Keys of This Blood (18 page)

In spite of all that, however, John Paul knew that in terms of diplomatic power he was seen as an anomaly among traditional world leaders. Most of the 116 full-fledged embassies on Vatican Hill are, in the internationally recognized formula, accredited to the “Holy See.” In practical terms, Karol Wojtyla, as Pope John Paul II, is that Holy See. Neither his institutional organization nor his investment portfolio—and certainly not religious reverence or agreement with the Pope on moral matters or political ideals—dictates the necessity of maintaining those diplomatic missions, but simply hardheaded realism.

Most of those diplomatic stations are run by decidedly non-Catholic and often predominantly non-Christian states. Not all of them by far are benign either to religion in general or to Roman Catholicism in particular. Yet while all of them, from major nations to pint-sized principalities even smaller than the Vatican, are host to John Paul's reciprocal diplomatic representatives, even the weakest national government in the most primitive of nations can, at least physically, cripple local sections of his worldwide organization.

In fact, at the very moment of his visit to Poland, several had taken it into their heads to do just that. And in doing so, they had demonstrated that as world leader, if that was what he claimed to be, John Paul had no military alliances to protect him or his interests. He had no economic or industrial punch to use as a retaliatory threat. He had no preponderance in international law or in the assemblies of nations to hold his attackers to account. He could not even call upon any preeminent scientific or
academic prowess that would command the respect of Poland's Communists, or any other regime for that matter.

Nevertheless, it was not lost on Moscow or on Warsaw that he had not gone to Poland as a weak supplicant asking for favors. Pilgrim though he might call himself, he had carried no beggar's bowl, had waited upon no alms or contributions or official indulgence.

Instead, once he had stepped off his papal plane, everything he had done had spoken volubly and dramatically of a peculiar kind of power. He had behaved everywhere as if he was possessed of, or heralded, a force to be reckoned with, a force his peers in government could neither ignore nor maltreat with impunity. This they seemed to sense.

For Warsaw and for its neighbors on every side, John Paul had demonstrated that the very papal persona of Karol Wojtyla embodied the unshakable Roman Catholic persuasion that the papacy, older by far than any secular government, and certainly more durable than the Marxist “revolution” of 1917, would be alive and vibrant long after the “Polish experiment” was reduced to a few pages of recorded history.

No doubt some Poles may and do choose to become atheistic Marxists and anticlerical Communists. But in the presence of Peter's 263rd successor, and in the face of the total intertwining of Roman Catholicism with Polish nationalism, such Poles in particular fall victim to what Lord Acton cleverly called the “millennia jealousy”—the deep and helpless frustration of those who had thought to face and outlast such millennial force as John Paul represented, but who see all too clearly that they have no realistic chance of making it around the next curve of history's road.

In Poland, John Paul had successfully staked out his first strong claim to be heard as a judging voice, and not merely in an ecclesiastical setting—in a papal letter or a sermon from a church pulpit. He had entered the arena of public and civil and political affairs in a segment of the world claimed as the turf of superpower. He had held up in despicable detail the total lack of justice and popular support of that regime. He had exposed the local Communist leadership as not merely unloved, but as inconsequential. More important for his adversaries, East and West, this seemingly unpapal Pope had redefined power in unexpected, irresistible terms; and then he had taken that power in his two hands and marched off with it.

In the aftermath of the drama that had been played out, it was neither in Warsaw nor Moscow nor the Vatican, but primarily among Western
commentators and observers, that the peculiarly Slavic ironies, and the sometimes almost mystic overtones of the give-and-take that had passed between John Paul and his reluctant hosts, remained puzzling for some time. A few Western reports and commentaries did contrast the Pontiff's reception as head of state with his proclaimed role as pilgrim. But they seemed unable to reconcile the two. Perhaps
The New York Times
summarized as well as anyone the early Western assessment of the strange endeavors of this unconventional Pope at this stage in his pontificate: “The visit of John Paul to Poland does not threaten the political order of the nation or of Eastern Europe.” If only the Times editorialist could have had a crystal ball for 1989.

