In the End, the World Was a Stage

By Joseph Farrel

Professor Joseph Farrell teaches Italian studies at Strathclyde University and is an expert on Italian theatre and playwrights. He is the author of several books on Italian culture and edited Understanding The Mafia (Manchester University Press)

POPE John Paul II was one of the few figures in this age whose fame and legacy are guaranteed to outlive it. Historians centuries hence will be debating his influence on Church doctrine, his role in reshaping the modern Papacy and extending its prestige worldwide, his part in the liberation of Europe from communism and the remaking of the continent, as well as the enigmas of the private man and the public leader.
His impact on his age could not have been foreseen when on October 16, 1978, the announcement was made that Cardinal Wojtyla had been chosen as the 264th successor of St Peter. Nobody had predicted a Polish Pope, but it quickly became a matter of received wisdom that both the man Karol Jozef Wojtyla and the Pope John Paul II could be understood only by reference to his Polish roots.

Poland has a vision of itself as a nation offended by history. Many complex political and historical factors contribute to the Polish sense of self, but allegiance to Catholicism is one of its core elements. While visiting Castro’s Cuba, Pope John Paul II stated that a universal church can legitimately break down into a series of national communities, each true to the culture of the nation which produced it. The statement is as true of Poland as of Cuba. The Polish church has always seen itself as guardian of culture and identity, but also as embattled and at odds with a political authority which at many points of history was in the hands of adversaries.

The Pope was a writer as well as churchman, and his Polishness is obviously most strongly felt in his literary works. The history and culture of his native place gripped the young Wojtyla, who read avidly its poets and playwrights, forming a special attachment for the patriotic writers of the Romantic era. At university, he began publishing poems and plays of his own, and he would continue writing verse for the next 40 years, seemingly stopping only when he was elected to the throne of St Peter. His literary output was vast, although comparatively little of it is available in translation. Polish literary historians say that his poetry is difficult, hermetic, full of complex imagery, and deals mainly with theological or philosophical issues. The emotional or personal dimension common in lyrical poetry is absent.

His theatrical work is more easily accessible, and perhaps provides better clues to his key convictions. In some dramas, he expressed a debt to Adam Chmielowski, a 19th-century Polish monk, whom he regarded as his alter ego and whom he beatified in Krakow in 1983. Chmielowski had been an icon for the Polish resistance to Nazism, and in his speech at Wawel Castle, with Poland still under Jaruzelski’s martial law, the Pope offered the newly beatified Chmielowski as an example of the moral rebel.

The implications of his words were not lost on the regime. Chmielowski had already been portrayed, obliquely, in the Pope’s most successful play, In Front Of A Jeweller’s Shop (1962), made up of a series of tableaux, soliloquies and sketches associated with a jeweller who deals in wedding rings. The jeweller’s clients include three couples considering marriage or facing the failure of their relationships, and Adam has a brief part as counsellor. The same figure appears more openly in Brother Of Our God (1979), which tells of the Polish painter who experienced a road to Damascus conversion and dedicated himself to working with the poor.

The bitterness against the unfair distribution of wealth and the advocacy of revolution, not in the name of socialism but of justice as understood by Catholic social teaching, would surprise those who regarded the Pope as an arch-conservative. Chmielowski, the freedom fighter-artist-preacher, was the figure through whom Wojtyla gave an expression to the religious conservatism, social radicalism, literary creativity and Polish identity which were of the essence of his philosophy.

There were other forces in his formation. He belonged to that generation of Eastern and Central Europeans who experienced in their lifetimes the worst that modern totalitarianisms could unleash on humanity. He was born on May 18, 1920, the very day that Marshal Pilsudski won the victory in Kiev against the Soviet Union which secured the precarious independence granted to Poland in the post-first world war settlement.

Karol’s father had fought in the Austro-Hungarian army in that war, and continued a military career with the Polish army after it. He married Emilia Kaczorowska in 1906, and had three children, of whom Karol Jozef was the third. The second child Olga died in infancy, the first in a series of deaths which marked the future Pope’s boyhood. He was aged nine when his mother died. The family continued living in the village of Wadowice, where his brother Edmund died in 1932 of a disease contracted carrying out his medical work. His father died of a heart attack shortly after he and Karol had moved to Krakow to allow the young man to enrol at the Jagellonian university. Wojtyla developed mystical notions not merely of the value of suffering but of its necessity for anyone who wishes to achieve work of value. He experienced much pain in his own life.

In the late 1930s while he was still a student, history in its most malevolent form inflicted another wound on the life of Wojtyla and of the Polish people. Hitler’s threatened invasion of Poland made even Neville Chamberlain conclude that war was inevitable, although the division of the country between Hitler and Stalin was wholly unforeseen. Krakow, the city with which Wojtyla was identified until his move to Rome, finished in the German domain. Auschwitz was built only few miles away, initially as a labour or death camp for Polish Resistance fighters. Karol Wojtyla worked as a labourer in a stone quarry and, even although attendance at Polish-language theatre was punishable by death, he was one of the founders of the Rhapsodic Theatre and performed in several underground productions. The company continued its operations after the war, until the communist regime banned it.

