IN THE FIRST MONTHS of 1981, Pope John Paul II remained unconvinced that Communism could be vanquished; it appeared that he still held to the opinions that he had expressed in the mid-1970s when talking of Communist rule in Eastern Europe to his close friend and professional colleague Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. He saw Communist rule as invincible and dismissed the United States as ‘immoral, amoral perhaps’.
On 23 April the links that the Pope had begun to forge with the ‘immoral, amoral’ United States grew immeasurably stronger. He had a meeting in his study with William Casey, the director of the CIA. Such a meeting was far from novel. The links between US intelligence and the Vatican went as far back as the Second World War. Bill Donovan, head of the OSS (the forerunner of the CIA) was a frequent visitor to the Papal Library of Pius XII and the offices of his deputy, Secretary of State Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Pope Paul VI.
This was not a crisis meeting. Neither was there urgent concern about the current events in Poland. At the time of this meeting more than three weeks had elapsed since the last crisis. Only the previous week on 17 April the peasants’ union in Poland had finally reached full agreement with the Government Commission paving the way for the formal registration of the union on 10 May, thus honouring the promise made by General Jaruzelski. The 23 April meeting between Casey and the Pope was to discuss medium-term and long-term aims not in Poland but in other spheres of mutual interest. Inevitably top of this list was the Soviet Union and worldwide Communism. Casey’s analysis of the Soviet Union was of dubious value to the Pope. Throughout his tenure as head of the CIA Casey would demonstrate an alarming naivety. The meeting in the Vatican between the head of the world’s oldest intelligence agency and the head of the world’s most technological advanced would be the first of a number of visits by Casey. The CIA had only one major asset within Poland, Colonel Ryszard Kuklinski, and sooner or later he would be exposed or forced to flee the country. For the Vatican, every priest, every nun – apart from those spying for the Communists – represented a potential source of information. If the Pope was prepared to co-operate, the CIA and the Reagan administration might well get into the hearts and minds of the Polish regime and also glean something of developments within the Soviet Politburo.
For such apparently disparate men they had much in common. The Jesuit-educated Casey, like Karol Wojtyla, from his student days had embraced a deep attachment to the Virgin Mary; statues of Mary and Jesus were to be found all over the Casey home on Long Island. Like Karol Wojtyla, Casey did not merely lean to the right in the fight against ‘the enemy’, he supported and upheld its position with every ounce of his strength. Like Wojtyla, he had supported the fascist Franco during the Spanish Civil War. The Falange might be fascists but they were Catholic fascists fighting communists. The head of the CIA had even considered the alcoholic Senator Joseph McCarthy essential in the fight against ‘the enemy’. At the time of this first meeting he looked very favourably on a number of right-wing dictatorships. He and other senior members of the Reagan administration would come to learn that this was yet another position that they shared with the Holy Father. The Pope’s clear and continuing hostility to Liberation Theology could cement the relationship with the Reagan administration.
The meeting did not discuss human rights, no longer the top priority of US foreign policy. For the Pope, coming from an occupied country, human rights were of paramount importance but it was unclear how strongly or consistently he would fight for them. He was whole-hearted in championing the human rights of his fellow Poles but would he show the same enthusiasm to champion the rights of the oppressed in El Salvador, Zaire, South Korea, Chile and the Philippines? Would he attempt to convince the Reagan administration, so eager to win his approval, that human rights were a vital issue?
Prior to Casey’s visit, there had been ample time for the Vatican’s Secretariat of State to reflect on some of the early signals that had been sent out by the new administration. The week after Secretary of State Haig’s human rights dismissal of the issue, General Chun Doo Hwan, the President of South Korea, arrived at the White House as the first head of state to meet President Reagan. The previous year there had been continuous student demonstrations throughout the country against a corrupt government regime that was ruling without recourse to the national ballot box.
On 22 February 1981 the Reagan administration lifted economic sanctions against Chile and its military dictatorship and invited it to participate in inter-American naval exercises. On 3 March Reagan sent $25 million of US military supplies and personnel to El Salvador under executive authority, thereby circumventing the need to obtain approval from Congress.
On 9 March in direct contravention of a twenty-year policy forbidding any military contact with the racist regime of South Africa, UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick held meetings with South African military officers. Two days later the US voted against a UN resolution condemning human rights violations in El Salvador. On 15 March Argentina’s ‘President’, military dictator General Roberto Viola, was invited to the US. In both Chile and Argentina there was total censorship, death squads, an ever-growing number of Los Desaparecidos – ‘the disappeared’ or ‘the missing people’. On 21 March National Security Advisor Richard Allen announced that future relations with South Africa should depend on US self-interest and not on US disapproval of apartheid.
It was easy to understand why the Reagan administration sought approval for their policies from the spiritual and moral leader of nearly one fifth of the planet, but what was the exchange? What could the Pope hope to gain from the President and his cabinet?
The most glittering prize would be to affect United States policy on a range of issues. It would assist the Vatican immeasurably if Reagan could be persuaded to have full diplomatic relations with the Vatican. It would greatly increase the Pope’s potential to influence and change United States policy on issues such as abortion and artificial birth control. With such diplomatic channels open the Vatican would have constant and immediate access to the State Department and through that to the Oval Office.
