source of Church decadence. The Cardinal implied that the Holy Father might profitably address himself to the problem in question.

To the surprise of all within earshot—for the exchange took place
before the two had reached an entirely private area—and as if to underline his papal refusal to bring order out of chaos, the Pope turned on Ratzinger with a sharp and open rebuke of a kind rarely seen in the Apostolic Palace.