In 1942, the Archbishop of Krakow established a secret seminary for boys who aspired to the priesthood, and Wojtyla became one of its first students. On November 1, 1946, he was ordained priest and almost immediately left for Rome to continue his studies .

The situation of Poland, now under Soviet domination, required men of exceptional calibre, and Wojtyla was made in turn assistant bishop, archbishop and finally, in 1967, Cardinal of Krakow. The other remarkable Polish churchman of the age was Cardinal Wyszinski of Warsaw and the relations between the two have been the subject of much debate. Wyszinski decided early on to find as much accommodation with the communist authorities as possible, while Wojtyla seemed to ignore them. For this reason, he was judged apolitical and effetely intellectual by the government, who passed up the chance to veto his elevation to the See of Krakow.

It was a disastrous misjudgement. Krakow became, in ecclesiastical terms, a self- sufficient city-state ruled by its own cardinal, who kept the communist authorities at bay.

Wojtyla was by now well connected in Rome, and made strong contribution to the debates during the Second Vatican Council. More controversially, it appears that he was instrumental in helping draft Humanae Vitae, the 1968 encyclical issued by Pope Paul VI outlawing the use of artificial contraceptive devices.

His stance on sexual morality and on questions of marriage and the family was rigid and inflexible from the outset. In 1962, he published a book entitled Love And Responsibility dealing with the place of love and sexual drives inside marriage. The book even contains little diagrams of the vagina. The future Pope’s book sold widely in Poland and abroad, and anyone reading it would have been aware that a Wojtyla papacy would be at odds with liberal Western thinking on such topics as divorce, contraception, abortion and homosexuality.

Abortion drew his violent condemnation. Anticipating the later initiative of Cardinal Winning in Glasgow, he established in Krakow a centre to support pregnant women who might have been tempted to seek a termination.

Pope Paul died in 1978, and his successor, John Paul I, lasted only a few months in office. The question then facing the cardinals in the Sistine Chapel was whether, after 456 years, it was time to elect a non-Italian pope. It took eight ballots to resolve the dilemma. Karol Wojtyla’s election caused consternation in the countries of the Warsaw Pact, but gave heart to dissidents in Poland. In the view of some experts, his election was instrumental in creating the conditions which led to the fall of communism. Timothy Garton Ash, a leading British historian of central Europe, is uncom promising: “Without the Pope, no Solidarity. Without Solidarity, no Gorbachev. Without Gorbachev, no fall of communism.” Others are more circumspect about the Pope’s part in the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, but none doubt his impact on the regime in his native Poland.

His first visit as Pope to Poland in 1979, with its palpable raising of national morale, was equivalent to the laying of delayed-action mines. The following year there were riots over food shortages, and the occupation of the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk led to the emergence of Lech Walesa and the foundation of the free trade union, Solidarity. The Pope’s second visit in 1983 took place after the suppression of Solidarity by General Jaruzelski, but by then the course of history was irreversible. The Pope formed a constructive relationship with both Walesa and Jaruzelski, and took pleasure in the fact that the liberation of Poland was accomplished non-violently.

It was initially believed that the assassination attempt on the Pope in St Peter’s Square on May 13, 1980, was part of a conspiracy masterminded by the KGB to prevent him from influencing further the affairs of the Soviet domain. The assailant was a Turk, Mehmet Ali Agca, a known member of a Turkish terrorist group, but in prison he alleged that the Bulgarian secret police had commissioned his operations. The CIA gave credence to the theory, but the case collapsed in court in 1986.

The Pope visited Agca in jail in 1983 to offer Christian forgiveness, and on a visit to Bulgaria in 2002 told his hosts that he had never believed in their involvement. He himself attributed his survival to the intervention of Our Lady of Fatima, so called after the Portuguese town where the Virgin Mary is believed to have made an apparition. On a pilgrimage of thanksgiving to Fatima, John Paul II had the bullet incorporated into Our Lady’s crown.

Future historians will find it as difficult as do contemporary pundits to produce one totally coherent assessment of the Wojtyla papacy. Those who expect neat, mutually exclusive categorisations of retrograde and progressive, liberal and conservative policies will find themselves disconcerted by the stances John Paul II adopted in differing fields.

He was unquestionably a conservative in ecclesiastical matters. He presided over a reassertion of authority and of dogmatic orthodoxy after the uncertainty produced by the Second Vatican Council, and outraged many by his unbending views on abortion, birth control, divorce, women priests and homosexuality.

