Sunday, January 02, 2011

Two popes helped put Eastern Europe on the long road to freedom (Contribution)

NORMALLY anyone using the National Archives is looking for specific information, but when the State Papers are released to journalists each year, it is a different matter. 

Most do not know what they are looking for; they just plough through the files looking for anything of likely interest.

Files released for 2010 covered the 1979 visit of Pope John Paul II, so I took a chance to look at a file covering the Irish embassy at the Vatican.

The first news that the embassy had of the Pope’s intended visit to Ireland was when Fr Dermot Martin, who now happens to be the Archbishop of Dublin, telephoned to enquire if the embassy had any further information about the Papal visit. 

When the secretary at the embassy said that they knew nothing at all about it, Fr Martin said that he had been told that the cardinal and the ambassador were to have been informed the previous Saturday.

"So far we had not got any official communication about the event," the Secretary of the Embassy noted. 

But Fr Martin had inside information. 

He was present when the head of the Vatican Press Office said that the Deputy Secretary of State had instructed the press office to notify Cardinal Tomas Ó Fiaich and the Irish Embassy that the Pope was going to Ireland.

"I said that we did not get any call from the Vatican," the secretary replied.

"At this," the secretary noted, "Fr Martin said ‘better for me to come up to the embassy and not to talk any further on the phone,’ He promised to call at the Embassy before 1pm." 

That was a story in itself. 

When he was in the Vatican, the current Archbishop of Dublin felt that he could not trust the telephone service. If you could not trust the telephones in the Holy See, where could you trust them?
I suspect that what happened was that Cardinal Ó Fiaich had been informed and he asked the Vatican Press Office not to inform the embassy. 

Less than two months earlier the cardinal had received his red hat at the Vatican, but the Taoiseach Jack Lynch was not invited. 

In fact, Fr Jimmy Clyne, Archbishop Ó Fiaich’s private secretary, pointedly telephoned the Taoiseach’s office to say "that an invitation was not being issued to him".

That was one thing, but when the Pope was coming to Ireland and the state was going to be saddled with picking up an enormous tab in paying for the visit, one would have thought that a telephone call from the Press Office would have been just normal courtesy. But instead it was Fr Dermot Martin who passed on the information.

Later Lynch asked that the Pope should visit Cork and he would personally accompany him, but Jack was snubbed again. 

The Pope went to Limerick instead. 

There was no indication in the file as to why Lynch was being snubbed, but I would suggest that it might have had something to do with the fact that Lynch’s government was then in the process of enacting the Family Planning Bill.

Having been intrigued by what I found in the Vatican embassy file last year, I took a look at the one for this year. For some reason the reports in the file went back to 1976. I was immediately struck by one referring to the situation in Poland.

Much of the credit for advances that the Catholic Church made in Eastern Europe during the last quarter of the 20th century was attributed to the Polish Pope, John Paul II.

But reports from the Irish embassy at the Vatican in 1976 and 1977 suggest that the changes were already under way during final years of the pontificate of Pope Paul VI.

"Many people within the Church and indeed outside as well have expressed dissatisfaction with the Holy See because of the contacts it has been developing with communists states," Irish Ambassador Gerry Woods reported on October 14, 1976. 

This was apparently a reaction to a change that was taking place in the Vatican.

Ambassador Woods clearly felt that Pope John XXIII deserved credit for the change from the confrontational attitude towards communism adopted by Pope Pius XII.

It was John XXIII who broke the ice with the communists in 1963, when he received Aleksei Adzhubei, editor of the powerful Russian newspaper Izvestia. 

Adzhubei was particularly influential, because he was also the son-in-law of Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader.

Pope John XXIII introduced "complete change from the tough anti-communist line," according to Woods. The fruits of his more open attitude became apparent during the reign of his successor Pope Paul VI.

"Paradoxically the Church in the Soviet Bloc under Communism is not just surviving but showing remarkable and unexpected strength," Ambassador Woods noted in another report in October 1976.

"The Pontiff looks with a bleak eye on the many tribulations of the Church almost everywhere — except Eastern Europe!"

At the time the Catholic Church in Poland was enjoying the largest increase in vocations anywhere.

"Today, after 30 years of experience, our state authorities talk with the Polish Hierarchy and the Holy See in order to arrive at an agreement and a normalisation of our relations," Woods wrote.

"The Polish Church’s remarkable strength is not difficult to comprehend when it is known that all the Seminaries are full and Church ceremonies are uninhibitedly performed not only inside the Church buildings proper but also out of doors."

Woods thought it was significant a year later when a long article on Eurocommunism appeared in the Vatican newspaper, Osservatore Romano. The Vatican Secretary of State was reputed to have written that article, which "took a cautious but not entirely negative view of Italian communism". 

This was particularly significant because many Italian bishops were adopting a hardline reactionary stance.

The fact that the Pope recently discussed Eurocommunism with the British Prime Minister James Callaghan was "further evidence of the keen interest which the Holy See is taking in this question," the ambassador reported on October 26, 1977.

Pope Paul VI was coming to the end of his reign, and Woods clearly thought it was particularly significant that he elevated his former private secretary Monsignor Giovani Benelli to the College of Cardinals in 1977.

This was of particular interest in Ireland, because Benelli had served as Secretary in the nunciature in Dublin from 1950 to 1953.

"Benelli has earned himself a reputation as a tough and realistically minded administrator of Holy See policies whose hardness of approach has not endeared him to his subordinates or to all people who have dealings with him," Woods noted.

He seemed to be hinting that, in spite of his somewhat difficult personality, Benelli was likely to be a future pope.
Benelli actually supported Cardinal Albino Luciani for Pope the following year, but Luciani’s reign as Pope John Paul I lasted only 33 days.

Cardinal Benelli reportedly led throughout the early voting for Pope when the College of Cardinals next met in October 1978, but he was eventually surpassed by the surprise election of the Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, who became Pope John Paul II and did much to build on the approach towards Eastern Europe adopted by the two popes whose names he adopted.

SIC: IEX/IE