Keys of This Blood (8 page)

Whatever may have been his grave policy decision in this matter, and while nobody in his right mind would assess John Paul as anything but a thoroughly Catholic soul and an intensely professional pope, the conclusion is inescapable that there has been no reliable sign from his papal office that a reform of his Church has even been seriously mounted.

The overall result of that policy for the Roman Church has been profound. But in one key area—the area of papal privilege, and of the papal power embodied in the sacred symbol of the Petrine Keys—the policy has been disastrous. For it has enabled those in the Church bent on an antipapal agenda—the anti-Church within the Church—to arrive within touching distance of their main objective; namely, the effective elimination of papal power itself as an operative factor in the administration of the Roman Catholic structure and in the life of the Roman Catholic institution.

This policy decision of John Paul's is the more puzzling because, while it bears directly on the obvious fragmentation of the Church Universal, if there is one aspect of that Church upon which this Pope lays continual emphasis, it is unity. The fact remains, however, that because he has steadfastly refused to discipline his bishops, he has no means to resist the planned ways in which many of those bishops, through such regional bureaucratic organizations as the National Catholic Conference of Bishops in the United States, for example, and the European Conference of Bishops—to name just two among many—have in effect deprived bishops as individuals of their consecrated power to govern their individual dioceses.

The result is something that has never before existed in the Roman Church. An anonymous and impersonal force has been created, centered in the regional Bishops' Conferences around the world, which has now begun to exercise its own power in contravention of papal power.

So far has this situation progressed already that—even though their actions often imply and sometimes condone deep departures from the traditional teaching and the moral laws of the Roman Catholic Church—such regional intra-Church groups are consistent in claiming both autonomy for themselves and special discernment concerning doctrine and morals in their separate regions.

It is true that this victory of in-Church papal enemies is only a de facto affair; that nowhere and by no explicit statement has Pope John Paul formally renounced his Petrine power. But that is cold comfort for those who find his huge gamble with the Petrine Office the most frightening element of John Paul's papal policy. It is all very well, warn some papal advisers, that the Pope refuses to bless the work of those intent upon shattering the Rock of Peter. But the effective catalyst here is the Pontiff's abstention from exercising his papal power in matters critical to Church governance. And, the warning continues, unless the Pope begins to extirpate those who are silently and covertly sapping the foundations of papal privilege and power upon which his Church rests, then into the bargain he might just as well give his blessing to the anti-Church.

That may be an extreme sentiment, especially for men who do remain faithful, and who do accord to John Paul the deference due him as Pope; but it is a sentiment that is understandable. For while the Pope tarries, his in-Church enemies—those who arc sworn to rid the earth of the papacy as a centralized governing institution—use this strange and unsettling policy of John Paul's as a comfortable highway leading to their own ultimate victory. Day by day, these papal advisers and advocates see the desuetude and obsolescence of the papacy more fully confirmed as a fact of life. In that situation, and as human affairs go, they foresee that the bulk of Roman Catholics can more and more easily be induced to look upon Rome much as they look upon St. Paul's of London—as a venerable institution with its classic dome and whispering gallery, housing invaluable memories of the past but having no practical bearing on their faith or their lives. And in that situation, these advisers expect that the bulk of Roman Catholics can be ever more easily persuaded to accept the papacy itself as the office of a somewhat influential and honorific Catholic bishop who happens to live in Rome, and who will be as revered as the Dalai Lama—and just about as powerful.

Those among Pope John Paul's advisers who are most urgently and deeply concerned about what some call this “self-slaughter” of the Roman papacy do remain confident in Christ's promise that its destruction will not be completed; that even the Gates of Hell itself will not prevail against the Church Jesus founded upon Peter as its Rock. But, as Lord Nelson commented after a cannonball came too close for comfort at the battle of Trafalgar, it looks to be “a damn near thing.”

