The Life and Legacy of Pope John Paul II (3 page)

He completed his doctoral dissertation, which was written in Latin, on
The Doctrine of Faith According to St. John of the Cross
and completed his doctorate with near-perfect marks. He did not, however, receive his degree from the Pontifical Athenaeum because he didn’t have the money to publish his dissertation, which was the final prerequisite. When he returned to Poland, he submitted the dissertation to Jagiellonian University and received his doctoral degree there at the end of 1948.

No longer a student, Father Wojtila was assigned to his first parish as an assistant cleric in a small, rural town called Niegowi, located in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains not far from Krakow. He would remain there for eight months, educating children, conducting marriages and baptisms, hearing confession, and actively working to engage the people of his parish. He even started a drama club and directed a play.

In 1949, he was transferred back to Krakow, to a large parish consisting of many intellectuals. At St. Florian’s, Father Wojtila was expected to interact not only with the regular members of the parish, but also with students from Jagiellonian University, Krakow Polytechnic, and the Academy of Fine Arts, serving as a kind of university chaplain. He held lectures, organized study groups, and visited dormitories. Under the influence of the liturgical renewal movement, he began a student choir and taught them to sing various parts of the Mass in Gregorian chant. He again directed plays, and in 1950, he started an innovative marriage preparation program, which enabled him to interact with burgeoning families. The range of his evangelism also encompassed country hikes, skiing, and kayaking. He was dedicated to bringing Catholicism out into the world.

He began to write essays for Catholic publications. Employing pseudonyms, he wrote plays exploring religious and philosophical themes. He also wrote poetry. The number of his followers grew as his reputation spread. He was known for openness, kindness, and an exacting level of intellectualism. He also impressed people with his devotion to a life of poverty, for his garments were invariably threadbare, and he gave away any presents bestowed upon him to whomever he deemed more needful. Even other priests respected him for his obviously genuine piety and goodness.

In Communist Poland, it was still important to be circumspect about Catholic undertakings. Informers were always listening for anyone speaking against the regime. Catholic youth groups had been officially banned. Restrictions on the Catholic Church were onerous and variable. As a result, many activities had to be conducted carefully. Not everyone with whom Father Wojtila interacted knew or wanted to know the young priest’s real name. Some knew him as “Wujek,” (Uncle), while others called him “Sadok.” The clever priest took these designations from his knowledge of literature and drama.

In 1951, Father Wojtila left the parish to study for a second doctorate in philosophy, but his pastoral mission persisted as he continued to minister to his sizable following. He received his second doctorate from Jagiellonian University at the beginning of 1954, writing on the topic:
An Evaluation of the Possibility of Constructing a Christian Ethics on the Basis of the System of Max Scheler.
In October of that year, he joined the Philosophy Department at the Catholic University of Lublin, the only Catholic university allowed to exist, albeit with difficulty, within the Communist orbit. In 1956, he was named to the Chair of Ethics, which he held for over twenty years. He donated his salary to student scholarship funds and continued his subsistence lifestyle. Because he commuted to Lublin from Krakow, he was able to maintain his chaplaincy in Krakow. He was also a chaplain, of sorts, to the students in Lublin, always available to speak with them or hear their confessions. Some of his best-attended courses were in Ethics, where he championed self-giving and coexistence as the keys to fulfillment.

In 1960, he published his first book,
Love and Responsibility
, a treatment of sexual and marital ethics drawn both from his philosophical pursuits and his pastoral mission. In it, he celebrated sex within the vocation of marriage. This was a rather more positive view of sexual expression than was usually found in Church discussions. He was expressing his views in the general context of the sexual revolution and the particular situation in Communist Poland. In order to undermine the Church, Poland’s Communist government encouraged sexual license among young people and had passed an abortion law permitting it as a birth control option. Instead, Father Wojtila argued that sexuality should
not
involve the primacy of self, but rather the mutuality of relationship. Accordingly, sexuality should be treated
not
as an expression of personal autonomy, but rather of personal responsibility for another person.

