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Saturday, April 30, 2011
This essay first appeared here in the April, 2005 issue of TheScreamOnline.
The Terrible Beauty of Pope John Paul II
Janosik, folk hero in Slovakia and Poland. Image purchased in Gdansk; artist unknown.
Gay rights? Yes. I've
published, broadcast, marched. Women's rights? Yup. I've worked hard, and paid
the price – even in the "enlightened" Ivory Tower. Church sex abuse?
As I said in a broadcast essay, it's about time this stuff went public, and
married and women priests are two of our best hopes for change. Liberation
Theology? I taught in the
students died of stomachaches.
Pope John Paul II
dropped the ball on all of these.
On April 3, 2005, in
the cold and rain of a very late spring, I traveled far, to
Egan presided; UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Senator Chuck Schumer, Rudy
Giuliani, and Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy were in attendance. My
sneakers were wet with rain and I was cold and my students' midterms needed
grading. Why was I there, my pew-mate's elbow in my ribs, my dripping raincoat
in my lap? The answer presented itself to me; this was the first clear thought
I'd had since I learned of the death of Karol Wojtyla. I was there because I
was in so much pain that I felt that I would rip my heart out of my chest if I
didn't do something, and this high-falutin, but rather uninspired, high
mass was the thing to do. I was, as people do when they mourn, just assigning
my head, heart and hands busywork until I could face my real assignment:
inconsolable grief.
The face of a feminist, a proponent
of gay rights, a fan of Liberation Theology, has run with tears over the death
of John Paul II. If you'll allow me, I'll tell you why.
***
"How do you know if your house has been robbed by a Polak?
The garbage can is empty and the dog is pregnant." I grew up hearing those
jokes. Grew up telling them.
Oh, you're thinking, so you
liked him out of simple chauvinism. You're Polish-American; a famous guy was a
Pole.
And I respond, "You don't understand."
Poles say that a lot. And then we say, "Let me explain."
Polak jokes, as vile as they were, spoke one truth: Poles were
among the scum of the earth.
The word "slave"
in major European languages comes from the word "Slav." Slavs were
Europe's and
century, and, then, again, under Hitler. Between 1772 and 1918,
colonized; this dark period is called "the partitions." Noblemen were
marched to
hangings; schoolchildren were punished for praying in their mother tongue.
Lots of peoples have been oppressed. No, make that most
peoples. Even WASPs. The Highland Clearances drove peasants from the Scottish
countryside to make room for the more profitable sheep.
An
old Peace Corps proverb says, "Volunteers come back from Latin America
talking revolution, from Asia contemplating their navels, and they come back
from
attests that different peoples process oppression in different ways. What makes
the Poles, as sufferers, different from any other miserable, blistered batch of
seething humanity?
Popular commentators provide an easy
answer: the Catholic Church. That answer is too easy. During the, roughly, two
hundred years when Poland was more or less occupied territory, the Vatican was
quite capable of telling Poles not to make waves. Too, when
free before the partitions, it was a proudly multicultural state, hosting
Protestants, Muslims, Jews, Orthodox, Arians and Unitarians.
nationalist heroes include Adam Michnik, a Jew. Nazi and then Communist ethnic
cleansing made
more than ninety percent Catholic only in the second half of the twentieth
century.
There's another possible explanation for
ability to propagate offspring like John Paul II. Before the partitions,
Knights, who were famous for converting Pagans to Christianity by killing them.
Catholic Poles united with Pagan Lithuanians; some see this alliance as the
genesis of
famous religious tolerance.
Poles were on the winning
side of the 1683 Battle of Vienna. Bernard Lewis cites this Turkish defeat as
the beginning of a long slide for Islam that reached its nadir in the terror
attack of September 11. Poles saved
from advancing Jihad. Poles did well as well as doing good; some families
measured their diamonds and pearls by the bucket-load.
