WOJTYLA’S PREDECESSOR POPE JOHN PAUL I, Albino Luciani, had thus declared a public sentence of death on Vatican Incorporated and ended the Roman Catholic Church’s lust for temporal power.
‘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 affairs, which are matters for your governments. In this way, our diplomatic missions to your highest civil authorities, far from being a survival from the past, are a witness to our deep-seated respect for lawful temporal power, and to our lively interest in humane causes that the temporal power is intended to advance.’
By refusing to confirm Luciani’s reforms or to dismiss Marcinkus and his cronies, Wojtyla had reactivated the Church’s preoccupation with the acquisition of wealth by any means, but what would he do about the Vatican’s political standing in the world?
The Holy See had not been perceived as a player on the international stage since the loss of the Papal States in 1870. The last time it had been asked to serve as mediator in an international dispute had been 1885 when Germany and Spain were disputing ownership of the Caroline Islands. It took until the signing of the Lateran Treaty of 1929 for Pius XI to accept that the Papacy was now reduced to a state of 108.7 acres. Albino Luciani had therefore merely acknowledged the reality of lost temporal power, in common with the majority of Church members. But not Karol Wojtyla. Throughout his career in Poland he had largely steered clear of politics. Yet in his reign spiritual and temporal power were to become indivisible. Karol Wojtyla aspired to be the most political pope in living memory, and the greatest evangelist since the Gospel Writers.
The aspiration had a modest birth. Before Christmas 1978 the Vatican had been approached by Chile and Argentina to act as mediator on a boundary dispute in the Beagle Channel. After several weeks while the papal emissary, Cardinal Antonio Samore, talked discreetly to both sides to establish some ground rules, it was announced on 6 January 1979 that the two countries had formally requested the Vatican’s mediation. Both countries had undertaken not to resort to arms during the negotiations. The talks eventually produced an agreement and a significant coup for the new Papacy.
By the middle of January 1979, while Pope John Paul II was preparing for his imminent tour of Mexico, two floors below in the Vatican Bank, Marcinkus had other preoccupations. The financial circles of Milan were yet again seething with rumours about the Knight, Roberto Calvi. Judge Alessandrini, having carefully studied a summary of the 500-page report, had ordered Lieutenant-Colonel Crestam, the commander of the Milan tax police, to pay a long-postponed visit with a full team to Banco Ambrosiano. The judge’s brief sought a point-by-point check on the many criminal irregularities detailed within the report. No one outside official circles had access to the judge’s brief to the Head of Financial Vigilance; no one, that is, apart from Calvi and Gelli.
On 25 January 1979, Pope John Paul II left Rome on his first visit to Latin America. His destination was a country with an uneasy relationship with the Catholic Church. Mexico was, officially, a secular state with an anti-clerical constitution. At the time of this papal visit religious orders were still banned from wearing their uniforms in public. The Holy See had no diplomatic relations with Mexico and the initial invitation to the Pope had come not from the Mexican President but the country’s bishops who officially did not exist, a surreal concept in a country of nearly sixty million Catholics.
Father Marcel Maciel, the founder of a rapidly growing order, the Legionnaires of Christ, happened to know the President’s confidential secretary. Wojtyla would call it Providence. Certainly Father Maciel would come to regard his intervention on behalf of the Pope as the best thing he had ever done in his life. President Jose Lopez Portillo was persuaded to issue the invitation to the Pope, although he made it clear that the Pope would not be received as a head of state and would have to have a visa like all lesser mortals.
When the Pope kissed the Mexican tarmac and got to his feet he found standing in front of him the tall figure of President Lopez Portillo. Like any astute politician, he recognised a groundswell of national enthusiasm and he welcomed Wojtyla to the country. There were no flags, bands or guards of honour to inspect but the President did invite the Pope to join him later in the day for afternoon tea. It was meant to be low-key but, unfortunately for the anti-church government, no one had told the Catholic population. At the airport a band began to play, crowds that had been held well away from the runway broke though the barriers, roses were strewn on the Pope’s path and as if by magic he was wearing a sombrero, an image that went like a flash around Mexico and around the world. It took the Papal car more than two hours to travel the nine miles to Mexico City. Huge crowds estimated at over one million thronged both sides of the road, most waving flags with the Holy See’s colours, a river of white and green yelling, ‘Viva el papa! Viva Mexico!’
On the morning of 29 January the Pope, while talking to the impoverished Indians in Southern Mexico, railed against the many injustices that these people were suffering and called upon ‘powerful classes to act to alleviate the suffering’. Simultaneously, many thousands of miles away in Milan, one of those powerful classes, the organised criminal class of Italy, was acting to protect their interest. Judge Emilio Alessandrini kissed his wife goodbye, and then drove his young son to school. Having dropped the boy off he began to drive to his office. A few seconds before 8.30a.m. he stopped at the traffic lights on Via Muratori. He was still gazing at the red light when five men approached his car and began firing. Late in the day a group of left-wing terrorists called Prima Linea claimed responsibility for the murder. The group also left a leaflet about the murder in a telephone booth in Milan Central Station. Neither the phone call nor the leaflet gave any clear reason for the murder.
The script was implausible: a left-wing group murders a judge who is renowned throughout Italy for his investigations into right-wing terrorism. In reality, groups such as Prima Linea and the Red Brigades did not merely kill for political or ideological reasons. They could be bought and frequently were. The many links between such groups in the 1960s and 1970s are a matter of record.
Marco Donat Cattin, the second man to open fire on the trapped and helpless judge, observed subsequently, ‘We waited for the newspapers to come out with reports of the attack and we found in the magistrate’s obituaries the motives to justify the attack.’ Heaven forbid that Cattin and the others should admit to being motivated by mere money.
The murder of Pope John Paul I had bought Marcinkus, Calvi, Sindona and their P2 friends a momentary breathing-space. The election of Karol Wojtyla had resolved the problem of exposure from within the Vatican. Now the murder of Emilio Alessandrini had removed the threat of exposure by the Italian authorities. The investigation he had ordered continued – but with a marked lack of urgency.
However, in the Bank of Italy, Mario Sarcinelli and the Governor of the Bank, Paolo Baffi, were determined that the long, complex investigation which had been carried out during the previous year would not be a wasted exercise.
Roberto Calvi was again summoned for interrogation at the Central Bank. He was questioned very closely by Sarcinelli about Suprafin, about his bank’s relationship with the Vatican Bank, about his own relationship with Bishop Marcinkus. With Alessandrini dead, Calvi was transformed; his eyes that had previously studied the floor during questioning were now ice-cold and unblinking, and all the old arrogance was back. He flatly refused to answer the questions of the Head of Viligance but was left in no doubt that the Central Bank had not thrown in the towel.
Not in their wildest dreams could the Vatican officials accompanying the Pope have been prepared for the Mexican reaction to this visit. There had been crowds in Rome since the inauguration, for the regular Angelus and the weekly public audiences, but St Peter’s Square can only hold so many. Now for the first time the Vatican and the watching world saw the power not just of this new and unknown Pope but of the faith and the Church he represented. It would remain like this for the entire six days of the trip. The adrenalin rush that such a reaction triggers was not confined to the Pope and his retinue. Many of the news media, both Mexican and foreign, focused on the excitement and froth of the moment. Only a few reported his response to the major question he had to address on this first Papal trip: ‘What about Liberation Theology?’
With his face set sternly as if confronted with an impudent pupil, Wojtyla responded, ‘It depends on whose Liberation Theology. If we are talking about the Liberation Theology of Christ, not Marx, I am very much for it.’
Liberation Theology, and Marxism, meant something different in each Latin American country. One common thread was the shift in the Church’s position. Before Vatican Council II the Church had traditionally sided with the rich and powerful and the right-wing regimes and military dictatorships which sustained them. After Vatican Council II declarations such as Dignitatis Humanae and Gaudium et Spes committed the Church to reject the status quo of the juntas and embrace the poor in an active struggle for freedom, peace, justice and the basic tenets contained in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948.
Liberation Theology explored, to most people at that time, the relationship between Christian theology and political activism, particularly in areas of social justice and human rights focusing on the image of Jesus as a liberator. Emphasis was placed on those parts of the bible where the mission of Jesus was described in terms of liberation. Some of its followers within Latin America had added Marxist concepts to the theology. The father figure of the movement was Father Gustavo Gutierrez. Before setting out from Rome, the Pope had read Gutierrez’s work on the subject and would have noted there was not one single reference to a relationship between Marxism and Liberation Theology. The application of the theology in the struggle for social justice and basic human rights aspired to improve the human condition of Latin America and not just for the region’s three hundred million Catholics. It was an historic opportunity for the mass to escape from their subhuman conditions to break free of a situation where the Church had rights but her people did not.
In Brazil a military dictatorship had seized power in 1964. The full range of predictable repressions followed, including random murders of opponents of the regime, torture, rigid censorship, disappearances of liberals, trade unionists, intellectuals and lawyers, as well as appalling poverty for the masses. In 1979 similar dictatorships also ruled Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Paraguay. In Mexico itself the ruling party Partido Revolucionario Institucional – PRI – had corruptly clung to power for more than fifty years.
In many countries clergy had protested against the sustained abuses of power that had been criminally seized. Many priests paid with their lives for supporting the poor. In San Salvador the week before the Pope had flown into Mexico, Father Octavio Ortiz Luna was assassinated, the fourth such murder in the past three years, the second within a month. A week later while the Pope was speaking in Puebla 600 nuns and priests and over 2,000 peasants, workers and students marched silently, their only banner proclaimed, Basta ya – ‘Enough’. They marched through the capital of El Salvador to the Rosario Church where the previous year more than a hundred of the congregation were forced out of the church by tear gas and then massacred. During that same year another twenty-seven priests had been arrested, tortured and then expelled. Later in Puebla, Archbishop Oscar Romero of Salvador told an audience including the Pope,
‘There is a lamentable cleavage among the bishops. Some think there is no persecution. They believe in the security that gives them privileges, or that renders them apparent respect. In the same way, others who enjoy a privileged position in the country don’t want to lose friendships that they have, and so forth. So they don’t demand the reform that is so urgent for the country.’
In the week of the Puebla Conference a report was published in São Paulo by Brazil’s bishops, that detailed ten years of persecution by the Brazilian military junta including the harassment of religious and lay people working with the poor in Brazil. The study showed that thirty bishops had been harassed, nine of them arrested, while 113 religious and 273 lay people had also been arrested: thirty-four priests had been tortured and seven murdered. In the decade between the Medellin conference in 1968 and the Puebla meeting in January 1979, tens of thousands of people had been killed by the juntas of Latin America. Among that number more than 850 priests and nuns had been murdered. The minority of bishops at the 1968 meeting who supported the poor had become the majority of Puebla. After celebrating open-air Mass the Pope withdrew to talk in a closed session from which the public and the media were barred. This was one of the most important speeches he would ever make. Within this speech Wojtyla would address an issue that was crucial not only to his immediate audience and the entire Latin American continent but to every country on the planet where the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights had yet to be implemented.
