Keys of This Blood (14 page)

Within that unprecedented context, those closest to John Paul knew that he had, and still does have, his own unwavering vision of the way human affairs will develop and climax. He knows—or is persuaded that he knows—what the ultimately resulting system will be, should he lose this gargantuan gamble of his.

In other words, John Paul has a clear vision of our near-future world. And his reading of what that world will be is at serious odds with that of his dedicated adversaries.

All of the Pontiff's papal actions, and his inaction as well, were and still are dictated by that vision. Moreover, everything he did, even in the earliest days of his pontificate, was undertaken according to a timetable linked to that vision.

This papal timetable was, and remains, as unprecedented in its way as so much else in John Paul's pontificate. It is a timetable synchronized with the galloping historical developments of our present era. And yet, it was never defined or set out in days or weeks or years. John Paul never saw himself or his adversaries in the world's supercompetition in a race against time, as might be the case in some more banal struggle. He was always certain that he would have all the necessary time of this world at his disposal, just as he always knew that his competitors were equally confident that time was on their side.

For whatever comfort it might be, John Paul's vision did not, nor does it now, encompass bloody events in terms of bodies and lives. He did not, nor does he now, see the competition into which he had plunged in terms of wars and military weapons. He saw it, and sees it now, in terms of mind-destroying and soul-consuming clashes of irreconcilable humanisms ranged against himself and one another. Nevertheless, John Paul knew that the tension between himself and his adversaries would be no less fierce for the absence of crude weapons and invasion dates. A historian and realist, the Pope knew that victory in any war—and certainly in this war—is made possible above all by the spirit of the combatants.

From John Paul's point of view, then, and in the calculations of his competitors, the stakes were too high for lukewarm spirits or halfhearted efforts. Hence, he refused to break out in distraught laments and would allow himself only a few angry reproaches. Hence, too, he would refuse to lash out in a policy of harsh repression or sanctions. Despite constant urgings from every quarter, he would declare no wars of any expected kind on anyone.

For the many who believed then, and who may still believe, that this
so public Pope was what they saw and no more, it was an irony that, while his efforts in the arena of papal foreign policy quickly evened up some of the odds against him, the enemies of his Church were scoring just as heavily through John Paul's own failure to control his Church from within.

Meanwhile, for those of his enemies who understood, as they still understand, that there is much more to John Paul and to his pontificate than meets the inexperienced eye, worry rapidly replaced any sense of irony. No one of his enemies, and no combination of them who were in the arena at that moment, were able to match the international stature John Paul so quickly and skillfully made his own. Nor would they try; in this quarter, discretion was still the better part of valor. Nevertheless, if this Pope could not be beaten on what his adversaries regarded as their turf, perhaps he could not be beaten at all.

Of course, there was another side to that coin. The critical question even among the Pope's staunchest supporters was: How far could John Paul advance without a vibrant and papally unified Church behind him? Papal serenity was all very fine; but how far could the shambles be allowed to go? How far would be too far? Or—and this was always the ultimate fear for some who had John Paul's ear and for an ever-increasing number who did not—was it to be that the Church under this Pope would become invisible, reduced to some sad and tattered modern equivalent of the Church of the ancient catacombs?

Even in the context of his great competition, therefore, there were always those who warned the Pope that if he didn't address the decay and disarray in his own papal backyard, he could gamble his whole position right out the window. Now more than ever, this argument went, leaders are powerful only insofar as they stand at the apex of a powerful institution or organization. Obvious examples were cited again and again over time to sway John Paul's mind. The power of the American presidency, he was reminded, rises or declines in our time with the power and hegemony of the United States as military and economic centerpiece of the Western alliance. Later, the more somber example of Ferdinand Marcos was brought to bear. For when Marcos lost control of his political machine and of the Philippine Army officer corps, his fate was sealed.

Except that they had lately become more unforgiving and inexorable, the essentials of that equation of power had not changed since the rise of the Egyptian pharaohs six thousand years ago. However grand one's past, anyone whose hand slips for a moment from the levers of power finds himself the next moment to be the pawn in someone else's game. That was the warning to John Paul.