At the time of Casey’s visit, the Pope had already publicly joined in the abortion debate, not within the United States but on his own doorstep. Italy was going to hold two referenda on 17 May, both on abortion. Three years earlier, Italy, a country with nominally 99.8% Roman Catholics, had stood the Church’s teaching on abortion on its head and voted to legalise abortion for physical or psychological reasons, or because pregnancy would cause everwhelming economic, social or family problems, or if the foetus was declared deformed.
The first referendum would make obtaining a legal abortion much easier. Its supporters claimed that many women could not get the abortion that the law permitted because a significant number of doctors could use a ‘conscience clause’ to opt out of the state system. The second referendum, supported by the largely Catholic pro-life movement, was an attempt to make availability much more restrictive. Abortion would be allowed only if pregnancy or birth would involve grave risk to the life of the potential mother or there was clear medical evidence of serious dangers to her physical health.
Karol Wojtyla had been deeply and bitterly opposed to legalised abortion from his earliest days as a priest. His position was very powerfully reinforced when he was shown a medical film using an internal camera of a child within the womb being aborted. For Wojtyla abortion was a crime against nature and against God that could never be justified. He had confronted the issue continuously in Poland but that was among his own people. Though the issues remained the same, in Rome they required more subtle tactics. As a foreigner, the Pope needed to be aware that any involvement in a domestic issue ran the risk of being seen as interference in the internal affairs of Italy. Long before polling day the majority of the Italian political parties were accusing the Pope of just such interference. He had begun quietly enough, waiting until his Italian bishops had made their position clear in mid-March. They told their congregations that they would have preferred a referendum on the question of total abolition of abortion; they recommended that Catholics should vote for the pro-life resolution, as it was ‘the lesser evil’. This advice in the words of the bishops was ‘gravely binding’: not advice but an order.
On the following Sunday, 22 March, his voice shaking with barely controlled emotion, the Pope read the bishops’ statement in St Peter’s Square. The Pope had re-entered the Italian debate on ‘the killing of the unborn child’. He reverted to the interrogative form that he so favoured. He also reverted to use of the regal pronoun ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ which his predecessor Albino Luciani had abandoned.
‘If we were to accept the right to take away the gift of life from those who are not yet born, how can we defend the right of man in other situations? Will we be able to halt the process of destroying the human conscience?’
On Sunday, 10 May, just a few days before the referenda, John Paul II addressed a huge rally in St Peter’s Square on the coming vote: ‘This is a sacred cause. Those who oppose us have sunk into a moral insensibility and a spiritual death.’
For the Pope it was not a question of reducing the categories of women who could legally obtain an abortion. Quivering with anger, he demanded a complete ban on abortion. It should never be available to any woman, not even a rape victim, not even one who was a young child or a nun. The rights of the unborn child transcended all other rights. In these and many other horrific factual cases the Pope’s position was and remained until his death that no one but the unborn child has any rights. Though the issues were very different, he showed the same certitude as in the controversy over the letter asking forgiveness for Poland from the German bishops. He was right and his critics were not only wrong but grossly impertinent to challenge him. For all his learning, the Pope seemed to have missed one simple lesson taught in all Roman Catholic schools during the first half of the 20th century: ‘When you are in the right you can afford to keep your temper. When you are in the wrong you cannot afford to lose it.’
Many within the Roman Curia who knew Italy and its people far better than this man ‘from a far country’ were deeply uneasy. If the Pope had seriously misjudged the mood of the people on the abortion issue, then by taking such a public stand he ran the danger of suffering a personal deep humiliation and, beyond that, the risk of permanent damage to the Papacy and the Roman Catholic faith.
Three days after his anti-abortion rally, at lunchtime on 13 May 1981, the Pope sat down to what should have been his last meal on earth. The menu was the usual culinary mixed blessing, part Italian part Polish. On one occasion, when asked if the cuisine in the papal household was any good, the French cardinal, the late Louis Marie Bille, replied, ‘Coming from Lyon, that question is difficult for me to respond to. Let’s say there are a sufficient number of calories.’ Members of the household busied around the Pope and his three guests in the third-floor dining room of the Apostolic Palace.
Each Pope inevitably brings with him at least some elements of his former life. They serve as constant living reminders of times gone but still remembered. Paul VI surrounded himself with what the Roman Curia bitchily called ‘the Milan Mafia’; John Paul I brought from Venice just two human mementos: Sister Vincenza, who had been his housekeeper for 20 years, and the young and inexperienced Father Diego Lorenzi, who came as a junior secretary. John Paul II was cared for by a fiercely protective retinue largely from his homeland: five nuns from the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Cracow to cook his meals and do his laundry; Sister Emilia Ehrlich who a lifetime ago had taught Wojtyla English; Father Magee, uniquely serving his third Pope; and above all ‘Monsignor Stanislaw’, Stanislaw Dziwisz, also from Cracow.
