Keys of This Blood (87 page)

The wondrous effect of that Pact and its georeligious consequences could be seen in Poland of the sixteenth century, which housed a population of ethnic Poles, Lithuanians, Russians, Germans, Armenians, Tartars, Ruthenians, Estonians, Latvians, Danes, Norwegians, Jews and the largest expatriate community of Scots in the world. All of these represented a dozen religions—including Roman Catholicism; and all of them considered themselves to be Polish citizens within a framework that catered to their ethnic and religious rights. Poland of 1939 housed nearly 40 percent of all Jews in the world then—10 percent of Poland's total population; Poland was the preferred homeland of Jews away from their homeland in Israel.

Polishness, in fact, and in the sense of those diverse groups, had no distinctive ethnic, religious or nationalistic note. It had geopolitical overtones—and this on the territory of a nation that, without the shadow of a doubt, was thoroughly and confessionally Roman Catholic. How or why did the Polish nation arrive at that concrete estimation of human liberty and human commonality which did not begin to dawn on the reputedly more enlightened peoples of Western Europe and America before the middle of the twentieth century?

This trait of Polishness gave Papa Wojtyla his deep love for and understanding of freedom—and his hatred for the prostitution of freedom by those who mouth its name in the cause of something-or-other. It gave him his deep understanding of the potential of Western democracy and republicanism—and his repulsion at Western unfaith. It gave him his model for free associations among the nations on the basis of love—but not on the basis of conquest or greed for power or profit.

There is even more implied in the name Poland that is relevant to John Paul II's papal career. If a search and examination were to be made,
say, among the countries of Europe—and even extended to the Americas—for a country whose national history could be regarded as a “natural” preparation for geopolitics in general and papal geopolitics in particular, about the only country to answer this description would be Poland. This does not mean that every miner in Silesia and every shipyard worker in Gdansk and every farmer and housewife and intellectual in Poland is or could be a practicing geopolitician. But it does mean that, peculiarly to Poland, its national ethos and aspirations, the concrete historical events lived by Poles, together with their art and folklore, would be the most favorable conditions in which a geopolitically inclined mind would be nourished and developed, given the required will and opportunity. Wojtyla had the education, the sensitivity and the interest that facilitated his adopting a geopolitical attitude and policy.

Much more deeply and intricately than meets the eye at first sight, the Polish Pact with Mary, the mother of Jesus, has been and will always be an operative key element in this Pope's geopolitical mentality and—it must be stressed—his career as Pope. Long before he became Pope, he had concretized the general Polish Pact with Mary in a personalized form by consecrating himself as priest, as bishop, and as cardinal to Mary. His motto,
Totus Tuus
, reflects that decision.

But all that has been preparation for the signal role he firmly believes Mary will one day play in bringing into visible existence the geopolitical structure he has made his goal. Again, in keeping with his mind, he bases this expectation on a georeligious event in which Mary figures as the instrument of divine providence. God, through Mary, he believes, has already forewarned the nations and predicted that geopolitical outcome.

The school in which was developed Wojtyla's keen sense of the geopolitical as distinct from the national, the nationalistic, the regional and the ideological was his during all his days as a cleric in Poland. From 1948 onward, he was overshadowed by Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, Primate of Poland and—in the Stalinist circumstances of post-World War II Poland—the effective
Interrex
who, over a period of some thirty-three years, successfully protected the Polish people from the Leninist demoralization planned by the Moscow masters. He not only did that; he reduced the Polish Stalinists to impotence—they who, in theory, had absolute power—and directly made the Gorbachevist “liberation” of Poland and the other satellites of Eastern Europe an inevitability. Ruefully or gratefully, Gorbachev owes Wyszynski a debt.

As Archbishop and later as Cardinal, Wojtyla worked hand in glove with Wyszynski, learning from him firsthand not only the function of
Interrex
, but, more important, the geopolitical way to reason about the then all-embracing Leninism of the USSR and about the fateful weaknesses of the capitalist West.

