TIME Domestic
December 26, 1994 Volume 144, No. 26
BYJOHN ELSON
So wrote the Romantic-era Polish poet Juliusz Slowacki in 1848, lines so visionary and improbable - a Pole as Supreme Pontiff! - that few, even in long-suffering Poland, believed they would ever come true. In 1938, however, a Polish teenager would be singled out for what would eventually be an appointment with prophecy. In that year, Karol Wojtyla was a student - and an actor of considerable promise - at a secondary school in the grimy industrial town of Wadowice. As the school's prize orator, he was asked to deliver a speech welcoming a grand visitor, the princely Adam Sapieha, scion of a noble house and, more important, Archbishop of nearby Cracow. Sapieha was clearly impressed, so much so that he inquired after Wojtyla, asking what he hoped to do with his life. The answer: the pursuit of philology or an actor's life. "A pity," the Archbishop said in response. But he decided to keep an eye on the charismatic young man, for the greater glory of the church.
When the spirit did call Wojtyla, however, it was not the way Sapieha wanted. The young man had become enamored of the mystical writings of the great Carmelite saint John of the Cross and wanted to become a contemplative friar. Wojtyla petitioned Sapieha three times for permission to enter a monastery; each time, the Archbishop would hear none of it. He did not want Wojtyla walled in as a mystical recluse. Could not the young man see what God really wanted him to do? Wojtyla got the message. He would become a diocesan priest, serving the people directly, a pastor ministering to the immediate needs of the faithful in Poland. Sapieha ordained him in 1946. And thus, it began to come to pass . . .
For 16 years now, Karol Wojtyla - once actor, then priest, then Archbishop and Cardinal - has been Pope John Paul II, the Supreme Pontiff, Bishop of Rome, leader of a church of nearly 1 billion souls. "It's curious," an Italian Archbishop once said, "you'd think he had always been Pope." And yet to understand the man and his papacy, one must look not only to the Vatican, from which he issues spiritual guidelines, but also to the almost mystical Poland he holds in his heart. Indeed, though the Pope's corner bedroom on the third floor of the Vatican's Apostolic Palace has a view of the baroque wonder of St. Peter's Square, it is almost as spare as a monk's. The room contains a single bed, two straight-backed upholstered chairs, a desk. There is a small carpet near the bed, but otherwise the parquet floor is bare. The walls too are unembellished except for a few souvenirs, mostly icons. But these are eloquent by their very presence. They are from Poland.
The great paradox is that this most universal of Pontiffs, this most traveled and most global of Popes, is, at the same time, a loyal son of Poland. He is ever mindful of its painful legacies - repeated partition, Nazi occupation, communist oppression - and that vision suffuses his view of the church and its mission in the world. As he told Polish journalist Jas Gawronski last year, "I have carried with me the history, culture, experience and language of Poland. Having lived in a country that had to fight for its existence in the face of the aggressions of its neighbors, I have understood what exploitation is. I put myself immediately on the side of the poor, the disinherited, the oppressed, the marginalized and the defenseless."
To some dissident liberal Catholics, of course, John Paul's Polish heritage is a mixed blessing. They see him as the product of a conservative, patriarchal church, which helps explain his increasingly autocratic and negative pronouncements on such subjects as the ordination of women and artificial birth control. For all his manifest charisma and personal compassion, these critics charge, John Paul rules with an iron hand - and there is no velvet glove to soften it.
In his homeland, John Paul is still regarded as a kind of uncrowned king. The yellow stone house where he was born in Wadowice - appropriately on Koscielna, or "Church," Street - is now a museum that receives 180,000 visitors a year. Six families were relocated to make way for this monument to the city's favorite son. In the second-floor flat, Sister Magdalena, a knowledgeable if sometimes stern tour guide, shows off memorabilia such as the young Karol's favorite canoe paddle, his hickory skis and the three papal robes John Paul donated as exhibits. Please stop by the gift shop before you leave, she advises visitors. And please do pick up a copy of the Pope's new book. When that volume was first published in Poland this year, copies were so scarce - the publisher had severely underestimated demand - that they were selling at double the cover price.