Karol Wojtyla first addressed the issue in 1939. During the first week of November, writing to his friend and mentor, Mieczyslaw Kotlarczyk, the man who had first fired him with a passion for the theatre, Wojtyla talked of his growing awareness of what life in Poland had been like for the majority during his first twenty years.
‘Today, after reflection, I understand with full clarity that the idea of Poland lived in us as a romantic generation, but in truth it did not exist because the peasant was killed and imprisoned for demanding just rights from the government. The peasant was right to protest and he had law on his side, but the nation was misled and lied to.’
He continued, ‘The sons of these peasants have been chased across the world by hostile winds, like in the days of the Partisans.’ In conclusion he observed, ‘They have left so that they would not rot in the Motherland’s prisons.’
Wojtyla returned to the issue in a stage play, Our God’s Brother, by far the most interesting he ever wrote. Wojtyla writes with compassion and insight of what would be called several decades later ‘liberation theology’. He began the play in 1945, in Archbishop Sapieha’s secret seminary, and worked on it intermittently until 1950, when Poland was living under Godless Communism. The play asks: is revolutionary violence ever justified? Confronted with oppression and tyranny, with exploitation and manifest injustice how should the individual react?
The play confirmed yet again Wojtyla’s chosen religious quietism to achieve the goal ‘freedom’. However, the play also fully justified violent insurrection by the faithful.
During the course of the lectures Karol Wojtyla delivered at the Jagiellonian and Lublin Universities between 1953 and 1960, the man who would ultimately be seen as deeply opposed to all things Marxist demonstrated great sympathy towards both Marxism and the Communist movement. Writing in his mid-thirties6 Wojtyla observed,
‘In the contemporary Communist movement, the Church sees and acknowledges an expression of largely ethical goals . . . Pius XI has written that criticism of capitalism, and protest against human exploitation of human work, is undoubtedly “the part of the truth” which Marxism contains . . . Every person has an undeniable right to struggle to defend what rightly belongs to him . . . when an exploited class fails to receive in a peaceful way the share of the common good to which it has a right, it has to follow a different path.’
Lest there be any misunderstandings about that ‘different path’, the future Pope made it clear that society ‘has a strict right, even a duty’ to ensure justice through governance, an ability to control abuse and to acknowledge error. An absence of these crucial elements gives the people the right to passive resistance and if that fails ‘active resistance against a legal but unjust power’.
Now his listeners in Puebla and much further afield awaited his Papal response to violent insurrection and the phenomenon known as Liberation Theology.
He began by exploring the role of the priest.
‘As pastors, you keenly realise that your chief duty is to be teachers of the truth: not of a human rational truth but of the truth that comes from God. That truth includes the principle of authentic human liberation: “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” ’7
He then developed his opening theme of ‘the truth about Jesus Christ’. He continued:
‘Now today we find in many places a phenomenon that is not new. We find “re-readings” of the Gospel that are the product of theoretical speculations rather than of authentic meditation on the word of God and a genuine evangelical commitment. They cause confusion insofar as they depart from the central criteria of the Church’s faith, and people have the temerity to pass them on as catechesis to Christian communities.’
Among examples of these ‘re-readings’, the Pope said,
‘People purport to depict Jesus as a political activist, as a fighter against Roman domination and the authorities, and even as someone involved in the class struggle. This conception of Christ as a political figure, a revolutionary, as the subversive of Nazareth, does not tally with the Church’s catechism.’
People who saw Jesus as a political activist he suggested were ‘confusing the insidious pretext of Jesus’ accusers with the attitude of Jesus himself’. For John Paul II, Christ was non-political and someone who ‘unequivocally rejects recourse to violence’. He elaborated to the listening bishops on ‘the truth about the mission of the Church’. It was to keep the faith that had been entrusted to them to uphold the authority of the Church. There was to be no double magisterium, no double hierarchy, no competing authority. Evangelising was ‘the essential mission’ and this could only be achieved by
‘sincere respect of the sacred magisterium, a respect based on the clear realisation that in submitting to it, the People of God are not accepting the word of human beings but the authentic word of God.’
He invoked the ‘dogmatic formulas enunciated a century ago by Vatican I’ to justify universal acceptance of the Church’s authority. The most significant of those formulas had been the declaration of papal infallibility.
He then drew attention to an attitude of mistrust that was being fostered towards the ‘institutional’ or ‘official’ Church which critics saw as ‘alienating’ and against which a ‘people’s Church, one which is born of the people and fleshed out in the poor’ was functioning as a rival. He desired unity of message and action. He then turned to the area where that unity was being seriously challenged by the varying responses of the bishops to the human conditions that confronted them in Latin America:
‘Dignity is crushed underfoot when due regard is not maintained for such values as freedom, the right to profess one’s religion, physical and psychic integrity, the right to life’s necessities, and the right to life itself. On the social and political level it is crushed when human beings cannot exercise their right to participate, when they are subjected to unjust and illegitimate forms of coercion, when they are subjected to physical and psychic torture and so forth.
‘I am not unaware of the many problems in this area that are being faced in Latin America today. As bishops you cannot fail to concern yourselves with them.’
He fully accepted that the Church should be involved in defending or promoting human dignity but there were clear parameters.
‘[the Church] does so in accordance with its mission. For even though that mission is religious in character, and not social or political, it cannot help but consider human persons in terms of their whole being.’
The Pope then cited the parable of the Good Samaritan as the model way of attending to all human needs. Thus when confronted with the extraordinary array of problems, imprisonment, hunger, a complete and total absence of human rights, the correct response was to extend a helping hand but always within the Christian framework. ‘The Church,’ declared the Pope, ‘therefore does not have need to have recourse to ideological systems in order to love, defend and collaborate in the liberation of the human being.’ [Author’s italics.]
The Church would find ‘inspiration’ as the trustee of its Christian message
‘for acting in favour of brotherhood, justice and peace; and against all forms of domination, slavery, discrimination, violence, attacks on religious liberty and aggression against human beings and whatever attacks life.’
The Pope did not explain precisely how any actions of the bishops would transform the wretched existence of their flocks yet referred to ‘the Church’s constant preoccupation with the delicate question of property ownership’. He compared the growing affluence of a few people with the growing poverty of the masses and observed, ‘It is then that the Church’s teaching, which says that there is a social mortgage on all private property, takes on an urgent character.’ [Author’s italics.]
Before yet again powerfully describing the ‘massive increase in violations of human rights in many parts of the world’, he again reminded them of the solution. ‘We will reach human beings; we will reach justice through evangelisation.’
The Pope finally addressed the vexed issue of Liberation Theology. He could not bring himself to mention it by name and resorted instead to Vaticanese:
‘Pastoral commitments in this field must be nurtured with a correct Christian conception of liberation. The Church . . . has the duty of proclaiming the liberation of millions of human beings . . . the duty of helping to bring about this liberation.’
He was quoting directly from Paul VI’s Apostolic Exhortation, Evangeli Nuntiandi, and continued with Paul’s warning:
‘. . . but it also has the corresponding duty of proclaiming liberation in its deeper fuller sense, the sense proclaimed and realised by Jesus. That fuller liberation is “liberation” from everything that oppresses human beings, but especially liberation from sin and the evil one, in the joy of knowing God and being known by him . . .’
‘There are many signs,’ he continued,
‘that help us to distinguish when the liberation in question is Christian and when, on the other hand, it is based on ideologies that make it inconsistent with the evangelical view of humanity, of things, and events. The content proclaimed by the would-be evangeliser was a good guide. Was it faithful to the Word of God? To the Church’s living tradition? And most tellingly to its magisterium? To its ultimate Papal authority?’
From the position of an autocratic Catholic hierarchy, it was a skilful, deliberate and brilliant attack on Liberation Theology; all the more so for never naming the ‘enemy’. It came from a man who believed and believed deeply that Marxism could not be defeated but it might perhaps be contained within certain already heavily infected areas such as Eastern Europe. The Pope did not understand that Marxist ideas in Latin America were not those he had lived with in Poland for so many years. He failed to acknowledge that the founder of Liberation Theology had totally rejected any linkage with Marxism. Even if he had, he would almost certainly have maintained his attack. Anything that appeared to challenge the authority of the Church, which ultimately was his authority, was ‘the enemy’. His final words on the subject were a direct warning to his listeners against political activism.
‘Secular duties and activities belong properly, although not exclusively, to laymen. It is necessary to avoid supplanting the laity, and to study seriously just when certain ways of substituting for them retain their raison d’être. Is it not the laity who are called, by virtue of their vocation in the Church, to make their contribution in the political and economic areas and to be effectively present in the safeguarding and advancement of human rights?’ [Author’s italics.]
Karol Wojtyla was widely regarded throughout his Papacy as one of the twentieth century’s great communicators. His output was prodigious: millions of words spoken and written, sermons, encyclicals, books, videos, records. How much of that output was clearly understood, however, is debatable. While it was eagerly anticipated, his speech at Puebla bemused and confused many within his wider world audience. It gave delight to Pinochet and the other military dictators and their death squads throughout Latin America. It thrilled the Communist regimes in Europe, particularly in his native country where First Secretary Gierek broke out the champagne as he read in his Warsaw daily,
‘Pope John Paul II has underlined that the clergy’s task is to work in the religious field and not to engage in politics, so the Church is not a social movement but a religious movement.’
The Communist media’s collective interpretation of the speech was precisely the same as that of the majority of the secular press. In the words of the New York Times editorial of 30 January, the Pope had ‘rejected political involvement, let alone action, by the Church . . . and spoken out flatly against the concept of “Liberation Theology”.’ Among the laymen who shared this take on the speech were some of the men gathering around Ronald Reagan, the governor of California. These insiders would become known as Reagan’s ‘kitchen cabinet’, the steering committee planning his campaign for the 1980 Presidential elections. The Catholic vote was always important and, based on their interpretation of the Pope’s comments at Puebla, Ronald Reagan and his advisors concluded that he was a man they could do business with.
There were two fundamental reasons for the Pope’s hostility to Liberation Theology. Firstly, his knowledge of Latin America, his views, his prejudices, were entirely shaped and fashioned by his Vatican advisors, deeply conservative men who overwhelmingly desired that the status quo that existed in much of the continent should continue. The Catholic Church’s accommodations with the ruling juntas, as Archbishop Romero of El Salvador had observed, suited the majority of bishops well. ‘They believe in the security that gives them privileges, or that renders them apparent respect.’ Secondly, these same men also suffered from a deep paranoia that extended to the higher reaches of the Vatican offices of the Secretariat of State, where there was a widely-held belief that countries such as Mexico were on the brink of ‘a radical and anti-religious revolution’.
