Keys of This Blood (10 page)

Warsaw was not the only bombshell John Paul lobbed, as he went
rapidly about installing the new spirit of his papacy. By means of his papal style, and taking the mantle of publicity that fell so easily and so usefully around him as an instrument—one of several—he began a series of truly unsettling meetings within the Vatican.

On November 18, he received the dissident French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. Lefebvre had been hit with a severe ecclesiastical Roman sanction in 1976, and had been banned from the papal presence. But here he was, as large as life, spending fully two hours in a private and cordial talk with the new Pope. The message was clear for all those who hated the “retrogressive and destructive conservatism” Lefebvre represented for them. And John Paul was serving notice that he was Pope for all Catholics.

The Pontiff's reception at the Vatican of Donald Coggan, Archbishop of Canterbury and the spiritual head of all Anglicans, spread the net still wider. Coggan was the second Archbishop of Canterbury ever to be received by a reigning pope since the sixteenth century. John Paul's message was clear for all those who hated the liberal, breakaway independence Protestants represented for them: Even those Rome holds to be long-standing heretics remain open to the influence and leadership of the Pope, whose primacy they once rejected.

It quickly became clear as well that John Paul would not confine his message, his influence or his leadership to ecclesiastical matters. Those who had begun to worry that His Holiness intended to insert himself into their temporal affairs were apparently right to do so.

Toward the end of November, the Pope met with four black liberation leaders from sub-Saharan Africa: Oliver Tambo, President of South Africa's African National Congress (ANC). George Silundika of Rhodesia's Zimbabwe Patriotic Front (ZPF) together with ZPF Secretary of Social Services and Transport Kumbirai Kanyan. And Sam Silundika of the Southwest African People's Organization (SWAPO).

It was hardly lost on some who were entrenched in power in and out of the Vatican that John Paul had pointedly and early in his reign decided to meet some of the most powerful challengers to all vested power—including his own. The question in such minds was: How far was this Pope going to go? The rainbow of startling possibilities they began to see was just beginning to form over their heads. One answer to the question “How far?” was given by John Paul himself. He gave it on December 8, a feast day in honor of the Virgin Mary, to whom he had dedicated his papacy.

There has grown up in Rome a papal custom observed each year on this day commemorating the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin
Mother of God. The Pope proceeds sedately by automobile to the Piazza di Spagna, where the statue of the Virgin stands atop a graceful column. He places a basket of roses from the papal gardens at the base of the column. He gives his solemn papal blessings to the crowds in attendance. And then he returns to the Vatican as sedately as he came.

Not so John Paul.

First, he interrupted the drive to the Virgin's statue with a stop in the Via Condotti—Rome's version of posh and trendy Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills—to accept a chalice presented to him as a gift from the Via Condotti merchants. Then, after going on to the Piazza di Spagna and placing the basket of roses at the base of the column, he preceded his papal blessing with a discourse so sweeping and so inconsistent with modern precedent that many there seemed not merely unwilling but literally unable to comprehend it.

He spoke that day of how he viewed human history: “The entire history of man is in fact pervaded by a tremendous struggle against the force of evil in the world…. This Pope desires to commit the Church in a special way to Mary in whom the stupendous and total victory of good over evil, of love over hate, of grace over sin, is achieved….”

He announced that day his new principle of religion: for all Christians, yes, but for all mankind as well. “This Pope commits himself to her [Mary], and to all those whom he serves, and all those who serve him. He commits the Roman Church to her as the token and principle of all the churches in the world in their universal unity.”

So there it was. His thrust would truly be universal. He really would stake a modern-day claim to that universality that had always been asserted by the Church he now headed. Perhaps because no pope had ever spoken of “a universal unity” shared by all the churches of Christianity, the idea was unintelligible for Roman Catholic Churchmen as well as for the leaders of other churches.