In Italy, the Pope must plow through daily scheduled meetings and audiences, prayers and Masses, visits to Rome's 320 parishes and deep philosophical debates. Yet he remains intensely interested in anything involving the church in Poland. John Paul reads the Cracow Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszechny as soon as it arrives at the Vatican. Indeed, bishops around the world have caught on to this habit and compete fiercely to have their latest works published in what editor Father Andrzej Bardecki calls "our little weekly."
In the past, John Paul has not hesitated to involve himself in Polish politics, albeit surreptitiously. His friend Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a Solidarity intellectual who was Poland's first postcommunist Prime Minister, this month told TIME something that church officials in the past frequently denied. After the communist regime imposed martial law in 1981, the Pope wrote letters of counsel to Solidarity activists interned by the communists; priests and bishops served as couriers because they were not subject to body searches. Said Mazowiecki: "Their robes carried more mail than many workers in our postal service."
Today a fervent Polish fealty - part feudal, fiercely loyal - attends John Paul in the Vatican. The five black-robed nuns who cook his meals and do his laundry are members of the Servants of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which is based in Cracow. More important, one of the Pope's two secretaries - and the one who controls all access to his boss - is Monsignor Stanislaw Dziwisz, 55, also of Cracow. (The other secretary is not Italian, as one might expect, but Vietnamese, Monsignor Vincent Tran Ngoc Thu.)
Utterly loyal and discreet, Dziwisz (pronounced Gee-vish) served as Wojtyla's secretary and chaplain when the future Pope was still Archbishop and Cardinal of Cracow. Today he is the gatekeeper: no one - neither papal friend nor foe - comes to the Holy Father save through the humble monsignor. Says a close papal aide: "Whoever the Pope is, he's going to be someone who feels very much alone. You need someone by your side, a kind of soul mate, and that's what Don Stanislaw is."
The Pope's day begins while Rome still sleeps, around 5:30, and does not end until 11:30 p.m. By 6:15 he is in his private chapel, praying and meditating before its altar, over which hangs a large bronze crucifix. Within sight is a copy of Poland's most cherished icon, the Black Virgin of Czestochowa, from whose image Poles historically drew strength as they battled against their oppressors.
The testimony is universal that prayer, more than food or liquid, is the sustaining force of this Pope's life. He makes decisions "on his knees," says Monsignor Diarmuid Martin, secretary of the Vatican's Justice and Peace Commission. Sometimes John Paul will prostrate himself before the altar. At other times he will sit or kneel with eyes closed, his forehead cradled in his left hand, his face contorted intensely, as if in pain. At this time, too, he brings to his God the prayer requests of others. His prie-dieu, at the front center of the chapel, has a padded armrest. It lifts up, and underneath there is a small container for a couple of prayer books and a big stack of intentions, written on yellow sheets. Last month the stack was 200 sheets thick, and the one on the top had nine different names written on it, including that of a 17-year-old Italian boy with cancer, an Italian mother of three who was very sick and an American child.
The prayers nowadays may also concern the decline of his own health, the result of age and the lingering effects of wounds suffered in the 1981 assassination attempt by Mehmet Ali Agca. John Paul has written an apostolic letter on the supernatural value of human suffering in which he teaches, "Each man, in his suffering, can also become a sharer in the redemptive suffering of Christ." Though he does not mortify his flesh with a hair shirt - as Paul VI sometimes did - he clearly sees his own physical ailments in this light.