Attempting to sweeten his strictures on Liberation Theology, the very next day after his Puebla speech the Pope delivered a startlingly radical message at Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, to an audience largely composed of poor native Indian peasants and workers. Their conditions of life were typical of the overwhelming majority of the 320 million people of Latin America. Estimates of their number ranged from 25,000 to over 500,000 depending on which spin doctor was supplying the count. Their case was presented to him by a Zapotecan peasant named Esteban Fernandez who had been chosen to greet the Pope on behalf of his fellow Indians: ‘We welcome you and we greet you with joy,’ he began. Then, looking directly at the Pope, he continued,
‘We’re suffering a lot. The cattle are better off than we are. We can’t express ourselves and we have to keep our suffering locked up inside our hearts. We don’t have jobs, and nobody helps us. But we’re putting what little strength we have at your service. Holy Father, ask the Holy Spirit for something for your poor children.’
The crowd were cordoned off behind wire netting. Many could not understand Wojtyla’s Spanish, and some grew restive and began to walk away as Wojtyla talked of ‘the Church’s universal concern’ and his admiration for their way of life. ‘We love your people, your culture, your traditions. We admire your marvellous past, we encourage you in the present and we have high hopes for your future.’ Expressing his desire to be the ‘voice of the voiceless’ he began to list the rights of Mexico’s indigenous peoples. ‘The right to be respected; the right not to be deprived; the rights for barriers of exploitation to be destroyed; the right to effective help.’ To achieve these rights it would be ‘necessary to effect bold transformations’. He now had their undivided attention. No one in a position of any significant authority had ever said to these poor wretched people that their homelands should be returned to them. ‘For the Christian it is not enough to denounce injustice. He is called upon to be a witness and agent to justice.’
He called out for action, but not from the Church and not from the Mexican Indians. The action must come from those who ‘are responsible for the welfare of nations, powerful classes . . . those who are most able’. Meanwhile those who were suffering must ‘not harbour feelings of hate or violence, but rather gaze toward the Lord’. This call to arms was certain to be ignored by the ruling elites of Latin America. The Papal solution was fanciful but at least the Pope had accurately and publicly identified some of the dreadful problems that bedevilled the continent.
After his return to the Vatican in early February, the consensus around the Pope was that the trip had been an overwhelming success. Estimates put the total number of people who had turned out to hear or just to see the Pope at five million.
Among his listening audience at Puebla the eventual response was less than effusive. The only unqualified praise came from the bishops who were supporters of the status quo, whether the Mexican version of democracy or General Pinochet’s. Among the liberal cardinals, men like Aloisio Lorscheider and Paulo Arns of Brazil who had helped get Wojtyla elected, there was dismay. How right Wojtyla had been to remark, soon after the Conclave, ‘The eminent cardinals who elected me did not realise what sort of man they had elected.’ They were rapidly finding out.
Karol Wojtyla had begun work on his first encyclical immediately after being elected. It was published in March 1979. Redemptor Hominis – The Redeemer of Man – was the summation of thirty years’ work on its central subject, an analysis of the human condition or as the Pope would later describe it ‘a great hymn of joy for the fact that man has been redeemed through Christ – redeemed in spirit and body’. Its inherent joy is one of the encyclical’s most appealing elements but to attempt a detailed analysis of such an all-encompassing subject with a mere 24,000 words, even with the aid of a host of Vatican archivists, and several in-house ghostwriters, shows a staggering self-confidence. The result did not meet with total acclaim in the Catholic press. One reviewer’s response was typical: ‘The Pope is not, on the basis of this translation, a polished writer, even a cohesive thinker. The encyclical is patched together in parts . . . Hope, optimism, strength and the other personal qualities of the Pope exude from this statement, but it nonetheless contains enough abrupt stops, lack of continuity of thought and elements of “old fashioned” thought to give theologians, liturgists, intellectuals and commentators plenty to write about and some things to complain about. The sexist language warrants such complaint.’
Within the document the Pope ranged far and wide, writing of the need for human rights, freedom of religion, his own experiences in Poland, and a powerful condemnation of the arms race. Throughout the document he pitted the Church against the secular world, the individual against the community, spirit against matter, Christian against humanist and the supernatural against the natural world. The encyclical was fundamentally an impassioned plea for Catholics to put Christ at the centre of their lives. Within it the Pope paid tribute to the man he had followed.
‘I chose the same names as my beloved Predecessor John Paul I. Indeed, as soon as he announced to the Sacred College on 26 August 1978 that he wished to be called John Paul – such a double name being unprecedented in the history of the Papacy – I saw in it a clear presage of grace for the new pontificate. Since that pontificate lasted barely thirty-three days, it falls to me not only to continue it but in a certain sense to take it up again at the same starting point. This is confirmed by my choice of these two names.’
Those words stood in sharp contradiction to Wojtyla’s actions. To have continuity would have required him to have implemented the changes and initiatives frustrated by Albino Luciani’s murder. Every single one was rejected by the man who now claimed to be continuing the Luciani programme.
The same week that the encyclical was published Cardinal Jean Villot died. As Camerlingo – acting head of the Church – he had orchestrated the cover-up after the murder of John Paul I. He removed items from the Papal bedroom, the medicine by the bedside, the notes concerning the Papal transfers and appointments from the dead Pope’s hands. He also removed the smoking gun – the Vagnozzi report. He had imposed a vow of silence on the Papal household on the discovery of the body and substituted an entirely fictitious account for public consumption. He had arranged for a series of ‘off the record’ conversations to take place. Trusted members of the Curia phoned press contacts and weaved a concoction of lies about the late Pope’s health. So well was this operation performed that even today, despite the true chapter and verse on Albino Luciani’s health being available, the same old lies are parroted by the duped.
In Villot’s place as Secretary of State Karol Wojtyla appointed Archbishop Casaroli, the man who with Paul VI had created the Vatican’s version of Ostpolitik, the cultivation of good working relationships with the Eastern bloc. Casaroli and the late Pope had achieved considerable success in a number of areas, not least in Poland. At the time of Paul’s death the Vatican had been close to establishing diplomatic relations with Poland. Now with the man from Cracow at the helm, a question mark concerning future relations with the Eastern bloc in general had appeared.
It had become very clear within hours of Wojtyla’s election that, in certain areas at least, this was going to be a hands-on papacy. Above all, Wojtyla wanted to take personal charge of foreign policy. And the key to that was, in his mind, Poland.
Old hands in the Curia had noted with interest the rising excitement among the group that had travelled to Mexico as part of the papal entourage. In late February the Papal Apartments were again buzzing with expectation. After very delicate negotiations between the Vatican, the Polish government and the Polish Church, the next overseas trip had been finalised: Poland. All parties in the negotiations were acutely aware that the Soviet Union was watching closely. Commenting on the atmosphere, one senior member of the Curia recalled,
‘We rapidly realised that these preparations for the various overseas trips and indeed the immediate days after the Holy Father had returned represented excellent opportunities. If there was a difficult problem or an awkward decision to be taken, these were the best of times to get it resolved. There was such euphoria and excitement during those periods, he would sign anything and agree to the most surprising suggestions.’
The Pope had wanted to be in Poland to celebrate the feast of St Stanislaw on 8 May. It would be the 900th anniversary of his martyrdom. A Polish pope wished to stand on the soil of his homeland and pay due honour to a patron saint who had been one of the founding fathers of the Polish Church and the Polish nation, a man slaughtered for refusing to yield to a despotic ruler. The symbolism in the current context of the country was all too obvious. Brezhnev and the other members of the Soviet Politburo believed in the ‘domino theory’ as strongly as the Americans. They merely differed as to the identity of the dominoes. If one Communist state fell to Western democracy and ‘capitalism’, the others could fall in sequence. Poland had been the most likely first domino for some time and that was before a Polish pope entered the equation.
After long haggling, it was agreed that instead of coming for two days in May the Pope would come for nine days in June. Six cities would be visited instead of two. The Communists had lost the first set comprehensively. Soon after that had been agreed, Cardinal Wyszynski announced that the Polish episcopate would be extending the anniversary celebrations for St Stanislaw for a further month. They would now conclude on 10 June which by some extraordinary coincidence would be the final day of Wojtyla’s visit.
The Pope wanted to visit the shrine of the Virgin Mary in Piekary, something he had done regularly while resident in Cracow. This particular shrine is in Silesia, the personal domain of First Secretary Gierek and he did not want the Pope on his patch. The Pope was also blocked from going to Nowa Huta. The regime retained bitter memories of Wojtyla’s involvement with this purpose-built monstrosity of a town on the outskirts of Cracow that consisted of enormous blocks of flats that resembled filing cabinets reaching to the sky. The town lacked, very deliberately, a church. It was an omission that brought the then Bishop Wojtyla to an open field to say Holy Mass on a freezing Christmas Eve in 1959. He returned every subsequent year and continuously petitioned the regime for permission to build a church. Upon Wojtyla’s promotion to Cardinal in June 1967, the regime as part of its strategy to cause dissension between Wojtyla and the Polish Primate Wyszynski promptly granted planning permission for the new church. The blissfully ignorant Wojtyla saw the permission as a personal triumph.
To allow the Pope to visit Nowa Huta and say Mass in the church was never an option. The media coverage was another subject of long and intense debate. These particular negotiations went down to the wire and were not resolved until very shortly before the papal visit began. While the Polish Church demanded television coverage and media access of a kind denied for thirty years, Gierek and his government faced pressure to ban television coverage from his neighbours, Romania, Czechoslovakia and still-Soviet Lithuania, where people could pick up Polish television. Eventually, the government reasoned that the more television coverage they gave the tour, the more chance there was of reducing the crowds. They agreed to national television coverage of the arrival and departure and certain other specified events, while other parts of the trip could be covered by regional television and radio. Crowd management throughout the trip was left entirely to the Catholic Church.
Among the regime’s hardline faction there was discussion that the papal trip should be sabotaged. A variety of disruptions were considered including leaking information from the secret polices files that would cause the Vatican considerable embarrassment. It was argued that to reveal the truth of the Pope’s wartime activities, of his work on behalf of the Third Reich, of just how ‘good’ a war he had experienced, of his failure to join the armed resistance might well put a severe spoke in the wheels of the Wojtyla bandwagon. Others recalled the scandal of the 1965 ‘forgiveness letter’ that Wojtyla had drafted with the assistance of two other Polish bishops. The letter, addressed to all German bishops, was an invitation to attend celebrations of Poland’s Christian millennium in 1966. It had caused deep offence and outrage in Poland because Wojtyla had attempted to open ‘a dialogue at the level of bishops’ to resolve the issue of the German territory east of the Oder and Neisse rivers that had been taken from Germany and given to Poland as compensation for the loss to the Russians of a vast tract of East Poland. Having in earlier passages of the letter detailed a number of the horrors that had been perpetrated upon Poland by Germany during the Second World War, including the murder of more than ‘six million Polish citizens mainly of Jewish origin’, the letter writers had in their final paragraph declared: ‘We forgive and we ask for forgiveness.’ The national anger within Poland at the letter was not confined to the Communists: many of the Catholic faithful were equally appalled. It was a situation that Wojtyla did nothing to alleviate. To the bitter end of a controversy that ran on for months, he angrily denounced those who had criticised him; he saw himself as a man who had been deeply wronged. In the end, however, First Secretary Gierek, having learned of what was being discussed, stamped out the suggestions of the hardliners.
