Keys of This Blood (91 page)

Similarly, without a geopolitical framework in mind, no accurate understanding of John Paul II is possible. He will remain an enigma for non-Catholics and a stumbling block for his own adherents.

As a politician, he has not interfered in any massive way in the internal politics of Poland either to save Solidarity from its present fragmentation, or to foment a forceful Catholic or Christian democratic movement. Everyone knows where his heart goes as a Pole, as a Catholic and as Pope. Yet he manifestly remains immersed and actively involved in the geopolitical relationships between Poland and other Europeans as well as in the slow dismemberment of the USSR. Obviously, he is looking far beyond the confines of Poland and the local political interests of Polish Catholicism. He is thinking and planning as a geopolitician.

But the difficulty his contemporaries are experiencing in assimilating this role in a modern pope surely stems from what Czar Nicholas called euphemistically the Polish combination of “geography and history.” Over one hundred years later, a Stalin and a Khrushchev did, each in his own inimitable way, employ more blunt and brutally frank language than the Czar when referring to Poland's importance for the security of the USSR within the European continental system.

By that fact of Poland's importance for the USSR, Poland automatically becomes important for the other European nations who share the continent with the USSR as well as with the U.S.A. For, as of the summer of 1990, the U.S.A. had declared itself to be “a European power,” and Europeans were already so describing the U.S.A. Thus, the Europeans of 35 nations, the former Soviet satellites (minus Romania, for the moment), the new “Russia” of Mikhail Gorbachev, and the U.S.A. are now engaged in creating an integrated economy and a geopolitical structure in which to house that economy. John Paul's instinct for geopolitics and his in-house training, so to speak, in matters geopolitical have been his as a Pole. For his Poland has been a geopolitical pawn for nearly two hundred years.

That is not to say, however, that Poles failed to exhibit the behavior that has become so familiar to us in the many brutalities, repressions and “little” wars that are used in our day to gain or maintain some share in the world's balance of raw power. All along the line, in fact, the first long
night of Polish enslavement was punctuated by the flaring explosions of successive Polish rebellions. There was the 1830 Warsaw uprising against the Russians, and the uprisings of 1846, 1848 and 1863 against their other occupiers and oppressors.

Aside from their internal rebellions, thousands of Poles emigrated to take up arms under the flags of other nations—of Turkey, for one, a power that had its far different reasons for opposing the Three Powers of Austria, Prussia and Russia. More thousands of Poles, such as the great composer-pianist Frédéric Chopin, formed a kind of army of expatriates who flooded out through Europe and dedicated their lives and careers to keeping Poland's cause before the eyes of the world as best they could.

But the unique element in the situation of Poland, and the one that made its long-sought death impossible to achieve, was the radical distinction between the Poles as a nation and Poland as a sovereign state.

From the time of the Piast Pact of 990 with the Holy See, the Polish identity—
polonicitas
, or Polishness—was something more than “Frenchness” or “Italianness” or “Americanness” or “Germanness.” For Polishness was anchored not so much in the ever-shifting borders and fortunes of its territory but in that vertical configuration of the faith of the people, entwined with and expressed on the horizontal plane of their daily lives as Poles.

The orientation of Poles was to Rome. It was the same
romanitas
that had for so long been the means of the ascent of the Polish mind and soul to God: the joining of their practical lives and fortunes as a people to that Roman Christian ideal. That remained the central reality for the Polish nation. And that reality remained rooted in the Three Pacts—their Pact with the Vicar of Christ as overlord of Poland, their Pact with Mary as Queen of Poland, and their Pact with the Primate Bishop as
Interrex
of Poland.

Truth to tell, in the persons of Pius VII and Gregory XVI—which is to say from 1829 to 1846—the papacy lived up poorly at best to its responsibilities in the Piast Pact with the Holy See. Gregory in particular—who was elected through Austrian influence and was protected by Austrian arms—had such a clumsy hand and so little knowledge or understanding of what was going on that in June of 1832 he actually issued a formal encyclical roundly condemning the Polish uprising in Russian-held Warsaw.

