The End and the Beginning Read online

  ALSO BY GEORGE WEIGEL

  Tranquillitas Ordinis: The Present Failure and Future Promise of American Catholic Thought on War and Peace

  Catholicism and the Renewal of American Democracy

  American Interests, American Purpose: Moral Reasoning and U.S. Foreign Policy

  Freedom and Its Discontents: Catholicism Confronts Modernity

  Just War and the Gulf War (with James Turner Johnson)

  The Final Revolution: The Resistance Church and the Collapse of Communism

  Soul of the World: Notes on the Future of Public Catholicism

  Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II

  The Truth of Catholicism: Ten Controversies Explored

  The Courage To Be Catholic: Crisis, Reform, and the Future of the Church

  Letters to a Young Catholic

  The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God

  God’s Choice: Pope Benedict XVI and the Future of the Catholic Church

  Faith, Reason, and the War Against Jihadism: A Call to Action

  Against the Grain: Christianity and Democracy, War and Peace

  John Paul II in Częstochowa, June 1983. (L’Osservatore Romano)

  Copyright © 2010 by George Weigel

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Doubleday Religion, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  www.doubledayreligion.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the DD colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Weigel, George.

  The end and the beginning: Pope John Paul II—the victory of freedom, the last years, the legacy/George Weigel. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. John Paul II, Pope, 1920–2005. I. Title.

  BX1378.5.W44 2010

  282.092—DC22 2010005173

  eISBN: 978-0-307-71586-9

  v3.1

  In Memoriam

  Robert Charles Susil

  1974–2010

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  A BRIEF NOTE ON PRONUNCIATION

  Prologue

  The Millennial Pope

  A pope of many surprises • Roots • The impact of Vatican II • Evangelical papacy • Global witness

  PART ONE

  NEMESIS

  Karol Wojtyła vs. Communism 1945–1989 Chapter One

  Opening Gambits

  Poland’s fate • The rigors of Stalinism • A leader of consequence • A new way of ministry • Making arguments for freedom

  Chapter Two

  Defensor Civitatis

  A bishop on the front lines • The first years of the Vatican Ostpolitik • Target: Wojtyła • A new archbishop swindles the regime • “Disintegrating” the Catholic Church • In defense of the rights of all • A very dangerous man

  Chapter Three

  Confrontation

  A Polish pope • Moles in the Vatican • Nine days to change the world • The rise of Solidarity • The mark of Cain • Diplomats and stability • A state at war with a nation

  Chapter Four

  Victory

  Solidarity goes underground • An attempt at blackmail • Restoring hope • Martyrdom • Sowing seeds of freedom • The Revolution of 1989 • Evaluating the Ostpolitik • The man in the pivot

  Photo Inserts 1

  PART TWO

  KENOSIS

  The Last Years of Pope John Paul II

  2000–2005 Chapter Five

  The Great Jubilee of 2000: Up to Jerusalem

  The meaning of a millennium • At the Holy Door • On pilgrimage with Abraham and Moses • The cleansing of conscience • To walk where Jesus walked

  Chapter Six

  The Great Jubilee of 2000: Into the Deep

  The fullness of witness • Homage to the Virgin • Priests for the third millennium, and a birthday party • A great procession of young people • The uniqueness of Christ • Putting out the nets for a catch

  Chapter Seven

  The Turbulence of History: 2001–2002

  The mission continues • On the Mars Hill of modernity • Bringing Ukraine into Europe • A world transformed by wickedness • Bishops as evangelists • Scandal and crisis in America • Struggling with Orthodoxy • Triumph in Toronto • The Rosary renewed

  Photo Inserts 2

  Chapter Eight

  Darkening Valley: 2003–2004

  Return of a poet • The Eucharist and the Church • War, again • Europe in crisis • Following John of the Cross • To defend life • Episcopal memories • Among the sick

  Chapter Nine

  The Last Encyclical: January–April 2005

  Cheerful realism • Remembering the twentieth century • Final illness • Along the way of the cross • To the Father’s house •The world’s tribute • John Paul the Great?

  PART THREE

  METANOIA A Disciple’s Life Explored Chapter Ten

  From Inside

  The interior lives of great men • Ongoing conversion • Faith, hope, and love • A man in full • The cardinal virtues • The drama of a cruciform life

  Chapter Eleven

  The Measure of a Pontificate

  A surprising preparation • An unprecedented record • Ten enduring accomplishments • Questions of context • What didn’t go right • The Christian radical and the new humanism

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A BRIEF NOTE ON PRONUNCIATION

  Polish pronunciation, which can seem daunting, is in fact far more regular than English. The native English speaker, having learned the invariable rules of Polish pronunciation, will have an easier time of it with Bialystok, Jasna Góra, and Wadowice than a native Polish speaker—or “American” speaker—trying to figure out Gloucester, Leicester, Slough, Worcester, and so forth.

