Keys of This Blood (19 page)

As time went on, it was only natural that some papal sources within the Vatican did show a certain exasperation with such insistently naive interpretations of the Pontiff's motives and intent on his travels. It seemed to these observers and participants that commentators and reporters had not paid sufficient attention even to their own early stories about Wojtyla's record of “firsts,” or about Wojtyla as a man marked for a special destiny, or about what he had accomplished as priest and bishop in Poland.

Still, Rome is a persevering and patient place. It was felt that, even without rereading the early press, and without extensive papal interviews either, a simple review of John Paul's achievements would soon force recognition that, by his travels alone, in a true and benign sense, this Pope was turning the papacy inside out.

Besides, argued some of John Paul's aides, in all fairness it was not surprising that public and private understanding lagged far behind the reality of what John Paul was really about in undertaking his trips. The mere fact that he was becoming a sort of papal Marco Polo was in itself a revolution that took some getting used to.

After all, as these partisans of patience reminded their Vatican colleagues, the Roman Catholic Pope had always been someone who resided and presided in Rome. Even for Romans, he had always been permanently “
there
,” never in the “
here
” of our ordinary lives. He had been perpetually separated from “
here
” by flanks of cardinals and prelates. He had been housed in hush and secrecy. A precious few might gain access to a semiprivate audience, where they would listen to the
Pope speak from a throne surrounded by severe-faced chamberlains and exotically dressed guards. People who were very special might have their picture taken with the Holy Father and kiss his ring. A very few—usually important people in their own right, the kind who lived in a “
there
” somewhere else—might actually meet deep in the mysterious recesses of the Vatican's Apostolic Palace for a conversation with the Pope.

The ancient ecclesiastical reason for this most Catholic attitude had always seemed simple and clear and willingly accepted. It was true that, as a point of sacred physical origin, the mother church of all Christianity was in Jerusalem. But it was also true that, under the Holy Spirit's inspiration, Christianity had long ago renounced all freehold lease on those places made holy by Christ's earthly presence as a mortal man. In the primary Christian optic, it was on one of Rome's seven hills—on
mons vaticanus
, Vatican Hill—that God had staked a perpetual claim to 110 acres for the precise geographical and spiritual center of his visible Church as sole source of blessing and salvation.

And so had Rome been held in all the long heyday of Catholicism as the universal religion in all of Europe. From Galway Bay in Ireland to the Ural Mountains of pre-Soviet and even Soviet Russia, and from Archangel in the Arctic Circle to the Congo River in Africa, this Rome was held to be the truest center of the universe.

Even when the Americas and Asia and Oceania hove into sight of Christian eyes, Rome remained the center. And the European countries ringed nearest around it came to be seen as the Christian heartland in an expanding world.

For the first seventeen hundred years of the papacy, then, and in a very real sense, it could fairly be said that the Pope was Rome, and Rome was the Pope. It wasn't exactly that no pope ever traveled outside Rome. But it was true that no pope ever traveled over the high seas. Never beyond that Christian heartland, in fact. Not even in forced exile.

It was true, as well, and just as significant, that whatever papal travels there were had always had a pointedly clear and totally ecclesiastical objective. A special council of bishops, perhaps; a royal coronation; a political meeting; a visit to a particularly venerable shrine.

The few exceptions only served to prove the rule. The instance of Julius II riding out in the full regalia of a knight at arms to fight his own battles, in the literal, hand-to-hand sense of the term, was something Catholics preferred to forget as most unpapal behavior. Even when the papacy was transferred to Avignon in southern France—allegedly for security reasons that encompassed sixty-nine years and six pontificates—the popes stayed put at Avignon. The principle, if not the site, remained the same. They still were “Roman popes.”

In the nineteenth century, there were two exceptions to this tradition. Pius VI and Pius VII left Rome, but only because they were kidnapped by French governments and imprisoned on French soil. Even then the reason was arguably—and perhaps doubly—ecclesiastical. And while Pius VI died in his imprisonment, Pius VII made it back to Rome as soon as he was allowed by his captors.

