To non-Catholics, the procedure for choosing a new bishop of Rome has always been something of a curiosity. By the late twentieth century, when many Westerners increasingly seemed to be dismissing religion as mere superstition, papal elections seemed to hark back to an outmoded world. The cardinals who participated in the conclave resided temporarily in the Sistine Chapel, made their deliberations in absolute secrecy, and revealed the outcome with a puff of smoke. While the process entailed plenty of drama, the person chosen at the end was usually more of an anticlimax. Popes were always male, and usually elderly and Italian as well.
And then, in the fall of 1978, John Paul I died of an apparent heart attack after a mere thirty-three days as pontiff. The conclave that formed to choose his successor was almost identical to the one that had picked him. The shock of his sudden death made the College of Cardinals reassess the inscrutable will of the Almighty. Perhaps, some of them wondered, this was a sign. Perhaps they were being urged to make a dramatic break with the past, to take a leap of faith. The most likely candidate, another in a long line of well-established Italians, suddenly encountered reservations. The other favored candidate was unable to muster enough votes for a challenge. The members of the conclave found themselves considering an improbable way out of the impasse.
On October 16, 1978, a puff of white smoke emerged from the Sistine Chapel chimney. When Pericle Cardinal Felici stepped out onto the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica to announce the choice of a new pontiff, the crowds grew confused. Carolum? Who was Carol? Felici continued: “Cardinalem Woi-ty-wa.” A young American newscaster stumbled over the peculiar name: Wojtyła. Who was that? A foreigner, someone said. “E il Polacco,” someone said. “It’s the Pole!”1 Then, at 7:42 p.m., the new pope emerged into view, charming them with his accented Italian as he commiserated with them over the loss of his predecessor. It was in his honor that the Polish pope, the first non-Italian to assume the post in 456 years, chose the same regnal name as his predecessor.
Age fifty-eight at the moment of his election, John Paul II was the youngest pope in well over a century. As a correspondent from Time put it, the College of Cardinals had “done not merely the unexpected but the nearly unthinkable.” They had chosen a pontiff from behind the Iron Curtain.
Many Poles did not believe the first rumors. Finally, a special announcement on television brought confirmation: some thought they detected a note of pride in the newsreader’s voice—distinctly unlike the bland tones with which he announced the usual record harvests or steel production figures. In Kraków, where Karol Józef Wojtyła had spent most of his life as a priest, the news spread fast. The British journalist Mary Craig, who was there, records how joyous crowds filled the streets to celebrate the news:
No one went to bed that night. Young and old stayed in the Rynek Glowny, the historic market place which many say is the most beautiful in Europe, with its enchanting medieval Cloth Hall (the Sukiennice), and the splendid Gothic and Renaissance churches which surround it. “The drawing-room,” they call it in Cracow, and in the daytime it is ablaze with flower stalls and a-flutter with pigeons, while the townsfolk gather in groups under the arches of the Sukiennice. This evening the square was floodlit, and all night long the crowd swayed and seethed, making emotional impromptu speeches, singing religious and national songs (often one and the same), reverting again and again to what often seems like an alternative national anthem—”Sto lat, sto lat, niech zyje zyje nam”—the Polish equivalent of “For he’s a jolly good fellow.”2
The new pontiff’s election was cause for joy in those quarters that still saw an intimate connection between Catholicism and the long struggle for national sovereignty. For precisely the same reasons, Polish Communist Party officials were quick to comprehend the magnitude of the challenge that the new situation in the Vatican presented to them. Party chief Edward Gierek couldn’t help himself when he heard the news, exclaiming, “Oh, my God!” One of his aides, hearing about the spontaneous celebrations in Kraków, stated that “he would prefer to deal with a different nation.”3
If anything, the leaders of the Soviet Union—a country whose official ideology was grounded on strict allegiance to atheistic “historical materialism”—reacted to the news with even greater anxiety. As good students of history, they knew how religion had served in the past as a force for the mobilization of Polish national feeling, and they understood that a revival of such sentiments could easily direct itself against the Kremlin. The KGB station chief in Warsaw quickly dispatched a character study of the new pontiff to his masters in Moscow. The contents of the memo had been supplied by the SB, the KGB’s Polish sister service:
Wojtyła holds extreme anti-communist views. Without openly opposing the Socialist system, he has criticized the way in which the state agencies of the Polish People’s Republic have functioned, making the following accusations: that the basic human rights of Polish citizens are restricted; that there is an unacceptable exploitation of the workers, whom “the Catholic Church must protect against the workers’ government”; that the activities of the Catholic Church are restricted and Catholics treated as second-class citizens; that an extensive campaign is being conducted to convert society to atheism and impose an alien ideology on the people; that the Catholic Church is denied its proper cultural role, thereby depriving Polish culture of its national treasures.4
Yuri Andropov, the head of the KGB, immediately dispatched a cable to his rezident in Warsaw that berated the man for allowing this debacle to happen. To his credit, the KGB officer wrote back to his boss that Andropov might be better advised to direct his ire to the station chief in Rome.
