2. The Battle with Totalitarian Regimes

JOHN PAUL II

Was God at Work in the Fall of Communism? (Excerpt)

 

 

By your question you confirm that in the fall of Communism the action of God has become almost visible in the history of our century. We must be wary of oversimplification. What we refer to as Communism has its own history. It is the history of protest in the face of injustice, as I recalled in the encyclical Laborem Exercens—a protest on the part of the great world of workers, which then became an ideology. But this protest has also become part of the teaching of the Church. We need but recall the encyclical Rerum Novarum, from the end of the last century. We add: this teaching is not limited to protest, but throws a farseeing glance toward the future. In fact, it was Leo XIII who in a certain sense predicted the fall of Communism, a fall which would cost humanity and Europe dearly, since the medicine—he wrote in his encyclical of 1891—could prove more dangerous than the disease itself! The pope said this with all the seriousness and the authority of the Church’s Magisterium.

And what are we to say of the three children from Fatima who suddenly, on the eve of the outbreak of the October Revolution, heard: “Russia will convert” and “In the end, my Heart will triumph…!” They could not have invented those predictions. They did not know enough about history or geography, much less the social movements and ideological developments. And nevertheless it happened just as they had said.

Perhaps this is also why the pope was called from “a faraway country,” perhaps this is why it was necessary for the assassination attempt to be made in St. Peter’s Square precisely on May 13, 1981, the anniversary of the first apparition at Fatima—so that all could become more transparent and comprehensible, so that the voice of God which speaks in human history through the “signs of the times” could be more easily heard and understood.

This, then, is the Father who is always at work, and this is the Son, who is also at work, and this is the invisible Holy Spirit who is Love, and as Love is ceaseless creative, saving, sanctifying, and lifegiving action.

Therefore, it would be simplistic to say that Divine Providence caused the fall of Communism. In a certain sense Communism as a system fell by itself. It fell as a consequence of its own mistakes and abuses. It proved to be a medicine more dangerous than the disease itself. It did not bring about true social reform, yet it did become a powerful threat and challenge to the entire world. But it fell by itself; because of its own inherent weakness.

“My Father is at work until now, so I am at work” (John 5:17). The fall of Communism opens before us a retrospective panorama of modern civilization’s typical way of thinking and acting, especially in Europe, where Communism originated. Modern civilization, despite undisputed successes in many fields, has also made many mistakes and given rise to many abuses with regard to man, exploiting him in various ways. It is a civilization that constantly equips itself with power structures and structures of oppression, both political and cultural (especially through the media), in order to impose similar mistakes and abuses on all humanity.

How else can we explain the increasing gap between the rich North and the ever poorer South! Who is responsible for this! Man is responsible—man, ideologies, and philosophical systems. I would say that responsibility lies with the struggle against God, the systematic elimination of all that is Christian. This struggle has to a large degree dominated thought and life in the West for three centuries. Marxist collectivism is nothing more than a “cheap version” of this plan. Today a similar plan is revealing itself in all its danger and, at the same time, in all its faultiness.

God, on the other hand, is faithful to His Covenant. He has made it with humanity in Jesus Christ. He cannot now withdraw from it, having decided once and for all that the destiny of man is eternal life and the Kingdom of Heaven. Will man surrender to the love of God, will he recognize his tragic mistake? Will the Prince of Darkness surrender, he who is “the father of lies” (John 8:44), who continually accuses the sons of men as once he accused Job (cf Job 1:9ff)? It is unlikely that he will surrender, but his arguments may weaken. Perhaps, little by little, humanity will become more sober, people will open their ears once more in order to hear that word by which God has said everything to humanity.

And there will be nothing humiliating about this. Every person can learn from his own mistakes. So can humanity, allowing God to lead the way along the winding paths of history. God does not cease to be at work. His essential work will always remain the Cross and the Resurrection of Christ. This is the ultimate word of truth and of love. This is also the unending source of God’s action in the sacraments, as well as in other ways that are known to Him alone. His is an action which passes through the heart of man and through the history of humanity.

 

 

CARL BERNSTEIN

John Paul II and the Fall of Communism

 

On Monday, October 16, 1978, ninety-nine cardinals out of one hundred and eight gave the archbishop of Kraków their vote. They had done the unimaginable: They had chosen a pope from a country subject to the Soviet Union, a country with a Marxist and atheist government. He was the first non-Italian pontiff in 450 years, a young pope, at the age of fifty-eight. Outside of Poland and the Sacred College, few knew much about this Slav who had become shepherd to a flock of eight hundred million Catholics.

Amid the silence the voice of the cardinal president could be heard asking: “Do you accept? What name will you take?”

Wojtyla accepted. The tension vanished from his face, which took on a solemn expression. Not only did he say “Yes,” as tradition demanded, with a clear voice, but he added: “With obedience in faith to Christ, my Lord, and with trust in the Mother of Christ and of the Church, in spite of the great difficulties, I accept.”

Now to express his commitment to the legacy of the last three popes and his affinity to Albino Luciani, he took as his name John Paul II.

In Warsaw, an officer flung the door open and, ignoring both protocol and discipline, shouted: “Comrade General, sensational news! Wojtyla’s been elected pope.”

The man at the desk had a pale, almost ghostly white face. Hidden behind dark glasses, his eyes were invisible. The back brace he was snapped into made him sit stiffly. In his olive-green uniform he looked like a mannequin. He thanked the adjutant correctly and acknowledged the message: In two hours members of the Politburo and other state officials would meet in extraordinary session.

Jaruzelski seemed almost overwhelmed with ambiguity: How to handle this news from Rome? Wojtyla as pope meant trouble. Relations between the cardinal of Kraków and the Communist authorities had been strained. Yet the general allowed a wave of patriotism to sweep over him. For the first time in the thousand-year history of Catholic Poland, a son of the motherland was ascending the loftiest throne in the world. It was as if this day—October 16, 1978—had conferred a magnificent prize on the entire nation. Perhaps a bit of the splendor would shine on the government too, undoing the sense of defeat and indignity that scarred the national conscience. Poland had once been a European power, but that had been a long time ago.

The streets of Warsaw were filling up with people on their way to church to pray and light votive candles. Their joy seemed close to rapture—as if Easter, Christmas, and Independence Day had all come at once. Government-controlled Polish radio and television had incongruously broadcast the historic news in the form of a brief bulletin. Since the party hadn’t issued any official response, no one had dared flesh out the report with so much as a thumbnail biographical sketch of the new pope.

Yet across the capital the bells were booming like an autumnal cloudburst, as each church rang out in celebration of the news. Jaruzelski thought the choice of a pope from Kraków was a master stroke. From the great cathedral on the Wawel Hill and his episcopal palace, Wojtyla had systematically and ostentatiously ignored the party hierarchy. With philosophical contempt, he had denied any legitimacy to Marxist-Leninist ideology; and with his considerable influence on the Catholic intelligentsia, he had built up a front of spiritual resistance to the country’s political leadership. Indeed, Wojtyla’s election was dangerous. Jaruzelski was worried that the Polish Church would become a model for all of Eastern Europe, that its influence, hitherto held within the borders of Poland, would now reach Christians in the USSR.

Jaruzelski felt swamped by confusion. He picked up the phone and tried to get some guidance—and commiseration—from the chief Communist overseer of the Catholic Church in Poland, Stanislaw Kania, head of the party’s Administrative Department.

“What is there to build on?” Kania asked tentatively. He conceded, of course, that past relations with the archbishop of Kraków offered little ground for optimism. But Communist rhetoric required that every negation be followed by an affirmation. The Church of Rome, he declared, had learned the value of cooperating with the Communist authorities. “We can expect the Holy See to stick to the path of reconciliation, of Ostpolitik.” But that wasn’t enough to calm the assembled leaders, now beset with visions of a grand conspiracy. Was a Polish pope a threat to the socialist system in Poland? That was the crucial question.

“What if the new pope decides to come to Poland?” one of the ministers asked Kania. The weight of the question settled oppressively over the entire room.

The government, warned the minister of internal affairs, has to focus immediately on the risk of a wave of pilgrimages by the Polish faithful to Rome. “Those trips alone might pose a danger to the stability of Poland.”

In the very first hours of his pontificate, the election of the first pope from a socialist country had raised the specter of destabilization. Suddenly the Vatican had become an ominous, unknown quantity to the Communist world.

The first day of John Paul II’s triumphant return to his homeland on June 2, 1979, had left the Communist authorities in Warsaw and Moscow shaken. More than a million Poles had converged on the airport road, on Victory Square and in the Old City during the first hours of his visit. Students had taken up the crucifix as the symbol of resistance to the regime. Just as disturbing to the Polish authorities were the pope’s words in private to First Secretary Edward Gierek. In the course of their meeting in the Belweder Palace John Paul II had voiced his hopes for the kind of agreement between Church and state that Gierek himself badly wanted. But the pope had laid down a list of conditions designed to convince a Communist power that it would have to make unprecedented concessions if it was to coexist peacefully with the Church.

Gierek had spoken about international detente. The pope replied that “peace and rapprochement among peoples had to be based on the principle of respect for the objective rights of the nation,” among which he included its right to “shape its own culture and civilization.”

Gierek had spoken about Poland’s security obligations and its position in the international community—a clear allusion to the alliances of COMECON (the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance) and the Warsaw Pact, both of which were thoroughly dominated and run by the Soviet Union. John Paul II had responded that “all forms of political, economic, or cultural imperialism contradict the needs of the international order.” The only valid pacts could be those “based on mutual respect and on the recognition of the welfare of every nation.” His boldness took the Communist leader by surprise. Gierek was disposed to reach a generous settlement on the place to be assigned the Church in Polish society for its religious activities. The pope wanted an acknowledgment that the Church “serves men and women in the temporal dimension of their lives,” that is, in the social and political spheres. All this was deeply disturbing to the hierarchy of the Polish Party and—more significant—to the men in the Kremlin.

The next day, Pentecost, June 3, John Paul II arrived in the city of Gniezno like a modern incarnation of the Spirit, by helicopter. The million people who had turned out in Warsaw proved not an exception, just a prelude. Enormous throngs awaited him in the field where his helicopter touched down. “We want God,” they chanted, taking up the same cry as the crowds in Warsaw the previous day.

By Sunday evening, June 3, John Paul II had already succeeded, through the prophetic vehemence of his speeches, in challenging the ideology of the regime, the role of the state, the nature of Poland’s alliance with the Soviet Union, and the geopolitical arrangements in Europe resulting from the Second World War. General Jaruzelski, who was following the pope’s moves from a command center in the Ministry of Defense, could see that his comrades in the Polish Politburo were extremely disturbed, even fearful—both of the responses the pope was eliciting and of reaction from the Kremlin. The party hierarchy didn’t like the crowds’ attitudes, which struck them as “beyond normal behavior,” almost cult-like. Worse, many passages in the pope’s speeches went dangerously beyond the expectable tame religious formulas. Gierek, the party secretary, and Premier Piotr Jaroszewicz were already expressing their concerns about “destabilization.”

