Keys of This Blood (109 page)

For them, he was Bishop of a very ancient and important diocese—Rome. But the Keys of his authority were historical relics, not symbols of actual authority guaranteed by the human blood of God's Son. The Keys of this Blood no longer meant anything realistic for a plurality of his bishops.

For himself, John Paul was now held within a different paradigm of historical development. He had come into the Petrine Office in 1978 hailed as the Polish Pope. Now, more accurately, he saw himself as the Slavic Pope, giving the term “Slavic” a connotation that was somewhat different from the meaning given it by the poet Slowacki, who had been the first to speak of the “Slavic Pope.” This Pope would be called Slavic because, originating among the Slavs of Poland, he was destined to preside over a geopolitical upheaval and sea change affecting the whole society of nations and directly springing from a Slavic—Russian, in this case—source tainted and corrupted by the primordial sin of Lucifer: hatred of all that God is and of all that is good.

John Paul now saw himself as all that, and then as something more. For that key message of Fatima had spoken of more. “In the end,” the text of the Fatima message stated, as it wound down, quoting Mary's words to the children, “Russia will be consecrated to me, the chastisements will cease and the world will enjoy peace for a while.”

That “more”—in John Paul's outlook—would be another era, long or short, in mankind's history, when a grand design of God's would be inaugurated for the society of nations. It would be a geopolitical unity of all the nations. It would come after all the efforts of Transnationalists and Internationalists, of all the globalists, had come to utter shipwreck because of the malignant geopolitical plans of the Party-State, which were more efficient, more thoroughly elaborated and more zealously executed than theirs.

There would be general shipwreck because on both sides, not the will of the Creator and Redeemer of mankind was the absolute rule of the contenders' efforts, but primarily greed for power and indulgence in mutual fratricide. Following that shipwreck, the Grand Design of God would be executed. He, John Paul, would be the Servant of that Grand Design.

There was both irony and pathos attendant on that late recourse of John Paul to the example of Pope Pius XII, a papal figure who had been denigrated as a hater of Jews—when, in reality, he had personally saved over 1.5 million Jews from the Nazi ovens—and as a medieval-minded prelate outshone and outclassed and consigned to the compost heap by the “glories” of the Second Vatican Council.

To find some palliative for the dilemma of his Church and the world at the beginning of the eighties, John Paul had to reach over the heads of the vacillating and permissive Pope Paul VI and of the strangely irresponsible “Good Pope John XXIII,” back to the last Roman Pope who firmly maintained his hold and exercise of the precious Keys Peter had received and passed on to all his successors.

That Pius XII should be the point of recourse was ironic. That, after all the vaunted and falsely triumphalistic blowing of trumpets about “Vatican II,” the Pope of 1981 had to reach back to Pius—this was papal pathos. John Paul II, self-proclaimed champion of “Vatican II,” had to bypass all that “Vatican II” connoted.

Among this Pope's intimates, the very discreet word is that this is not and has not been the only earthly connection between Pius XII and Papa Wojtyla. Meanwhile, the subsequent private conversation between his would-be assassin, Mehmet Ali Agca, and himself in the Turkish hit man's Roman cell confirmed all of John Paul's surmises about the place assigned to him in the geopolitical plans of his enemies. The contents of that Confession-like conversation will one day come to light. For there was a pattern of destiny weaving the new venture of the Soviet Party-State and the geopolitical plans of Rome's enemies into the whole cloth of the Grand Design. And Mehmet Ali Agca, with his malign paymasters, was but a bit player in a drama just beginning then and now developing rapidly at the opening of the nineties.

In the final analysis, John Paul II is a geopolitician-pope who spent the first part of his pontificate establishing himself and his Holy See as authentic players in the millennium endgame, which, during the same period of time, has become the “only game in town” and in this last
decade of the second millennium will absorb the energies, the efforts and the vital interests of the great powers in our world.

He is a Pope who is waiting. That is the essence of his action. And in the meantime, he is busy in all the highways and byways along which the men of his age are moving helter-skelter. They have figured their present onrush as the last stages on the road to a new world order already in view, a true City of Man, built by Man's ingenuity for Man—this, finally, is the avowed goal they forecast for themselves, shimmering on the mountains of the future. John Paul is waiting, but not for that city to be built in order, as it were, to find out if there will be a place in it for him. He knows it will not be built, at least not as men have configured it.

