The Pope in Winter

PART 1
Holy Theatre 1920–99

‘“Holy Theatre” implies that there is something else in existence, below, around and above, another zone even more invisible, even farther from the forms which we are capable of reading or recording, which contain extremely powerful sources of energy.’

Peter Brook, There Are No Secrets: Thoughts on Acting and the Theatre

1. Close Encounters

There is no substitute for the living presence, the inclination of the head, the meeting of the eyes, the idiosyncratic gesture, the tone of voice. I first met Pope John Paul II privately in his halcyon days. It was a grey morning in December 1987 and I had attended Mass in his private chapel.

Accompanied by his secretary Stanislaw Dziwisz, a Polish priest with soft gestures and an undulant step, John Paul appeared in the library of the papal apartment as if he had all the time in the world. He looked utterly centred in himself.

I noticed that his cassock was a little worn and off-white, a comfortable favourite for early mornings: he gave the impression of being equally comfortable and settled in his papacy. He was wearing a gleaming gold watch that flashed, like his pectoral cross, in the strong arc lamps. He wore a pair of stiff, shiny, fashionable tan casuals; they seemed to me, at first, incongruous, unclerical. Previous popes in this modern era had floated on felt-soled scarlet slippers.

He studied me with narrowed eyes, dragging those feet in sturdy shoes along the marble floor, somewhat pigeon-toed. ‘Stas’ Dziwisz, the ‘velvet power’ in the papal apartment, was whispering something in his ear. Then he was next to me, deeply stooped and hugely broad-shouldered, his legs a little apart like a hill-walker steadying himself. There was a discreet hint of peppermint and aftershave: I understood he liked Fisherman’s Friend lozenges for his throat, and dabs Penhaligon eau-de-Cologne on his well-shaven jowels. His silver-white hair was inexpertly cut and slightly tousled. His familiar face, the most famous face in the world, looked drained, exhausted, as if he had not slept. Cinematically handsome from afar, he appeared eminently human up close. If he was a mystic, as many of his biographers claimed, I sensed no numinous aura.

He inclined a large Slavonic left ear, inviting me to speak. His hand went out; as I grasped it and wondered whether I should kiss his ring, he managed to clutch my arm and push it away at the same time. His great square head went down until his chin was buried in his chest; then the eye opened, a steely, knowing eye, scrutinizing me sideways. He was waiting for me to say something. I caught a sudden impression of the Niagara of sycophancy, persuasion and petition that poured into that ear day by day. Then he turned full face on: a wide, fatherly, frank face. He began to speak: pointing his forefinger at me.

That first impression was of a man who was at once recollected, and yet dauntingly observant; kindly, yet capable of stern authority. I sensed an unassailable integrity, and openness, and yet there was something cunning, a peasant craftiness about the way he nailed you sideways with that eye when you least expected it. Above all, in that Vatican milieu of fleshy celibates, whose ambiance was cushioned offices and plump prayer stools, he came across as a plain man who set no store by decorous niceties; an unaffected, integrated, informal, utterly human person.

His informality, setting him apart from a generation of prelates who stood on ceremonial and ecclesiastical dignity, was captured in another first encounter I had heard about.

The late Derek Worlock, Archbishop of Liverpool, was serving on a bishops’ commission in Rome with Cardinal Wojtyla of Krakow, as John Paul then was in the early 1970s. One morning, according to Worlock, Wojtyla arrived late, soaked, having walked through driving rain across Rome, eschewing the use of the chauffeur-driven car to which he was entitled. Without the least embarrassment, as the assembled bishops and cardinals looked on, he first took off his shoes, then his sodden socks. Standing in bare feet, he squeezed out the water on the floor, placing the socks over a radiator to dry. Then he turned and said to the amazed prelates: ‘Well, gentlemen! Let’s get on with it.’