To make matters worse, every gesture, every allusion of the pope was immediately rebroadcast throughout the world by the more than a thousand journalists who had come to Poland to follow the story. In turn, echoes of the trip from the outside world were having negative reverberations in the USSR, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany, whose leaders eyed Warsaw’s every move with suspicion and skepticism.

From the third day on, his trip began to look more and more like a triumphant pilgrimage by the pontiff among his people—and an enthusiastic march of millions of Poles toward the pope, their compatriot. All the regime’s precautions for limiting the impact of his visit proved futile. On the contrary, every restriction was turned into formidable counterpropaganda against the regime. The roadblocks set up by the police eighteen miles from Czestochowa to screen the pilgrims served only to remind Poles of the vexations inflicted on them by the totalitarian system. The restrictions imposed on television programs—people in Warsaw or Poulah were barred from seeing what anyone in Czestochowa could see—only increased the desire for the free flow of information. The tricks in TV camera coverage, which during religious celebrations tended to show only the pope and persons next to him at the altar, instead of the vast crowds, only added to the drama of his words and the shouted responses from the unseen masses.

An enormous billboard, hung on the walls by the Catholic students of Lublin, summed up the general feeling: “Holy Father, we want to be with you, we want to live a better life with you, we want to pray with you.” When the pope met the miners from Silesia, the underground monthly Glos commented: “The millions of working people gathered to meet the pope would seem to prove that the official thesis of the natural atheism of the working class and its progressive de-Christianization is utterly false.” The dissident journal added prophetically: “At present the authorities are afraid that the pope, who used to be a worker himself, and whose sensitivity to exploitation is well known, might act as a spokesman for the Polish working class.” In the face of the intense expectations focused on his person, John Paul II was careful to act with great calm and balance, avoiding confrontational tones. Speaking freely with a group of a thousand university students from Lublin in a closed-door meeting, the pope said: “The cause of Christ can also be furthered or harmed by the choice of a worldview diametrically opposed to Christianity. Everyone who makes this choice with innermost conviction must have our respect.” Some students were perplexed by these remarks. By way of explaining his thoughts the pope added: “There is a danger for both sides, both for the Church and for the others, in the attitude of the person who makes no choice at all.” Thus, in keeping with his philosophical vocation, John Paul II had returned to preach personal commitment and respect for those who think differently.

On the penultimate day of his trip, the pope chose a meeting with workers near the monastery of Mogila, in the Nowa Huta district, to seize ground traditionally claimed by the Communists and deliver a direct blow to Communist ideology. “Christianity and the Church have no fear of the world of work,” he proclaimed. “They’re not afraid of any system based on work. The pope isn’t afraid of the workers.” Many times, of course, popes had feared worker movements. John Paul II recalled his personal experience working in the rock quarry and the Solvay factory during the Nazi occupation; and he extolled the Gospel as a guide for the problems of work in the contemporary world. Amid an ecstatic crowd, waving thousands of flags and banners, the pontiff defiantly declared that people couldn’t be demeaned as a mere means of production. “Christ will never approve of it,” he exclaimed. “Both the worker and the employer must remember this, both the system of labor and the system of remuneration must remember this. The state, the nation, and the Church must all remember this.”

The audience cheered and applauded frenetically. For the workers this was pouring oil on the flames. They were already outraged at the government’s latest price increases and eager for higher salaries, and they remembered the regime’s violence against the workers’ protest in 1976 at Ursus and Radom. Now the Polish leadership took the rebuff, powerless to fight back. In the final analysis the requests made of the pope by the government were having no effect at all. Not on John Paul, not on the people. Monitoring his speeches day by day, General Jaruzelski noted both the force of the pope’s words and the subtlety of his approach: John Paul II was not only addressing the present state of affairs, “he was consolidating hope and courage” for future struggles, for the long term.

A similar thought occurred to Wiktor Kulerski, who would join the ranks of Solidarity activists barely a year later. “We’re living in a different country,” he told himself as the pope traveled around Poland. “Communism doesn’t matter anymore, because nobody submits to it.” Kulerski felt that the pope’s stay in Poland was a moment of relief, a moment to gather one’s energies: “The pope is here, and he’s beyond the reach of the Communists. He can say and do the things we can’t. They can’t get him. People repeat the pope’s words, and they know that he’s their bulwark.”

On June 10, more than a million faithful arrived at the meadow at Blonie on the edge of the city. Merely to draw a million people was incredible, even revolutionary in a country of the socialist bloc. That day was chosen to honor St. Stanislaw during the papal trip, and it turned into a celebration of the new power of John Paul II as, brandishing Christ like a battle standard, he announced that the nine hundredth anniversary of the death of St. Stanislaw would be a turning point for the nation and the Church.

That was all the crowd needed; they understood perfectly. As he left, the pope could bestow a new blessing on his people. He could entrust them with a new mission. “You must be strong, dearest brothers and sisters!” he cried. “You must be strong with the strength that flows from faith! You must be strong with the strength of faith!”

For one last time he addressed—without naming them, but in a way obvious to everyone—the peoples behind the iron curtain. “There is no need to be afraid. The frontiers must be opened. There is no imperialism in the Church, only service.” Catching sight of a group of pilgrims from Czechoslovakia, he insisted: “Oh how I would wish that our brothers and sisters, who are united to us by language and the fortunes of history, could also have been present during the pilgrimage of this Slavic pope. If they are not here, if they are not here in this vast expanse, they are surely in our hearts.” The pope and the Slavic nations versus the Soviet empire. The battle lines were now drawn. In his native land, almost one out of every three citizens had been able to see him in person.

On Thursday, August 14, 1980, Pope John Paul II spent the day in the papal villa at Castel Gandolfo, twenty miles from the Vatican. The air in the Alban hills was more breathable than in the scorching streets of Rome. Ever since the late 1600s the villa had been a refuge for popes during the hottest months of the year.

That Thursday, the pace at Castel Gandolfo was more languid than usual. It was the eve of the Assumption, ferragosto, the summer’s most sacred holiday for Italians, when everything stops running, even the buses.

While the pope worked in his study, Lech Walesa, a square-shouldered, unemployed electrician with a distinctive mustache, was clambering up a steam shovel at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, Poland. All summer the workers at the shipyard had declined to join the strikes that were sweeping the country. But on this morning, some of them formed into an unruly procession within the gates, demanding pay raises and the rehiring of the shipyard’s crane operator—a defiant critic of management who had been transferred to a job outside Gdansk.

Poland’s economy was devastated. Millions of factory workers across Poland were by now thoroughly disgruntled. The spontaneous strikes that had begun in July had spread to more than 150 enterprises. The government was reacting with the usual promises of change and salary increases—so far without violence. This time the protests continued. The sun was setting on the decade of Gierek. The country now found itself mired in debt; productivity was sinking; basic items like spare parts for industrial equipment were in short supply. Bankruptcy loomed.

The workers in the naval shipyard, the most important in Poland, where police in 1970 had killed forty-five striking employees, had shown little enthusiasm for a new confrontation. The director of the Gdansk shipyard, Klemens Giech, was promising a pay raise if workers would go back on the job, and many were ready to agree. But Walesa, who had scaled the yard’s twelve-foot high chain-link fence that morning, now stood next to the shipyard manager atop the steam shovel and denounced his offers.

He was a popular figure who had taken part in the uprisings of 1970 that had brought down Gomulka. After the bloody repression of the demonstrations in Radom and Ursus in 1976, he had devoted himself to creating an independent labor union, and he had often been arrested for these activities. Now he called for a sit-down strike: To protect themselves from security forces, workers would lock themselves inside the factory. The crowd heeded his call.

The truth was that the strikes that shook Poland in the summer of 1980 were not merely strikes. They were political insurrections—“counterrevolution,” as Brezhnev correctly put it. This movement, like all historic social revolutions, united a constellation of formidable political forces—labor, the intelligentsia, and the Church—that had never before come together so decisively.

In the previous economic crises, which had ended in violence, the workers had been disorganized and had lacked any national forum for expressing their grievances. In 1980, though there was still no centrally organized political opposition, there was a loose alliance of forces prepared to challenge the whims of an imperious state. These were the Workers Defense Committees (known by the acronym KOR) that had been formed by intellectuals to assist workers arrested or fired after the violent crackdown in 1976; the Catholic Intellectual Clubs (KIK); and the bishops who, backed by the Polish pope, now tentatively preached a gospel of human rights as well as of salvation.

On Saturday, August 16, the workers again seemed inclined to call off their strike, in exchange for the promise of a 1,500-zloty raise and a guarantee that a monument would be built at the shipyard to honor the victims of December 1970. But Walesa, emboldened by these concessions, issued a sixteen-point list of demands, the most important of which was government recognition of free trade unions. His proposal was not especially popular, and a day later, when management offered a heftier pay raise, many older workers filed out of the yard, giving up the strike. This was perhaps Walesa’s greatest moment: Circling the yard in a small motorized vehicle, he rallied the workers back to the cause. When the strike finally resumed in full force on the 18th, Walesa issued a new, more radical list of twenty-one demands, including alleviation of censorship and the release of political prisoners. It showed the hand of KOR advisers who had infiltrated the shipyard.

All negotiations were broadcast by loudspeaker through the yard, so word of the strike and the workers’ audacious new demands spread rapidly across the Baltic seacoast. That day work stopped in 180 more factories from Gdynia, Gdansk, and Sopot on the coast to Tarnow (near Kraków) and Katowice in Silesia. Now the avalanche was unleashed.

At Castel Gandolfo, John Paul II received confidential reports on the events in Poland from Monsignor Dziwisz, his Polish secretary, and from his Secretariat of State, which was in touch with the Polish episcopate. Breaking habit, Wojtyla eagerly watched television reports of the sensational events in his homeland. With him was Sister Zofia Zdybicka, his ex-student who was staying at the summer residence as a guest. Sister Zdybicka, like the pope, was a philosopher, and first as a student, then as a teacher, finally as a friend, she had often discussed such matters as the nature of Marxism and the destiny of man with Karol Wojtyla. “This,” she declared as she watched the TV news, “is a lesson for the whole world. Look at the contradiction: The workers are against communism.” The pope readily agreed, but at first he seemed less confident, less enthusiastic. “Except that the world doesn’t understand anything,” he replied. “The world doesn’t get it.” He said this three times. He didn’t seem entirely surprised by the remarkable doings in Poland. Sister Zdybicka remembered being with the pope on another occasion when he had told a visiting professor from the Catholic University in Lublin, “You have to be ready.” Ready for what? she and the professor had wondered, but now she thought she understood. This was what the pope had been waiting for.