Ultimately, however, Andropov and his Polish comrades were unsure about precisely how John Paul II would choose to approach relations with his home country’s rulers and the rest of the Communist world.
His past offered some useful clues. Few other world leaders could claim the same degree of familiarity with the excesses of twentieth-century totalitarianism—in both its National Socialist and Soviet flavors—as Karol Wojtyła’. He had studied for the priesthood in an underground seminary during the Nazi occupation, then came of age as a priest during the most brutal period of postwar Stalinism. From the very beginning, his religious vocation was bound up with the challenge of defending spiritual values against the overweening state.
Wojtyła was born in the small town of Wadowice in 1920. His father, who had risen to the rank of captain in the Austro-Hungarian Army, was a fervent Catholic. Karol, the youngest of his two sons, inherited his piety—which offered vital consolation during a tragic family history. The Wojtyłas had much experience with death in the family. Karol’s mother, Emilia, died in childbirth when he was nine. Her daughter, who would have been her third child, was stillborn. Karol’s older brother, Edward, died two years later from scarlet fever, which he had caught from his patients while he was working in a hospital during an epidemic of the disease. So Karol spent his formative years living alone with his father, who instilled in his son a deep attachment to the teachings of the church.
From an early age Karol showed both an avocation for sports as well as a passion for poetry and the theater. In 1938 he and his father moved from Wadowice to Kraków so that Karol could enter Jagiellonian University, an institution that dates back to the fourteenth century. He studied languages and literature.
Karol’s second year at university was preempted by the start of World War II and the German invasion. The university, like all others in Poland, was shut down. To avoid being deported to Germany, Wojtyła took up a series of manual jobs, working in a stone quarry and a chemical factory. His work immersed him in the life of the Polish working class and also gave him many opportunities to witness firsthand the brutalities of German occupation. In 1941 his father died, leaving Karol orphaned and alone. “I was not at my mother’s death, I was not at my brother’s death, I was not at my father’s death,” he later told a biographer. “At twenty, I had already lost all the people I loved.”5 His father had already instilled in him a strong personal faith, and now the loss of his loved ones, experienced against the background of war and general deprivation, drove Wojtyła into an even deeper exploration of his relationship with Christ, which helped him to make sense of the reality of human suffering. His belief acquired an additional dimension from Jan Tyranowski, a lay mystic who helped show the way toward a more immediate experience of the divine.