  The following rules and examples should be helpful.

  The letters ą and ę are pronounced as a nasal aw and en in English.

  C is pronounced as ts in English.

  Ch is pronounced as a hard h in the Scottish “loch.”

  Cz is pronounced as ch in “church.”

  Dz is pronounced as j in “jeans.”

  I is pronounced as ee in English.

  J is pronounced as Y in English.

  Ł and ł are pronounced as W in English.

  Ó and ó are pronounced as “oo” in the English “cool.”

  Ś is pronounced as s in the English “sure.”

  Sz is pronounced as the English sh.

  W is pronounced as V in English.

  Y is pronounced as a y in the English “myth.”

  The accent in Polish is almost always on the second-to-last syllable.

  Thus …

  Częstochowa is pronounced Chens-toe-HOE-vah.

  Dziwisz is pronounced JEE-vish.

  Kraków is pronounced KRA-koov.

  Malecki is pronounced Mah-LETS-kee.

  Rybicki is pronounced Rih-BEETS-kee.

  Stanisław is pronounced Stan-IS-wahv.

  Środowisko is pronounced Shroe-doe-VEES-koe.

  Wałęsa is pronounced Vah-WHEN-sah.

  Wawel is pronounced VAH-vel.

  Wojtyła is pronounced Voy-TEE-wah.

  Wujek is pronounced VOO-yek.

  Wyszyński is pronounced Vih-SHIN-skee.

  The surnames of married men and women are masculine and feminine, thus “Piotr Malecki” and “Teresa Malecka
.” These have been retained, but for the sake of simplicity the masculine plural form (“the Maleckis”) is used when referring to couples together rather than the Polish plural, which in this instance would be “the Maleccy.”

  PROLOGUE

  The Millennial Pope

  As March gave way to April in the spring of 2005 and the world kept vigil outside the apostolic palace in Rome, the pontificate of Pope John Paul II, then drawing to a poignant end, was already being described as one of the most consequential in two millennia of Christian history.

  Eight months after his election to the papacy on October 16, 1978, John Paul had ignited a revolution of conscience in his native Poland—a moral challenge to the Cold War status quo that helped set in motion the international drama that would culminate in the collapse of European communism in 1989 and the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Millennial Pope’s impact on the world was not limited to his native region, however. Over the first two decades of the pontificate, John Paul also played important roles in democratic transitions in venues ranging from Central and South America to East Asia, even as he established himself as a universal moral witness to the dignity of the human person and the world’s principal exponent of the universality of human rights. As he neared the end of his earthly pilgrimage, John Paul II—of whom the world knew very little at the beginning of his papacy—had become the singular embodiment of the trials, tragedies, and triumphs of the second half of the twentieth century for billions of human beings.

  His impact on the Catholic Church had been just as dramatic as his influence on world affairs. Over two and a half decades, he had reinvigorated the Church spiritually and intellectually, restoring a sense of the adventure of discipleship for many Catholics and constantly reminding the entire Church that it did not exist for its own sake, but for its evangelical mission: to proclaim the Gospel of God’s saving love for humanity throughout the world. Vigorously deploying the tools of the modern communications and transportation revolutions, John Paul II had given new meaning to the papal title “Universal Pastor of the Church,” bringing the ministry of the Bishop of Rome to the Church in a series of papal pilgrimages inside Italy and around the globe that was unprecedented in history. One of the signature events of those travels, itself an astonishment to many, were World Youth Days in which the Pope confounded the expectations of both secure secularists and insecure churchmen by demonstrating that young people from the developed world, the formerly communist world, and the developing world all responded enthusiastically to his forthright challenge to live lives of heroic virtue.

  Equally surprising to some had been John Paul II’s robust commitment to the quest for Christian unity, his determination to forge a new relationship between Catholicism and Judaism, his investment in interreligious dialogue with the increasingly restive worlds of Islam, and his interest in building bridges between religious faith and science. At the same time as he was giving new meaning to the traditional papal title of “pontiff”—which derives from the Latin word for “bridge”—and even as he was reinventing the papacy as an office of evangelical witness rather than bureaucratic management, John Paul II was creating the most intellectually consequential body of papal teaching in centuries, calling the Catholic Church to deepen its commitment to its doctrinal and moral traditions while engaging modernity’s critique of revealed religion and classic morality. Perhaps most strikingly, John Paul had proposed a fresh reading of Catholicism’s sexual ethic in which faithful and fruitful marital love was understood as an icon of the interior life of the Holy Trinity.

  In his intellectual method—putting classic truths of faith and morals into rigorous dialogue with contemporary understandings of the human person—as in other facets of his pontificate, John Paul II had been a sign of contradiction as well as a “witness to hope,” as he described himself at the United Nations in 1995.