Not for much longer, surmised John Paul's advisers among themselves, would the real successes of the papal visit to Poland be dimmed, either by Western misunderstanding or by the faint praises of Polish government spokesmen conceding to the Pontiff the puny stature of an “outstanding personality … a great humanist.”

For the Roman assessment of John Paul's pilgrimage to Poland was this: Without a single armored division at his command—a factor that would always emphasize his power for some, and throw doubt upon it for others—John Paul had taken on not merely a national regime but an international system of government. He had violated with impunity all the taboos imposed by a rigid dictatorship of Big Brother. He had opened the first effective challenge to the political order of the Soviet satellite system, and of the Soviet Union itself. Just as he had said he would in his earliest speeches after his papal election, he had indeed called for the beginnings of “a new order” in Central Europe, and in the international, political and economic order enlaced with it.

He had, in short, within eight months of his election as Pope, made his first entry into the high-stakes competition to which he had committed his papacy. And he had emerged from it with the stature of an international figure.

“I am a giver,” John Paul once said of himself. “I touch forces that expand the mind.”

It was true. Some special magnetism that had been apparent even in his earliest days in the papacy seemed to follow him everywhere. As Pope, he had been heard calling for Poland's free integration not only into a free Europe but into an integrated world.

His voice was that of a Polish bishop become Roman Pope. But, if he had his way, the message was of one who would be regarded by increasing millions in many lands over decades to come as the patriarch of that integration.

Pope John Paul's foray into Poland was deeply successful in several ways. It had been performed with such precision that, with no crude revolutionary onslaught upon the political and security systems in place, the Pontiff had nonetheless forced powerful and appealing alternatives into the forefront of the arena. Not only had Poland and the entire Eastern bloc been compelled to look those alternatives straight in the eye. The Western bloc, which had long acquiesced for its own benefit in the status quo, was forced to face those alternatives as well. That could only have profound and lasting consequences on every side.

Equally important was the fact that, for millions upon millions of people, John Paul had given those powerful and appealing alternatives a human face. The face of Christ's Vicar on Earth.

Nevertheless, and though the drumbeat of publicity that attended his every step in Poland had been all but deafening, it proved difficult in their own din for the hordes of journalists and commentators to catch up with the mind-set of this Pope. It sometimes seemed to John Paul's aides that the press was watching a bravura performance whose substance remained a mystery for them.

Right enough, a certain dramatic slant came through in the Polish coverage. But the most that came from that was the portrait of an exiled and now powerfully placed son of
Polonia Sacra
who had returned for a high noon face-off, a personal challenge Vatican-style, with the Soviet-controlled persecution that had blanketed Karol Wojtyla's homeland for nearly thirty-five years.

Even at the most favorable level, and as John Paul's travels multiplied far beyond Poland and far beyond 1979, they were understood and presented in the media for as long as possible, and commented upon by
experts, as no more than pastoral visits by a caring Pope to troubled parts of his Church. The wider and deeper confrontation John Paul had in mind seemed stubbornly to escape the torrent of public reportage and expert commentary.

Perhaps there was a tinge of wishful thinking in such commentary, or perhaps some other powerful force drove it along its own lines. In any case, memories seemed very short. It had not been so long since Cardinal Malula stood like a symbolic spokesman for the world, a prophet of sorts, in St. Peter's Square that October day in 1978 and demanded that “Everything must change!” Yet now that the change had truly begun—now that there was no longer to be a Pope echoing the familiar tones and behavior of his predecessors who had been content or constrained to wait upon history—everyone seemed to reject the idea as unintelligible or indigestible or invisible.

This mentality was to pursue John Paul for years. In September 1989, 1.1 million young people—in their quasi totality ranging in age between sixteen and twenty-five—came of their own accord to greet John Paul at St. James de Compostela in Spain. No television or radio networks, no government agency, no international PR company promoted the visit. There was no television coverage of that huge gathering. Why not?