Even before his father’s death, the young Wojtyła’s deeply felt faith had led him to wonder about the possibility of pursuing a vocation within the church. It was a question that assumed greater intensity against the backdrop of the German occupation. The Nazis, who were determined to eradicate all the sources of Polish national selfhood, soon began a campaign to destroy the Polish church. They dispatched priests to concentration camps or had them summarily shot for activities deemed hostile to the occupation. So Wojtyła joined an underground seminary run by Adam Stefan Cardinal Sapieha, a formative influence on the future pope and an extraordinary figure in the long history of Polish Catholicism. As the head of the church in German-occupied Poland, Sapieha gained fame for his uncompromising stance. When Hans Frank, the head of the Nazi occupation government, invited himself to dinner, the archbishop of Kraków served him black bread (partly made from acorns), jam made from beets, and ersatz coffee, served on the elegant silver service of the cardinal. Sapieha explained to his guest that this was all the food that he could offer according to the rations set by the Nazis.6
Wojtyła continued his studies through the hazards of wartime. He would later be credited with helping to protect many Polish Jews from the Nazis. In February 1944, a German truck ran him over—but officers in the truck jumped out and brought him to the hospital. In the wake of the second Warsaw Uprising in 1944, he evaded a Gestapo search by hiding behind a door when they came to the house where he was living. He spent the rest of the war in hiding in the archbishop’s palace. After the Germans abandoned the city in January 1945, he helped save a teenage Jewish girl named Edith Zierer who had escaped from a nearby concentration camp.
In 1946 he was finally ordained as a priest and soon earned popularity for the openness of his pastoral approach. He was deeply involved in the lives of his parishioners. He did not believe in restricting his faith to the confines of church, often accompanying members of his congregation on camping trips or ski outings. In public they developed the habit of referring to him as wujek, “uncle,” to avoid the unwanted attention that the word father might have earned from the authorities. He was not your usual priest. In a sharp departure from the stuffy practice of the times, he even counseled his parishioners on the joys of sex—within the bounds of marriage, needless to say. (He later put his thoughts on the subject into a book, Love and Responsibility, published in 1960.)
When the war was over, the new Communist rulers of Poland were not more favorably disposed toward the church than the Nazis had been. The Soviet forces who had occupied half of Poland in September 1939, after the Molotov- Ribbentrop Pact, had arrested and shot many priests. Now the Polish government installed by Moscow did whatever it could to beat back the power of the church. The authorities accused priests of everything from sedition to violations of tax law, mocked them in the media, or threw them in jail. But somehow Wojtyła managed to navigate these treacherous waters. He succeeded not only in anchoring himself firmly in the hearts of his congregation but also in maintaining a demanding schedule of academic work, studying for his doctorate in philosophy at the Catholic University of Lublin, the only nonstate university allowed by the authorities in the People’s Republic of Poland. In 1958, when he became the youngest bishop in the country at age thirty-eight, the Polish secret police opened up its first permanent file on him.7
In the first decades after World War II, the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church faced harsh choices as they surveyed the geography of the faith. Millions of believers now lived behind the Iron Curtain, under the rule of Communist governments that had little tolerance for religion, however strongly they insisted the opposite. Officially, East-bloc regimes ascribed to full religious freedom; in reality, they viewed organized religion with intense suspicion, since its existence implied institutional alternatives to the official atheism that undergirded Marxist-Leninist doctrine.
Relations between the Vatican and the Soviet government had never been good. In the first phase of the Cold War, relations between Moscow and the Holy See were mutually hostile. The Yalta agreement, which granted the USSR control of Eastern Europe, had dramatically expanded the number of Catholics under Communist control, and in the 1940s and ’50s, Stalin’s minions had done their best to crush the church by persecuting priests and harassing churchgoers.
But by the early 1960s, both sides saw reason for compromise. The Kremlin wanted to advertise a spirit of tolerance, and the church was worried that continued confrontation could lead to the complete destruction of the Catholic communities who lived within the Soviet empire. So in the early 1960s Agostino Cardinal Casaroli, as cardinal secretary of state of the Holy See, signed agreements on mutual diplomatic recognition with Hungary and Yugoslavia—the first step in the Vatican’s version of what would later come to be known as Ostpolitik. He was striving to do the same with Poland. His reasoning was understandable enough: the Soviet Union was not going anywhere, and a deal would give the Vatican at least some sort of diplomatic leverage for protecting Catholic rights.
