Keys of This Blood (6 page)

By contrast, and for all of Mikhail Gorbachev's genius as an innovative and imaginative geopolitician, the Soviet leader is heir to a mentality and an organization that remain committed to Leninist ideology and goals, however they are to be achieved. And, for all of his difficulties as he tries to steer the Soviet Union into the river of Western European progress—avoiding shipwreck on the rock of Stalinist hard-lining as best he can, while maneuvering around the hard place of implosion and disintegration of the Leninist system—he has never been at the mercy of forces within his own house that clamor for an end result any different from the one he himself is after. Neither the problems Gorbachev faces, nor the bold and unprecedented means he has adopted to overcome those problems, provide John Paul with realistic and persuasive evidence that Gorbachev's vision for the ultimate grand design is at odds either with Lenin's seminal vision or with the aims of the most powerful elements of his own Party. The quarrel in the USSR is not over the end to be desired, but over the means to achieve that end.

The Wise Men of the West likewise proceed in the same hope they have always shared that their animating spirit will be sufficient to propagate democratic egalitarianism into a coherent geopolitical structure, and never mind the nay-sayers. They are as one in their intent to give the lie to the medieval maxim “Hope is a good companion, but a bad guide.” Even the fact that they have been forced by Gorbachev into a deep revision of their earlier plans is not in itself a revolutionary change; for it has been true more often than not over the past seventy years that Soviet leadership has been the active agent in international affairs and that the West has made hay out of its role as a powerful reactive agent. There may be as many opinions in the West as there are in the Soviet Union about which path to follow in any specific situation. But about the end result that is desired and sought, there is no bedrock disunity. In that sense at least, the West is not a house that is irreparably divided.

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When John Paul started into the millennium endgame—when he initiated it—all of his moves were tied to his clear but decidedly long-range vision that he could supersede the plans of both East and West; and, further, that he could leaven and finally supplant those superpower plans with some system that would tie the condition of the whole world no longer to the success barometers in Moscow and Washington but to the legitimate and absolute needs of the whole of mankind.

Even had any of the world leaders in 1978 and 1979 known what John Paul had in mind in their regard, none of them would have ventured a guess that the Middle European hotbed of nineteenth-century politics and wars would become the actual arena of the late-twentieth-century contest for world hegemony. For, to all intents and purposes, those leaders accepted the Iron Curtain as a permanent element of international life; as a kind of reliable center they could count on as they moved forward with their contentious agendas.

It was expected by most that the United States, Western Europe and Japan would continue as the trilateral giants of their camp. It was expected by those giants themselves that, over time, they would be able to weave and extend a net of profound change in the conditions of life around the world. It was expected that, over time, such profound change would lead to the creation of a geopolitical house in which the society of nations would live happily ever after. It was expected further that, over time, as the West built the sinews of a new world on the foundations of its technological, commercial and developmental prowess, it would simultaneously wear down the Soviet Union by the same means.

John Paul's program was intent upon sweeping all such plans aside. The suffering caused by the East-West divide was too intense—too urgent and too widespread—to be acceptable as the permanent center or the reliable element in anybody's plans. He came to the papacy, therefore, certain in the knowledge that the old order had to go.

Moreover, the Holy Father's own certainty that the locus of change must lie within Eastern Europe was not mere whim or contrariness or personal will. It was not even luck or untutored intuition. It was based on the careful penetration of what the West had long regarded as the Soviet enigma. It was rooted in the facts of hard-nosed intelligence; facts he analyzed without the impediment of an ideology rooted in the motives of profit or seduced by the siren song of raw power.

Pope John Paul was not surprised, therefore, by his early victory in Poland in 1979. Nor was he surprised that it was not the West, but the Soviet Union—the constant catalyst of twentieth-century affairs—that saw its advantage in shifting the locus of significant activity away from
the agenda that had been fixed by the trilateral allies for their own advantage, and toward Eastern Europe, where the USSR needed early solutions to grave problems.