Then,
in 1772,
decreed goal was "to abolish everything which could revive the memory of
the existence of
Poles had a mission: resisting genocide, not just for themselves, but for other
oppressed peoples. Thus was born the messianic slogan Poles cried when fighting,
as they did, in the only successful New World slave uprising in
in the American Revolution – think Kosciuszko and Pulaski – and in the RAF,
"For your freedom, and ours."
The Polish
mythology I'm proposing, in brief: "Our true home is glory. Our current,
entirely wretched, circumstances are temporary. We reveal our true selves not
in how others serve us, but how we serve others." Of course, this meshes with
the Judeo-Christian narrative of
Not everyone was invested in this; if you go, you will
meet as many jerks in
as elsewhere. But I've traveled the world, and the fine people of
In the dregs of Soviet-era
I encountered distinctly Polish lives lived as if powered by lightening.
Even e-mails from cranks can contain a grain of truth. Years
ago a disgruntled reader wrote, "I can't stand Poles! I've been there!
They can be nothing but peasants who crap in an outhouse and they strut like
the lord of some manor!" Well, yeah.
"Where
there is no vision, the people perish." So says the book of Proverbs.
of those places where vision could be a leading export. Modern poets testify to
the burden a surfeit of vision imposes. William Butler Yeats belongs to
could have been a Pole. Yeats wrote, "A terrible beauty is born,"
about the diamond-hard heroism that hardship and vision together sometimes
conspire to engender.
Here in the
woman, long before
became hip, I was resisting the American-flavored genocide of ethnic jokes. As
a teenager, I got a job as a nurse's aid, earning minimum wage. I saved up. I
went to
beauty.
I'll tell you just this one story; this happened
in
a nation with its own mythology. My Uncle John knew everything there is to know
about the forest. A biologist hired him as a guide. The Communists had made
this biologist a non-person. He lived in a one-room, underground hovel with
sheet metal walls. He was forbidden contact with other scholars. Luckily the Communists
did not realize that my peasant uncle, though unschooled, was a brilliant man;
they were allowed to associate.
Scientific
paraphernalia surrounded the scholar. We chatted in English. He was eager to chat
with me, a backward teen. He kept me a long time. I itched for the door. Though
he was painfully courteous to me, the scholar's speech hurt me. His vocabulary
was broad and his grammar flawless but his speech sounded mechanical, jerky,
almost like one of those voice synthesizers that people with ALS use. I was
eventually told why. This scholar had taught himself English, with the aid of
nothing but a bilingual dictionary. He had never had a conversation in this
language he had so painstakingly learned.
I am haunted
by this man, by the power of his dream, by the pressure of his prison, by the
sound of his voice. I was depressed in his presence and I wanted to leave. I've
never left, of course. When I try to do something hard, and I weaken and want
to quit, I think of him in his hovel, word by word learning a language he’d
never be able to use to read distant colleagues' work and to express his
discoveries, his enthusiasm, his life. And I keep going.
My Uncle Jan is at the far left of this photo.
Oppression plus vision is an invitation, not an obligation. It is an
invitation that many decline. Much of the Soviet-era
a diorama of the bleakest aesthetic principles and logic of Film Noir. Life was
ugly and irrational, and …then it was ugly again. A pacifist, I felt violated
by my own dreams: manning sandbag barricades and machine-gunning faceless
enemies.
Late one winter afternoon, I was in a bar
mleczny, one of the cheap vegetarian cafeterias the Communists had set up. An
old man with a thick stubble was eating fermented rye soup and cheese
pierogies. He wore rumpled workingman's clothing. His posture was hunched, his
fingers thick. There was nothing remarkable about his appearance. He picked up
one of his pierogies, and smeared it across his stubble. It was disturbing to
watch. No one reacted. I rose from my unfinished dinner and left.
That old man could have been crazy in the way that people
anywhere are crazy. But to me he's the poster boy for the person who reaches a
point where he can't take it anymore, and stops resisting the crushing tide of
ugliness, and joins it. So, no, not everyone accepts oppression's invitation to
heroism. But some do, and, strangely, there are reports of how darkness can
introduce light.
