In the summer of 1981 when I was posted in Moscow for Newsweek,
Solidarity was riding the crest of a euphoric wave in neighboring
Poland. The free trade union had been operating openly for a full
year, and the country was flooded with Solidarity banners, pins,
stickers and other mementos, including those that celebrated the
pride of Poland, Pope John Paul II. The communist authorities
would abruptly change course a few months later, declaring martial
law and outlawing Solidarity. But those fair days were still a
period when seemingly everything was possible, everything was
permissible.
That summer my wife, Christina, who grew up in Poland, was returning
from a visit there with our three children in tow. I drove out
to Moscow's Sheremetevo Airport and waited for them to arrive
on a flight that was delayed and didn't land until midnight. I
could see that our children, especially 1-year-old Adam, were
exhausted as Christina maneuvered them and the luggage through
the long customs line. To my relief, the customs officer, a young
woman, saw what kind of shape they were in and began waving Christina's
suitcases through without inspecting them. She allowed me to take
the children and put them into the car. When I returned, Christina
was all set to go, but at the last minute the customs officer
asked her to open her purse. When Christina did so, the woman's
face suddenly colored as she plucked out a key chain with a picture
of Pope John Paul II and Solidarity leader Lech Walesa. "Oh, no,
this won't pass," she sputtered. "Bring back everything." For
the next three hours as the children slept in the car, she methodically
searched every piece of luggage. And she refused to return the
key chain.
A year later, I was expelled by the Soviet authorities from
Moscow because of their displeasure with my reporting, and I was
assigned to Rome, where I began covering the pope, regularly traveling
with him on his many foreign trips. But for me, what happened
that night at Moscow's airport remains as one of the most revealing
incidents that I witnessed, a minor moment that said so much about
the power of John Paul II. It demonstrated the fear that this
Polish pope inspired in the Soviet Union, even at a time when
the old guard still appeared firmly in command -- and almost no
one could envisage the collapse of communism that would begin
in Poland by the end of the decade and quickly bring the entire
system crashing down with it.
But looking at events from their perspective, the Soviet authorities
were absolutely right to fear a key chain featuring John Paul
and Lech Walesa. Any assessment of this pope's place in the history
of the church and of the last century will note that he helped
trigger the incredible sequence of events that would bring about
the implosion of the Soviet empire and its totalitarian system.
With John Paul now visibly ailing, slowed by advanced Parkinson's
disease and arthritis, the report cards on his pontificate are
already beginning to be drawn up, his accomplishments and shortcomings
hotly debated.
Let me be blunt about my own preliminary judgment. I'm convinced
John Paul II will go down in history as one of the greatest popes
ever, whose intense spirituality, intellectual brilliance and
sheer physical stamina are beyond dispute. I'm also convinced
that he has left some extremely difficult issues to his successor
-- issues he hasn't confronted and hasn't been willing to open
up for serious discussion.
It's hard to overstate this pope's impact, reach and visibility.
Consider the fact that his constant travels, which have taken
him to more than 100 countries, have meant that he has logged
the equivalent of three times the distance between the earth and
the moon. Those of us who accompanied him, riding in what would
be the economy class of the chartered papal plane, often felt
as if we were part of an endless marathon, and our biggest challenge
was just to keep up. On long stretches in the air, we couldn't
tune out completely since we had to be prepared with the right
question in case the pope made one of his walkabouts through our
section. The pope, who speaks an amazing array of languages with
varying degrees of proficiency, had the daunting habit of answering
questions in whatever language the questioner used.
There were also the slightly surrealistic moments, particularly
when local carriers were used as the papal plane instead of Alitalia,
which usually provided this service. Richard Roth of CBS recalls
a ride on an Air Gabon charter where the pilot announced: "Your
Holiness, Eminences, my Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen, the duty-free
shop is now open."
On a 1983 trip to Central America, we were loaded onto a Honduran
airliner for a flight across rugged, mountainous terrain. At one
point, the plane started losing altitude. At first, there were
a few jokes in the press section about the next day's coverage:
"Pope Dies in Plane Crash" in huge type, with a tiny wire service
item buried deep in the package: "Dozens of journalists also killed."
But as the flight dropped lower and lower, silence descended on
our cabin. We watched the Boeing 737 drop to within a couple of
hundred yards over the treetops of a village before pulling up
sharply and barely making it over the next mountain range. Later,
we learned that the pope had been asked to bless the Honduran
president's village as the plane flew over it, and the president
had ordered the pilot to drop as low as possible to make that
blessing stick.
The first non-Italian pope in 455 years, John Paul II has broken
precedent after precedent, not just in terms of travel. One of
the most significant examples has been his reaching out to those
of other faiths, particularly Jews. He became the first pope in
history to visit a synagogue, the first to visit a mosque. Another
has been his willingness to apologize for the Catholic church's
sins -- for its treatment of Jews, for the Crusades, for its persecution
of Galileo. American Catholics may have wanted something even
stronger, but his speech to the American cardinals visiting Rome
last April about the sexual scandals was incredibly blunt by Vatican
standards.
If his image is sometimes larger than life, he is also resolutely
human. As a young pope, he continued to ski, swim and hike, which
his predecessors would never have thought of doing. And even now
when he is old and ailing, he maintains his self-deprecating sense
of humor. After his trip to Poland in August 2002, when he attracted
a crowd of nearly 3 million for a Mass on Krakow's Blonie meadow,
he invited Maciej Zieba, the head of the Dominican order in Poland,
for lunch with him at the Vatican. Zieba congratulated the pope
on the "great event" in Krakow. "I remember a bigger event," the
pope responded. He then told Zieba about a school outing in 1933
to the same site. The occasion was a military parade where Marshall
Jozef Pilsudski, the prewar Polish leader, reviewed the troops.
"That was a great event," the pope concluded. As Zieba
puts it, "He still has a sense of irony."
And there have been plenty of ironies in Karol Wojtyla's career.
Perhaps the greatest one was how the communist authorities in
Poland misread him early on. Since he talked about faith and culture,
not about what passed for politics, they believed he could be
easily manipulated. As George Weigel points out in his excellent
biography Witness to Hope, party ideologist Zenon Kliszko
vetoed seven candidates the church put forward to be bishops in
the early 1960s; at that time the government had the power to
block nominations. "I'm waiting for Wojtyla," Kliszko said, "and
I'll continue to veto names until I get him." He got him soon
enough, when Wojtyla was named archbishop of Krakow in 1964. The
communists soon regretted their decision, but it was too late.
The pope's commitment to faith and culture proved profoundly
subversive. When I was reporting on the fate of religion in Eastern
and Central Europe, I became aware of the scope of his encouragement
for the faithful in places like the Ukraine and Czechoslovakia,
where persecution was the norm. It wasn't just his public prayers
for the "hidden churches" or his appointments of new bishops for
these churches, even if they had to remain in exile. I talked
with one of the Polish priests, dressed in civilian clothes, who
traveled to parts of the Soviet Union to hold secret Masses. As
late as 1989, I went to a secret Mass in the western Ukrainian
city of Lvov that was attended by dissidents who had spent as
many as 18 years in the gulag.
