‘WHEN ONE POPE DIES, we make another one.’ So runs a popular saying in Rome. They were particularly busy in 1978. It was the year of three popes. The death of Pope Paul VI on 6 August 1978 surprised very few Vatican observers. Indeed, as his reign entered its sixteenth year, some reporters already began to write in the past tense. The reign of his successor, Albino Luciani, who took the name Pope John Paul I, was different.
One month after his election, Albino Luciani received an extensive and very detailed interim report that had been carried out at his request by Cardinal Egidio Vagnozzi of an investigation into Vatican finances. Vagnozzi had been President of the Prefecture of Economic Affairs of the Holy See, Chancellor of the Exchequer or Auditor General since late 1967. Pope John Paul I considered the report alongside additional information he had obtained from Cardinals Benelli, Felici and deputy Secretary of State, Archbishop Giuseppe Caprio. He reached a number of decisions which were certain to have a dramatic effect on the Church and the Pope advised his Secretary of State, Cardinal Villot, of these reforms on the late afternoon of 28 September. Within hours Albino Luciani was dead and the lies and the cover-up surrounding the death of the thirty-three-day Pope had begun.
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His death stunned the cardinals. As they gathered in Rome in October to elect a new pope, many were clearly frightened. Albino Luciani – Pope John Paul I – had been murdered.1 No Cardinal uttered that conclusion in public, of course; the party line as decreed by Secretary of State Cardinal Jean Villot held more or less steady during the three months period of sede vacante – the empty throne. Nonetheless, questions were raised behind General Congregation doors; the Pope’s death was both sinister and politically momentous: under the Vatican constitution all of Luciani’s reforms would die with him unless his successor chose to implement them. At stake were profound issues such as discipline within the Church, evangelisation, ecumenism, collegiality, world peace and a subject that now pre-occupied most of the Cardinals – Church finances.2 The man they had elected had indeed immediately instigated just such an investigation; now he was dead.
Cardinal Bernardin Gantin voiced the fears and confusions of many when he observed, ‘We are groping in the dark.’ Cardinal Giovanni Benelli, a man who had been particularly close to the ‘Smiling Pope’, made no attempt to hide his thoughts: ‘We are left frightened.’ Many cardinals were shocked not only by the sudden death of a perfectly fit man in his mid-sixties but by the orchestrated lies peddled by Villot and those under him. They knew that a Vatican cover-up was under way.
In Rome, in off-the-record briefings to reporters, the Vatican machine quickly spun three stories about the late Pope. The first – alleging weak health – is fully examined within In God’s Name as is the second exercise which attempted to demolish Luciani’s remarkable talents and reduce him to a grinning simpleton. ‘Really it’s a blessing in disguise that he died so soon; he would have been such an embarrassment to the Church.’ This attack on the late Pope was mounted particularly by members of the Roman Curia. As with lies about his health, many of the media fell for it and stories directly inspired by this disinformation appeared throughout the world’s press.
The third story was a traditional platitude. Luciani’s work was done: the Lord had taken him away. Thus Cardinal Siri:
‘. . . this death is not a complete mystery, nor is the event totally opaque. In thirty-three days this pontiff completed his mission . . . With his style so close to the Gospel, it can be said that Pope John Paul I opened an era. He opened it and then quietly went away.’ He was echoed by Cardinal Timothy Manning, ‘ . . . he made his statement and then dropped off the stage.’
Other princes of the Church took another view:
‘Why the lies about his health? All this nonsense about operations? Why are they lying about who found the Pope’s body? Why the lies about what he was reading? What are the facts about these changes that were to have occurred the following morning? Changes within the Vatican Bank?’
Villot stonewalled on these and a host of other questions. His blanket response, that it ‘was God’s will’, convinced very few. Cardinal Benelli’s icy response was, ‘I thought it was God’s will that Cardinal Luciani was elected. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh?’
Inside the Vatican village the customary intrigue, vindictiveness, rumour, counter-rumour and character assassination got under way for the election of the new pope. The Curia went ruthlessly about its task of ensuring as far as possible that all rivals to their own man, the reactionary Archbishop of Genoa, Cardinal Siri, were dispatched into oblivion. But as they cut a swathe through the opposition, the Curia was also busy organising defence strategies just in case their man was not elected.
Before departing on the 7.30 a.m. flight to Rome from Warsaw on 3 October Karol Wojtyla, Archbishop of Cracow, Poland, interrupted his schedule to have an ECT examination on his heart and take the print-out with him. It may have seemed extraordinarily prudent for a cardinal who had attracted less than a handful of votes in the August Conclave. But he was aware that the Vatican was peddling lies about the late Pope’s medical history. It would be even easier to pump out rumours about a candidate’s health, especially one such as himself, whose medical history revealed a pattern of illnesses. Certainly, some of Wojtyla’s colleagues viewed his actions as signs that he knew that he would not be returning to Cracow.
During the previous five days, Wojtyla had spent much of his time with his invaluable friend and ally, Bishop Deskur, in Rome. This friendship went back to their years together in the secret wartime seminary in Poland. Since the war, Deskur had guided Wojtyla through the labyrinth of Vatican politics. Never would his help be more needed. Karol Wojtyla listened very carefully as Deskur listed the strengths of this rival candidate, the weaknesses of another. Then he had lunch with other countrymen including Bishop Rubin. These meetings left Karol Wojtyla in no doubt that this time he was a genuine candidate. Those who were pushing his candidacy realised that if the Italians could not unify around one of their own contenders, then the cardinals they had been lobbying would be aware of a stunning alternative. Karol Wojtyla was now obliged to draw on the acting skills he had honed as a young man. Externally a picture of detached calm, the inner self was agog at the prospect that came more clearly focused before him. So much of his early life had been a preamble to this moment. He believed deeply in divine providence and again and again would offer divine intervention as the explanation for his good fortune. Providence, in the shape of a good contact, a patron or a protector, called with remarkable frequency on Wojtyla.
In May 1938 the Archbishop of Cracow, Adam Sapieha, came to Wadowice to give the sacrament of confirmation to those who were about to graduate. The student assigned to the task of welcoming Sapieha in the name of the college was Karol Wojtyla, speaking in Latin. When the young man had finished, there was a thoughtful expression on the face of the Archbishop. ‘Will he enter the seminary?’ he asked religious teacher Father Edward Zacher.
Karol responded for himself. ‘I’m going to study Polish literature and philology (language).’
The Archbishop was disappointed: ‘What a pity.’
Sapieha was destined to become one of Wojtyla’s early protectors. There had been others before, especially his father. By the time that Karol senior died in February 1941, providence had already ensured that while many of the twenty-year-old’s peer group would perish before the end of the Second World War, he would survive; his French tutor, Jadwiga Lewaj, had a quiet word with her good friend Henryk Kulakowski, the president of the Polish section of Solvay, a chemical firm with a large plant in the Cracow suburb of Borek Falecki. At the time all able-bodied Polish males were candidates for forced labour in Germany or working on border fortifications on the Eastern Front. Either route led to a brutal and usually short life. Working at Solvay carried a large range of benefits. It was in some respects a self-contained village with residential homes, containing a surgery with a resident doctor, staff canteen, a shop and a gymnasium. Apart from his wages and the perk of vodka coupons that could be traded on the black market, Karol Wojtyla also carried at all times his guarantee that he would have a good war: an Ausweis, or identity card, that indicated that the bearer was employed in a kriegswichtig industry, work that was essential to the Third Reich’s war effort. The caustic soda the company created had a variety of uses, not least in the production of bombs.
It was during his wartime years at Solvay that a vocation for the priesthood first stirred within Karol Wojtyla. At this time Archbishop Sapieha had created a secret seminary and in August 1944 Karol moved with a number of other young men into the safety of his residence. Wojtyla was ordained as a priest on 1 November 1946. Two weeks later, Sapieha, newly promoted to cardinal, sent Karol Wojtyla to Rome to study for his first doctorate. The archbishop had already marked out Wojtyla for fast-track treatment. The special consideration shown to Wojtyla extended to making funds available so that during the vacations he could tour around Europe along with a fellow priest.
Wojtyla returned to Cracow in June 1948 after obtaining his doctorate with maximum marks in virtually every section. There Cardinal Sapieha continued to carefully nurture his young protégé: seven months as a village curate were followed by a post as student chaplain in the St Florian’s diocese of Cracow where he rapidly developed a devoted following among the undergraduates. The position also gave him the opportunity to mix with the movers and shakers of Cracow society. Wojtyla displayed a remarkable ability at networking and during these years friendships and contacts that would last a lifetime were forged.
On 23 July 1951 Wojtyla’s protector, the Prince-Cardinal Sapieha, died at the age of eighty-five. The Cardinal had seen something special about Karol Wojtyla at their first brief meeting in May 1938. Archbishop Baziak, already established in Cracow as Sapieha’s successor, had discussed Wojtyla’s future at great length with the Prince-Cardinal. Seemingly, the baton had been passed. A few months later Baziak ordered Wojtyla to take a two-year leave of absence to study for another doctorate. This would qualify him to teach at a university. Wojtyla was opposed to this course of action. He wanted to stay at St Florian’s where his involvement with the students was going from strength to strength, but Baziak was adamant, commanding that Wojtyla also move home from the priest’s house at St Florian’s and that any pastoral work he wished to undertake during the two-year sabbatical had to first be approved by Archbishop Baziak. The doctorate came first and led to a thesis, a degree and a job as a university professor.
