Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (16 page)

Wojtyła also lent his support to a beleaguered Catholic youth organization called Light and Life, organized by Father Franciszek Blachnicki. Blachnicki’s group had evolved out of another of his initiatives called Oasis, which organized Catholic summer camps for teens as an alternative to the system of activities promoted by the party youth organizations. Blachnicki believed that the most effective way to counter Communist spiritual hegemony was precisely by carving out preserves where people could develop their own alternative values. He called it “living in the truth.” “If enough Poles ‘plucked up the courage to live by the truth and unmask lies,’ Blachnicki insisted, ‘we would already be a free society.’”
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Blachnicki’s camps were subject to a range of official harassment—permits denied, fines issued against landowners who hosted the events—but the now archbishop Wojtyła persisted in lending whatever support he could.

For Wojtyła, his dealings with the world of politics were an inescapable yet ultimately incidental function of his job as a priest. In a society where the official ideology claims supremacy over every aspect of citizens’ lives, however, any attempt to promote an alternate view of existence—whether aesthetic, moral, or spiritual—inevitably acquires a political dimension. And though Wojtyła was prepared to
acknowledge the practical political reality of Communist rule, he was consistently unwilling to concede its claimed monopoly on truth—a point he made clear at every step. This was not lost on the Communist Party. In 1973, we now know, the secret police, the SB, considered prosecuting Wojtyła for three of his sermons—based on a paragraph of the criminal code that specified jail terms of one to ten years for seditious statements.
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In 1976 and 1977, Wojtyła’s contacts with Polish dissidents—especially Bohdan Cywiński, one of the founders of KOR—were also carefully documented by the SB’s informers.

This, then, was the man Poles gathered to celebrate in November 1978. British journalist Mary Craig, who had already experienced how Krakówites reacted to his election, now watched as they experienced his inauguration. The receptionists at the city’s main hotel for foreigners, asked whether they could point the way to a television, demurred. Then a passing waiter whispered to Craig that there was a set in the common area on the fourth floor, if she and her companion didn’t mind walking up. In this unlikely location they found a crowd of spellbound Poles watching a black-and-white television, barely audible, encased in a glass box. Someone went to complain about the sound and returned with a hotel official carrying a huge bunch of keys. Finally, the official managed to open the box and turn up the volume.

The ceremony in Rome had already started. The onlookers in Kraków watched as the cardinals lined up to pay homage to the new pontiff. One of the first was the venerable Stefan Cardinal Wyszyński, who just a few days before had been Wojtyła’s boss:

            
The old man knelt to make his obeisance, ready to kiss not only the hand of the Pontiff but also his feet. Wojtyła acted swiftly to forestall him. Gently pulling the old Cardinal to his feet, he embraced him three times, in the Polish fashion, and kissed his hand. In the Dom Turysty there was a sudden explosion of coughing and shuffling and chairs were shifted this way and that, in a bid to escape the intolerable emotion aroused by the scene. The men standing near me looked at the ceiling, then inserted a finger beneath their spectacles to brush away the tears.
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The reaction of the audience attested to the intense feelings that this new pope could unleash. They were not inherently political emotions, but they rarely followed the paths of acceptable sentiment charted out by the party. A commentator from Polish State TV, carried away by the range of nationalities in St. Peter’s Square,
suddenly remarked: “We may belong to different nations yet we are all children of the same God.” As Craig aptly observed, it was “an unremarkable comment elsewhere perhaps, but on the State Television service of a People’s Republic . . .”
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A few weeks later the pope made his first official outside visit outside of the Vatican, to the city of Assisi. Someone in the crowd cried out, “Don’t forget the Church of Silence!” The remark was a reference to the Catholic Church in Eastern Europe. John Paul II replied, “It’s not a Church of Silence anymore because it speaks with my voice.”
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T
he new pontiff—a vigorous and cosmopolitan man—made it clear from early on that he intended to minister to the world, and Vatican officials barely had time to get used to their new boss’s presence before he set off on his first trip.