It was as if it was too difficult—and for some, within and outside the Church, too unwelcome—to recognize that in John Paul II they were not dealing with anything like a traditional papal mind. And they were certainly not dealing, as some appeared determined to think, with a provincial cleric at play in a worldwide ecclesiastical maze.

What they were dealing with was a pope who had come to the papacy already fitted with a supremely innovative mind. A man who had been schooled by long experience, and by such tough and wily Polish Churchmen as Cardinal Sapieha and Cardinal Wyszynski, at a unique, subtle, unremitting and successful confrontation with brute power. They were dealing with a pope who had emerged from the crucible called Poland, where religious reality and moral justice had survived centuries of daily warfare with every changing face of oppression. They were dealing with a man whose intent was to leave behind all that was done and over in the papacy, the Church and the world, and take with him as many as he could, to span the quantum leap to a fast-approaching new world order.

The time finally did have to come, of course, for a different range of reactions to set in.

It began to be noted that, though John Paul's trips multiplied, there remained an unexplainable absence of any changes such as might have been expected, though dreaded, if the Pope's intent and motive had to
do with pastoral reform. After a public humiliation accompanied by sacrilege in Sandinista Nicaragua in 1983, after being insolently insulted during his American visit—and with the connivance of the American bishops—after he was burned in effigy and had his “popemobile” spattered with excrement by Dutch Catholics in 1986, there were no witch hunts, no vindictive appointments, no retaliatory actions. In strict law, he should have reacted punitively. He bore an office, and his was the duty to defend its rights and prerogatives. He did nothing.

Then, too, there was the curious fact that, as John Paul ranged ever more widely throughout the world, he was obviously throwing a far wider net than was needed for his Roman Catholics. He spoke not only with them and not only with Christians.

One day it would be five resident swamis in Los Angeles, and on another it would be animist priests in Togoland. Or maybe it would be Buddhists in Thailand; Parsis and Hindus and Muslims and Jains in India; or Protestants in South Carolina; or Humanists in Switzerland; or the Anglican Royal Family in England. This Pope clearly showed that he wanted to meet them all, talk with them, pray over and with them, bless and be liked by them.

If such papal behavior was strange, the reaction of some of the most interested commentators was at least as strange. To be sure, the publicity tone changed; but understanding did not deepen. The general approach seemed not so much to explain the extraordinary—for such papal behavior as this was nothing if not extraordinary—but to explain it away as a new act in a sort of continuing papal road show.

“This Pope,” commented one U.S. writer, “is tremendously at home with crowds.”

An Irish editorial commented on the Pontiff's “natural flair” for “the public relations gesture.”

The
Times
of London summed up its view of John Paul's visit to France in 1980 as though it were covering some costly civic parade. “On the whole,” said the
Times
, “the Pope was well received. But it is to be doubted that the outlay of expenses will be justified very soon.”

Some accused John Paul of traveling to escape a Vatican bureaucracy they were certain he found unbearable, and of being a bad administrator incapable of governing his Church. “We have, in fact, a simple Polish Bishop,” commented one highly placed Roman official, “who remains merely a Bishop at heart and who craves simple, pastoral work. He's not papal timber.”

Others saw a kind of perverse triumphalism of retrenchment and defeat in the papal travels. “The Pope,” declared one American Protestant
scholar in a global masterpiece of backhanded praise, “is well aware that, in the next century, Catholicism will survive only in Third World countries. Catholicism has always flourished only in poor populations of low educational quality. The sophisticated West can take Catholicism's narrowness no longer. The Pope realizes that.”

On the whole, then, the general feeling seemed to set in, at a very acceptable level of reporting, that Pope John Paul was simply doing what he did best. You might pick a fight over whether he was escaping from the burden of day-to-day governance of his Church, or over the crueler accusation that he was doing the only thing he was capable of doing. Such quibbling aside, however, it was taken as modern gospel that John Paul II was neither more nor less than a public relations genius. If he could only skip some of his more puritanical and narrow opinions—especially the ones on morality—he could be expected to do no great damage to anyone. In fact, it was generally conceded, in some instances he might even be a rather effective ambassador of good will.