Keys of This Blood (92 page)

These were the men who were the direct ecclesiastical and religious ancestors of Karol Wojtyla.

At the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Poland's Bishop Primate and
Interrex
, Edmund Cardinal Dalbor, saw fully two million of his people forcibly conscripted to fight the war of their Russian, Austrian and Prussian oppressors. By war's end, 220,000 Poles serving in the armies of Austria had been killed, as well as 110,000 in the German Army, and 55,000 in the Russian Army. In the territories that had been Poland before the partitions, two million buildings and two thirds of all railroad yards and stations were destroyed. In all, $10 billion in Polish property was sacrificed in somebody else's war.

Finally, in the teeth of all that destruction, the Austrian forces were in
retreat from Polish lands by the beginning of 1918, and a German-Austrian defeat was at last on the horizon. Even before the November 11 armistice, Cardinal Dalbor set in motion a whole series of political events, and a cascade of new hope for Poland.

Early in 1918, in his mandated role as
Interrex
, Dalbor assembled a Regency Council composed of Archbishop Alexander Kakowski, Prince Zdzislaw Lubomirsk, and Dr. Jozef Ostrowski. The Polish delegates to the Austrian parliament took advantage of the fast-developing situation to declare their independence from Austria as citizens of a freed Poland.

Though Poles had not been permitted to govern themselves for over a century, they had by no means forgotten how. On November 7, 1918, a provisional Polish government was formed in Lublin. On Armistice Day itself, November 11, the Regency Council dissolved itself and transferred power to the commander of the Polish Legions, Jozef Pilsudski. Pilsudski in turn issued a decree declaring Poland a republic—the Second Polish Republic—with himself as provisional head of state. Within barely two months more, a general election for a constitutional Polish parliament was conducted.

Hardly had this cascade of hope poured out, however, when a shadow of what lay in store cast itself over Poland. In February of 1919, with the new Polish
Sejm
barely elected, Lenin's Bolshevik government in Russia made a bid to annihilate the Second Polish Republic before it could consolidate itself. Lenin flung an army of 800,000 men into the effort. With a three-to-one superiority in artillery over the defending Poles, Bolshevik Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky was soon advancing to the very gates of Warsaw.

Even in the face of certain disaster, Cardinal Primate Dalbor would not allow Poland to be denied again. He did the one thing the Pacts of Polishness dictated. Before the decisive battle was engaged, in August 1920, he led his bishops in a formal rededication of the Polish nation to Mary as its Queen. He made for the Second Polish Republic the very same pact of trust that had been made by King Jan Kazimierz for the First Republic just before the Swedes were unexpectedly driven out of Poland in the seventeenth century.

Sure enough, it had the same results. Despite all the odds, the Poles routed Lenin's superior army and pursued its remnants well beyond the Vistula River and the eastern borders of Poland. The date of Tukhachevsky's unexpected rout and defeat was August 15—the Feast of Mary's Assumption into Heaven. And, as any Pole will declare to this day, that victory was a miracle—the “Miracle of the Vistula.” That miracle was the effect of Mary's protective intercession with God, who finally
decrees the outcome of all human battles. Military strategists certainly had no better explanation. And, in the eyes of the faith that has always been Poland's privilege, there was no doubt about it.

Lenin's army or no, the Poles never had paused in their efforts to put their Second Republic into working order. On February 20, 1920, with the Russians still pounding at them, the newly elected
Sejm
adopted a constitution and proceeded to erect an orderly system of government for Poland.

On the international front, meanwhile, Poles hadn't lost any of their ideals or their ability to see the consequences and benefits of international alliances freely formed. Jozef Pilsudski proposed a federation of nations led by Poland and to include Finland, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia. It was a brilliant proposal, designed to block all advances of Lenin's Bolshevik state, and to stabilize Central Europe. Had Pilsudski's plan been carried out, in fact, there would have been no World War II.

That was not to be, however. The ideological animus against Poland as an integral Catholic power in Central Europe was still vibrant and would prove to be as costly to the world as ever. The devilment of English and French Masonry raised its head again—personified now in David Lloyd George, Prime Minister of wartime Britain and ardent Freemason, and in France's Georges Clemenceau. Lloyd George went so far as to falsify the line of demarcation between Poland and the new Russian state—the so-called Curzon line—agreed upon in December of 1919 by the Allied ministers. Lloyd George illegally and dishonestly shifted that line to include the Lwów region of Poland in Soviet territory.

