A Triumphal Return
It was like a carnival, a political campaign, a crusade and an enormous Polish wedding all in one. Almost from the moment his Alitalia 727 plane deposited Pope John Paul II in Warsaw and he knelt, in his gleaming white cas sock, to kiss the earth of Poland, his countrymen converged upon him in joyful and dumbfounding millions. Babies, brought to be kissed or blessed. Grandmothers in bandannas. The teenage young flocking to him like rock fans afflicted with Beatlemania. Hard-faced coal miners, pampered by the workers' party, gathering around him by tens of thousands and roaring out the words of the hymn Christus Vincit (Christ Conquers), while the first Polish Pope in the history of the Catholic Church sang right along with them in his fine baritone.
The June air was torn by the peal of church bells, the buzz of helicopters, the crackle of loudspeaker commands, the waves of thundering applause, the melodious drone of old hymns, the murmur of Masses being said, dozens of them, beneath the burning sun of an early Polish summer.
Riding in an open car the Pope rolled through city and town. Spires, lampposts, postmen's bicycles, railroad stations, pretty girls' balconies, all were ablaze with flowers, and the tails of innumerable papal banners, yellow and white, the colors of the Supreme Pontiff from distant Rome, fluttered against a blue sky.
It was a performance unique in the annals of the papacy. In all, John Paul made an astonishing three dozen public appearances. When he took to helicopters, often to go quickly to meet with work-worn peasants, a thousand journalists struggled to follow. Wherever he went, the people had walked and driven for miles, and then stood for hours, shoulder to shoulder, some even dropping in exhaustion, merely to glimpse the man. Most unpontifically, the Roman Pontiff plunged among them, raising children high in the air, throwing a hammerlock on old acquaintances, hugging and blessing the pilgrims.
He seemed to convey always an almost tangible sense of strength and an extraordinary, low-burning joy--joy in adversities endured, joy in the signs of national pride and faith that he saw before him, joy in being a Christian, in being human.
There were sobering moments, too, on this unprecedented journey. At Czestochowa, where the revered painting of the Black Madonna is enshrined, the Pope led half a million pilgrims in an elaborate consecration of Poland and the universal church to Mary, the "Queen of Poland" whose veneration runs deep in the Polish consciousness. On Thursday, caught in a whipsaw of emotions, he went immediately from a fond visit to his picturesque home town of Wadowice to the still standing symbol that epitomizes human evil: Auschwitz. The concentration-camp site, he told a huge, hushed throng, is "the Golgotha of the modern world."
Shedding Vatican rhetoric, he spoke to the people in folksy Polish, just as he sang folk songs and ballads and made bad jokes. One night in Gniezno, after an open-air Mass for 100,000 young people, he began to lead them in a songfest of popular tunes, starting the huge crowd into favorite after favorite. The youngsters pressed him into encore after encore, and would not let him go until finally he picked up the microphone and half sang to them: "Your buses are ready, your buses are ready."
All over the country the people sang and waved and prayed and wept with him, and he sang and waved and wept with them, and they drew power from each other. In Czestochowa, a vast expanse of several hundred thousand worshipers, at a single hand gesture of the Pope, sank to the earth, like a field of instantly scythed wheat, to pray.
Charisma was not the word to describe what had happened. Returning to his homeland for the first time since he was chosen Pope last October, Karol Wojtyla, John Paul II, stirred an outpouring of trust and affection that no political leader in today's world could hope to inspire, let alone command.
If the journey to Poland was a kind of spontaneous show business of the spirit, there were plenty of political overtones. And when the visit was over, it seemed as if the spiritual geopolitics that involve European Communism and Christianity, East and West, church and state, might never again be quite the same. John Paul had a mission on his mind, just as he did in visiting Mexico. There the Pope laid out a clear but complex policy for social action in Latin America and, by extension, for his worldwide church of 700 million. In Poland, the contest between Christ and Marx is far more explicit than in Latin America. Every papal gesture, every deft historical reference had political connotations in this setting. The week saw the first great public outpouring of religious and nationalistic fervor permitted since the Communists took command of Eastern Europe. Even though he never once mentioned the Communist Party or the Soviet Union by name, the new Pope was surprisingly blunt in challenging the power of the Kremlin on the issue of human freedom.