Dziwisz had worked alongside the Pope from the mid-1960s. Officially he was the principal private secretary, a totally inadequate job description. Yet over the years a father/son relationship had developed. The Pope trusted Dziwisz more than any other living person and in turn Dziwisz believed that his role was to ensure that the Pope’s orders, instructions and wishes became reality. He did not always succeed but it was not for want of effort. No one got to the Pope without going through Dziwisz, which was another reason for the Roman Curia to display their endemic bitchiness. ‘The other Pope’ was one of their politer epithets for the papal gatekeeper.
In some respects this meal on 13 May was a working lunch. The principal guests were the French physician Professor Jerome Lejeune and his wife, Birthe. The highly distinguished Dr Lejeune, often described as ‘The Father Of Modern Genetics’, was the man who discovered the genetic cause of Down’s Syndrome. Like John Paul II he was passionately opposed to abortion and to artificial birth control. It was Lejeune’s film The Silent Scream of a foetus within the womb being aborted which had so deeply shocked the Pope. Predictably much of their lunchtime conversation focused on this issue and the appointment of Professor Lejeune as the first President of the Pontifical Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family. The abortion referendum was but one of many serious problems that demanded the Pope’s urgent attention on 13 May 1981. But it was not the only one.
By May 1981 the financial exposure of the Vatican-owned front companies that Roberto Calvi secretly controlled was in excess of $750 million. The Italian Treasury Minister, Beniamino Andreatta, had recently said in secret that the Vatican should withdraw from its various business arrangements with Calvi and Banco Ambrosiano immediately. He paid a discreet visit to the Vatican Foreign Minister Cardinal Casaroli and revealed details of the damning Bank of Italy report of 1978. Though unaware of the Vatican Bank’s liability with regard to Calvi and Banco Ambrosiano he knew of some of Calvi’s activities, and knew also of his ties to Licio Gelli and Umberto Ortolani.
He urged the Cardinal to break all connections with Banco Ambrosiano immediately ‘before it is too late’. Casaroli delicately reminded the devout Andreatta that they were discussing the ‘Pope’s Bank’ and the Pope had, despite the urgings of Casaroli and others, refused to remove Marcinkus and until that was done nothing could be done to end the Vatican’s relationship with ‘the priests’ bank’ in Milan.
Unknown to either man as they sat quietly talking in the offices of the Secretariat of State, their conversation was academic, for by May 1981 it had become impossible for the Vatican to sever the links. Through an array of Panamanian and Liechtenstein companies it had acquired over sixteen per cent of Banco Ambrosiano. With the rest of the shares of the bank scattered among small shareholders, that gave the Vatican – and ultimately the Pope – a controlling interest.
Even if Marcinkus had been able to disentangle the cords that bound him inextricably to Roberto Calvi, there were other attendant problems. The Vatican Bank’s prime function was to offer a banking service to religious orders and to religious institutes. Officially it was virtually impossible for a layman to open an account at the Bank. As of May 1981 there were over 12,000 current accounts. A minority conformed to the statutes of the Bank; the remaining 9,351 were owned by ‘privileged citizens’, including members of the Gambino, Inzerillo and Spatola Mafia families who used their accounts to launder profits from their illegal narcotics activities, kidnapping and other organised crime pursuits. The ‘privileged citizens’ also included the Mafia family Corleone. Their bagman to the Vatican Bank was the ‘Puppet Master’ himself, Licio Gelli. Francesco Mannoia, the chief heroin-refining expert for the Corleone family, was one of a number of the family who learned of this arrangement from the then Godfather of Sicily, Stefano Bontate. He would later testify to this further link between the Mafia and the Vatican Bank.
This mutually convenient arrangement came to a dramatic halt in 1981 when police officers raided Gelli’s palatial villa in Arezzo and his office at the Gio-Le textile factory. What they found was a Pandora’s box of corruption and scandal. In Gelli’s safe were the names and Masonic codes of 962 members of P2. There were also numerous dossiers and secret government reports. The list of P2 members was a veritable Who’s Who of Italy: fifty generals and admirals, present and past Cabinet members, industrialists, and journalists, including the editor of Italy’s most prestigious newspaper Corriere Della Sera and several of his staff. There were also thirty-six parliamentarians, pop stars, pundits and police officers and members of every single Italian Secret Service. It was a state within a state.
Many have said that Gelli was planning to take over Italy. They are wrong; he had taken over Italy. The only element missing at the Villa Wanda was the Grand Master of the establishment. The arrangements for the police raid had been top secret, which meant that only trusted police officers and Licio Gelli had been told. He had caught a plane to South America.
The scandal not only brought down the Italian government: it also gave considerable momentum to the Milan magistrate’s investigation of Roberto Calvi. Now with a new investigating judge, Gerardo d’Ambrosio, the net yet again began to close around Calvi and this time Gelli was not there to valiantly corrupt all and sundry. By 13 May 1981 those prepared to stand up and publicly defend Calvi had paid their dues. Bettino Craxi, the leader of the Socialist Party, and Flaminio Piccoli, the president of the Christian Democrats, got to their feet in Parliament and made pleasant remarks about Calvi and his bank. It was the least they could do in view of the millions that Calvi had poured into their parties’ bank accounts.