In the weeks leading up to the June visit, euphoria and excitement filled the Vatican. On 8 May Wojtyla issued an apostolic letter from Rome, Rutilans Agmen – Glowing Band – to the entire Polish Church. Stanislaw’s martyrdom was one of that glowing band of witnesses from which the Church had drawn its strength over the centuries and it was still ‘at the root of the affairs, experiences, and truths’ of the Polish nation. Polish nationalism was again on display eight days later when the Polish Primate, Wyszynski, arrived in Rome along with over 6,000 Polish expatriates from around the world for a solemn commemoration of the saint’s anniversary. Two days later Wojtyla and Wyszynski led the thirty-fifth-anniversary commemoration of the Second World War Battle of Monte Cassino, in which Polish forces along with British troops took what was left of the ruined Benedictine monastery after a bitter five-month siege. Having avoided the political arena for most of his life, Pope Karol Wojtyla was making up for lost time and a splendid opportunity to assume a political role awaited him in his homeland.
He had left Poland as a Cardinal unknown by the wider world: he returned eight months later in June 1979 as one of the most recognisable people on the planet. John Paul II walked down the steps of the Alitalia plane and, continuing the gesture first demonstrated in Mexico and the Dominican Republic, knelt and kissed the ground. At that moment church bells began to peal throughout Poland as Wojtyla rose and joined the Polish President, Henryk Jablonski and Cardinal Wyszynski. Their statements of welcome were brief but polite. In response Wojtyla thanked both men and then stared directly at the welcoming crowd.
‘Beloved brothers and sisters. My dear fellow countrymen. I greet you on this special day with the same words I used on October 16th last year to greet those present in St Peter’s Square. “Praised be Jesus Christ!” ’
Nine days of freedom had begun. His progress was fascinating, causing the Communist party daily newspaper Trybuna Ludu to observe, ‘It is hard to tell where pastoral work stops and politics begin.’ Nonetheless the Communist regime maintained its schizophrenic attitude to the Church throughout the visit, by turns relaxed and repressive. It ordered television crews to hold the Pope in a tight close-up shot to blank out the hundreds of thousands lining the streets of Warsaw as he drove into the city and the million-plus gathered to hear him say Mass. Against this absurdity, the regime generously provided helicopters to fly the Pope around the country, kept the security forces in the background at all times and made no attempt to prevent the huge crowds.
Hours after his arrival he stood in the rebuilt Cathedral of St John, which had been totally razed to the ground after the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. The Poles had fought for each pew, for each foot of the aisle against the German forces. Mixing nationalism with fundamental Christianity, the Pope reminded his congregation of that epic courageous battle against terrible odds, made even worse when Stalin denied the Poles help from the Red Army or the allied forces. At the papal reference to the destruction of Warsaw and ‘the wait to no avail for help to come from the other side of the Vistula’ (a direct reference to the Soviet Union and her forces) there was an instant reaction among the members of the Politburo watching the television transmission in Party Headquarters. Stanislaw Kania, a senior member of the Politburo, telephoned the Chairman of State Television and ordered him to fade out the microphone covering the Pope. Maciej Szczepanski refused to carry out the order. Realising there would be a political fall-out, he advised First Secretary Gierek of his refusal. Gierek, the fully committed Communist, congratulated him: ‘You did very well, Maciej. Do your job as you have done so far.’ It was a quintessential Polish moment.
Happily oblivious, the Pope continued his seditious path. ‘To be in this rebuilt cathedral is to be reminded of what Christ once said: “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.” ’8 Then he slipped in some politics:
‘Salvation history is not something that happened in the past; salvation history is the dramatic context in which Poland has continued to live out its national life. Does not our tradition recall Stanislaw once saying to King Boleslaw “Destroy this Church, and Christ over centuries will rebuild it”?’
Wojtyla and his congregation all knew the modern equivalent of the historic oppressor. Later the same day he met several representatives of the oppressor at the Belvedere Palace, the official residence of the Polish President. Wojtyla and Wyszynski exchanged formal pleasantries with President Jablonski and First Secretary Gierek. The Pope moved the conversation on. He talked of the need for ‘voluntary collaboration’ and the need to end ‘all forms of economic or cultural colonialism’. He claimed that the Church did not ‘desire privileges’, just the freedom to ‘carry out its evangelical and moral mission’.
‘Permit me to continue to consider Poland’s good as my own, and to feel my sharing in it as deeply as if I still lived in this land and were a citizen of this state . . . Permit me to continue to feel, think, and to hope this and to pray for this.’
The nine days rapidly took on all the trappings of a triumphal tour. Warsaw gave way to Gniezno, a small town with a population of just 58,000 where a further million Poles were there waiting for him. Here again he mixed nationalism, politics and fundamental Christianity in his speech. Stressing the importance of religious education for children, he compared its denial to child abuse and quoted St Luke: ‘It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than he should offend one of these little ones.’
Gniezno gave way to two days in Czestochowa and the Shrine of the Black Madonna and yet another million pilgrims. Then came four days in his ‘beloved Cracow’ and some of the surrounding areas including his birthplace, Wadowice. Karol Wojtyla had lived in Cracow for forty years, fourteen of them as Archbishop. He had stood at the head of a vast, rambling archdiocese which had more than one and a half million Catholics. Helping Wojtyla attend to their needs both spiritual and temporal had been 1,500 priests, a similar number of nuns and brothers and some 200 seminarians. Ranged against this force was the Communist state who, unknown to Wojtyla, was very eager to please him. And now that he was Pope, however, the regime was confronted with the reality of its own creation, moving millions of countrymen and women in a way that it would never be able to move them. It is the greatest irony of Karol Wojtyla’s life story that without Communist intervention he would never have become Pope. Returning to his birthplace would also return Wojtyla to the dark heart of Poland’s recent history.
Many others apart from the power players within the Church hierarchy had played a role. As the Pope moved around Cracow he met a number from his past and reminders of others no longer among the living – his French teacher, Jadwiga Lewaj, who ensured Wojtyla gained a job at Solvay and an identity card that declared the bearer was employed in work that was vital to the Third Reich’s war effort. The President of the Solvay plant, Henryk Kulakowski, and his Director of the Cracow operation, Dr Karl Föhl, went out of their way to employ and protect nearly a thousand people, a considerable number of undergraduates and graduates. These individuals were seen by Kulakowski and Föhl as part of Poland’s future. They reached out and offered sanctuary not only to such potential high flyers but also to a variety of waifs and strays who would otherwise have been drafted into slave labour followed by an early death. There would be no post-war recognition for two very brave and courageous men. They were accused by some of the Communists working at Solvay of being collaborators and shipped to their deaths in the Soviet Union. The fact that everyone who had worked at the Solvay plant during the war was a collaborator was ignored.
The Solvay plant was still functioning at the time of the Papal visit in 1979, its railway track still a vital element. During the war years that had been the reason that the Nazis had put such a high value on the Solvay plant: the railway line and station located at the heart of the Solvay works at the Cracow suburb of Borek Falecki. Many people would claim after the war had ended and the full horror of the Holocaust was exposed to the world that they did not know, had no idea, did not for a moment imagine that genocide was on the Third Reich’s agenda. No one living in Cracow could use such excuses. The trains ran through the city. The railway line that ran through the Solvay works, the line that was considered vital to the German war effort as it carried troops, supplies and munitions to the Eastern Front, also ran through the Solvay works heading west towards Auschwitz, an equally vital requirement to ensure that another part of the Third Reich’s aspirations could be fulfilled, namely the Holocaust. Professor Edward Görlich, who worked in the Solvay laboratory and became a good friend of Karol Wojtyla, is insistent that, above everything that the soda products could be used for, the reason the works had their kriegswichtig designation and were vital for the war effort was the existence of the railway line.
After Borek Falecki, the station for the Solvay works, there was only one stop travelling west: Auschwitz. The only way that the overwhelming majority of these wretched souls got out of Auschwitz was via the cremation chimney. When the wind blew from the west the citizens of Wadowice and Cracow rapidly came to recognise, after the Final Solution was put into action during the summer of 1941, the smell of burning human flesh.
With one exception, the entire experience for both the Pope and those who came to hear him, to pray with him, sing with him or just cheer was one of joy. The exception was his trip to Auschwitz. Huge crowds lined the road as the Pope’s convoy drove to the camp. He got out and walked through the gates with their infamous exhortation Arbeit macht frei – Work Makes You Free. He continued down the neatly-kept gravel paths deeper into the camp until he came to Block 11 where he entered Cell 18. One of its previous occupants had been Father Maximilian Kolbe. He had volunteered to take the place of a married man, knowing that by doing so he would die.
The Pope knelt in prayer and contemplation as he had many times before in earlier years. There was not a sound at that moment in Auschwitz. He kissed the cement floor where Kolbe’s life had ebbed away, then left a bouquet of flowers and an Easter candle. Outside this block was the ‘Wall of Death’. Before praying at the Wall with the West German Cardinal Hermann Volk, the Pope met and embraced seventy-eight-year-old Franciszek Gajowniczek whose life had been saved by Father Kolbe’s self-sacrifice. Among those who were executed by firing squad were men that Wojtyla had known – the group picked up at random from a Cracow café one afternoon, the Salesian priests at his local church, his good friend and fellow seminarian Szczesny Zachuta who was shot after being caught helping Jews obtain baptismal certificates to save them from deportation and death. Evidently no one either knew or had told Wojtyla any of this before his visit. He certainly made no reference to these events.
Continuing the journey through the ultimate nightmare, Karol Wojtyla followed the railway tracks over which 1.2 million had been transported to their deaths. Here an altar had been built. The cross on the altar had a ring of barbed wire at the top and from one of the crosspieces hung a replica of some of the striped sheeting used to make the camp uniforms. Among the congregation were elderly survivors of Auschwitz wearing their wartime prisoner clothing. The priest and bishops assisting the Pope at the altar were men who had survived wartime imprisonment in the camps. During his sermon Karol Wojtyla referred to his surroundings as this ‘Golgotha of the modern world’. To those who might be surprised that he had come to this place ‘built on cruelty’ he explained simply:
‘It was impossible for me not to come here as Pope. I kneel before all of the inscriptions that come one after another bearing memory of the victims of Oswiecim in their languages. Polish, English, Bulgarian, Romany, Czech, Danish, French, Greek, Hebrew, Yiddish, Spanish, Flemish, Serbo-Croat, German, Norwegian, Russian, Romanian, Hungarian, Italian and Dutch.
