Keys of This Blood (100 page)

Though it cost him dearly in some ways, Wyszynski never did make such procedural mistakes. Indeed, he accepted willy-nilly such things as the nomination of certain priests he knew to be in the government's pocket, if not in its employ. He continually received government agent Boleslaw Piasecki as a visitor to his residence, despite the fact that he regarded Piasecki as an arch-apostate and a double-dealing agent for Gomulka. And when the Marxist head of state, Aleksander Zawadzki, died, the Primate sent his condolences in the proper diplomatic manner.

In other words, Wyszynski never violated the code of public conduct in dealing with these or thousands of other issues that had constantly to be fielded. For none of those issues, nor all of them together, were more than trivialities in comparison with the swelling volume of awareness among the people concerning the universal significance of their coming vow of national servitude to the Queen of Poland.

Nevertheless, Wyszynski was not about to become a passive, wimpish whipping boy, helpless against government onslaughts or their base
calumnies. He protested every inimical government move. To one nonplussed government representative who had gone too far by half in his abusive threats, Wyszynski vowed, “We will talk about this issue from the pulpit, and we will talk about it with the Party. I will talk to everyone, with the first secretary and the prime minister, if need be.”

Without a doubt in the world, he would have done just that. Public rules and decorum were one thing, but in closed-door meetings Wyszynski was always prepared to give as good as he got—and a little bit more if the situation called for it. In one such meeting—a marathon conference in June of 1958 that lasted from five in the afternoon to four o'clock the next morning—he made that point ringingly clear.

First Secretary Gomulka and the Cardinal's old enemy Prime Minister Cyrankiewicz had beseeched Wyszynski to come to the meeting. As always, they needed his help to keep popular discontent in check.

The unstable Gomulka threw all caution out the window at one point and began shouting at Wyszynski at the top of his voice. The Primate understood the situation and managed first to stop the shouting and then to calm the first secretary.

When Cyrankiewicz started to play his old games again, however, attempting to control Wyszynski by accusing him of unlawful procedures, it was an entirely different matter. The Cardinal turned the full blast of his personality and fearless authority on the prime minister. More, he hit him in the face with a brazen counterthreat. “I did not come here as an accused person … I came here to present the facts. I do have an unsettled account with you, sir. The fact that I haven't brought up personal grievances doesn't mean that I've forgotten them. If you want to take up accusations, I will first of all accuse you … and demand a public rehabilitation, which will disgrace you in the eyes of Poland and the world.” Wyszynski had driven his point home; there can have been no doubt in the prime minister's mind that the Cardinal was talking not only about his own illegal arrest and imprisonment but about Cyrankiewicz's personal corruption and his participation in certain sordid actions of Joseph Stalin.

There were no more such threats from Cyrankiewicz. At least, not in that meeting. But years of contention still lay ahead. And more often than not, success or failure for the Poles depended on the ability of the Primate and his bishops to maintain balanced judgment and to keep the people calm in what sometimes seemed a madhouse run by the criminally insane.

·   ·   ·

In October of 1962, the opening session of Pope John XXIII's much publicized Second Vatican Council drew virtually every Roman Catholic bishop—there were 2,500 in all—in the world to Rome, and any number of non-Catholic observers, as well.

With Bishop Karol Wojtyla at his side as his closest protégé, Cardinal Wyszynski led the Polish bishops as delegates to this extraordinary georeligious and geopolitical event, which was to have deep and lasting effects not only on the Roman Catholic Church but on the configuration of world politics for the remainder of the twentieth century. Among the Polish bishops present at the Council, Wojtyla was to achieve a prominent place in the eyes of his fellow bishops and of those who would one day elect him Pope. The unison and the differences between the two men came out in clear relief—not that those differences made a whit of difference to Wojtyla's devotion to Wyszynski or to Wyszynski's belief in Wojtyla's star as one destined to ascend in the firmament of the Church and the broad expanse of human skies.