Baziak’s aim was simple: he wished to combat the tide of communist repression that was sweeping over Eastern Europe. The communists were attempting to plant assistant pastors who were members of the secret police within a great many dioceses, aiming to inevitably control the Church’s infrastructure from the inside. The continuing conflict between Church and State as to who had the right to appoint bishops grew more intense. The communists came up with a radical solution: any bishops who did not meet with their approval were forcibly removed or arrested and imprisoned. In 1952 among the victims were the Bishop of Katowice, Stanislaw Adamski, and two auxiliary bishops. In November that year Wojtyla’s latest mentor and protector Archbishop Baziak and his auxiliary bishop Stanislaw Rospond were arrested, an action that shook the Catholic community of Cracow to its core. Karol Wojtyla said nothing, publicly or privately, and two days after the arrests went on a skiing holiday to the Marty Mountains. Two weeks later the Primate of Poland, Archbishop Wyszynski, was advised that the Pope had named him cardinal. It was a promotion richly deserved; when the news reached Wyszynski he had just denounced the arrests of Baziak and his fellow bishop from a Warsaw pulpit. The regime’s response was a refusal to grant Wyszynski an exit visa, a petty gesture that denied the Cardinal the honour of kneeling before the Pope while the red biretta was placed upon his head.
The regime’s approach to the Church was that of a paranoid schizophrenic, ranging from the conciliatory to the cruel; arrests would be followed by permission to hold a great procession or pilgrimage where Wyszynski was free to make a speech on human rights. In January 1953 the situation in Poland deteriorated to a new level of barbarity when four priests and three lay workers within the Cracow archdiocese went on trial in a military court charged with collaborating with the CIA and illegally trading in foreign currency. After a five-day trial, including scathing denunciations of the late Cardinal Sapieha, Father Jozef Lelito and two of the lay workers were found guilty and sentenced to death. The sentences were subsequently commuted and all seven men were given long terms of imprisonment.
Throughout all this turmoil Karol Wojtyla continued with his pastoral duties at St Florian’s. During the academic year he would give lectures to the students on ethics, he organised retreats, said Mass, heard confessions and studied diligently in preparation for his thesis. Nonetheless, he continued to remain totally uninvolved in the life-and-death struggle of his Church to secure the most basic freedoms. No amount of arrests and imprisonments could stir him into protesting.
In some ways this was a replay of his response to the Second World War when he took no part in armed resistance and urged his friends to do the same, declaring that the Polish Army had been defeated and that it was useless to fight on. During the last three months of 1939 the German invaders turned their attentions to the mentally ill and vulnerable of Poland. They began by emptying the psychiatric clinics in the north of the country. Over 1,000 Poles were transported from a number of the clinics to a wood beside the village of Piasnica Wielki and shot. A year later nearly 300 elderly people were told they were going to the town of Padernice. No such town has ever existed. The lorry conveying them stopped in a wooded area on the outskirts of Kalisz. They were gassed by the lorries’ exhaust fumes and buried in the woods of Winiary. As early as October 1939, less than a month after the German occupation of Poland had begun, ghettos for the Jews were being created. Sometimes they were crammed into a section of a city that had historically been occupied by Jews, as in Warsaw where the Jews were forced to build a wall around the designated area and to pay for the wall.
During these same months Wojtyla wrote to his close friend Mieczyslaw Kotlarczyk:
‘First and foremost, I must tell you that I am keeping busy. Some people are currently dying of boredom, but not I, I have surrounded myself with books, dug in with Arts and Sciences. I am working. Would you believe that I am virtually running out of time! I read, I write, I study, I think, I pray, I struggle with myself. At times I feel great oppression, depression, despair, evil. At other times, as if I were seeing the dawn, the aurora, a great light.’
His letters show an extraordinary preoccupation with his own activities. Poland was enduring the most grievous ordeal in its history and yet this exceptionally gifted graduate wrote fulsome letters which harked back to the prewar days at university.
Now in the 1950s, confronted with communism, Karol Wojtyla had again retreated. Even when his long-time friend and teacher Father Kurowski was arrested, he remained silent and within his writings or sermons he never once directly attacked communism. This pattern of behaviour continued to flourish thoughout the 1950s. In 1953 he completed his dissertation, leading to the award of his second doctorate; in October he began to lecture at his former university, the Jagiellonian, on social ethics. There were numerous excursions with his adoring students, skiing, kayaking, and most of all, hiking. He was a prodigious walker, on one occasion walking 26 miles in a day. In July 1958, while enjoying one of these vacations in the lake region in Northern Poland, he received a summons to come and see Cardinal Wyszynski. Archbishop Baziak, who had been quietly furthering Wojtyla’s career, had recommended him to Wyszynski for the post of auxiliary Bishop to Cracow. News had just been received by the Primate that the Pope had accepted their recommendation. Significantly, the Polish Communist regime had also approved of the appointment.
Although Wojtyla obviously possessed a string of academic achievements, Baziak’s recommendation ignored his lack of any administrative experience, an essential for a suffragan bishop. Moreover, because of the academic direction in which both Cardinal Sapieha and Baziak had channelled him, his pastoral experience was severely limited. At thirty-eight, he was also a good ten years younger than the norm for a new bishop. He was now the youngest bishop in Poland. In itself it was not such a bad thing but such early success in the backbiting world of the Catholic priesthood can prove a handicap.
The invective within the Church hierarchy in Poland can be gauged from the files of the Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa – SB – the secret police. The regime were kept extremely well-informed. At any given time there were well over 1,000 priests who worked as spies and informants for the Polish Communist government. In a shocking betrayal of trust, the confidentiality of the confessional was regularly breached. The files reveal that the most highly valued asset working for the communists was ideally placed to spy and inform on Karol Wojtyla.
The informer had been directly responsible for the arrest and imprisonment of the Bishop of Katowice, Stanislaw Adamski, and two auxiliary bishops in 1952, and in November of the same year for the arrest of Archbishop Baziak and his auxiliary Bishop Stanislaw Rospond. There were other victims of this man’s treachery, yet the fact that not a hair on Karol Wojtyla’s head was ever disturbed speaks most eloquently of total rejection of any involvement in the Catholic Church’s struggle within Poland at this time. In 1958 the informer was in the perfect position to give a detailed report on the opposition Archbishop Baziak had faced when he had decided to promote Wojtyla.
The particular spy so prized by the secret police was Father Wladyslaw Kulczycki. During the Second World War he was active in the Polish underground, an activity that led to his arrest and imprisonment by the Nazis. After the war he returned to Cracow where for a short while he held the position of Judge at the Curia’s court. He knew the Primate of Poland well and had cared for Cardinal Wyszynski’s father. Well-educated, he had studied law in Strasbourg and history in Paris. The Polish secret police discovered he was engaged in a passionate love affair and blackmailed him into becoming a spy.
Wojtyla was only settling into his new role when unexpected news came from Cracow. Archbishop Eugeniusz Baziak died on 15 June 1962. His successor was not publicly announced until 19 January 1964. The eighteen-month delay was caused solely by the stubborn intransigence of two individuals. The Primate of Poland was determined that his point of view would prevail while the Communist regime’s number two, Zenon Kliszko, was equally determined to have his man running the Archdiocese of Cracow. In fact Baziak had never been recognised by the regime and for thirteen years had officially functioned not as Archbishop but as an Apostolic Administrator, the regime’s way of humiliating both the man and his faith. Cardinal Wyszynski did not share the same universal awe and admiration of Wojtyla as many of his peers. Indeed, it has been suggested that Wyszynski was bounced into the decision in 1958 to make Wojtyla a bishop by the regime. Whatever the truth, the Primate certainly did not want to give a further promotion to Wojtyla, whom he regarded as little more than an ambitious man preoccupied with networking. What particularly exercised the Primate was the high-handed manner that Bishop Wojtyla adopted with other members of the Cracow Archdiocese. ‘Wojtyla should not forget that he is only a temporary administrator and as such should stop bossing people around,’ was a typical observation from a member of the Wyszynski circle duly recorded by the SB. Acting on the traditional protocol, Cardinal Wyszynski submitted three names to the Polish Government. All three had previously been approved by the Pope. Wojtyla’s name was not on the list. Months later the list came back to Wyszynski with all of his candidates rejected. The files of the Polish secret police and additional information from former Communist Party members reveal a wonderfully ironic tale – independently confirmed by papal biographer George Weigel.3 A bemused Primate retired to his study and eventually a further three names were sent to the Vatican for papal approval, which was forwarded to the Polish Government. After a further three months the second list came back to Cardinal Wyszynski; again the regime had given the thumbs down to all three names.
During the late autumn of 1963 Father Andrzej Bardecki, the ecclesiastical assistant on the Catholic Church-financed paper, Tygodnik Powszechny, had a visitor at his Cracow office. Professor Stanislaw Stomma headed the minority Catholic Party in the Polish Parliament. With a maximum of five members it was in reality no more than a rump yet it served many useful purposes, not least as a conduit between the Communists and the Catholic Church. The professor quietly invited Father Bardecki to join him for a stroll around part of the city. As the two men walked, Professor Stomma recounted a conversation he had recently had with Zenon Kliszko, the Communist number two. Kliszko had asked him who would be the best candidate for the vacancy in Cracow. ‘I told him, firmly and categorically, that Wojtyla was the best, indeed the only choice.’ Kliszko beamed and replied, ‘I’ve vetoed seven so far. I’m waiting for Wojtyla and I’ll continue vetoing names until I get him.’