The leaders of the Polish church tended to be skeptical about the extent to which the Soviets could be expected to honor the terms of any such agreement. They believed, based on their own experience of the Communist system, that the best way to defend the community of believers was by insisting on their rights to worship as they pleased. There could be no compromise on this essential point. Wojtyła agreed. But his philosophical investigations increasingly led him to a conclusion that the church had not always defended human rights as aggressively as it should have: namely, that the teachings of Christ demanded that the church defend the rights of all human beings, not just those who happened to be Catholic. The integrity of the individual stood at the core of Christian ethics. To be sure, there could be no real freedom without freedom for the church. But neither was it possible to imagine a free church in an unfree society. Of course, one might have argued that such questions were moot in a country as tightly controlled as the People’s Republic of Poland. Wojtyła, however, was not willing to concede the point.
As a rule, the management of world affairs tends to demand certain mental skills and crowd out others. Intense ambition, shrewdness, and focused practicality tend to outweigh gifts of contemplation, poetic language, or metaphysical abstraction. A capacious memory—a characteristic common to Thatcher and Deng—goes a long way. Most presidents and prime ministers are monoglot; in rare cases they might know a second language, but usually little more than that. And you will rarely see them consuming philosophy or exploring noncanonical art.
John Paul II was such a dramatic exception to this rule precisely because he did not set out to be a politician. He became a priest because he wanted to serve God. He never lost sight of that fundamental calling until the end of his days; it was the onlookers, especially non-Catholics, who tended to look at him as a statesman. Even as he hobnobbed with the presidents and the general secretaries, it was never quite possible to deny his otherness.
It was partly his range of experience that made him unique. There were very few twentieth-century heads of state who had been on the receiving end of both Nazism and Stalinism. But it was also a peculiar combination of intellect and accessibility that made Wojtyła extraordinary. This was a pope who bantered with his flock in a dozen languages. As a young man he acted in experimental theater productions of a type that probably would have left Margaret Thatcher sniffing in scorn, and he continued to write poetry well into his old age. At the same time—thanks to his long immersion in the daily affairs of the parishioners to whom he devoted so many years—he never lost his touch with the joys of ordinary life and the reality of everyday suffering.
He was also a professional academic philosopher. Wojtyła actually earned two doctorates—the first, in theology, in 1948 (after two years of study in Rome) and the second, in philosophy, in 1954.8 He wrote his second doctoral dissertation on the German thinker Max Scheler, who extended the teachings of the great pioneer of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, into a discourse that placed love at the center of moral action. Phenomenology, which seeks to root insights about the world in the fact of human experience, can be rather forbidding stuff. But in Scheler’s emphasis on the authenticity and primacy of individual experience, Wojtyła found a powerful tool to combat what he saw as the crisis of twentieth-century ethics, which had undercut the centrality of moral choice. His work led him to the conclusion that the philosophy of the Enlightenment had, at its worst, spawned materialist ideologies that ran roughshod over individual freedom and responsibility, and in so doing opened the way to totalitarianism.
Wojtyła’s interest in personalism emerged, of course, directly from his own confrontation with the radically depersonalizing (and secularizing) ideologies of Nazism and Stalinism. His radical insistence on the rights and responsibilities of the individual thus represented an important step toward a philosophical stance that directly challenged the central claims of these systems. For the Marxist-Leninists who ruled Poland at the time he was writing, Wojtyła’s writings could only be regarded as profoundly counterrevolutionary. Little did they suspect that his philosophical explorations were indeed preparing the ground for a fundamental challenge to their ideological hegemony.