Walesa, said the pope, had been sent by God, by Providence. On the screen they watched Walesa and the workers praying. “So serious, so young, those intent faces,” she noted. In his lapel Walesa wore a pin with a picture of the Black Madonna of Czestochowa. On Sunday and now on Monday, mass was celebrated by the strikers in the shipyard, led by Walesa’s parish priest, Father Henryk Jankowski, of St. Brygida’s in Gdansk.

Photos of the pope and large pictures of the Black Madonna were posted on the gates of the shipyard. John Paul noted with ironic satisfaction that Western politicians, especially those on the left, were amazed that throngs of strikers were flocking on bended knee around improvised outdoor confessionals and that they had chosen religious symbols for their battle standards. Sister Zdybicka sensed that the pope saw the hand of God lifted up against the Communists, as the workers turned their rulers’ weapons against them.

Spontaneous demonstrations were now breaking out along the coast under the leadership of the Inter-Factory Strike Committee in solidarity with the strikers at the Lenin Shipyard. Workers all over the country, spurred into action by KOR, were joining forces with the Catholic intelligentsia, while secular-minded intellectuals too were making common cause with the Church.

John Paul II kept silent for a week. Like the heads of the European community who cautioned Gierek and the Polish leadership not to take repressive measures, like U.S. President Jimmy Carter, and like Moscow, which was trying to figure out how the Polish Communist Party could maintain control of the country, the pope was prudent.

On Wednesday, August 20, as the strike movement threatened to provoke long-term political paralysis, the pope said two brief prayers with a group of Polish pilgrims in St. Peter’s Square: “God, grant through the intercession of Mary that religion may always enjoy freedom and that our homeland may enjoy security.… Lord, help this people, and always defend it from every evil and danger.”

“These two prayers,” said the pope, “show that all of us here in Rome are united with our compatriots in Poland, with the Church in Poland, whose problems are so close to our heart.”

Thus did the pope do something that old Cardinal Wyszynski couldn’t and wouldn’t do: He publicly blessed the strike. This was a turning point. Now the bishop of Gdansk, Lech Kaczmarek, presented Walesa and the other fourteen members of the strike committee with medals of Pope John Paul II.

Walesa, in turn, sent a reassuring message to Moscow and the Polish Communists: “Our struggle is about unions; it’s not a political effort.… We have no intention of calling into question Poland’s international alliances.”

With the world’s attention focused on the extraordinary events in Poland, President Carter privately wrote to the pope that the United States shared the aspirations of the Polish workers and that it would use its diplomatic channels to urge Soviet restraint.

On August 23, the pope sent the primate of the Polish Church a delicately nuanced letter: “I am writing these brief words to say how especially close I have felt to you in the course of these last difficult days.” Then, after the affectionate flourishes and invocations of the Madonna, the letter gave a precise political order: “I pray with all my heart that the bishops of Poland… can even now help this nation in its difficult struggle for daily bread, for social justice, and the safeguarding of its inviolable rights to its own life and development.” Bread, social justice, independent development. With these words the pope gave his complete support to the strikers’ goals. The Church, observed the Catholic writer Stefan Kisielewski, with only a touch of oversimplification, was managing the first democratic strike in the history of Poland.

That evening the government made a historic concession, agreeing to enter into direct negotiations with the strike committees in Gdansk, Gdynia, and Szczecin.

With the beginning of negotiations, which turned into a dramatic weeklong test of strength, a group of advisers made an appearance alongside Lech Walesa. The group included intellectuals, professors, and members of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Two of its leaders were closely associated with Wojtyla: Tadeusz Mazowiecki, editor of the Warsaw Catholic periodical Wiez, and historian Bronislaw Geremek. With the arrival of this group, the strategic leadership of the movement—eventually to be known as Solidarity—passed largely into the hands of the Church. Now the Black Madonna in Walesa’s lapel was a sign that Solidarity had taken its inspiration directly from Karol Wojtyla.

On August 27, at the pope’s instigation, the Polish bishops approved a document that explicitly claimed “the right to independence both of organizations representing the workers and of organizations of self-government.” The pope’s will had become the national will. Now the government had little choice but to give in. Walesa knew he had the pope’s backing.

On August 31, the historic Gdansk accords were signed, ratifying the establishment of the first independent union behind the iron curtain. The accords set the standard for subsequent agreements that would be made throughout Poland as the Solidarity movement swept the land. Free trade unions, wage increases, health care improvements, curtailment of censorship, release of political prisoners—virtually everything was now negotiable.

At the signing ceremonies for the accords, Walesa dramatically pulled an oversized, brightly colored pen out of his pocket. TV cameras recorded the moment: The pen was a souvenir from John Paul’s trip to Poland, and on it was a picture of the pope.

The attempt to murder the pope on May 13, 1981, remains one of this century’s great mysteries. The pope’s response to the shooting and its aftermath has only deepened the mystery.

Nonetheless, many of the pope’s closest aides and acquaintances became convinced that the Soviets or their allies, notably the Bulgarian regime, were behind the attempt. An informal group meeting in the Vatican, which included Secretary of State Casaroli, argued secretly that the Soviets wanted the pope killed because his death seemed to be the only way to decapitate Solidarity. With the pope dead, this reasoning went, Solidarity could have been smothered by the Polish authorities without the Soviets incurring the lasting international opprobrium that military intervention by the Warsaw Pact would have brought.

“Surely the assassination was not an isolated attack,” Casaroli stated publicly in January 1995.

Cardinal Achille Silvestrini, who was Casaroli’s deputy at the time, says, “It was clear to us that it was not a random accident… not simply the act of a madman. It was something aimed at a goal, there was something behind the killer.… We have to keep in mind the situation in Poland and Eastern Europe at that time. If the assassination attempt had succeeded, it would have been the gravestone for Poland and for those who were challenging the control of the [Soviet] system.” But Silvestrini is skeptical about the Bulgarian scenario and believes the trail heads somewhere else in the former communist East.

No illuminating documents relating to the assassination attempt have been found in either Bulgaria or Moscow since the fall of communism—though Western intelligence professionals ridicule the notion that a paper trail to the Kremlin might exist.

Many facts about the attempt on the pope’s life are contradictory or open to interpretation, and the failure of intelligence agencies around the world to tackle the case immediately and pool their knowledge has helped make it impossible to piece together a definitive record.

On May 17, 1981, four days after the shooting of Wojtyla, President Reagan, who had only partially regained his strength but seemed in the midst of a vigorous recovery, made his first trip since being shot: to deliver a long-scheduled commencement address at the University of Notre Dame—Our Lady—in South Bend, Indiana.

By now, Reagan’s speechwriters knew his priorities: As on the day he was shot, Reagan again turned his thoughts to the pope and the Evil Empire. Wearing a black academic gown and a black mortarboard with a yellow tassel, the president looked out over a vast audience; he could see that it included a small number of students wearing white armbands and white mortarboards to protest administration policies in El Salvador and budget cuts that hurt the poor. Then the president of the United States made his own prophecy:

The years ahead will be great ones for our country, for the cause of freedom and for the spread of civilization. The West will not contain communism, it will transcend communism. We will not bother to denounce it, we’ll dismiss it as a sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.

He was deadly serious, though the reporters traveling with him mistook his words for mere rhetoric and blind hope. But he had confided to his wife and his closest aides that he was certain this was why he and the pope had been spared. The previous day, in Kraków, 300,000 people had attended an open-air mass to pray for their former archbishop John Paul II and for the recovery of Cardinal Wyszynski, whose grave illness had been announced by the episcopate the day after the pope was shot. Reagan continued:

It was Pope John Paul II who warned last year, in his encyclical on mercy and justice, against certain economic theories that use the rhetoric of class struggle to justify injustice: that “in the name of an alleged justice the neighbor is sometimes destroyed, killed, deprived of liberty or stripped of fundamental human rights.” For the West, for America, the time has come to dare to show to the world that our civilized ideas, our traditions, our values are not—like the ideology and war machine of totalitarian societies—a facade of strength. It is time the world knew that our intellectual and spiritual values are rooted in the source of all real strength—a belief in a supreme being, a law higher than our own.

Not only had he quoted the pope, but in the religious cadences of his rhetoric, Ronald Reagan had begun to sound like the pope.

By mid-October of 1981, the situation in Poland was on the brink of chaos. No one seemed to be in control of the country; uncompromising factions in both the Polish Communist Party and Solidarity were demanding harsh, almost apocalyptic action. Riots and clashes between civilians and security forces were spreading. The Polish economy was in ruins, and the crisis was aggravated by hundreds of strikes, by everyone from coal miners to transport workers. In the stores, even toothpaste and soap had disappeared from the shelves.

At the stroke of midnight, tanks and soldiers stationed across the country moved into the streets and forests as Operation X got under way. At six a.m., Jaruzelski addressed the nation on television.

“Citizens and lady citizens of the Polish People’s Republic! I turn to you as a soldier and chief of government! Our motherland is on the verge of an abyss.” By the time he read his prepared statement, thousands were already in jail. The prisoners, he said, were guilty of “growing aggressiveness and an attempt to dismantle the state. How long will our outstretched hand be met with the fist?” he asked.

For the foreseeable future, the nation would be governed by a Military Council of National Salvation. The new rules of governance, ending sixteen months of hope and excitement, suffering and disappointment, were pasted on lampposts, street corners, and trees throughout the cities and across the countryside. They had been printed months before—in the Soviet Union.

The civil society that Solidarity had been building brick by brick under the protection of the Church was gone. In its place was a declaration of a “state of war.” A nightly curfew was in effect indefinitely. Except for those of the military and security forces, every telephone in Poland was dead (even at local Communist Party headquarters) and would remain so for a month. All civilian communications with the outside world were severed. All schools except nursery schools were closed, as were theaters and movie houses. Except for religious services, public gatherings were now illegal. Travel outside one’s city of residence could only be undertaken with official permission. All mail was subject to censorship. “Tourism, yachting, and rowing… on internal and territorial waters” were forbidden.

During the sixteen months of Poland’s great experiment, more than two thousand clandestine books and newspapers had been published, with help from the West. As many as 100,000 Polish citizens had been involved in their preparation, working as printers, writers, or distributors. Now the Military Council of National Salvation forbade the purchase of typewriter ribbons and typing paper without official permission.

The military would henceforth be responsible for running railroads, highways, mail service, broadcasting, distribution of petroleum products, firefighting, importing and exporting, and the manufacture of strategic goods. Polish borders were sealed and the country’s airspace, closed. The newscasters on television now wore military uniforms.

Between twenty and thirty people had been killed in the early days of martial law, most of them murdered by security forces. Hundreds of others were injured and arrested at the shipyard at Gdansk, the birthplace of Solidarity, where thousands of workers had rushed when they first heard of the “state of war.”

The most serious violence occurred at a coal mine near Katowice, where miners called a sit-down strike.

The violence at Katowice, which was reported by Polish state radio on the next day, Thursday, prompted John Paul II to begin writing a letter that afternoon to Jaruzelski.

