Like Arthur Chrenkoff (
My Pope),
my primary view of John Paul II is in his political achievements,
in helping liberate the Poles and the rest of eastern Europe from
Bolshevism. (Interesting that the etymological root of 'liberate'
is
liberatus,
past participle of
liberare "set free," from
liber
"free", so we pray 'sed libera nos a malo', i.e. 'deliver us from
evil'.)
Anyway, it seems as if people have forgotten, willfully in some
cases, that the Soviet control of eastern Europe was viewed as
permanent, enduring (especially as something the people there had
to endure), particularly after the Helsinki Accords ratified the
postwar national boundaries, boundaries which the Polish government
in exile objected to after Yalta. Foolish predictions about
'convergence' of the Free World and the Communists abounded. Poles
frequently understood that they had been abandoned by the West, and
the impotent frustration built up, expressing itself when the
Communists raised food prices.
But Wojtyla's election and visit home some eight months later were
'detonators' ('[T]he Pope and his teachings served as a detonator
which liberated the spirit of society and gave it strength ...':
General Wojciech Jaruzelski's quote, at Angus Roxburgh's BBC
article
Pope's role in
Communism's end), beginning something
no one viewed as
possible, much less inevitable. That cannot be emphasized enough:
there was no chance, no hope, of the Captive Nations' liberation,
never.
Chrenkoff says he gave the Poles hope. At first, i wanted to say
'yes, and courage, too', but that's not a virtue in short supply
with them, though it has often been expressed in glorious,
foolhardy and suicidal gestures: as part of a saying goes about the
1956 Hungarian Revolution, 'the Hungarians behaved like Poles
...'
The visit changed many things in Poland: the government was forced
to broadcast the events on the monopoly media, the arrangements
were largely done by citizens acting together, not the State, the
cooperation between the workers, farmers and intellectuals which
had begun a decade or so earlier, received a big boost, shows of
support
en masse took place without serious retribution,
emboldening the populace, and people heard truth being spoken,
live, by their Church, to the entire nation. What a cliche that
last has become, but that's because we in the West could not
imagine the 'contaminated moral environment' (Vaclav Havel's
phrase):
We fell [not 'felt'] morally ill because we became used
to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not
to believe in anything, to ignore each other, to care only about
ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility,
or forgiveness lost their depth and dimensions, and for many of us
they represented only psychological peculiarities, or they
resembled gone-astray greetings from ancient times, a little
ridiculous in the era of computers and spaceships.
The
Czech Republic - Part III - Vaclav Havel's speech in
1990.
Another quote from the Roxburgh article, this one from Lech Walesa:
'The Communists were as frightened of those [moral] values as the
devil is of holy water ...'
Chrenkoff was six when Wojtyla became Pope; I was 27, and he 'can
still remember first the disbelief and then the euphoria that after
four and a half centuries of Italian pontiffs the cardinals have
chosen an outsider, and not just any outsider but one of ours'. I
was in Fairbanks, Alaska, and had left the Church a dozen years
earlier. I did wonder what the effect would be on Poland and
Russia, though I cannot claim to have predicted 1989.
On another note, Patrick Sweeney posts an image of the Pope as he
leaves Auschwitz. I want to draw attention to the Nazi's vile
slogan 'Arbeit macht frei' ('Work liberates') in metal above the
guard post. (
"The Holy Father died this evening at 9:37 p.m. in his private
apartment."). He doesn't comment about that slogan; he uses the
image to illustrate how John Paul II changed relations between Jews
and the Church and Catholics. But how ironic, that the Pope is
associated with the twisted Nazi phrase, the Pope who understood,
from his own labor in a quarry and a chemical factory under the
Nazis, and who proclaimed in Gdansk,
There cannot be a struggle more powerful than
solidarity. There cannot be an agenda for struggle above the agenda
of solidarity ... That's exactly what I want to talk about, so let
the Pope speak, since he wants to speak about you, and in some
sense for you ...
(quoted in
A
Christian Athens: The Rhetoric Of Pope John Paul II And The
Political Transformation In Poland, 1979-1989 by Cezar M.
Ornatowski of San Diego State University). This was the
extermination camp where Fr Maximilian Kolbe stepped forward to die
in place of Franciszek Gajowniczek. Gajowniczek
recalled:
I could only thank him with my eyes. I was stunned and
could hardly grasp what was going on. The immensity of it: I, the
condemned, am to live and someone else willingly and voluntarily
offers his life for me - a stranger. Is this some dream? ... For a
long time I felt remorse when I thought of Maximilian. By allowing
myself to be saved, I had signed his death warrant. But now, on
reflection, I understood that a man like him could not have done
otherwise. Perhaps he thought that as a priest his place was beside
the condemned men to help them keep hope. In fact he was with them
to the last.
That was the depth of Kolbe's solidarity.
I don't think I'll blog more about John Paul II. This post has
forced me to put down in writing some of my my thoughts, and I
haven't time on most days to delve into something quite this
much.