Scheler had found a way to make a critique that avoided the solipsism and pure subjectivity of other defenders of individuality, and Wojtyła would develop a similar line of thought in his work Person and Act, which he intended to be the authoritative statement of his own inquiry but never quite managed to complete (though a version of it was finally published, in Polish, in 1969). In the book, which combines traditional Thomist ethics with a stark new phenomenological sensibility, Wojtyła argues that human subjectivity is defined precisely through its dialogue with society. There is an irreducible specificity and uniqueness to each individual—yet no human being can exist in isolation. Individuality is defined by social interaction. By the same token, the exploitation or violation of the dignity of an individual’s rights represents a repudiation of the most fundamental principle that binds society together. There should be no contradiction between the interests of the collective and the individuals who make it up. A society cannot be free if some of its members are not.
The secret police could not fail to notice such heresy. While the SB continued to keep Wojtyła under surveillance, there was little that they could do to silence him as long as he enjoyed the protection of the church establishment. And, indeed, his brilliance did not go unnoticed in Rome, either.
In 1960, shortly after his appointment as archbishop of Kraków, Wojtyła received a letter from the commission that was organizing the recently summoned Second Vatican Council called by the new pope, John XXIII. The letter asked for his recommendations about the agenda. He responded with an impassioned plea for a council that would directly confront the ethical emergency of twentieth-century society. The church, he wrote, should formulate a renewed emphasis on Christian humanism that placed the inviolability of the individual human being at its center. It was an emphasis that emerged from a philosophical and theological trend known as “personalism,” which aspired to counter the mechanistic schemes of modern thought that subordinated the fates and choices of individuals to the dictates of history, economics, national identity, or realpolitik. His experience as a priest in a society that denied freedom of confession had made Wojtyła particularly sensitive to the need for a clear statement of the centrality of human rights.
Vatican II proved a watershed in the life of the newly anointed bishop, Wojtyła. Though often portrayed as a doctrinal conservative, John Paul II is perhaps better seen as a somewhat idiosyncratic traditionalist with a decidedly vernacular sensibility. He strongly believed that the church needed to renew and revive the message of the Gospel in order to resist the dehumanizing tendencies of modern culture—a threat he saw as much in the rampant modernizing capitalism of the West as in the atheistic materialism of the East. Bishop Wojtyła became a member of the committee that composed Gaudium et Spes (Joy and Hope),9 one of the key documents of the Second Vatican Council promulgated in 1965, and his own thinking finds intriguing reflection in it: “This council lays stress on reverence for man. . . . [T]here is a growing awareness of the exalted dignity proper to the human person, since he stands above all things, and his rights and duties are universal and inviolable.” One sentence in the document strikingly expresses the paradox that had already preoccupied Wojtyła in his earlier writings: “Man . . . cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.”
Wojtyła’s beliefs in the primacy of individual freedom governed his behavior toward the state as his responsibilities grew. In 1964 Pope Paul VI appointed him archbishop of Kraków, the position that had been held before him by the charismatic Sapieha. Kraków is both the cultural and the spiritual center of Poland, the home of many of the country’s greatest artists, thinkers, and priests, and Wojtyła engaged in a rich and multilayered dialogue with the city and its residents for forty years of his life. He was well acquainted with its workers, its intellectuals, its university students. In 1967 he was created cardinal. His new status necessarily brought him into direct confrontation with a state that brooked no rivals to its spiritual hegemony. It was a job that required less in the way of theological subtlety than practical political guile. In his relations with the Communist Party, Wojtyła focused from the very beginning on a strategy of holding and broadening the space available to the church in the public sphere. Every year, for example, he dueled with the party hierarchy over the city’s traditional Corpus Christi procession. Over the years the functionaries had worked to restrict the procession, which followed the Stations of the Cross around the city’s most prominent religious landmarks, to a barely visible minimum. Wojtyła fought back, marshaling the support of his parishioners in a variety of maneuvers to win back as much symbolic terrain as possible.10
The most famous duel with the powers that be, however, focused on the suburb of Nowa Huta, a Communist “model town” built around the Lenin Steelworks. From start to finish the steel town was conceived as a showcase of socialist values—right down to the thousands of indistinguishable apartments in rows of modular high-rise apartment buildings. The party’s planners, however, did not trouble to include a church. Why would the enlightened working class need a place of worship? The workers, and the diocese of Kraków, came up with their own solution to the oversight: they would build it themselves. The workers contributed their own labor, donating their spare time to the construction. Wojtyła leveraged his prestige and political astuteness. When the bureaucracy proved reluctant to issue the necessary permits, the archbishop took to conducting Christmas midnight mass under an open sky at the spot where the Church of the Ark was to be built, attracting thousands of worshipers who gave the lie to the official party propaganda that the “masses” had turned their backs on the church. Wojtyła broke ground at the construction site of the church in 1967. Ten years later he was finally able to celebrate mass in the finished building.