Gelli’s flight to Uruguay deprived at least one section of the Mafia of its number one bagman, but other members of the Cosa Nostra were still able to call on the services of an honourable trustworthy man to ensure that their money arrived safely at its intended destination in their account at the Vatican Bank.
In late April 1981 the Trapani Mafia, based on the west coast of Sicily, had a problem. Francesco Messina Denaro, lawyer and Mafia head of nearby Campobello di Mazara, was a fugitive from justice. At the time of his rapid disappearance he was safe-housing some ten billion lire ($6 million). The money, proceeds from drug trafficking, belonged to the Trapani family. It had to be moved to an undetectable location before the police seeking Denaro stumbled over it. The Trapani clan knew just the place, one that they used frequently. Catching a plane to Rome, three of the Mafia family plus a fourth man who was later referred to disparagingly as ‘only a corrupt man’ were met at Fiumicino airport by three limousines. Vincenzo Calacara, one of the Mafia members accompanying the money, later testified that among the high-ranking prelates waiting to meet the Sicilian Mafia was the man who took charge of the money – Bishop Paul Marcinkus.
The group drove into Rome to the Via Cassia, ‘to the office of the public notary Alfano’. There Bishop Marcinkus, still clutching the six-million-dollar suitcase, and the other priest went into the notary’s office while Calacara and his colleagues returned to the international airport. The IOR might have been the ‘Pope’s Bank’; it was also the Mafia’s.
By the time that the Pope and his guests had begun their lunch, the office of Secretary of State Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, on the second floor of the Apostolic Palace, was deserted. Casaroli was on his way to New York, a welcome break from the problems that currently preoccupied him. In particular he was greatly concerned by one issue that the Pope was studiously ignoring: the indomitable Cardinal Wyszynski was dying. From the beginning of May, his condition had worsened and he could no longer say daily Mass. He had fought this terminal illness as he had fought every battle throughout his life, with faith, extraordinary resolution and great courage, but Wyszynski was a realist and, accepting that his death was not far away, he put the day-to-day running of the affairs of the Church into the hands of Bishop Bronislaw Dabrowski in conjunction with Karol Wojtyla’s successor in Cracow, Cardinal Franciszek Macharski. Who should replace Cardinal Wyszynski? The Primate, with a minimum of papal assistance, had steered Poland again and again away from the precipice. With the Soviets still baying for martial law to be declared, for a clampdown and repression, and most of all for the destruction of Solidarity, exactly what should Karol Wojtyla do to assist Wyszynski’s successor? And exactly who should attempt to follow such a legend?
Another problem requiring urgent attention concerned the continuing overtures that the Vatican were getting from the Reagan administration. Just how deeply should the Holy See be sucked into a relationship with the government of one of the world’s two superpowers? John Paul II’s view of the world differed very sharply in a number of key areas from the Secretary of State’s. That was inevitable when one compared Casaroli, the hugely experienced Foreign Minister, with Wojtyla, a man who, with the exception of his brief sojourn in Rome during the 1940s, had never lived outside Poland in his entire life. Casaroli had discovered that this Pope actually listened a great deal less than he appeared to. He believed that the Pope’s entry into the political arena in Italy in such a public, confrontational manner over abortion was likely to be highly counter-productive and had attempted to protect the Pope. As for the burgeoning relationship with the United States, Casaroli was already very well acquainted with the new administration’s foreign policies. Some accorded with Vatican positions but others were fraught with danger for the Roman Catholic Church. This relationship was going to be a continuing problem.
Another continuing problem demanding immediate papal attention was the Vatican City State itself. Few other communities housed such an extraordinary array of problems and forms of corruption within such a mere 108 acres. Its civil service had a deeply entrenched resistance to change; the Curia had fought a bitter rearguard action against any modernisation. In theory the Pope was the absolute ruler of the larger worldwide Church as well as his personal domain across the River Tiber. In reality, for over 500 years the Italian grip on the Church’s central government had been resolute. Many within the Curia viewed the Pope as a transient figure whereas they were there for ever and a day. It was a problem that Karol Wojtyla had been determined to address but one that as of May 1981 was still awaiting his attention.
It was understandable that this most energetic of popes had prevaricated about taking on the Curia. There were so many aspects to the problem. Careerism and promotion were all-important with every seminarian determined to become a bishop. To move up the ladder required finding a protector; it also required embracing ‘the five don’ts’: ‘Don’t think. If you think, don’t speak. If you speak, don’t write. If you think, and if you speak, and if you write, don’t sign your name. If you think, and if you speak, and if you write, and if you sign your name, don’t be surprised.’ Moving up the ladder with the help of a protector also frequently required participating in an active homosexual relationship. Estimates of practising homosexuals in the Vatican Village ranged from twenty to over fifty per cent. The village also housed factions including the sects of Opus Dei members, and Freemasons and fascists. The latter could be found particularly among priests, bishops and cardinals from Latin America.