Recent events in Poland since the declaration of martial law on December 13 [wrote the pope] have resulted in death and injury to our fellow countrymen, and I am moved to address this urgent and heartfelt appeal to you, a prayer for an end to the shedding of Polish blood.

During the last two centuries, the Polish nation has endured great wrongs, and much blood has been spilled in the struggle for power over our Fatherland. Our history cries out against any more bloodshed, and we must not allow this tragedy to continue to weigh so heavily on the conscience of the nation. I therefore appeal to you, General, to return to the methods of peaceful dialogue that have characterized efforts at social renewal since August 1980. Even though this may be a difficult step, it is not an impossible one.

The welfare of the entire nation depends upon it. People throughout the world, all those who rightly see the cause of peace furthered by respect for the rights of Man, are waiting for this return to nonviolent means. All humanity’s desire for peace argues for an end to the state of martial law in Poland.

The Church speaks out for this desire. Soon it will be Christmas, when generation after generation of Poland’s sons and daughters have been drawn together by Holy Communion. Every effort must be made so that our compatriots will not be forced to spend this Christmas under the shadow of repression and death.

I appeal to your conscience, General, and to the conscience of all those who must decide this question.

The Vatican 18 December 1981

John Paul II

This letter, like all of the pope’s responses to martial law, stemmed in part from a central premise. However repugnant, martial law, in the pope’s phrase, was a “lesser evil” than civil war or Soviet intervention. The pope correctly assumed that Jaruzelski would eventually need the Church’s cooperation to find a way out of the terrible situation in which he and the nation now found themselves. Since Jaruzelski had only two choices—to turn toward the Church or toward Moscow—the pope believed that Jaruzelski would ultimately seek the protection of the Church.

No moment of his young papacy was as delicate, no problem as vexing, as the situation that faced Wojtyla in 1983 on his second trip to Poland. That winter had been an especially depressing one for Poles. Martial law seemed unrelenting. Dismissals, secret accusations, and acts of repression had poisoned the air.

As he arrived on June 16, 1983, John Paul II did not hide his sadness at the condition of his country. It was evident in his first words at Warsaw’s airport, after he had kissed the ground: “I ask those who suffer to be particularly close to me. I ask this in the words of Christ: I was sick, and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me. I myself cannot visit all those in prison [the crowd gasped], all those who are suffering. But I ask them to be close to me in spirit to help me, just as they always do.”

Later that same morning he held the first of two private meetings at Belweder Palace with Prime Minister Jaruzelski, sessions in which real negotiations finally began. The man who had crushed Solidarity looked stiff, correct, and expressionless as he greeted the pope. His pale face wasn’t shielded by his usual dark glasses. His uniform gave him a certain patriotic elegance, but John Paul II noticed that when the general spoke, his right hand, which held his prepared remarks, trembled, and his left was clenched in a fist. Jaruzelski has since admitted that he felt extremely nervous and excited. When the time came for official speeches, the pope placed a microphone between himself and Jaruzelski, as if to distance himself as much as possible from the man in charge of martial law. Then the pope publicly addressed Jaruzelski and Jablonski in a televised speech, asserting Poland’s right to independence, “her proper place among the nations of Europe, between East and West.” The path to true sovereignty and reform, he said, must take into account “social agreements stipulated by representatives of state authorities with representatives of the workers,” that is, the Gdansk accords.

His idea, which he now passed on to a whole nation, was a variation of his own experience as a youth during the war: Victory was within. Spiritual victory forged from the suffering of their nation, the path of martyrdom, was possible. “Man is called to victory over himself,” he declared. “It is the saints and the beatified who show us the path to victory that God achieves in human history.” To achieve that victory requires “living in truth.… It means love of neighbor; it means fundamental solidarity between human beings.” In a theme he repeated over and over in the following days, to the chagrin of the regime, he said that victory means “making an effort to be a person with a conscience, calling good and evil by name and not blurring them … developing in myself what is good, and seeking to correct what is evil by overcoming it in myself.

“You come to the Mother of Czestochowa with a wound in the heart, with sorrow, perhaps also with rage,” he preached. “Your presence shows the force of a testimony, a witnessing which has stupefied the whole world: when the Polish worker made his own person the object of a demand, with the Gospel in his hand and a prayer on his lips. The images transmitted to the world in 1980 have touched hearts and consciences.”

In his homily to another crowd of one million people in the steel town of Katowice (and to the Communist regime), he reiterated the basic rights of workers: “to a just salary,” “to security,” “to a day of rest.” “Connected with the area of workers’ rights is the question of trade unions,” he said, “the right of free association,” the right of all workers to form unions as “a mouthpiece for the struggle for social justice.” Quoting the late Cardinal Wyszynski, he continued, “The state does not give us this right, it has only the obligation to protect and guard it. This right is given us by the Creator who made man as a social being.” Each day his speeches alluded to these elements of the Gdansk agreements.

He met privately with Lech Walesa on the last day of his visit, as well as with intellectuals who were secretly in contact with the Solidarity underground. He received from them copies of underground newspapers.

After eighteen months of martial law, Solidarity was no longer a mass organization of labor, with membership cards and a list of workplace demands. The state had destroyed that body, and its resurrection seemed almost inconceivable. But with the pope’s second visit, Solidarity became an idea, a consciousness, a set of values, even a way of life “in solidarity.”

At the close of his visit, the pope and Jaruzelski met again, this time alone face to face for more than an hour and a half at the Wawel, “a place of great symbolic importance,” as Jaruzelski noted. The meeting, unscheduled, had been requested the night before by the pope.

The pope stunned Jaruzelski with his directness: “I understand that socialism as a political system is a reality,” he said, “but the point is that it ought to have a human face.”

The pope always spoke “in terms of human rights or civil rights,” the general noted. “And when we discussed rights we naturally mean[t] democracy. If there is democracy, then you have elections; if you have elections, then you have power. But he never put it that way. It showed his great culture and diplomacy, because in substance he used words and phrases that you couldn’t argue with. Because if he had said, ‘You have to share power with Solidarity,’ we would have argued about it, naturally. But when one simply mentions human rights, it’s such a general term, such a general notion, that you can have a constructive discussion, which eventually brought us [the regime] closer to that goal without losing face.”

The pope’s first real sign of “socialism with a human face”—three years and three months after the declaration of martial law in Poland—came in the unlikely form of a visit to the Vatican on February 27, 1985, by Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko. In Moscow, unbeknownst to the pope, Konstantin Chernenko was near death. Twelve days later Gromyko, who had served every Soviet leader since Stalin, would play a crucial role in the selection of Mikhail Gorbachev to succeed Chernenko as general secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR.

Gromyko now let the pope know that the USSR might be interested in establishing diplomatic relations with the Holy See. When John Paul II voiced his concerns about world peace, particularly the need for progress at the stalled Geneva talks on arms control, and the plight of Catholics in the Soviet Union, Gromyko seemed unusually responsive. He suggested further explorations of such matters by representatives of the USSR and the Vatican. This overture took Wojtyla completely by surprise.

That spring, in May, he began receiving reports from Poland that Gorbachev might indeed be a different kind of Communist and that the Brezhnev era might finally be ending, two and a half years after his death. Gorbachev had traveled to Poland in late April to attend a meeting of the Consultative Political Committee of the Warsaw Pact. More consequentially, when the meeting adjourned, Gorbachev remained behind to speak with Jaruzelski. He had only an hour, the new general secretary said, but then the hour stretched into five as the two men conducted an exhaustive review of the situation in Poland and the USSR and a long discussion about the pope and the Vatican.

From this discussion, Jaruzelski concluded that Gorbachev was a different kind of Communist and took steps, through the primate, to inform the pope of their meeting. “It was a critical moment,” Jaruzelski disclosed almost a decade later (and Gorbachev too confirmed the portentous nature of their encounter): “Five hours of conversation face to face without an interpreter. Much of it centered on the Church and Wojtyla, but first “we spoke about the past, about the origins of the system, about the necessity for change.” Gorbachev had been general secretary for only a few weeks and he wanted to learn firsthand as much as possible about the internal situation in Poland and about the Holy See. Jaruzelski got the impression that, “though he was broad-minded” and had been a member of the Politburo for several years, “his knowledge of the Church and religion was superficial.”

Jaruzelski clung to Gorbachev like a drowning man to a life preserver: Finally someone in the Kremlin was giving him a sympathetic ear—and not just anyone, but the general secretary himself.

“First of all I tried to explain the difference, the uniqueness of the Church’s role in Poland, compared with that of the Church in other countries,” Jaruzelski recounted. As rigidly controlled as conditions were then in Poland, the country had engaged in a bold experiment with human rights before the imposition of martial law, and both men agreed that Communist societies had to evolve in the direction of that experiment.

Gorbachev had yet to use the term perestroika—meaning “restructuring”—but this talk with Jaruzelski turned on some of the concepts he was later to introduce, including a broad guarantee of religious rights for Communist citizens. He asked Jaruzelski many questions about the failures of Poland’s planned economy and about the moribund state of the Polish Communist Party. But the conversation kept returning to the Church, and eventually to the pope himself.

“What kind of a man is he?” Gorbachev asked. “What is his intellectual training? Is he a fanatic? Or is he a man with his feet on the ground?”

Jaruzelski replied that the pope was “an outstanding personality, a great humanist, a great patriot,” above all a man committed to peace.

Gorbachev now began talking enthusiastically about peaceful coexistence between East and West, arms reductions, even the radical elimination of armaments. Jaruzelski knew how important this was because he had heard the pope take a similar tack on such issues. When he did, Jaruzelski told Gorbachev, “it was not only as the leader of a great religion, a great Church, but also as the son of a nation whose lot had been particularly hard. When this particular pope spoke about peace, it sounded different than when, say, Pius XII talked about it.”

It now occurred to Jaruzelski that he could become the intermediary between the pope and Gorbachev, that he could explain one to the other. Later, Gorbachev, like the pope, credited him with playing just such a role.

The advent of Gorbachev brought rapid changes to Church-state relations in Poland and created an atmosphere in which Jaruzelski felt safe to begin relaxing many of the restrictions that had accompanied martial law.

Then, on June 2, 1985, the pope issued one of his most important encyclicals, Slavorum Apostoli (Apostles to the Slavs), charged with both religious and secular significance. It was an invitation to ecumenical dialogue with the Eastern churches in the USSR.

With the coming of Gorbachev, the Kremlin would no longer automatically interpret such offers as insidious attempts to undermine the foundation of Communist legitimacy. Twice in the next year, at Jaruzelski’s urging, Primate Glemp was permitted to visit Minsk and Moscow, where he met with Catholic and Russian Orthodox leaders and clergy, along with secular officials and scholars. Never before had a Polish cardinal visited the Soviet Union.

The “Slavic encyclical” commemorated the eleven hundredth anniversary of the evangelism of Sts. Cyril and Methodius, who brought Christianity to most of the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe. In this document, the pope invoked the metaphor of Europe as one “body that breathes with two lungs.” In 1980 he had made Sts. Cyril and Methodius co-patrons (with St. Benedict) of Europe.