Wojtyła also lent his support to a beleaguered Catholic youth organization called Light and Life, organized by Father Franciszek Blachnicki. Blachnicki’s group had evolved out of another of his initiatives called Oasis, which organized Catholic summer camps for teens as an alternative to the system of activities promoted by the party youth organizations. Blachnicki believed that the most effective way to counter Communist spiritual hegemony was precisely by carving out preserves where people could develop their own alternative values. He called it “living in the truth.” “If enough Poles ‘plucked up the courage to live by the truth and unmask lies,’ Blachnicki insisted, ‘we would already be a free society.’”11 Blachnicki’s camps were subject to a range of official harassment—permits denied, fines issued against landowners who hosted the events—but the now archbishop Wojtyła persisted in lending whatever support he could.
For Wojtyła, his dealings with the world of politics were an inescapable yet ultimately incidental function of his job as a priest. In a society where the official ideology claims supremacy over every aspect of citizens’ lives, however, any attempt to promote an alternate view of existence—whether aesthetic, moral, or spiritual—inevitably acquires a political dimension. And though Wojtyła was prepared to acknowledge the practical political reality of Communist rule, he was consistently unwilling to concede its claimed monopoly on truth—a point he made clear at every step. This was not lost on the Communist Party. In 1973, we now know, the secret police, the SB, considered prosecuting Wojtyła for three of his sermons—based on a paragraph of the criminal code that specified jail terms of one to ten years for seditious statements.12 In 1976 and 1977, Wojtyła’s contacts with Polish dissidents—especially Bohdan Cywiński, one of the founders of KOR—were also carefully documented by the SB’s informers.
This, then, was the man Poles gathered to celebrate in November 1978. British journalist Mary Craig, who had already experienced how Krakówites reacted to his election, now watched as they experienced his inauguration. The receptionists at the city’s main hotel for foreigners, asked whether they could point the way to a television, demurred. Then a passing waiter whispered to Craig that there was a set in the common area on the fourth floor, if she and her companion didn’t mind walking up. In this unlikely location they found a crowd of spellbound Poles watching a black-and-white television, barely audible, encased in a glass box. Someone went to complain about the sound and returned with a hotel official carrying a huge bunch of keys. Finally, the official managed to open the box and turn up the volume.