One problem transcended all others in May 1981. The letters, petitions, demands and requests had begun to arrive from the African continent, from the United States, from Latin America, from Canada, from all over Europe, every country on the planet where there were significant numbers of the faithful. Many gave precise and exact details, others made allegations; others sent sworn affidavits, all of them had one underlying theme: sexual abuse.
In each case the alleged perpetrators were priests, bishops, and members of the religious communities. No child, it seemed, was too young, no woman inviolable. Complaints about bishops were eventually directed to the Secretary or the Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, those involving priests to the Congregation of the Clergy, and those involving the various religious orders to the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and for Societies of Apostolic Life.
The Secretary assigned each letter to the appropriate member of staff. The archivist gave the letter a protocol number and noted its date, author, diocese or origin and topic. As befitted the Roman Curia with its centuries of experience, the letters were faultlessly processed into the system. Minimal action was taken. If the bishop of the diocese was unaware of the complaint, he would be made aware. At that stage the bishop would usually apply ‘the secret system’. It had always been successful in the past and the bishop was answerable only to the Pope.
At five in the afternoon on 13 May St Peter’s Square was crowded with pilgrims, sightseers and tourists. There was also one young man who was particularly anxious to get a good view of the Pope. He moved past the ambulance parked ready to deal with the everyday ailments of the crowd. In an open-top jeep the Pope was being driven around the square for the second time. Behind him sat Monsignor Stanislaw Dziwisz. The papamobile slowed as the Pope returned a young girl he had been holding to her mother. As he stood erect, pink-cheeked and exuding good health, an apparently disembodied arm jerked out of the crowd some fifteen feet from the jeep. The hand at the end of this arm was holding not a camera but a Browning 9-mm automatic pistol. Two shots were fired. One hit the Pope in the abdomen after grazing the index finger of the left hand and emerged from his back to fall at the feet of his secretary. The other hit the Pope’s right elbow, searing the skin, then continued on its path, wounding a nun. There was a moment of stunned disbelief. Dziwisz saw the Pope tottering but there was no sign of blood on his white robe.
‘Where?’ he asked.
‘In the stomach,’ the Pope responded.
‘Does it hurt?’
‘It hurts.’
Standing behind the Pope the much smaller Dziwisz supported him so that he did not fall as the jeep made for the parked ambulance, in front of the first-aid post.
The ambulance, part of the Red Cross facilities that were ever present on such occasions, offered only brief refuge for the Pope. It lacked oxygen tanks and equipment, necessitating a second acutely painful transfer to another ambulance. On the journey to the Gemelli hospital, Karol Wojtyla drifted in and out of consciousness. His secretary heard him continuously repeating staccato short prayers. ‘Mary, my mother! Mary, my mother!’
There are two primary sources for what follows: one is Father Dziwisz, the other the surgeon who operated on the Pope, Francesco Crucitti. At the hospital it quickly became apparent to the doctors that the Pope’s life was ebbing away. His blood pressure had fallen dramatically, his pulse was by now weak and faltering. The last sacrament of extreme unction was administered by his surrogate son, Stanislaw Dziwisz. Externally, his injuries seemed superficial. But when Francesco Crucitti made the first incision he was shocked to find blood everywhere.
‘A moment or two later and it would have been too late,’
recalled Crucitti.
‘The Pope’s life was literally haemorrhaging away . . . He had lost between five and six pints of blood. Little more than a quarter of his blood was barely sustaining life. The colon had been perforated; there were five wounds to the small intestine. Twenty-two inches of intestine were removed during the five hour, twenty minute operation.’
As news of the shooting swept around the world, the power of prayer was given a severe examination. The bullet that had entered the stomach passed a few millimetres from the central aorta. If that had been hit, death would have been instantaneous. On exiting the body the bullet had missed the spine. Karol Wojtyla’s lifelong and oft-repeated belief in Providence and prayer was triumphantly vindicated on that May afternoon.
Two hours after the Secretary of State’s plane had landed in New York, Casaroli boarded a return flight to Rome, telling reporters: ‘My duty is to be with the Holy Father.’ While the Pope’s slow and difficult recuperation continued, life in the world outside the Gemelli hospital went on. Four days after the attack, with Karol Wojtyla still on the critical list in the intensive care unit, Italy voted on the abortion issue that the Pope had battled so passionately to overturn. For the pro-life movement in general and for the Pope in particular the vote was a stunning defeat. The pro-life proposal that would have restricted abortion to cases involving danger to the life or physical health of the mother was massively rejected by seventy per cent of voters despite the pulpit injunctions from Italy’s priests and bishops that a ‘yes’ vote was ‘gravely binding on the Christian conscience’, despite John Paul’s declaration in St Peter’s Square to a pro-life rally on the Sunday before the referendum that this was ‘a sacred cause’. It was precisely the public humiliation that the Roman Curia had privately predicted. Vatican correspondent Peter Hebblethwaite wrote: ‘John Paul’s immense popularity, his crowd-pulling appeal, does not mean people are listening to what he says, still less obeying him. They like the singer not the song.’