First, as he planned it then, he would introduce step-by-step and carefully balanced alterations in the sociocultural forces already deeply at work in Poland, not as a governmental entity but as a nation of people. His aim was to provide a model the Soviet Union could follow to ease the mounting pressures besetting the Politburos in Warsaw and Moscow; and to do that without spooking them in the areas of their military security and political dominance in that key sector of Eastern Europe.

With that delicate purpose in mind, and with the on-site cooperation of Cardinal Wyszynski and his Polish hierarchy, who were already past masters at such activity, the first instrument the Pope fomented—Solidarity—was devised purely and simply as a model of sociocultural liberty. Pointedly, he did not demand or want for it a political role; nor did he envision for it any action that would precipitate a Soviet-inspired security or military backlash.

The sociocultural model in and of itself was not an original idea. It traced back at least as far as the argument set out by Thomas Aquinas seven hundred years ago to the effect that the two seminal and ineradicable loves of any individual human being are the love of God and the love of one's native country; and, further, that these can live and flourish only within the framework of a religious nationalism.

The greatest significance of Solidarity, therefore, was to be its function as a modern laboratory of sociocultural liberty rooted entirely and sufficiently in religious nationalism. If it was totally successful, it would be an important new ingredient introduced into the dough of international affairs that would produce a slow leavening of the materialist mind dominating East and West alike.

Even without total success, however, Solidarity would be an unbloody battleground for a choice John Paul was certain would have to be made. A choice, on the one hand, for the sociocultural religious nationalism vindicated in Poland by the Pontiff's mentor, Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, and championed in the Soviet Union itself first by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and more recently by Igor Shafarevich. Or, conversely, a choice for the opposing sociopolitical model personified in the Soviet Union mainly by Andrei Sakharov and in Poland by the two well-known activists Adam Michnik and Jacek Kuron: a model totally based on the Western ideal of democratic egalitarianism.

To some degree, then, Solidarity was the first international arena in which John Paul's early idea—his early vision, if you will, of religious
nationalism as the vehicle for sociocultural freedom—made its debut in the hostile territory of the Soviet Union, and at the same time went head-to-head with the basic premise of the capitalist superpower.

Solidarity alone would not do the trick, of course. The melting of the Soviet iceberg of materialist, anti-Church and anti-God intransigence would, as John Paul saw the matter in 1979, be an intricate affair of papal policy that he would begin. But it would continue into another pontificate after he himself had joined his predecessors in the papal crypt beneath the altar of St. Peter's Basilica.

While time was thus not the primary factor for the Pope in those early years of his reign, still he wasted not a moment in setting the broader lines of his new policy with respect to the USSR. And the manner in which he proceeded was instructive concerning his whole approach to Vatican politics.

The policy toward the Soviet Union initiated in 1959–60 by Pope John XXIII, and subsequently elaborated from 1963 to 1978 into the wellknown
Ostpolitik
of the Vatican under Pope Paul VI, presented a practical problem for John Paul. For, at its heart, it was the same policy of containment that the Western powers had adopted toward the USSR of Joseph Stalin in the forties and that they had followed ever since. Its essence was to contain Soviet aggression; to react to Soviet moves; and to wait for some favorable evolution within the Soviet system.

Whatever the results of such an
Ostpolitik
for capitalist democracy, it was a barren policy for religion and for the Church. It promised only silent martyrdom amid the slow erosion of all religious tradition by the steady pressures of a professional antireligion. It was a seemingly perpetual tunnel with no light at the end, filled merely with the ever-encroaching darkness of spreading godlessness.

Nonetheless, Pope John Paul made it clear that he would not abrogate the policies of his predecessors. Practically speaking, it would have been difficult and even counterproductive to do so in any case, for diplomatic protocols with some Eastern European countries had already been signed, and others were in train.