On January 26, 1979, the new pope flew to Mexico for his first overseas pilgrimage. For much of the twentieth century, Mexico had been governed by a secular revolutionary movement with a history of violent anticlericalism. In the 1920s, Mexican priests had been actively persecuted, many of them shot. At the time of the pope’s visit, the church still faced a number of official restrictions, and the Mexican government had no diplomatic relations with the Vatican. The Mexican president, José López Portillo, issued the invitation to the pope with the proviso that he would not be welcomed as a head of state.

Yet López Portillo was there to greet him at the airport, having understood that it was politically expedient to do so. Mexicans were thrilled to greet John Paul II. More than a million of them lined the roads to cheer the pontiff during his visit. When he and his aides left the country, they looked down to see the light from countless mirrors held aloft to reflect the sun’s rays at his departing plane. It was a remarkable dress rehearsal for an even bigger trip the pope was planning, to another country where the faith of ordinary people stood at odds with a government’s program of militant secularism.

The term
Liberation Theology
was invented by the Peruvian priest and theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez Merino in 1971. Merino would be accused of swapping out theological terms with political ones and of reducing a spiritual teaching to a materialist social theory. One of the most famous of the liberation theologians was Ernesto Cardenal, the Nicaraguan priest and poet who in July 1979 became the minister of culture in the new Sandinista government that took power in Managua after toppling dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle.

“We cannot be Christian and materialist,” John Paul had once said. “We cannot be believer and atheist.”
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Now he used his Mexico trip to drive the point home. He
seized the occasion of his address to the bishops for an uncompromising restatement of church doctrine. The Gospel, he said, could not be reduced to a set of social or political precepts, however well intentioned; the message of the Catholic Church was one of eternal salvation, and to choose it was to make a choice of cosmic and eternal dimensions. Violent revolution and class warfare could not be reconciled with church teaching—not least because they always ran the risk of violating the rights of one group of people while exalting those of another. The next day the pope celebrated mass with representatives of Mexico’s indigenous peoples, whose long history of suffering served to drive home the point that the struggle for justice was an integral part of the church’s mission. He conceded the point that Catholic institutions had sometimes allied themselves with the forces of dictatorship and oppression and went on to stress that, whenever the church took sides, it should always strive to take the side of justice.

These were not tactical compromises, made for the sake of calming his critics in the Liberation Theology camp. Christian humanism, and the inviolability of the individual, remained at the core of his thinking. In March he addressed these issues in his first encyclical. Entitled
Redemptor Hominis
(Redeemer of Man), it offered one of the clearest statements of his personalist philosophy. It is a text that displays a profound anxiety about the rising threat posed to individual human rights by various collectivist systems, including totalitarianism, imperialism, and colonialism:

            
If human rights are violated in time of peace, this is particularly painful and from the point of view of progress it represents an incomprehensible manifestation of activity directed against man, which can in no way be reconciled with any program that describes itself as “humanistic.” . . .

                    
If, in spite of these premises, human rights are being violated in various ways, if in practice we see before us concentration camps, violence, torture, terrorism, and discrimination in many forms, this must then be the consequence of the other premises, undermining and often almost annihilating the effectiveness of the humanistic premises of these modern programs and systems. This necessarily imposes the duty to submit these programs to continual revision from the point of view of the objective and inviolable rights of man.
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Redemptor Hominis
is first and foremost a statement of religious doctrine, but it is also a crucial addition to the long and deepening discourse on human rights that has also been one of the twentieth century’s great gifts to mankind. But John Paul II
was not content to make his contribution in words alone. He was also planning to take a public stand in defense of the principles he held dear. And what better place to do it than in his own homeland?

