The deaths of the powerful
elicit extravagant claims, and many of the tributes to
the man being buried in Rome on Friday have been little
short of grotesque. Dumbing-down comes over obituary writers,
and in their eagerness to define a clear legacy they often
produce simplifications that take no account of how the
world and people change.
The way Poles saw communism
in the 1970s is not the way they see it now. The Polish
Catholic church was in regular dialogue with the communist
authorities, and both worked subtly together at times
to resist Soviet influence. John Paul altered his own
views as he travelled.
So the notion that anti-communism
was always a consistent part of his motivation is off
the mark. It was prominent in his early trips to Poland
but less important in his dealings with Latin America.
Pacifism was also a key
principle for John Paul, and when it came to preserving
power in his own domain, authoritarianism was his watchword
rather than the protection of freedom.
The retrospectives that
draw a line between his first visit home as Pope in 1979,
the rise of Solidarity a year later and the collapse of
the one-party system in 1989 are especially open to question.
They ignore martial law,
which stopped Solidarity in its tracks and emasculated
it for most of the 1980s. It was a defeat of enormous
proportions that John Paul could not reverse until the
real power-holders in eastern Europe, the men who ran
the Kremlin, changed their line.
The Pope's 1979 tour, with
vast crowds at his open-air masses, undoubtedly gave Poles
a tremendous sense of national revival. It added an unpredictable
factor after decades of periodic crises between discontented
workers, communist leaders who wanted to show their national
credentials by finding a "Polish road to socialism"
and narrow-minded rulers in Moscow.
The Pope's support when
workers struck in Gdansk and founded the Solidarity union
as Poland's first independent national organization helped
it to grow with amazing speed.
But things had changed
a year later. Solidarity was split over tactics and goals.
At its 1981 autumn congress, where western reporters were
given full access, delegates fiercely debated priorities:
was the key issue to be workers' demands for better wages
and self-management in their factories or the call for
political freedoms that the intellectuals on the Solidarity
bandwagon saw as paramount? Should the union accept or
reject the Communist party's leading role in government?
All sides agonised over whether and how Moscow would intervene.
There were already strong hints that the Polish army would
be used rather than Soviet tanks.
None of us thought a clamp-down
could be avoided. Within weeks we were proved right. The
Kremlin got its way with relative ease. Poland's own communist
authorities arrested thousands of Solidarity's leaders
and drove the rest underground.
John Paul's reaction was
soft. Armed resistance was not a serious option, but there
were Poles who favoured mass protests, factory occupations
and a campaign of civil disobedience. The Pope disappointed
them. He criticised martial law but warned of bloodshed
and civil war, counselling patience rather than defiance.
After prolonged negotiations
with the regime, he made a second visit to Poland in 1983.
Although martial law was lifted a month later, many Solidarity
activists remained in jail for years.
The government sat down
to negotiate with Solidarity again only in August 1988,
by which time Mikhail Gorbachev had already launched the
drive towards pluralistic politics in the USSR itself
and publicly promised no more Soviet military interventions
in eastern Europe.
The impetus for Gorbachev's
reforms was not external pressure from the west, dissent
in eastern Europe or the Pope's calls to respect human
rights, but economic stagnation in the Soviet Union and
internal discontent within the Soviet elite.
The Pope's cautious reaction
to martial law was prompted by his firm belief in non-violence.
If it tempered his anti-communism, so did the high value
he put on national pride.
His line on communist Cuba
differed sharply from his line on Poland. He realized
that Castro's resistance to US pressures reflected the
feelings of most Cubans. He saw that nationalism and communist
rule went hand in hand in Cuba in a way that they did
not in Poland, where the party was ultimately subordinate
to Moscow.
In Havana the Pope mentioned
freedom of conscience as a basic right, but his visit
strengthened Castro. His critique of capitalism and global
inequality echoed Castro's and he denounced the US embargo
on Cuba.
Nor was John Paul's attack
on liberation theology in the 1980s motivated primarily
by the fact that the so-called "option for the poor"
was infused with Marxism. The Pope was worried by other
features too.
He felt it was being used
to justify violence and leading Catholic parish priests
to support armed struggle by peasants against repressive
landowners and feudal dictatorships.
In Nicaragua, where the
Sandinistas toppled the US-backed Somoza regime by force,
three priests became ministers. In El Salvador priests
were often reporters' best conduits to guerrilla commanders,
taking us into remote villages to meet them.
In the Philippines some
priests carried guns themselves. "The situation required
more than a human rights group. I went underground and
joined the defence forces," Father Eddy Balicao,
who used to serve in Manila Cathedral, told me in the
mountains of Luzon.
John Paul also opposed
liberation theology because he saw priests defy their
bishops and challenge the church's hierarchical structure.
Even while communism still held power in Europe, he had
more in common with it than many of his supporters admit.
He recentralized power in the Vatican and reversed the
perestroika of his predecessor-but-two John XXIII, who
had given more say to local dioceses.
With the fall of "international
communism", the Vatican was left as the only authoritarian
ideology with global reach. There was no let-up in the
Pope's pressures against dissent, the worst example being
his excommunication of Sri Lanka's Father Tissa Balasuriya
in 1997, an impish figure who questioned the cult of Mary
as a docile, submissive icon and argued that, as a minority
religion in Asia, Catholicism had to be less arrogant
towards other faiths.
The Pope could not accept
that challenge to the Vatican's absolutism. So it is fitting
that he will be buried in the crypt from which John XXIII
was removed, symbolically marking the primacy of Wojtyla's
conservative era over the liberal hopes of an earlier
generation. -Dawn/The Guardian News Service.
(The writer reported from
Poland, the Soviet Union and Latin America in the 1970s
and 1980s).