Rome's Communist newspaper,
L'Unità
—the name means unity, but not the brand John Paul had in mind—was quicker off the mark when it came to a clear understanding of the political consequences of such “universal unity” on the lips and as the policy and driving force of a Roman Catholic pope. Such a “universal unity,”
L'Unità
warned, over which this Roman Pope would obviously claim primacy, clearly implied “an interference in the internal affairs of the USSR whose Russian Orthodox Church belongs to no pope.”

L'Unità
seemed almost alone, however, in its trenchant willingness to look John Paul and his policy straight in the eye. As Christmas 1978 approached, many newspapers appeared content to concentrate on another
sort of papal first in John Paul's Vatican: an all-Polish Christmas feast was described in succulent detail. The barszcz; the small stuffed pastries called pierogi; the roast pork; the cabbage and kielbasa and cake: all received lighthearted and sometimes hilarious attention.

With the turn of the new year, 1979, John Paul began in earnest to flesh out his early statement about starting “anew on the road of history and of the Church.” In initiatives that were highly visible and depended solely on him for their success and effect, his earlier references to the role of his papacy within the scope of international affairs became a central focus of his most public activity.

On January 9, John Paul's personal representative, Antonio Cardinal Samore of the Vatican's Secretariat of State, succeeded in a dicey bit of international diplomacy at which even the Queen's government in England had failed. At issue was a question of war and peace between two of South America's most important countries, Argentina and Chile. Those two had fought bloody wars before, and were seemingly willing to go at it again—this time over the possession of the three islands, Nueva, Picton and Lennox, in the strategically important Beagle Channel.

After what amounted to extensive shuttle diplomacy that took him back and forth between the capital cities of Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile, Samore at last persuaded the two governments to send their negotiators to the neutral grounds of nearby Montevideo, Uruguay. There, under Samore's guidance, foreign ministers Carlos W. Pastor of Argentina and Hernan Cubillos of Chile signed an agreement pledging both countries to demilitarize the disputed area, and to submit to binding arbitration that would be conducted by John Paul's papal envoys.

What stood out as the fascinating element in this Latin American venture were two things. First, that John Paul was willing to commit himself and his prestige in an international arena at the very outset of his pontificate. And second, that without politicking of any kind, but solely because of the religious and psychological prestige of John Paul and his Vatican, two nations backed off from political claims so intense and so laden with history and emotion that war had seemed the inevitable recourse.

On January 24, John Paul dramatically underscored the worldwide ambit he had in mind for exactly that type of apolitical intervention by his unconventional papacy. He met that day in the Vatican with the Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko. The Pontiff spent nearly two hours in private face-to-face discussion in fluent Russian with the man the Soviets had nicknamed the “Icy Survivor.”

Western diplomats who had dealt with Gromyko had always been impressed—sometimes
frightened—by the cluster of talents he had displayed in negotiations, and by his near-miraculous political agility in surviving nearly forty years of Soviet intrigue and other vagaries of Kremlin life. John Paul, too, was impressed. In answer to a query about what he thought of Gromyko in comparison to all the other diplomats who had dutifully trooped through his private study in the first months of his pontificate, the Pope was undiplomatically candid: “He's the only horse shod on all four feet.”

Of more concern for Western governments, perhaps, was Gromyko's interest in Pope John Paul. Gromyko rarely spent that amount of time with any individual statesman. The question in embassies and cabinet rooms and chanceries was: What on earth had they discussed for two hours, this unpredictable Roman Pope and this wiliest of Soviet diplomats? Beyond Gromyko's reference to John Paul after their meeting as “a man with a worldview,” the Soviet gave no hint of what had passed between the two of them. Characteristically, it was the Pope, sometime later, who spoke frankly with reporters.

“I welcome any criticism from Communist officials,” John Paul said, adding that he and Gromyko had discussed “the prospects for world peace.”

Far from satisfying the questions, the Pope's remarks raised concern in certain government and diplomatic quarters to a higher pitch. Why on earth would Gromyko discuss matters of “world peace”—matters, in other words, that were exclusively of a political and geopolitical nature—with this Pope who hailed from the Polish backwater? For that matter, why would the Pope of Rome discuss them with this Soviet man?