The solution for John Paul lay in the fact that there was nothing in the Vatican's
Ostpolitik
, and nothing in the Vatican protocols, to keep him from attempting an end run around the Soviet Party-State. In precisely such a move, the new Holy Father set about building closer and ever closer ties with the Russian Orthodox Church and with Eastern Orthodoxy in general.

This papal end run included certain overt moves—John Paul visited the Greek Orthodox center in Istanbul, for example; and he received and openly favored visits to the Vatican by Orthodox prelates. But there were also constant covert moves originating in Poland and radiating into western parts of the USSR, moves that fostered a common religious bond between Eastern European Roman Catholics and Russian Orthodox communities.

Later historians with access to records unavailable today will document the successes of John Paul's end-run policies and their basic premise. Suffice it to say now that, in spite of the official prostitution of the Russian Orthodox Church to the ideological policies of the Party-State, John Paul's efforts nourished within that Church a genuinely Christian core of prelates and people eager once and for all to reenter the mainstream of European Christianity as vindicated by papal Rome; and eager as well to renounce the role, accepted once upon a time by Russian Orthodox Church authorities, as servants of the Soviet Party-State in the fomentation of worldwide revolution.

By the opening of the eighties, about half of the Orthodox prelates were already secretly prepared, if the opportunity were afforded, to place themselves under the ecclesial unity of the Roman Pope. A sociocultural leavening had been produced within the Russian Orthodox Church. While the Vatican's official
Ostpolitik
remained undisturbed, a deep cultural change was being effected covertly within the body of Russian Orthodox believers that could lead in the long run—as all deep cultural changes do—to sociopolitical change.

Yet another factor the Pope reckoned as working for his new policy of stirring up change in the Soviet Union was the information revolution taking place worldwide. Launched in the West, and already producing a global invasion of practical knowledge into the business of international linkage and development, this was not a factor under John Paul's control. But it could only work hand in glove with the sociocultural change so essential for his stategy in the Soviet Union. For the information revolution would inevitably mean the dawning of the factual truth about things on the minds of Soviet citizens. Factual truth about past history, for one thing; and about present economic and social conditions in the world. The kind of truth that would help free those citizens from the darksome toils of the Big Lie foisted on them by the Party-State.

John Paul achieved some remarkable successes in the dynamic pursuit of his independent policies to sow the seeds of sociocultural change in the geopolitical soil of the East. Indeed, his assault on the Soviet monolith was key to the 1989 liberation of the Eastern European states. And
by 1990—almost overnight, as it seemed to the inattentive—whole blocs of Russian believers voted themselves and their church property back into the Roman Catholic fold.

Nevertheless, this was not a pope for halfhearted ventures, nor for half an international policy. His end run around Soviet officialdom was not a religious gambit, but a geopolitical strategy, and it was therefore joined to a twin policy toward the West. His concern, in other words, was not only to produce a change in the policies of what Cardinal Wyszynski had always called the Red
Internationale
of the USSR. At least as much of his attention, and a great deal more of his physical energy, was devoted to a change in the increasingly materialist, antiChurch and anti-God stance of the Golden
Internationale
of the Western capitalist nations.

It was significant in that regard that the Solidarity experiment with which the Pontiff was so deeply involved in his Polish homeland would quickly fire the popular imagination, and the deep concern of all truly democratic minds, in the Western nations. But the deepest and broadest effects of John Paul's policies were produced in the West as a direct consequence of his crisscrossing lines of world travel. By those travels he achieved a high international profile; he made his ideas current coinage among world leaders; and in countries that were battlegrounds between East and West, he was able to juxtapose those ideas persuasively with Leninist-Marxist ideas. Within a brief time, it became so clear that Pope John Paul had taken his due place among the nations' leaders that—after over a hundred years of an attitude that passed for a policy, an attitude regarded by some as “Hands off this political hot potato”—even the United States reestablished formal diplomatic relations between Washington and the Vatican.