The ceremony in Rome had already started. The onlookers in Kraków watched as the cardinals lined up to pay homage to the new pontiff. One of the first was the venerable Stefan Cardinal Wyszyński, who just a few days before had been Wojtyła’s boss:
The old man knelt to make his obeisance, ready to kiss not only the hand of the Pontiff but also his feet. Wojtyła acted swiftly to forestall him. Gently pulling the old Cardinal to his feet, he embraced him three times, in the Polish fashion, and kissed his hand. In the Dom Turysty there was a sudden explosion of coughing and shuffling and chairs were shifted this way and that, in a bid to escape the intolerable emotion aroused by the scene. The men standing near me looked at the ceiling, then inserted a finger beneath their spectacles to brush away the tears.13
The reaction of the audience attested to the intense feelings that this new pope could unleash. They were not inherently political emotions, but they rarely followed the paths of acceptable sentiment charted out by the party. A commentator from Polish State TV, carried away by the range of nationalities in St. Peter’s Square, suddenly remarked: “We may belong to different nations yet we are all children of the same God.” As Craig aptly observed, it was “an unremarkable comment elsewhere perhaps, but on the State Television service of a People’s Republic . . .”4
A few weeks later the pope made his first official outside visit outside of the Vatican, to the city of Assisi. Someone in the crowd cried out, “Don’t forget the Church of Silence!” The remark was a reference to the Catholic Church in Eastern Europe. John Paul II replied, “It’s not a Church of Silence anymore because it speaks with my voice.”15
The new pontiff—a vigorous and cosmopolitan man—made it clear from early on that he intended to minister to the world, and Vatican officials barely had time to get used to their new boss’s presence before he set off on his first trip.
On January 26, 1979, the new pope flew to Mexico for his first overseas pilgrimage. For much of the twentieth century, Mexico had been governed by a secular revolutionary movement with a history of violent anticlericalism. In the 1920s, Mexican priests had been actively persecuted, many of them shot. At the time of the pope’s visit, the church still faced a number of official restrictions, and the Mexican government had no diplomatic relations with the Vatican. The Mexican president, José López Portillo, issued the invitation to the pope with the proviso that he would not be welcomed as a head of state.
Yet López Portillo was there to greet him at the airport, having understood that it was politically expedient to do so. Mexicans were thrilled to greet John Paul II. More than a million of them lined the roads to cheer the pontiff during his visit. When he and his aides left the country, they looked down to see the light from countless mirrors held aloft to reflect the sun’s rays at his departing plane. It was a remarkable dress rehearsal for an even bigger trip the pope was planning, to another country where the faith of ordinary people stood at odds with a government’s program of militant secularism.
The term Liberation Theology was invented by the Peruvian priest and theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez Merino in 1971. Merino would be accused of swapping out theological terms with political ones and of reducing a spiritual teaching to a materialist social theory. One of the most famous of the liberation theologians was Ernesto Cardenal, the Nicaraguan priest and poet who in July 1979 became the minister of culture in the new Sandinista government that took power in Managua after toppling dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle.
“We cannot be Christian and materialist,” John Paul had once said. “We cannot be believer and atheist.”16 Now he used his Mexico trip to drive the point home. He seized the occasion of his address to the bishops for an uncompromising restatement of church doctrine. The Gospel, he said, could not be reduced to a set of social or political precepts, however well intentioned; the message of the Catholic Church was one of eternal salvation, and to choose it was to make a choice of cosmic and eternal dimensions. Violent revolution and class warfare could not be reconciled with church teaching—not least because they always ran the risk of violating the rights of one group of people while exalting those of another. The next day the pope celebrated mass with representatives of Mexico’s indigenous peoples, whose long history of suffering served to drive home the point that the struggle for justice was an integral part of the church’s mission. He conceded the point that Catholic institutions had sometimes allied themselves with the forces of dictatorship and oppression and went on to stress that, whenever the church took sides, it should always strive to take the side of justice.
These were not tactical compromises, made for the sake of calming his critics in the Liberation Theology camp. Christian humanism, and the inviolability of the individual, remained at the core of his thinking. In March he addressed these issues in his first encyclical. Entitled Redemptor Hominis (Redeemer of Man), it offered one of the clearest statements of his personalist philosophy. It is a text that displays a profound anxiety about the rising threat posed to individual human rights by various collectivist systems, including totalitarianism, imperialism, and colonialism:
If human rights are violated in time of peace, this is particularly painful and from the point of view of progress it represents an incomprehensible manifestation of activity directed against man, which can in no way be reconciled with any program that describes itself as “humanistic.” . . .