In social and political affairs, on the other hand, his was a continuously, and ferociously, anti-capitalist voice. On all occasions, he stood resolutely against wars – in the Falklands, in ex-Yugoslavia, in the Persian Gulf – which broke out during his Pontificate. An enduring image for many will be of President George W Bush seated meekly in the Vatican last autumn while the ailing and infirm Pope berated his policies in Iraq.

His first trip abroad was to Mexico, where his magnetic personality drew millions of people to listen to him. It was clear that a new force had been unleashed on the world, but its nature was not clear. In Mexico City, he thundered against poverty but he also denounced Liberation Theology. This distaste for a movement which based itself on the radicalism of gospel teaching was unexpected in a man who was simultaneously proclaiming the dignity of labour and claiming that the term “working class” had biblical origins, but he seems to have regarded Liberation Theology as representing the intrusion of Marxism into Catholic social teaching.

Discipline would be one of the watchwords of his papacy. He repeated his denunciation of any contamination of religious teaching by political action on subsequent trips to Latin America, and in Nicaragua reprimanded the poet-priest Ernesto Cardenal for accepting a post in the Sandinista government.

He condemned the inhumanity of capitalism. His 1987 encyclical Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (Concern In Social Policy), on the arms race, poverty, hunger, unemployment and human rights impressed Gorbachev, while in 1991 he returned to questions of social justice with Centesimus Annus (The Hundredth Year), which commemorated the pioneering social encyclical by Leo XIII. He attacked what he termed the “radical capitalist ideology” of materialism and injustice. In Riga, Latvia, in 1993, he even allowed that there was a “kernel of truth in Marxism”, for its recognition of the “situation of exploitation to which an inhuman capitalism had subjected the proletariat since the beginning of industrial society”.

Left-wing sympathy for such statements was dissipated by his condemnation of “the culture of death”, which translated into outright opposition to contraception and abortion. His unwavering opposition to the birth control policies advanced by the UN at a conference in Cairo in 1994 on population control caused outrage in some quarters. He attacked what he termed “contraceptive imperialism”, and intervened, unsuccessfully, with President Clinton to have proposals to widen access to birth control watered down. The Pope was equally inflexible in upholding priestly celibacy and in refusing to countenance the ordination of women. He was appalled in the last years of his papacy by the paedophile scandals involving priests, especially in the USA.

No Pope travelled so widely. His visit to Scotland in 1982 brought to Bellahouston Park in Glasgow the biggest crowd ever gathered in one place in Scottish history.

There were two sources of tension associated with that visit. The international anxiety concerning the desirability of visiting Britain while the Falklands war was underway was resolved by visiting Argentina immediately afterwards. Local anxiety was over whether he would recognise Scotland’s nationhood by kissing the ground on arrival, as was his custom when he descended from his plane in a new country, but he preserved the nation’s honour by kneeling to kiss the soil of Scotland .

His interests in all countries was deep, and he once startled Cardinal Winning while the Scottish hierarchy was on a visit to Rome by suddenly asking him at dinner to account for the Scottish Reformation. Regrettably, the Cardinal’s reply is not recorded.

John Paul II fostered good relations with other faiths, and was the first Pope to visit the synagogue in Rome. He retained friendship with individual Jews from his boyhood in Krakow, and it is unlikely that any previous Pope has spoken with such respect of Jewish belief.

His need to come to terms with errors committed by his own church led him to apologise for the condemnation of Galileo, and even, in Damascus, for the havoc wreaked in Muslim countries by the Crusades. Some in his own communion regretted that he could not show equal openness towards them. He kept his distance from the Jesuit order whom he regarded as dangerously suspect on social and theological matters, and silenced respected thinkers, like the German theologian Hans Kung. Pragmatism was not a quality he valued, or practised.

On a personal level, his last years were clouded by his declining health. His robust constitution caused him to make a complete recovery from the assassination attempt, but in the early 1990s he spent periods in hospital being operated on for pre-cancerous cells and, in successive years, receiving treatment for a dislocated shoulder and a fractured hip. In 1994, he was ordered to give up skiing, but was allowed to continue the long walks in northern Italy he undertook in the company of Sandro Pertini, Italy’s veteran socialist president . In the same year he was diagnosed as suffering from Parkinson’s disease, and no sadder sight could be seen than of this once active man, pushing his body to the limits with a programme of international visits, but plainly suffering from the muscular wastage induced by this brutal illness.

He is leaving a less Eurocentric church than the one he inherited, and this may be reflected in the choice of successor. His innate energy and charisma made it easy for him to adapt the papacy to a globalised society, but the next Pope, with perhaps different attributes, may find it more difficult.

John Paul II’s own vision of the regal papacy, founded on obedience and deference, clashed with the democratic, pluralist aspirations of reformers inside and outside the church. He influenced the course of history without ever seeking the popularity of compromise.

Stalin once asked how many regiments a Pope had, but John Paul II demonstrated that the sheer power of moral conviction and vision are adequate substitutes.