‘In particular, I pause before the inscription in Hebrew. This inscription awakens the memory of the people whose sons and daughters were intended for total extermination. This people draws its origin from Abraham, our father in faith as was expressed by Paul of Tarsus. The very people that received from God the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” itself experienced in a special measure what is meant by killing. It is not permissible for anyone to pass by this inscription with indifference.’
According to the Church’s estimation, the Pope had been seen in person by more than one third of the entire national population, thirteen million Poles. Through television he had been seen by virtually the entire nation. For nine days the people had not been merely expressing their faith. Filling churches, gathering at sacred shrines, singing their traditional songs signalled a massive rejection of the regime and of Communism, and an expression of national pride in the Polish pope. After advising the bishops and priests of Latin America to stay out of politics, the Pope had delivered a very different message in Poland: stay in politics as long as you are fighting Communism. It was never expressed so directly but it was understood very clearly by Ronald Reagan, preparing his bid for the Presidency, and by Soviet Leader Leonid Brezhnev.
Edward Gierek and his Politburo breathed a collective sigh of relief as the papal entourage departed for Rome. They were encouraged to note in the passing days that there were no strikes, no demonstrations, no fire of counterrevolution sweeping the country. Very rapidly most visible evidence of the Pope’s visit had vanished but the memories of those nine days remained burned into the very psyche of Poland. Above everything else in those nine days, Karol Wojtyla had succeeded in rekindling within the hearts and minds of many millions of Poles a personal dignity and the ability to hope.
The five-day tour of the United States by Karol Wojtyla in October 1979 resembled a rock group taking the country by storm. Time magazine called the Pope ‘John Paul, Superstar’. Yet this was a superstar who still retained his initial deep reservations about the American way of life and the American people. He hypnotised many with his extraordinary charisma but the words he uttered were frequently in sharp contrast with the physical aura. The crowds were beguiled by the man, but many of those who actually listened and analysed his words were less impressed.
The American tour had got off on the wrong foot before it had even begun. In mid-September the Vatican announced that women were barred from distributing Holy Communion at a Mass to be celebrated by the Pope during his stay. The decision provoked an immediate and angry protest. There had been growing support for some years for all Church ministries to be open to women. Many nuns, expressing their ardent feminism, wanted a great deal more than acting as handmaidens during a Papal Mass. The papal critics would have been even more incensed if they could have been present when Bishop Paul Marcinkus in his role as tour stage-manager and papal minder discussed arrangements with US colleagues for the Mass. When they told him of the plan to have women assisting the Pope during the Mass, Marcinkus erupted. ‘No broads. That’s out.’
On 2 October, Karol Wojtyla addressed the UN General Assembly. In a powerful speech that had human rights as its central theme the Pope made constant reference to ‘the fundamental document’ that was the very keystone of the UN: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He talked of his recent trip to his homeland and, in particular, of his visit to Auschwitz, describing the death camps as ‘a warning sign on the path of humanity today, in order that every kind of concentration camp anywhere on earth may once and for all be done away with’. ‘The real genocide’ that occurred in Auschwitz and the other death camps of the Second World War were ‘the basic inspiration and cornerstone of the United Nations Organisation. The Universal Declaration was paid for by millions of our brothers and sisters.’ He continued:
‘. . . If the truth and principles contained in this document were to be forgotten or ignored and were thus to lose the genuine self-evidence that distinguished them at the time they were brought painfully to birth, then the noble purpose of the United Nations could be faced with the threat of a new destruction.’
Wojtyla condemned the modern continuation of
‘the various kinds of torture and oppression, either physical or moral, carried out under any system, in any land; this phenomenon is all the more distressing if it occurs under the pretext of internal security or the need to preserve an apparent peace.’
For the papal biographer George Weigel the speech marked the point ‘at which the Catholic Church unambiguously committed itself to the cause of human freedom and defence of basic human rights as the primary goals of its engagement with world polities’.
Shortly before his journey to Poland, Wojtyla had peremptorily removed all hope for a significant percentage of the priesthood. In his Palm Sunday worldwide message to priests he declared that celibacy was ‘a special treasure’ to which the Latin Church would ‘maintain fidelity’. He talked of priests who ‘do not simply have the power of forming and governing the priestly people’ but ‘are expected to have a care and commitment which are far greater and different from those of the layperson’. In other European countries and in the United States such views smacked to many of the faithful as a curious form of religious elitism from a far-gone age. For good measure, at much the same time the Pope began wholesale rejection of requests from priests for Laicisation – a papal dispensation releasing priests from their sacred obligations and returning them to the lay state.
His attitudes to issues were often at odds with his calls for universal human rights. Although he praised the various roles of women in society and within the religious orders, he simultaneously reiterated that the Vatican ban on the contraceptive pill and the refusal to countenance or consider women entering the priesthood were non-negotiable issues.
He spoke often on his tours of the right to a living wage – but did not apply it in the Vatican, where up to 4,000 workers had no trade unions and no democratic representatives. Early in 1974 a group of Vatican employees stating they ‘were in serious economic difficulties’ had written to Pope Paul VI.
These men and women had been notoriously underpaid for decades. Their letter began with the restatement of a fundamental truth.
‘The figure of the Pope is the only example in the world by which the truth he preaches as head of the Church can be directly checked in his work as head of State.’
Injustice within the Vatican could, as the letter writers observed, be put right ‘only by an act of sovereign justice’. Having made it clear that the Pope alone could answer their plea positively they continued:
‘The principal motive in writing is the urgent necessity of solving the problem of the extremely low wages of the Vatican employees who, as always, without any right to speak are forced to ask softly in deaf ears that have no wish to hear them.’
The Vatican civil servants concluded with a reminder that the solution lay ‘in a will to face these problems with – even before justice and honesty – a Christian conscience and, for this, it would be enough to recall what the Gospels say about “a just wage” which is essentially what we are asking for.’
Five years later, as John Paul II rose to begin a very long address to the United Nations on human rights, the Vatican staff were still awaiting a response.
On the final day of a tour that had appeared to have everything – except a single significant statement from women – the Pope was at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington. About to address a congregation very largely made up of 5,000 nuns, he was introduced by Sister Theresa Kane, in her official capacity as Administrator General of the Sisters of Mercy of the Union in the United States and President of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious News.
Sister Kane made it clear that she did not lack love or respect for the Holy Father.
‘Our hearts leap as we welcome you . . . As women we have heard the powerful message of our Church addressing the dignity and reverence for all persons. As women we have pondered these words. Our contemplation leads us to state that the Church in its struggle to be faithful to its call for reverence and dignity for all persons must respond by providing the possibility of women as persons being included in all ministries of the Church.’
Dressed in everyday clothes, talking quietly, the diminutive figure had created an electric atmosphere. The Pope looked nonplussed and his hands, set for the customary modest acknowledgement of praise, fluttered unsurely. She drew his attention to the ‘intense suffering and pain that is part of the life of many women in the United States’. ‘As women,’ she observed, ‘we have heard the powerful message that the Church preaches about human rights.’ Her pleas that these human rights should be extended to women provoked thunderous applause from the audience who clearly understood that she was not merely referring to women in religious orders or just to the issue of the ordination of women.
Her words touched many listeners both in the room and much further afield. By no means all agreed with her and in a subsequent quarter-page advertisement in the Washington Post many signatories apologised to the Pope for the ‘public rudeness shown to him by Sister Theresa Kane’ who ‘was not only impertinent to the Holy Father but also offended the millions of us who love him and gladly accept his teaching’. However, an NBC poll taken on the eve of the papal visit suggested that Sister Kane did not lack for support. The poll showed that 66 per cent of American Catholics did not agree with the Church’s position on birth control, 50 per cent dissented on abortion, 53 per cent on clerical celibacy, 46 per cent on the ordination of women and 41 per cent on papal infallibility.
Apart from provoking a national debate, Sister Kane had inspired a great many of the professional commentators who had covered the papal tour to assess it more realistically than they might otherwise have done. Critics considered, as the Pope had wrongly reaffirmed in Time, ‘the thought that Christianity is a body of fixed beliefs rather than a faith that ought to be adapted to modern circumstances’. His defenders declared that Wojtyla was restating the basic truths of the Christian faith and that these could not be negotiated upon. Still others believed that Wojtyla was putting his own particular spin on the eternal truths, rewriting the Gospel according to John Paul II.
Newsweek’s Religious Editor, Kenneth Woodward, writing on this occasion in the National Catholic Reporter, was one of many who struggled to come to terms with the Pope as his tour ended. On the positive side, he considered the speech on human rights at the UN showed the Pope at his best, though none of it would have been surprising to any who had read his encyclical published in March or were sufficiently aware of the Catholic tradition on humanism. Other positives included ‘a quality which encourages other people to do deep down what they would like to do, namely throw off their pessimism, lethargy and narcissism and commit themselves to some form of service to other people’. Billy Graham’s description of John Paul II as ‘the moral leader of our times’ was for the Newsweek editor ‘a comment more on the lack of quality of leadership’.
On the negative side, Woodward was devastating.
‘He has set the ecumenical movement back a hundred years and that’s conservative. It was evident that the man does not listen . . . It is not evident where he got his information about this country which was faulty. In New York he praised people for supporting the family structure, the opposite of what this country really does. I do not find him a warm person, particularly. I found his gestures with children stilted, the actions of an actor, not a grandfather.’
After listing other perceived failings in the Pope, Woodward concluded with an observation which many would come to share.
‘What I found in the Pope’s statements, and even in his manner, was a lack of empathy for Christians struggling to be good Catholics: married couples, facing the problem of birth control, or divorced people who found themselves in very difficult marriages.’
Such views were not confined to one well-informed and caring journalist; a great many observers were equally critical. Most tellingly, the Pope’s critics had intuitively picked up his dismissal of America and all things American. Before the visit to the United States he had nothing but acclamation and adoration in Mexico, Poland and Ireland. Those heady experiences may have caused him in the USA to forget his lines and from time to time his performance. Like many an actor before him Wojtyla blamed his audience. Members of his personal entourage suggested on the flight home that the US tour had been the most superficial papal journey to date. Back in Rome he dismissed Sister Kane and her supporters. They were, he observed, ‘irritated and embittered for nothing’. After a year in office, most observers felt that Pope John Paul II had strengthened the Right with virtually everything he said. He was variously described as ‘great box office’ but also as ‘a tank that crushed all opposition’.
By the middle of 1979 yet another threat to Bishop Marcinkus had emerged, this time not from Calvi but from Michele Sindona. The former ‘saviour of the lira’ had been fighting extradition from the United States to Italy since 1976 by every means at his disposal. These included putting out a contract for the murder of the assistant district attorney, John Kenny, the chief prosecutor in the extradition hearings. Sindona’s Mafia friends attempted to explain to him that while killing a prosecutor in Milan might slow down a case, it usually had the reverse effect in New York. The $100,000 contract was tempting but there were no takers.