"The Pope's youth wasn't happy," says Father Joseph Vandrisse, a former French missionary in the Middle East who now covers the Vatican for the French daily Le Figaro. Wojtyla lost his mother when he was nine, his father when he was 21, and his only brother, a doctor, died during a scarlet-fever epidemic. "He has meditated a lot on the meaning of suffering. Now that he is weakened in a world that is horrified by sickness and death, he thinks that the image of someone who is suffering is important for the church." To the sick whom he visits, the Pope has a request: "Pray for me. Pray for me." Still, his friend and confidant, Jean-Marie Cardinal Lustiger of Paris, advises the Pope's critics not to underestimate the aging Pontiff: "This is perhaps the most decisive moment of the whole pontificate."
Every morning, before his private and general audiences, John Paul devotes an hour or so to writing or - increasingly, as age and injuries have taken their toll - to dictation. When he can, he composes quickly, in Polish, with a neat, flowing hand, using a black felt-tipped pen. On the top left of every page he prints the letters AMDG (initials for Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam - To the Greater Glory of God). On the top right of the first page he inscribes Tuus Totus (All Thine), the opening words of a short prayer to the Virgin whose text he continues on subsequent pages. The Pope's literary output is staggering. His letters, sermons and speeches fill nearly 150 volumes. In addition to 10 encyclicals, two are in the works, on ecumenism and the sanctity of life.
His goal, says his spokesman and intimate adviser Joaquin Navarro-Valls, is nothing less than the establishment of a completely Christian alternative to the humanistic philosophies of the 20th century - Marxism, structuralism, the atheistic ideas of the post-Enlightenment. "They were simply among the tools of the age. Wojtyla said no, we have something new, we don't have to copy. Let us humbly build a new sociology, a new anthropology, that is based on something genuinely Christian." The Pope, says his spokesman, believes he has at least laid the groundwork for this task.
Thus he writes and thinks as well as discusses and debates - even through mealtimes. For the Pope, meals are occasions to bounce ideas off friends from Poland, bureaucrats and theologians who want to discuss policy and liturgy, young seminarians, ordinary people who are invited for his 7 a.m. Mass and breakfast. There is a kind of hierarchy of meals. Says Marek Skwarnicki, a Polish journalist and papal friend: "Lunch is for bishops, dinner is for friends."
If his companions are Vatican aides, Sister Tobiana, one of the Pope's Polish nuns-in-waiting, will serve family-style. With guests from outside the city-state, Angelo Gugel, the chief papal valet, dons a waiter's jacket for formal service. The menu is Italian: pasta or antipasto, followed by a meat dish with vegetables and salad, and either fruit with cheese or a Polish pastry for dessert. Asked if the papal cuisine was any good, a French Cardinal once responded: "Coming from Lyons, that's hard for me to say - but there are a sufficient number of calories."
Yet, says Navarro, the papal spokesman and confidant: "If you say, 'Holy Father, did you enjoy your lunch?' he will say yes. But if you ask him what he just ate, he couldn't tell you." John Paul is often too engrossed in talk and thought to pay attention to food. Amid intense conversation, he may push his plate away and fiddle with the cutlery, eyes closed, while concentrating on the speaker's words. He listens and responds. At lunch one day, some of the Pope's advisers started talking about the violence of the Serbs in Bosnia. The Pope interjected: "And the Croats - you think they're angels?"
Fluent in eight languages, the Pope chooses his idiom to suit his dinner companions. Says a Vatican aide: "He listens, talks directly, asks questions, puts you at ease. After five minutes you forget you are talking to the Pope." For visiting bishops with problems to share, he can turn on the charm, singing and joking - although his humor runs more to irony and good-natured kidding. After the dissident Swiss theologian Hans Kung was censured for a book questioning papal infallibility, John Paul commented, without malice, "And I'm sure Kung wrote that infallibly."
The Pope's reading is eclectic: philosophy, history, sociology - all in the original languages. He will take time for serious fiction and poetry: he knows Dostoyevsky and the other great Russians and has a special fondness for the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. He rarely watches TV - except for a brief glance at a soccer match - or reads a newspaper other than Cracow's weekly Catholic paper; he relies instead on a daily summary of the news prepared by aides to Angelo Cardinal Sodano, 67, the Vatican's Secretary of State.