Gorbachev, a Slav and a Communist, and Wojtyla, a Slav and a Christian, were moving toward each other, each increasingly aware of the other’s power and potential for doing good. Later that June, the new general secretary propounded the economic changes that would come to be known as perestroika: He spoke of a humanism that united the aspirations of Europe for economic and political peace and security. Similarly, the pope’s Ostpolitik was grounded in the belief that the Church must speak not just for Western Europe, but for a single undivided entity and culture, from the Urals to the Atlantic, “with a pan-European tradition of humanism that encompassed Erasmus, Copernicus, and Dostoevsky,” in a historian’s phrasing.

The pope was excited and hopeful about the changes Gorbachev was initiating. There was no doubt that Poland, the Communist nations of the East, and even the USSR were on the verge of a great transformation.

That spring of 1985, to the immense satisfaction of the pope, the USSR Council for Religious Affairs recommended Soviet participation in the interreligious convocation that John Paul had called for in Assisi. But Wojtyla was also a realist; he had long years of experience dealing with Communist ideologues. Early in Gorbachev’s tenure, the pope had a lengthy discussion about the new general secretary with Rocco Buttiglione, an Italian intellectual who frequently visited the Vatican. “Well, he’s a good man, but he’ll fail,” the pope declared, “because he wants to do something that’s impossible. Communism can’t be reformed.” The pope was never to change this judgment, though he hoped and prayed for Gorbachev’s success. Gorbachev was already meeting resistance in the Soviet party and Politburo. “Perestroika is an avalanche that we have unleashed and it’s going to roll on,” the pope said to Father Mieczyslaw Maliliski, his fellow underground seminarian. “Perestroika is a continuation of Solidarity. Without Solidarity there would be no Perestroika.”

The avalanche was rumbling through Czechoslovakia. In the spring of 1985, in commemoration of the eleven hundredth anniversary of the death of St. Methodius, eleven hundred priests—one-third of the Catholic clergy in Czechoslovakia—concelebrated mass at the Moravian shrine of Velehrad. Cardinal Frantisek Tomasek, eighty-six years old, who had been imprisoned by the Communists, read a letter from the pope urging the priests “to continue intrepidly in the spirit of St. Methodius on the path of evangelization and witness, even if the present situation makes it arduous, difficult, and even bitter.”

“We felt how strong we were,” said Bishop Frantisek Lobkowicz, who was a thirty-six-year-old pastor at the time. Until then the Church had not figured conspicuously in the Czech opposition, though some prominent Catholic intellectuals were affiliated with Charter 77, the umbrella organization of Czech resistance groups. Three months later, in “normalized” Czechoslovakia, 150,000 to 200,000 Catholic pilgrims marched to Velehrad for another observance in honor of St. Methodius. For months the government had tried to transform the event into a “peace festival.” But when the Communist leaders took to the microphones, the pilgrims shouted back, “This is a pilgrimage! We want the pope! We want mass!” It was the largest independent gathering in Czechoslovakia since the Prague Spring of 1968.

The definitive sign that the era of martial law in Poland was finally ending came on September 11, 1986, when the regime announced a general amnesty and released the 225 prisoners who had been considered most dangerous to the state. The release of political prisoners had been the number one demand made by the underground since 1981.

For the first time in almost five years, all of Solidarity’s leaders could meet freely. Polish jails were once more reserved for criminals, not political prisoners.

On January 13, 1987, for the first time since their conversation in the Wawel in 1981, John Paul II and General Jaruzelski met, in the pope’s study in the Vatican. Jaruzelski would later describe the visit as “historic,” because of what he saw as a crucial meeting of minds. For different reasons the pope’s closest aides have used the term “historic” for the session. The discussion lasted eighty minutes, during which Jaruzelski delivered a firsthand report on his conversations with Gorbachev and what the general secretary called his new thinking.

By now, the regime was easing more of the restrictions on civil rights imposed during martial law: Travel in and out of the country was relatively easy, censorship had become less pervasive, the police less conspicuous, and some independent organizations were reinstated.

“I found that [the pope] had a complete understanding of the processes through which we were living,” Jaruzelski said of their meeting. “I concluded that the pope saw in the trends and changes occurring in Poland a significance well beyond the Polish framework… that they [were], to a great extent, an impulse for the changes occurring in the other countries, especially in the Soviet Union.”

By this time, Jaruzelski was openly courting the pope—and the forces of history. As usual, he sought the approval of those he admired, whether in the Kremlin or in the Vatican. In his (dubious) version of events, he claimed that, after imposing the brutal restrictions of martial law, he suddenly reversed direction out of a long-standing democratic impulse.

The pope’s view of Jaruzelski, according to the people closest to John Paul II, was somewhat cooler than the general’s perception of it, though there is no doubt that Wojtyla regarded Jaruzelski as above all a patriot. But in his dealings with Jaruzelski, the pope always tried to offer the general a vision preferable to Moscow’s. This was one of his great accomplishments.

“The pope was aware,” says Cardinal Deskur, “that Jaruzelski had a very strong religious background… Catholic school, Marian Fathers, etcetera. ‘I think he is a man deeply credente—believing,’ the pope said. ‘He hasn’t lost his faith.’” And Wojtyla intended to make the most of it.

When Jaruzelski briefly visited Moscow in late April 1987 to sign a declaration of Soviet-Polish cooperation—in “ideology, science, and culture”—he was told by Gorbachev that perestroika was encountering fierce resistance.

John Paul II arrived triumphantly in Warsaw two months later, on June 8, 1987, for his third pontifical pilgrimage to his homeland, this time to reclaim Solidarity. Though his visit came against the backdrop of profoundly disturbing privation and suffering, the expectant spirit of his first pilgrimage—the hope, the excitement, the defiance—was in the air.

Solidarity was now operating in the open, though tentatively, and its adherents understandably held the authorities in great suspicion. During the week of his visit, the pope had met privately with Walesa near the Gdansk shipyard (after he finished his shift as an electrician) then served communion to him at a mass attended by hundreds of thousands. The pope made an unrelentingly emotional appeal to “the special heritage of Polish Solidarity,” and each day his challenge to the regime became more overt.

At one of the most extraordinary masses of his pontificate, celebrated in Gdansk before a crowd of 750,000 workers and their families, the pope invoked the 1980 accords, tracing their roots to the bloody events at the shipyard in 1970. The Gdansk accords, he declared, “will go down in the history of Poland as an expression of the growing consciousness of the working people concerning the entire social-moral order on Polish soil.” Looking out over a sea of Solidarity banners, the pope put aside his prepared text.

“I pray for you every day in Rome, I pray for my motherland and for you workers. I pray for the special heritage of Polish Solidarity.” His audience was beside itself: weeping, applauding, praying, raising clenched fists.

John Paul II stood on a structure shaped like a gigantic ship, whose prow was in the form of St. Peter raising the keys to the kingdom and the Gospel in his hands. From his “ship,” the pope told the crowd, “I’m glad to be here, because you have made me captain.… There is no struggle more effective than Solidarity!” He then asserted the workers’ absolute right to “self-government.” After the pope’s speech in Gdansk, Walesa said, “I’m very happy. Now even a fool can understand that finding a passage in this labyrinth… requires Solidarity. This is the only road.”

John Paul II used almost every stop of his journey to widen the perceived gulf between his vision and that of the regime—to the increasing chagrin of Jaruzelski. The pope called for a rethinking of the “very premises” of Poland’s Communist order. “In the name of the future of mankind and of humanity the word ‘solidarity’ must be said out loud,” he told hundreds of thousands of seamen at the port of Gdynia, near Gdansk, speaking from a towering altar set up near the harbor’s gray waters. “This word was spoken right here, in a new way and in a new context. And the world cannot forget it. This word is your pride, Polish seamen.”

The regime responded to the visit with television censorship, the deployment of tens of thousands of riot police, hundreds of detentions, and, finally, a bitter outburst by Jaruzelski at the farewell ceremonies for the pope at the Warsaw airport.

Following the pope’s visit, events in Poland moved with methodical swiftness: At each important turn, the regime responded with half-measures to the pressures from Solidarity, the people, and the pope, and became overwhelmed. Recognizing that the economic reforms of the past five years had failed, it scheduled a referendum that asked Poles to vote for or against a program of radical economic change, dramatic austerity, and limited steps toward political pluralism. Solidarity urged a boycott of the referendum on the grounds that the government would use it as a vote of confidence. The boycott succeeded. When it failed to attract a majority of eligible voters to the polls, the government announced that it had lost the referendum, the first time in postwar history that a Communist government admitted that it had failed to win an election.

Trying to avoid direct negotiations with Walesa or other Solidarity leaders, Jaruzelski reached out to the Consultative Council, whose members included Jerzy Turowicz and other Catholic intellectuals close to the pope. More than anything, Jaruzelski did not want to be the first Communist leader in the Warsaw Pact to be replaced by a non-Communist. There would be scores to settle. But his gesture was too little too late.

A series of spontaneous strikes in 1988 proved the turning point. Walesa had always warned that the workers would take matters into their own hands. The strikes, in April and May, turned into a tidal wave. But they weren’t called by Solidarity. The strikers were almost all young, impoverished factory workers for whom the events of 1980 were the stuff of myth. They struck in anger because they were disgusted with their constantly eroding standard of living. Their raw emotions threatened chaos. The government flinched and turned to Walesa himself to coax the strikers back to work. But they refused—hundreds of thousands of them—until Jaruzelski and the regime promised that the government would begin talks about the country’s future with an opposition that included Walesa.

On January 18, 1989, Jaruzelski announced that Solidarity would once again be legally recognized as a trade union. He had resigned as prime minister to become the president of Poland, with full executive powers. His successor as prime minister, Mieczyslaw Rakowski, formerly his deputy, made an official visit to Primate Glemp, as protocol dictated. Their conversation turned on the political situation, and Glemp now told the Communist Rakowski how essential it was to support Gorbachev’s policies in the Soviet Union; he added that the pope was committed to those policies both in the USSR and in Poland.

On February 6, even as demonstrators around the country were protesting price increases, representatives of the government and the opposition sat down at what became known as the Round Table negotiations on the future of Poland. The end of an epoch was at hand.

The talks, quietly conducted under the aegis of the Church, lasted eight weeks and covered subjects ranging from economic policy to health care, from political reforms to the inalienable rights of Polish citizens. Walesa, General Czeslaw Kiszczak (the interior minister who had placed him under arrest in 1980), Politburo member Stanislaw Ciosek, and a gaggle of party advisers carried out the most sensitive part of the negotiations themselves, with Cardinal Macharski of Kraków or his representatives in attendance. “If neither side gave in,” said Ciosek, “we always knew we could go to the Vatican for help.”

The crucial agreement reached by the Round Table mandated free and open elections in June for seats to a new body to be called the Senate. The full legalization of Solidarity was also agreed upon.