Centuries before Karol Wojtyla walked the fields and forests and climbed the mountain slopes of Poland, the Pacts of Polishness earned for Poles the same enmity of worldly powers that Christ bequeathed to his followers. The Pacts provided Poles with the only means imaginable by which they were able to survive as a people for centuries, although deprived of their own sovereign government, their own nationhood and a territory they could call their own. Completely partitioned among Austrians, Russians and Germans from 1795 to 1918, then thoroughly sovietized structurally for forty years, Poles en masse were impermeable, and proved that resident in them was a self-propelling and unstoppable dynamism that maintained cultural, social and spiritual protective mechanisms and ensured the perseverance of the Polish
racja stanu
, the unforgettable and unbreakable will to survive. “As long as we live,” Poles always sang in their national anthem, “Poland lives….”

The death and entombment of the First Polish Republic as a sovereign nation-state was an accomplished fact by 1795. It was the direct result of pacts for its extinction concluded between the Great Powers of Europe. It lasted a full 125 years, until 1919, when the Second Polish Republic was established, to live a precarious twenty-year existence until 1939, when, once more, its extinction was accomplished by Hitlerian Germany and Stalinist Russia, whose avowed aim was to liquidate forever not merely the nation-state of Poland but the Poles as a distinct ethnic and national group. No other great power in Europe really objected to that result. As David Lloyd George wrote in a well-publicized letter of September
28, 1939, “the people of Britain are not prepared to make colossal sacrifices to restore to power a Polish regime represented by the present government….” Lloyd George goes on to say that the USSR had every right to swallow up the Polish republic.

When the Western allies, Great Britain and France, did finally wage real war on Germany, ostensibly to free Poland, manifestly it was because they themselves were faced with a lethal threat. The “phony war” of September 1939 to March 1940 was a time of intensely studied options. It need not have ended with the waging of the real World War II at the beginning of spring 1940.

The “real proof of the pudding” came with the tragically erroneous Yalta and Potsdam agreements between Joseph Stalin and the Western allies: Poland was once more condemned to extinction, its people once more to be merged indistinguishably into the “peoples” and the “republics” of the Stalinist Gulag Archipelago—and that for another forty-three years. Another pact of Polish extinction.

Apart from the mortal blow to the rights of Poles as individuals and citizens, however, Poland's planned extinction for a terrible total of 168 years was a geopolitical and historical mistake of universal proportions. Because the net result was a lopsided and unbalanced view of history, of history's models and of history's lessons for later generations, it was a mistake that was doomed to be repeated; and not only in Poland. And despite all its twists and turns and complications, Poland's story from Renaissance times right into our own day makes it clear that the Soviets were by no means the first ideologically driven group to practice the professional elimination of whole blocs of history; nor were they the first to think up the dreadful stratagem of the “nonperson”—the person other people agree to pretend never existed.

But this extinction of Poland had one more result of far-reaching consequences: It bred among Poles and particularly in the men and women who were Karol Wojtyla's intellectual, religious and moral mentors and political forebears a vivid realization of geopolitics. For their fate as a nation, their daily lives as a people, and the very reason for being Poles depended on vastly intricate affairs involving the Great Powers of world politics. The
racja stanu
about which the Poles were and are justifiably preoccupied—the raison d'être of Poland as a nation-state—has been so long entwined with international affairs and world-wide events that Poland has taken on a permanently geopolitical connotation.

The upper reaches of that connotation and its global dimension was guaranteed by the inherent Romanism of Poland and what it stands for. In a true but not derogatory sense, Poland became and is a regularly
played pawn in the geopolitical game. Small wonder then that John Paul would come equipped geopolitically. The Pacts of Extinction ensured that much.

The three major forces that led directly to the demise of the First Polish Republic in 1795 sprang from such varied motives and backgrounds that, without the advantage of hindsight, one would have expected war to break out between them, rather than the fusion of interests that grew instead.