He is waiting, rather, for an event that will fission human history, splitting the immediate past from the oncoming future. It will be an event on public view in the skies, in the oceans, and on the continental landmasses of this planet. It will particularly involve our human sun, which every day lights up and shines upon the valleys, the mountains and the plains of this earth for our eyes. But on the day of this event, it will not appear merely as the master star of our so-called solar system. Rather, it will be seen as the circumambient glory of the Woman whom the apostle describes as “clothed with the sun” and giving birth to “a child who will rule the nations with a scepter of iron.”

Fissioning it will be as an event, in John Paul's conviction of faith, for it will immediately nullify all the grand designs the nations are now forming and will introduce the Grand Design of man's Maker. John Paul's waiting and watching time will then be over. His ministry as the Servant of the Grand Design will then begin. His strength of will to hold on and continue, and then, when the fissioning event occurs, to assume that ministry, derives directly from the Petrine authority entrusted solely to him the day he became Pope, in October of 1978. That authority, that strength, is symbolized in the Keys of Peter, washed in the human blood of the God-Man, Jesus Christ. John Paul is and will be the sole possessor of the Keys of this Blood on that day.

For John Paul, there is no personal glory attached to this ministry. There has already been hard labor and much hardship for him; and the future holds the promise of deep suffering and of trials by the fire of contempt and enmity. He accepted all that freely, it is true, and knowingly. Yet, no life of any past pope was more unitary in its thrust than Papa Wojtyla's has already been. By race, in character, through training, and vehicled on the happenings of his life, he appears to have been custom-fitted, as the phrase goes, for this unique role. Like his Master, for this he was born and came into the world.

·   ·   ·

Just a little over ten years ago, Karol Wojtyla walked onto the world stage as His Holiness, Pope John Paul II, and eyed each of his contentious globalist contemporaries from a geopolitical standpoint. For it was as a geopolitician he had been elected Pope. And he entered the ranks of world leaders as the Servant of a Grand Design he claimed was God's will for the society of nations.

Rife among his contemporaries, he found, was the persuasion of an imminent sea change in human affairs, and a competition to establish what many called a new world order on the back of that change. The society of nations, in fact, was starting to formulate a Grand Design of its own; but there were many competitors, each with his own ideas. One by one, he examined their proposals. He measured their behavior with the gauge of his Roman Catholic morality. He appraised their individual prospects for success. He knew, as they knew: There could be only one victor in that competition.

He had already decided to join that competition. For he also had his ambitions in the vital matter of a new world order. Those papal ambitions had been formed and nourished in him by the Polishness of his ancestors, and in the hard school of Stalinist Poland under the tutorship of the greatest cardinal in modern Church history, Stefan Wyszynski. The historical pacts of that Polishness provided him with a geopolitical outlook on all things human, crystallizing that geopolitical instinct in Mary, the Mother of Jesus. In his school, Wyszynski taught him the perennial lesson Christians have always had to learn: to seek no exclusive territory in the City of Man, but to establish the City of God within the very walls of that City of Man. Hence, John Paul's decision to enter into contention.

From that Polishness and from Wyszynski he also came to realize that in the growing crisis between the Gospel and the anti-Gospel, the resolution of the crisis would begin in the historic home area of the Slavs. Logically, then, he launched his entry onto the geopolitical stage from that area. He began in the Poland of 1979. For, in his conviction, Poland was the keystone in the area out of which would come the forces of change that all globalists were counting on.

Over a period of ten years, and among ninety-two nations across the length and breadth of five continents, he established himself as a world leader, one who was free of all disfiguring partisanship; as someone endowed with an all-embracing mind, a rare political savvy, a nimble diplomatic agility; and as the possessor of an international profile of perhaps
the highest personal definition achieved by any one individual in recorded history. He became, on those terms, an acknowledged and accepted contender in the competition.