In Poland, the attempt on the Pope’s life had initially aroused an almost unanimous feeling of revulsion and horror turning to general despondency. The heady early days of the emergence of Solidarity were forgotten as the nation confronted a future where nothing was certain except ever-growing shortages and ever-lengthening queues. Cardinal Wyszynski had been only too right to advise Solidarity, ‘Do not ask for more than they have to give.’ The standard of living was dropping before the very eyes of a nation that had so recently believed it was entering the Promised Land. Solidarity demanded ever more and the Government ducked and dived, both sides adeptly avoiding reality. Meanwhile, the Pope, their Pope, lay helpless in a hospital bed. Then, as so often, there was further tragedy for Poland.
On 28 May Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski died. With his death, an extraordinary era closed. The Primate had succeeded in 1948 at a time of acute crisis both for the church and the country. Against formidable odds he had steered both through many treacherous waters. A measure of his achievements can be gauged by the response in Communist-controlled Poland when state authorities ordered a four-day national mourning period as a tribute to the cardinal. A joint statement signed by Chairman of the Council of State Henryk Jablonski, First Secretary Stanislaw Kania and Prime Minister General Wojciech Jaruzelski paid tribute to the Cardinal. They praised his patriotism and pledged the Government to persevere in its efforts to improve the relationship between Church and State. They acknowledged Wyszynski as a ‘a great statesman, a man of great moral authority recognised by the nation’ with a profound understanding of the ‘historical process and civic responsibility’, who had by his example ‘created a pattern of cooperation between the Church and the socialist states’.
The Primate’s funeral, attended by virtually every high-ranking Communist, was broadcast live by the state radio and television for more than five hours. The requiem Mass with a congregation of over one quarter of a million people was celebrated by the Pope’s personal envoy, Secretary of State, Cardinal Casaroli. In his sermon he described Wyszynski as a ‘man of an indestructible hope nourished by faith in the virtue of his people’, a man who had ‘only two great passions in his life – the Church and Poland’. In a special message, the Pope asked that the period of national mourning be extended to 30 days, as ‘a period of special prayers, peace and reflection’.
This was a direct attempt to prevent further confrontation between Solidarity and the regime before the Communist Party Congress in July. In less than a week after the Pope’s plea Solidarity’s National Coordinating Commission announced a two-hour strike for 11 June. The cause hardly required such urgent action but was a signal that those responsible for a violent attack on Solidarity members at Bydgoszcz in March needed to be punished. The powerful Church influence that Wyszynski had left as a rich inheritance was being squandered by the day by his successors. There was a desperate need to fill the vacuum left by the Primate’s death but the delay in appointing a successor grew ever longer.
In Rome, they were talking within the Vatican of a miraculous intervention that had saved the Pope’s life. For others the reasons for the attack were more clear and present. A number of American neo-conservatives just knew; the attempt had happened in the fourth month of the Reagan presidency. From the very beginning a number of members of the administration attempted to link the attempt to kill the Pope with the Soviet Union. Secretary of State Haig, head of the CIA William Casey, former special advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and a host of lesser lights were convinced that Mehmet Agca, a member of an extreme right-wing fascist group called the Grey Wolves, was in fact working for the Bulgarian secret services, themselves acting on the orders of the KGB. This scenario had a number of benefits for its supporters. The Reagan administration had made global terrorism its number one priority; if the KGB link could be made to stand up, it would make it that much easier to achieve the President’s aim of a huge military build-up of resources in the USA and the placement of nuclear missiles in Western Europe. As a potential successor to the ailing Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, head of the KGB, was an ideal target. To make him a moral leper before he had his feet under the table of the First Secretary’s desk would be even better than killing him.
These accusations first appeared in print in September 1982, when Andropov had just emerged as a strong contender for the Soviet leadership, in a full-length Reader’s Digest article by the egregious Claire Sterling, the favourite bedtime author of CIA chief William Casey and Secretary of State Alexander Haig. Although the Agency had not turned up a single piece of evidence that linked the Soviets with the Agca attack, William Casey wanted to believe Sterling’s account and continually pressed his analysts to find the firm evidence; they never did. The Sterling article was followed by a cottage industry of books, TV specials, and newspaper articles who happily turned a blind eye to some very powerful evidence. In the event, they either ignored that evidence or rejected it.
If Agca had indeed been acting on behalf of the Bulgarians and the KGB, he was the most incompetent assassin ever employed by any intelligence agency. His pre-planning did not even cover the basics. He came to Rome in January to carry out a reconnaissance, staying at the Hotel Sia on Via Cicerone, a ten-minute walk from the Vatican. He attended one of the Papal audiences in the Nervi Hall and his plan for the May attack was based on the assumption that this would be where he would shoot the Pope; no one told Agca that from spring onwards the Curia transferred the audiences into St Peter’s Square to accommodate the large crowds.