Such papal collaboration in the partition of Poland cost the Poles dearly. But even that factor made no deep or lasting difference in their survival. For one thing, of course, Gregory XVI did not have the last word in the matter of Poland's Pact with Christ's Vicar in Rome. From
the time that Pius IX succeeded Gregory, in 1846, each Roman Pope has become more aware than the last of the profound issues at stake in Poland.

Aside from policy changes in Rome, however—in fact, well before 1846—there had already begun what Polish historians have described as the “organic labor” of self-preservation, the silent constructive work of preserving Polishness. Poland and Polish culture lived on, because Poles as Poles lived on.

A whole new and cohesive literature came into being that celebrated Polishness and Polish
romanitas
. Writers who remain as unknown in other Western nations as do the Polish roots of their own democracies were among the men and women who fueled the fires of perseverance among their compatriots. Henryk Sienkiewicz was to Poles in that terrible time what playwright-cum-president Vaclav Havel came to be for Czechoslovakia in 1990. There is a long honor roll of such Polish writers—Maria Konopnicka, J. I. Kraszewski, Boleslaw Prus, Eliza Orzeszkowa, among many more—who became part of the passionate refusal of Poles to give their consent to their enslavement or to see their enslavement as the extinction of Poland.

Nor was Poland's Pact with Mary ever in doubt or in danger among the people. Never in their “organic labor” to preserve their Polishness did they neglect on special Holy Days to gather in their tens of thousands, as they have done for over two hundred years, at the Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, near Krakow, with its basilica dedicated to Mary. Never did they fail in their mass pilgrimages to CzÈ©stochowa monastery on their “Bright Mountain” of Jasna Góra, where the scarred icon of Mary and her infant Son remained housed. Always the queenship of Mary that such icons represented shed beams of light through the darkness of this first Polish night.

Still, without leadership and organization, it is doubtful that either fealty to Rome or the most intimate piety toward God and his holy family would alone have preserved the identity or cohesion of Poland in any practical sense as a nation. And that was where the
Interrex
Pact—by which the Primate Bishop of Poland was obliged to head the nation when constitutional government was suspended and political leadership failed—proved itelf as the essential element for survival.

Around the Bishop of Gniezno and Warsaw, and around what he stood for, Poles successfully erected the paradigm of Polish culture, Pacts and all. From the time of Pius IX in the mid-nineteenth century—and particularly since the turn of the twentieth century—the Polish Catholic hierarchy has been filled with Churchmen who were all Rome-oriented
in their deepest core, all utterly devoted to Mary as the Queen of Poland, all furnished with a faith untouched by the wildfire storm of Protestantism or the deluge of Masonic humanism. Over the decades, tens upon tens of thousands of bishops, priests, nuns and faithful laity suffered torture, deportation, execution, enslavement and constant serfdom on their own soil. But none of that, nor all of it together, could eliminate or diminish the function of the
Interrex
as a primary force uniting the people in a way that seemed beyond the power of their adversaries to comprehend.

There was just one point in time when the Catholicity of Poland was almost led onto a fatal path. That moment reached its paroxysm around 1848—the year of revolution in Europe, the Springtime of the Nations—when the deep Polish night was subjected to the torture of the false and meretricious light of an illusory dawn.

Among the expatriate Polish leaders and intellegentsia, mainly in France, there arose a deep and moving conviction that Poland, in imitation of Christ himself, would be resurrected from the tomb of territorial dismemberment. It was nothing less than a national Messianism; and it developed into a fierce belief among the Polish émigrés in Paris.

The comparison they made between Poland and Christ was full-blown. Poland, they said, had died a violent death at the hands of enemies, as Christ had. Poland's sufferings and death were redemptive, as Christ's were. As Christ was resurrected from the dead, so would Poland be. As the Risen Christ set all men free from sin, so the Risen Poland would set all nations free from oppression. So far did the Messianists go in their febrile enthusiasm that they believed the dead Polish heroes of the past would be reincarnated, and would even develop angelic powers of moral persuasion.