If, in spite of these premises, human rights are being violated in various ways, if in practice we see before us concentration camps, violence, torture, terrorism, and discrimination in many forms, this must then be the consequence of the other premises, undermining and often almost annihilating the effectiveness of the humanistic premises of these modern programs and systems. This necessarily imposes the duty to submit these programs to continual revision from the point of view of the objective and inviolable rights of man.17
Redemptor Hominis is first and foremost a statement of religious doctrine, but it is also a crucial addition to the long and deepening discourse on human rights that has also been one of the twentieth century’s great gifts to mankind. But John Paul II was not content to make his contribution in words alone. He was also planning to take a public stand in defense of the principles he held dear. And what better place to do it than in his own homeland?
John Paul II had begun to think about making a pilgrimage to Poland within days of becoming pope. The coming year of 1979 offered a perfect occasion for a visit. It was the nine hundredth anniversary of the martyrdom of Poland’s greatest saint, Stanisław Szczepanowski. He was the Polish equivalent of Thomas à Becket, a man who stood up to the highest power in the land in the name of his faith. In 1072 Szczepanowski became the bishop of the city of Kraków. What we know of him is blurred by legend, but it is clear that he must have been a man of strong will and stubborn principles. He soon became embroiled in a feud with the king of Poland, a brutal character by the name of Bolesław the Bold. (As is so often the case in history, the nickname “bold” was really a euphemism for “psychopathic.”) Bolesław refused to put up with the churchman’s challenge to his authority, and he demanded the death of Stanisław. But no one would carry out the order, so Bolesław did the deed himself. He is said to have cut the bishop down while he was conducting a mass. Few of the king’s deeply Catholic subjects were willing to countenance the killing, and Bolesław soon lost his hold on power. Stanisław, on the other hand, quickly achieved sainthood as one of Poland’s greatest martyrs.
Though many of the details of Stanisław’s death remain mysterious, one thing we do know for certain is that it happened in 1079. A thousand years might seem like a long time to most of us, but the particulars of the story—the principled stand of a bishop of Kraków laying bare the moral bankruptcy of untrammeled state power—gave it unnerving relevance to Poland’s situation in 1979. The Communists certainly thought so, in any case.
So the announcement that John Paul II intended to return to Poland to celebrate the nine hundredth anniversary of Stanisław’s martyrdom sent a shiver of dread through the ranks of the United Polish Workers’ Party. “The cause of the bishop’s death was a conflict with the king,” one internal party memorandum noted in late 1978. “We see no sense in invoking the memory of the bishop’s head and the royal sword, because they symbolize the sharpness of church clashes with the government. We are for cooperation and create favorable conditions for this.”18
The Russians did not need to understand this particular historical backstory to see the potential for trouble if the pope were to return home. Leonid Brezhnev phoned Gierek to persuade him to cancel the visit. “How could I not receive a Polish pope,” Gierek answered, “when the majority of my countrymen are Catholics?” Brezhnev countered by recommending, somewhat bizarrely, that the pope declare himself indisposed. Gierek, presumably gritting his teeth, replied that John Paul II was clearly determined to make the trip. “Well, do what you want, so long as you and your party don’t regret it later,” Brezhnev said—and hung up.19
In October 1978, the Polish Episcopate invited John Paul II to visit Poland to commemorate Stanisław’s death. A few days later, a Communist Party spokesman responded that, while such a visit would undoubtedly be welcomed by the pope’s compatriots, the exact timing depended on unspecified “circumstances” that necessitated detailed discussions.20 The party was so nervous about the Saint Stanisław issue that it censored a reference to him in the Polish version of the pope’s new Christmas address just as it was about to be published.21
Elaborate negotiations ensued. This exhaustive back-and-forth over the details of John Paul’s itinerary might have seemed absurd to outsiders. In fact, though, what these p reparations show is just how anxiously the authorities reacted to the prospect of a visit by the new pontiff. For the government in Warsaw, the homecoming of this one man was a terrifying prospect. The talks continued into the new year.