An additional problem for Sindona, and by association for Marcinkus and other Vatican Bank employees, was the investigation by the state liquidator of one of the Sindona Banks, Banca Privata Italiana. Giorgio Ambrosoli, like Emilio Alessandrini, was a courageous, incorruptible man. Appointed by the state in September 1974 he had by the end of May 1979 penetrated the entire criminal edifice that Sindona had so cleverly created.
The parking of shares, the buy-backs, the dazzling transfers through the myriad companies, the laundries, the illegal export of currency and, most importantly, the links that bound him to Calvi, Marcinkus and those other trusted men of the Vatican, Monsignor De Bonis, Massimo Spada, Luigi Mennini and Pelligrino de Strobel – all of these scams that Sindona had worked with the Vatican Bank had for years acted like a vast drain on the Italian lira. At any trial of Sindona in Italy Giorgio Ambrosoli would be the star witness. Before that he was destined to take on the same role when Sindona was tried in New York on ninety-nine counts of fraud, perjury and misappropriation of bank funds. The charges stemmed directly from the collapse of a Sindona bank, the Franklin First National, with losses in excess of $2 billion, at the time the biggest bank crash in American history.
On 9 June 1979, the judge who had been appointed to try the American case against Sindona had arranged for Ambrosoli to swear a deposition in Milan. On the same date William Arico, the man who had been paid to murder Ambrosoli, was also in the same city, staying at the Hotel Splendido with his five accomplices. Their weapons included an M11 machine gun fitted with a silencer and five P38 revolvers. Arico hired a Fiat car and began to trail Giorgio Ambrosoli. The first day of the deposition taking had gone very badly for Sindona’s lawyers. They had hoped to demonstrate the absurdity of the charges that their client stood accused of in New York. Four years of work, over 100,000 sheets of meticulously prepared notes plus the mind of an exceptionally gifted lawyer began to reveal the appalling truth in front of a cluster of American lawyers.
Not knowing that he was being followed, Ambrosoli went on to another meeting – this time with the head of Palermo’s CID, Boris Giuliano. The Sicilian police chief had recovered documents from the body of a Mafia enforcer, Giuseppe Di Cristina, a man who had worked for the families Gambino, Inzerillo and Spatola. The documents very exactly cross-referenced with a series of transactions indicating that Sindona had been recycling the proceeds from heroin sales on behalf of these Mafia families through the Vatican Bank to his Amincor Bank in Switzerland. After a lengthy discussion Ambrosoli and Giuliano agreed to a fuller meeting once Ambrosoli had finished his testifying to the US lawyers.
Later that day, Ambrosoli was still not finished with Sindona. He had a long telephone conversation with Lieutenant-Colonel Antonio Varisco, Head of the Security Service in Rome. The subject was the matter Varisco was currently investigating, P2.
The following day as his deposition continued, Ambrosoli dropped one of a large number of bombshells. Detailing how the Banca Cattolica del Veneto had changed hands he stated that Sindona had paid a ‘brokerage fee of $6.5 million to a Milanese banker and an American bishop’ – Calvi and Marcinkus. By 11 July Ambrosoli had completed his deposition and it was agreed that he would return the next day to sign the record of his testimony and that the following week he would be available for questioning and clarification by the US prosecutors and Sindona’s lawyers.
Shortly before midnight on the eleventh, Ambrosoli arrived outside his apartment. From the window his wife waved. They were about to have a belated dinner. As the lawyer moved towards his front door Arico and two of his aides appeared from the shadows. The question came out of the darkness.
‘Giorgio Ambrosoli?’
‘Si.’
Arico aimed at point blank range and at least four bullets from the P38 entered Ambrosoli’s chest. He died instantly.
By 6.00 a.m. Arico was in Switzerland. One hundred thousand dollars was transferred from a Sindona account at Banca del Gottardo into an account of Arico’s in the name of Robert McGovern at the Credit Suisse in Geneva. The account number was 415851–22–1.
On 13 July 1979, less than forty-eight hours after the murder of Giorgio Ambrosoli, Lieutenant-Colonel Antonio Varisco was being driven in a white BMW along the Lungotevere Arnaldo da Brescia in Rome. It was 8.30 a.m. A white Fiat 128 pulled alongside. A sawn-off shotgun appeared through its window. Four shots were fired and the Lieutenant-Colonel and his chauffeur were dead. One hour later the Red Brigades ‘claimed’ responsibility.
On 21 July 1979, Boris Giuliano went into the Lux Bar in Via Francesco Paolo Di Biasi in Palermo for a morning coffee. The time was 8.05 a.m. Having drunk his coffee, he moved towards the cash desk to pay. A man approached and fired six shots into Giuliano. The café was crowded at the time. Subsequent police questioning established that no one had seen anything. No one had heard anything. Boris Giuliano’s position was taken by Giuseppe Impallomeni, a member of P2.
The killing, like the murder of Ambrosoli, had bought Marcinkus and his Vatican cronies more time, and this meant more money. They were left free to concentrate on the four-day meeting on the Church’s cash crisis to which the Pope had summoned every cardinal in November.
Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, their activities in the Vatican Bank had no impact on the Church’s general finances. The Vatican Bank, or IOR, is the Pope’s bank and all profits derived from that source go directly to the Pope for him to use as he sees fit. No accounts covering the operation of the Vatican Bank are ever published. Any figures made public that declare yearly positions always specifically exclude the Vatican Bank.
The November meeting of all the cardinals had been called at very short notice and disrupted the plans of many people. It was not a good way to deal with a range of issues from Church finances to Curial reform needing detailed preparation. The only attendee who did not cancel previous engagements was the man who had called the meeting. The Pope absented himself for much of one of the four working days to spend time with Rome’s railway workers. There was nothing unusual in this behaviour. His indifference to time, his unpunctuality and his total unawareness of the inconvenience he frequently caused others, had been well known in Cracow.
During his opening address to the cardinals the Pope very largely confined himself to generalities. ‘It is obvious that the Church’s possibility of offering economic contributions in relation to the many different needs in the various parts of the world is limited.’ Then with an eye towards greater contributions from the wealthier countries he continued, ‘Here one should also stress that this solidarity of the Church ad extra demands solidarity from within.’ A few moments later he returned to this theme. ‘In this field, the “rich and free” Church, if one may use such an expression, has enormous debts and commitments toward the “poor and constricted” Church, if one may use these expressions as well.’
Near the end of his speech the Pope again commented on the third topic to be discussed.
‘Bearing in mind the different fields of the Apostolic See’s activity, which had to be developed in relation with putting the council into practice and in relation with the Church’s present tasks in the sphere of evangelisation and of service to people in the spirit of the Gospel, it is necessary to formulate the question of economic resources. In particular the Sacred College has the right and duty to have exact knowledge of the present state of the matter.’
The factual ‘present state of the matter’ would have included details of why men were being slaughtered in Milan, Rome and Palermo to protect the Vatican Bank, but this was not revealed to the cardinals. Truth and facts were in extremely short supply during the ensuing discussions on the Holy See’s finances, as can be gauged by Cardinal Krol’s subsequent report on the meetings to the American bishops.
‘The presentation of the financial situation of the Holy See evinced beyond a shadow of doubt that the Catholic Church is indeed the Church of the poor. The report also evinced that the age of fables and myths, as the Holy Father noted in his concluding talk, is not something of the past.’
Where the Pope led, his cardinals dutifully followed. Consequently all accounts of Vatican wealth were dismissed as ‘fables’.
One specific issue for the cardinals was the plight of the Vatican employees. As Cardinal Krol put it,
‘Considering the number of employees in the Vatican is over 3,000, the majority of them lay people with family obligations, the Holy See would be irresponsible if it did not address itself to this financial problem, which affects the daily life of so many people.’
Krol continued,
‘It should be noted that the total budget of the Holy See is less than the total budget of all Catholic institutions of some of the large dioceses [in the United States]. In fact, there are very likely some Catholic health-care or educational institutions which have higher budgets and higher resources.’
In 1979, the real financial position of the Holy See (as opposed to fables) was scattered among a number of different institutions. There was the Administration of the Patrimony of the Holy See (APSA), with its Ordinary and Extraordinary sections. The Ordinary Section demonstrated all the wealth of the various congregations, tribunals and offices. It specifically owned a great deal of the real estate of the papacy. In Rome alone this amounted to over 5,000 rented apartments. In 1979, its gross assets were over $1 billion.
The Extraordinary Section, the Vatican’s other bank, was as active in its daily stock speculations as the IOR (the Vatican Bank so-called) controlled by Marcinkus. It specialised in the currency market and worked closely with Credit Suisse and the Société de Banques Suisses. Its gross assets at the end of 1979 were over $1.2 billion.
The Vatican Bank, which Marcinkus was running, had gross assets of over $1 billion. Its annual profits by 1979 were over $120 million, of which 85 per cent went directly to the Pope to use as he saw fit. One additional figure to put the ‘fables’ in context: at the end of 1979 the Catholic Church in West Germany alone received $2 billion from the state as their share of the annual church tax. By the end of 1979 the Vatican civil servants who had written directly to the Pope in March were still waiting for a reply. Although the Pope and Cardinal Krol had used the plight of the Vatican staff as a device to wring more money from the wealthier dioceses around the world, there had been no pay rise.
At the end of 1979 Pope John Paul II on his return from America first demonstrated his attitude to theologians who disagreed with his views. As a newly appointed bishop at Vatican Council II, Wojtyla had admired Hans Küng, a Swiss theologian who taught at the University of Tübingen in Germany. He had a highly gifted mind and, unusually for an advanced theologian, his writings were accessible and readily understandable. This was a man who had shaped an era of thinking within the Church at a crucial time. It was inevitable that the forward-reasoning Hans Küng would rapidly come into conflict with the authoritarian traditional position of Pope John Paul II. Küng did not accept without qualification the doctrine of papal infallibility and cited numerous examples of historic errors by the Roman Catholic Church. They ranged from ‘the condemnation of Galileo’ through to ‘the condemnation of human rights and particularly freedom of conscience and religion’. Hans Küng believed that as a matter of urgency the Church should reconsider its ban on artificial birth control and he sought a Catholic Church that believed in democracy.
As Pope, Wojtyla expected unquestioning acceptance of his authority. He had never experienced life in a democracy and he made it clear from the beginning of his Papacy that he intended to exercise power, not share it. The Holy Office, or to give it its modern name, the Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith, announced that Küng would ‘no longer be considered a Catholic theologian’. It left Küng free to teach, but he was no longer a Professor of Catholic Theology. He was in the wilderness, without the weight of authority. Hans Küng was not without supporters, unlike the French Dominican Jacques Pohier who had raised questions about Christ’s resurrection and as a result lost his licence to teach or give public lectures in 1978. Küng’s case became a cause célèbre, with protests at his silencing throughout Europe. In early January 1980 there was hope that the ban might be lifted but the gap between the theologian and the Vatican remained unbridgeable.