It was still January of 1979 when, with such questions hanging in the air of international diplomacy, John Paul gave the surest sign that he would not merely set a grand new papal tone for others to pick up. He would not merely say what was to be done by means traditionally used by popes and then leave it to his hierarchy and the faithful to get it done.

That signal was John Paul's first trip to Mexico, widely covered by the media, from January 25 to 30. That trip did begin to reveal something about what the world beyond the Vatican and Rome could expect from the reign of John Paul II. But it demonstrated again that commentators were not prepared for so radical a change as was even then under way, and certainly not for one so quick in coming.

Already well behind the new pace and the new course being set by the Pontiff, the eighteen hundred reporters and commentators assigned to cover this papal trip assumed that the Pope wanted simply to counteract the spread of Marxism—a recognized target of Vatican and Roman
Catholic opposition, after all—among his clergy and people in that part of the world.

It was admittedly difficult for those covering the trip not to be beguiled by what seemed to be this Pope's public relations instincts, already in full swing during the ten-and-a-half-hour flight from Rome across the Atlantic. Passing over the Azores, John Paul sent his blessing by radio to the Portuguese living there. Flying over the island of Puerto Rico, he chatted with President Jimmy Carter by radio.

Not even his opening words—“I am come as a traveler of peace and hope”—spoken during a one-day stopover (January 25–26) in Santo Domingo, were seen as pointing to the new role this Pope had chosen for himself.

It was only to be expected, after all, that he would present himself at this gateway to the Americas as the embodiment of five hundred years of Christianity in the Western Hemisphere. Referring to the fact that Santo Domingo was the selfsame Hispaniola where Columbus had first set foot in 1493, John Paul offered the reminder that “here the first Mass was celebrated, the first cross was placed.”

However, speaking later to a quarter of a million people gathered in Santo Domingo's Plaza de Independencia, the Pope began to speak, not of some self-satisfied continuation of old ways, but of something like a revolution for which he wanted to prepare as many as would listen to him. “The present period of human history requires a revived dimension of faith, in order to communicate to today's people the perennial message of Christ adapted to the realistic conditions of life.”

Later, in the Cathedral of Santa María la Menor, the oldest cathedral in the Americas, built of limestone blocks in the early 1500s, John Paul carried the point further and again applied its pressure to more than his own Roman Catholics. “All Christians,” he declared, “and all peoples must commit themselves to construct a more just, humane and habitable world, which does not close itself in, but which opens itself to God.”

This combination of traditional religious devotion to the Mass and to the Cross of Christ, on the one hand, and allusions to sweeping geopolitical intentions, on the other, had much the same effect in the world press as John Paul's December 8 commitment to “universal unity.” Even seasoned observers were simply not able to take it in.

Things went much the same way in Mexico. Commentators and reporters expected the Pope to talk with his bishops. And they expected his remarks about Marxism and religion. A pope is supposed to do that sort of thing.

But now, perhaps, they had even come to expect the same freewheeling
personal spontaneity that had so endeared John Paul to the people of Italy. And sure enough, everyone loved the exotic touch in his meetings with the Indians and
campesinos
in Monterrey and Guadalajara. He kissed babies and embraced invalids, led crowds amiably in their spontaneous chant, as enthusiastic as for some home-game football match: “Papa! Papa! Rah-rah-rah!” He joined happy crowds in singing a popular Mexican song. He donned all the hats he was offered—a peasant's straw sombrero, a broad-brimmed ranchero's hat, a feathered Indian headdress. He joined eighty thousand in singing Beethoven's “Ode to Joy.”

Given that beguiling dimension of John Paul's performance, most journalists gave the world a folkloric, if not folksy, view of John Paul's entire stay in Mexico. They did, of course, report the Pontiff's conversation of nearly two hours with Mexico's President López Portillo, who, though born a Catholic, described himself as “a Hegelian.” And they reported that López Portillo took the Holy Father to visit the President's mother and sister in the private chapel of their home.