The range for this Risen Poland envisioned by the Messianists would not be geopolitical in the sense that had become normal by now in Polish thinking; it would be supergeopolitical. They felt Poland would provide in microcosm a model for the new world order. And in the dreams of these enthusiasts, that world order would forever exclude the old divisive internationalism still so deeply embedded in the contemporary empire-builders of the nineteenth century—the French, the Dutch, the English, the Germans, the Russians and the Chinese.

This new Polish identity was prophesied principally by three Polish poets, each of whom was born and died within the time of Poland's official nonexistence: Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855); Zygmunt Krasinski
(1812-1859); and Julius Slowacki (1809-1849), whose verses were used to express the deep bond between Pope John Paul II and the Polish people in 1979, as they cheered him and sang with him and wept to see him when he went to Poland to issue his first direct, geopolitical challenge as Pope to Moscow. For he was theirs in a most special sense, their
Interrex
in Rome itself. “We need strength / To lift this world of God's,” Slowacki's words rang out in the sudden hush of the crowds on the eve of John Paul's departure. “Thus here comes a Slavic Pope, / A brother of the people!”

Each of these poets insisted on the Christ figure of Poland; and each took Poland—the center of the cross formed by
romanitas
and
polonicitas
—as the point of salvation for Poles and for all human beings.

In the awful circumstances in which the Messianists found themselves, their dream is understandable as an errant offshoot of the “organic labor” of self-preservation. But at base, their Catholicism was erroneous—a fact that was pointed out to them by their countryman and archcritic the great poet, philosopher and patriot, Cyprian Norwid. There was one and only one Christ in human history; there cannot be another. There was only one cross on which a redeeming crucifixion could take place. There was only one human death and divine resurrection—Christ's—that could have universal redemptive value. No other individual—and no nation at all—could be described accurately in these same terms.

In time, most of these Polish Messianists came to recognize the error of confusing Poland with Christ. Further, in reaction to their own mistake—and in a move that would have deep and long-lasting repercussions for Poland, for Polishness, for the nearly unbelievable strength
Interrex
would provide for Poland's survival, and for the direct formation of Karol Wojtyla as priest and Pope—some of the Messianists formed a new religious order, the Resurrectionist Fathers.

Founded with papal approval, the vocation of the Resurrectionists was to reinterpret Polish history in an orthodox way; to preach accurately the one and only divine resurrection—Christ's; and to prepare for that eventual day when
Polonia Sacra
would be called upon to play a special role in the society of free nations.

In 1866, the Resurrectionist Fathers founded the Polish College in Rome, where Polish priests could be trained. “This college,” Pope Pius IX declared, “will be mine, and I will be the ruler for these poor Poles here in Rome, since they have no ruler of their own.”

With their Catholicism screwed on straight again, and with their geopolitics firmly rooted in that bent of mind, the Resurrectionists established
their Polish College fairly quickly as an indispensable place for the orthodox ecclesiastical formation of the Polish Catholic hierarchy. At a time when all of life in Central Europe was based on
imperium
—on the power and the dazzle of imperial majesty and glory—and at a time when not only Poland but Rome itself was stripped of its former status as a temporal power and seemed at the mercy of the
imperium
, the Polish College purified itself, and the many priests who served or studied or stayed there, of all the retrograde instincts that had led the Messianists so far astray.

All in all, it may well be true that without the Polish College in Rome, there would have been no
Interrex
. And it is true almost beyond question that without
Interrex
, there would have been no Second Polish Republic; and there would have been no survival possible against the cruel and bloody tides of Nazi genocide and Stalinist enslavement. There would have been no Poland.

What happened instead was that the Polish College in Rome influenced and helped to form the generations of Polish bishops and priests who themselves could be broken neither in spirit nor in will by the vilest brutality of their oppressors. Nor would they allow the will of Poles or their spirit of Polishness to be broken.

The twentieth century that dawned upon Poland would prove to be a new crucible of suffering and hope for her people. By then, the Church in Poland was peopled with priests and bishops who were to become the fashioners, the teachers and the exemplars of twentieth-century
polonicitas
, of an untainted Polish
romanitas
, and of a georeligious and geopolitical mentality that was as unparalleled in their world as the First Polish Republic had been in the world of the sixteenth century.