Moreover, staying in Rome has not always been an easy matter. Leaving aside the early martyr popes, who included Peter himself, as late as 1870 Pius IX suffered the loss of all papal territory in Italy—a swath of some 16, 000 square miles—to the infant Italian state. In retaliation, Pius declared himself a “prisoner of the Vatican.” He not only refused to leave the complex of buildings on Vatican Hill; he would not so much as set foot on the front balcony of St. Peter's Basilica to give his blessing to the crowds in the square below.

This historic resolve was perpetuated by every pope after Pius IX until, in 1929, the Italian government made honorable amends, indemnifying the Vatican of Pius XI for its earlier losses with an undisclosed sum of money and certain concessions of privilege in the social, economic and political life of the country.

No sense of wanderlust invaded the papacy even then, however. Rather, popes simply and most naturally reverted to the ancient pattern. Neither the summer retreats of Pius XII to Castel Gandolfo, for example, nor his compassionate succoring of the wounded in the streets of Rome in the midst of at least one of the twenty Allied bombings during World War II, were seen by him or anyone else as exceptions.

In a similar manner, John XXIII's rare forays out of the Vatican—a pilgrimage to the holy shrine of Loreto, a visit with the convicts in Regina Coeli, Rome's central prison—were wholly and traditionally ecclesiastical in nature.

Paul VI did break one mold: He was the first to travel overseas. But it was almost a technical change that did not alter the basic pattern; for his intent and his every action on those trips were entirely governed by the ancient ecclesiastical tradition. From the papal point of view, in fact, the travels of Paul VI were not to cities or to nations at all. They were to a shrine here, to a devotional exercise there, to an international organization elsewhere.

To effect a reconciliation between Catholics and Greek Orthodox Christians, for example, he went to the Holy Land and to Turkey. It was for Eucharistic celebrations that he went to Uganda, India, Colombia, the Philippines and Australia. Even his stopovers in Iran, Indonesia, Samoa, Hong Kong and Sri Lanka were taken as what they were—necessary stepping-stones along an ecclesiastical journey. A major
speech—a highlight in Paul VI's life—took him to the United Nations headquarters in New York. It was to honor the Virgin Mary that he went to Portugal's famous shrine at Fatima. Though there was the appearance of innovation, in other words, and though he occasionally adopted the description of himself as the “Pilgrim Pope,” Paul VI set no new pattern, at least in this area of papal tradition and observance.

When seen against the backdrop of so long, so consistent and compelling a record of papal travel, the more patient members of John Paul's inner council argued that it was fair to expect a certain resistance to change; to expect a lag time for understanding to catch up even with John Paul's traveling ways, not to mention his remarkable outlook on the world he was coming to know so intimately.

Moreover, it was pointed out, for anyone who understood the very nature of the Vatican, it would not do for long to argue that John Paul was just a publicity seeker or craved simple pastoral work. It made no sense to argue that a proven media magnate such as John Paul would not bother to set foot out of the Vatican, if all he wanted was a high publicity profile. Or that the two to three million visitors who came to the Vatican each year would not serve even the deepest pastoral urge to press the flesh.

In point of fact, the Vatican has long been the one place in the world where nothing is treated as off limits by the most intricate, ever-watchful, sometimes irreverently curious and incompassionate network of global communications. The Vatican has always been what one veteran hand described as “a place where every corridor is a whispering gallery and every office an echo chamber.” The eighteenth-century French diplomat Joseph de Maistre doubted “that even the Holy Spirit could fly through it without being buffeted by the winds of gossip and the stentorian breathing of secrets.” And things had not changed a bit two hundred years later when Frank Shakespeare, posted as United States ambassador to the Holy See, observed that “the Vatican is unrivaled as a listening post.”

Within that atmosphere, a swarm of international journalists, reporters and commentators—not to mention embassy and consular officers whose business it is to monitor this Pope and his Vatican—spend entire careers wiring themselves into vast networks of “confidential” Vatican sources.