Meanwhile, John Paul II and the Curia had to deal with a dangerous outbreak of democracy in the Dutch Church. After Vatican Council II the Dutch had led the European Catholic Churches in introducing a wide range of democratic and enlightened reforms. They had reduced the distinctions between the priest and congregation; lay people, in particular women, helped prepare the liturgy and taught scripture and catechism classes; during Mass they assisted with the communion and frequently read from the Bible. Priests and nuns were organised into democratic councils that formulated recommendations to the Bishops; they led protests against the installation of new US missiles in Europe and opposed the dictatorships of the Third World. By the beginning of 1980 it was obvious that the Dutch style of Catholicism was a huge success. It had overtaken the Protestants as the largest religious group in the country.
However, there was a conservative minority within the country both among the laity and the clergy that had remained united in its disapproval of these activities. They were supported by elements of the Curia. Until the election of Wojtyla, these elements were in a minority and consequently without power. His election shifted that balance of power overnight. The Pope summoned the Dutch bishops to a specially convened synod. The meetings over a two-week period were attended by the Pope and senior members of the Curia. The Dutch bishops had been told at the outset by the synod’s secretary, Father Joseph Lescrauwaet, that they were about to be exposed to ‘the ministry of authority’. When that comment reached the Pope he recognised a kindred spirit and promoted Father Lescrauwaet to auxiliary bishop.
All of the changes that the Dutch bishops had introduced were banned while the traditional authority of bishop over priest and priest over laity was reasserted. Lay members of the Church were forbidden to take part in any of the activities and there was to be no involvement in political issues nor democratic councils. The control of the Dutch Church thus passed to the Curia who would approve or reject on leading issues. The seven Dutch bishops had been kept locked up until they signed the forty-six propositions repudiating the positions they had adopted since Vatican Council II. This was done in total secrecy. Attempting to justify what had occurred, the Pope told the journalists,
‘I am sure you will understand that the Church, like all families, at least on certain occasions, needs to have moments of exchange, discussion and decision which take place in intimacy and discretion, to enable the participants to be free and to respect people and situations.’
Five years later the deep and widely-felt anger was still evident when the Pope visited Holland. There were many protests at the visit and some became violent as the Dutch Catholics felt that they along with their bishops had been humiliated. Hostile posters were everywhere to be seen. ‘Move over John Paul. You’re hiding Jesus,’ read one. If the Pope had been dismayed when he stood alongside the diminutive figure of Sister Kane during his trip to America and listened to her calm, gentle plea for change, one can only wonder at his thoughts as he listened to blunt speeches of welcome. One missionary put a question directly to him. ‘How can we have credibility in the preaching of the Gospel of liberation when it is being proclaimed with a pointed finger rather than an extended hand?’ The Dutch hostility and the lack of warmth affected the Pope. He told the crowds that he understood their feelings but he left them still feeling profoundly humiliated while taking with him the conviction that what he had experienced on the trip had nothing to do with him and everything to do with a range of excesses triggered by Vatican Council II.
Sitting patiently in the Vatican during this episode was another bishop waiting for the Pope’s attention. Again democracy was at the heart of this man’s plight, not greater democracy within his Church but the total lack of basic democracy within his country.
Archbishop Oscar Romero was an unlikely candidate for heroic martyrdom. A quiet, conservative man from Ciudad Barrios in the mountainous south-east of El Salvador near the border with Honduras, he was born on 15 August 1917, the second of seven children. At the age of thirteen he already had a vocation for the priesthood and trained at a seminary in San Miguel before studying in the capital, San Salvador, followed by a number of years in wartime Rome. Recalled to San Miguel by his bishop in January 1944, Romero became secretary to the diocese, a position he held for the next twenty-three years. By February 1977 he had slowly and unspectacularly worked his way up to become Archbishop of San Salvador. As he had not fully embraced all of the radical liberal changes of Vatican Council II, the consensus was that here was a safe pair of hands, a quiet man who would support the status quo in a country ruled by a right-wing military junta with the help of death squads. Aiding and abetting the military were the rich landowners and the overwhelming majority of the Roman Catholic bishops who assumed that Romero was one of their own.
Within a month of his new appointment, two events radically transformed the new archbishop. A crowd of protesting farm labourers and their families were brutally attacked by soldiers in the central square of the capital, virtually on Romero’s doorstep. About fifty men, women and children, all unarmed, were gunned down for complaining about the corrupt election of the latest military dictator. The police cleared the square by firing into the crowd and then hosing away the blood. Then on 12 March 1977 a radical priest who was a friend of Romero’s, Father Rutilio Grande, was murdered in Aguilares. Two of his parishioners were also killed, an elderly man and his seven-year-old grandson. Father Grande’s crime had been his constant defence of the peasants in their battle for fundamental rights including their aspiration to organise farm cooperatives. Grande had publicly declared that the dogs of the large landowners ate better food than the campesino children whose fathers worked in their fields. On the night of the murders, Oscar Romero drove out of the capital to El Paisnal to view the three bodies. The country church was packed with Father Grande’s congregation. They had lost their champion and the Archbishop saw a mute question in many of the eyes staring at him. His subsequent actions gave his answer; he would be their voice for as long as he drew breath.
Within the year more than 200 of those who had silently watched as Romero had walked into their country church were dead. As the carnage continued, over 75,000 Salvadorans were killed. One million fled the country, a further million were left homeless, in a country with a population of less than five million, over ninety-nine per cent Roman Catholics. There was no official enquiry into the murder of the three men at El Paisnal. The power to authorise such enquiries was of course in the hands of the perpetrators.
Romero went on the attack from the pulpit, from the radio stations not controlled by the government, with his pen, in every avenue open to him he accused, identified and entreated. He wanted to know where the ‘disappeared’ of El Salvador had gone. He wanted to know who controlled the death squads that murdered again and again with impunity. He asked who gave the soldiers who wandered the countryside their orders, who had sanctioned the army to kill on a whim, to slaughter without reason. He also organised a group of young lawyers in an attempt to bring some measure of justice to victims. Anyone protesting for better wages, a better standard of living, was invariably arrested and charged with subversion. The opposition at the time of the emergence of Archbishop Romero was in the process of forming itself into the Democratic Revolutionary Front, the FDR. It was a mixture of Christian Democrats, Social Democrats and Communists. The majority of the Communists would have had the greatest difficulty in distinguishing between Karl Marx and Groucho Marx but like their colleagues in the FDR they had a very clear idea of their enemy.
Soon after the murder of Father Grande and his two parishioners, Romero announced that as a gesture of solidarity with the preachings of Grande he would refuse to appear at any public ceremonies with army or government members until the truth surrounding the triple murders was officially established and until true social change had begun. It instantly made him the hero of the people and the enemy of the military junta and the politicians. Romero’s homilies on the radio became essential listening. His voice reached into the furthest corners of the country and assured his listeners that he could not promise that the atrocities would cease but that the Church of the poor, themselves, would live on.
‘If some day they take away the radio station from us . . . if they don’t let us speak, if they kill all the priests and the bishop too, and you are left a people without priests, each one of you must become God’s microphone, each one of you must become a prophet.’
All the while the US Carter administration was continuing to pump in military aid, while it simultaneously declared its whole-hearted commitment to human rights. In 1980 Romero wrote to President Carter pleading with him to halt the military aid because ‘it is being used to repress my people’.
Instead the government-controlled press continued to attack him. With one exception his fellow bishops condemned him to Rome, accusing him of being in league with Communist elements, denouncing him for actively encouraging Liberation Theology. Their right-wing friends within the Vatican ensured that the Pope was kept fully briefed not just on the facts but also the accusations that so neatly touched certain Papal nerves. Before January 1979 Wojtyla had never been to Latin America and knew nothing about its real condition, relying heavily on briefings. Having lived under a Communist regime for so long, he was especially vulnerable to the suggestion that any critic of the establishment was an agent of Communism. The Pope read the reports that had been carefully screened by various Curial departments stating that Romero had been unduly influenced by the Liberation Theology movement, that there was a grave danger of the country falling to the Communists and that Marxism would replace the faith. After the Puebla conference in January 1979 when Archbishop Romero became aware of the campaign being waged against him, not only in his own country but within the Vatican, he requested an audience with the Pope.
His treatment by the Vatican was disgraceful. He was kept waiting for four weeks by men who pulled every trick in the book to ensure that he did not meet the Pope. They hoped that Romero would tire of waiting. They did not know the man. Eventually he was received by the Pope on 7 May 1979. He brought with him seven thick files of evidence that he had painstakingly collected for the interview. Romero, like many bishops at Puebla, had hoped that the Pope would publicly condemn the murder of priests and other religious and the massacres of the poor that were occurring in Latin America. They had left the Puebla conference very disappointed.
Clutching his bundles, Romero was ushered into the Papal presence. Romero began to paint a picture of his country: two per cent of the population owned sixty per cent of the land; eight per cent of the population received fifty per cent of the national income. Nearly sixty per cent of the population earned less than $10 per month; seventy per cent of children under five were malnourished. The majority of the rural population had work for just one third of the year. Romero showed the Pope photographs of murdered priests and mutilated peasants. He told him what was blindingly obvious: ‘In El Salvador the Church is being persecuted.’
The Pope responded, ‘Well, now don’t exaggerate it. It is important that you enter into a dialogue with the government.’
‘Holy Father, how can I enter into an understanding with a government that attacks the people? That murders your priests? That rapes your nuns?’
‘Well, you must find common ground with them. I know that it is difficult. I understand very clearly how difficult the political situation in your country is but I am concerned with the role of the Church. We should not only be concerned with defending social justice and love of the poor; we should also be concerned with the danger of the Communists exploiting the situation. That would be bad for the Church.’
Romero continued: ‘In my country it is very difficult to speak of anti-Communism because anti-Communism is what the right wing preaches, not out of love for Christian sentiments, but out of selfish concern to promote its own interests.’
The Pope cautioned Romero against using such specifics. His advice to his archbishop was to function as he himself had done in Cracow:
‘I recommend that you apply great balance and prudence, especially when denouncing specific situations. Far better to stay with general principles. With specific accusations there is a risk of making errors or mistakes.’
It was obvious to Romero that the Pope had been heavily influenced by the negative and inaccurate reports sent to him by the bishops who preferred to dine with the military junta rather than break bread with the poor. Displaying total ignorance of the realities confronting Romero in El Salvador, the Pope talked of how much harder it had been in Cracow where he had been faced with a Communist government. Wojtyla talked of the importance of unity with fellow bishops thus comparing Polish clerical bitchiness with Romero’s adversaries who regularly socialised with psychopaths who came to the dinner table fresh from murdering another group of protestors. It was not the Papacy’s finest hour.
