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April 8, 2005 • Volume 13 Number 15
Pope John Paul II visits Poland, June, 1979
Did the pope beat Communism?
Q&A with BC's Prof. Lawrence Wolff
Prof. Larry Wolff (History) has written extensively on the intellectual and cultural history of early modern Europe, including his 1988 book The Vatican and Poland in the Age of the Partitions. The Chronicle caught up with Wolff this week to discuss Pope John Paul II's political legacy in Eastern Europe.
What was Pope John Paul II's role in the fall of the Iron Curtain? Did he actually play a part?
Once you recognize that the events of 1989 in Eastern Europe were very much driven by what was happening in Poland - that is, Communism began to give way in Poland first - it is clear that John Paul, together with Lech Walesa, were both tremendously important for bringing down the Iron Curtain.
Looking back to the longer history of the collapse of Communism, it was John Paul's first papal visit to Poland in 1979 that acted as a catalyst for the Solidarity revolution in 1980, John Paul who partly inspired that revolution, John Paul who encouraged the survival of Solidarity underground after the declaration of martial law in Poland in 1981, and he remained very closely identified with the Solidarity movement as it emerged to challenge the Communist government in 1989.
Are there other religious figures who played an important political role in Eastern Europe during the last 50 years?
In Poland, especially there were other influential religious figures, like Cardinal Wyszynski, primate of Poland from the 1950s to the 1970s, who really made the church into a force of spiritual resistance to Communism; also the layman Jerzy Turowicz who edited the Catholic journal Tygodnik Powszechny (The General Weekly), and actually received an honorary doctorate from Boston College in 1989.
What is your take on how the press is characterizing John Paul's role in defeating Communism? Has it been overstated?
Well, it's probably overstated to say that John Paul was the single most influential figure (think Gorbachev), but he really was very important for the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe.
How did the election of a Polish pope impact the Polish people, who for years lived under the boot of Communist oppression? What did this do for Polish nationalism?
The election of John Paul in 1978 was perceived in Poland as something like a providential miracle, and it is really impossible to overestimate its impact on the spirit of national resistance to communist oppression. There is no question that he stands as one of the towering national heroes of Polish history.
Had the pope elected in 1978 come from a Western nation, do you think that the course of history would have been altered in some way?
Yes, very probably the history of Europe in the 1980s and 1990s would have evolved somewhat differently, though it's difficult to speculate on exactly how different things would have been. Religion already functioned as a force of resistance to Communism in Poland before 1978, and there were, of course, many other internal factors that weakened Communism as a political system in Eastern Europe.
How would you characterize the way the relationships between the Vatican and Eastern bloc nations changed from the pre-1978 period to the period up until 1989? What was different?
In the 1970s under Paul VI the Vatican pursued a kind of detente with the Eastern Bloc Communist governments, looking for greater freedom for the Church within those countries; John Paul encouraged more emphatic religious resistance to Communism, but there were certainly continuities between the detente of the 1970s and the resistance of the 1980s, especially in the figure of former Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Casaroli. •