Why Wojtyla? The regime considered him politically naïve and as a man who had never displayed any of the intransigence for which his Primate was internationally famous, someone who would be open to compromise. It was an opinion largely based on the stream of information they had received from the regime’s prize spy planted in the very heart of the Cracow Archdiocese. An appointment such as this had considerable ramifications to the Communist Government of Gomulka. The Communists and the Catholic hierarchy were involved in a delicate balancing act and if the two failed to co-exist there was the very real possibility that Soviet tanks would appear on the streets of Warsaw and Cracow. All it might take would be a newly elected Archbishop reaching ambitiously for an international profile through confrontational tactics. Speaker Kliszko did not want a firebrand or a political agitator preaching from the pulpits of the Cracow churches. He had studied the secret police dossier, such as it was, on Wojtyla and he saw nothing worse than midnight masses in a field at Nowa Huta and a sermon commemorating the centenary of the January Uprising against the Russians in 1863. Kliszko was also reassured by Wojtyla’s war activities, or rather their absence; here was a man who had repeatedly refused to join or assist the partisan army and had relied on God’s will to prevail. In Kliszko’s eyes, Wojtyla was extremely unlikely to make common cause with any Polish dissident faction that might emerge.
The clinching element, however, had been the highly detailed report that Kliszko had requested from the Communist Party’s top agent in Cracow, Father Wladyslaw Kulczycki. Kliszko’s tactics worked a charm. When he had received a further nomination from the Cardinal, the list contained the name ‘Wojtyla’. It is not every Communist leader that can claim to have been instrumental in the making of a pope, particularly a Polish pope. On 8 March 1964, Karol Wojtyla was installed as Archbishop of Cracow. He was now only two steps away from the throne of St Peter.
When the Second Vatican Council reconvened in October 1964 Wojtyla, who had risen to speak at the first session as a junior auxiliary bishop, now addressed the Council as an archbishop. His promotions had given him a growing confidence and he made influential contributions to a number of proposed declarations, most notably during the debate on the Declaration on Religious Freedom where he argued that the oppressive nineteenth edict that ‘error has no rights’ was in need of a modification. His views, which were much in line with the reformers within the Council, that tolerance and proclamation of the fundamental right to freedom of conscience were essential before there could be any meaningful dialogue with other Christian Churches, were reflected in the final published Declaration on Religious Freedom – Dignitatis Humanae.
In May 1967 Paul VI announced the next Consistory, or council of cardinals, and among the names of the cardinalselect was Karol Wojtyla. This news of yet another promotion came a few days after his forty-seventh birthday and came as a great surprise within Poland; Wojtyla was extremely young to be so honoured. There had been no pressure on the Pope to appoint a second cardinal and quite a number of archbishops were older and more experienced. The man himself was heard to yet again murmur something about Providence yet there may have been more earthly reasons. In February that year Wojtyla had been a key member of highly secret discussions that had taken place at various locations in Poland. A papal delegation, headed by the then Monsignor Agostino Casaroli and Wojtyla’s old friend Monsignor Deskur, had held meetings with Polish officials, the Primate and Karol Wojtyla. The main subject on the agenda was the possibility of establishing diplomatic relations between Poland and the Vatican State. With the exception of Cuba it would have been a first for a communist country.
Two months later, on 20 April, after yet another highly favourable report on Wojtyla had been given to the Pope by Casaroli, the pontiff received the man from Cracow in a private audience. Paul was very impressed by his relatively new archbishop; just how impressed became publicly apparent in May when the relatively new archbishop became a completely new cardinal.
Papal biographers have written freely that by this time the communists had long realised that they had made a dreadful mistake in plotting to bring about Wojtyla’s promotion to bishop and that, when the news of his red hat was announced, they were beside themselves with anger and displeasure at the prospect of Cardinal Wojtyla. A confidential report written by members of the Polish secret police tells a quite different tale. The report dated 5 August 1967, just five weeks after Wojtyla became a cardinal, is headed: ‘Our Tactics Towards Cardinals Wojtyla and Wyszynski’. It is a fascinating insight into how the two men were perceived by at least some of the most senior members of the ruling Communist party. The authors had the benefit not only of Father Kulczycki but regular reports from a large secret service staff and spies; they also had access to evidence acquired from the full range of electronic eavesdropping equipment.
Predictably, in view of his long history of opposition, Wyszynski won few bouquets:
‘Cardinal Wyszynski was brought up in a traditional family of Church servants. In the opinion of the clergy this is an inferior type of people, and this stigma weighs on him to this day . . . He built his “scientific career” on anti-Communist activity and anti-Communist writings which, in 1948, were decisive in his advancement to bishop . . . During the cold war his position becomes greater – he is the standard bearer of the anti-Communist front.’
There was a great deal more in similar vein. The secret police saw Wyszynski as a complete cynic:
‘His concept of shallow, emotional and devotional Catholicism is correct and profitable from the view-point of the Church’s immediate interests. For some years his treatment of the intellectual elite, Catholic intelligentsia and laity as “uncertain elements” has its roots in Polish realities.’ For Wyszynski, according to the secret police report, the strength of the Church in Poland ‘has resided for centuries not among the elites, but in the Catholic masses’.
Cardinal Wojtyla, on the other hand, was much more to the liking of the Communists. They wrote approvingly of his origins (unaware of the altar and the font of holy water in his boyhood home): ‘a family of the intelligentsia – from a religious but not a devotional environment’. Inevitably they were on much firmer ground when they moved into the war years and beyond: ‘He rose in the Church hierarchy not thanks to an anti-Communist stance, but thanks to intellectual values.’ The Communists were impressed by Wojtyla’s success as an author and noted that his book Love and Responsibility had been translated into many languages. In the eyes of the Communists Wojtyla had a great deal going for him.
‘He has not, so far, engaged in open anti-state political activity. It seems that politics are his weaker suit . . . He lacks organising and leadership qualities and this is his weakness in his rivalry with Wyszynski.’ [Author’s italics.]
At no time do the intelligence files on Wojtyla indicate that he represented any more than the occasional pinprick in the body politic of the country. He has been portrayed by the Vatican, by numerous journalists and countless biographers as a man who stood resolute against the Communists and fought them tooth and nail in the years leading to his papacy but the facts reveal a man who successfully survived the Polish Communists as he had survived the Second World War, namely by prudence and a complete absence of any heroics.
The recommendation was that Wojtyla be given every support even to ensuring that he should be handled very gently. ‘We must risk the approach that the less he is pushed by us, the sooner a conflict (with Wyszynski) will develop.’ Obversely, the Communists planned to keep maximum pressure and discomfort on Wyszynski who, they believed, would eventually erupt as he saw the young man being granted every conceivable privilege and respect. In the eyes of the Communists, ‘Wyszynski had received Wojtyla’s elevation to the cardinalship with explicit reluctance.’ So the old man was to be humiliated and hemmed in at every turn while ‘we should act positively on matters of prestige that would improve Wojtyla’s self-esteem.’
Karol Wojtyla’s ‘self-esteem’ kept pace with his irresistible rise as now, among his many other duties and activities, he began to focus on the wider world beyond Poland. During August 1969 he deputised for Cardinal Wyszynski on a three-week tour in Canada followed by two weeks in the United States. The Primate had balked at the prospect of coping with a new experience, press conferences; nor could he speak English. Wojtyla leapt at the opportunity, and accompanied by his personal chaplain, Father Stanislaw Dziwisz, and two friends, Bishop Macharski and Father Wesoly, he flew to Montreal. There and at Quebec City Wojtyla could relax into his relatively fluent French before moving on to a seven-city tour of predominately English-speaking cities. Much of the time, however, he was able to speak in his native tongue, the official purpose of the trip being to visit Polish communities. If he learned little about Canada and subsequently the United States he learned the value of cocktail parties and banquets and the networking habits of his guests; as his English improved he also began to enjoy the press conferences.
In the United States his experience was again largely confined to Polish community activities but Father Wesoly recalls that Wojtyla was advised to visit every city where a cardinal was in residence – a curious piece of advice unless the recipient was ambitious to further his career. Wojtyla did not make them all but he had a good stab at the task. In the two-week stay, apart from his many official tasks on behalf of Polish Americans, he managed to meet seven of his fellow cardinals. Then hurrying back to Rome he met quite a few more at the extraordinary session of the Synod of Bishops.
The Synod had been created by Pope Paul to ensure that the decisions that had been taken at the Vatican Council sessions were implemented. Very typically Wojtyla never missed a meeting. He had been nominated a member not by his Primate but by Pope Paul and, like other gestures by Paul, this nomination has been subsequently seen as significant. Wojtyla’s biographers have contended that Pope Paul’s actions were clear indications that Wojtyla was his anointed one, the man he would like to see succeed him on St Peter’s throne. In fact, Paul made a very public and symbolic gesture to Albino Luciani, the man who actually did succeed him and of course Paul would not be voting in the Conclave to choose the next pope.
Without the benefit of hindsight, any contemporary observer of Cardinal Wojtyla in the 1970s would have judged him a man whose ambitions reached far beyond his current achievement. Of course, Wojtyla gave no public hint of his desire for the papacy; that would have been fatal, but as so often before, his actions spoke very eloquently for him. The international Synod of Bishops was one of a number of gatherings that saw Wojtyla at virtually every meeting. He was elected and re-elected a member of every steering committee between the Synods. At the 1974 Synod he was appointed realtor, the man who drafts the final report, on the issue of evangelisation in the modern world. When the question of evangelisation in Communist countries and Marxist-influenced societies was discussed Wojtyla was dismissive of what he considered to be the naive, ill-informed views of the delegates from Western Europe and Latin America. He considered that for them Marxism was a ‘fascinating abstraction rather than an everyday reality’. Inevitably he failed to write a final report that was acceptable to the Synod. More significantly he had given a very clear indication of his ignorance that Communism had more than one face, there were varying forms of Marxism, and that the words of socialism had different effects in Europe than in Latin America or South Asia. It was a deficiency that he would never remedy and one with far-reaching and disastrous consequences.
