Poland’s mourning for John Paul II is special, as might be expected: All the newspapers are framed in black, every shopping mall is closed, and not a single TV station is daring to run commercials. Poland has lost not just a pope, but a national redeemer, the person who led us out of Soviet captivity and across the Red Sea into the land of liberty and democracy.
Normally a cantankerous lot, Poles rally around about once a generation, and then their enthusiasm becomes overwhelming. The last time was when, under the Pope’s influence, they organized Solidarity, the first free trade union in the Communist world. The Pope’s death has brought them together again in sadness, but also out of gratitude, that Providence gave them this man to begin with. As the poet Czeslaw Milosz observed, in the depths of our humiliation, we got a king that we had always dreamed of.
Quite rightly, we’ve been hearing these last several days about what the Pope did for Poland. What’s less discussed, but equally interesting, is what Poland did for this pontificate, how important the Pope’s Polishness was to the way he discharged his office.
His critics had no doubt his Polishness was a factor: The Pope’s philosophy supposedly stemmed from his roots in a backward, patriarchal, authoritarian country with a reactionary church hierarchy preserved by Communism in a Counter-Reformation time warp. I was shocked to hear the BBC follow this line minutes after John Paul II’s heart stopped beating. Throughout the pontificate, some of the criticisms were suffused with a strain of ethnic prejudice that would have been considered racist if the Pope had been, say, a Nigerian. In Britain, God’s personal enemy, Richard Dawkins, mocked Paul Johnson for “taking his orders from an elderly Pole,” as if it were any worse to be an elderly Pole rather than a clapped-out Englishman like him. A British biographer was left “fascinated and appalled” by the “Polish interlude” in the Church’s history. Predictably, The Nation has called John Paul II a “Polish authoritarian” who “galvanized the international right wing” and “destroyed the careers of activist Catholic leaders who challenged U.S. military and business interests.” Several years ago, editor Andrew Sullivan of The New Republic feared that the Pope’s teaching might harm liberal society: “If you doubt this, visit Poland.”
Calling him a Polish pope, in the sense of bringing a specifically Polish perspective into the papacy, is correct but not in the way that critics imagine. The Poland in which Karol Wojtyla ascended the steps of his ecclesiastical career was indeed ruled by authoritarian, even totalitarian regimes: Nazi Germany first, and then the Soviet-imposed Communist government. Yet he was their heroic opponent, so it is unfair to tar him with that particular brush. In fact, it was his experience of living under two tyrannies that probably explains his frequent and passionate pleas for respecting human rights. And while Poland is still poor, it is a secure democracy with social attitudes comparable to those of Italy or the U.S.
No, John Paul II’s Polishness was reflected more subtly in his emotional sense of history. His passionate pronouncements in behalf of multi-ethnic Sarajevo, besieged by the Orthodox Serbs, is partly explained by historical memories that go back 300 years: Any Pole knows that Orthodox Russia destroyed the multi-ethnic Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 18th century. On the other hand, would any but a Slav pope have sent ten cardinals to the celebrations of the millennium of Kievan Rus’s Christianity in 1988? Would any other have supported so steadfastly the underground church in Lithuania, or the Uniate Catholics in Ukraine? Nor is his sensibility merely European: Look, for example, at the way he tried to make his pilgrimage to Cuba a similar awakening to what he had done in Poland 20 years before.
As someone who spent the war so close to Auschwitz he could smell it, and lost personal friends--both Polish Catholics and Polish Jews--during the German occupation, he was only naturally committed to reconciliation with Judaism. It took a Pole from Kraków on the throne of St. Peter for a pope to visit Auschwitz. In 1986, John Paul II became the first pope to visit a synagogue, and was later the first to pray at the Wailing Wall. But then, it had been he, already as a bishop, who argued at the Second Vatican Council that the doctrine of Jewish guilt for the crucifixion of Jesus be dumped.
Having spent three decades battling a Communist regime, this pope also knew the power of symbolic gestures. If you don’t have any divisions to send in, solidarity with the victims may be the best weapon. The candles that simultaneously burned in the windows of his Vatican study, and of Ronald Reagan’s White House, to grieve for Solidarity’s suppression in December 1981, carried a more powerful message to the Kremlin than dozens of new missile silos. The few million dollars sent via Vatican accounts to Solidarity’s underground cells were hardly significant as material support, but shored up the freedom fighters’ morale. As we now know from the Mitrokhin archive and other sources, the Soviets were terrified of him.
He was also an early master of applying “people power.” In the 1950s, Polish Stalinists had built an ideal Communist town called Nowa Huta. The healthy influence of a working-class town was supposed to dilute the conservatism of the ancient city of Kraków nearby. As a model Communist development, it was designed without a church, but the planners had not reckoned with Bishop Wojtyla. He supported crowds in guarding a wooden cross around which they prayed under open skies until the authorities gave in and allowed a church to be built. It was ready to be consecrated just as he arrived on his first pilgrimage as Pope.
The Pope’s Polish experience--of rule by two godless ideologies, of war, of genocide, of poverty and revolution--chimed with the experience of most of the world’s Catholics. They do not, after all, live in the pampered West. It was his experience of the transitory nature of regimes, power, and wealth in his native land that reinforced his insistence on the personal, rather than collective or state-directed, pursuit of goodness. After all, for most of three centuries, remaining personally decent while nasty regimes came and went was all that the average Pole could hope for.
His Polishness also inspired the Pope’s solidarity (a word that cropped up very often in his homilies) with the world’s underdogs. Hence his condemnation of apartheid, his visit to the leper colony in the Ivory Coast, and his meal with the Vatican’s tramps. Even his pronouncements on international relations--his passionate belief that lasting peace can only be built on justice--may stem from his perceptions of the history of Poland, repeatedly the victim of realpolitik played by more powerful neighbors. “If you want peace, remember man,” was one of his favorite maxims. Hence his advocacy of the Bosnians, the “wandering Palestinians,” and the Kurds.
You have to be a Central European to appreciate the poignancy of a meeting between two elderly Poles at the Vatican in February 2001. Pope John Paul II was receiving my boss at the time, Poland’s foreign minister, Wladyslaw Bartoszewski. Bartoszewski--an Auschwitz survivor, an inmate of Communist jails, an honorary citizen of Israel for his role in saving Jews during the war--had been summoned to offer his advice on John Paul II’s forthcoming trip to Ukraine, the first ever by this pope, or any other. Ukraine’s Christians had recognized Rome in the 16th century at the time of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which included most of today’s Ukraine. Centuries of persecution under both czarist and Communist Russia followed. Now a Polish pope was consorting with a Polish foreign minister on how a papal comeback could return Ukraine to the Western fold.
The Ukrainian trip, in June 2001, was a smashing success and three years later Ukraine had its own democratic revolution. Most of Victor Yushchenko’s support came from John Paul II’s flock in Western Ukraine. It was no coincidence. What the Pope’s critics don’t seem to comprehend is that before people demand democracy and social rights, they have to gain faith in their own human dignity. John Paul II’s confidence in the inalienability of certain rights was a spiritual rock on which whole peoples rebuilt that faith.
One of the Pope’s greatest regrets, on the other hand, was that Russia chose to be the only historically Christian country that never let him set foot on its soil. Given the direction in which the country is going, perhaps Russian authorities knew all too well why they barred him.
Radek Sikorski is the executive director of the New Atlantic Initiative and a resident fellow at AEI, and he is the former deputy foreign minister of Poland.