  Revered by hundreds of millions of people, many of them neither Catholic nor Christian, he had been sharply criticized by many Catholic intellectuals and activists throughout his papacy, which his critics (who included priests, religious sisters, and bishops) deemed one of “restoration”—an abandonment of the commitments the Catholic Church had undertaken at the Second Vatican Council, held from 1962 through 1965.

  A champion of freedom who had done as much as anyone to liberate his Slavic brethren from the totalitarian yoke, he was resented by some for his insistence that freedom is not a neutral faculty of “choice,” and that freedom rightly lived is always freedom tethered to moral truth and ordered to goodness.

  A genuine intellectual with a profound reverence for the life of the mind, he was accused by some of being an opponent of academic freedom; a pastor with more than five decades of experience in helping men and women grapple with the ambiguities and temptations of the human condition, he was not infrequently charged with being insensitive and authoritarian. Yet even his critics had to concede that he had become a global moral reference point—a man whose thought mattered, even to those who opposed it and opposed the Church he led.

  How had he come to this point? What were the influences that had formed this unique and striking personality—a man who, while thoroughly grounded in a particular faith, had come to exercise a kind of universal fatherhood that touched hearts, minds, and souls across the spectrum of human experience and conviction?

  The story of the pre-papal life of Karol Wojtyła and the first twenty-two years of his papacy is told in Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II, to which this volume is both complement and sequel.1 In the years since that book’s publication, information has become available that sheds new light on the drama of Karol Wojtyła’s forty-year struggle against communism—and communism’s forty-year effort to impede Wojtyła’s work and destroy his reputation. It is a striking tale, for Poland’s communist authorities, their masters in Moscow, and their allies throughout the Soviet bloc long regarded Karol Wojtyła as a mortal enemy—and, after his election as pope, as a mortal threat to the communist position in central and eastern Europe, to the communist project throughout the Third World, and indeed to the very survival of communism itself. ln these judgments they were not mistaken, although they were often wrong in their conception of Wojtyła’s strategy and in their reading of his mind.

  Vast human and financial resources were expended in the communist war against Karol Wojtyła and, after his election as pope, against the Church he led. Those efforts ultimately proved futile, for the weapons Wojtyła deployed were weapons whose impact communist tactics could not blunt. Yet the communists tried, hard, to destroy his work and his authority, first in Kraków, later when he came to Rome. Many remain convinced that these efforts included the assassination attempt of May 13, 1981; in any event, the war against Wojtyła included an extensive campaign to suborn, blackmail, and recruit as informants his associates in Poland and in Rome. These clandestine enterprises were frequently coordinated by the intelligence agencies of the Soviet bloc, with all information gathered by Warsaw Pact intelligence services shared with the KGB in Moscow, where copied records of these operations likely remain (and remain closed to scholars).

  Many records of the communist war against Karol Wojtyła and against Pope John Paul II were destroyed during and immediately after the communist crack-up in 1989, but a vast archive that had only begun to be explored in the first half decade after John Paul’s death remained. Careful analysis of even a modest selection of these primary source materials—all of which were originally classified, and some of which were considered so sensitive that they were only available to the most senior communist party and communist secret police officials—yields a much richer and more detailed portrait of how and why communism went to war against Karol Wojtyła, when he was archbishop of Kraków and after he became Bishop of Rome. These materials also illustrate how communist governments and secret intelligence services penetrated the Vatican and sought to use diplomatic contacts with the Holy See as means to advance their interests (which could hav
e been expected) and to strengthen their efforts to penetrate the highest levels of Catholic leadership, particularly in the Vatican itself (a process to which many senior Vatican officials seemed largely oblivious). The records of the KGB, the Polish Służba Bezpieczeństwa (or SB), and the East German Stasi also offer a window into the mind-set of Vatican diplomacy, even as they confirm the intuition that John Paul II and his diplomats often had dramatically different views of the strategy and tactics appropriate for meeting the communist challenge.

  Before telling that previously untold story (which is Part One of the present volume), before accounting for the last six years of the life of John Paul II (which follows in Part Two), and before attempting to assess the man and his accomplishments in detail (Part Three), a brief synopsis of Wojtyła’s pre-papal life, and of the accomplishments of the first two decades of John Paul’s pontificate, is in order.

  SON OF POLAND

  Karol Józef Wojtyła was born on May 18, 1920, a member of the first generation of Poles to be born in a free country since the late eighteenth century. Wojtyła’s mother, the former Emilia Kaczorowska, died one month before her second son’s ninth birthday; his older brother, Edmund, a doctor, died in 1932 after contracting scarlet fever from a patient he was treating. Thus the principal figure in the childhood and adolescence of the boy known as Lolek to his family and friends was his father, the elder Karol Wojtyła: “the Captain,” as he was known to everyone in Lolek’s hometown of Wadowice (located several dozen kilometers southwest of Kraków), for he was a retired army officer. He was also a man of profound Catholic faith and granitelike integrity, whose example of manly piety left a lasting impression on his son.