Wojtyla’s maiden journeys to Canada and the United States gave him an appetite for international travel that would never be satiated. In February 1973 he represented the Polish Church at an International Eucharistie Congress in Melbourne. During the month he managed also to travel to New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and Manila. He met Polish communities in at least seven Australian cities. None of these trips, however, could be defined as learning experiences; they fell more comfortably into the ‘if it’s Tuesday it must be Paris’ type of travel. Travelling frequently to Rome, Wojtyla became a familiar figure not only at meetings and conferences but also within the papal apartments. Between 1973 and 1975 he was received eleven times by the Pope in private audiences, an unprecedented figure for a non-resident cardinal. In early 1976 the Pope accorded Wojtyla a singular honour when he asked the Cardinal to conduct the Curia’s Lenten retreat.
Wojtyla was acutely aware of the opportunity that had been presented to him. Many of the cardinals who would at some point in the near future be choosing the successor to Paul VI would be present. To prepare himself he retired for 20 days to the mountains. There, in a convent of Ursuline sisters, he ‘wrote the meditations until midday, went skiing in the afternoon, and in the evening went back to writing’. The week-long retreat was held behind closed doors in St Mathilda’s Chapel within the Vatican in the presence of the Pope. Also present were the papal household and over 100 members of the very heart of the Roman Catholic Church, the Curia Romana. This was the central government of an organisation with a membership approaching one sixth of the planet. To one side of the altar, tucked discreetly out of sight sat the Pope, seventy-nine years of age and in poor health, his physical condition not helped by the penitential shirt he was wearing under his robes, a garment made of coarse horse hair and thorns that pressed into his skin.
The ranks of the all-powerful Curia sat quietly listening as the man from Cracow – speaking, at the Pope’s previous suggestion, in Italian – sat at a small table with a microphone in front of him and began with a quote from the Old Testament. ‘May God grant me the grace to speak as I desire and to formulate thoughts worthy of the good things given me, since he is the guide of Wisdom.’4 Many of his listeners knew Wojtyla, but not well: only his champion Andrzej Deskur, now an Archbishop, could make that claim. He had been opening doors, arranging meetings over meals, quietly talking up the abilities of Karol Wojtyla since the earliest days of Vatican Council II. Now more than anyone else he listened in eager anticipation to his close friend.
Wojtyla had chosen as his central theme the aspirations embodied in what he considered to be the central plank of Vatican Council II: Gaudium et Spes – Joy And Hope – The Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. It was an impressive performance. The congregation sat listening and observing as his command of Italian grew warmer. Never had the Cardinal’s previous acting experience been used for such high status. Again and again he had been able to draw on acting experiences in Wadowice. Again and again the acting technique that the Rhepsodic Theatre group had developed that relied on the voice rather than on the body, had taken Karol Wojtyla beyond the threshold that exists between actor and audience. Among the Princes of the church listening as Wojtyla developed his theme that ‘it is only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of man truly becomes clear’ were: Cardinal Secretary of State, Jean Villot, the Frenchman whose icy exterior hid an icy interior; Giovanni Benelli, number two at the Secretariat of State and a pope maker in waiting; Cardinal Bernardin Gantin of Benin, young and strong; Cardinal Sergio Pignedoli, President of the Secretariat of Non-Christians and Pope Paul’s ‘best-loved son’ and favoured by many to be the next Pope; Cardinal Sebastiano Baggio, prefect of the Congregation of Bishops, and a man who entertained no doubts about the identity of the next pope – himself.
The Cardinal made good use of other skills and talents as he expanded not least on knowledge acquired through his years of prodigious study. He quoted from a galaxy of sources, including the Old and New Testaments, Christian classics, contemporary philosophy and general literature, from St Augustine to Hans Küng. But Wojtyla also demonstrated that he was a man with a soul as well as a brain. Speaking with great power and authority, he talked of that moment when
‘a man goes down on his knees in the confessional because he has sinned. At that very moment he adds to his own dignity, the very act of turning again to God is a manifestation of the special dignity of man, of his spiritual grandeur, of the personal meeting between man and God in the inner truth of conscience.’
When his Lent sermons were subsequently published, the Cracow intellectuals were impressed, more so than some of his listeners within the Vatican who regarded the abundance of sources quoted as ‘reminiscent of an undergraduate’s defence of his thesis’. But then some of this group of listeners would have marked down God if He had chanced to deliver a sermon. Wojtyla returned to Rome in March and April to give conferences on philosophy. In September he was back again, this time in Rome and Genoa giving more lectures, gaining more exposure.
In July 1976, Karol Wojtyla went on his second visit to the United States. The official reason was to attend the International Eucharistie Congress in Philadelphia. Yet again a passport was made available to him courtesy of the Communist Government, attempting to sow dissension between the Primate Cardinal Wyszynski and Cardinal Wojtyla. Yet this official policy of divide and rule failed completely to produce the desired results. Although theirs was far from the easiest of relationships, Wyszynski and Wojtyla had developed a mutual respect and a mutual trust over the years. It helped greatly that from the outset Wojtyla had always deferred to Wyszynski and had on a number of occasions demonstrated his loyalty to the older man. Although the Primate had a profound distrust of intellectuals he came to appreciate Wojtyla as a colleague with a variety of qualities, which included a sharp native shrewdness.
While in the United States Dr Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Wojtyla’s co-author on the English-language version of his philosophical work The Acting Person, took it upon herself yet again to help his career. She had already been responsible for bringing his original book to a far wider audience. Wojtyla stated within the preface of the book that he had ‘tried to face our issues concerning life, nature and the existence of Man directly as they present themselves to Man in his struggles to survive while maintaining the dignity of a human being, but who is torn apart between his all-too-limited condition and his highest aspirations to be free’. In Poland the book had largely been dismissed by Wojtyla’s fellow Catholic philosophers until the appearance of the lively, vivacious Dr Anna-Teresa; through her collaboration with Wojtyla on the English-language edition she succeeded in the truly formidable task of liberating his mind so that he could articulate what he actually wished to say, something he had failed to do within the original version of the work.
When the new edition was completed Dr Anna-Teresa was determined to introduce the author to the American audience. This included arranging for him to speak at Harvard, a White House meeting with President Ford, and a mass PR campaign to the media, in which he was described as a distinguished Polish Cardinal considered by at least some European commentators to be a contender for the papacy. Wojtyla baulked at none of this though he was obliged to cancel afternoon tea with the President because of a previous commitment. He had no problem with being introduced at the Harvard gathering by Dr Tymieniecka’s husband as ‘the next Pope’. The New York Times was suitably impressed and ran an article on Wojtyla. Anna-Teresa considered Wojtyla to be ‘Christ-like’ and full of wisdom yet with one profound flaw: she was alarmed at his ignorance of Western democracy and his unawareness of the power of the system that stood in opposition to Communism. He had given her the clear impression during their many meetings that Communist rule in Eastern Europe could not be defeated, that it was impregnable. She found Wojtyla dismissive of the West, particularly the United States which he regarded as devoid of morality. Her alarm was shared by Professor Hendrik Houthakker of Harvard who had attempted in vain to open his eyes to the merits of capitalism and democracy. If it became public knowledge this antipathy to the United States would have destroyed any chance of the papacy for Wojtyla. Anna-Teresa worked long and hard to dissuade him from revealing his true feelings on this subject.
* * *
She was largely successful but not entirely. Wojtyla had weighed the United States and found it wanting. When he returned home he freely criticised American culture and what he perceived as its shallowness. In an interview with Tygodnik Powszechny he demonstrated not only a deep prejudice about the United States but an equally deep ignorance.
‘The question of belonging to a nation of fathers and forefathers reaches deep into the conscience of man, requiring truth about himself. Not accepting this truth, man suffers a basic need and is condemned to some kind of conformism . . . This is a real problem in the structure of the American society. The extent of this problem is demonstrated today by the so-called “Black Question”. I have not noticed any average American even of the WASP type express the words “American nation” with the same conviction that an average Pole in Poland speaks of the Polish nation.’
(There is no evidence that at the time these remarks were made Cardinal Wojtyla had met a single ‘average’ American.)
On Sunday 6 August at 9.40 p.m. Pope Paul VI died. The throne was empty. Now, after a thirty-three-day papacy and the murder of Pope John Paul I, it was again vacant.
Plots and counter-plots about who would take the vacant throne were outlined at discreet meetings. The death of John Paul sent the Church into paroxysm. The majority of the men from Latin America wanted more of the same, another Luciani; they wanted birth control, a Church of the poor and a sweeping reform of the Vatican Bank. Some of the Europeans wanted all of that plus an acceleration of the reforms that Vatican Council II had promised. Others, such as the German and the Polish Cardinals, considered that these Council reforms were being implemented at a positively hectic pace and wanted to slow the whole process down. Cardinal Benelli, who had worked so assiduously to ensure the election of Albino Luciani, now worked just as hard to bring about his own election. Other Princes of the Church had a range of agendas: a hastily arranged meeting in the French Seminary discussed the need to find a candidate to stop the election of the conservative Cardinal Siri. Meanwhile, at dinner at the Felician Sisters’ convent on the Via Casaletto, others planned the promotion of Cardinal Wojtyla’s candidacy.