In his presence there is a sense of fathomless seriousness, a hint of inconsolable melancholy even. And yet, you see in those intelligent, watchful eyes a ready sense of life’s ridiculousness, held firmly in check. In the atmosphere of adulation that surrounds him, his minor jests are greeted with collapsing paroxysms of mirth, as when he said, for example, to Mayor Koch in New York: ‘You are the mayor, I must be careful to be a good citizen!’ Rarely reported are his more outrageous pranks, aided by his thespian gifts. A Vatican monsignor who was in attendance on the pope for some years told me the following revealing story.

One morning John Paul gave an audience to a phalanx of German visitors, theologians, bishops and VIPs. They were extremely formal and uptight: typically German. After I had shown them out of the audience room, I went back in to take my leave of the pope. He looked me fiercely in the eye, stood ramrod straight, clicked his heels and gave a barely perceptible, but quite unmistakable, little Nazi salute with a slightest gesture of the hand. It was hilarious: the Polish supreme pontiff sending up the Krauts! I was fit to burst out loud. Instead, insanely, I forgot myself and decided to turn the joke on him. So I gave him a look of horror, my hands on my cheeks, as if to rebuke him: as if to say: ‘Oh you naughty Holy Father! What would the Germans make of your little charade?’ His face darkened instantly and terrifyingly. His eyes were blazing with anger. But at that moment Ratzinger, another German, swept into the room and I had to shut the doors on them, giggling nervously to myself. Later that day John Paul and I were alone again. He turned on me, furious, and hit me hard on the arm. It actually hurt. ‘I was just trying to encourage you!’ he said. ‘Didn’t you understand? I was encouraging you!’ It was an odd phrase to use in English. But I understood what he meant. He meant that he was trying to amuse me or liven me up for the day. I stood there, fit to cry, because I loved him so much and I could see that I had offended him deeply. But how could I tell him that of course I had been ‘encouraged’, but I was just engaged in a little light-hearted irony in return? I just had to let it go, leaving him to think that I was a sanctimonious, humourless idiot.

Whatever the character of the man who becomes pope, the papal role, in time, begins to take over the human being, the personality of the individual elected to the strangest, most impossible and isolating job on earth. Paul VI, pope in the 1960s and 1970s, described the isolation thus: ‘I was solitary before, but now my solitariness becomes complete and awesome. Hence the dizziness, the vertigo. Like a statue on a plinth – that is how I live now.’

We will never know the solitude, the psychological fragmentation, the inner sufferings that have afflicted John Paul in consequence of his papal office. But there are clues. Eamon Duffy, the Cambridge church historian, relates a story told him by a theologian friend who had been invited to dinner with John Paul II in the days when young priests were invited regularly to the papal table. This friend found himself sitting next to John Paul and decided to strike up a personal conversation rather than trying to find something arresting or important to say.

He said: ‘Holy Father, I love poetry, and I’ve read all your verse. Have you written much poetry since you became pope?’ To which the pope said: ‘I’ve written no poetry since I became pope.’ So the theologian said: ‘Well, why is that, Holy Father?’ The pope cut him dead, turning to the person on his other side.

Twenty minutes later, John Paul turned to the theologian and said curtly: ‘No context!’ That was all.

As the dinner party broke up and the guests were departing, Duffy’s friend, on taking his leave, said somewhat rashly: ‘Holy Father, when I pray for you now, I’ll pray for a poet without context.’ The pope did not respond. He just froze.

John Paul clearly felt that he had laid bare a very private part of his life. But he had imparted a tragic truth perhaps. The papal office takes over the whole person. That is what the job demands. When he said there was no ‘context’ for poetry, he seemed to be acknowledging that in the depths of his soul, deep down where the poetry is written, there lies a terrible, vertiginous solitude.

There are many millions who have never met the pope in the flesh, but who have encountered him in their dreams. Graham Greene, towards the end of his life the most famous Catholic writer in the world, had been a friend of Pope Paul VI who had read all his books and admired them. But Greene never received a call to meet with John Paul II. When I talked with Greene not long before he died, he told me:

I dream about John Paul II. There is a recurrent dream. I am in St Peter’s Square and there are tens of thousands of people, nuns and priests and lay people. They are all grovelling on their knees, venerating him in the most repulsive fashion. And he is in their midst dispensing communion from a huge ciborium. Only he is not dispensing the communion bread but ornate over-rich Italian chocolates.

