Keys of This Blood (15 page)

Putting the best face on a bad situation, the government finally agreed
on a plan to be offered to John Paul. The Pope's representatives had named several places the Holy Father wished to visit. The government would divide the country into four parts. Each quadrant would be centered around a principal city John Paul insisted be included. There would be Warsaw, of course, as the capital where the Pope would arrive, and where he would have his reception and his meeting with President Jablonski. There would be Gniezno, the official See of Poland's Cardinal Primate and a place of abiding religious and historical significance. The third quadrant would center around Częstochowa, the site of Poland's great Marian shrine of Jasna Góra. Finally, Krakow, where John Paul himself had until recently been such a troublesome cardinal archbishop, would be the center of the fourth quadrant.

Citizens would be allowed to travel only within the quadrant where they lived in order to see Papa Wojtyla. The forty thousand Soviet garrison troops would be confined to barracks for the duration of the papal visit; but in their place, special mobile units of “security agents” would be trucked into each city.

The side trips that would be allowed, it was finally determined, would include the Pope's hometown of Wadowice and the Nazi death camps. But Nowa Huta's little church still got an emphatic thumbs down.

It was specifically decided that none of the wives of government officials would attend any reception. Presumably, the danger was too great that some might be overcome with emotion at the Holy Father's presence and kneel to kiss his ring.

Back and forth the discussions and the emissaries flew between Rome and Warsaw. When just about everything was in place except Moscow's approval, one Vatican official summed up the tone and the mood of the negotiations: “It has been a fight from start to finish. The [Polish] authorities are terrified.”

Speculation inevitably arose in some quarters that Moscow's relatively quick approval of the plan—surprising to some, and surely disappointing to officials in Warsaw—may have owed something to the long meeting a few months before between John Paul II and Andrei Gromyko. “This papal visit is a Polish bit of nonsense,” Soviet Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev reportedly grumbled. “Let them take care of it. But no accidents!”

Though it had been agreed that no official invitation would be forth-coming, Warsaw had insisted on making the first official announcement. It did so on March 2, 1979. His Holiness the Pope would come for a nine-day “pilgrimage” to Poland. The dates agreed were June 2 to June 11. Two hours later, a Radio Vatican broadcast followed with the same news, as arranged.

“This is not a religious or state visit.” Chauvinist editor Mieczyslaw
Rakowski was quick to make clear the official CPP stance in an editorial published in the government organ,
Polityka
. “He [John Paul] is a Pole coming to his home country, and we will welcome him as a Pole…. We believe the papal visit will strengthen unity in Poland.”

This pair of announcements set the stage for a sort of split-screen drama, entirely new to current world politics, that would be played out in Poland's streets and squares and conference rooms, a drama that would be ever so carefully monitored as a test case by John Paul's adversaries and friends in the arena of geopolitical contention.

The Polish regime was one prime actor in the drama. It had been forced by Rome into a perilous tightrope situation. Since the Party's beginnings after World War II as representative of a rabidly Stalinist Soviet regime, its history in Poland had been dismal. Its members had been consistently anti-Catholic and anti-papal. In 1948, seven hundred Catholic priests had been jailed. In 1953, Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski had been “deposed” and imprisoned. At least once, a plan to do away with Karol Cardinal Wojtyla had been contemplated.

The tally on the secular side of things was no better. The economy of Poland was in ruins. The infrastructure was aging and broken down. Production was sagging. The country's debt to foreign banks ran well over $25 billion. The Communist regime existed in Poland only because of those forty thousand Soviet troops quartered in the eastern part of the country. At its maximum, the CPP itself counted a mere 2.5 million members out of a population of 35 million. After thirty-five years of total control over all means of production and all that was produced, and over education and the media, the brute fact was that in Poland, the special constituency of any Communist Party—the workers—was totally alienated from Communism in general and from this Communist regime in particular. And the brute fact was, further, that workers and nearly everybody else had remained firmly devoted to the Church.