In the serenity of his own convictions concerning Heaven's agenda for the nations, meanwhile, it is reasonable to think that John Paul himself fully expects that as Pope he will one day in the not distant future be hailed by the generality of his contemporaries in much the same terms
as Czechoslovakia's President Havel used to welcome him to Prague on April 21, 1990.

After the Pontiff, following his now familiar custom, stepped off the papal plane and kissed the ground, Havel told the world that “the Messenger of Love comes today into a country devastated hy the ideology of hatred…. The Living Symbol of civilization comes into a country devastated by the rule of the uncivilized…. I have the honor to be a witness when its soil is being kissed by the Apostle of Spirituality.”

To all who are presently skeptical about the acceptance on a universal scale of such a role for this or any Roman pope, John Paul might well respond, with Havel, that “I do not know whether I know what a miracle is…. Nevertheless, I dare say I am a party to a miracle now.” And indeed, to an extent John Paul would be justified in making such a response. For, five years before—even five months before—no one would have imagined such a papal visit possible. As he said that day to his Czechoslovak hosts, “Almighty God can make the impossible possible, can change all human hearts, through the queenship of Jesus' mother, Mary.”

Nevertheless, it would appear that now, as in 1980, John Paul has judged that he still can find no way to reform his rapidly deteriorating Church structure; that he cannot make an end run around the antiChurch, as he did so successfully in regard to the Vatican's established policy of
Ostpolitik
.

Meanwhile, the threat to the power and authority of the Petrine Office has become so critical that, at least in the view of faithful and important Churchmen who are themselves as steeped as he is in practical and hardnosed experience, somewhere down the slope of papal desuetude and obsolescence John Paul will have to issue what will amount to his Protocol of Salvation. They foresee a day of confrontation when Pope John Paul will stand in front of friends and enemies and recite the words with which Jesus once confronted Simon Peter as the chosen head of his Church, to reassure him that his own weakness would not end in the destruction of that Church: “Simon, Simon, Satan has set out to make you like useless chaff he can blow away. But I have prayed for you that your faith not be extinguished. So, in time, you will return to the true faith. And you will correct your ways. And then you will reinstill faith in your brothers.”

That day may come suddenly, out of the blue. It may come too late to salvage and restore the faith of millions who have been disillusioned, or to revive the faith of other millions of Roman Catholic apostates. It seems probable, as things are going, that it will come after most who still
retain fidelity to the Pope, to the papacy and to the traditional dogmas and faith of universal Roman Catholicism have been shut out of places of Catholic worship that will, for the most part, be fully occupied by those who retain no such fidelity.

When that day does arrive, surely not all of John Paul's friends, nor most of his enemies, will accept the Holy Father's Protocol of Salvation. Surely, many will walk away from him and his papacy forever. But those who submit and remain will no longer be troubled by the ambitions and the meretricious promises of the many among them who would be little popes. Nor will they be blinded and shriveled by the subsequent glory of the Woman Clothed with the Sun.

On October 14, 1978, a new era began for the Roman Catholic Church and its nearly one billion adherents around the world. And with it, the curtains were raised on the first act of the global competition that would end a thousand years of history as completely as if a nuclear war had been fought. A drama that would leave no regions or nations or individuals as they had been before. A drama that is now well under way and is already determining the very way of life that in every place every nation will live for generations to come.

On that October day, the cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church assembled in the Vatican from around the world for the second time in barely two months. Only in August, they had elected Cardinal Albino Luciani of Venice as Pope John Paul I. Still in shock at the sudden—some said suspicious—death of the man now sadly called the “September Pope,” they had convened to settle on a new man from among their contentious and divided ranks who could lead this unique two-thousand-year-old global institution at a time when it seemed in immediate danger of painful self-destruction.

Before and after any papal Conclave, discretion is normally the watchword for every Cardinal Elector. But, on this day, Joseph Cardinal Malula of Zaire did not care who in St. Peter's Square might hear his views about what kind of pope the Church must have. A stocky, well-built man with brilliant eyes and expressive mouth, Malula gestured at the Vatican buildings all around him, then struck a sharp blow against one of Bernini's columns with the flat of his hand. “All that imperial paraphernalia,” he declared, “all that! Everything must change!”