Sodano is, in effect, the Pope's Prime Minister and the only curial official with instant access to John Paul. But there are other Cardinals the Pope confers with regularly. Every Friday evening, the Pontiff meets with Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, 67, the austere German theologian whose title is prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (once known as the Holy Office). "Ratzinger is a theologian and John Paul is a philosopher, but they basically see eye to eye," says a veteran Vaticanologist. The two became friends at the Second Vatican Council, when both were young bishops. On Saturday evenings, the Pope has another standing appointment, with Bernardin Cardinal Gantin, 72, of Benin, head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Bishops, to discuss episcopal appointments. Naming heads of dioceses is one of the Pope's most effective weapons in maintaining doctrinal discipline within a church that he believes became dangerously fragmented after the Second Vatican Council.
John Paul also consults frequently with bishops outside Rome whose judgment he trusts. The Pope has relied heavily for advice on the synod of bishops that meets in Rome every three years. He has attended all their sessions - including the most recent ones in October - listening with his usual intensity. But there is never a joint final communique. Indeed, the Pope may be advised, but to the private dismay of many bishops, any decision on issues discussed will be made by the Pope, and the Pope alone. As John Paul once told TIME's Wilton Wynn: "It is a mistake to apply American democratic procedures to the faith and the truth. You cannot take a vote on the truth. You must not confuse the sensus fidei ((sense of the faith)) with 'consensus.' "
As for those who do not agree? John Paul's most recent encyclical, Veritatis splendor - The Splendor of Truth - makes it clear that clerics and theologians are bound to a "loyal assent." He has imposed the equivalent of ecclesiastical gag orders on those who, he feels, have challenged church teaching, including Kung, American moral theologian Charles Curran and Brazil's Leonardo Boff, an exponent of Liberation Theology.
John Paul's dissatisfaction with some of the church's traditional priestly operatives - like the Jesuits, whom he perceived until recently as becoming too liberal - has led him to encourage lay Catholic movements such as Opus Dei. (Papal spokesman Navarro is a member.) He has declared this controversial organization a personal prelature, which means that it is exempt from the jurisdiction of local bishops and reports directly to Rome. The Pope has also given warm encouragement to a new religious order, the Legionaries of Christ, which some conservatives see as a replacement for the Jesuits of old. Members are in training for up to 14 years (even longer than Jesuits) and have proved themselves to be more personally committed to supporting the papacy. With more than 300 priests and nearly 3,000 more in training, the Legionaries are on track to become a major force in the Catholic Church.
John Paul can be moved to wrath - and not just over theology. In 1985 he defrocked four Nicaraguan priests for not quitting the Sandinista government, including Minister of Culture Ernesto Cardenal, a Trappist monk. That same year the Pope, after returning from his second trip to Poland, was ired by an article in L'Osservatore Romano - the semiofficial Vatican daily - that criticized Lech Walesa and the Solidarity movement. The article was signed by deputy editor Don Virgilio Levi. Dressed down by the Vatican's Under Secretary of State, Levi proposed to run a retraction. But the official pointed sternly to the pen and paper on his desk. "The Holy Father wants you to write your resignation," he said. "Now!" (This year, too, the Vatican pressured Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide into seeking laicization if he wanted to remain President of Haiti.)
Success has eluded the Pope in one notable area: reforming the Vatican bureaucracy. The Pope has appointed a significant number of Americans, Africans and northern Europeans to high curial offices, but the 2,300-member organization remains largely Mediterranean, and old ways are entrenched. Rather than waste all his energies in battling the bureaucracy, John Paul frequently waits until death or retirement removes an incompetent. "I think he doesn't like to govern and to rule," says Stefan Wilkanowicz, editor of a Polish monthly in Cracow and another old friend. "He's primarily a pastor, not an administrator who tries to call all the shots."