The Polish connection was proving a powerful gambit as Cardinal Franz König of Vienna and Cardinal John Krol of Philadelphia began to work the telephones. Krol was a formidable operator with peerless political expertise. His high-powered friends included three former American Presidents – Johnson, Nixon, Ford – and the future President, Ronald Reagan. Krol got to work softening up his fellow American cardinals. The first to get the treatment was Cardinal Cody of Chicago and in this instance Krol was pushing at an already open door as Cody had stayed with Wojtyla in Cracow, and a Polish Pope would be acclaimed by the large number of Polish immigrants in Chicago. Above all, Wojtyla’s victory might well save Cody’s position; the dead Pope had decided to remove Cody, who was up to his neck in corruption. König, meanwhile, was making a pitch in a very different direction: Stefan Wyszynski. He gently sounded him out about the possibility of a Polish papal candidate. The primate dismissed the idea. ‘It would be a great victory for the Communists to have me permanently removed to Rome.’ König gently pointed out that there were in fact two Polish Cardinals. Wyszynski was astonished. Eventually he recovered sufficiently to dismiss the idea out of hand. ‘Wojtyla is unknown. The idea is unthinkable. The Italians will want another Italian Pope and so they should. Wojtyla is far too young to be even a consideration.’ Wojtyla, meanwhile, was discovering he had much in common with a number of cardinals he had not met before, including Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Germany.
The Italians were barely waiting for the Conclave: reputations were being shredded and characters assassinated, at the drop of a red biretta. They did indeed want another Italian pope but some wanted Siri, others Benelli; still others were committed to Poletti, or Ursi or Colombo. In the week prior to the Conclave, the Roman Curia mounted a major offensive on behalf of their ‘favourite son’, Giuseppe Siri. Those looking for a bandwagon to jump on began to move in Siri’s direction. At one stage it seemed it would take a miracle to stop Siri; the miracle duly arrived. Siri had given an interview to a trusted reporter on the Gazzetta del Populo. A condition of the interview was that it would not be published until the cardinals were in the Conclave and uncontactable. The Gazzetta reporter, according to one Vatican Village rumour, contacted his good friend Cardinal Benelli and outlined to him the salient points of the interview. Whether or not on Benelli’s urging, the reporter broke the embargo and, just a day before they were sealed into the Sistine Chapel, the cardinals learnt the main points of the interview. Siri had dismissed the Luciani Papacy and ridiculed the late Pope as a man who had delivered as his inaugural speech a text written for him by the Curia. He had then been equally critical of Cardinal Villot, the Secretary of State and Camerlingo. He had also dismissed the concept of collegiality. The interview cost him a number of votes but equally there were supporters of Siri who, convinced that the whole affair had been engineered by Siri’s main rival, vowed they would vote against Benelli until hell froze over.
* * *
While news of the Siri interview flew around the Apostolic Palace, Karol Wojtyla was preoccupied with a personal tragedy. His friend of more than thirty years, Bishop Deskur, had been rushed to hospital after suffering a major stroke. Wojtyla had hurried to his bedside and the following day, Saturday 14 October, said Mass on behalf of his stricken friend who was lying paralysed and virtually speechless. Wojtyla’s candidacy owed more to Deskur than to any other man and he had worked tirelessly over the years to further Wojtyla’s career. Deskur had continued to organise events for him virtually to the eve of the Conclave: lunch on 9 October with guests including Cardinal Nasalli Rocca; lunch on 11 October with guests including Cardinal Cody. Phone calls to Benelli’s secretary arranged an accommodation; a meeting was held to reassure a German contact on continuity. Now Wojtyla’s fate was in the hands of others. When the voting began on 15 October a protracted, deeply bitter struggle opened between Benelli’s supporters and the Siri faction. These machinations were in sharp contrast to the back room negotiations surrounding Lucia-ni’s election, which was one of the shortest debates in the Vatican’s history.
It would be logical to assume that, as John Paul I had been the clear choice for the overwhelming majority, then little more than two months later they would indeed be seeking another from the same mould: a truly humble, modest man who desired a poor Church for the poor of this earth. When Luciani declined the pomp of a papal coronation he said:
‘We have no temporal goods to exchange, no economic interests to discuss. Our possibilities for intervention are specific and limited and of a special character. They do not interfere with purely temporal, technical and political affairs, which are matters for your governments.’
Thus in one dramatic gesture he demonstrated that the Church’s timeless lust for temporal power was abolished. This presumably was the kind of man that the Princes of the Church would now be attempting to find for a second time. At the end of the first day they were still looking after four ballots. The following day after a further two ballots they were no nearer. Giovanni Benelli who, though no replica of Luciani, would most certainly have followed him down the same path of financial reform, came within nine votes of the necessary majority but it was not to be.
Lunch on the second day produced, after energetic lobbying from Franz König and John Krol, a compromise candidate, Karol Wojtyla. At the meal, after the sixth ballot, Cardinal Wojtyla affected the traditional concern and dismay at his growing support; he also began to consider what name he would use if elected. He had a particular inclination for Stanislaw in homage to St Stanislaw of Cracow, the spiritual hero of Poland, who had been martyred in 1079, but several of those who had managed his candidacy considered that at least an illusion of continuity was desirable. During the counting of the decisive eighth ballot Wojtyla picked up a pad and pencil and began to write rapidly. At the end of the ballot the throne was Wojtyla’s. Asked if he accepted the nomination, Wojtyla paused for what seemed a long time. Some of the waiting cardinals feared that he was about to reject the supreme office. He was in fact composing his answer in Latin. ‘Knowing the seriousness of these times, realising the responsibility of this selection, placing my faith in God, I accept.’ Asked by what name he wished to be known, there was another interminable pause before he responded, ‘Because of my reverence, love and devotion to John Paul and also to Paul VI, who has been my inspiration and strength, I will take the name of John Paul.’
With some reluctance he followed Luciani in rejecting the traditional opulent coronation with its waving ostrich feathers and the papal tiara encrusted with emeralds, rubies, sapphires and diamonds. Another of Albino Luciani’s quiet innovations, the refusal to refer to himself using the royal ‘we’, was however rapidly abandoned. Small things and silence had been superseded by pomp and majesty. His election gave rise in an instant to global speculation as to what kind of pope he would be. Would Wojtyla pick up Luciani’s posthumous challenge and carry out the various reforms? One fact was obvious from the very beginning of this papacy: Cardinal Bernardin Gantin expressed exactly the fear and confusions of many of his fellow cardinals when he observed, ‘We are groping in the dark.’ Most of the cardinals were still shocked and numbed by the sudden death of Albino Luciani. These men were ill-equipped to pick a successor to the man who less than two months earlier they had hailed as ‘God’s Candidate’. Cardinal Ratzinger talked of Luciani’s premature death as creating conditions for ‘the possibility of doing something new’. Cardinal Baum of Washington said, ‘His death [Luciani’s] is a message from the Lord quite out of the ordinary . . . This was an intervention from the Lord to teach us something.’ These were the rationalisations of men struggling to come to terms with a disaster.
If the cardinals had potentially picked a great pope in the making, it owed almost everything to luck and very little to their collective judgement or knowledge of Karol Wojtyla. Equally, as the pre-conclave electioneering demonstrates, Wojtyla’s election owed nothing to Providence. Ironies abounded everywhere: Benelli was rejected in part because he was too young at 57; Wojtyla was 58. Those who prided themselves on stopping the Siri bandwagon would discover that in many respects they had elected a Polish version of Siri. Those who wanted another Albino Luciani would come to realise that he was irreplaceable. Those who voted for Wojtyla to achieve a collegiate papacy found that they had elected an autocrat.
At 6.45 p.m. on Monday 16 October 1978, the doors leading to the second-floor balcony above St Peter’s Square swung open and for the second time in seven weeks Cardinal Felici emerged to announce to the crowd below and to the far greater audience beyond Italy’s shores, ‘Annuncio vobis gaudium magnum: Habemus Papam!’ The crowd below roared and clapped their approval. ‘We have a Pope!’ Who he was at that moment was not important, what mattered was that the dreadful void had been filled. When Felici shared the name ‘Cardinal Wojtyla’ with the crowd, they were bemused. “Who? Is he Black? Is he Asian?”
Father Andrew Greeley, the author and noted Catholic sociologist, in the crowd below recalled the response of those around him:
‘When I explained that no, he wasn’t black or Asian, but a Pole, they were astonished. It was an angry sullen crowd. None of the joy of Luciani’s election. There were no cheers. There were boos – but mostly total dead silence.’
Thirty minutes later Wojtyla appeared on the balcony to perform the ritual of the Papal blessing. The minor Curial officials told him to just bless the crowd and get back inside. Wojtyla ignored them. The old warrior Cardinal Wyszynski stood quietly in the background but his presence gave the younger man the moral support he needed for this crucial first meeting with the public. The actor deep within the man rose magnificently to the challenge. His words were not ad lib comments but the thoughts he had jotted down while the votes were still being counted on the final ballot. In a gesture designed to win over the crowd, he spoke in Italian. ‘Praised be Jesus Christ!’ Many in the crowd automatically responded. ‘Now and forever.’
Wojtyla’s deep, powerful voice amplified by the microphone carried to every corner of the square.
‘We are still all grieved after the death of the most beloved Pope John Paul I. And now the most revered Cardinals have called a new bishop to Rome. They have called him from a distant country, distant but always so close for the Communion in the Christian faith and tradition.’
The crowd were warming to him now, calling encouragement to him as for the majority listening in the square below he continued flawlessly in their mother tongue.
‘I was afraid to receive the nomination, but I did it in the spirit of obedience to our Lord and in the total confidence in His mother the most holy Madonna. Even if I cannot explain myself well in your –our – Italian language, if I make a mistake you will correct me.’
The deliberate little stumble was a masterstroke, and he had them in the palms of his hands.
‘And so I present myself to you all to confess our common faith, our hope, our confidence in the mother of Christ and of the Church also – and also to start anew on that road, the road of history and of the Church, to start with the help of God and with the help of men.’