In Poland, the visible contrast between the church and the ruling regime, even after it has been in power for more than 30 years, was devastating, and John Paul took full psychological advantage of it. His message to the 77-member Polish Bishops' Conference and to tightly smiling Party First Secretary Edward Gierek was the same: the church must be free to accomplish its mission in the world.
The papal vision went beyond Poland, and beyond Catholicism. John Paul reached out eloquently to "the Silent Church," the hosts of oppressed congregations in the Soviet orbit that fare worse than Christians in Poland. In one remarkable sermon, the Pope wondered aloud about God's purposes in the election of an East European as the first non-Italian Pope in 455 years. He called himself history's "first Slav Pope," whose succession to the Apostle Peter forms a bond of blood not only with Poles but with other Slavic peoples, including Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Serbs, Croats, Bulgarians, Ukrainians and, most dramatically, Russians --some 220 million Slavs in all. Rhetorically, at least, that included the great Orthodox churches of East Europe. The Pope seemed to envision an eventual pan-European Christian alliance against the secular materialism of both East and West.
It would be sad to believe," he said, "that each Pole and Slav in any part of the world is unable ^ to hear the words of the Pope, this Slav. I hope they hear me." Many did, but no thanks to the Communist state media. Soviet television carried a 30-second clip on the Pope's arrival, but refused to show its audience the hundreds of thousands who turned out to greet him. Darkly, the TV commentator explained that "some circles in the Polish church are trying to use [the visit] for antistate purposes." The Soviet press ran a two-sentence news report. Most of the satellite nations followed Moscow's lead, but Radio Free Europe, the BBC and Voice of America filled the gap, beaming extensive radio coverage of the visit. Yugoslavia's weekly NIN remarked: "It is hard to tell where pastoral work stops and politics begins," while Albania's party daily fumed: "The old desires of all the oppressors, the slaveowners, religionists and Popes to rule in peace are now being crushed" by the working masses.
Poland's own television provided more extensive coverage, but played down the crowd size and response. Meanwhile, officials did their best to belittle the turnout, offering reporters a ridiculously low estimate of 120,000 for one of the Czestochowa Masses. The audiences were "disappointing," one official declared, and Czestochowa's mayor let it be known that he had laid in 400 tons of bread a day to feed 1.5 million visitors and had a lot of it left over.
At the Czestochowa shrine there was one brief scuffle between police and pilgrims. A priest also took the microphone to announce: "Let us pray for those who cannot reach Czestochowa because they are stopped." The regime denied the persistent reports that it was hindering pilgrims in order to cut down the crowds. Supposedly, roadblocks were set up to prevent traffic jams in the cities, but a Western diplomat ran into one a full 19 miles away from Cracow before the Pope's arrival there. Church officials reported to friends that in various cases the buses for pilgrims that were promised in order to ease road congestion had never been delivered.
Even before his welcoming Mass in Warsaw, John Paul issued his first challenge to the Polish regime. It was presented in the guise of a formal greeting to Party Secretary Gierek. "It is [the church's] mission to make man more confident, more courageous, conscious of his rights and duties, socially responsible, creative and useful. For this activity the church does not desire privileges, but only and exclusively what is essential for the accomplishment of its mission."
Poland gives the church far more leeway than most Communist countries, but the Pope and his bishops want fundamental guarantees: freedom to publish books and periodicals, to broadcast, to build churches and name bishops without interference, the opportunity for Christians to earn jobs and degrees and educate their children in the faith without discrimination. The Pope told Gierek that church-state detente in Poland could be "one of the elements in the ethical and international order in Europe and the modern world, an order that flows from respect for the rights of the nation and for human rights."
A early Sunday morning Mass that the Pope celebrated just before leaving Warsaw brought a convincing demonstration that Polish Catholicism has deep roots among the young. The congregation outside St. Anne's Church consisted of youths, tightly packed into the square and surrounding streets. Here, as elsewhere, people continually passed out from the heat (as high as 93DEG) while the Pope addressed his "children." At last he said that he would bless any crosses that the young congregation had brought. Suddenly thousands of crucifixes of all shapes and sizes were thrust out of the crowd and waved aloft. Said the Pontiff: "I hope you will be faithful to this sign always."