Arriving at St Peter’s at 4.45 p.m. on 13 May, Agca was nonplussed. An open-air audience? He would have to improvise. He wandered the square, stopping at the obelisk that marked the centre of the piazza. He asked a Benedictine monk, Father Martino Siciliani, where the Pope would appear from and was directed towards the bronze gate. Shortly after 5 p.m. the Pope emerged, from the other side of the square, from the Gate of Bells. This, to say the least, does not smack of KGB planning. The location was the one place from where subsequent escape was a virtual impossibility. The idea that the Soviets would have sanctioned such a scenario and that Bulgarian agents would have accepted it is absurd.
The alleged Bulgarian connection did not emerge for seventeen months, taking Agca that long to ‘decide’ to reveal their existence. During those seventeen months he was visited by Italian intelligence officers on a number of occasions. Among numerous documents and photographs the intelligence officers showed him were photographs and a wide variety of details on the three Bulgarians that Agca subsequently named and identified as his co-conspirators. These revelations came more than three months after Agca had been tried for the attempted murder. At the outset of his trial, he strongly insisted that he had acted alone. He then announced that he would take no part in the trial and dismissed his lawyer. At the end of three days in the dock he was sentenced to life imprisonment, becoming eligible for parole in thirty years. His only way out earlier was if he could cut a deal with the Italian intelligence services. Two of the Bulgarians named by Agca had returned home; the third – Sergei Antonov, deputy head of Balkan Air – had obligingly waited from May 1981 to November 1982 in Rome until Agca denounced him, at which point the Italians arrested him.
The motive for the assassination according to Sterling et al was to stop the Pope carrying out his threat already contained in a 1980 letter to Brezhnev, to leave the Vatican and return to Poland and stand at the head of his people should the Soviets invade his motherland. No such letter was ever written and no such threat was ever made.
Part of the same theory also claimed that, as the creator of the Solidarity movement, John Paul II represented a continuing threat to Soviet attempts to turn back the clock to pre-August 1980 Poland and the only solution was to have him killed. As the earlier facts amply demonstrate, the Pope had nothing whatsoever to do with the creation of Solidarity and did virtually nothing to assist the movement in its early desperate struggle for survival.
A further problem for the conspiracy theorists is a letter written by Mehmet Agca after his earlier escape from a Turkish prison (where he was serving a life sentence for the murder of the editor of the newspaper Milliyet). He wrote to Milliyet about the Pope’s forthcoming visit to Turkey.
‘Fearing the creation of a new political and military power in the Middle East by Turkey along with its brother Arab states, western imperialism has . . . dispatched to Turkey in the guise of religious leader, the crusade commander John Paul. Unless this untimely and meaningless visit is postponed, I shall certainly shoot the Pope.’
The letter was published in November 1979, nine months before the Gdansk shipyard strike that led to the creation of Solidarity.
Far from being an agent of the Soviets or the Bulgarians, Mehmet Ali Agca despised their political system every bit as much as he hated the American way of life. A note found immediately after his arrest in St Peter’s Square described the shooting as a political act, a protest against ‘the killings of thousands of innocent peoples by dictatorships and Soviet and American imperialism’. Agca was first and foremost a right-wing Turkish nationalist who fully endorsed the fascism of his group, the Grey Wolves. The 9-mm Browning gun with which he shot the Pope was not put in his hand by a Bulgarian or a Soviet agency but by the Grey Wolves’ leader, Omer Bagci.
During the 1985 trial against the three named Bulgarian agents, the prime, indeed the sole, witness against the three Bulgarians was Agca, brought from his prison cell to confirm the string of accusations he had made over the years. The case of a Soviet/Bulgarian conspiracy went downhill from the opening day when the star witness Agca declared that he was Jesus Christ. The trial eventually ended with the prosecution recommending that the Bulgarians be acquitted for lack of evidence. They had no alternative in view of the fact that at no time during the four-year investigation had there been a single witness who could support Agca’s claims. Yet still the neo-conservatives clung grimly to their discredited and fatally flawed thesis.
As of May 1981 Yuri Andropov had a great deal more on his mind than Pope John Paul II. During the preceding month he had arrived at an alarming conclusion, based on KGB analysis of the four-month-old Reagan administration. In May 1981 in a secret speech to a major KGB conference in Moscow, Andropov electrified a packed assembly as he declared that
‘the American Administration was actively preparing for nuclear war and that the possibility of a first-strike nuclear attack had been created by the United States. The Soviet Politburo had concluded that the ongoing acquisition of military and strategic data and information concerning such a pre-emptive strike either by the United States or NATO would be the absolute top priority for Soviet intelligence operations.’
His audience listened in astonishment as Andropov revealed that for the first time the KGB and the GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence) – after years of mutual suspicion and hostility and jealously guarded independence – would be collaborating in a joint intelligence operation code name ‘RYAN’ – raketo-yadernoe napadenie – nuclear missile attack. As double agent Oleg Gordievsky has revealed, although the head of the KGB had reacted with alarm to a variety of Reagan’s policies, the initiative for RYAN came from the highest military command, namely Defence Minister Marshal Ustinov. Reagan’s grandiose Star Wars plan served to confirm Russian fears.