Wyszynski had been part of the Preparatory Commission appointed by Pope John XXIII to draft the official agenda of his Second Vatican Council. The Commission's work resulted in what were officially called
Schemata
; each of these dealt with some important topic the Commission judged should be discussed by the Council. When the Council went into session as of October 1962, it quickly became clear that a very well-organized faction among the bishops and the assistant theologians was bent on abrogating the Commission's
Schemata
. Although a minority, this faction succeeded by excellent parliamentary maneuvers to encompass their purpose.

The net result was that the idea of the Church in the world and of how the Church should function and of what it should achieve—all these vitally important ideas were changed. In the original
Schemata
, the traditional Roman Catholic point of view on all three questions was dominant. In the new
Schemata
, that traditional Roman Catholic view was replaced by a new standpoint, which had more to do with modern (particularly American) concepts of democracy and people's power than with Roman Catholic teaching. Successfully sold to the bishops of the Council, adapted by them and incorporated into the official documents of the Council, these new ideas gave birth to a new ecclesiology, a new view of Catholicism, of the Roman Church and of the papacy.

The new ecclesiology could have been reconciled with the traditional ecclesiology, if great care and deliberate efforts were forthcoming. They weren't. The net result was that an ambiguity floated through all the Council's official statements. Wyszynski and Wojtyla both saw the danger.
Wyszynski did not want to live with that ambiguity. Wojtyla thought the Church could live with it and that in time the reconciliation of the two viewpoints could be and would be effected. Actually, as it happened in the twenty years following the Council, that ambiguity wreaked havoc with the institutional organization of the Church that Wojtyla as Pope would inherit in 1978. But at the time of the Council, all that was hidden in the future; in the Council's immediate aftermath, a false euphoria, expressed as the “Spirit of Vatican II,” successfully—because pleasantly, as most people judged—put the majority of bishops and others off their guard. Only when the high and rough winds of screeching dissidence starting blowing, and only when the central authority of the papacy under Pope Paul VI was ripped to pieces by the “democratization” of religious belief and practice, only then were Wyszynski's warnings recalled. But by then it was too late to reconcile the old and the new Vatican II viewpoints.

Back in the Council days, 1962–65, however, Stefan Wyszynski's Polish agenda was never absent from his thinking; and in that regard there were a few matters of particular importance he deemed it necessary to discuss personally with Pope John. In two private interviews, the longer of which lasted for fully an hour and three quarters, the two men reviewed such matters as the issue of the Western Lands disputed between Poland and Germany and the question of the nomination of bishops—Polish or German!—for that territory.

Mainly, however, Wyszynski wanted to urge upon Pope John that he dedicate the Council, the bishops of the Church, and the laity of the world, whose servants they were, to the same bond of servitude to Mary that the Cardinal was preparing in Poland.

It seemed to the Primate that there would never be a better moment in terms of opportunity, or a more urgent one in terms of need. All of the bishops were gathered in Rome at this moment, and they would be back again for succeeding Council sessions. And across the whole world, every continent was obviously suffering to one degree or another from the power meddling and totalitarian oppression exerted by the Soviet Union.

But more than that, just about the whole world was aware by now, as Wyszynski was, that two years before, Pope John had opened and read what was purported by credible investigators to be instructions taken down from the lips of Mary during a supernatural visitation to three peasant children in the remote district of Fatima in Portugal. Though the contents of those instructions were secret—in fact, they were referred to as the “three secrets of Fatima” by the increasing number of
people who got wind of their existence—it was nonetheless widely known by now that Mary had called for a dedication of more or less the same kind Wyszynski was urging on Papa Roncalli; and that she had apparently done so for more or less the same georeligious and geopolitical reasons that had motivated Wyszynski.

Given such crucial events in Poland's history as the Jasna Góra victory of 1665 over the Swedes, and the “Miracle of the Vistula” against Lenin in 1920, the little he knew about Mary's purported request at Fatima seemed as reasonable to the Cardinal as it did to any Pole. In fact, taking into account the condition of the world in the early 1960s, and given the perfect occasion in the form of an assembly of the world's bishops in Rome, why not just get on with it? Why not get things started?