In the continuing heat, the Pope went by helicopter to Gniezno and told the welcoming crowd there with a grin, "It was so hot in Rome that I decided I must come to Poland." It was at Gniezno, where Polish Christendom's first see was established in A.D. 1000, that John Paul made his sweeping opening to the East. The day was Pentecost, the feast marking the birth of the New Testament church, when the Apostles began to speak in a profusion of languages. This miracle of tongues was held as proof of the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the church, and is also interpreted as an early sign of Christianity's future mission to the world.
In that context, John Paul speculated on the ethnic significance of his election as Pope last Oct. 16. "Is it not the intention of the Holy Spirit that this Polish Pope--this Slav Pope--should at this precise moment manifest the spiritual unity of Christian Europe? Although there are two great traditions, that of the West and that of the East, to which it is indebted, through both of them Christian Europe professes 'one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all.' "
The Pope was quoting the Apostle Paul, who in Ephesians 4:5-6 called on first-generation church congregations to overcome their internal divisions. In doing so, he enunciated an ecumenical policy of broad social import. Vatican analysts had already expected that this Pope from the East might seek to heal the 11th century break with the Eastern Orthodox churches more ardently than to mend the 16th century split-off of Protestantism. The Pope's sermon surveyed the centuries of missionary activity in present-day Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and, finally, Soviet Lithuania.
That night a papal sing-along for young people occurred. Before he put aside his prepared text to lead the music, the Pope lectured his audience on Polish Catholic culture. "Be nobly proud of it," he said. "Multiply it. Hand it on to future generations." A bittersweet moment came as John Paul led the young people in a mountaineer's ballad: "Don't you miss your country, your fields and pastures, your valleys and streams?" In the song, the mountaineer cannot return because he has been called to heaven, and no one missed the parallel with "Lolek" Wojtyla, who had been called away to duty in Rome.
The Pope spent three days in the shrine city, Czestochowa, where he led the ceremony of consecration to the Virgin. Inside the fortress-like Jasna Gora (Bright Mountain) monastery is the Black Madonna painting, attributed by legend to St. Luke. "There are people and nations. Mother," the Pontiff prayed, "that I would like to say to you by name. I entrust them to you in silence. I entrust them to you in the way that you know best." Poles believe that prayer to her image by the Jasna Gora monks staved off invading Swedish armies in 1655. Since 1656 Mary has been proclaimed "Queen of Poland," a title that in today's context implies that Polish sovereignty resides beyond the Communist Party.
It is known that John Paul would dearly love to return to Poland a second time in 1982 for the 600th anniversary of the installation of the Black Madonna at Czestochowa, and at the shrine he made a teasing reference to this hope. He said that the Prefect of the Pontifical Household and the Chief of Vatican Protocol were "novices" in Poland but "they must get used to it." These are officials who must accompany a Pope on trips. A return would be subject to another round of negotiations with the regime, and, as the Pope twice suggested during his tour, the Polish government had kept Pope Paul VI from coming to celebrate the millennium of Christianity in Poland in 1966.
In a lighter moment at Czestochowa, John Paul said at a Mass for priests: "In Rome they say the best things the Pope says are not in his prepared texts. You are enjoying yourselves now, but I will have a row later on for being late for my next appointment." The fact that the Pope's Italian staff objected to his ad-libbing and fretted about his getting behind schedule became a standing joke between the Pope and the Polish crowds.
On Monday evening the Pope sat before the shrine listening to the incongruous sound of a Catholic folk-rock band that blasted out We Want God and other religious songs. When the musicale ended, John Paul confessed, "I have a sweet tooth for song and music. This is my Polish sin. Now I must go; otherwise I will lose my image."
The Polish ecclesiastical hierarchy held a nationwide meeting to coincide with the Pope's visit. John Paul's speech to a closed-door session was the most significant statement of his trip. In the Christian-Marxist confrontation, the Pope said, "authentic dialogue must respect the convictions of believers, ensure all the rights of citizens and also the normal conditions for the activity of the church as a religious community to which the vast majority of Poles belong." The dialogue "cannot be easy," he added bluntly, "because it takes place between two concepts of the world that are diametrically opposed."