And there was another dream: ‘I am sitting on my balcony in Antibes having breakfast. I open up the newspaper and there’s this headline: “John Paul Canonizes Jesus Christ”. I sit there, astounded that this pope could be so arrogant as to make a saint of our Saviour.’ Then Greene said, as if he had got to the bottom of John Paul’s character: ‘He had a lot in common with Ronald Reagan. They were both world leaders who were in fact just actors.’

Greene’s antipathy towards John Paul, encapsulated in those dreams, represents a familiar reaction among many sophisticated, liberal Catholics: John Paul arrogant and autocratic, patting the heads of the faithful, John Paul obsessed with saint-making, John Paul acting a part. One wonders, though, how Greene, with his novelist’s antennae, might have judged John Paul had he actually met him in the flesh.

Not everyone has been bowled over by John Paul; and John Paul, we are told, can shut a person out, totally and finally, when he feels that his interlocutor is behaving inappropriately. On my second private meeting with him, I, too, dared to ask him about his creative writing. His response was to feign deafness. I asked again, and he pointedly made an unrelated observation in order to change the subject.

But the inescapable reaction of those who have had dealings with him, person to person, and this was certainly my own impression, is dynamic paradox and contradiction. The philosopher Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka worked with him on his book The Acting Person in the 1970s. Sexually attractive, subtle, with great force of character, she spent hundreds of hours with him, sometimes with his secretary present, but often alone. She was under no illusions about John Paul’s foibles; her percipient description of his character, given in an interview with Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi, is as memorable as it is moving:

He has developed in himself an attitude of modesty, a very solicitous way of approaching people. He makes a person feel there is nothing else on his mind, he is ready to do everything for the other person… Due to his innate personal charm, which is one of his great weapons, he has in addition a poetical nature, a captivating way of dealing with people. These are all evidences of his charisma – even the way in which he moves, though now it is no more, now that he is an old gentleman. He had a way of moving, a way of smiling, a way of looking around that was different and exceedingly personal. It had a beauty about it.

Yet Dr Tymieniecka went on to say: ‘If there is one trait of character which I can observe in him it is love of contradiction.’ She says: ‘People around him see the sweetest, most modest person.’ Then she adds: ‘He is by no means as humble as he appears. Neither is he modest. He thinks about himself very highly, very adequately… This is an extremely multifaceted human being, extremely colourful.’

2. Stage-struck

Like a moth to a flame, the boy Karol Wojtyla was drawn irresistibly to theatre. From the age of eight, tall for his age and plump in the face, he was stage-struck: running errands for an amateur dramatic society, helping to build stage sets, aspiring to be a prompter. At home, alone in the privacy of his bedroom, he performed another kind of play-acting: priestly rituals in make-believe vestments sewn by his seamstress mother, Emilia. When his brother Edmund, fourteen years his senior, became a doctor, Karol solo-acted scenes for the patients in the hospital wards. By the time he left school Karol had directed, and acted in, ten productions, invariably in the lead role.

He had a taste for patriotic drama, statuesque postures and grandiloquent bardic monologues. Years later Wojtyla would declare that the tradition of Polish drama puts Shakespeare in the shade. Polish theatre, he explained, preserved the existence of the nation through all the annexations and occupations inflicted by barbarous neighbours. The Catholic Faith and Polish drama blended indistinguishably: liturgy, pilgrimage, theatre had greater reality and power than the ebb and flow of armies and dictators. And the fount and origin of Polish nationhood was the motherhood of the Virgin Mary. For Catholic Poles history was shaped not by the vanity of human ambitions, but by Mary’s intercessions and miraculous initiatives.

