The crowd’s first reaction was one of utter astonishment. There was a vast hubbub of murmuring as people asked one another, “Cardinal who?” Though I didn’t see this reported in any of the accounts I read the next day, the largely Italian gathering was frankly stunned at first with sheer disbelief: the conclave was the first to elect a non-Italian in almost five hundred years! (The last non-Italian elected was Pope Adrian VI of the Netherlands in the 1520s.) I had with me a book of dossiers on all the eligible cardinals—part of an earlier Vatican press office handout—and quickly checked to read the brief description of Wojtyla. Then, rushing back, I found to my immense relief that the line in the press office was still free and that there was an editor waiting on the other end in Toronto. So, in a matter of moments, there was the thrill of being told that I had got the news to them before any of the other available services had reported it. Because of the time difference—six hours between Rome and Toronto—the brief story I dictated was just in time to make the front page of the final edition of the day. Considering just how significant a role the new Pope was to play on the international stage for the next twenty-six years (he died in April 2005, after one of the longest documented pontificates in Church history), it was a great privilege to be able to be there and to have had a tiny part in making his arrival on the scene known to the wider world beyond. All of this, of course, was before the current wizardry of the Internet and all the other instant news-gathering technology of the present day. Newspapers and radio were still the primary sources of breaking news for the world back then.
Cardinal Wojtyla chose the title John Paul II to signify his intention to walk a middle path between the adventurous liberal spirit of Pope John XXIII and the quieter, more conservative stance of Paul VI. Papa Luciani had had the same kind of dream a month or so earlier, hence his choosing of the title John Paul I, but fate had cut him short. John Paul II also followed Luciani’s example in refusing a coronation, and so was inaugurated, or invested, in a stately ceremony on October 22. Then things promised to grow quieter for a while, but what nobody knew at the time was that this Pope was to become not just the most travelled pontiff in history but one of the most travelled world leaders of all time, eventually visiting 129 countries in all.
While the moment of his election is still fresh at hand, I want to set out briefly my own take on Pope John Paul II, formed after years of observing him up close on his earliest travels and then many years as a religion columnist watching from afar. He clearly was one of the most influential men ever to lead the Roman Catholic Church. He was all the things the media said about him—or nearly all. He was obviously charismatic, eloquent, courageous, and persistent in carrying out his vision for the Church. But to me it was clear from the first long peroration he delivered at his first angelus to the crowded Piazza di San Pietro that he loved too much the limelight and the feel of his own personal power. Throughout his papacy he gave speech after speech and sermon after sermon, but he never ever listened to the cries for help coming from his clergy or indeed from his own enormous flock. The media adored him and gave him a wholly free ride as far as critical analysis went. Few figures in the modern era have so completely escaped a truly objective, balanced reportage as he did. He was portrayed as a fully modern man when he was in fact anything but. Underneath the charismatic exterior was a wilfully stubborn, undemocratic temperament ill suited for the huge task of giving guidance to a Church heading into the third millennium of the Common Era. His successor, Benedict XVI, is just beginning to reap the fruits of his planting, and there will be much more to come. (As a matter of fact, Benedict is in many ways very much like Pope John Paul II in mind-set—but without the charisma.)
People forget that the New Testament emphasis upon loving your enemies is there not because it sounds pious but because there is a terrible spiritual truth behind it. Those who have enemies and are unable to love them (not “like” them, but as far as possible wish them nothing but good) are fated to become like them. Wojtyla knew life under the hated Nazis and then under the Communists in his native Poland. Unfortunately, in dealing bravely with them, he also became very much like them. At heart he was to prove every bit as autocratic as they—only in a much kinder environment. That is why, for example, though on the surface he gave every appearance of being willing to make overtures of peace to the Orthodox churches, the Anglican Church, the Jews and other non-Catholic religious groups, nothing really solid resulted from any of it. The words were there, but the action was not. As a matter of fact, at times even the important words were wanting. The Buddhist leader and leading spiritual figure Thich Nhat Hanh, in his bestselling book Living Buddha, Living Christ, rightly points out the latent intolerance in the late Pope’s thinking. Commenting upon Wojtyla’s manifesto, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, he chides him for maintaining that Jesus Christ is “the one mediator between God and humanity,” that he is “unique.” The Buddhist monk writes: “The idea behind the statement . . . is the notion that Christianity provides the only way of salvation and all other religious traditions are of no use. This attitude excludes dialogue and fosters religious intolerance and discrimination. It does not help.”
Wojtyla did, of course, assist in the dismantling and fall of Communism in Poland and then the rest of Europe. But he was very far from accomplishing this by himself, as most uncritical and overly enthusiastic commentators would have us believe. It was instead rather like the case of a large decaying tree that eventually takes little more than a firm, strong push to make it come crashing down. The signs of Communism’s decay and imminent collapse were in evidence on all sides before the Solidarity movement began. Of course, the question of whether or not I personally liked Pope John Paul II is not of great consequence. But for the record, I did not. There was much about him to admire, but the total package, spiritually speaking, was a matter for regret.
Early in December 1978, with Toronto well into the winter doldrums, the streets already dismally wet and the first real storm of the season predicted to arrive that evening, I walked my customary three miles to the office. There was a note from the city editor stuck on the edge of my computer screen. It said that she and the managing editor wanted me to come up with some suggestions for another Christmas special. In the wake of recent gloom-and-doom events filling the pages of the paper, she added: “P.S. Something on the hopeful side would be a great help!” It was in essence an offer no journalist with a yen for adventure and an inquiring mind could ever refuse. As long as there was a story to be told, it was a ground rule that expense was not an issue; I could travel wherever necessary to track it down.
With the phone and other interruptions I couldn’t think straight, so I put my parka back on and walked down by the harbour for an hour or so. Then I went in, did some fact checking and typed up a memo for my editors with an outline for a Christmas series of four feature stories. It would be called Signs of Hope, Christmas 1978. For the first story I proposed going to visit Jean Vanier at L’Arche (“The Ark”) in the French village of Trosly-Breuil, in the Forêt de Compiègne, close to the River Oise and the site of the historic railway carriage in which the armistice papers ending World War I were signed. From there I proposed going to a remarkable orphanage and school for needy children on the Bay of Naples, Casa Materna. It first came to prominence as a response to the large number of destitute children running in the streets of that teeming city at the end of World War II. Next I would take the readers to Krakow, Poland, the city where the newly elected Pope, John Paul II, had spent his youth and where he became the cardinal archbishop. Finally we would journey to one of the farthest boundaries of Europe, the holy island of Iona in the Inner Hebrides, where new life had been breathed into a site that once was so crucial in the spread of Christianity in Ireland and beyond to Britain and even as far away as Russia.