When elections were held on June 4, Solidarity won all but one of the 262 seats it was allowed to contest. Parish priests had called on the faithful at mass that Sunday to back Solidarity candidates against the Communists. “This is a terrible result,” said Jaruzelski. “It’s the Church’s fault.”

Jaruzelski, with unofficial support from the union, narrowly won the presidency. But such a shaky coalition of two old foes was bound to fail. On August 19, Jaruzelski asked Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a Catholic intellectual who had advised Walesa during the Gdansk strikes of 1980, to form a cabinet, and on August 24 Mazowiecki became prime minister and Solidarity officially came to power.

Meanwhile, Walesa’s first act after the Round Table accords were signed was to fly to Rome with five associates to thank John Paul II on behalf of Solidarity and the Polish people.

The reverberations from the fall of Poland shook the Eastern bloc for the rest of the winter of 1989, until there was no bloc left.

And then there was the USSR.

On December 1, 1989, the sidewalks of the great avenue leading to the Vatican were thronged with tens of thousands of people in a state of anticipation and excitement. The general secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR and the supreme pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church were about to meet for the first time.

Virtually every monsignor and archbishop of the Curia had stopped work to witness, either from an office window or on television, the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev in his limousine (bearing the red flag with its hammer and sickle). For more than sixty years the Catholic Church and the Kremlin had struggled fiercely, and these men in black attire, trained in their seminaries to despise and fight the “enemies of God” throughout the world, had been in the front lines.

Yet the day before, in a speech in the Italian Capitol, the general secretary had spoken of the need for spirituality in the world. He had called for a “revolution in men’s souls” while exalting “the eternal laws of humanity and morality of which Marx spoke.”

“Religion helps perestroika,” he declared. “We have given up pretending to have a monopoly on truth.… We no longer think that those who don’t agree with us are enemies.” This was truly a “new world order.”

The first meeting between a general secretary of the USSR and a pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church was rich in symbolism for a new era.

Wojtyla, wearing his white robes, greeted Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa, enthusiastically in the reception room of the papal apartments. Then the two men adjourned to the pope’s study.

“Generally speaking,” the pope declared, “there are quite a few spots on this earth where peace is having a hard time. Perhaps we could act together in concert here.” He was thinking particularly of regions with large Christian populations and historic Soviet influence.

Then John Paul offered the general secretary a homily on the subject of human rights:

We have been waiting with great anxieties and hopes for the adoption, in your country, of a law on the freedom of conscience. We hope that the adoption of such a law will lead to a broadening of the possibilities of religious life for all Soviet citizens. A person becomes a believer by his own free will; it’s impossible to force somebody to believe.

With such a law, the pope said, diplomatic relations between the Holy See and Moscow could move forward—something Gorbachev now desired more than the Vatican, owing to the need to strengthen his position at home and the pope’s great international prestige. Gorbachev readily pledged that a law on freedom of conscience would soon be adopted by the Supreme Soviet.

In August 1991, the Red Empire went into its death throes. At dawn on the 19th, in a coup d’etat, conservative members of the Politburo seized power in Moscow and put Gorbachev under house arrest in his Crimean dacha, announcing that he had been taken ill. Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian Federal Republic, rebelled against the coup and transformed the Russian parliament building (called the White House for its marble facing) into the headquarters of the resistance.

Thanks to a radio transmitter belonging to Father van Straaten, which was intended to broadcast Catholic-Orthodox religious programs and was smuggled into the parliament’s kitchens in a vegetable truck, Yeltsin was able to maintain contact with the outside world. His resistance prompted the West to support him.

A sincere cry of joy can be heard in the telegram that John Paul II sent to Gorbachev on August 23, the day the coup leaders surrendered: “I thank God for the happy outcome of the dramatic trial which involved your person, your family, and your country. I express my wish that you may continue your tremendous work for the material and spiritual renewal of the peoples of the Soviet Union, upon whom I implore the Lord’s blessing.”

John Paul II’s hopes, like those of many other world leaders, were shortlived. Yeltsin’s victorious resistance became a sign of the people’s will to wipe out the Communist regime once and for all. On December 25, the man who invented perestroika left office, and in the afternoon the red flag was lowered over the green cupola of the Kremlin.

Years later, much of the world came to hail Wojtyla as the conqueror of a war he had begun in 1978. The pope himself took a sober view. He expressly avoided parading as a kind of superman who had floored the Soviet bear. He urged his audience not to oversimplify things, not even to ascribe the fall of the USSR to the finger of God. When the Italian writer Vittorio Messori asked him about this, John Paul II replied: “It would be simplistic to say that Divine Providence caused the fall of communism. It fell by itself as a consequence of its own mistakes and abuses. It fell by itself because of its own inherent weakness.”

John Paul II had experienced the crisis of communism from within, and above all he had meditated as a philosopher on the essence of communism’s contradictions. Better than many Western politicians he understood that the Soviet system had collapsed through implosion. The external pressures had revealed the cracks in the system, but in the end the collapse had come from deep internal flaws.

In this collapse, economic and moral factors were interwoven. The economic resources of the USSR simply couldn’t guarantee every citizen a secure existence, at however poor a level, while maintaining all the military apparatus of a superpower fighting a cold war. This was even clearer in the case of Communist East Germany, which, though far better organized than the USSR, was still facing economic bankruptcy on the eve of its collapse.

But it was above all ethical contradictions that had undermined the system. With Khrushchev the need for truth had stimulated an attempt to reform the system. With Brezhnev the denial of truth had produced stagnation and massive cynicism. With Gorbachev the thirst for truth, for glasnost, had become so intense as to overturn the system itself.

This theme of the truth and of the unsustainability of lies has always fascinated John Paul II in his thinking on totalitarianism. He read the works of both Andrei Sakharov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and was moved by their moral conviction. Above all, Solzhenitsyn’s booklet Don’t Lie made a great impression on him, because he was convinced that the refusal to lie was the most powerful means of provoking a crisis in any totalitarian state. John Paul II spoke at length about ethics when Solzhenitsyn came to visit him in the Vatican in 1994. Communism, the pope had said in his first visit to post-Communist Prague in 1990, had “revealed itself to be an unattainable utopia because some essential aspects of the human person were neglected and negated: man’s irrepressible longing for freedom and truth and his incapacity to feel happy when the transcendent relationship with God is excluded.”

 

ERNEST EVANS

Observations: The Vatican and Castro’s Cuba

 

Pope John Paul II is the best-traveled pope in history, and on his foreign travels he has shown no hesitation about speaking his mind, even when so speaking may upset his local hosts. As a consequence, his overseas visits often have resulted in friction with the local authorities. For example, when the pope visited Mexico in 1979 for a conference of the bishops of Latin America, the Mexican government went out of its way to emphasize the strict separation of church and state that exists in that country: At the airport, there were no papal flags, no banners proclaiming welcome, and no honor guard; the only official presence was Mexican President Jose Lopez Portillo and his wife Carmela, who were dressed as private citizens and who, after shaking the pope’s hand and briefly greeting him, vanished into the crowd of well-wishers.¹ Similarly, when the pope visited Poland in 1983, two years after the repression of Solidarity, the Polish government allowed him to meet only briefly with Solidarity leader Lech Walesa; the government arranged the meeting in a secluded location and refused to allow the press to be present.² And, perhaps most famous, during his 1983 trip to Nicaragua the friction between the pope and his Sandinista hosts was so serious that the pope’s outdoor mass was disrupted by pro-Sandinista protesters.³

The pope’s visits to Mexico, Poland, and Nicaragua were all cases in which there was active hostility between the government in power and the local Catholic Church. As plans proceeded for the pope’s January 1998 visit to Cuba there were fears of another such tense visit, in light of ongoing church-state conflicts in Cuba. But the visit was marked instead by mutual cordiality between the pope’s party and the Castro government. In retrospect, such cordiality should not have been surprising because, while there are serious church-state disputes in Cuba, relations between the Castro regime and the Cuban church had never been as bad as they had been in most of the formerly Communist countries of the Soviet bloc.

There are other goals of Vatican foreign policy that also dictate accommodation and détente with Castro. However, it would be a mistake to assume that the warm and friendly atmosphere that marked the pope’s visit to Cuba indicated a problem-free future for Vatican-Cuba relations; there remains great potential for conflict between these two parties. In this article I will discuss first the reasons for the Vatican’s current policy of détente and accommodation with the Castro government, and then the reasons for possible serious conflicts.

The Castro government has never been as repressive of the Catholic Church as other Communist governments have been. The Cuban church did not make the mistake that the Mexican church made when it strongly opposed the uprising against the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz.⁴ Instead, although the Cuban hierarchy did not endorse Castro’s struggle against Batista, it made clear its view that Batista should step down. Equally important, despite the fact that by 1961 Castro’s revolution had become explicitly Communist, the Cuban church, while it strongly denounced the closing of church schools, universities, and newspapers, did not endorse armed counter-revolutionary efforts such as the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion.⁵ The importance of the church’s not endorsing armed struggle against Castro is indicated by the fate of other churches that did call for the armed overthrow of Communist governments. In the Russian Civil War the Russian Orthodox Church endorsed the Whites’ campaign against the Bolsheviks, and in the Spanish Civil War the Spanish Catholic Church endorsed the Nationalists. In both countries, thousands of clergy and dozens of bishops were killed.

However, Castro’s relative benevolence toward the Cuban church is not based only on the church’s not having called for armed resistance to his regime during its struggles to seize and consolidate power. Castro is well aware that despite the low levels of mass attendance by Catholics in Cuba and elsewhere in Latin America, there is a broad and deep respect for the church among the population—a respect and a reverence that can be awakened in the right circumstances, including the government repression of the church.⁶ For example, in response to the growing radicalization of the Cuban revolution, including its increasingly anti-religion orientation, some one million Cubans attended the National Catholic Congress in Havana in November 1959; the previous year only 10,000 had attended this event.⁷ And, in case Castro had any delusions that his decades in power had eradicated the popular Catholicism of the Cuban people, the pope’s 1979 visit to Mexico—where he was greeted by huge and enthusiastic crowds—should have served to dispel any such notions. Several decades of strongly anticlerical government in Mexico had not eradicated that country’s popular Catholicism.⁸

In brief, Castro had recognized with respect to Cuba what the Communist governments of Poland between 1945 and 1989 had also recognized: namely, their national Catholic Church had a deep enough hold on the loyalties of the populace that the sort of brutal repression of religion that took place in most Communist countries would have been most unwise. Joseph Stalin himself recognized that special accommodations had to be made with respect to the Polish church when he made his famous statement that fitting communism to Poland was like putting a saddle on a cow.⁹

The Vatican’s policy toward Cuba is also influenced by the continuing (though diminished in recent years) appeal of the Castro regime to much of the Third World. In assessing this factor, one must understand that as the twentieth century has progressed the church has become, from its highest to its lowest levels, less and less a European church and more and more a Third World church. Whereas in 1900 there were 392 million Christians (Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox) in the developed world and 67 million in the rest of the world, in 1965 there were 637 million Christians in the developed countries and 370 million in the rest of the world. In 1960 there were 297 million Catholic Christians in the developed world and 251 million in the rest of the world; it is estimated that in the year 2000 there will be 380 million Catholics in the developed countries and 854 million in the rest of the world.¹⁰ The steady growth in the Third World’s proportion of church communicants has led to changes in the church hierarchy. Whereas in 1946 an absolute majority of the College of Cardinals was Italian and there was not a single cardinal from Asia or Africa, by the 1990s there were several dozen African and Asian cardinals.¹¹

The Castro government’s failure to significantly raise the living standards of the Cuban people—a failure made obvious to all after the end of the billions of dollars of annual foreign aid to Cuba following the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union—has considerably reduced the appeal of the Cuban revolution in the Third World. Nevertheless, the Castro regime still evokes much sympathy in the developing world for the following reasons:

• Castro is seen as a hero by much of Latin America because he has defied “the colossus of the North” since 1959. The Cuban revolution’s continuing appeal appeared in the explosion of Che Guevara memorabilia all over Latin America, especially among the young people, on the thirtieth anniversary of Guevara’s death in 1997.