At 6:18
P.M.
on the second day of Conclave, fifty-eight-year-old Karol Cardinal Wojtyla of Krakow emerged on the eighth ballot as the new Pope. Malula reportedly let out a discreet hut audible whoop. He had his wish.

In fact, he now had something more complex and far-reaching than perhaps even he had bargained for. Suddenly, and without anything like an explanatory statement, there broke upon the Roman and the international scene the figure of a Pope who was about to shatter every mold. A Pope who was anything but imperial and who was not about to be isolated—at least, not in the sense Joseph Malula had meant.

From the first moment of his papal election, publicity figured, as an unusual dimension even for a Pope, in the pontificate of John Paul II. The most avid public attention seemed to fall upon him like a cloak that had been made to his measure. It was a cloak he would wear with startling and unremitting purpose.

At the outset, it all seemed a natural enough consequence of the curiosity one could expect to surround a new Pope. The immediate and seemingly insatiable hunger for details, whether accurate or not, was only to be expected, the more so given the exceptional nature of this choice for the papal throne. Between the time of his election in Conclave and his formal investiture as Pope, early publicity had to feed on what was easily available concerning Wojtyla's life in Poland. Even so, there was a peculiar shape to many of the stories. Things seemed in hindsight to have marked the young Polish bishop as a man of special destiny.

Take, for example, the solar eclipse on May 18, 1920, the day Wojtyla was born. Did not that confirm the supposedly ancient prophecy that the 264th Pope—for so he was—would be born under the sign of
labor solis
(the classical expression for a solar eclipse)? Was not destiny also written in the death of three important people in Wojtyla's life: his mother, when he was nine; his elder brother, when Karol was twelve; his father, when his son and namesake was twenty-three? After all, another old legend had it that a triple death signified a triple crown. And that, in turn, was applied to the triple tiara traditionally used to invest new popes with the universal authority of Peter.

Never mind that John Paul would refuse to wear that ancient gem-studded symbol of his churchly power and temporal influence. Destiny is destiny; and until the new Pope had time to settle in and provide fresh news, the legend that linked death and power made good copy.

Not all the early stories in that brief waiting time were of such a Gothic nature, however. For one thing, there was a lot about Karol Wojtyla that did not fit the popular idea of the papal mold; but it always made for avid reading. Like the still-beloved John XXIII, always remembered as “the good Pope John,” there was nothing of the patrician about John Paul II.
His early life proved him to be a man familiar with both the common and the heroic struggle of people everywhere.

On the more common side of the publicity ledger, much was written about the fact that he had been born in an obscure—some said drab—little town named Wadowice, a place of about 9,00 souls, 170 miles south of Warsaw in the foothills of the Beskids mountain range. A good deal of media time was given to the fact that he had spent his earliest years growing up in an unremarkable two-room apartment. Story after story spotlighted the three years the young Wojtyla had spent as a worker in the Zabrzowek Quarry and in the Belgian-owned Solvay Chemical Works, where he was a boiler-room helper.

Less commonplace were the stories that focused on Wojtyla's close association with the mysterious tailor-mystic Jan Tyranowski; on his skill as a soccer goalie; on his love of music and his talent as an amateur guitarist; on his membership in the Rapsodyezny Theater of Krakow, where he specialized in poetry reading.

Not one, but two, bona fide underground experiences made for a dramatic edge in the early publicity. Much attention was given to Wojtyla's association during World War II with the Polish underground team that supposedly helped obtain one of the first Nazi V-2 rockets to be smuggled out of occupied Poland and over to wartime London. And at least as much was made of his life as an underground novice in the now famous “conspiratorial seminary” set up under the noses of the German occupation forces by the Polish cardinal Adam Sapieha, Archbishop of Krakow.