Romeo Dallaire was commander of UN
Peacekeeping forces in
during the 1994 genocide. He told an interviewer that he is certain that there
is a God at least partly because he shook hands with men possessed by Satan. One
night Dallaire wanted to quit and leave to protect himself and his men. At that
moment, "there was a sort of a breeze or a sense that came through the
window, and I just felt some presence. It's sort of like a vibration or
something." He decided that "we were going to sustain ourselves one
way or another, we were going to stay and we were going to do everything we
could" (Fresh Air). Dallaire identified that breeze that made him change
his mind about leaving
as God. He is not the only one who knows of light because he has seen darkness.
T. S. Eliot, in "The Wasteland," mentions a
phenomenon experienced by some humans in extremis – at the brink of
their ability to hold on.
"Who is the third who
walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only
you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white
road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
—But who is
that on the other side of you?"
Here Eliot refers
to Antarctic explorers who were near death and alone, but were convinced that a
benign companion accompanied them.
Rabbi Gershon
Winkler, in his book, The Place Where You Are Standing is Holy, tells
the following tale.
"The eighteenth-century Rabbi
Pinchos of Koritz once visited the home of a disciple who had suddenly absented
himself from the rabbi's weekly discourses. He found the young man secluded in
his bedchamber, disheveled, melancholic, and unkempt. 'Where are you?' the
rabbi called to him.
The disciple, shocked by the
presence of the holy master, warned him to stay away: 'Do not approach me,
Rebbe, for I am in the darkest of all places, the lowest of abysses, and, in
fact, at the very final gate of ultimate defilement! Stay away or you will be
contaminated!'
When the rabbi heard these words, he
broke into joyful excitement and seized the hand of the 'fallen' man,
exclaiming, 'The darkest place, you say? The lowest of all abysses, you say?
The very final gate of defilement, you say? Please let me join you! For I, too,
want to see the Face of God!'"
Warsaw
During my trip to
We are the scum of the earth. The jokes are only half right, though. This
earth-scum hoards diamonds.
That was in 1978. A few
days after my birthday, my phone rang off the hook. The College of Cardinals
had elected the first Polish pope in history. Am I telling you that John Paul
II was elected as a birthday present to me because, as a teen, I scrounged
enough dough to travel to
You know I am. Shamelessly.
And I believe your stories,
too. He was elected the day a couple got married; an unseen hand pushed a
teacher to the front of the line at just the right moment and John Paul
II blessed his newborn; a woman was cured of cancer. And all of these stories
are true.
John Paul II said mass in Yankee stadium. As
he turned to the portion of the crowd where I was, I felt – palpably – his
charisma. Pinpricks in throngs report: "You feel as if he is talking just
to you." Illusion? Then explain this: when the sun shines, it shines on
billions, and, yet, you feel it, it changes your day, as intimate
as a warm liquid swallowed down your throat. That you share a light weakens the
light not at all. Illusion? What could be more real than the millions gathered
in
only reward to walk, hurried by guards, past his mortal remains? In April,
2005, "How many legions has the pope?" ceased being the snarky retort
of Godless Communists and became the panicked cry of the operators of
Illusion? Almost everyone I know has at least one miracle
story, information they knew that they could not have known, dreams that
predicted the future, sudden reversals of ill fortune to good. Miracle stories
involve love. How powerful is love, anyway? As powerful as the sun? What
happens when a man surrenders to love everyday of his life? Why don't we
perform an experiment, and find out?
***
Love? Love?
For many, nothing
is more abrasive of the skin encasing the heart, than the wall-to-wall media
coverage of what a good man John Paul II was. The accolades from Jews, Muslims,
Communists – from Fidel Castro! From the Dalai Lama. People concerned with gay
rights, women's rights and AIDS have expressed much pain.
"Hey," these voices are saying. "We are part of the human
race!" they are saying. "And he said that our love is evil, that we
are inferior. How dare you equate such hatred with love? Do you know how abandoned
we feel?"