The Pope has two modes of decision making: quick and slow. On large strategic issues, he can be instantly decisive, since he has invariably thought through what he wants to do beforehand. But if he is unhappy with options proposed by the Curia on a tricky problem, he will put the issue aside for weeks or even months. When he brings up the problem again, startled aides have discovered, he will not have forgotten a detail. His aides attest that John Paul has immense powers of concentration and - his health problems notwithstanding - a virtually photographic memory for names and details.
In spite of such acumen, the Pope is not a hands-on manager, preferring consultation to the intricacies of dealing with the bureaucracy. John Paul has "a solitary way of working," says a veteran Vatican observer. "He uses people to break down material for him. He has very fragmented relationships. He might want to talk to a certain priest about a specific problem, so he calls him in. For two hours that priest is important to him - but not afterward."
There has been, however, at least one bureaucratic success story under John Paul: Edmund Cardinal Szoka, the former Archbishop of Detroit, who oversees the Prefecture for the Economic Affairs of the Holy See. With tighter accounting, an up-to-date computer system, a demand for efficiency - and a little luck on exchange rates - the Cardinal turned a huge deficit ($87 million in 1991) into a modest surplus ($1 million last year) on a budget of nearly $170 million. What is John Paul's direct role in all this? "Obviously he can't get into it and manage it himself," says Szoka, who goes over the finances directly with the Pope at least twice a year. "He's very sharp, catches on quickly to the figures and accounting. He follows it closely, asks questions. Don't forget, he was a bishop of a diocese and once had similar responsibilities."
as time erodes his physical powers and numbers the days of his pontificate, John Paul seeks strength from the friends of his youth. Several times a year, he dines with Jerzy Kluger, a Jewish classmate from Wadowice who is a businessman in Rome. Swapping stories and memories, Kluger calls the Pope by his youthful nickname, Lolek. John Paul likes to spend his vacations hiking with the Rev. Father Tadeusz Styczen (pronounced Stee-chen), the Polish philosopher who succeeded to Wojtyla's chair at the University of Lublin and plays a key role in the shaping of his encyclicals. Styczen, 62, continues to be fascinated with John Paul. "He still remains a mystery to me. He begins to pray and five minutes later forgets anyone is around." Styczen hinted he actually feels sorry for the Pope and the responsibilities he has to bear. "I remember when he was elected. A friend called me and said, 'Wojtyla's the new Pope.' I was so shocked that I didn't respond. My friend hung up, and then I just cried, because I remembered the anguished face of Paul VI."
And then there is Danuta Michalowska, an actress who performed with Wojtyla in an underground drama group, the Rhapsodic Theater, during the Nazi Occupation. After his election as Pope, she sent him a formal message of congratulation, lamenting that they could not stay in touch because of his new eminence. Back came a handwritten note from John Paul, gently chiding her for thinking he would ignore her. Since then she has written the Pope dozens of letters, and every one has been answered.
"It's intimidating, really," says Michalowska, who is still an actress. "You can't write nonsense to the Pope when you know that, no matter what, he's going to take time out to write back to you. The responses aren't long, and they aren't always handwritten. Sometimes he'll scribble his response on the margin of a speech or some document, and Sister Eufrosina - a Polish nun who's been with him for years - is very good at making out what he's written and typing it up." She adds, "I think of him as a man who needs to stay in touch with his friends because he is so terribly busy."
And with so much less time to do what he believes must be accomplished. The Pope, under strict orders from his physician, must take a half-hour after-lunch nap. After that he exercises by walking along the Apostolic Palace's rooftop terrace while reciting the rosary and reading his breviary.
He chafes under the burden of his infirmities. His image has always been of the robust mountain climber, swimmer, skier, soccer goalkeeper. Once in the high Dolomites, the Pope, determined to reach a cross planted on a peak far ahead, walked so far that his aides became worn out and could go no farther. He agreed that all his staff could rest and wait for him, but he insisted that the fit and trim Joaquin Navarro continue with him. It took another three hours to reach the cross. The Pope was dressed in hiking togs - one of those rare moments when he has been seen publicly in mufti. On the way up, they passed a group of German hikers descending the slope. John Paul greeted the group briefly in German and walked on. When the tourists were about 30 yards down the mountain, Navarro heard one of the women shriek, "Gott im Himmel! It was the Pope!"
