When Pope John Paul II, Karol Józef Wojtyła, is beatified
on Sunday, the world again will have reason to reflect on the
greatness and goodness, and the world-historical significance, of
this remarkable man. Perhaps the best, most immediately accessible
way to fathom that significance is to watch the tour de
force video by Citizens United Productions, with Newt and
Callista Gingrich, called Nine Days That Changed
the World. While the importance of JPII’s papacy spreads
well beyond his essential contribution to the liberation of Poland
and destruction of Soviet-led Communism, that accomplishment alone
is a story of awe-inspiring note and moment. Nine Days
doesn’t just tell that story; it shows it, through stark and moving
video footage and interviews. To flesh the story out in magnificent
depth, combine Nine Days with George Weigel’s recent
First Things article/2011
Simon
Lecture called “All War, All the Time,” which draws heavily on
Weigel’s book
The End and the Beginning.
It is virtually impossible, after reviewing these and
other source materials, to conclude that JPII was anything other
than one of the greatest men not just of this age, but of any age
in recorded history.
Nine Days opens with video of almost
indescribably massive throngs of joyous people, gathered on the
streets of Krakow in June of 1979 to greet this new pope of their
own homeland, a man who for decades had helped keep the Polish
church alive against vicious degradations and deprivations by the
Communist authorities.
“This memory will remain with me my whole life,” said
Monsignor Jaroslaw Cielecki, who was there in Krakow, in opening
Nine Days. “When the Pope arrived, there was joy, there
was applause, the people shouted. There was really a moment of, of,
I was thinking like a child at that moment…. It seemed that we had
left behind this time of suffering — that he had a key, I can say
in a sense, the Pope has a key to open, for freedom. The people
felt it in this moment.”
The footage is breathtaking. It’s a celebration such as
we’ll rarely witness again in our lifetimes. “It was many more
divisions than Stalin could imagine,” said Weigel on camera. “The
history of the 20th century turned in a dramatic way.”
Nearly one third of the entire Polish population turned out to see
their hero between June 2 and 10. They did so despite the
government’s clear disapproval. They did so amidst repression. They
did so in full knowledge that Communist henchmen
had brutally put down similar populist expressions in Hungary in
1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 — and in a lesser-known crackdown
in Poland itself in 1970. They did so while wearing bright colors
and holding aloft flowers and signs dedicated to faith and
freedom.
JPII stood literally face to face with Communist
authorities and asserted that Poland had the right to its own
culture, its own traditions. To the masses he preached a simple
message of God’s love and redemption. To the world he showed that
faith could face down totalitarianism. The people responded in
song. One film clip shows hundreds of thousands singing these
words: “We want God, in family circles, in the care of parents, and
in children’s dreams. He is our King and our Lord.” The Pope,
speaking to those hundreds of thousands in Warsaw’s Victory Square,
reassured them: “Christ cannot be kept out of the history of man in
any country in the world.”
As Nine Days well explains, the Solidarity
movement grew directly from the experience of freedom and the
example of courage shown during the Pope’s 1979 visit. The movie
takes you through the next decade of growing anti-Communism and the
weakening of the Soviet bloc’s totalitarian bonds. Rare interviews
were secured with Solidarity leader and later Polish President Lech
Walesa, and with Czech Republic President Vaclav Havel.
“At that state of despair and hopelessness, the Pope
appeared,” said Walesa. “And he awoke the nation…. The Pope
organized millions for us.”
What the movie could not really delve into, but what
Weigel’s First Things essay did, was the history
stretching back some 60 years of the Communist war against the
Catholic Church. Files unearthed after the collapse of the Soviet
Union detail how the Soviets and their satellites actually
infiltrated the Vatican with spies, how they fought the church at
every turn, how they brutalized some of its priests — and how they
particularly were vexed, even for decades before Wojtyła became
pope, by this one courageous priest who became bishop and then
cardinal while openly challenging the Communists at every turn.
When that cardinal Wojtyła was named pope, the Communist
authorities were horrified. Eventually, it is clear, they tried to
have him killed, with their hired assassin only barely failing to
end Wojtyła’s life.
“The Commission for New Martyrs of the Great Jubilee of
2000 concluded that there were likely twice as many martyrs in the
twentieth century than in the previous nineteen centuries of
Christian history combined,” wrote Weigel. “The great majority of
these twentieth-century martyrs gave their lives for Christ at the
hands of communism.”
And this:
In November 1973, the SB’s [Polish Secret Police’s]
Department IV created “Independent Group D,” which was assigned the
task of “distintegrating” Polish Catholicism through a coordinated
attack on the Church’s integrity. The leader of Independent Group
D, SB colonel Konrad Straszewski, had been the secret-police
contact of one of Wojtyła’s colleagues at the Catholic University
of Lublin for years. The reports on Wojtyła from Straszewski and
other SB agents led Polish prosecutors to consider charging the
archbishop of Kraków with sedition on three occasions in 1973-1974.
Things had changed since the heyday of Polish Stalinism, however,
and communist leader Edward Gierek did not dare do to Wojtyła what
his predecessors had done to Wyszyński in 1953. So the surveillance
of the archbishop increased, as did the efforts to suborn his
associates in the archdiocesan chancery. And then there was the
brutality: Msgr. Andrzej Bardecki, ecclesiastical advisor to the
lay-run Catholic newspaper Tygodnik Powszechny, was beaten
senseless by SB (or SB-inspired) thugs one night after leaving an
editorial meeting that Cardinal Wojtyła also attended. Visiting the
elderly priest in the hospital the next day, the archbishop said,
“You replaced me; you were beaten instead of me.”
No Hollywood film could do justice to this decades-long,
cloak-and dagger, deadly and redemptive story of faith against all
odds. But for the part of the story covered by Nine Days That
Changed the World, the video, interviews, and narrative leave
the viewer dumb-struck with awe.
Karol Józef Wojtyła is being beatified Sunday not because
he helped kill Communism, but as a result of how he carried out his
life and ministry in the full myriad of ways a priest and pope acts
to touch the hearts of the faithful. One needs not be Catholic, or
even Christian, to recognize profound goodness and even holiness
when it appears — as it did appear in the person of Wojtyla. One
need not share his exact theology to recognize its rare combination
of learning, faith, humility and compassion.
Pope John Paul II made this world a better place. This
weekend, the Catholic Church moves one step closer to pronouncing
him a saint. Catholic or not, we all can pronounce him a blessed
champion.
————————————-
Writer’s notes:
1. For full disclosure, I served for about five weeks
on the payroll of Citizens United several years ago, to help with
two specific projects. The idea for this movie emerged months after
I left, and my brief tenure at Citizens United in no way affected
my assessment of this film.
2.
I am an Episcopalian, not a Catholic; what I understand
about beatification is only reed-thin. I therefore offer no
opinions on the beatification itself, but only on the public record
of the man Wojtyła.