In the early months of all this anticipation and activity, as World War I was clearly in its last phase and Cardinal Primate Dalbor was working toward the establishment of the Second Polish Republic, Polish quartermaster Karol Wojtyla retired from the Austrian Army Headquarters in Krakow. With his wife, Emilia, and their young son, he took up residence in the industrial town of Wadowice, some fifty kilometers southwest of Krakow. There on May 18, 1920, just three months before Poland's reconsecration to Mary and the “Miracle of the Vistula,” a second son, Karol, was born to the Wojtylas. He would grow into young manhood in the brief twenty-one-year springtime of Polish independence, and under the influence of some of the most extraordinary Churchmen ever to be assembled at the same moment in a single nation.

The men who set the tone for Poland and Polishness during Karol Wojtyla's boyhood and youth following Cardinal Dalbor's death were led
by Cardinal Primate August Hlond, whose policies were clear, concise and of a piece with Poland's geopolitical ideal rooted in the Three Pacts. It doesn't take much to see that those policies are of a piece, as well, with the exhortations of Karol Wojtyla as Pope John Paul II in the eighties and nineties.

Poles as a nation, said Hlond, were not merely to believe in some passive fashion what the Church teaches, but were “to go into action with the Church … with a mighty Catholic offensive on all fronts…. We want parochialism to die, and what is the truth of the spirit and the substance of the supernatural life to live.”

Like the influential Resurrectionist Fathers at the Polish College in Rome, Hlond consistently and energetically voiced the modern ideal of Polishness, and of Polish
romanitas
, purified of any retrogressive tendencies or longing for imperial glories, and certainly purged of any messianic errors. But he was firm, as well, in the conviction that temporal life and spiritual life cannot be walled off from one another without grave consequences.

With an eye cocked toward the Masonic humanism that had been so costly for Poland, and toward the seemingly everlasting effort to malign and isolate both Poland and Rome, Hlond insisted that the Church is not “a hothouse plant,” or “a museum filled with people retarded because they practice holiness” or “a great fortress surrounded by barbed wire … occupied solely with staving off attacks.”

Rather, he maintained with all his energy that the Church is “the builder of the world” and “the guardian of the nations … structuring the relationship between temporal progress and the supernatural cultivation of the human soul.”

Clearly, then, Hlond rejected any thought that the Church Universal should contemplate turning back to earlier temporal glories. “Erroneous is the attitude,” he argued vigorously, “that somehow the task of the Church is to turn back the present to the past forms—to the baroque, to a medievalism in the clouds. It is not the task of the Church to impede mankind's movement into the future.”

Nevertheless, in Hlond's view, the Church in the twentieth century had the same georeligious and therefore geopolitical mandate it had had since the first century, when Christ as its founder had charged it with its worldwide mandate. In one ringing sentence, Hlond summed up that geopolitical function of Rome. Its task, he said, was not “to be concerned that the epochs of world history be all alike in terms of the structure of social and political conditions, but rather that every epoch might live by the spirit of Christ.”

Long before Karol Wojtyla became a priest, he and all of Poland heard this local Polish bishop give clear definition to that universalist Catholic attitude, which bishops and priests in other lands have forgotten or never knew. It is an attitude that many bureaucrats in the Vatican now headed by Karol Wojtyla have a difficult time understanding in this consummately Polish Pope.

It is an attitude countered, in fact, by many bishops, who take it upon themselves to move in exactly the opposite direction as they retire into the regional parochialism of the “American Church” of the United States, or the “Hinduized Church” in India, or the “Liberation Theology Church” of Latin America.

The
romanitas
that Hlond fostered in his Poles—clergy and people alike—allowed for no trace of any such provincialism and for no ethnic bias or peculiarity, Polish or otherwise.