John Paul was skiing as recently as last March. But he will never ski again. He now has an artificial femur and must walk with a cane. "He doesn't know how to use it," says Navarro. "He was operated on the right hip and holds the cane in his left hand. The recovery is not as fast as hoped, because he didn't spend enough time in physiotherapy." When, impatiently, he tries to move without a cane, he often falls on a companion for support. The appearance of weakness has prompted rumor and speculation: bone cancer, Parkinson's disease, a series of small strokes. All are denied by the Vatican.
What keeps John Paul on the move, despite his age and numerous injuries? A few Pope watchers believe that if he becomes immobilized by infirmity, he will resign the papacy and retire to a monastery in Poland. (The last Pope to step down was Celestine V in 1294; he was later canonized, even though Dante cast him into the Inferno for the "great refusal.") Others, though, are convinced John Paul is determined to reign at least until the year 2000, which has immeasurable symbolic importance for him. According to a papal aide, "Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski ((the late Archbishop of Warsaw who was one of the Pope's mentors)) told John Paul he would lead the church into the 3rd millennium, and he believes it."
John Paul's ambitions for the millennial year are vast. He dreams of having a summit of all monotheistic religions at Mount Sinai and of concelebrating a Mass with Patriarch Aleksey II of Moscow to mark the reconciliation of Roman Catholicism with Russian Orthodoxy. Last month the Pope issued an apostolic letter on preparing for the year 2000 in which he asked Catholics to "reflect on all those times in history when they departed from the spirit of Christ and his Gospel." Specifically, he suggested that the church needs to repent for its sometimes intolerant treatment of other faiths. That notion shocked some bishops, who would have preferred that the Pope emphasize the accomplishments of the church.
The other driving force in the Pope's waning years is a biblical injunction. St. Paul in I Corinthians declares, "Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!" Despite his belief in the redemptive power of human suffering, John Paul feels deep personal anguish at the conflicts that have devastated the peoples of Rwanda and Bosnia. Nothing this past year disappointed him more than the cancellation of a proposed visit in September to Sarajevo, where he had hoped to meet the spiritual leaders of the Bosnian Muslims, the Orthodox Serbs and the Croatian Catholics for a show of unity. What if the Muslims, say, were to boycott the summit? asked a Curia official who was helping plan the trip. No matter, the Pope replied: he would visit the leaders individually in their homes.
"We discussed it every day," recalls Navarro. "There were real security questions - not just for the Pope but for the people. But he wanted to go very badly." Less than a week before the trip, the Vatican received a veiled threat from Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader. "His message was full of trickery," says Navarro. "He told us in effect, 'I have no problem with the trip, but what if the Muslims attempted an assassination and blamed us?' " John Paul sent a personal envoy to Karadzic to get him to repeat the same thing to his face. He did. That indirect but personal threat - together with the dangers facing the citizens of Sarajevo who would gather for a papal Mass - scuttled the trip. "We thought of publishing the real reason why the trip could not take place," said Navarro. "But in the end we just said, 'We cannot go.' "
The depth of the Pope's disappointment was apparent when he visited Croatia on Sept. 10. He walked unsteadily and gasped for breath, leading to rumors that he might be near death. What may have troubled the Pope more than physical discomfort was a fear that his mission as priest and prophet would end prematurely. Five days later, John Paul summoned senior Curia officers to his summer retreat at Castel Gandolfo. "He was tired," said an official, "and obviously suffering with his hip." And then the Pope surprised his aides by declaring once again, "I have to go to Sarajevo. We must find some way to make these people stop killing each other." So much to do, so little time.
Reported by Greg Burke, Thomas Sancton and Wilton Wynn/Rome and John Moody/Cracow