Wojtyla lectures reveal he saw communism as
based in misunderstanding
By JONATHAN LUXMOORE
Special to the National Catholic Reporter Warsaw,
Poland
In any assessment of Pope John Paul IIs 21 years at the head
of the church, his role in communisms collapse is a dominant theme.
How he pulled it off, though, is a question awaiting convincing
answers.
Now a new theory is afoot, drawn from a seemingly forgotten
collection, never published, of Polish-language lectures. They are signed with
Wojtylas name and were printed as a samizdat underground edition in the
early 1950s. It was titled Catholic Social Ethics.
Previously, the nearest anyone got to a general theory was that
the Polish pope understood his opponents well enough to outdazzle their
ideology with Christian truth.
But its a theory that hadnt gained universal
acceptance.
Former associates from Kraków insist that Karol Wojtyla
never studied Marxist classics; that he picked up his arguments secondhand from
Catholic handbooks. They maintain that his reliance on biased sources explains
the popes hostility to everything linked with Marxism, from Polish
communism to the liberation theology that he so vociferously opposed in Latin
America.
Catholic Social Ethics runs to 336 dense pages. Just a
few dozen copies were printed, on cheap, thin paper. The text isnt
available at Catholic seminary or university libraries in Poland. But it throws
important light on John Paul IIs personal political views.
The few surviving copies of Catholic Social Ethics are
jealously guarded. A rare surviving copy was obtained by NCR from
Romuald Kukolowicz, a former assistant to Polands Cardinal Stefan
Wyszynski (1901-1981).
Although it contains sections on Personalism, Liberalism and
Individualism, as well as Totalism and Solidarism, the
bulk of the text is written as a response to Marxism. Wojtyla stated his aim
clearly. The text, he wrote, wasnt a total criticism of
Marxist philosophy, but an analysis of how it had used or misused ethical
categories.
In the contemporary communist movement, the church sees and
acknowledges an expression of largely ethical goals, Wojtyla wrote. He
noted that Pope Pius XI had acknowledged that Marxism stemmed from criticism of
capitalism and protest against capitalisms exploitation of human work.
Pius XI had added that such criticism was undoubtedly the part of
the truth which Marxism contains.
When these words were printed, Stalinist rule was at its height,
and dozens of Polish priests and bishops were in jail. A 1949 Vatican decree
had barred church members from any dealings with communists, who show
themselves, in teaching and actions, to be enemies of God, true religion and
the church of Christ.
But Karol Wojtyla was noted among students as an unusual lecturer.
Ordained in 1946, hed studied in Rome, where hed
gained insight into Pius XIIs dilemmas as he confronted Eastern
Europes newly installed communist regimes. Hed also visited
worker-priests in France and Belgium, observing their attempts to
rebuild a church presence among secularized industrial communities.
Class struggle is the starting point for Wojtylas analysis.
Such struggle, he said, is an evil that may be justifiable to
ensure a just distribution of goods.
Catholicism cannot accept, though, primacy of
economics or materialism as philosophical principles, he wrote. The
ability to choose spiritual goodness testifies to the
spiritual nature of the human will.
In a well-organized society, orientated to the common good,
class conflicts are solved peacefully through reforms, Wojtyla wrote.
But states that base their order on individualistic liberalism are not
such societies. So when an exploited class fails to receive in a peaceful way
the share of the common good to which it has a right, it has to follow a
different path.
If Marxism regards class struggle as a means of liberation, the
sacred duty of the proletariat, Catholicism views it differently.
It is not a supreme ethical imperative and can help achieve the
common good only indirectly and marginally.
Despite all the factors which divide people in society (such
as cultural levels), or set them against each other (such as attitudes to the
means of production), Catholic social ethics assumes there are other deeper,
more fundamental factors which unite them and build solidarity, Wojtyla
wrote.
When it comes to demanding justice, though, Wojtyla is
unequivocal. Achieving social justice is an element of building
Gods kingdom, he said. Society has a strict right, even a
duty, to ensure that just government by controlling its exercise of power
and criticizing its mistakes. When this fails, society has a right to passive
resistance. And when this fails, it has a final option: active resistance
against a legal but unjust power.
As the authoritative text, Wojtyla cites Pius XIs 1927
encyclical Nos Es Muy Conocida, which defended armed resistance against
anti-church atrocities by Mexicos socialist regime a quarter-century
before.