Underlying the rhetoric lay an important shift in Vatican policy that the new Pope has introduced. Popes John XXIII and Paul VI inaugurated Vatican Ostpolitik in contrast to the policies of Pius XII, the coldest of cold warriors, who even found Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, the venerable Primate of Poland, too soft on Communism. Their theory was that concessions for the Polish church could best be won by high-level negotiations between the Vatican and Warsaw. Now, just as he had done when he was a Polish bishop himself, John Paul was announcing that the Polish church leaders ought to do the bargaining directly.
Before leaving Czestochowa, the Pope demonstrated how completely Poles look to the church rather than to the party for leadership. The regime had balked at John Paul's plan to visit the miners in the industrial heartland of Silesia, presumably because it would have been too explicit an embarrassment to have even the workers eating out of his hand. But he held a Mass for workers at the shrine, which drew a special delegation of miners with czaka (plumed ceremonial hats), their wives in traditional peasant dress with brilliant red bandannas on their heads. The crowd of a quarter-million waved papal and Polish flags, applauded deliriously and several times broke into Sto Lot (May you live 100 years), a traditional song that resembles the refrain, "For he's a jolly good fellow," then kept yelling for more songs. Replied the Pope: "I was the Metropolitan of Cracow too long not to know that the Silesians never get enough." After he arrived at Cracow, his former see, in historic Wawel Cathedral white-clad priests jostled and shoved each other to reach their former superior and kiss his ring.
Thursday morning brought the Pope back to Wadowice (pop. 15,000), where he was born and grew up. The village's central plaza was officially renamed Red Army Square, but the townspeople still call it Market Square. The Pope had a quick snack as he chatted with Monsignor Edward Zacher, the aging priest who was the Pope's first religious instructor. He also went to see the font where he was baptized.
The Pope startled his former neighbors with another new nugget of family information. Said he: "My prayer is for so many people who have died, beginning with my parents, my brother and my sister, whom I never knew because she died before I was born." Papal aides later explained that the girl, born three years before the Pope, lived only one day. His mother Emilia died years after that while giving birth to a second daughter, who was stillborn.
Only 25 miles away lay Auschwitz and the adjoining concentration camp, Birkenau. The Pope visited the cell of a beatified Franciscan priest, Martyr Maximilian Kolbe, who offered his own life to save a fellow prisoner. The prisoner, Franciszek Gajowniczek, was there, along with other survivors of the camp (including some 200 priests), eager to roll up their sleeves and show the tattooed serial numbers on their arms. Said one of the first inmates, an old man who had been injected with typhoid in a Nazi medical experiment: "Our religion helped us survive the greatest hell on earth." Said another: "One miracle is that I did not die in this camp. The second is that we have a Polish Pope."
John Paul spoke with obvious emotion, sometimes seeming short of breath, often lowering his voice for emphasis. Six hundred thousand people listened in rapt attention, surrounded by the grim watchtowers and barbed wire. "It is impossible merely to visit [Auschwitz]," said the Pope, who served in the anti-Nazi underground and hid Jewish refugees. "It is necessary to think with fear of how far hatred can go, how far man's destruction of man can go, how far cruelty can go."
By now John Paul was tiring. That Thursday evening, after he had retired in the house of the Archbishop of Cracow, the Pope was called out onto the balcony by a crowd of serenaders. When he appeared in his shirtsleeves, the crowd shouted the usual, "May you live 100 years." Asked the Pope: "Do you really want your Pope to live 100 years?" Shout ed the crowd: "Yes!" Replied the Pope with a smile: "Then let me get some sleep."
When the Pope spoke on Friday, his voice was noticeably hoarse. The occasion was a helicopter trip to Nowy Targ, home of the gorale (mountain people). The Pontiff pointed out that he was a goral himself, as was one of the prelates who accompanied him: Polish-American John Cardinal Krol of Philadelphia. The Pope, when an archbishop, enjoyed visiting friends and skiing in the area and the turnout surpassed even those at Czestochowa. But it could have been larger. The Pope made an off-the-cuff, explicit reference to the reports that pilgrims from other Communist states had been turned away at the Polish border. "The borders should not stop our brothers from coming," he said.