Wojtyla had succeeded to the papacy with his acting skills intact and well honed. All that had changed was the size of the audience. The small ‘mistake’ had produced good-natured laughter in the crowd, the reference to ‘Madonna’ had brought cheers, the reference to his coming from a ‘distant’ country had been received with sympathy and their more serious implications were not considered on that first autumn evening in St Peter’s Square. Further afield, his election and its potential implications were being very closely considered. In virtually every capital city throughout the world Presidents, Prime Ministers and First Secretaries were issuing instructions for detailed briefing documents. Intelligence agencies, Foreign Offices and State Departments were all working late. Within the Kremlin there was dismay; inside the White House there was delight.
In Warsaw the news was greeted with stupefied disbelief. Virtually overnight the election of Karol Wojtyla transformed the attitudes and expectations of the Polish Roman Catholic faithful. The moral authority of the Church within his homeland was enormously increased, at the drop of a biretta. The response from the regime was not long in coming. Minister of Defence Wojciech Jaruzelski was uplifted. One of his countrymen sat on the throne of St Peter. Poland should share in this glorious moment. First Secretary Edward Gierek had a similar reaction; turning to his wife he remarked, ‘A Pole has become Pope. It is a great event for the Polish people and a big complication for us.’
The following day a lengthy congratulatory telegram signed by Gierek, the Polish president Henryk Jablonski and Prime Minister Piotr Jaroszewicz was sent to the new Pope. With an eye towards an extremely twitchy Moscow, the signatories did not neglect to give credit for this achievement to forces other than God’s Will.
‘For the first time in ages, a son of the Polish nation – which is building the greatness and prosperity in its Socialist Motherland in the unity and collaboration of all its citizens – sits on the Papal Throne . . . the son of a nation known throughout the world for its special love of peace and for its warmest attachment to the cooperation and friendship of all peoples . . . a nation which had made universally recognised contributions to the human culture . . . We express our conviction that these great causes will be served by the further development of relations between the Polish People’s Republic and the Apostolic Capital.’
For the moment the Vatican policy of Ostpolitik hung in the balance. Would Wojtyla continue his predecessors’ efforts of opening up and expanding relationships with the Eastern bloc or would the Church revert to its position before Vatican Council II of open hostility?
‘I have accepted with special gratitude the congratulations and wishes, full of courtesy and cordiality, sent to me by the highest authorities of the Polish People’s Republic. On the occasion of the choice of a son of Poland for the capital of St Peter, I identify with all my heart with my beloved Poland, the Motherland of all Poles. I earnestly hope that Poland will continue to grow spiritually and materially, in peace and justice and in respect for man . . .’
Thus the new Pope demonstrated to the Polish leadership that nationalism was one of the elements that bound them all together. For Poland at least the policy of Ostpolitik would continue apace.
While the Pope was addressing the nature of the future relationship between Rome and Warsaw, the Vatican Press Office, aided by other Curial elements, was busily engaged in rewriting Wojtyla’s past. For Cardinal Villot, a man who had already demonstrated a remarkable ability to hide the truth concerning the death of Pope John Paul I, a disinformation exercise concerning events that had occurred during the Second World War was a relatively simple matter. Few, if any, would have the necessary information to challenge either the Vatican Press Office or anonymous sources within the Curia.
While the official details of Wojtyla’s life contained, for example, in L’Osservatore Romano, were accurate, they were a masterpiece of brevity when dealing with Karol Wojtyla’s war years. Villot, already familiar with the Vatican dossiers on Wojtyla, knew better than the majority of his fellow Cardinals that in electing this man they had created a potential for both triumph or disaster. Used effectively by the Communists, the truth was capable of creating such an aura of negativity around this new papacy that it could struggle for years to overcome the damage. There was the issue of Wojtyla’s non-existent wartime assistance to Jews. He had never lifted a hand to save a single life or assist any of a race marked for mass extermination. There was the issue of his wartime work for the East German Chemical Works, previously called Solvay: work that merited him the special protection of the Third Reich because it was deemed vital to the war effort. Facts such as these could easily be manipulated by the Church’s enemies. Villot and those assisting him moved with remarkable alacrity. Their lies duped experienced Vatican reporters along with the naïve.
Father Andrew Greeley was one of the former, a long-standing Vatican watcher who wrote a syndicated column for over one hundred outlets and broadcast regularly from Rome. He was convinced by the biographical material passed to him from the Vatican Press Office. He was not the only one – the Religious News Service, AP, Time, Chicago Sun Times, NBC News, the San Francisco Examiner and The Times of London all concurred in the story of Wojtyla’s wartime activities. Greeley wrote:
‘as a young man during the Second World War, Wojtyla was active in an underground movement which assisted Jews. He helped them to find shelter, to acquire false identification papers, and to escape from the country. He was blacklisted by the Nazis for helping Jews, and one of the reasons for his remaining hidden was to avoid arrest by the Nazis.
After the war he defended the Jews who remained in Cracow from Communist anti-Semitism. He helped to organise the permanent care of the Cracow Jewish cemetery after that cemetery had been desecrated by secret police-inspired thugs. The Cardinal called upon the students of the University of Cracow to clean and restore the defiled tombstones. In 1964 on the Feast of Corpus Christi, he condemned the Communist government for its anti-Semitism. In 1971 he spoke at the Cracow synagogue during a Friday night Sabbath service ...’
Despite the fact that one of Father Greeley’s sources was a Rome-based official of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League there is not one single word of truth in the above account. More than twenty years into the Wojtyla papacy, the Vatican Website was still quoting another Jewish organisation, B’nai Brith as a source for these fantasies. Yet B’nai Brith hold no evidence to justify any of the claims made in the quoted passage and have also further denied to the author that they have ever made the claims attributed to them.
Lies told often enough become the truth. What was fed to Greeley was fed to many reporters and journalists and used. It went around the world. Some of Wojtyla’s actual wartime activities, particularly the reality of his years at the Solvay plant, were also put through the myth-making machine. The fact that he had been privileged and protected was replaced with tales of slave labour while wages, a staff canteen, a gymnasium and a company store and the other benefits did not feature in Vatican press releases. Karol Wojtyla never instigated or encouraged such fantasies but then neither did he – nor the some fifty trusted Poles who were rapidly moved into the Papal Apartments and various parts of the Roman Curia – ever correct them.
The Polish Communist regime was prepared to be largely positive about Wojtyla’s election:
‘The concordat that the First Secretary and Paul VI had been working towards will continue. There will be diplomatic relations between us and the Holy See. Better, far better, that it is Wojtyla rather than Wyszynski.’
Moscow, however, reacted with a mixture of alarm, paranoia and pessimism. Some of the Soviet Politburo saw the election as a form of coup d’état organised by a cabal that included United States National Security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, Cardinal Krol and the West German leadership. Brzezinski and Krol’s Polish roots were seen as ‘significant’, a conclusion endorsed in a subsequent KGB report. The alarmists saw a call to arms from the Pope to his fellow countrymen as a likely scenario until they read the pre-election Polish secret service files on Wojtyla. The pessimists saw the potential end of the Vatican initiative of Ostpolitik even after studying Wojtyla’s warm response to Warsaw’s congratulatory cable.
When Moscow learned that the Pope was talking of visiting Poland in early 1979, the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev immediately telephoned General Secretary Gierek in Warsaw. Gierek later recalled,
‘He said that he had heard the Church had invited the Pope to Poland and he wanted to know my response.
“We are going to receive him properly.”
“I advise you, don’t receive him because you are going to have a big problem with this.”
“How can I not receive a Polish Pope, if the majority of my compatriots are Catholics and for them his election is a great holiday? Besides, do you imagine the reaction of the nation if I close the border to him?”
“The Pope is a wise man; he will understand. He can declare in public that he is unable to come because he is ill.” ’
The conversation became rapidly more acrimonious with Brezhnev shouting, ‘Gomulka was a better Communist; because he did not receive Paul VI in Poland and nothing terrible happened.’ Gierek refused to back down and finally, before slamming down the phone, the leader of the Soviet Union remarked, ‘Do as you please then, provided that you and your party won’t regret it later.’
Brezhnev and the Politburo were still mulling over the contents of the first of a number of reports on Wojtyla. The report’s author, Oleg Bogomolov, the director of the Institute for the World Socialist System, had been handpicked for the task by Yuri Andropov, the head of the KGB.
Bogomolov saw Wojtyla as
‘a cardinal who had always taken right-wing positions but one who had urged the Church to avoid frontal attacks on socialism. He prefers instead a gradual transformation of socialistic societies into pluralistic liberal-bourgeois systems. Initially, the new Pope will be dependent on the Curia which, without doubt, will try to subject him to its influence. But the independent temper and energy of John Paul II suggest that he will be fairly quick to get the hang of things and break free from the guardians of orthodoxy in the Curia.’
While the world outside the Vatican was still preoccupied with the implications of the new papacy, the man at the centre of their speculation was getting acquainted with the job. Interest in Karol Wojtyla was intense; at his inauguration ceremony on 22 October, more than 200,000 pressed into St Peter’s Square. The square was regularly packed with thousands for the Papal Sunday Angelus. Apart from his novelty value, he also made himself available to the media – who could not get enough of the man – but strictly on his terms. Mingling freely with the media in the Apostolic Palace and casually responding in a variety of languages, he was asked if a press conference like this one would ever be repeated. ‘We’ll see how you treat me,’ he replied. No Pope had ever used the media like this before.