Despite this cyclone of questions and lethal arguments that swirled around himself and his papacy, however, this young and stubborn Pope John Paul II remained the steady-as-you-go Vicar of Christ for whom everything—no matter how important it might appear to others—was and would remain secondary to his central perspective and preoccupation: the progress and outcome of the international, winner-take-all competition.

In the arena where that competition would be fought, government reports from around the world were already beginning to take account of the wide-ranging mind of this Pontiff, and of the accuracy of his judgments, which, even before his election in October of 1978, were somehow based on deep and exact intelligence. And as if to give the lie to the dire warnings of what happened to men like Marcos, who lose everything when they lose their visible power base, John Paul was perceived to hold in his hand such real power, in spite of the tatters of his institutional Church, that many of the players arrayed against him in his supercompetition felt themselves impelled to seek him out for the respect and legitimacy he alone seemed able to confer on them, and on their causes.

Great power brokers who had no use for what they regarded as his outmoded faith or his Petrine privilege—but who certainly coveted his institutions and his universal authority—quickly began to seek even the briefest meetings with John Paul II. Like rival guerrilla leaders who learn to stop shooting at the enemy long enough for a good photo opportunity, current and rising and declining political leaders of every stripe trooped to Rome. International and transnational money managers came and went. Professional technocrats and humanists who busied themselves with the nuts and bolts of the new internationalism joined the crowd. For in spite of their back teeth, John Paul had to be recognized as the X factor who had entered the millennium endgame they had thought they had all but sewed up.

With each of those encounters—no matter how contradictory or bizarre they might seem to some—it became clear to his adversaries that, by a long shot, this Pope was not, as some were suggesting in apparent frustration and lusty irreverence, just some Polish bishop who had stumbled in from the Soviet satellite Gulag of Poland, locked away in its nineteenth-century Marxism, and then lost his way in the world of the twentieth century. Instead, many recalled those terse words of assessment the Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, had given after the first of his several meetings with the new Pope: “a man with a worldview.”

Nevertheless, and even if the world competition had to be the driving
force of his pontificate, there still remained all those urgent and painful questions of the Catholic faithful themselves. Even though he was so busy about so many things, was there still not some way John Paul could attend to the upheaval in the Church that was tossing the faithful about like so many millions of rag dolls? With so wide a spectrum within the Church from Right to Left, and with so deep a hunger at the Center for some measure of comfort—the smallest measure would do, perhaps—could John Paul not find the opportunity to satisfy
somebody?

Certainly, there were those who expected—who demanded—that he try.

John Paul did not even try. Instead, this very public man in the white robe stood as though he were the prophet Habakkuk standing on his watch, waiting for the appointed time to roll around, waiting upon the vision that would surely come, the vision that would not tarry and that would not disappoint when it dawned around him.

Yet soon, very soon, in his pontificate, and vision or no, this Pope who had been hailed as a man of firsts and as marked by destiny from birth was seen by the faithful adherents of his Church as the ultimate enigma: the first successor to Peter the Apostle destined to be everyone's guest, but nobody's Pope.

The hard-faced men of the Soviet surrogate regime in the Poland of 1979 needed no help from press or commentators to make up their minds about Karol Wojtyla. Scratch the surface of government sentiment about him, and you would hear such descriptions as “stormy petrel,” “troublemaker,” “dangerous,” “unpredictable.”

Their history of difficulties with Wojtyla reached back through his years as protégé of Poland's Primate, Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski of Warsaw. The “Fox of Europe” had for nearly forty years successfully outwitted
the plots of Russian commissars, Nazi Gauleiters and Polish Stalinists. He had groomed the younger man carefully to follow in his steps.

Wojtyla had been an apt and eager pupil. Most recently, the Polish government had suffered him as the thorny Cardinal Archbishop of Krakow. Even as recently as September of 1978, not long before he was summoned to Rome for the second papal Conclave in as many months, Wojtyla had written and circulated throughout Poland a pastoral letter in which he had not merely denounced state censorship, but declared that “freedom of information is the proper climate for the full development of a people, and without freedom all progress dies.”

