By P. Raymond J. de Souza
Kraków, Poland – Poland is a nation that has endured thanks to memory, a land where, therefore, anniversaries are commemorated with special care. It is the place where I learned to view anniversaries as a means of keeping the lessons of history alive. The anniversary, with its annual recurrence, takes its reference from chronos (“time”), but makes present once again past moments of kairos (the “fitting” or “opportune” moment). The liturgy itself possesses an anniversary character.
For more than thirty years, George Weigel has led a three-week seminar in Kraków on the free society, founded in 1992 together with his late colleagues Michael Novak, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus and Fr. Maciej Zięba, OP. Since Fr. Richard’s death in 2009, I have been part of the faculty here, though I certainly cannot take his place.
Saint John Paul the Great, son of Poland, deepened the Church’s ancient intuition about anniversaries, declaring in the opening words of his first encyclical that his pontificate would be oriented toward the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000. He had lived the millennium of Poland’s baptism in 1966 as a time of spiritual renewal, national unity and cultural resistance to communism.
In Poland, anniversaries come to mind more readily. This year I have been thinking of four Polish cardinals who shaped the life and ministry of the Polish Pope.
On August 3 falls the 125th anniversary (the “quasquicentennial”) of the birth of Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński, Primate of Poland for thirty-three years, from 1948 to 1981. He was, in Weigel’s assessment, “the undisputed leader of a Church that became the safe-deposit box of Poland’s national identity during four decades of communist efforts to create the New Soviet Man.”
Beatified in 2021, Wyszyński is widely known as the “Primate of the Millennium.” He was arrested at his residence in Warsaw and confined to a rural area of Poland for three years, from 1953 to 1956. After his release, he announced the Great Novena: nine years of preparation for the thousandth anniversary of Poland’s conversion to a Christian nation with the baptism of Mieszko I on Holy Saturday in 966.
The millennium celebrations demonstrated definitively that Polish Catholicism was stronger than Soviet communism. Karol Wojtyła would be ordained a bishop and named archbishop of Kraków during the Great Novena; from Wyszyński he would learn, in part, how to deal with tyrants.
Wyszyński’s approach earned him suspicion in Rome. Under Pope Pius XII, he was thought to yield too much to the new Stalinist regime in seeking room to maneuver; under Saint Paul VI, he seemed too resistant to the more accommodating papal Ostpolitik.
The dominant figure in Wojtyła’s formation was the bishop who ordained him a priest in 1946, Adam Sapieha, the prince-archbishop of Kraków. The longest-serving successor of Saint Stanislaus, Sapieha endured for forty years (1911-1951) the greatest carnage imaginable: two world wars, the Nazi invasion of Poland (Auschwitz lay within his diocese) and the Soviets, who would “liberate” Poland after the war.
While the Polish primate, Cardinal August Hlond, went into exile during the Second World War, Sapieha remained. His cathedral stood across the square from the Wawel hill, opposite the royal palace where the Nazi governor Hans Frank had installed himself. Sapieha, noble by birth, was the “unbreakable prince” of the Polish resistance, hiding his clandestine seminarians in his own residence. Among them was Wojtyła, whom he would ordain in his private chapel.
Seventy-five years after his death, which occurred this July 23, Sapieha is not as well known as Wyszyński, but he was the most important figure in John Paul’s life.
Wyszyński and Sapieha were created cardinals by Pope Pius XII; Sapieha after a long delay because he was at odds with Pope Pius XI. Cardinal Marian Jaworski, whose centenary of birth falls on August 21, was created a cardinal in pectore for the first time by his friend, John Paul, in 1998, and revealed later in 2001.
Jaworski was born in Lwów (Lviv), today Ukraine, in 1926, when the city was part of Poland. Lviv is a spiritual sister to Kraków; even its physical architecture is similar. For a long time it was the seat of the head of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, now transferred to Kyiv. It is also the center of Roman Catholicism in Ukraine. Sapieha himself was ordained a priest of Lviv in 1893.
In 1945, as Soviet brutality descended upon Ukrainian Catholics, the Latin archbishop of Lviv, Eugeniusz Baziak, fled westward into Poland with his seminarians, among whom was Jaworski. They first resided at the shrine of Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, near Wojtyła’s hometown of Wadowice. Baziak would ordain Jaworski a priest there.
Later, Baziak moved to Kraków, succeeding Sapieha as archbishop. He would ordain Wojtyła an auxiliary bishop in 1958. Meanwhile, Jaworski was entrusted with teaching philosophy and theology in the seminaries, living for a time with Bishop Wojtyła in the same residence in the shadow of Wawel.
In 1967, Jaworski replaced his friend to deliver a lecture. The train on which he was traveling derailed and he suffered the amputation of part of his left arm. Wojtyła considered that his friend had suffered for his ministry.
John Paul named Jaworski archbishop of Lviv in 1984, though the Soviets prevented him from entering Ukraine until 1991. It fell to him to rebuild the Ukrainian Latin Church after the return of independence. He remained a dear friend of John Paul until the end. On his deathbed in 2005, he administered Viaticum to the dying Pope. Jaworski died in 2020 and is buried in Kalwaria, the shrine John Paul visited countless times.
Cardinal Andrzej Maria Deskur does not mark a key anniversary this year, but I include him because he was ordained a priest the same year as Jaworski, in 1950. As the highest-ranking Polish bishop in the Roman Curia in the 1970s, he befriended Wojtyła when the latter had business in Rome. The day before the second conclave of 1978, Deskur suffered a severe stroke.
Cardinal Wojtyła visited him in the hospital and then went straight to the conclave. He returned to the hospital after his election, at which point Deskur told him he would offer his sufferings for the new Pope and his ministry. He was left paralyzed, confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. He outlived John Paul, dying in 2011, and is buried at the John Paul shrine in Kraków, near the Basilica of Divine Mercy. His episcopal motto does not appear on his tomb, but rather “Salvifici doloris”, the title of John Paul’s letter on the Christian meaning of human suffering.
John Paul regarded Poland as a land of “especially responsible witness.” The Polish cardinals of his era included four of noble lineage.
About the author
Fr. Raymond J. de Souza is a Canadian priest, Catholic commentator and senior fellow at Cardus.