Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

Wojtyła rarely read newspapers, listened to the news on the radio or watched it on television. Every fortnight, however, Father Andrzej Bardecki, the Church’s liaison officer with the Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszechny (to which Wojtyła was a regular contributor), came to his study in the archbishop’s palace at Kraków and gave him a news briefing. 7Bardecki had been a target of PROGRESS operations by KGB illegals ever since BOGUN, posing as a West German press photographer, had first made contact with him in 1971. 8In 1977 another illegal, Ivan Ivanovich Bunyk, codenamed FILOSOV (“Philosopher”), who had been instructed by the Centre to develop sources inside the Polish Church, had a series of meetings with Bardecki. Bunyk had been born in France but had emigrated as a teenager with his Ukrainian family to the Soviet Union in 1947. In 1970 he had returned to France as a KGB illegal, trained as a journalist and set himself up as a freelance writer and poet. On his first meeting with Bardecki in 1977, FILOSOV probably presented him with one or more of the books he had published in France with the aid of KGB subsidies. Though the files noted by Mitrokhin do not include FILOSOV’s reports from Poland, there is little doubt that his main priority in cultivating Bardecki was to seek out information on Wojtyła. 9

SB surveillance reports during 1977 showed Wojtyła aligning himself with a variety of protest movements. On March 23 he received the student organizers of a petition of protest to the authorities and gave them his support. 10Increasingly he invoked the example of St. Stanisław, the martyred bishop of ancient Kraków whose silver sarcophagus formed part of the high altar in the cathedral, as a symbol of resistance to an unjust state:

St. Stanisław has become the patron saint of moral and social order in the country… He dared to tell the King himself that he was bound to respect the law of God… He was also the defender of the freedom that is the inalienable right of every man, so that the violation of that freedom by the state is at the same time a violation of the moral and social order. 11

It is easy to imagine the rage in the Centre as Wojtyła continued with impunity to defend the rights of the individual against violation by the Polish state.

Among the greatest triumphs of Wojtyła’s years at Kraków was the consecration on May 15, 1977 of the great new church at Nowa Huta, constructed after many years of opposition from a regime which had sought to exclude a visible Catholic presence from what it intended as a model “Socialist city.” 12In his sermon to a congregation of over 20,000, Wojtyła gave his blessing to those protesting against the death of a KOR activist, Stanisław Pyjas, who was widely believed—despite official denials—to have been murdered by the SB. 13That evening a long procession of mourners wound its way through the streets of Kraków to Wawel Castle, where a Committee of Student Solidarity was formed. Similar committees followed in other cities, all independent of the officially sponsored Socialist Union of Polish Students. 14

As church bells rang out across Poland on October 16, 1978 and the streets filled with excited crowds to celebrate Wojtyła’s election as pope, the PUWP Politburo reacted with private shock and alarm. Publicly, the Politburo reluctantly felt compelled to associate itself with the mood of popular rejoicing and sent a lengthy telegram of congratulations to the Vatican, expressing hypocritical joy that for the first time “a son of the Polish nation… sits on the papal throne.” What particularly disturbed the KGB, however, was the evidence that among many PUWP members, even some senior officials, the joy was genuine. 15As well as sending official reports on Polish popular rejoicing, KGB officers in Warsaw also unofficially relayed to their colleagues at the Centre some of the political jokes circulating immediately after John Paul II’s election. The white smoke from the Vatican chimney, traditionally used to signal the election of a pope, was said to have been followed on this occasion by red smoke; Wojtyła had burned his Party card. According to another satirical account, the new pope had secretly visited the Polish interior minister, who was responsible for the SB, and announced after the election, “Comrade minister! Your important instructions have been carried out!” 16

Two days after the election, Aristov, the Soviet ambassador, reported to Moscow in more serious vein:

The leadership of the Polish People’s Republic considers that the danger of Wojtyła’s move to the Vatican is that it will now clearly be more difficult to use the Vatican as a moderating influence on the Polish episcopate in its relations with the state. The Catholic Church will now make even greater efforts to consolidate its position and increase its role in the social and political life of the country.

At the same time, our friends consider that Wojtyła’s departure from the country also has its positive side, since the reactionary part of the episcopate has been deprived of its leader—one who had an excellent chance of becoming Primate of the Polish Catholic Church.

Aristov criticized the Polish Politburo for compromising its ability to resist the Church’s future demands by its past weakness in permitting the construction of new churches, the ordination of more priests and larger print-runs for Catholic publications. 17

At the time of Wojtyła’s election, Poland was probably the world’s most Catholic country. The KGB estimated that 90 percent of the population were Catholic. 18With 569 ordinations in 1978, Poland had the highest ratio of priestly vocations to population anywhere on earth. In total, there were 19,193 Polish priests and 5,325 students in seminaries. 19Somewhat alarmist KGB assessments put the figures higher still. 20A steady rise in religious practice continued over the next few years. According to a secret study circulated to the PUWP central committee, “This phenomenon emerged particularly acutely among the intelligentsia, especially among persons with higher education.” In 1978 25 percent of those with higher education were reported to engage in private prayer at home; by 1983 the figure had risen to over 50 percent. The central committee study plausibly attributed the increase to the “social-political crisis” and the influence of the Polish Pope. 21Even many Polish Party officials felt in awe of Wojtyła’s intense, mystical spirituality. They reported to Moscow that he often spent six to eight hours a day in prayer. On entering his private chapel, aides would sometimes find him lying motionless on the marble floor, his arms outstretched in the shape of a cross. 22

The KGB privately denounced some of John Paul II’s first acts in the Vatican as “anti-Soviet gestures.” Among them was his order on the day after his election that the red zuchetto —cardinal’s skullcap—which he had worn at the papal conclave should be taken to Lithuania by two priests from the Kraków archdiocese and placed on the altar of the church of the Virgin of Mercy in Vilnius. 23What most concerned the Centre during the early weeks of the new pontificate, however, was the Pope’s evident determination to give the Vatican a major voice in world affairs. Though John Paul II’s concerns ranged widely over the problems of peacekeeping and human rights around the globe, his first priority was the situation in Poland and eastern Europe. 24The Centre was particularly suspicious of the Pope’s appointment of the Lithuanianborn Andris Backis as one of his chief advisers on the Vatican’s relations with the Soviet Bloc. Backis’s father had served as pre-war ambassador of independent Lithuania in Paris, and Backis himself was believed to follow in the same “bourgeois” tradition. His appointment was, in the Centre’s view, another “anti-Soviet gesture.” 25On November 5 the Pope made his first official visit outside the Vatican to Assisi, the city of St. Francis, patron saint of Italy. A voice from the crowd urged him to remember eastern Europe: “Don’t forget the Church of Silence!” “It’s not a Church of Silence any more,” replied John Paul II, “because it speaks with my voice.” 26