• Throughout the Third World, Castro has attracted support for his call for renunciation of the huge debts that most of those countries have incurred to banks in the developed world in the past twenty-five years. Many, if not most Third World leaders recognize that such a repudiation of their debts would be unwise in the long run, but even those who reject debt renunciation resent the banks of the developed countries. Therefore, Castro’s call for debt renunciation (or at least a debt repayment moratorium) finds many sympathetic listeners in the Third World.

• In the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of a world political system in which the United States is the sole superpower, there has been considerable resentment of what is seen as an overbearing and insensitive U.S. foreign policy. For example, the reluctance of most UN members to support U.S. military action against Iraq is rooted in large part in a sense that the United States is “bullying” Iraq. The continuation of tough U.S. sanctions against Cuba despite the collapse of the Soviet Union is also viewed by many in the Third World as “superpower bullying” of a poor country.

Yet the cordiality with which the Castro government received Pope John Paul II does not mean that there is no danger of future conflict. As has been widely reported, the pope and much of the leadership of the church are dismayed by what they see as the spread of the American “consumerist culture” throughout the formerly Communist countries of the Soviet bloc.¹² There can be little doubt that the overthrow of Cuban communism would also lead to a Cuban version of the same rampant consumerism. However, despite concerns that the dialectical materialism of communism has been replaced by a new consumer materialism, the church continues to strongly defend the basic human rights of freedom of speech, of conscience, of the press, and of assembly.

It is the Vatican’s defense of these basic human rights that potentially puts it on a collision course with Castro’s regime. A totalitarian government such as Castro’s cannot allow its citizens such basic human rights without signing its own death warrant. This is the clear lesson of Mikhail Gorbachev’s failed effort, through the reforms he called glasnost and perestroika, to reform the Soviet system without destroying the Communist Party’s monopoly on political power.

Castro is no one’s fool, as even his worst detractors will admit. He is well aware that the pope’s visit to Cuba, in conjunction with his own efforts to make some reforms in the Cuban economy, could be the same sort of catalytic steps that set in motion the unraveling of the Communist governments of the Soviet bloc. Were the pope’s visit and Castro’s own reform efforts to lead, as in Poland after the 1979 papal visit, to efforts to organize independent trade unions and political groups, Castro would have to choose between the unpalatable options of reversing his own reforms and of watching his regime’s power base fall apart.

Were Castro to respond to any stirrings of independent political organization with massive repression on the lines of the Polish government’s repression of Solidarity in 1981, there can be little doubt that the Vatican would, as it did in Poland, support economic sanctions against Cuba. The Vatican learned some valuable lessons about the link between economic sanctions and democratization from its experience with Solidarity in Poland. The Vatican knew that the Communist government in Poland was mindful of the dangers of popular uprisings over economic conditions, such as those in Gdansk in 1970. Thus, the Polish government was frantic to lift the crippling economic sanctions imposed on Poland after the 1981 suppression of Solidarity. In the end, those sanctions caused enough pain that the Polish government had to choose between legalizing Solidarity, which it knew would soon result in its legally stepping down from power, and allowing popular discontent to build to violent revolution, as occurred in Romania in 1989.¹³

The Vatican believes that lifting the current U.S. sanctions against Cuba would give momentum to Castro’s limited economic and political reforms. Moreover, the Vatican is aware of, and concerned about, the suffering of many ordinary people in Cuba because of U.S. sanctions. However, the Cuban government would be mistaken were it to assume that the Vatican’s humanitarian concerns would cause it to oppose a return to sanctions in the event of a crackdown in Cuba. If the Vatican was willing to tolerate similar popular suffering in the pope’s home country in the 1980s as a necessary sacrifice for the defense of basic human rights, there is no reason to believe that it would act any differently toward Cuba.

In sum, Fidel Castro would be making what could be the greatest mistake of his political career were he to believe that the warmth that marked Pope John Paul II’s recent visit somehow represents a Vatican “stamp of approval” for his regime. True, the Vatican appreciates his policy of relative toleration for the Cuban Catholic Church and, conscious of its own growing Third World orientation, does not want to offend the many Catholics in the developing countries who admire Castro. But in the twentieth century the Vatican has learned through hard experience with both the Communist regimes of the Left and the Latin American national security states of the Right that it also has a very real stake in the defense of basic human rights. Hence it will continue to strongly press the Castro regime on those issues. At bottom, the message from the Vatican to Castro is simply this: Mr. Castro, your days as Cuba’s dictator are numbered. You can depart à la Wojciech Jaruzelski, or à la Nicolae Ceausescu, which is to say, you can walk out or be carried out.

NOTES

1. Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi, His Holiness: John Paul II and the Hidden History of Our Time (New York: Doubleday, 1996), 202–3.

2. Ibid., 384–85.

3. Eric O. Hanson, The Catholic Church in World Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 243–45.

4. J. Lloyd Mecham, Church and State in Latin America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1966), 380–82.

5. Ibid., 304–7.

6. Margaret Crahan, “Salvation Through Christ or Marx: Religion in Revolutionary Cuba.” In Churches and Politics in Latin America, ed. Daniel H. Levine (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1980), 240–41.

7. Ibid.

8. Bernstein and Politi, His Holiness, 205–13.

9. Ibid., 75.

10. Andrej Kruetz, Vatican Policy on the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990), 29.

11. Ibid., 4.

12. For a discussion of Pope John Paul II’s concerns about what he sees as rampant consumerism in the late twentieth century see Bernstein and Politi, His Holiness, part 8, “The Angry Pope,” 485–539.

13. Bernstein and Politi, His Holiness, 469–71.

 

 

JOSEPH RATZINGER

War Service and Imprisonment

 

Because of the increasingly worn-down condition of the men in the armed forces, our rulers came up with something new in 1943. They observed that boarding-school students already had to live in community away from their homes and that, therefore, nothing stood in the way of changing the place where they boarded—namely, to the batteries of the anti-aircraft defense (Flak). And since in any event they could not be studying the whole day, it appeared quite normal to engage them in their free time for the service of defense against enemy planes. Even though I had not for quite a while now been in boarding school, still, juridically, I belonged to the minor seminary in Traunstein. So it was that the small group of seminarians from my class (those born in 1926 and 1927) were now drafted, and we had to go to the Flak in Munich. Being all of sixteen years of age, I now had to undertake a very peculiar kind of “boarding-school” existence. We lived in barracks like the regular soldiers, who were of course in the minority, wore uniforms similar to theirs, and basically had to perform the same services as they, with the only difference being that on the side we had in addition a reduced load of courses, given by the teachers of the renowned Maximilians-Gymnasium in Munich. In many respects this was an interesting experience. We now formed one class with the actual students of this gymnasium, who had likewise been drafted into the Flak, and so we entered a world that was new to us. Those of us from Traunstein were better in Latin and Greek, but we became aware that we had lived in the provinces and that the big city, with its multitude of cultural offerings, had opened other horizons to our new schoolmates. At first there was a lot of friction, but with time we all grew together to form a good community.

Our first location was Ludwigsfeld, to the north of Munich, where we had to protect a branch of the Bavarian Motor Works (BMW) that produced motors for airplanes. Then we went to Unterföhring, to the northwest of Munich, and for a brief time to Innsbruck, where the railroad station had been destroyed and protection seemed necessary. When no more attacks took place there, we were finally transferred to Gilching, just north of Lake Ammer, with a double commission: we had to defend the nearby Dornier-Werke, from which the first jets soared into the air, and, more generally, we had to stop the Allied flyers who gathered in this area for attacks on Munich.

I need not belabor the fact that my time with the Flak brought many an unpleasantness, particularly for so nonmilitary a person as myself. And yet I remember Gilching very fondly. There I belonged to telephone communications, and the noncommissioned officer in charge of us defended the autonomy of our group with tooth and nail. We were exempt from all military exercises, and no one dared to intrude into our little world. Autonomy reached its high point when I was assigned living quarters in the neighboring battery and, for inscrutable reasons, even got a room all to myself—primitive, but a real single room. Outside my hours of service, I could now do whatever I wanted and cultivate my interests without any hindrance. Besides, there was a surprisingly large group of active Catholics here who organized religious instruction and occasionally led visits to churches. And so, paradoxically, this summer is inscribed in my memory as a wonderful time of largely independent living.

To be sure, the overall climate of contemporary history was anything but encouraging. Early in the year our battery had been directly attacked, with one dead and many wounded as a result. In the summer, systematic large-scale attacks on Munich began. Three times a week we were still allowed to travel into the city to attend classes at the Max-Gymnasium; but every time it was frightening to see new destruction and to experience how the city was falling into ruins bit by bit. The air was more and more filled with smoke and the smell of fire. In the end, regular train service was no longer possible. In this situation, most of us came to look on the Western allies’ invasion of France, which finally began in July, as a sign of hope. Basically there was great trust in the Western powers and a hope that their sense of justice would also help Germany to begin a new and peaceful existence. However, which of us would live to experience it? None of us could be sure that he would live to return home from this inferno.

On September 10, 1944, having reached military age, we were released from the Flak, in which we had actually served as students. When I arrived home, the draft notice of the Reichsarbeitsdienst already lay on the table. On September 20 an endless trip took us to Burgenland, where we (including many friends from the gymnasium at Traunstein) were assigned to a camp in a spot where three countries—Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary—meet. The weeks spent in the labor detail have left me with oppressive memories. Most of our superiors were former members of the so-called Austrian Legion and thus old Nazis who had done time in prison under Chancellor Dollfuss. They were fanatical ideologues who tyrannized us without respite. One night we were pulled out of bed and gathered together, half asleep in our exercise uniforms. An SS officer had each individual come forward and, by taking advantage of our exhaustion and exposing each of us before the gathered group, attempted to make “voluntary” recruits for the weapons branch of the SS. A whole series of good-natured friends were in this way forced into this criminal group. With a few others I had the good fortune of being able to say that I intended to become a Catholic priest. We were sent out with mockery and verbal abuse. But these insults tasted wonderful because they freed us from the threat of that deceitful “voluntary service” and all its consequences.