Just before Pope Pius XII passed away, he named the young priest a bishop (1958), making the thirty-eight-year-old Wojtila the youngest bishop in Poland. In due course, he would be named an archbishop (1964) and finally a cardinal (1967).

Karol Wojtila’s Role in Vatican II

The Second Vatican Council, or Vatican II as it was dubbed, was convened by Pope John XXIII in October 1962. He would not live to see its conclusion, and its agenda would be carried forward by Pope Paul VI. This ecumenical council took place over four autumns. Its goal was to renew the Church and enable it to speak in the modern world. It also aimed to create unity within the growing diversity of the universal Church.

At its beginning, Wojtila was a bishop, but he would soon be named Archbishop of Krakow. He was present at all four annual sessions, and it was his first time outside of Poland since he had left his studies in Rome. He took advantage of his leave-taking from Poland to also make an inspirational visit to Egypt, Israel, and the Jordanian-occupied territories, as Pope Pius VI had suggested Council participants do.

Bishop Wojtila found the Council profoundly spiritual, and he relished the vitality of the theological discourse over issues. The breadth of racial and cultural diversity he found among the clergy delighted him. He fully believed that the Holy Spirit was guiding the progress of the Council, and he was prepared to aid in the Council’s efforts to chart a course for the new millennium. Toward that end, he spoke before the Council multiple times each year. The importance of addressing the human condition and the role of the laity were recurring themes in his learned speeches (known in the Council’s terminology as “interventions”).

His best-known contributions had to do with formulating and expressing the role of the Church in the modern world. He helped write the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World,
Gaudium et Spes
(“Joy and Hope”), which was one of four Apostolic Constitutions resulting from Vatican II and promulgated by Pope Paul VI in December 1965.

By the end of Vatican II, Archbishop Wojtila’s reputation would no longer be confined to Poland. He was now well-known to his fellow clergy throughout the world.

Back in Poland

Archbishop Wojtila’s second book came about as a result of his participation in the Council.
Person and Act
was an attempt to express the philosophical underpinnings of the teachings that emerged from Vatican II. The book is notoriously difficult reading. An English edition exists, but critics argue that it has been modified from the original so that it does not always represent the author’s thinking.

One of the vital documents from Vatican II was
Dignitatis Humanae
, which among its other teachings declared that people have a right to religious freedom, both freedom from coercion to worship and freedom to worship according to their conscience. The document encouraged the structuring of society to ensure that right. This pronouncement created an obvious problem for the Communist government in Poland, whose goal was to control and suppress the Church in Poland. Then, too, both the Church in Poland and the Communist government in Poland lived under the cloud of potential Soviet intervention, which neither group wanted. Consequently, both were engaged in a delicate balancing act.

The Communist government in Poland asserted a great deal of control over Church activities, including the right to veto appointments. When that government pressed for the nomination of Karol Wojtila to become Archbishop of Krakow, they no doubt saw him as an inexperienced young man who was unschooled in politics and would be easy to manipulate. What they got was more than they bargained for. Throughout his clerical career in Poland, he confounded the regime.

Were Catholic charities banned? He created less formal charitable networks at the parish level. Was there a moratorium on creating new parishes? He found ways to evangelize the population of the neighborhood to create the reality of a parish. Did the communist bureaucrats refuse to process permits for building new churches? He created a groundswell of support that caused problems for the government and got the church built.

The regime had its victories, too, as when Father Jozef Kurzeja, who had been agitating for the building of a church in a particular location, was so hounded by the security police that he died of heart failure at the youthful age of thirty-nine. Archbishop Wojtila saw to it that the church was built. He was able to dedicate it as pope, seven years after Father Kurzeja’s death, in 1983.