In his sermon in the mountains he spoke out against alcohol abuse and immorality that threaten family life. The lament on alcoholism supported a theme that the regime is also pressing, but another of the Pope's moral concerns this day, abortion, put him in direct opposition to official Polish policy. The Pope's Saturday schedule was relaxed, with a midday visit to the Cistercian shrine at Mogila, and a poignant meeting with the sick and disabled at a Cracow basilica.
" 'What will we do with this Slav Pope?' they will say," John Paul joked to fellow Poles, describing the nervousness of his Italian aides. But the question will more likely be asked by Communist Party leaders all over Eastern Europe, most crucially perhaps by the Soviets. It is in the Kremlin, more than anywhere else, that the conditions under which the East bloc churches live could be quickly changed, for better or worse. Just as the real area of agreement between the Polish party and the Polish church was a fear of domestic disorder that might activate the Red Army divisions stationed in Poland, so John Paul's statements were notably diplomatic only in his deft omission of any mention of his prime targets. When the Pope spoke with patriotic fervor of the way in which the church had helped preserve the Polish nation in the past century, he had no need of reminding Polish audiences of the well-remembered horrors of the czarist-era partition.
More pointed restraint was necessary when the Pope recalled that in 1944 the city of Warsaw rose up to wage "an unequal battle against the aggressor . . . in which it was buried under its own ruins." During that battle, he noted, the city was "abandoned by the Allied powers." He spoke of Allies in the plural, but only one was involved. Stalin halted his troops a few miles outside the city and left the Polish underground army to be massacred. But the Pope also made a poignant statement about the wartime sufferings of the Soviet people.
A great part of the tension is due to Polish nationalism and to the traditional enmity between Poles and Russians, which complicate any prediction of the future and any estimate of what John Paul's visit may achieve. What will happen now? Will the visit stir even more nationalistic fervor in Poland and elsewhere and eventually help weaken the hold of the Soviet Union? Will the Soviets pressure Gierek because he indulged the Pope in his desire to visit? Will the Warsaw government feel the need to reassert itself by cracking down on Catholicism?
Though analysts have worried about such a post-visit backlash and Moscow remained ominously silent about the Polish spectacle, TIME Eastern Europe Bureau Chief Barry Kalb reports that the Pope's visit is unlikely to produce any dramatic result. The Kremlin reluctantly recognizes that the Polish government needs Catholic support and that it could not indefinitely avoid a visit by the most celebrated Pole since Copernicus. Gierek has gradually improved relations with the church and, since that policy has strengthened his regime and his nation, he is not expected to alter it.
Alexander Tomsky, an emigre from Czechoslovakia who monitors East European church life at Britain's Keston College, expects that within Poland "nominal Catholics are going to be unwilling to make the small daily compromises to keep the party and the system satisfied." Beyond Poland, Tomsky thinks that the arrival of John Paul occurs "at a time when the Soviet Union is tired ideologically. In this climate, the revival of Polish Catholicity will be exciting to all believers. The Pope has told people in effect, that they should be dissidents." And if the Pope's ecumenical thrust toward Orthodoxy succeeds, "it could bring the fire of Poland into the Russian heartland. The other governments in Eastern Europe will try to do everything to isolate their people from the events in Poland, but who can now predict what will happen?"
In most other Communist nations, churches and political dissidents are in incomparably weaker situations because they do not have a single church that enjoys the backing of virtually the entire populace. As in Poland, the freedom of the Catholic Church in each Communist nation generally reflects the degree of liberty permitted in politics and communication.
In Yugoslavia, which was expelled from the Stalinist Cominform in 1948, the church faces typical Communist harassments in attenuated form. In Hungary, it is precisely 30 years since Josef Cardinal Mindszenty was drugged, stripped naked and whipped with a rubber truncheon in preparation for his Communist Party show trial as a traitor. Today Catholic bishops are installed in every see, but the bureaucracy has control even of the assignment of priests, and it tightly restricts seminary enrollment. Czechoslovakia is nearly a throwback to Stalinism. Only three bishops, all aging, hold permanent appointments among the 13 sees. Two seminaries exist, all but empty, and there is a freeze on admission to religious orders.
The Catholic population is small in four other nations: heavily Lutheran East Germany (whose Christian daily ran a front-page story on the papal tour); Rumania, where Eastern-rite Catholics were forced into the Orthodox Church in 1948 by the Communist regime; Bulgaria, which now has a full complement of Catholic bishops for the first time in 35 years; and xenophobic Albania, which claims to have exterminated all religion.