Well, yes, as a matter of fact, I do,
actually. But I've already bored you with
you with my own. Please, though, bear with me just a bit longer…
***
Mystics say that before we are
born, we choose the lives we are to lead. Tell me, who would choose this one?
He was born in a country that hadn't existed two years before his birth, a
country wracked by the wretchedness of all post-colonial states, from
internecine killings to a shaky economy to train tracks that did not mesh from
one region to the next; differing colonial powers used different gauges. His
mother died when he was nine. His classmates would later recall that his pants
were made out of his father's hand-me-down uniforms. His brother, and then his
father, died. As he put it, "At twenty I had already lost all the people I
loved, and even those I might have loved, like my older sister who, they said,
died, six years before I was born." One day while he was serving as an
altar boy at mass, invading Nazis bombed
his city.
The world is rightly well-informed about
Jewish suffering during WW II, and the world is largely ignorant about what
happened to non-Jewish Poles. Without that understanding, one can't understand
Pope John Paul II.
Historian Michael Steinlauf, son of
Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivors, wrote that Poles, "after the Jews and
the Gypsies, [were] the most relentlessly tormented national group in Hitler's
"without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of Polish descent or
language." For almost the first two years of its existence, most of
Non-Jewish Poles were among the first to be gassed there with Zyklon B.
Estimates of non-Jewish Poles killed by Nazis run between two
and three million. One estimate of non-Jewish Poles enslaved puts that number
at two million. Two hundred fifty thousand Polish children were taken from
their parents and relocated to
to be raised as Germans, because their "superior" traits revealed
German ancestry. The Nazis erased 300 Polish villages. The Soviets invaded from
the east as the Nazis invaded from the west. During this Soviet occupation,
wrote Jan Gross, "the Soviets killed or drove to their deaths three or
four times as many people as the Nazis from a population half the size of that
under German jurisdiction."
How did Karol Wojtyla
respond?
"'It was the first wartime Mass before
the altar of the crucified Christ and the scream of sirens and the thud of
explosions have remained forever in my memory – nonetheless Karol in his
imperturbable way had crossed over the bridge and walked to the Cathedral
because he was always observant in his religious commitments.'
After he left Mass, he walked through the agitated crowds with
his friend, the actor and theater director, Juliusz Kydrynski. German pilots were
dropping bombs all over the city. The two friends stood inside a courtyard
watching the smoke and mayhem...Juliusz remembers Karol's calm demeanor:
'All hell was breaking loose – and Karol stood by the wall as
it trembled in its foundations not showing the slightest fear – if Karol was
praying, he was praying in his soul quietly...'" (WGBH Educational
Foundation.)
In a stone quarry, Wojtyla was a
"slave laborer," according to his friend Gilbert Levine. Wojtyla was
struck by a German vehicle; unconscious, he was left for dead. Had a passerby
not aided him; he probably would have died. He survived the occupation at least
twice by hiding from Nazis, once in his own basement, once in the home of an
archbishop.
Karol resisted. He performed Polish national
works in an underground theater. Nazis were executing Poles for such crimes as
owning a radio. Performing Polish works in an underground theater was vital
resistance, for which one risked one's life.
Karol
decided to become a priest. Polish priests had been singled out for torture and
extermination. They were subject to gruesome medical experiments. Eventually
thousands would be murdered. In one region, Pelplin, forty-six percent of
priests died in concentration camps. That a handsome, gifted young man would
find the priesthood inviting under these conditions is extraordinary.
In January, 1945, this young seminarian would save the life of
a Jewish girl, Edith Zierer. He fed her and carried her to safety. Had he not,
later, gained world fame, the only pages to know this story would have been
those of Edith Zierer's diary.
After the war, there was
no liberation. Soviets invaded, and something close to civil war broke out.
Under Communism, Wojtyla's superior, Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, was arrested
and imprisoned.