To begin with, we were trained according to a ritual invented in the 1930s, which was adapted from a kind of “cult of the spade,” that is, a cult of work as redemptive power. An intricate military drill taught us how to lay down the spade solemnly, how to pick it up and swing it over the shoulder. The cleaning of the spade, which was not to show a single speck of dust, was among the essential elements of this pseudo-liturgy. This world of appearances suddenly collapsed overnight when neighboring Hungary, at whose border we were stationed, surrendered in October to the Russians, who in the meantime had penetrated deep into the center of the country. We thought we could hear the din of artillery at a distance; the front was drawing closer. Now the rituals with the spade came to an end, and every day we had to ride out to erect a so-called southwestern rampart: tank blockades and trenches, which we, along with an enormous army of allegedly volunteer workers from every country in Europe, had to dig directly across the fertile clay soil of Burgenland’s vineyards. When we went home exhausted in the evening, the spades, which previously could not have a single speck of dust, now hung from the wall full of big clods of clay; but no one cared. Precisely this fall of the spade from cultic object to banal tool for everyday use allowed us to perceive the deeper collapse taking place there. A full-scale liturgy and the world behind it were being unmasked as a lie.

It was common practice, as the front drew closer, for those engaged in the work detail simply to be taken into the military. This is what we expected. But, to our grateful astonishment, something different happened. In the end, all work on the southwest rampart was stopped, and we lived in our camp without further orders. No cries of command were now heard, and an eerie, hollow silence reigned. On November 20 our suitcases with our civilian clothes were given back to us, and we were loaded onto railway cars. We thus undertook a journey home that was continually interrupted by air-raid alarms. Vienna, which only in September had still remained untouched by the events of the war, now showed the scars of bombs. I was even more strongly affected by the fact that in my beloved Salzburg not only did the train station lie in ruins, but it was evident from far off that the city’s splendid centerpiece—the huge Renaissance cathedral—had been heavily damaged. If I remember correctly, the dome had caved in. Since, because of danger from the air, the train had to pass through Traunstein without stopping, the only thing to do was to jump off. It was an idyllically beautiful fall day. There was a bit of hoarfrost on the trees, and the mountains glowed in the afternoon sun. Seldom have I ever experienced the beauty of my homeland as on this return from a world disfigured by ideology and hatred.

Much to my amazement there was still no notice on the table drafting me into military service, as I might have expected. I had been granted almost three weeks for both interior and exterior renewal. Then we were called to Munich, where we were informed of our different destinations. The officer in charge was quite openly critical of the war and Hitler’s system. He showed much understanding for us and tried to find the best possible assignment for each of us, the thing that would be most bearable. Thus, he assigned me to the infantry barracks in Traunstein, and with fatherly kindness he encouraged me to take a few more free days at home without rushing to report to my new post. The atmosphere I found in the barracks was a pleasant change from what I had known in the labor service. It is true that the head of the company liked to shout and that he apparently was still a faithful devotee of Nazism. But those in charge of our formation were experienced men who had tasted the horrors of war at the front and who did not want to make things more difficult for us than they already were. We celebrated Christmas in our living quarters with a heavy mood. Serving in the same unit with us young men there were several heads of families, nearly forty years of age, who, despite health problems, had now been called to arms in the last year of the war. My heart was deeply moved by their homesickness for wives and children. It was already difficult enough for them to be subjected to military drills like schoolboys along with us, who were twenty years their junior. After basic training, beginning in mid-January, we were continually relocated to different posts all around Traunstein, but, on account of an illness, I was largely exempt from military duty. Very strangely, we were not called to the front, which was drawing ever nearer. But we were given new uniforms and had to march through Traunstein singing war songs, perhaps in order to show the civilian population that the Führer still had young and freshly trained soldiers at his disposal. Hitler’s death finally strengthened our hope that things would soon end. The unhurried manner of the American advance, however, deferred more and more the day of liberation.

At the end of April or the beginning of May—I do not remember precisely—I decided to go home. I knew that the city was surrounded by soldiers who had orders to shoot deserters on the spot. For this reason I used a little-known back road out of town, hoping to get through unmolested. But, as I walked out of a railroad underpass, two soldiers were standing at their posts, and for a moment the situation was extremely critical for me. Thank God that they, too, had had their fill of war and did not want to become murderers. Still, they had to find an excuse to let me go. Because of an injury I had my arm in a sling, and so they said: “Comrade, you are wounded. Move on!” In this way I came home unhurt. Sitting at the table were some of the English Sisters whom my sister knew well. They were poring over a map and trying to determine when we could finally count on the Americans’ arrival. When I walked in, they thought that the presence of a soldier would be a sure protection for the house, but of course the opposite was the case. In the course of the next few days there lodged with us, first, a sergeant major of the air force, an agreeable Catholic from Berlin, who, following a strange logic we could not understand, still believed in the victory of the “German Reich.” My father, who argued extensively with him on this matter, was finally able to win him over to the other side. Then two SS men were given shelter in our house, which made the situation doubly dangerous. They could not fail to see that I was of military age, and so they began to make inquiries about my status. It was a known fact that a number of soldiers who had left their units had already been hanged from trees by SS men. Besides, my father could not help voicing all his ire against Hitler to their faces, which as a rule should have had deadly consequences for him. But a special angel seemed to be guarding us, and the two disappeared the next day without having caused any mischief.

The Americans finally arrived in our village. Even though our house lacked all comfort, they chose it as their headquarters. I was identified as a soldier, had to put back on the uniform I had already abandoned, had to raise my hands and join the steadily growing throng of war prisoners whom they were lining up on our meadow. It especially cut my good mother’s heart to the quick to see her boy and the rest of the defeated army standing there, exposed to an uncertain fate, prisoners under the custody of heavily armed Americans. We had hopes of being released soon, but Father and Mother quickly put together a number of things that could be useful for the road ahead, and I myself slipped a big empty notebook and a pencil into my pocket—which seemed a most impractical choice, but this notebook became a wonderful companion to me, because day by day I could enter into it thoughts and reflections of all kinds. I even tried my hand at Greek hexameters. During three days of marching, we advanced on the empty expressway in a column moving toward Bad Aibling that was gradually becoming endless. The American soldiers liked especially to take pictures of us, the youngest ones, and also of the oldest, in order to take home with them souvenirs of the defeated army and the woeful condition of its personnel. Then for a few days we lay about in an open field at the military airport of Bad Aibling, until we were shipped off to an area of enormous farmlands near Ulm, where about fifty thousand prisoners had been brought. The magnitude of these numbers apparently taxed the abilities of the Americans themselves. Until the end of our captivity, we slept outdoors. Our rations consisted of one ladleful of soup and a little bread per day. A few fortunate individuals had brought a tent with them into the prisoner-of-war camp. When, after a period of good weather, the rains started, “tent clubs” began to be formed for primitive protection against the inclemency of the weather. In front of us, at the very horizon, rose the majestic contours of the Ulm cathedral. Day after day the sight of it was for me like a consoling proclamation of the indestructible humaneness of faith. In the camp itself, moreover, numerous initiatives were undertaken to lend help. There were a few priests present who now celebrated Holy Mass every day in the open air. Those who came were not exactly a huge crowd, but they were grateful indeed. Theological students in their final semesters, and also academicians of different backgrounds (jurists, art historians, philosophers), began to meet formally, so that a wide-ranging program of conferences developed that brought some structure to our empty days. Real knowledge was imparted, and slowly friendships began to grow across the different blocks of the camp. We lived without a clock, without a calendar, without newspapers; only through rumors—often strangely distorted and confused—did something of what was happening in the larger world penetrate through the barbed-wire fence into our own separate world. Then, around the beginning of June, if I remember correctly, the releases began, and every new gap in our ranks was a sign of hope. The different occupations determined the order of release: farmers first, and last of all—because the least needed in this situation—students. Quite a few academicians understandably declared themselves to be farmers, and very many suddenly remembered a distant relative or acquaintance in Bavaria in order to be released into that region, because the American sector appeared to be the most secure and promising. Finally it was my turn, too. On June 19, 1945, I had to pass through the various inspections and interrogations, until, overjoyed, I held in my hand the certificate of release that made the end of the war a reality for me, too. We were brought by American trucks to the northern edge of Munich, and then each of us had to fend for himself in finding a way to get home. I teamed up with a young man from Trostberg, in the vicinity of Traunstein, to find our way home together. In three days we hoped to cover the 120 or so kilometers that separated us from our families. We planned to spend the night along the way with farming families, who would also give us a bite to eat. We had passed Ottobrunn when we were overtaken by a truck, powered by wood gas and loaded with milk. Both of us were too shy to signal to it, but the driver stopped on his own and asked us where we were headed. He laughed when we said that Traunstein was our destination, because he worked for a dairy in Traunstein and was now on his way home. So it was that, unexpectedly, I arrived in my home city even before sunset; the heavenly Jerusalem itself could not have appeared more beautiful to me at that moment. I heard praying and singing coming from the church: it was the evening of the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. I did not want to create a disturbance, so I did not go in. Rather, I rushed home as fast as I could. My father could hardly believe it as I suddenly stood there before him, alive and well. My mother and sister were in church. On the way home they learned from some girls that they had seen me rushing by. In my whole life I have never again had so magnificent a meal as the simple one that Mother then prepared for me from the vegetables of her own garden.

Yet something was still missing to make our joy complete. Since the beginning of April there had been no news from my brother. And so a quiet sorrow hung over our house. What an explosion of delight, then, when one hot July day we suddenly heard steps, and the one we had missed for so long suddenly stood there in our midst, with a brown tan from the Italian sun. Full of thanksgiving at his deliverance, he now sat down at the piano and intoned the hymn “Grosser Gott, wir loben dich” [Holy God, we praise thy Name]. The months that followed were full of a sense of newly won freedom, something we were only now learning really to treasure, and this period belongs to the most beautiful memories of my entire life. Little by little all of us who had been strewn so far apart began to gather again. We were continually searching each other out, exchanging recollections and comparing plans for our new life. My brother and I worked with other returnees to make the seminary buildings—so run-down after six years as a military hospital—again usable for their intended purpose. No books could be bought in a Germany that lay desolate and in a total economic shambles. But we could borrow some from the pastor and the seminary and so attempt to take our first steps into the unknown land of philosophy and theology. My brother devoted himself passionately to music, his particular gift. At Christmas we were able to organize a class reunion. Many had fallen in the war, and we who had returned home were all the more grateful for the gift of life and for the hope that again rose high above all destruction.