Immersion in Anniversaries
First Things, 13 May 2021
To fully understand the meaning of what happened forty years ago—in the mind of the Polish pope, at least—it is necessary to go back to 1966 and ahead to 2000. And even, we might add, 2021.
or years there was a single cobblestone in St. Peter’s Square that was painted red, marking the place where blood was shed. Now, in place of a cobblestone, there is a simple white plaque with the coat-of-arms of St. John Paul II. There are no words, just the Roman numerals: XIII V MCMLXXXI. It marks the date John Paul was shot, May 13, 1981.
Today is the fortieth anniversary of that assassination attempt on John Paul. It falls on Ascension Thursday, but usually Catholics observe it as the feast day of Our Lady of Fatima, commemorating the date of the first Marian apparition in 1917 to the shepherd children.
George Weigel has written that “immersion in anniversaries—the reclamation of the past as a platform from which to launch out to the future—was an integral part of Karol Wojtyła’s experience as a Pole.” To fully understand the meaning of what happened forty years ago—in the mind of the Polish pope, at least—it is necessary to go back to 1966 and ahead to 2000. And even, we might add, 2021.
The dominant anniversary that shaped John Paul’s life as a Polish pastor was 1966, the millennium of Poland’s Christian faith, the baptism in 966 of Prince Mieszko I of the Piast dynasty. During the Polish millennium, Wojtyła learned a great deal about how to be a bishop from the indomitable Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, archbishop of Warsaw and primate of Poland from 1948 to 1981. In 1953, the Polish regime arrested Wyszynski on trumped-up charges and held him under house arrest for three years.
In 1956 Wyszynski was freed. He had put his time to good use. Upon release he announced an ambitious decade-long program for the millennium of 1966. He would call it the “Great Novena”: nine years of evangelization, catechesis, and formation to prepare for 1966, when all of Poland would recommit to its baptismal vows. The message was clear: Poland was a Christian country, no matter the atheism of the incumbent regime. Its Catholic faith would be renewed during the Great Novena; cultural resistance would be the Church’s defense of the Polish people against the Soviet-imposed regime.
Cardinal Wyszynski sent a replica of Poland’s national patroness, the Black Madonna of Częstochowa, on a tour of every parish in Poland. When the communists clumsily seized the image, Wyszynski ordered the processions to continue with an empty frame. The crowds only increased.
In 1966, Wyszynski celebrated the great millennium before an immense gathering at Częstochowa, with Archbishop Wojtyła of Kraków at his side. The primate had invited St. Paul VI to attend; the regime blocked the invitation. When John Paul first arrived in Poland in June 1979, he opened the homily that ended the Soviet empire with a reference to the 1966 millennium. He was now doing what Paul VI had been prevented from doing. The Polish millennium was complete.
So momentous were the millennial celebrations that Cardinal Wyszynski came to be known simply as the Primate of the Millennium. Thus when the senior Polish cardinal spoke to the junior Polish cardinal on the occasion of his election as pope, his words resounded in the very depths of Karol Wojtyła’s Polish and Catholic soul. “Cardinal Wyszynski said to me: ‘If the Lord has called you, you must take the Church into the third millennium!’” John Paul revealed in 1994. The Primate of the Millennium was passing the torch to the Pope of the Third Millennium.
“I understood then, that I must take the Church of Christ into the third millennium with prayer and with different initiatives,” John Paul explained. “However, I realized that this wasn’t enough. She had to be introduced with suffering . . . the Pope had to be attacked, he had to suffer so that every family, so that the world, would see that there is, so to speak, a higher Gospel, the Gospel of suffering.”
John Paul brought many initiatives with him from Poland to Rome. But above all, he launched the Church into the third millennium. “Preparing for the Year 2000 has become as it were a hermeneutical key of my Pontificate,” he would write in 1994.
What then would have happened if he were killed nineteen years short of the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000?
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