Now the Warsaw Politburo was faced with the reality that it had been forced by Wyszynski and Wojtyla—two powerful adversaries they had thought to destroy—to receive one of them as Pope and as honored guest. To deny John Paul's visit would have been seen as imposing further government oppression; and any such signal would have had two likely consequences. Further financial bailouts from the West would become a much more difficult proposition. And further unrest at home would become much more likely. Either one of those consequences could bring on the military investment of Poland by the Soviets.

Yet by acquiescing in the papal visit, the government leaders were not by any means clear of those same risks. They well knew from experience that John Paul could not be prevented from disseminating direct challenges,
in person and over the airwaves, to vast crowds of Poles and to the world. Oh, they would do their best. They would delay and misroute busloads of pilgrims. They would beat “disorderly” Catholics now and again. They would grumble over the airwaves and arrange for third-party criticisms in the international media. But they knew they could neither totally predict John Paul's actions nor totally control the public response to his presence for nine days.

Already rejected by the people they ruled and nominally represented, the CPP could not tolerate an open show of the Party's weakness or of popular unrest. Whatever happened, they would have to act out the pretense that the visit was yet another triumph of the proletarian regime of the Polish People's Republic, and then pick up the pieces as best they could.

On the other side of this split-screen drama, John Paul was about to make an extraordinary entrance, bringing with him to what seemed this unlikeliest of places a deep and compelling challenge to the status quo of the world order.

By contrast to the position of the Polish regime in this affair, it was true that in a certain sense John Paul was leading from strength in coming to Poland to make this first test of everything essential to his pontificate, as he planned it even then. He knew this country—its people, its leaders, its problems, its astonishing strengths—not only as one of its sons but as one of its heroes. In the negotiations just completed for his pilgrimage, he had demonstrated again his ability to use that knowledge to his advantage.

Nevertheless, the risks for the Pope were greater in some ways than those faced by the CPP. If he had his way, the Communist Party in Poland would be playing out an endgame of sorts. At the same time, however, the entire future of his own papal policy would stand or fall on this testing ground of Poland.

Success for John Paul would mean a tacit acceptance by a variety of players—not all of them visible onstage—of a long-range challenge that he would offer on the basis of the apparently fragile strength of the papacy. A challenge not to his Polish Catholics, but certainly to the Communist Party in Poland, to the Soviet system itself and, further, to the entrenched powers of the world beyond Eastern Europe that had tied certain vital interests of their own to Poland's deplorable condition. As no other man alive, John Paul saw himself at this one moment in a position to show up the limits of the Soviet system on the very ground it occupied, and to show the way to a different path—a different direction—for politics and policies.

Still, success for John Paul did not mean that Poland was to establish
its freedom by leaving the Soviet system. Rather, the role he saw for Poland was messianic, in the sense that it would—if he succeeded—become the very leaven that would change the Soviet system itself. And not only in Warsaw, but at its heart.

And if he failed? Despite the obviously decayed system of Soviet Communism, both the task John Paul had set for himself and his risk of failure seemed monumental to those advisers privy to his aims. Perhaps he was leading from strength by coming first to Poland. But there were dangers enough to match the advantages. He would have his own tightrope to walk.

For one thing, John Paul could not afford an uprising in Poland any more than could his unwilling hosts. He was about to come home to 35 million Poles who in their majority would rise up if he said to rise up, who would respond to his every emotion. Yet if he allowed his presence to become a signal for riots and revolt, then what was meant to be the beginning of a long, patient and dangerous road would instead be the end for all his plans. He would at the very least be branded as an American lackey. He would certainly be seen as a bull let loose in the china shop of Cold War tensions. Just as certainly, his delicate probe at the Soviet Union, already under way in various East European countries, would be doomed. He would introduce no challenge, no new spirit, no leaven, in Poland or anywhere else. He would, in fact, be unwelcome in the world; and plans already on the drawing board of his mind for future variations of this Poland card he was about to play would be worse than useless. He would have no choice but to slink back to Rome to rethink his entire papacy.