Even then, Wojtyla drew a careful distinction between
active resistance and revolution. Catholic moral theologians, he
said, denied that political revolution -- the kind envisaged by
Marx -- could be ethically justified. This was not because the Catholics were
conservative or opportunist, he said, but because they knew that
the revolutionary step carries grave consequences for the common
good.
Wojtyla traces communism back to Christian tradition, too, even
subtitling one section of his text The Objective Superiority of the
Communist Ideal. But he makes clear hes using the term generically
to mean common ownership -- the kind of communism idealized by
philosophers all the way back to Plato.
According to patristic tradition and the centuries-old
practice of monastic life, the church acknowledges the ideal of
communism, he wrote. But given the near impossibility of implementing the
ideal, he opted for reforms to ensure social justice within an economic
system based on private property.
Human nature suits private property, he wrote.
Wojtyla wasnt the only Polish priest saying things about
Marxism. He admits drawing on the work of Frs. Jan Piwowarczyk and Andrzej
Szymanski, who had pointed to the revolutions indirect benefits in
speeding up events on a path toward implementing justice.
Meanwhile, even Polands Catholic primate, Archbishop Stefan
Wyszynski, claimed in his prison diaries to have gone through Das
Kapital three times, and makes it clear hed have supported
communist socioeconomic reform, if not for the Communist
Partys narrow atheism. Catholic Social Ethics
shows Wojtyla had not only studied Marxism -- along with thinkers from Adam
Smith to Nikolai Berdyaev. It also proves he had already worked out how to
counter its ideological appeal.
His aim wasnt to apply Marxism to Christianity. Just the
opposite: It was to give Marxist concepts a Christian meaning and win back the
ideas of social justice that Marxism had expropriated
The ability to dissect Marxism and reassemble it in a Christian
form made him a potentially significant Catholic thinker. It would take him
another two decades to perfect this approach in The Acting Person
(1969), a book that was studied, much to Wojtylas satisfaction, not only
by Catholics but also by communists.
But Catholic Social Ethics served as a prototype for
Wojtylas later efforts. Although he hadnt developed a coherent
philosophy of his own, hed thought out ways of transferring Marxist
concepts of alienation and participation to a Christian context. Hed also
set down the master concepts that would recur in his sermons in the 1980s.
One was solidarity, which became the name of the
Polish movement that helped bring communism to a peaceful end in the 1980s.
Credit for uncovering Wojtylas unpublished text goes to
American journalist Jonathan Kwitny, who devoted a section to it in his Man
of the Century (Henry Holt, 1997). Evidence suggests, however, that Kwitny
severely distorted what Wojtyla wrote, in an attempt to portray the future pope
as a youthful Marxist enthusiast.
Professor Andrzez Szostek, rector of Polands Catholic
University of Lublin and a former Wojtyla student, said he is aware of
Catholic Society Ethics, but doesnt like calling it an
underground text.
The term underground applied when authorities
didnt want something published, he said. But Wojtyla prepared
and wrote down his lectures for himself and his students without ever intending
to publish them.
Fr. Tomasz Styczen, who heads Lublins John Paul II
Institute, thinks Catholic Social Ethics originated as a lecture
series at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, before the
universitys theology faculty was closed by the communist regime in 1954.
He thinks the text strengthens the likelihood that the popes
October 1978 election owed something to church figures who knew he had a
forceful grasp of Eastern Europes predicament, as well as the will and
ability to act on it.
Those who still claim he didnt read Marxism, or knew
it only from secondary sources, are clearly wrong. Every lecture in this
collection draws on original Marxist texts, Styczen said.
Styczen continues: Wojtyla believed social injustice, and
the righteous anger it aroused, represented a failure by those who had accepted
unjust conditions in the first place. Marx and Marxism would never have merged
if not for terrible injustices. This was why he spoke, and still speaks, about
the seeds of truth to be found in them. Yet he also realized early on that
Marxism was based on a mistake, since it failed to take account of free choice
and personal responsibility.
Pius XII had branded communism intrinsically evil.
John XXIII would opt for the medicine of mercy rather than
severity, and Paul VI would try to save what could be saved
by showing communists how much they could gain through concessions.
Wojtylas approach was different. He saw communism less as an
enemy than as a misunderstanding -- a misdirected turn toward a false
conception of the world and humanity. To correct any mistake, one had first to
understand it, to turn its illusory values into real ones.
National Catholic Reporter, November 5,
1999
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