Everywhere and to everyone he presented himself as the Bishop of Rome and the only lawful successor to Simon Peter the Apostle. Everywhere he claimed the authority and the duty to advise, admonish and exhort all men, regardless of creed, race or ideology, on their duties to God and their due place in God's Grand Design for the society of nations. His own Catholics understood better than anyone that the Keys of Petrine authority he held were guaranteed by the sacrificial blood of Christ.

As Pope, as embodiment of the Holy See, he presided over a steadily declining and decadent Church organization. The organizational institution of his Roman Catholic Church was honeycombed with the usual ecclesiastical defects and human deficiencies: heresy, schism, sexual immorality, greed, pride, wholesale lapse in religious belief and practice, breakdown of Catholic family life, corruption in the major religious orders of men and women. The Church has always known these, and has its remedies. But the lethal factor slowly killing off the soul of Catholicism was something other.

The unifying element in that worldwide institutional organization—his own apostolic authority as Holder of the Keys Christ confided only to Simon Peter—that element had been bypassed, diluted, explained away, neglected or denied outright by a solid half to two thirds of the Church's bishops by the time Karol Wojtyla became Pope in 1978. By that time, the big, dirty secret in the Roman Church was that it now consisted of regional and local communities, all giving more or less guarded lip service to their unity with and under the Pope, but really hard at work creating a series of Catholic churches molded and fashioned on the various cultures and politics of the differing regions. John Paul's day as Pope was the day of the great illusion. Catholic unity was gone, but the facade of unity was still maintained.

Complicating his position as Pope and head of the Holy See was another and more sinister element: the presence of a committed anti-Church faction among his ecclesiastical officials throughout his Church, and its embodiment in his own Vatican household. In a true sense, John Paul is a pope at bay in his own Vatican. The lethal-minded opposition to him as' Pope had been likened by one of his immediate predecessors to “the smoke of Satan invading the Sanctuary and the Altar.”

Nevertheless, John Paul's concentration and febrile activity were directed almost exclusively to the geopolitical issue in human affairs. He
did not undertake a serious and professional attempt to restore the former unity or to extirpate from the Church the known sources of its inner decadence. At one early moment, he even asserted that his Church structure could not he reformed. Anyway, his all-absorbing interest lay in the emergent geopolitical outline of the nations.

On this capital point, he did not—perhaps could not—imitate his beloved mentor, Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski.

Now, after those ten years of unremitting travel and labor, he was provided with a golden opportunity to reexamine the globalist scene. It was at the opening of the decade of the nineties—the last decade of Christianity's second millennium of existence and, by anybody's count, a watershed decade in world history. Specifically, this opportunity came during the first week of February 1990. Representatives and spokesmen for the most potent globalist currents—some 1,350 captains of industry, finance, politics, government, the media and telecommunications—trekked up 4,400 feet above sea level to the Swiss winter resort of Davos, the “Magic Mountain” of Thomas Mann's masterpiece, there to participate in the annual congress of the World Economic Forum.

This was no paltry meeting of theoreticians or academicians, or even of second-level personnel from finance, government and industry. The assembly included seventy government ministers—giants such as Helmut Kohl of West Germany, along with Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher; Hans Modrow, prime minister of East Germany; President François Mitterrand of France; Austrian Chancellor Franz Vranitzky; Italy's Foreign Minister Gianni de Michelis; Japan's Deputy Foreign Minister Koji Watanabe, with Eishiro Saito; Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew; France's Philippe Gerard d'Estaing and Edward Heath of England—both former prime ministers; Jean-Pascal Delamuraz, president of the Swiss Confederation; Indonesia's Finance Minister Johannes Sumarlin; Mexico's President Carlos Saunas de Gortari; and a list of high officials from the European Economic Community—the European Commissions vice-president, Sir Leon Brittan; the European Commissioner for External Affairs, Frans Andriessen. This list was topped off by the active presence of an impressive Soviet delegation: Deputy Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov, Deputy Prime Minister Leonid Abalkin, Nikolai Shmelev of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, along with six Soviet vice-ministers. They were flanked by Vitali Korotich, editor of the powerful
Oganyok
, and Oleg Bogomolov of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Clara Hills and Michael Farren, U.S. Secretary and Under Secretary of
Commerce, were the two most active and vocal officials of the Bush administration who were present.