And yet, as with all patriotism and nationalism, there are continuities with xenophobia and ethnic hatreds, as Poland’s Jews could confirm. There is no doubting Karol Wojtyla’s ease with the Jewish community in the town of his birth. His home in Wadowice was owned by Jews; his best friend, Jerzy Kluger, was a Jew; and Karol could bandy Yiddish with Jewish kids on the street. But it was Cardinal Hlond, Catholic primate of all Poland, who declared in 1936, when Karol Wojtyla was sixteen, and Hitler’s Reich was but three years in existence: ‘There will be the Jewish problem as long as the Jews remain.’

Nor were the Poles unknown to execute pre-emptive military strikes. In 1920, three months after Karol Wojtyla was born, in a bid to form an empire that would take in the Ukraine, Belorussia and Lithuania, Poland took on the Red Army. To be sure, Poland had much to fear from Russia and its satellites. Lenin had stated: ‘The path to world conflagration passes over the corpse of Poland.’ Tearing up the Versailles settlements following the end of the Great War, Poland’s military dictator, Jozef Pilsudski, seized the great city of Kiev from the Bolsheviks. In retaliation Lenin ordered the invasion of Poland, bringing four massive armies to the gates of Warsaw, outnumbering the Polish army virtually three to one. A call went out from every pulpit rallying Polish manhood to the defence of the native soil. The Poles were weary and many of her soldiers were no more than children and went barefoot. But the blood of the nation was up. On the day after the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, 16 August 1920, the Red Army was routed in an orgy of carnage on the banks of the great Vistula river. Some 15,000 Russians were slaughtered and 65,000 taken prisoner. A further 30,000 fled across the nearest border into Prussia and were disarmed. The victory was owed in popular imagination neither to the courage of the citizen army, nor to Pilsudski’s tactics, which were as brilliant as they were bold, but to the direct intervention of the Virgin Mary. She would be accorded credit for stopping the sweep of atheistic Communism into the West. The battle was to be known in future years as the Miracle of the Vistula. Patriotism and religious fervour, piety and violence, were at fever pitch.

Karol Wojtyla was born on 18 May 1920, in Wadowice, a scruffy provincial town some twenty miles south-west of Krakow, not far from the Czech border. His father, Karol Senior, was a non-commissioned officer, formerly in the Austro-Hungarian army, now a quartermaster in Poland’s militia; his mother, Emilia, an invalid for much of her adult life, and inconsolable following the loss of a baby daughter, Olga, took in sewing to make ends meet.

Karol Senior, seldom out of uniform, was a self-disciplined martinet, with carefully proportioned moustachios. He mapped out his sons’ days, scheduling even their leisure hours. He was pious and controlling. Karol Junior’s upbringing under a strict father (‘He was so hard on himself that he had no need to be hard on his son,’ remarked Wojtyla with fond approval) was imbued with devotion to the Virgin, her feast days, cults, shrines, privileges and perpetual acts of succour. Poland is the country, Wojtyla would one day declare, where one may ‘hear the beating of the heart of the nation in the heart of the Mother’. He knelt before the statue of the Virgin in the parish church every day on his way to school, where he was taught by a succession of dedicated priests.

Near by, on the summit of a hill, was a discalced, or barefoot, Carmelite community, austere monk-friars who practised both the contemplative and the active missionary life. He became an early devotee of the Carmelite scapular, two pieces of cloth to be worn over one’s breast and back, signifying Mary’s protection. Those wearing the scapular at their deaths, it was believed, were excused their due in Purgatory and would rise straight to heaven the Friday following their passing.

The greatest of Poland’s shrines was the monastery at Jasna Gora, ‘Bright Mountain’, housing the miraculous icon of ‘The Black Madonna’ in the city of Czestochowa. The wood on which the icon is painted is reputed to be the board of the table, crafted by St Joseph, on which the holy family ate; St Luke, the evangelist, is credited with having painted the image. Prince Ladislaus Opolszyk brought it to Czestochowa in 1382, and Prince Jagiello built the monastery and church for the Paulite Fathers, whose task in perpetuity was to venerate and protect the sacred object. After the monastery repulsed an attack by anti-papist Swedes in 1656, Our Lady of Czestochowa was proclaimed Queen of Poland. The icon became the rallying sign of Polish nationalism. On a visit to Jasna Gora, on 6 June 1979, Wojtyla, as pope, would inform his listeners that as a schoolboy he had been granted ‘special interviews’ with Our Lady at the shrine. The icon would become the inspiration for Henryk Gorecki’s Opus 36, Symphony of Songs of Complaint, which bears comparison with Britten’s War Requiem and Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony, as memorials to the victims of the Second World War.

