By Father Raymond J. de Souza
Given his decisive role in my priestly vocation, I pay special attention to the anniversaries of Saint John Paul the Great. We should call him that, as his two immediate successors maintained: Pope Benedict XVI explicitly and Pope Francis implicitly.
The Solemnity of All Saints this year marks the eightieth anniversary of John Paul’s priestly ordination, conferred by Cardinal Adam Sapieha in the chapel of the venerable residence of the Archbishops of Kraków. Thirty years ago, on the occasion of his golden jubilee, John Paul published a small book for the occasion, Gift and Mystery, which remains an excellent gift for any priest or seminarian.
It was on his feast—the 22nd of October, the date of his moving homily “Be not afraid!” at the beginning of his pontificate—that a dozen American bishops were drawn to the White House with the promise of meeting Vice President J. D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, both Catholics. It was deceptive from the start—Vance was in Nebraska and Rubio in India—and ended in manipulation: the White House surprised the bishops with an audience in the Oval Office, during which they were filmed bowed in prayer over the president.
It is impossible to control such things when playing away, so to speak. Benedict XVI once refused to be photographed with Nancy Pelosi, but he was on his own Vatican turf. Still, the liturgical recurrence brought to my mind one of the most vivid images of John Paul’s many encounters with civil leaders.
In 1983, John Paul returned to Poland for the second time. His homeland was under martial law, declared by Moscow’s man in Warsaw, General Wojciech Jaruzelski. When the two met at the presidential palace to exchange formal addresses, John Paul was sober and serene. Jaruzelski, to the astonishment of the assembled entourages and as noted by the journalists present, was trembling. Not figuratively. His hands and knees shook. He was afraid.
Contemplating that pathetic spectacle—a man of great moral weakness wrapped in political power—I suspect John Paul’s thoughts may have turned to the “unbreakable prince,” the “archbishop of the long night of the occupation,” Adam Sapieha. For forty years (1911–1951) as Archbishop of Kraków, he witnessed more bloodshed than any other bishop in the history of the Church. Two world wars unfolded on his territory, which included Auschwitz.
While the influence on John Paul of Poland’s “primate of the millennium,” Blessed Stefan Wyszyński, is widely known, it was Sapieha who had the greatest formative impact.
George Weigel’s biography, Witness to Hope, opens with dramatic scenes that marked the young Karol Wojtyła’s years in Kraków. Among them is one of the great dinners in Poland’s millennial history. Shortly after the German-Soviet dismemberment of Poland in 1939, the Nazis installed Hans Frank as “governor general” in Kraków. The gangster took up residence in Wawel Castle, the ancient seat of the Polish kings.
Weigel writes that Frank, “evidently seeking some shred of legitimacy, repeatedly hinted that an invitation to dine at the archbishop’s residence would be welcome.”
Sapieha issued the invitation and seated Frank at the far end of his banquet table. Then he served him, on the silverware of the prelate’s patrimony, “the people’s diet: hard bread and ersatz coffee.” The prince-archbishop knew the suffering of his people. He thought Frank should know it too. Years later, John Paul would remind Jaruzelski of the same.
It was in that same residence that Wojtyła completed his studies for ordination, in the clandestine seminary Sapieha conducted in his own house. It was there that he learned firsthand the lessons first taught in Kraków nearly nine hundred years earlier by the martyr-bishop Saint Stanislaus. When John Paul remained silent before a trembling Jaruzelski, it was Sapieha’s formation bearing fruit.
And what was Sapieha thinking that All Saints morning in 1946? Perhaps that the young man he was about to ordain had a singular future for Kraków? Perhaps he was thinking of that dinner with Frank in that very building.
Frank had been in the news. Fifteen days before the ordination, he had been executed after being convicted of crimes against humanity at Nuremberg. At the trial, Frank was an exception: he admitted his crimes and confessed that “a thousand years will pass and this guilt of Germany will not have been erased.”
He converted to Catholicism while in Nuremberg. The American chaplain, Father Sixtus O’Connor, brought him Holy Communion hours before he was hanged. He did not die defiant, like the others, but imploring God’s mercy. Judging the sincerity of that conversion and repentance is difficult, and Father O’Connor, with due pastoral and sacramental discretion, spoke little of it.
That All Saints morning, did Sapieha contemplate how vast the Communion of Saints might be? Did he consider that the man he had received at dinner might, perhaps after 1,000 years—10,000 years?—in Purgatory, be counted among them? Did he allow himself to think that perhaps his witness had been an instrument of Divine Mercy for Hans Frank?
Frank and his fellow war criminals were executed on 16 October 1946. Thirty-two years later, Wojtyła was elected Pope on that same date. If, in the unfathomable ocean of mercy, Frank was already free from Purgatory, was he interceding that day? One recoils at the thought. It is repulsive even to consider that Frank is not in Hell. But God’s ways are not our ways.
Jaruzelski, for his part, spent the post-communist years trying to justify his actions as those of a true Polish patriot. It was unconvincing, but something convinced the old tyrant instead. Before dying in 2014, he asked for a Catholic priest and the sacraments.
The consoling promise of All Saints is that, by God’s grace, I might meet my grandmothers in Heaven. The startling possibility is that Frank and Jaruzelski are there too. The idea of Sapieha and Frank, of John Paul and Jaruzelski, together at the heavenly banquet does not appeal to me now. But if they are there, near those heroes, then I would hope to join them, in the company of the improbably blessed.
About the Author
Father Raymond J. de Souza is a Canadian priest, Catholic commentator, and senior fellow of Cardus.