There could be no loss of control, therefore. However emotional this homecoming might be for him—and how could it be otherwise?—there could be no bowing to short-term ego satisfactions, no empty triumphalism, no isolated moments of inflammatory mistakes.

Never in any future trip would John Paul have the same breathless sense of opening a door and stepping into the unknown. No subsequent papal action of his would involve so lethal a gamble.

As the date drew near for this split-screen drama of the Polish Party and the Polish Pope to begin, those who settled in to watch with interest included some in Western capitals who regarded the whole venture as unwarranted papal meddling in the politics of a very sensitive area—and in the profits they reaped from it. There were others, in the Soviet-dominated East, who had already decided this Polish Pope had feet too big even for the sandals of the Great Fisherman. And there were those in John Paul's own Vatican who fervently wished this entire episode
would quickly end, and that there would be no more of its kind to follow from this venturesome Pope.

At 10:05 on Saturday morning, June 2, as Pope John Paul's all-white Alitalia 727 jet transport touched down at Okecie, Warsaw's military airport, bells in every church, monastery and convent throughout Poland's eleven thousand cities, towns and villages rang in joyous welcome. A smiling John Paul II stepped from the plane to the shouts and cheers of twenty thousand people from the Warsaw quadrant who had been allowed to approach the landing site.

Every unsmiling member of the formal reception committee watched as the Pope knelt and kissed the ground of Poland. Was this a kiss of love from a returning son? Or was it an embrace of the land and its people by a Pope claiming possession of both?

No hint of an answer came from John Paul as he rose, squared his shoulders and for some seconds looked each government official in the eyes. For, to be sure, every official worthy of the name was there: CPP Chief Edward Gierek; President Henryk Jablonski; Prime Minister Piotr Jaroszewicz;
Polityka
's editor, Mieczyslaw Rakowski; CPP Secretary Stanislaw Kania; Cults Minister Kazimierz Kakol; some three or four more. They all had to be there; for no one or two or three would have come without the whole contingent.

Standing to one side in a delegation of black-robed Churchmen was the slightly built, sharp-eyed Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski. He exchanged an unsmiling glance with the younger man, once his protégé, now his Pope. By now, the Cardinal and the Church in Poland had prepared things as well as could be done. Advance copies of John Paul's speeches had been widely distributed. Stewards from local parishes all over the country had been organized and instructed by Catholic groups to help keep things calm. On this morning, Wyszynski's shining blue eyes gave the only hint of his satisfaction at this, his latest triumph, of his affection for Karol Wojtyla, of his hope for this venture that had earned the derision of one Polish official as “a piece of papal mania.”

Standing between his old enemy, Party Chief Gierek, and his old friend. Cardinal Wyszynski, Pope John Paul viewed the march-past of the goose-stepping honor guard. He listened to the solemn playing of the Vatican anthem. He heard the familiar words of the Polish anthem: “… while we live, who still believe in Poland's ancestral faith….” He heard the formal words of welcome from his hosts.

When John Paul's turn at the microphone came, there was an immediate
contrast to the civil but frigid official welcome. With appealing reference to the Polish anthem's refrain, the Pontiff exulted that “a Pole coming today from the land of Italy to the land of Poland is received on the threshold of his pilgrimage with those words which we have always used to express the nation's unflagging will to live.” Every Pole who heard him—officials and citizens alike—understood his meaning. Polands “ancestral faith,” he was saying, is the heart of its people. Without faith as a living presence, the people die and there is no Poland.

The response from the crowd was like a tidal wave sweeping outward from Okecie Airport. Whether or not they had actually heard his remarks at his arrival or read an advance copy of his speech, his very presence was meaning enough. An estimated 290,000 cheering, weeping, chanting, praying Poles scattered flowers in the path of the Pontiff's motorcade; they waved a forest of papal and Polish flags and displayed brightly colored banners.