Keys of This Blood (86 page)

The
Interrex
Pact has been so crucial to Poland's survival as a people—a survival that was to prove nothing short of miraculous—that it must be ranked beside the Piast Pact as the Second Pact of Polishness.

·   ·   ·

The Third Pact of Polishness came about in circumstances far different from those that led to the Piast Pact and the
Interrex
Pact, circumstances of mortal danger for Poland. Even more than the first two, the Third Pact reflects the intimacy with the divine that lies at the heart of Polish Catholicism and of the Polish nation as a people.

By the 1600s, Poland was a power to be reckoned with in Central Europe. It was commercially and industrially prosperous. It possessed a well-trained army that included forty thousand Cossacks and was backed by multiple reserves. It had defeated the Russians and brought back their Czar Szujski in chains to Warsaw. It had defeated the Teutonic Knights at the terrible battle of Tannenberg in 1410. Internally, it was the mecca of Humanism—one of its brightest stars in that regard was the astronomer Copernicus, who stands as one key to modern astronomy. And it remained robustly Roman Catholic in the face of a rampant Lutheranism and Calvinism, and of a bellicose, expansionist Ottoman Turkey.

In 1648, the Unitary Republic of Poland was invaded and attacked by both Swedish and Turkish forces. At a certain stage of the war, only the Paulite Monastery on Jasna Cora—the Bright Mountain—overlooking the town of Częstochowa held out against the Swedish invaders.

Preserved in that monastery was the most famous Polish icon of Mary and the Infant Jesus. A special object of veneration since ancient Polish Christian times, the icon had been lodged at Jasna Cora since 1382. It is said to have been painted by St. Luke the Evangelist on a plank that originally served as a table for Jesus, his mother, Mary, and his foster father, Joseph, in their home in Nazareth. The right cheek of Mary's face on the icon bears a scar inflicted by a Tartar saber in 1430. Miraculously, as it seemed, Jasna Góra was never taken. After forty days of siege, the Swedish army retired.

In 1655, after peace came, King Jan Kazimierz proclaimed Mary to be Queen of the Kingdom of Poland. Like the Piast Pact and the
Interrex
Pact, that proclamation—together with its implicit promise of special fealty to Mary and reliance on her protection—has never been rescinded or denied or abandoned by the Polish nation or by any Polish government, Catholic or Communist, since 1655. Poland was often described as, and was in fact, the Garden of Eden of the New Eve: of Mary, the Virgin Mother of that Jesus whom Poles worshiped as God, Creator and Redeemer.

For the de-Catholicized and de-Christianized nations of the West today, the problem presented by the Polish Pact with Mary is even worse than the problem of the
Interrex
Pact. It appears simplistic, downright
superstitious and objectionable, in fact. Yet, from the start of Roman Christianity in Poland, Mary was accorded a special position, corresponding to the dignity that had always been accorded her in the Church as the mother of God's Son: as the heavenly mother, therefore, of all who belong to Christ.

At the basis of this veneration of Mary is the Roman Catholic certainty that the whole purpose of knowing about Jesus is to love him. The whole purpose, for example, of confessing sins and of assisting at the Sacrifice of the Mass is to be closely linked, personally and intimately, with Jesus. Nor is that intimacy a group event. Catholicism was never a religion of mass feeling or group sentiment. To be sure, each Catholic belongs to the community of believers; but the bond of each Catholic with Jesus is personal.

According to Catholicism, there is no possibility of knowing and loving Jesus unless he is accepted as he presents himself to us. As he presented himself, in other words, in his life, in his physical sufferings, in his resurrection, and as he presents himself today in his Church, under the veils of the Eucharist as the central sacrament of Roman Catholicism. For, in that sacrament, Catholics hold that they really participate in all that Jesus did, both before he died and subsequently—that they are united with Jesus in the actuality of his earthly and his celestial life.

“Behold! I stand at the door and knock,” Jesus is believed to say in the biblical words. “If any man will admit me, I will come into him, and eat with him, and he with me.” God's guarantee of personal intimacy.