Then there were the shrines of the Christ and Virgin of Kalwaria situated in steep woodland between Wadowice and Krakow – chapels and grottoes commemorating the House at Nazareth, the Mount of Olives, Mount Calvary, the Brook of Kedron, the tomb of Mary: twenty-four shrines in all. Each year the young Wojtyla and his father attended the richly sombre annual Marian festival, ‘The Funeral and Triumph of the Mother of God’, conducted on the eve of the feast of her Assumption into Heaven. All through the night Karol, among a host of pilgrims bearing lamps, trudged up and down the steep hills following an open coffin in which lay an effigy of the dead Mother of God. Parallel with the Way of the Cross, celebrated on Good Friday each year, her destination was the burial place from whence she would be assumed on the morrow, body and soul into heaven. The ritualistic insistence on the death of Mary was no small matter along these borderlands where the Latin rite antagonistically confronted the Eastern Orthodox schismatics who insisted that Mary merely slept rather than died before she was conducted to heaven by an angelic host.

It was to the altar in the basilica at Kalwaria that Wojtyla’s father and his two sons repaired in 1929 to pray for the soul of Emilia, Karol’s mother. She had died alone, away from home, aged forty-five. Karol was just nine years of age. All we know for certain is that she had been under treatment for kidney and heart disease. When the father learned of her death, he had marched over to Karol’s school, conveyed the information to a duty teacher and departed, leaving the boy to receive the news of his mother’s death without paternal consolation. It was remembered that Karol, dry-eyed, told the teacher: ‘It is God’s will.’ Ten years later, Karol Wojtyla, poet, dramatist and actor, would write a poem to her:

On your white tomb

Blossom the white flowers of life.

Oh how many years have already vanished

Without you – how many years?

On your white tomb

Closed now for years

Something seems to rise:

Inescapable as death.

On your white tomb

Mother, my lifeless love…

Karol grew up a pensive soul, although not introverted. One of his acting friends, Danuta Michalowska, says that when things went well during rehearsal he would cartwheel across the stage. Three years after the death of his mother, Edmund the doctor, the beloved older brother who had carried him everywhere on his shoulders, died from scarlet fever contracted from a patient. Edmund’s death made a deeper impression on Karol than the death of his mother, he would recall, ‘because of the dramatic circumstances in which it occurred and because I was more mature’. His brother died in agony and anger. The senior hospital physician who stood by his bed related that Edmund had cried out repeatedly in his death throes: ‘Why me? Why now?’

Karol Wojtyla had the answer. He solemnly reminded those who attempted to commiserate that it was ‘the will of God’. Throughout his pontificate John Paul has kept his brother’s stethoscope in a drawer in his desk.

Death, suffering and separation were inescapable, as the poem he wrote in honour of his mother emphasized. But the Motherhood of Our Lady exemplified a suffering that brought consolation and promise of succour. Her heart, too, had been pierced with sorrows. She too had died, but she would not allow death to separate her from her children. Her motherly care beyond death was demonstrated by her frequent visitations, her real presences on this earth, as if she were on pilgrimage to the promised era of the third millennium.

Such were the Marian meditations that would take shape in Karol Wojtyla’s soul on his strange and eventful path to the priesthood, and in time to the very pinnacle of the Catholic Church. He would articulate his particular insight into her earthly apparitions ‘through space and time, and even more through the history of souls’. Ruminating on the great shrines dedicated to her apparitions in his encyclical letter to the world Redemptoris Mater (Mother of the Redeemer, 1987), he would make special mention of Guadalupe (Our Lady of the Americas outside Mexico City), Lourdes, Fatima and his own Polish Jasna Gora, a ‘specific geography of faith’, as he called it, not forgetting ‘all those places of pilgrimage where the People of God seek to meet the Mother of God in order to find, within the radius of the maternal presence of her who believed, a strengthening of their own faith’.