A' home, the Soviet Union maintains rigid repression of religion and shows little real sign of any change. It is generally assumed that Poland refuses to allow Catholic radio and TV broadcasts partly because the Soviets do not want to encourage believers on their side of the border, especially in Lithuania. Tied to the Poles by culture and history, the Lithuanians are particularly oppressed and particularly resentful. It is an act of courage there even to attend Mass. Lithuanian clergy were reportedly forbidden to go to Poland during the Pope's visit. All six dioceses in the country, which was appropriated by the Soviets in 1940, are led by temporary administrators who face unending pressures from Moscow. When he named 15 new Cardinals last month, John Paul kept the identity of one of them secret. It is widely supposed that the man so honored in pectore--held "in the breast"--is Julijonas Steponavicius, the temporary "apostolic administrator" of Vilnius.
The evolving situation in Eastern Europe is influenced not only by the Pope's commanding personality and the religious fervor of his Polish people, but by the nature of the current struggle between Marxism and religion. Marx originally objected to religion in the belief that it encouraged men to ignore human suffering in the present in hopes of future spiritual salvation. He predicted that the forces of economic history would grind religion into oblivion. Then, somewhat perversely, his own theory became a secular faith. Before long it was actively contributing to human suffering, while encouraging men to endure the pain of the world against a future time when the state would wither away.
Twentieth century Marxist governments have done all they can to help history do in the Christian religion. As Poland proves, they have largely failed. In fact, faith in inevitable secular progress has been in decline everywhere. Partly for that reason, rigid cold war orthodoxies on both sides have softened a trifle. On paper, at least, the socialist states have recognized the importance of the human rights issue. The Soviet Union and its dutiful allies pledged, under the 1975 Helsinki accords, to "respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief for all." A Pope who knows Communism more intimately than any of his predecessors need only cite texts that have been ratified by Communist governments.
On the other side of the ideological divide, Catholicism itself continues to change. Once it used its own secular power in order to frustrate the religious freedom of others. But the bishops of the Second Vatican Council formally incorporated freedom of conscience in modern society into their creed. The Catholic Church now flatly opposes all attempts to compel conformity to religious belief.
Sensing the importance of this principle for negotiations with Communism, Poland's Archbishop Wojtyla was an eloquent champion of the council's decree; now, as Pope, he has already staked out a theme of advocacy not only for religious freedom but for all human rights.
In working toward them in his native land, the Pope must consider who will succeed Cardinal Wyszynski, who is now 77 and reported to be in precarious health. Two new Polish Cardinals are among those presumed to be candidates for Primate:
the Vatican's Wladyslaw Rubin, 61, secretary-general of the International Synod of Bishops, and Franciszek Macharski, 52, John Paul's scholarly protege and successor as Archbishop of Cracow.
Macharski was scheduled to join the Pope at his trip's final event, Sunday's Mass in honor of St. Stanislaw, their mutual predecessor 900 years ago in the see of Cracow. Stanislaw, according to legend, was felled by King Boleslaw the Bold because he dared to excommunicate the cruel and licentious Polish monarch for mistreating his subjects. Canonized in 1253, the martyred bishop is interpreted by the church as a defender of human rights against tyranny.
After John Paul's trip, French Religion Analyst Henri Fesquet sneered: "The Pope is nothing by himself. He has empty hands." Perhaps so, but that smacks of the hoary remark once made by Stalin about divisions. The view may be too harsh, too gloomy. The new Tory majority leader of Britain's House of Commons, Norman St. John-Stevas, is one who thinks so. "There is something like a vacuum in world leadership that John Paul might well be able to fill," says St. John-Stevas, a Catholic layman. He believes the world is "suffering from spiritual starvation and bereft of moral leadership. The gods of secularism and materialism have failed to satisfy, and mankind is looking for new perspectives."
Those failed gods, West and East, appear to be as powerful as ever in the onrush of events. But the Slav Pope has suddenly emerged from his triumphant visit to Poland as a dramatic and compelling personality on the international scene. John Paul will surely have something of his own to say about the principalities and powers of his era. -
This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.