That certainty is the basis for what Catholics of vibrant faith have always spoken of as their spiritual—their “inner” or “interior”—life. That is their vocabulary of personal identification with Jesus, and of their conviction that Jesus desires a personal intimacy with each one.

Traditionally in Catholic life, such intimacy is brought about by God's grace in the individual, and by cooperation with that grace on the part of each person. Intimate association is fostered, in other words, by entering into all the details of Christ's life on earth and in Heaven through prayer and ascetical practices and mental effort: by entering into his words, his thoughts, his actions, into his earthly and his eternal relationship with his mother, with his foster father, with his saints and his companions, with his heavenly Father and his Holy Spirit, with his sacraments and his laws, with his governance of human history. All of that is part of each individual's intimacy with Jesus.

In all of that, Mary has held a special place since the earliest days of the Church. Catholics have understood by the knowledge of faith that as the woman selected from eternity to be the mother of Christ without
any collaboration of a man, Mary was privileged from conception in her mother's womb. For many centuries before it was declared as dogma, the faithful have held that when Mary's mortal life was done, she was transferred body and soul to the Heaven of her Son's glory, where she occupies a special position.

It is that certainty, and that inexpressible joy of intimacy touched with the glory of God, that King Jan Kazimierz proclaimed as the Third Pact of Polishness in 1655. But even before that—fairly early in Poland's history as Unitary Republic—the relationship with Mary as the mother of Jesus and, therefore, as an essential aspect of Catholic intimacy with her Son was given lively and concrete expression.

In 1617—within an area of several square miles that lies between Wadowice, where Karol Wojtyla was born, and Krakow, where he lived, studied, was ordained as priest and served as Cardinal Archbishop—a remarkable project was begun by the Palatine Count Mikolaj Zebrzydowski in fulfillment of a penitential vow. Within two generations, that area, marked by four hills and known as Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, was covered with constructions—monuments, houses, churches, chapels, shrines, walks and trails and roads—that reproduced the main events in the life of Jesus and his associates. Represented at Kalwaria are Jesus' birthplace in Bethlehem, his home in Nazareth, the ancient Jerusalem that witnessed his preaching, passion, death and resurrection, and the founding of his Church.

And there, dwarfing the reproductions of Mount Zion, Mount Moriah and the Mount of Olives, stands the basilica dedicated to Mary as the Angelic Mother. There today, every year at the celebration of Christ's resurrection at Easter, and at the celebration of the Assumption—the taking of Mary in her whole person, body and soul, into her Son's eternal Heaven—anything up to sixty thousand Poles share in the intimacy between the divine and the human. They express a special love for Mary, because Jesus chose her as his mother. They place themselves in her charge and protection, because as babe and boy, Jesus freely chose to do exactly that. So said the Third Pact of Polishness in 1655. And so it says today.

Those Three Pacts of Polishness—the Piast Pact with the Holy See, the Pact with the Roman Catholic Primate of Poland as the
Interrex
, the Pact with Mary as the Queen of Poland—define the heritage, the meaning and the strength of Polishness. Nowadays, the one Pole whose Polishness is of vital interest to the world at large is Papa Wojtyla, and in one specific
regard: What has that Polishness to do actually with the papal character and policy of the “Polish Pope”?

It is a curious detail about the twelve-year pontificate of John Paul that, in the beginning, he was almost constantly referred to as the “Polish Pope,” but that with the passage of the years, the Polish tag has been most frequently omitted, almost as if people had stopped wondering and saying “a
Polish
Pope?” This change can be put down to the international stature Pope John Paul has achieved during the intervening years; today he is seen primarily as a cosmopolitan citizen, as belonging to the whole world. It is the surest sign of his successful drive to achieve geopolitical status and stature in the eyes of his contemporaries.

But a neglect of his Polishness as a major factor in his papal character and policy entails a misunderstanding of the role he has intended and does today intend to play as Pope, and of the geopolitical vision that animates him.

The first time that phrase, the “Polish Pope,” rose in people's minds and passed their lips to describe Karol Wojtyla was the first time the world laid eyes on him as Pope John Paul II; and it was, in all probability, because of one simple spontaneous gesture of his on that occasion.