In August 1938, when Karol was eighteen, he arrived in the city of Krakow with his father. They had inherited the lower ground floor of a house in which his mother had once owned a share. ‘Day after day,’ Wotyla would write later of his father, ‘I was able to observe the austere way in which he lived. After my mother’s death, his life became one of constant prayer. Sometimes I would wake up during the night and find my father on his knees.’ Small wonder he would refer to his home-life in Krakow as a ‘kind of domestic seminary’. For the serious young drama-king Karol, however, the comparison was entirely a favourable one.

He stood out among the first-year students at the university. With his long hair, open-necked collar and extravagant hand gestures, he looked every inch the artist. He was yet to master the minimalism that would bring the house down in later years. His bearing was ‘full of dignity’; one informant speaks of his wearing fashionable knickerbockers and trendy brown shoes of above-ankle cut. He continued to be stage-struck, and so when he enrolled at the Jagiellonian University he was drawn to courses in the history of the Polish language, Polish literature and Polish drama. He took voice training and joined yet another local drama group. Halina Kwiatowska-Krolikiewicz, the Polish actress, with whom he collaborated in the theatre at school and afterwards, has commented: ‘He analysed everything, thought everything through. But he also had a sparkle, an ironic sparkle in his eye.’

Disaster leading to global catastrophe struck as Karol Wojtyla entered his second year at university. On 1 September 1939, Hitler invaded Poland with overwhelming superiority in arms, exploiting the Wehrmacht’s new military bliztkrieg strategy. On 17 September, the Red Army, under the bitter and tyrannical deal struck with Hitler, swarmed into eastern Poland, greatly accelerating the bloody defeat of the country. But Poland’s agony was just beginning, particularly for the nation’s Jews, millions of whom were transported to concentration camps in Poland. By the end of the war, in addition to the uprooting of populations, starvation and repression, some six million Poles were to suffer death or physical injury. Hans Frank, the Nazi Governor General, planned to make Poland a slave state, destroying its culture and liquidating the entire intellectual and academic class, as well as its priesthood. Contemplating Karol Wojtyla’s profound abhorrence of contraception and abortion, it is crucial to remember that as a young man, having lost mother, sister and brother, he witnessed the tidal wave of hatred which threatened to crush the life out of an entire people. Small wonder he saw in every indication of thwarted life a type and exemplification of that lust for annihilation which he came to call a ‘culture of death’.

Wojtyla’s university teachers and many students were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. The brutality of the occupation gave greater impetus and point to Wojtyla’s passion for theatre. Working during the day in a quarry where minerals were mined for the Solvay chemical plant, which made explosives for the Nazis, he was entitled to a permit that allowed him to remain in Krakow. In his spare time he helped found a secret drama society, which staged readings of patriotic poetry and new writing. The group regarded their readings and clandestine improvisations as a form of resistance more effective than the violent tactics of the partisans who hid in the woods and came at night to kill Germans and collaborators. The theatrical material included a genre known as Polish Messianism, work of traditional ‘prophetic’ bards which exemplified the suffering and resurrection of Poland as a parallel to Christ’s sacrifice for the human race. Poland was the Christ, scourged and nailed to the cross.

Living amidst death, cruelty, privation and oppression and, in time, evidence of genocide from the smoking chimney stacks beyond the barbed wire of Auschwitz, thirty miles distant from Krakow, Wojtyla’s secret theatre assumed the proportions of an alternative world, an alternative reality. Nor were their dreams restricted to Central Europe. The Polish Messianists dreamed of a Slavic pope who would one day reform the papacy and spread Catholicism eastwards across the globe. The young Wojtyla would have heard many times the lines of the patriotic dramatist Juliusz Slowacki (1809–49):

Armed discord God strikes

At a bell immense,

For a Slavic Pope

He opened the throne…

Behold the Slavic Pope is coming

A brother of the people.