At the end of January 1980 Romero had a second audience with the Pope. Yet again he valiantly attempted to enlist the Pope as an ally. An outright condemnation from the Holy Father of the atrocities of the government of El Salvador would undoubtedly have an electrifying effect on the Catholic country. It would also reverberate in the larger world. Such pressure would certainly give the rulers of El Salvador and the rich landowners pause for thought. Again Romero had to make do with platitudes. The Pope concluded this second audience with a friendly embrace and the words, ‘I pray for El Salvador every day.’
The Pope was fully aware before this second meeting with Romero that, apart from praying on a daily basis for El Salvador, plans to remove the Archbishop from his homeland and his people were nearly complete. Wojtyla had been persuaded by the right-wing cabal within the Vatican, including the then Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Franjo Seper, to ‘reassign’ Romero. It was the Vatican way: remove the ‘problem’ to another location and the problem ceases to exist. Less than two months later, on 24 March, Archbishop Oscar Romero was shot in the chest as he celebrated Mass in the Chapel of the Divine Providence Hospital in San Salvador. He fell to the floor and, before choking to death on his own blood, forgave his killer. Shortly before he was murdered, Romero had taken a few hours away from San Salvador to walk on a beach with a fellow priest. As he sat gazing out at the waves, he asked his friend, ‘Are you afraid of death?’ The friend, thinking to show Christian solidarity, assured Romero that, ‘No, I’m not afraid.’ ‘Well, I am,’ said Romero. ‘I really am.’
It had been a professional contract killing ordered and paid for by Major Roberto D’Aubuisson, who was never charged with the murder. He and the Death Squad he controlled went on to kill many thousands of citizens. After his death D’Aubuisson was found guilty of the murder of the Archbishop by a United Nations Truth Commission. In 1999 the newly elected President of El Salvador dedicated himself to the memory not of Romero but of Roberto D’Aubuisson. The Pope never acknowledged Romero as a martyr and continued to give credence to the ‘theory’ put forward by Cardinal Trujillo that Oscar Romero was murdered by left-wingers wishing to provoke a revolt.
At the time of Archbishop Romero’s murder an Italian judge in a letter to Corriere della Sera commented that clearly the Pope liked to travel and asked,
‘Why did this travelling Pope not immediately set off for San Salvador to pick up the chalice that had been dropped from Romero’s hands and continue the Mass which the murdered archbishop had begun?’
The Vatican response to the murder was minimal. The Pope confined himself to condemning the ‘sacrilegious assassination’ with his ‘deepest reprobation’, as reported in L’Osservatore Romano. To represent him at the Archbishop’s funeral he sent Cardinal Ernesto Compio Ahumada of Mexico. What happened at the funeral was narrated by Father James L. Conner, President of the Jesuit Conference in Washington, in America magazine.
‘All went peacefully through a succession of prayers, readings, hymns until the moment in his homily when Cardinal Ernesto Corripio Ahumada of Mexico, the personal delegate of Pope John Paul II, began to praise Archbishop Romero as a man of peace and a foe of violence. Suddenly a bomb exploded at the far edge of the plaza, seemingly in front of the National Palace, a government building. Next, gunshots, sharp and clear, echoed off the walls surrounding the plaza. At first the Cardinal’s plea for all to remain calm seemed to have a steadying impact. But as another explosion reverberated, panic took hold and the crowd broke ranks and ran. Some headed for the side streets, but thousands more rushed up the stairs and fought their way into the cathedral.
‘As one of the concelebrating priests, I had been inside the cathedral from the start. Now I watched the terrified mob push through the doors until every inch of space was filled. Looking about me, I suddenly realised that, aside from the nuns, priests and bishops, the mourners were the poor and the powerless of El Salvador. Absent were government representatives of the nation or of other countries. The ceremony had begun at 11 a.m. and it was now after noon. For the next hour and a half or two, we found ourselves tightly packed into the cathedral, some huddled under the pews, others clutching one another in fright, still others praying silently or aloud.
‘The bomb explosions grew closer and more frequent until the cathedral began to shudder. Would the whole edifice collapse? Or would a machine gunner appear in a doorway to strafe the crowd? A little peasant girl of about twelve named Reina, dressed up in her brown-and-white checked Sunday dress, clung to me in desperation and cried, “Padre, téngame!” (“Father, hold me!”) We lived through that horror of bombs, bullets and panic – now dead bodies were being carried into the cathedral from outside – for nearly two hours. At certain moments one could not help wondering if we would all be killed.’
Such evil flourishes best in a culture of indifference. While the Archbishop was rapidly forgotten within the Vatican, his enemies flourished. One was Alfonso Lopez Trujillo. As the organiser of the Puebla Conference, Trujillo had been caught red-handed plotting to rig the outcome in favour of the extreme right faction among the bishops. Four years later John Paul II promoted Trujillo and he became a cardinal. In 1990 came further elevation when he was named President of the Pontifical Council for the Family. This important position entrusted Trujillo with carrying out the Pope’s ‘culture of life’ campaign against artificial birth control and abortion. He came to be widely regarded as a favourite of the Pope’s and considered a strong candidate should the next Conclave occur ‘in the near future’.
By April 1980 the Secretariat of State was deeply immersed in the final planning stages of the Pope’s next overseas trip, scheduled for the following month. It was a whirlwind tour of Africa where the Pope was set to make 50 major speeches in ten days as he visited Zaire, the Congo, Kenya, Ghana, Burkina Faso and the Ivory Coast. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Cardinal Casaroli was more concerned with the Pope’s travelling companions and whether they would include Bishop Paul Marcinkus.
Michele Sindona’s continuing fight to stay out of prison either in the United States or Italy had by early February 1980 looked perilously close to defeat. His New York trial was about to commence. The Vatican rallied to the Sindona cause. Bishop Marcinkus and Cardinals Caprio and Guerri had agreed to assist his defence counsel by swearing depositions on video. Intrigued by what these devout men might have to say about Sindona, the state prosecution had raised no objection to what was a very unusual gambit. It is normal for witnesses to have their statements tested under oath, in a courtroom, in front of judge and jury. Trial Judge Thomas Griesa, a man whom Sindona had so far failed to have murdered, instructed the defence lawyers to fly to Rome on 1 February. On the following day shortly before the depositions were to be sworn Secretary of State Casaroli intervened. There would be no depositions.
‘They would create a disruptive precedent. There has been so much unfortunate publicity about these depositions. We are very unhappy about the fact that the American government does not give diplomatic recognition to the Vatican.’
Casaroli’s decision was not of course based upon any of the formal objections that he had raised. It was based upon his realisation of the consequences of Sindona being found guilty after three high-ranking prelates of the Roman Catholic Church had all sworn under oath that he was pure as the driven snow. The three would be branded as liars and, more disturbingly, every Italian magistrate would demand the same co-operation from the Vatican.
That in turn would lead to a direct breach of the Lateran Treaty, which granted cardinals immunity from arrest in Italy. The next step after that would be a very public examination of Vatican Incorporated. That would inevitably lead to the Pope’s bank.
Casaroli had shrewdly saved the Vatican at the eleventh hour. In doing so, he had overridden a decision taken by the Pope who had happily agreed to the request that Marcinkus and the others should tell the world how highly they regarded Michele Sindona.
On 27 March 1980, Michele Sindona was found guilty on sixty-five counts, including fraud, conspiracy, perjury, false bank statements and misappropriation of bank funds. After recovering from a failed suicide attempt, Sindona was sentenced on 13 June to twenty-five years’ imprisonment and fined over $200,000.
Secretary of State Casaroli was aware that Pope John Paul I had been about to remove Bishop Paul Marcinkus at the time of his sudden death. He was also aware that, notwithstanding the evidence on the Bank and its array of criminal practices that had been available to him, John Paul II had declined to replace a man he continued to hold in high regard. Casaroli very discreetly talked to a contact within SISMI, the Italian Intelligence Service. He requested the fullest available information on Marcinkus and all of his business associates. While Cardinal Casaroli grappled with the Vatican Bank teetering on the edge of a public scandal others within the Vatican village had more prosaic concerns. A second letter arrived in the papal private apartment from some very exasperated employees.
‘Holy Father, do you not believe that between one journey and another you might come to earth, materially and among us, to solve, among so many problems, the ones we have and which are your exclusive competence as Head of State? In the second millennium, with so much “progress”, social justice, workers’ unions, and Papal encyclicals, if we want our problems solved, we are forced to write to the Pope because all other roads are barred to us.’
In Africa during an inevitable meeting with Polish missionaries in Zaire, Wojtyla directly alluded to the disgruntled within the Vatican ranks.
‘Some people think that the Pope should not travel so much. He should stay in Rome, as before. I often hear such advice, or read it in newspapers. But the local people here say “Thank God you came here, for you can only learn about us by coming. How could you be our pastor without knowing us? Without knowing who we are, how we live, what is the historical moment we are going through?” This confirms me in the belief that it is time for the Bishops of Rome to become successors not only of Peter but also of St Paul, who as we know could never sit still and was constantly on the move.’
During his trip to Brazil the Pope was taken through one of the favelas of Rio. Confronted with the poverty of the shanty town slums that were all around him the Pope took a ring from his finger and gave it to the local diocese. It had been given to him by Pope Paul VI when he named Wojtyla a cardinal. It undoubtedly had great sentimental value to Karol Wojtyla, but as a contribution to the problems that he could see around him, it provided little more than a moment of drama and a photo opportunity for the media.
Back at Vatican base, the Pope’s ‘own responsibilities’ were still waiting for their own less public gesture. In their latest letter the Vatican employees had talked of obtaining from the Pope a measure of ‘social justice’. It was a theme that the Pope used during his Brazilian tour. At São Salvador da Bahia, a region of the country that had been denied its share of central government funds for decades, he urged the haves of Brazilian society to do something about the have-nots. He called on the country’s politicians, the wealthy, the privileged, the elite to build a ‘social order based on justice’.
In the short term the overwhelming majority of the papal trips had great impact, with the crowds temporarily bonding with the man from the far country. But their long-term effect on the majority was minimal. The man was loved, the message ignored. The overwhelming majority of Roman Catholics have proved very resistant to the teachings of Pope John Paul II. A significant body of evidence confirms that they have in fact rejected his teachings on a number of key issues. As for getting to know ‘the local people’, a one-hour walkabout in a favela, a brief stop in São Salvador, a speech and a wave and on to the next name on the crowded itinerary is not merely irrelevant but superficial and patronising.
Karol Wojtyla was still in Brazil on 1 July 1980. On the same day in his beloved and deeply missed motherland, the Communist regime took a routine decision which triggered a series of momentous events. It announced new price increases for meat and other basic products.