At 8:17
P.M.
, the evening of the day he was elected Pope, October 16, 1978, he stepped out onto the front balcony of St. Peter's Basilica, Rome, flanked by some cardinals and officials. The golden light of the illuminations caught the blood-red and white colors of his vestments, the blue of his eyes, but it revealed one other detail—a particular gesture of his—that took all Vatican-watchers by surprise. In living memory, no Pope had ever used that gesture; it was not “Roman,” in that sense, nor was it “Roman Catholic” in the experience of the millions of Roman Catholics in the Western world who gazed on that scene live and by television satellite. And yet it seemed totally fitting and, because unwonted and new, a sign that this Pope represented a new era.

It was the position of his hands. Photographs and video records of the five previous popes (John Paul I, Paul VI, John XXIII, Pius XII, Pius XI), going back to 1922—the only popes in history who were caught on film at that solemn moment of their first appearance in front of the wide world—show a uniform tradition. As a newly elected pope, each one held both hands together at the level of the breastbone, palm on palm, fingers on fingers, thumbs crossed. It was and still is the normal Roman Catholic gesture of prayer and divine worship.

Karol Wojtyla's hands were closed in fists, and his right forearm was laid over the left, thus forming a cross on his chest, a fist almost touching the right and left shoulder. Many of the viewers that night had never
seen this gesture; it meant little to them. Some realized they had seen it depicted in icons of saints from Eastern European countries, particularly of martyrs going to their death or lying in the repose of death. Most of those who remarked on it took it as a “Polish” or “Slavic” gesture of prayerfulness. This was reinforced by the tones of his first three words: “
Sia lodato Gesucristo
” (May Jesus Christ be praised). The language was Italian certainly, and the expression was Roman Catholic. But the basso voice with its unmistakably Slavic pronunciation—particularly the l and the o and the other long vowels—resonated with that lilt so many had heard only in Slavonic hymns.

This Pope was quite new. This was the “Polish Pope.”

Most people in the West knew little about Poland and still less about Russia when Karol Wojtyla became Pope. But with his election to the See of Peter, at least some accurate information about modern conditions in Poland has reached the general public in the West. But what filters through the news media and the current spate of novels and travel books about both countries is not sufficient to give any substance to the term “Polish” when applied to the present Pope. His Polishness remains a vague, ill-defined adjective indicating only where he was born but little else that is clear. Such a poverty of detail and lack of clarity about John Paul's Polishness becomes a crippling liability in view of the geopolitical turn Karol Wojtyla has given to his papacy. Has that geopolitical bent of his eliminated his Polishness as a factor, or—conversely—how genuine can the geopolitical mind of someone be who is genuinely Polish?

Are we dealing here with two opposites (Polishness and geopolitics) in one and the same character?

The facts of history may be mind-boggling for many. Whoever says “Poland,” meaning the Polish nation, and with full knowledge of what he is talking about, is saying three things about that “Poland,” which boggle the modern mind as irreconcilables: Poland the bastion of papal Rome as the center of a georeligion; Poland the veritable shrine of that religious intimacy with divinity that is specifically Roman Catholic; and Poland the commonwealth of nations. That “Poland” is the direct result of the Three Pacts of Polishness; and the salient traits of John Paul as Pope have a clear lineage back to those Pacts.

The Piast Pact itself is the very womb of Polishness; and it is also the crucible in which the dimensions and the unremitting certainty of John Paul's driving political vision were formed and purified. This foundational Pact ensured that his association with Rome was as natural as his association with Christ and his mother, Mary. It made second nature for him the idea and goal of human membership in the family of nations—more
than a mere Internationalist, more than a simple Transnationalist, both of whom conceive the nations as an association of distinct parts related by human-fashioned pacts. Giving him form as a geopolitician because of his georeligion, it enabled him to start from the real unity of all men and women according to the Jagiellonian principle.

Beginning with the Piast Pact of 990, the Poles as a nation of people had identified themselves increasingly and uniquely as a people who not only communicated intelligibly with God but formed their practical and daily associations with one another and with the nations around them on the principle of that “divine love,” cited in the Jagiellonian Act of Union, through which “laws are established, kingdoms are maintained, cities are set in order, and the well-being of the State is brought to the highest level.”