Of course, Vatican protocol being what it is, the Primate didn't put the matter in just those terms; but his meaning was clear enough.

Roncalli listened with interest and indulgence. He respected Wyszynski, and admitted that, if he had heard Wyszynski out before he had made and implemented his decision, he might have acted differently. But his attitude to Wyszynski's urgings was the same as it had been when he had first read the secret instructions of Fatima in 1960. The purpose of such an act of dedication, as the Poles themselves had emphasized, would be to end the Soviet Union's lethal mischief-making in the world. To ask for such an intention would be to incur a face-to-face confrontation between the Roman Church and the USSR at precisely the time when Pope John had decided to leaven the Soviets instead through the spirit of his Council, which would spread throughout the world as his bishops returned to their dioceses.

The Pope's answer to the Cardinal, therefore, and almost in so many words, was that this time, “our time as Pope,” was not the time for such an act of dedication. Had the Cardinal been privy to the full contents of the “three Fatima secrets,” he might have wondered if there would be another time. Still, while Poland's choice was a matter confided to his hands, the choice for the world lay in the hands of his Pope. Wyszynski would not cavil at the Holy Father.

Anyone who knew Wyszynski would not have expected him to let the matter rest there. He saw Papa Roncalli again in May of the following year, during the second session of the Council. By then, Pope John knew that the Council was out of his control; his agenda for a deep renewal of activist faith in the Church had been set on a course the Pontiff had not foreseen, and it would serve someone else's agenda instead. And he also knew that he would have no time to alter that fact. On June 3, Angelo Roncalli died in his faith and his regrets.

Wyszynski finally persuaded John's successor, Pope Paul VI, at least to proclaim Mary as Mother of the Church. Paul did so solemnly on November 21, 1964, in front of the whole Council of Bishops. The Cardinal would have to be content with that; for Papa Roncalli's decision to politicize the idea of any wholesale dedication of the Universal Church to Mary, and his companion decision to temporize with reference to the Soviet Union, were to remain principles of Vatican policy for many years to come in this century.

Nearly twenty years later, those twin decisions by Pope John would almost literally have a stunning effect on the policies of Wyszynski's protégé, Karol Wojtyla, in his role as Pope John Paul II.

Meanwhile, the decision to so honor Mary had deep implications. It meant that explicitly the officials of the Church transposed the already great importance of Mary (as an active participant in Christian life) from the merely devotional and purely religious to the georeligious plane on which the Roman Church operates. Mary was now, whether one liked it or not, recognized as a geopolitical element in Christian salvation. It was a capital point in the formation of a prepapal mind in Wojtyla.

Wyszynski and Wojtyla and the rest of the Polish hierarchy were not much slowed at home by the Council going on in Rome. If anything, it almost appeared that Wyszynski's failure to change the mind of the Holy See concerning the dedication of the Church and the world to Mary caused him to redouble his concentration on Poland as a paradigm of the world, and on the Church in Poland as a paradigm of the Church Universal in its worldwide struggle with the evil abroad among men since the creation of the world.

Such a view was not a fanciful thing, for Wyszynski was a practical man; a doer. And he had expressed just such a view as far back as 1952. In that year, before Prime Minister Cyrankiewicz had so rudely removed him to imprisonment, the Cardinal had written to his hard-pressed Catholics with advice and instruction he never failed to keep in mind himself and never failed to impress upon Wojtyla and his other bishops.

“As a background for your perseverance,” the Primate had written them, “let me remind you of the fundamental position of the Church in the face of our Polish condition. In the course of 2,000 years … the Church has faced various situations; but she was never surprised by those situations. The wide world was [surprised] when it found itself Arian, Albigensian, humanistic, Protestant, rationalistic, capitalistic…. She [the Church] faces Communism with serenity … because she is compelled to exist with that reality … and, today, that relationship must be maintained even with her enemies—and they are not only the Communists but the Freemasons and pagan capitalism.”