In a Communist country, the dominant relationship was between the state and the individual, and the individual was clearly the subordinate. The individual’s loyalty had to be to the state. All other counter-loyalties were in the way, including the bonds of family and community. Archbishop Wojtila’s strength was in building community, and he created ties among all its facets: young marrieds, youth, elderly, infirm and disabled, laity, clergy, and uncommitted. He also extended an ecumenical hand in friendship to the tiny Protestant minority in Krakow. The archbishop’s success in forging ties flew in the face of Communist goals. As a result, his movements were increasingly monitored, and his residence was bugged. Occasionally, there was even cloak-and-dagger intrigue: the secret police following Wojtila’s car were eluded through fancy driving maneuvers and a quick change of vehicles.

In all his efforts, Archbishop Wojtila strove to implement the ideals of human dignity that emerged from Vatican II, but there were two areas in particular where Vatican II became his focus. First, his next book,
Sources of Renewal
(published in 1970), was a guide to the documents of Vatican II. Second, he organized a Synod of Krakow, in which he recreated for the clergy and laity of his jurisdiction the experience of Vatican II. Whereas a Synod would normally deal with issues of canon law, this Synod would focus on pastoral issues. The chief question asked of the participants was how the guidelines of Vatican II could be implemented within their diocese. Throughout the duration of the Synod, which lasted through most of the 1970s, tens of thousands of Catholics in Krakow were engaging with the documents of Vatican II and debating how to realize them in their lives. The archbishop’s book provided a commentary to the texts with which they grappled. The outcome of the process was an educated laity that functioned as a community and had created their own stake in how Vatican II and Catholicism worked within their churches and within their lives. The Synod was a master stroke of pastoral and administrative management.

When Pope Paul VI named him a cardinal in 1967, Cardinal Wojtila developed even more outlets for his talents, and his reputation and status grew accordingly. The Polish government usually granted him permission to travel, unlike some of his Polish colleagues. He traveled frequently to Rome for meetings of the congregations in which he served, and he became active on the Synod of Bishops, which met annually to discuss important issues. In 1969 he traveled for a month to Polish communities throughout Canada and the United States. In 1973, he traveled to Australia for the International Eucharistic Congress, at which time he also visited the Philippines, New Guinea, and New Zealand. There were other trips as well, including a return tour of the United States.

In 1976, only two years before his death, Pope Paul VI invited Cardinal Wojtila to conduct the annual Lenten retreat for himself and the Roman Curia. Cardinal Wojtila was to present a series of twenty-two lectures before the assemblage. It was a singular honor, and it put the cardinal on view before a host of very influential figures.

The Year With Three Popes

In August of 1978, the aged Pope Paul died. Within the same month, Cardinal Albino Luciani of Venice was elected pope in his stead. The new pope sought to honor his two great predecessors, John XXIII and Paul VI, by taking both their names. The unique choice of a double name endeared him the populace, both for the humility it demonstrated (his motto was
humilitas
) and because the choice contained the reassurance of continuity. But then, the world was dismayed when only thirty-three days later Pope John Paul I suddenly passed away. On October 16, 1978, on the second day of deliberations and the eighth ballot, Karol Wojtyla, the Cardinal Archbishop of Krakow, was elected pope.

It was not an outcome that Cardinal Wojtila had wanted. Friends who saw him before he left Poland for John Paul I’s funeral in Rome have indicated he may have had an intuition or a premonition that this would occur. His goodbyes seemed too serious, too somber. Becoming pope would mean leaving behind forever a lifetime of friendships and connections, the cultural and intellectual stimulation of his academic circle, and the city and country that he loved. He accepted the decision, as he put it, with obedience to Christ.

In one respect, the choice of Wojtila made sense to all who heard: this man was young and in good health. His election, in that respect at least, seemed a reaction to the stunning loss that had just occurred. But there were other aspects to Wojtyla’s election that came as a complete surprise. Upon hearing the unfamiliar sound of his name, some listeners thought he was African. “Who is he?” the people congregating in St. Peter’s Square wanted to know.