Initially he was slow to give the public indications of what kind of papacy his would be. The public signs were few and far between: there would be no relaxation of the strict rule of complete celibacy for the priesthood; he wanted to see priests, nuns and the other religious in uniform at all times. ‘It reminds them of their vocation.’ Privately he gave to Cardinal Villot a series of very powerful and sustained demonstrations of precisely what kind of pope he would be. The first issue was the democratic concept of power-sharing and decision-making, what the Roman Catholic Church, particularly since Vatican Council II, called collegiality. Villot, who had been reconfirmed as the Secretary of State, discussed with Wojtyla his views on the Synod of Bishops, created by Paul VI. The council did not give the bishops power but at least brought them into a consultative role. Since the Synod met only about once every three years and the subjects they discussed, usually one or two per session, were chosen for them by the Pope, it was effectively a device for the Vatican to ensure that all real power rested in papal hands.
Villot wanted to know if Wojtyla was minded to allow the bishops of the Church the freedom to set up a permanent body that would work in unison with the Pope, rather as a government or an administration, at least in theory, works in unison with a Prime Minister or a President. The Pope rejected the concept on the spot. ‘The Pope will remain supreme and sole legislator, with the ecumenical council,’ he declared. The ecumenical council, the grand assembly of bishops, could not of course be convened without the Pope’s permission. He assured Villot that he would consult with them more frequently than Paul VI had but, ‘there is no need to make this consultation obligatory.’ Wojtyla had spent almost all his life under some kind of totalitarian regime. He had now signalled his intention to continue living under such a system – with himself as the autocrat. Post-Vatican Council II collegiality would remain an illusion.
On a second issue Villot discussed with Wojtyla the changes that the late Pope John Paul I had been about to implement at the time of his sudden death. There was the meeting that Albino Luciani had been particularly determined to have with the American Select Committee on Population; Luciani believed strongly that a form of artificial contraception should be available to the Roman Catholic faithful. Wojtyla told his Secretary of State not to rearrange the meeting with the Committee. It would not take place this year, next year or ever. His angry rejection of the possibility of dialogue was entirely predictable. Wojtyla and his own Cracow committee had boasted of creating at least 60 per cent of Humanae Vitae with its prohibition on artificial birth control. ‘Rome has spoken. The case is concluded.’
Some of his other responses to his predecessor’s proposed changes, reforms that had been within hours of becoming realities, were less predictable. The problem of the vacancy in Ireland was one of many that showed real differences between the two popes.
The Church’s attitude to the IRA had long been a highly contentious issue. Many considered that the Catholic Church had been less than forthright in its condemnation of the continuing carnage in Northern Ireland. A few weeks before Luciani’s election, Archbishop O’Fiaich had hit the headlines with his denunciation of the conditions in the Maze prison, Long Kesh. O’Fiaich had visited the prison and later talked of his ‘shock at the stench and filth in some of the cells, with the remains of rotten food and human excreta scattered around the walls’.
There was much more in a similar vein. Nowhere in his very long statement, released to the news media with considerable professionalism, did the Archbishop acknowledge that the prison conditions were self-created by the prisoners.
Ireland was without a cardinal, which was a source of great pressure on Luciani. Some elements were for promoting O’Fiaich; others felt his previous promotion to the archdiocese of Armagh had already proved an unmitigated disaster.
Albino Luciani had considered the dossier on O’Fiaich and the files on Ireland. He had priests within the Vatican who were staunch Republicans including Archbishop O’Fiaich. Files showed an extraordinary picture of collusion between Irish priests and the IRA: safe houses, logistical support, providing alibis. The most shocking report concerned the assistance Father James Chesney had given to the IRA terrorist team responsible for the Claudy bombings in 1972. Nine civilians were murdered and Father Chesney’s involvement was covered up by an unholy alliance of Cardinal William Conway, the then Primate of all Ireland, and the then Northern Ireland Secretary, William White-law. An Anglo-Irish example of Realpolitik. There were other horrendous examples of the involvement of Catholic priests in IRA attacks. Now Luciani was being asked to endorse this history by promoting Archbishop O’Fiaich. He had returned the dossiers to his Secretary of State with a shake of his head and a one-line epitaph, ‘I think Ireland deserves better.’ The search for a cardinal was extended. It had been continuing at the time of Pope John Paul I’s death. Wojtyla read the same files and promptly gave the job to O’Fiaich.
Then there was the notoriously corrupt Cardinal Cody of Chicago. Cardinal Cody had improperly used Church funds long before he had arrived in Chicago. In June 1970, whilst Treasurer of the American Church, he invested $2 million illegally in Penn Central stocks. A few days later the share price collapsed and the company went bankrupt. He survived that scandal and set about alienating a large percentage of his 2.4 million diocese in Chicago. Priests that he considered ‘problem prelates’, men who were alcoholic, senile or just unable to cope, were dismissed with just two weeks’ notice and then tossed out onto the streets. He closed the black schools, claiming that his diocese could not afford to run them although its annual revenue was around $300 million. He was a fantasist, a compulsive liar and a paranoiac. He even showered gifts on a close woman friend, to whom he allegedly diverted hundreds of thousands of dollars and diverted further large sums by way of diocesan insurance business to her son. Paul VI had shrunk from ordering him to resign, confining himself to requesting through his intermediaries that Cody should stand aside. The Cardinal had refused and remained defiantly in office. Albino Luciani considered the Cody dossier.
Luciani determined that Cardinal Cody must go but he would be given the opportunity of going gracefully. He was 75 years of age and in ill health: excellent reasons for retiring. If Cody yet again refused to budge a coadjutor would be appointed. Again before that decision could be implemented, Luciani was dead. As the new Pope considered the Cody dossier, word inevitably reached Cody. He reminded the Pope of the huge amounts he had raised from his Polish constituents in Chicago, and then he upped the ante by making a new huge contribution for ‘the Motherland’. He reminded all and sundry of his close friendship with Wojtyla. Ignoring the advice of every single advisor, ignoring what was in the file in black and white, Wojtyla displayed a disconcerting weakness. He offered Cody a position in Rome. Cody rejected it and the case was closed; there would be no action against Cardinal Cody.
In addition the Vatican appeared to be bulging at the seams with Masons. Freemasonry had been strictly forbidden by a succession of popes reaching back many hundreds of years. Luciani had been given a secret list of 121 alleged Masons, many working close to him in the Vatican. He had demonstrably made a start on the problem. In his meeting with Villot on 28 September, he advised his Secretary of State of various changes and transfers. Each of them involved removing a man who was on the list of Vatican Freemasons.
The changes and reforms that John Paul I had discussed with Cardinal Jean Villot on what transpired to be the last day of his life included cleaning the Augean stable of the Vatican Bank. Under the Presidency of Archbishop Paul Marcinkus the Bank had taken part in a string of corrupt and criminal transactions, Now, after an unchallenged reign since 1969, Marcinkus was going to be sent back to where he came from, to Chicago. Also being put out to pasture were his partners in crime Luigi Mennini, Monsignor Donato de Bonis and Pelligrino de Strobel, all senior executives at the Bank. They were all to leave their posts immediately. John Paul I advised Villot that Marcinkus was to be replaced by the expert and upright Monsignor Giovanni Angelo Abbo, Secretary of the Prefecture of Economic Affairs of the Holy See.
Within a few hours of giving his Secretary of State these and the other instructions covering the immediate reforms, the Pope was dead. All of the files and documents, including the report by Cardinal Vagnozzi on the Vatican Bank, were available to Karol Wojtyla. He was advised by his Secretary of State Cardinal Jean Villot of the changes that Luciani had been about to make.
Wojtyla rejected every single change and reconfirmed all of these men within the Vatican Bank in their positions. Marcinkus was free to continue his activities with Roberto Calvi, most notably assisting Calvi in the continuous plundering of Banco Ambrosiano. The ultimate size of the theft would reach $1.3 billion.
According to the terms under which the Vatican Bank was created by Pius XII during the Second World War, the accounts should have been very largely confined to religious orders and religious institutes. At the time Karol Wojtyla gave the green light to ‘business as usual’ only 1,047 accounts came into this category. A further 312 belonged to parishes and a further 290 to dioceses. The remaining 9,351 were owned by diplomats, prelates and ‘privileged citizens’. Among the privileged citizens were criminals of every hue.
The exalted personages included leading politicians of every political persuasion, a wide variety of members of P2 (the Italian Masonic Lodge), industrialists, reporters, editors, and members of such Mafia families as the Corleones, the Spatolas, and the Inzerillos. Also included were members of the Neapolitan crime organisation, the Camorra. All of them used the Vatican Bank for recycling the profits of their various criminal activities. Licio Gelli assisted the Corleone family with their Vatican investments and members of the Magliana gang serviced the Vatican Bank accounts of the Mafia’s chief financial operator Pippo Calo.5 The Santa Anna Gate was a very busy thoroughfare as suitcases of money representing profits from the illegal narcotics industry went in past the Swiss Guards and up the stairs to the Bank. A number of the Mafia were traditionalists. They did not trust electronic transfers.
The tellers in the Vatican Bank were always polite, always solicitous of the needs of their regular customers. After all, the bank took an additional commission for handling the accounts of the ‘privileged citizens’.
It was hardly surprising that Secretary of State Villot (whose own hands were far from clean) should have been appalled with Wojtyla’s complete dismissal of every single one of Luciani’s proposed changes and reforms. On some of the issues, birth control for example, Villot was at one with Wojtyla but on the various Vatican reforms, the removal of Cody, the wholesale cleaning of the Vatican Bank, he knew better than anyone that Luciani’s proposals were an urgent necessity. A mere seven days into this new papacy Villot spoke quietly to a friend, the French priest Antoine Wenger.
‘The new Pope has a great deal of willpower and decisiveness. In the course of the first week of his pontificate he has made decisions in which listening to some careful advice would not have been out of place.’