I know people, and I do not condemn
these people, who have surrendered their faces to masks of bitterness,
cynicism, or even just a stubborn, numb refusal to engage because of just one
of these wounds. "My mother died when I was young…I have seen the worst of
humanity. And, so, you can't expect anything but poison, perversity, or heavy
sighs from me."
Think of that face we first espied
on the
1978 after the announcement, "Habemus papem." That face was dimpled.
It was smiling.
And who would choose this life: being
shot in the stomach, the arm, the hand. A vigorous athlete, relishing the speed
and freedom of skiing down snowy slopes, imprisoned by Parkinson's Disease.
Inexorably, his body becomes a prison squeezing his lungs and heart. This
public performer used to relying on his stalwart good looks must appear before
photographers stooped, drooling, and barely coherent.
***
The 1999 PBS' Frontline documentary, "The Millennial
Pope," featured important scholars and social activists voicing their
gripes against John Paul II. These were important, smart, concerned people. I
agreed with their points. Compared to John Paul II, they came across as
petulant children. Some seemed simply whiney.
They came
across as inauthentic; John Paul II came across as authentic. He believed in
Jesus Christ. He lived his life according to that belief, to the best of his
ability. How many people do you know who actually live by what they say they
believe?
I can't imagine Bishop Karol Wojtyla whining on
national television that the communist authorities would not permit him to
build a church in Nowa Huta.
Krakow was
cultural center, home to many ancient cathedrals and monuments that, together,
mutely and perpetually, recounted the Polish myth. Stalin decided to build a
steel mill there. Smokestack fumes would corrode
old stones, and the proletariat would rewrite Polish history. There was to be
no church in Nowa Huta.
The proletariat demanded a
church. Authorities denied permission to build. And, so, Karol Wojtyla, his
priests and congregants…built a church in Nowa Huta.
It
took twenty years. They were twenty years of non-violent protest, of open air
masses, of erected crosses being pulled down and put right back up again, of
filled-out forms and filed requests disappearing down bureaucratic black holes.
But they got the church. The altar cross was made from shrapnel removed from Polish
soldiers' wounds. Talk about turning swords into ploughshares. Talk about turning
ugliness into beauty.
"Live as if you are
free," John Paul II counseled dissident leaders Lech Walesa and Vaclav
Havel, before Communism fell in 1989. Not, "An eye for an eye." Not,
"Mock and whine." Not even, "Act nice in public but always bear a
grudge and nurse your resentments." Just, "Live as if you are
free."
***
There is no
reconciliation between the Bible's – between John Paul II's – insistence on the
worth and dignity of each human being and homophobia and misogyny. To the
Christian, it is clear: John Paul II was human, not God. Humans "see as
through a glass, darkly."
But what a magnificent
human. John Paul II is more than his failings. We need to acknowledge that to
be part of any effort to make the world a better place.
The
millions, perhaps billions, who mourned him, are correct. John Paul II raised
the bar. He challenges us. Long before that step out onto the
balcony and into history, he was a little boy who spoke out against
anti-Semitism in his own hometown. He kept his eyes on the prize, even as bombs
fell. He remained focused, even as he survived the two most murderous regimes
of the bloody twentieth century. He won his magnificent race step by step,
alone, endangered, wounded, without fanfare, missing his mother, even a sister
he never knew, doing the very small work that was right in front of him –
serving mass, performing an underground play that only four or five people
might see, bringing bread to a Jewish prisoner, building a cathedral brick by
brick; he did all this before we ever met him, when he was part of a people
defined as the scum of the earth, by powerful others who were acting on that
definition by putting people like him in concentration camps and using them for
medical experiments. In those humble, patient, loving steps, Karol Wojtyla
marched to the center of the world stage, to become the most recognized human
being on the face of the earth.
I will spend the rest
of my days trying to emulate Karol Wojtyla, Pope John Paul II. I hope others
do, as well. What better model could there be for those of us trying to build a
church we have been told it is forbidden to build?
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