Two of those three major forces had their earliest beginnings in the deep and violent strains placed on European order and unity by the relocation of the papacy to Avignon in France for sixty-eight years, from 1309 to 1377; and by the Great Schism that followed for another thirty-nine years, from 1378 to 1417. If ever a door of change opened in the affairs of men and nations, those 108 years constituted such a door.

Until then, the papacy had been the only highly developed and stable institution for hundreds of years, giving to the medieval world a sense of order, unity and purpose. In that world of early Europe, everything—politics, commerce, civil law, legitimate government, art, learning—all depended on the ecclesiastical structure that stretched from pope to cardinals and bishops, priests and monks, and outward through all the ramifications of life.

With the Great Schism came a sudden shock of universal doubt as to which of three rival claimants was the valid successor of Peter the Apostle. And along with doubt, the first seeds of challenge to the established order blossomed among the intellectual, artistic and aristocratic circles of European society. Again, only historical hindsight allows us to see now that, with the Great Schism and the Avignon papacy, something vital had departed from papal Rome, something precious and valuable for the papacy's name and standing. Men, for the first time, started to question papal claims. It was in this context that Catherine of Siena (1347-1380) announced the words she had heard in a vision of Heaven: “The Keys of this Blood will always belong to Peter and all his successors.”

The doctrinal revolt of John Wycliffe (1330-1384) in England, imitated and followed by Jan Hus (1370-1415) and his Hussites in Bohemia, was early warning of the trouble that was brewing. For on doctrinal bases, such men began to challenge the civil and political order established on the basis of papal authority.

In this unaccustomed climate of uncertainty and challenge that came
to mark early-Renaissance Italy, there arose a network of Humanist associations with aspirations to escape the overall control of that established order. Given aspirations like that, these associations had to exist in the protection of secrecy, as least at their beginnings. But aside from secrecy, these humanist groups were marked by two other main characteristics.

The first was that they were in revolt against the traditional interpretation of the Bible as maintained by the ecclesiastical and civil authorities, and against the philosophical and theological underpinnings provided by the Church for civil and political life.

Given the first characteristic, the second was inevitable: a virulent, professional and confessional opposition to the Roman Catholic Church and, in particular, to the Roman papacy, both as a temporal power and as a religious authority.

Not surprisingly given such an animus, these associations had their own conception of the original message of the Bible and of God's revelation. They latched onto what they considered to be an ultrasecret body of knowledge, a
gnosis
, which they based in part on cultic and occultist strains deriving from North Africa—notably, Egypt—and, in part, on the classical Jewish
Kabbala
.

The
Kabbala
, the highest reach of mysticism in Judaism's long history, was a direct descendant of the ancient pre-exilic Jewish mystic tradition rooted in the Carmel figures of Elias and Elisha. It left definite traces in the canonical Jewish Bible—the Assumption of Elias, the Millenarianism of Amos, the Servant Songs of Deutero-Isaiah, the Chariot Visions of Ezekiel, the New Covenant prophecies of Jeremiah, the haunting beauty of Malachi's prophecies.

The Jewish
Kabbala
itself was an attempt to outline how mere mortal man, within the strict Mosaic tradition of God's total separateness from man, could attain knowledge—and ultimately, possession—of the divinity. For that knowledge, or
Kabbala
, would itself be possession. Toratic purity was the only preparation for the reception of
Kabbala
; and it would bring with it profound effects and changes in the material cosmos of man.

The
Kabbala
was, in other words, a spiritual doctrine about the intervention of the wholly alien and supernatural life of the one God, the Creator of all things, into the material cosmos.

Whether out of historical ignorance or willfulness or both, the Italian humanists bowdlerized the idea of
Kabbala
almost beyond recognition. They reconstructed the concept of
gnosis
, and transferred it to a thoroughly this-worldly plane. The special
gnosis
they sought was a secret
knowledge of how to master the blind forces of nature for a sociopolitical purpose.