Roberto Calvi, Licio Gelli and Umberto Ortolani, three men who benefited greatly by the sudden death of Pope John Paul I, had gone abroad in August 1978. They stayed in South America throughout the brief reign of Albino Luciani. Calvi eventually returned home after the election of Wojtyla and only after the new Pope had reconfirmed Marcinkus as President of the Vatican Bank.
On 30 October, 1978 Calvi had a much-postponed meeting with Bank of Italy Inspector Giulio Padalino. The breathing-space gained by the sudden death of Luciani looked like being temporary. Calvi, eyes fixed on the floor of his office, yet again declined to give straight answers to a variety of questions. On 17 November the Bank of Italy inspection of Banco Ambrosiano, the ‘priests’ bank’ as it was affectionately known by the many religious that had accounts there, was completed.
Notwithstanding the fraudulent letter from Marcinkus and his Vatican Bank colleagues concerning the ownership of Suprafin, the mysterious company that had such a voracious appetite for Banco Ambrosiano shares, despite the lies and evasions of Roberto Calvi, despite all of the help from his protector Licio Gelli, the Central Bank inspectors concluded that a great deal was rotten in Calvi’s empire.
Gelli, the Puppet Master, telephoned Calvi at his private residence. Using his own special code name, he told Calvi, already wallowing in a mire of Mafia/Vatican Bank/P2 deals, that he was now very dangerously close to drowning for the second time in a few months. With Luciani in his grave and a compliant Wojtyla on the throne, Calvi, Gelli and Ortolani might have reasonably assumed that any new threat to the continuing billion-dollar theft would be minor: a bribe here and a favour performed there. That was all part of everyday life in the world of Italian banking. Within days of Inspector Giulio Padalino’s handing his report to the Head of Vigilance of the Bank of Italy, Mario Sarcinelli, a copy was in Gelli’s hands in Buenos Aires, not from the bank Inspectors but courtesy of Gelli’s P2 network. Gelli advised Calvi that the State Bank was about to send the report to the Milan magistrates and specifically to the man that Gelli had predicted would be given the criminal enquiry back in September, Judge Emilio Alessandrini.
Calvi and his empire were again on the edge of oblivion. Alessandrini could not be bought. Talented and courageous, he represented not only to Calvi, Ortolani and Gelli but also to Marcinkus and that other great saviour of Vatican Incorporated, Michele Sindona, a very serious threat. If Alessandrini ran true to form, Calvi would be finished, Archbishop Marcinkus and the criminal activities of the Vatican Bank would be exposed, even with the powerful protection of Karol Wojtyla. Gelli and Ortolani would have lost access to the Well of Ruth that Ambrosiano represented. Sindona, currently fighting extradition from the United States, would find himself back in Milan in double-quick time.
The new Pope continued to ignore ‘careful advice’. During the first week of November he made yet another decision that astonished his Secretary of State and many other insiders. This time he countermanded the orders not of John Paul I, but Paul VI. In doing so he chose to ignore an extraordinary volume of evidence compiled over four years at the direct instructions of Pope Paul. The issue was the shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa in Jasna Gora in Poland, controlled by the Pauline Fathers. Among their other activities they administered a replica shrine in Doylestown, Philadelphia. This secondary activity had brought a Vatican investigating team on the direct orders of Pope Paul VI to the Order’s American Headquarters. They established that the Superior of the Order, Father Michael M. Zembruski, and his favourites within the Order had dispensed with their vows of poverty and were living the high life with the use of credit cards, checking accounts, secret investments and huge loans. Father Michael was running a mistress as well as several Cadillacs. He had used donations to make illegal investments in two hospitals, a cemetery, a trade school, an aircraft equipment plant, a foundry and a number of other businesses. The investments were structured to obtain the greatest advantage from the Order’s tax-exempt status. The Vatican investigators also established that the Order had raised $250,000 from the Catholic faithful for hearings of the Mass, a curious revival of medieval practice, except that in Philadelphia the fathers spent the money and never even bothered to say the Masses. The investigators discovered another scam involving extracting a further $400,000 of contributions towards the cost of installing bronze memorial plaques within the shrine. Again, the funds were spent. No plaques were erected. The scams were countless, the embezzlements huge. The Pauline Fathers got through a substantial part of $20 million raised in charitable donations. Father Michael obtained multi-million-dollar bank loans. His security was a letter of guarantee from Father George Tomzinski, his superior in Poland, supreme head of the worldwide Pauline Order.
The letter, in effect authority to spend the total assets of the Pauline Order valued by Father Tomzinski at $500 million, did not bear close investigation, but that did not stop the Polish Primate Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski and Karol Wojtyla rushing to intervene on behalf of a man who was a disgrace to the Pauline Fathers Order. In 1976 the Vatican investigators, with the approval of Pope Paul VI, dismissed Father Michael Zembruski from the Order. Wyszynski and Wojtyla flew to Rome and proceeded to rewrite the verdict. They successfully pressured Pope Paul and his Vatican advisors into reversing the decisions. Subsequently Cardinal Wyszynski fired every single senior member of the Order who had co-operated with the investigation. His action, however, was illegal under Church law and shortly before he died Paul had appointed a committee to re-examine the entire affair. Less than three weeks into papal office, Wojtyla dismissed the committee and issued a confidential directive upholding Wyszynski’s illegal dismissal of men who were guilty of telling the truth.
The Roman Curia were dumbfounded. Senior officials within the Vatican Government saw it as a blatant misuse of papal authority in the name of Polish nationalism. Others, including a number of cardinals, saw the new Pope’s actions in conjunction with his refusal to clean up the Vatican Bank as evidence of something far more disturbing. They began to consider the possibility that they had placed on Peter’s throne a wilful, corrupt and potentially very dangerous man.
Those who had argued that Wojtyla’s rampant nationalism was the key did not have to look far for evidence. Apart from the highly dubious support that he had given Wyszynski and a deeply corrupt Polish religious order, there was his insistence that Marcinkus should continue to run the Vatican Bank. Marcinkus had raised millions of dollars for the Polish Church, and his Lithuanian ancestry gave him a historic and deep-rooted connection with Poland. The Polish-watchers within the Curia also pointed to the snowstorm of letters and communiqués between Wojtyla and his countrymen, urgent messages to the Communist regime, to the Catholics of Cracow, to the Church of Poland. Curial eyebrows went up again when Wojtyla announced his desire to visit Poland for the feast of St Stanislaw on 8 May. This was done without any negotiations, a source of embarrassment both to Edward Gierek and his Politburo and to the Vatican machine.
Karol Wojtyla’s preoccupation with Poland was evident immediately after his inaugural Mass when, instead of concerning himself with affairs of state, Wojtyla had spent much of the day talking and entertaining some of the 4,000 of his countrymen and women who had been allowed out of Poland for the occasion. Between national songs he told them ‘the eyes of the entire world are upon the Polish Church.’ During the first week of November the Pope met a delegation from the University of Lublin and again wrapped the Polish flag around the Almighty. His election, he declared, ‘was a gift from the Lord to Poland’. A month later the Vatican resounded to the traditional songs of Poland as, along with a group of priests from his motherland, he sang in honour of the feast of St Nicholas. In the first week of January while celebrating Mass for his fellow Poles living in Rome he praised the ultimate sacrifice that St Stanislaw had made as ‘a source of the spiritual unity of Poland’.
The Pope had very rapidly established a regular routine. His bedroom on the corner of the third floor of the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace was sparse. The room contained a single bed, two straight-backed upholstered chairs and a desk. Apart from a small carpet near the bed, the parquet floor was bare. On the walls were some sacred icons from his motherland. His days began at a time when most of Rome was still sleeping, at 5.30 a.m. By 6.15 a.m. he was in his private chapel, praying and meditating before its altar over which hung a large, bronze crucifix. Nearby was a copy of Poland’s most cherished icon, the Black Virgin of Czestochowa. Sometimes John Paul would prostrate himself before the altar; at other times he would sit or kneel with his eyes closed, forehead cradled, face contorted as if in great pain. One Vatican insider observed: ‘He makes many decisions on his knees.’
The Pope would celebrate his own private Mass at 7 a.m. and, having made a silent thanksgiving for about fifteen minutes, would then greet the handful of guests who had attended Mass, some of whom would be invited to join the pontiff for breakfast.
Every morning before his private and general audiences, Wojtyla would devote two hours to writing and reflecting on important decisions that confronted him. And then at 11 a.m. one of the papal secretaries would remind him that it was time for the private audiences.
His relative indifference to food was a habit of a lifetime. Conversation was always more stimulating for Wojtyla than calories. As Polish journalist Marek Skwarnicki observed: ‘Lunch is for bishops. Dinner is for friends.’ His privacy was guarded jealously by a largely Polish retinue who, as time passed, became increasingly preoccupied with the sombre thought that, with his election, Karol Wojtyla had chosen his last home on earth.
After lunch and a solitary walk on the terrace of the Apostolic Palace, the Pope would then return to his desk to work on the various dossiers prepared for his attention by the Secretariat of State. In the early evening, he would meet with members of the inner cabal, Cardinals Sodano, Ratzinger or Battista Re.
After dinner, a second set of dossiers would arrive from the Secretariat of State and, after further work on these, Wojtyla would devote the last portion of his day to prayer and a variety of readings.
The year of the three popes had drawn to a close with Karol Wojtyla displaying his linguistic abilities from the Papal balcony. He wished the assembled throng, and the much wider audience watching him on untold millions of television sets around the world, a fulsome Christmas greeting in a multitude of languages.
He believed all that had occurred during the year was due to Providence. Others, both Princes of the Church and in the wider world, were less certain.