The effect of that letter on the people was still causing trouble for the Warsaw government, when a friendly warning arrived from Rome on October 16, 1978, the second day of the Conclave, that Karol Wojtyla was heading for election as Pope. The Politburo of the Communist Party of Poland (CPP) lost no time gathering for an emergency meeting. It was urgent that the leaders agree on an official government stance in the face of this most unwelcome news.

The wisest course, it was decided, would be to issue a calm, anodyne statement congratulating this son of Poland on his high honor and confidently predicting that his papal election would contribute to fraternal harmony and world peace: “The election of Cardinal Wojtyla to be the next Pope can lead to cooperation between the two ideologies, Marxism and Christianity.” That, it was hoped in official Warsaw, would be that.

In Rome, however, it proved to be the beginning. No sooner was Wojtyla invested as Pope John Paul II than the first trial balloons were floated in the press indicating that he was thinking of a papal trip to Poland. A few chats between well-placed acquaintances—between a member of the Vatican's Secretariat of State and a Polish Embassy official in Rome, perhaps—nudged the proposal more firmly toward Warsaw.

May of 1979 soon emerged in such conversations as John Paul's target date. The idea was to commemorate the nine hundredth anniversary of the martyrdom of St. Stanislaw at the hands of the tyrant King Boleslaw the Bold, who consequently lost his crown and kingdom.

The unofficial Vatican proposal was nightmarish for the Warsaw regime. In Polish eyes, Stanislaw was the dissident par excellence, the prime symbol of Polish resistance against a chauvinist and ultimately unsuccessful government. Unless the CPP wished to risk riots and strikes that might well shut down the whole country, it would not do to have millions of Poles listening to a typical Wojtyla speech on such a day.

As its reply, the CPP managed to get several Eastern European diplomats
in Rome to point out to their counterparts in the Vatican Secretariat of State that any papal visit to Poland now—by which they meant the next five years or so—would be unwise. As to May of 1979, that would be impossible. To emphasize the point, the Warsaw government did something remarkably offensive: They censored John Paul's 1978 Christmas message to Polish Catholics, pointedly excising from it all reference to St. Stanislaw.

The nightmare refused to evaporate, however. Instead, it walked into the presidential palace in Warsaw in the person of Karol Wojtyla's old mentor, the now aging but always redoubtable Cardinal Wyszynski. With an icily superior demeanor, and his demonstrated ability to command the emotions and the actions of millions of citizens, Wyszynski froze Polish President Henryk Jablonski into a corner. For the sake of peace, and very likely his job, Jablonski conceded the possibility of a papal trip in, let us say, perhaps, a year or two.

“
Nie! Tego roku, Ekscelencjo
.” The Cardinal reportedly remained icily firm. “No! This year, Excellency.”

When Jablonski replied with a tentative query as to what date Wyszynski had in mind, the Cardinal had outmaneuvered the President. The papal trip was on. It remained only to fix those pesky dates—the Cardinal had June in his pocket before he left—and to set the itinerary.

The Communist leaders abhorred the discussions that followed between John Paul's advance men and the government watchdogs. The CPP tried to dictate the length of the Pontiff's stay, what he would discuss, what sort of reception he would be accorded, the cities he would visit. “The Pope can't go everywhere he likes,” came one stiff negotiating rejoinder from Cults Minister Kazimierz Kakol. But having given the first crucial inch, they found that fiat was no longer a trump card for them. They were forced into negotiation.

No, the Pope could not visit the Katowice and Piekary Ślaskie coalfields just because he once worked in a quarry. No, there would be no state holiday so that schoolchildren and workers could greet the Pope. Yes, His Holiness would be officially received at the airport upon his arrival. Yes, President Jablonski would sit down in a private meeting with John Paul. No a thousand times to any papal visit to the church he had built at Nowa Huta in the teeth of the government's armed opposition. Well, all right then, a visit to the Nowa Huta suburbs would be tolerated, and a few further side trips would be worked out. But emphatically no, there would be no official government “invitation.” Having been outmaneuvered was one thing. Allowing the government's nose to be publicly rubbed in it was another.