On top of that, it is an open secret—especially since the 1981 attempt on the Pope's life—that not only the Italian secret services but at least three other governments participate in the most minute monitoring of John Paul: his comings and goings; his staff; his food; his clothes; who reaches him by letter and by phone, and whom he reaches; who sees him
and why and for how long and what transpires between them. Always someone is watching, someone is listening, someone is probing and noting and reporting.

It is well understood by all, moreover, that no matter who is involved in any Vatican conversation or discussion, and no matter at what level of importance or secrecy, or what the subject at hand may be, matters finally turn to what the Pope may think about this, or what he may or may not do or say about that. Finally, in other words, whether he is personally present or not, the Pope is at the center of every confidence, every informal chat, every speculation and rumor.

In short, if John Paul were to be dismissed as merely a master of public relations, then by the same inexorable logic it had to be admitted that in the Vatican itself he had the ideal bureaucratic weapon for making news. He needed only to stir any pot of speculation with the papal stick of rumor to make headlines whenever he might choose. If all he wanted was publicity, why bother to log hundreds of thousands of miles in scores of supremely exhausting papal trips to something approaching a hundred countries to get it?

Within the arena of global competition where lay the real reason for John Paul's gargantuan travel agenda, there were a certain number of leaders who did begin to understand in a general way that they were watching and listening to a pope who was saying and doing things that were entirely new. But even they were unable to span the quantum leap between the traditional papal mind as they had always known it and the mind of this once Polish Pope.

To be sure, he had come out of provincial Krakow. In the words of one doorman there who had known him for years, Papa Wojtyla “had left … for Rome with an overnight bag, a toothbrush and a couple of bread rolls to eat.” Perhaps so. But quickly enough he seemed to have been transformed by the papacy. And now he was returning the favor. That much, at least, seemed clear.

Nevertheless, even his adversaries in the geopolitical arena—men who saw themselves as the very embodiment of a bright and totally new future for the world—displayed in John Paul's regard all the parochialism of which they habitually accused so many others. Like the skeptical Nathanael who asked on first hearing about Jesus, “Can any good come out of Nazareth?” such papal critics wondered, “Can any good come at the hands of an archbishop from provincial Krakow in retrograde Poland, who fancies for himself certain worldwide and internationalist aims?”

Lurking beneath the surface of such doubts, however, was the dawning realization for some that, fitted for combat or not, John Paul regarded
their competition, and had entered into it, as the most important struggle of our age. And there was the dawning realization, as well, that he had entered it over their heads by thrusting himself and the papacy he embodied into the forefront of the transnational mind that was being formed so swiftly and surely among his contemporaries.

“Holy Father,” John Paul was asked toward the end of a private audience for visiting dignitaries in 1983, “can we expect Your Holiness to undertake many more of these papal visits to different parts of the world?”

John Paul replied with candor. “Until as many men and women and children as I can reach have seen the face and heard the voice of Christ's Vicar; for I am their Pope, and this is what the Blessed Mother wishes her Son's Vicar to do.”

That was anything but the voice of someone seeking publicity as an escape, or a high international profile because he enjoyed the razzle-dazzle. It sounded the authentic tones of a man led by a commanding vision and intent upon a definite goal.

The trouble was that the more John Paul traveled in the world and the more he spoke to leaders and citizens in the countries and the cities and the wide places in the road where they lived, the more he seemed to be taken in some quarters as a living, traveling enigma. And as surely as nature abhors a vacuum, so do leaders in political, economic and social power abhor an enigma loose in their territory.

Even among John Paul's more observant and careful adversaries, some seemed truly at a loss to know what it was this Pope saw abroad in their world that was so dire as to have plunged him into what many in his own Church were criticizing as a perilous course, and possibly the most disastrous one any pope had ever set for himself. The most careful watch on this most public of popes, and the most searching analyses of his moves, did not seem to reveal to John Paul's secular adversaries—or to most of his allies—what lay behind the vast array of odd and seemingly contradictory aspects of his behavior as world leader, or as Vicar of Christ.