On the contrary. The Cardinal Primate admonished Poland in powerful terms that “when the smallest portion of the Church's hierarchical form loses vital contact with the rest of the Church … it ceases to be an organism and a portion of the Church.” Moreover, he insisted that the balance is complex but important between the hierarchical element—the bishops—and the laity, which “is aware that
it
is the Church … having a part to play with the hierarchy in the mission of the Church.”

August Hlond lived what he preached. He was plainly no hothouse Cardinal Bishop, but a vibrant and effective leader who concerned himself and his nation with developing the classical Polish persuasion of a commonwealth of nations resting upon the ideals of the First Polish Republic. There was a difference, however. Times had changed, and Hlond enlarged even those advanced ideals, purging them of the Eurocentric traits that had undeniably been part of classical Poland.

The mind of August Hlond and the mind of Poland's hierarchy were essentially one in all respects. Clustered around him, and creating a cohesive atmosphere in Poland, were all the ecclesiastical ancestors of Karol Wojtyla, prelates known for their piety and zeal, some of whom have since been proposed for canonization in the Church they served. Alexander Cardinal Kakowski of Warsaw, Latin Archbishop Eugeniusz Baziak of Lwów, Bishop Zygmunt Lozinski of Minsk and Pinsk, Bishop Jozef Sebastjan Pelczar of PrzemyŜl, Bishop Konstanty Dominik of Chelmno; Bishop Michal Kozal of Wloclawek, who would die in Dachau. The balance in that outstanding team of Polish ecclesiastics was rounded out by Churchmen of the caliber of Armenian Archbishop Jozef Teodorowicz of Lwów, Bishop Josef Felix Gawlina, head military chaplain, and Ukrainian Archbishop Andrzej Szeptycki of Lwów, in whose
seminary a young Ukrainian, Josyf Slipyj, was rector and would later be the famous Cardinal Slipyj.

These and thousands more who worked with them were the men whose ideas and ideals always remained in complete cohesion with Catholic Poland's distinctive history, but who nonetheless developed the ideas of
polonicitas
and
romanitas
beyond any scope that could have been entertained in Eurocentric Poland of the nineteenth century.

The first member of that Polish hierarchy who directly and personally affected the life and career of young Karol Wojtyla was Adam Sapieha, a man so extraordinary that his character seemed to embody the strength and the weakness—the hardiness and the pridefulness—of
Polonia Sacra
in its heyday as the third-largest power in Europe and as Roman Catholicism's bastion against both military incursion and doctrinal attacks against its millennial faith.

Born in 1867, Sapieha inherited all the characteristics of a family of princes that had won its prominence in the First Polish Republic by sheer determination and grit. In war, they were fearless fighters, troublesome enemies, ungovernable prisoners and magnanimous victors. Faith, honor and freedom were the rules by which they lived and, not infrequently, died. Accustomed to command, skilled in battle, they became equally skilled at the niceties of leadership in a democratic monarchy. And in the multiracial Polish commonwealth, they acquired, as well, a style of diplomatic language and negotiation that seemed to die in the rest of the world, as it succumbed instead to the crude language and the industrialized slaughter of war that has blemished diplomacy and international relations since World War I.

By the time Adam Sapieha became Archbishop of Krakow, in 1912, his Polishness and his
romanitas
had been leavened and enriched by his studies at the Canisianum, the international college at Innsbruck, Austria, and by a stint at Rome, where he not only received diplomatic training, but became private secretary to Pope Pius X, whose lineage as the son of a Polish mail carrier in Riese so many had done so much to obliterate.

In intimate association with Cardinal Dalbor as
Interrex
, Sapieha saw the people of his region through the awful suffering and ruin of World War I. Moreover, because of his lineage, his papal and diplomatic associations acquired in Rome, and not least because of his indomitable personal bearing and prestige, he was often more influential than Dalbor himself in the complexities involved in forming the Second Polish Republic.

In 1938, as a youth of eighteen, Karol Wojtyla came under the direct influence of this proud, influential, highly experienced and articulate proponent of Polish
romanitas
. Wojtyla's mother, Emilia, and his elder brother, Eduard, had died. He and his father moved into an apartment in the Debnicki sector of Krakow. As Sapieha was always on the lookout for vocations, and because it was his habit to visit widely and frequently among his people, it is sure that Sapieha and the young Wojtyla met soon after the move to Krakow.