Against this background the idea that the KGB or any member of the Soviet Politburo would sanction the assassination of the Pope is nonsensical.
The attempt on John Paul II may have had a minor tenuous motive concerning ‘a greater Turkey’ but Agca’s predominant aspiration was publicity, not just for the Grey Wolves but far more importantly for himself. Agca achieved his goal. While wallowing in the worldwide media attention his imagination was boundless.
‘I am Jesus Christ. The Vatican knows this to be a fact,’ he claimed.
‘The order to kill the Pope came from the Soviet embassy in Sofia. The first secretary of the Soviet embassy paid three million marks . . . I was responsible for the bombing of the US-financed radio stations in Munich in 1980.’
It is self-evident, however, that the Pope was extremely fortunate to survive; that his survival was due to divine intercession whether by the hand of God or Mary is quite another matter. The Pope never entertained any doubts as to the cause of his survival. As he observed to the French writer André Frossard, ‘One hand fired and another guided the bullet.’ He was convinced that he knew whose hand saved him. The attack on 13 May had occurred on the Feast Day of Our Lady of Fatima, the anniversary of the occasion in 1917 in Fatima, Portugal, when the Mother of Jesus Christ appeared to three young children and made three secret prophecies. In May 1994, on the same Feast Day, the Pope said of his survival, ‘It was a mother’s hand that guided the bullet’s path and in his throes the Pope halted at the threshold of death.’ The bullet that had so nearly killed the Pope as it passed through his body was given to the Bishop of Leiria-Fatima who had it placed in the crown of the statue of Mary that dominates the Portuguese shrine.
Even before the death of Pope John Paul II on 1 April 2005, there were calls for him to be given the title of ‘John Paul the Great’, an honour that has previously only been bestowed posthumously. After his death, the collective hysteria and hagiography was boundless. ‘Pope of Popes’ . . . ‘one of the greatest Popes in the Church’s 2,000-year history’ . . . ‘the greatest Pope ever’ . . . ‘the greatest spiritual leader of the twentieth century’ . . . ‘without him there would have been no end of Communism’ . . . ‘the Pope who changed the world’ . . . ‘This was a man who overthrew empires’ . . . ‘The most significant Pontiff since St Peter’ . . . ‘John Paul’s frame of reference was the same as the American Declaration of Independence.’
Even before his funeral, there was a clamour that he should be instantly made a saint and his former secretary obliged with details of the miraculous cure of a man terminally ill with a brain tumour. During this miraculous second life that began on 13 May 1981, what did Pope John Paul II achieve?
Soon after the actual shooting, it became evident that others shared the Pope’s belief in Divine Intervention. The deputy editor of the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, Father Virgilio Levi, assured his readers that Pope John Paul II was saved from death because he was ‘protected by Our Lady of Fatima. This is not a product of pious imagination’. Cardinal Ugo Poletti, speaking at a meeting in St Peter’s Square, talked of ‘the insane act, which was directed against the God whom the Pope represents, and the humanity which he loves as a father’. Monsignor Stanislaw Dziwisz, the Pope’s secretary, agreed that the Pope’s survival was ‘really miraculous’ pointing out:
‘The Holy Father saw all this [his survival] as a sign from heaven, and we – doctors included – regarded it as a miracle. Everything seemed to be guided by an invisible hand. No one spoke of a miracle, but everyone thought of one. For example, the injured finger recovered of its own accord. During the operation no one bothered about it. They thought of amputating it. An ordinary splint and the medicines intended for the patient’s general health were sufficient to cure it. Yet the second joint had been broken. Now it’s perfectly all right again.’
If it were so, then Pope John Paul II had been granted a second life by God. An existence that should have ended five days short of his sixty-first birthday had been miraculously extended. Such a gift if not unique is very rare; if John Paul II was correct, that gift had been given not to an unknown, impotent nonentity but to a head of state, the moral leader of a fifth of the planet, a moral leader with unfinished work. How then did the man, seen by the Roman Catholic faithful as God’s representative on earth, use that second life? His numerous overseas trips – over one hundred by June 2003 – are well documented; his encyclicals, his books, his post-synodal exhortations, the Apostolic Constitutions, the Apostolic letters, and the additional letters, messages, sermons and injunctions, if not read and studied by the vast majority of Roman Catholics, have been exceedingly well publicised.
None of this mountainous quantity of material reveals how the Pope confronted and dealt with the many problems that faced him on the eve of his ‘second birth’. What did he do about the financial corruption within the Vatican? The many unresolved issues in his homeland? What was his subsequent involvement with Solidarity? What action did he take about the institutionalised anti-Semitism within the Catholic Church? What of the increasing political role that he had embraced? The Church’s relationship with the United States? What steps did he take to correct the many myths and fantasies that from the very beginning of his Papacy were peddled firstly by the Vatican, then subsequently by countless reporters and writers as irrefutable facts? Exactly what was his role in the collapse of the Soviet Union and European Communism? Above all else there was a truly desperate need for papal action against the global sexual abuses by priests, bishops and cardinals on children, on young teenagers, on nuns and other religious.