As the world commemorates the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which came down on the historic evening of November 9th, many scholars and observers are still debating the causes of the world’s most memorable events of the 20th century. Any serious explanation of how communist regimes came crashing down has to reach back to the election of the Pole Karol Wojtyla as Pope John Paul II.
Three years ago, on April 2, 2005, Pope John Paul II, who led the world’s 1 billion Catholics for 26 years, died in his private apartment at the Vatican in Rome. John Paul II is already remembered as a stalwart opponent of communism. However, in his 1981 encyclical Laborem Exercens, he displayed eloquently his mastery of Marxist and socialist criticisms of the capitalist system.
If John Paul II’s battle against Communism, “an unjust and totalitarian system,” according to him, is an undeniable fact and if it significantly contributed to destabilize “People’s Democracies” in Eastern Europe, it is nevertheless inaccurate to qualify John Paul II as the “anticommunist pope.” In his 1981 encyclical Laborem Exercens, he displayed eloquently his mastery of Marxist and socialist criticisms of the capitalist system. Later, a short while after the crumbling of the “iron curtain,” the tireless preacher confessed that the Marxist ideology contained “seeds of truth” which “neither have to be destroyed nor forgotten.” Conversely, according to John Paul II, “many serious social problems (...) have partly their origin in degenerated manifestations of capitalism.”
“I grew over there. So I brought with me all the history, the culture, the experience and the Polish language. Living in a country which was forced to fight for its freedom, in a country exposed to the aggressions and the diktats of its neighbors, I was led to deeply understand the Third World countries (...). I understood what is exploitation,” declared Jean-Paul II in 1993 in a long discussion/interview with the European deputy Jas Gawronski. We learned in this interview what he really believed in and, in particular, that his commitment to the faith came from his native Poland, an atheistic “People’s Democracy” and a satellite of the authoritarian and undemocratic Soviet system.
Inured to dialectical historical materialism, it is in Poland at the beginning of the 1950s that the young priest Karol Wojtyla will fight his first battle in his quest for religious freedom. His peaceful and obstinate battle for the construction of a church (“Nowa Huta”) quickly revealed a genuine strategy of harassment against the Communist system. The Vatican supported him.
During these years, the cardinal-archbishop of Warsaw displayed strong political skills in that he was able to separate the relation Polish people have with God from the bond it had with its government of that troubled period. The future pontiff’s speeches and statements contained references only to religion and the faith. He never engaged in political propaganda, although his sermons had a political flavor and a huge effect. His ability to describe the Communist experience as a shooting star in the history of humankind, while the divine mission of the Catholic Church is immortal, was striking. With the evocation of the first Christians’ martyrdom in his homilies, John Paul II drew a parallel with the Communist state apparatus and its violence against dissidents. We know that parables became also instrumental in provoking the chivalrous knights of the Leninist ideology. Wojtyla the strategist contributed a great deal to transforming the Church in Poland into an institution where non-aggressive resistance was possible. It is in this context of religious effervescence and political instability that the trade union Solidarnost appeared on the scene in 1977.
Biographers of the Pope agree that it is during that period that the future chief of the Catholic Church worked out his strategy against Communism. Karol Wojtyla became John Paul II on October 16, 1978. A few months later, in June 1979, it is to his beloved Poland that it he makes his first of so many trips during his pontificate. A huge crowd came to listen to him and it is precisely at that moment that the Polish people realized how considerable his power was. Worker’s strikes multiplied, leading to a destabilization of the Polish communist regime. At the end of 1981, when the government, running out of arguments, adopted the martial law, Solidarnost had 10 million members and was carried on by a deep social wave. For the first time since 1968 in Czechoslovakia, a communist regime was seriously shaken. And it was not threatened by the strategic intercontinental missiles of the enemy or the capitalist world, but rather by its own people. That political predicament had simply become intolerable. The Polish communist regime fell eight years later, with all the other Eastern European communist regimes. The last “gensek” (General Secretary) of the Communist Party of Soviet Union (CPSU) paid homage to the Holy Father: “Nothing of what occurred in Eastern Europe would have been possible without the presence of this Pope”, conceded Mikhaïl Sergeyevich Gorbatchev in his memoirs in 1993. John Paul II could have sent back this compliment to the initiator of the Perestroika and Glasnost.
Meanwhile, John Paul II became head of state and he continued at the World level the revolution that he started in his native country. He fought battles against Communism in all corners of the world and even within the Vatican where the sovereign pontiff put the breaks on the Vatican’s policy of openness in Eastern European countries, a policy initiated by its predecessors. Man of peace, he nevertheless wanted to keep the Church away from pacifism which was gaining strength in the West. Finally he fought a battle against progressive priests in South America who were defending the ‘Theology of Liberation’. John Paul II could not accept this theory because he saw it as a concession to the Marxist theory.
The beginning John Paul II’s pontificate was so much influenced by the issue of anticommunism that a number of critical observers wondered about an alliance between the Vatican and the CIA. The assumption is tempting since Washington’s strategic interests during the Reagan years and those of the Vatican under Jean-Paul II appeared to mingle. However, even if the “holy alliance” made sense considering that Washington and Rome were involved in the same battle against the Soviet Union and its satellites in the Eastern Europe and the dissent priests in Latin America, no concrete evidence and verifiable facts can support this thesis. Moreover, it is historically indisputable that Jean-Paul II’s stand against communism did not need the green light from the White House.
The collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet empire did not mean that John Paul II had achieved his goal. This committed man carried other messages which revealed that he was at the service of the “infallible” doctrines of the Church and its political philosophy. Once Communism definitively liquidated, Jean-Paul II attacked the devastations produced by another ideology: capitalism.
After winning the battle against the “evil” regime, Poland, according to the pope, was at the dawn of the nineties worshiping new and distorted idols. In a rare interview, published in 1993, John Paul II asked his compatriots to be prudent with regard to the political and economic integration into the European Union. “For its promoters, this project implies the introduction in Poland, by the force of propaganda, of an ultra-liberal system of consumption, deprived of values,” he claimed. “It is important for Poland to be integrated [into the EU] with its own values, not without criticism and not by being blinded by Western customs.”
After victory over Communism, the main battle of his life, John Paul II, in spite of colossal energy, was not successful in his efforts to regenerate the Catholic Church in the Western World. It is still hit by a severe crisis.
Richard Rousseau is associate professor at the University of Georgia and columnist for The Georgian Times, Tbilisi, Georgia.
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