Sunday, September 28, 2008

This Day in Religious History (Karol Wojtyla, Future Pope, Becomes Bishop)


September 28, 2008—Karol Wojtyla was consecrated titular bishop of Ombi by Archbishop Eugeniusz Baziak, apostolic administrator of the Archdiocese of Krakow. A little more than 20 years later, he would be elected Pope John Paul II, entering the second stage of his high-stakes battle against the Communist regime that had originally backed his ascension into the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy.

In its nearly half-century of conflict with the Iron Curtain, perhaps nothing helped the West so much as the magnificent obtuseness of Communist regimes. Particularly catastrophic was the Polish Communist Party’s view of the 38-year-old Wojtyla as a potentially more malleable alternative to the nation’s Primate, Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski. How could the wrong be not only so wrong, but so badly wrong?

Let’s try to penetrate the thick ideological mindset of Poland’s totalitarian rulers—something many of us can accomplish, ironically enough, by virtue of organizational psychology involving a different kind of leviathan—capitalism. In this type of massive environment, what you want, above all, is the exact opposite of a leader who’s given you grief.

In Poland, that hives-producing leader was Cardinal Wyszynski. Once finished aiding the Polish underground in WWII, he didn’t stop resisting totalitarianism just because its replacement was Marxist. Between 1953 and 1956, the cardinal would be placed under restricted house arrest, moved a total of three times.

As soon as the anti-Stalinist first secretary of the Polish Communist Party let him out, the church leader began to agitate as loudly as before. I’m afraid the cardinal turned more than a few functionaries in the officially atheistic regime into God-fearing men—not because he tried to convert them, mind you, but because they began to offer prayers to God that they wouldn’t have to deal with this ecclesiastical nuisance ever again. You know—the eternal cry of rulers dating back at least to Britain’s King Henry II on Archbishop Thomas Becket: “Will someone rid me of this troublesome priest?”

How on earth did the UB (the Polish secret police) come to see young Wojtyla as the anti- Wyszynski? Their own secret archives, brought to light after the fall of the regime, help us out here. Having survived meager diets in unheated rooms for three years, Wyszynski was in no mood to brook interference with his proud old nationalist church from this upstart Soviet puppet.

For its part, the regime that proclaimed its love of the proletariat 24/7 took a—well, snobby— attitude about the humble origins of this church leader. And the condescension practically drips from the typewriter of the UB functionary who noted the cardinal’s “shallow, emotional and devotional” Catholicism.

And Wojtyla? After constant surveillance, they saw him as a poet, playwright, cloistered intellectual who taught ethics, for heaven’s (oops, better drop that word, comrade!) sake. Even his work as a youth minister sounded a bit leftist. They could work with him.

If the UB made its feelings known, this might have put the cardinal’s back up, because Wojtyla only placed seventh on Wyszynski’s list for the ecclesiastical vacancy. Somehow, however, he made it to the top of the list eventually.

Nearly 10 years later, the Communists had become far more cautious in their assessment of Wojtyla, now made a cardinal himself by Pope Paul VI: “He deftly reconciles-- unlike Wyszynski--traditional popular religiosity with intellectual Catholicism...he has not, so far, engaged in open anti-state activity. It seems that politics are his weaker suit; he is over-intellectualized...He lacks organizing and leadership qualities, and this is his weakness in the rivalry with Wyszynski."

They might have spared themselves some trouble had they read carefully his 1953 Catholic School Ethics (1953), which anticipated methods of nonviolence protest used by Martin Luther King Jr. three years later in the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott. In the nine-year-interim between his initial appointment and his cardinal’s hat, Wojtyla had also inspired many of the intellectuals that would form the core of the Solidarity movement and secretly ordained priests who served elsewhere behind the Iron Curtain.

Above all, Wojtyla was a Polish patriot who knew just how far to rally churchgoers without provoking a crackdown from the regime. Unlike the blunt Wyszynski, he preferred to go behind the scenes, confident in his own presence and self-confidence—honed as a young actor—to carry the day in one-on-one encounters.

For instance, when the regime requisitioned the church’s seminary building, he went to the Communist Party committee room to make his case in person. In the end, the state agreed only to use the fourth floor of the building.

Above all, Wojtyla never stopped trying. Shortly after his appointment in 1958, he pressed the government to allow the building of a church in Nova Huta, a brand new town built just outside Krakow that was meant to be a workers’ paradise—and, of course, without a church. Only the people wanted it.

Wojtyla’s campaign for the church, while never resorting to calls for violence, was relentless. He would give sermons in the open field on the site in all kinds of weather; file and refile building permits, even if rejected; celebrate Christmas mass on the site; and, when demonstrators jeered out with Communist flunky for his pusillanimous role in denying the permit, Wojtyla intervened before things got out of hand. Finally, 19 years after his consecration as bishop—one year before he was elevated to pope—Wojtyla consecrated the new church at Nowa Huta.

Before long, even Wyszynski had come to recognize the young bishop’s talent, and treated him as a valued protégée. Two decades and a month after his initial appointment, Wojtyla was told by the now-elderly Wyszynski during the deadlocked deliberations to elect a new pope that if the position were offered him, he should accept. Wojtyla did so, becoming John Paul II.


For the little-known story of Wojtyla’s rise in the church, I’d recommend the late Jonathan Kwitny’s Man of the Century: The Life and Times of Pope John Paul II. It also counters the mythology of Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi’s His Holiness and Peter Schweizer’s Victory that attributes the fall of Communism to the “Holy Alliance” between Ronald Reagan and the Pope (with Margaret Thatcher added more recently by National Review's John O'Sullivan). On the contrary, Kwitny argues persuasively, that claim detracts from the people who deserve credit the most—the pope and the Poles themselves.


A PBS documentary from a few years ago took issue with some particulars in Kwitny’s case for the pontiff without, I believe, undermining, in any fundamental sense, his central argument—that John Paul II, no matter the manifest weaknesses in his record (notably, a crackdown on church dissenters, lack of concern for finances, and disregard over anguish over priestly celibacy), remains one of the 20th century’s great apostles of nonviolence and freedom.

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