John Paul II had begun to think about making a pilgrimage to Poland within days of becoming pope. The coming year of 1979 offered a perfect occasion for a visit. It was the nine hundredth anniversary of the martyrdom of Poland’s greatest saint, Stanisław Szczepanowski. He was the Polish equivalent of Thomas à Becket, a man who stood up to the highest power in the land in the name of his faith. In 1072 Szczepanowski became the bishop of the city of Kraków. What we know of him is blurred by legend, but it is clear that he must have been a man of strong will and stubborn principles. He soon became embroiled in a feud with the king of Poland, a brutal character by the name of Bolesław the Bold. (As is so often the case in history, the nickname “bold” was really a euphemism for “psychopathic.”) Bolesław refused to put up with the churchman’s challenge to his authority, and he demanded the death of Stanisław. But no one would carry out the order, so Bolesław did the deed himself. He is said to have cut the bishop down while he was conducting a mass. Few of the king’s deeply Catholic subjects were willing to countenance the killing, and Bolesław soon lost his hold on power. Stanisław, on the other hand, quickly achieved sainthood as one of Poland’s greatest martyrs.

Though many of the details of Stanisław’s death remain mysterious, one thing we do know for certain is that it happened in 1079. A thousand years might seem like a long time to most of us, but the particulars of the story—the principled stand of a bishop of Kraków laying bare the moral bankruptcy of untrammeled state power—gave it unnerving relevance to Poland’s situation in 1979. The Communists certainly thought so, in any case.

So the announcement that John Paul II intended to return to Poland to celebrate the nine hundredth anniversary of Stanisław’s martyrdom sent a shiver of dread through the ranks of the United Polish Workers’ Party. “The cause of the bishop’s death was a conflict with the king,” one internal party memorandum noted in late 1978. “We see no sense in invoking the memory of the bishop’s head and the royal sword, because they symbolize the sharpness of church clashes with the government. We are for cooperation and create favorable conditions for this.”
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The Russians did not need to understand this particular historical backstory to see the potential for trouble if the pope were to return home. Leonid Brezhnev phoned Gierek to persuade him to cancel the visit. “How could I not receive a Polish pope,” Gierek answered, “when the majority of my countrymen are Catholics?” Brezhnev countered by recommending, somewhat bizarrely, that the pope declare
himself indisposed. Gierek, presumably gritting his teeth, replied that John Paul II was clearly determined to make the trip. “Well, do what you want, so long as you and your party don’t regret it later,” Brezhnev said—and hung up.
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In October 1978, the Polish Episcopate invited John Paul II to visit Poland to commemorate Stanisław’s death. A few days later, a Communist Party spokesman responded that, while such a visit would undoubtedly be welcomed by the pope’s compatriots, the exact timing depended on unspecified “circumstances” that necessitated detailed discussions.
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The party was so nervous about the Saint Stanisław issue that it censored a reference to him in the Polish version of the pope’s new Christmas address just as it was about to be published.
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Elaborate negotiations ensued. This exhaustive back-and-forth over the details of John Paul’s itinerary might have seemed absurd to outsiders. In fact, though, what these p reparations show is just how anxiously the authorities reacted to the prospect of a visit by the new pontiff. For the government in Warsaw, the homecoming of this one man was a terrifying prospect. The talks continued into the new year.

A
s Khomeini settled into his exile in France in the fall of 1978, the unrest was spreading back at home. Unprecedented mass demonstrations filled the streets of Iranian cities. Voices from across the political spectrum openly demanded change, both gradual and revolutionary. Leftist guerrillas engaged in battles with government security forces. The shah’s regime had never faced a challenge of such proportions before.

All this kindled utopian expectations among the revolutionaries who had gathered in Neauphle-le-Château. Yet the ayatollah remained imperturbable. He continued his daily prayers without interruption, making his obeisance to God in a tent especially erected on the grounds. He received an endless file of visitors, advisers, and petitioners. His supporters marveled at his supernatural equanimity, his simplicity, his unchanging steadiness. Everyone could see that he lived a life of uncompromising modesty; he owned almost nothing in the way of material possessions, and he ate no more than the plainest of meals. His granite sense of remove alienated many of his Western observers. A British correspondent noted that the ayatollah did not deign to shake his hand and that Khomeini’s gaze remained fixed on some faraway point during their conversation.
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Iranians tended to see this otherworldliness as a virtue, evidence of a genuine spirituality that refused to lose itself in the messy trivialities of daily existence.