Pope
John Paul II died over a decade ago. In
his lifetime, he has been widely credited with helping to resist the Soviet regime’s
attempt to undermine Polish Christian culture, which was the pope’s homeland. George Weigel writes in his biography of Pope
John Paul II – who went by the name Karol Wojtyla before becoming pope – that the
young Christian had earlier resisted the Nazi’s attempt to undermine Polish
Christian culture. Although he would
later resist as pope, at this earlier time, he resisted as a playwright:
“Karol
and his literary friends were determined that the German attempt to stamp out
Polish culture would not deter them. In
fact, the deliberate effort to decapitate Poland seemed to charge these young
actors and authors with an even more intense sense of purpose. In October 1939, a few weeks after returning
from his trek to Poland’s eastern borderlands, Karol and his Jagielonian
classmates, Juliusz Kydrynski and Tadeusz Kwiatkowski, joined by Danuta
Michalowska, a high school student passionate about the theater, met at the
Kydrynskis’ home to recite classic Polish texts, each taking different
parts. Two months later, Karol wrote his
first play, David, which has been
lost. A letter to Mieczyslaw Kotlarczyk
described it as a “dramatic poem, or drama, partly biblical, partly rooted in
Polish history…” (Witness to Hope 62)
He
also joined a theater troupe:
“Another
aspect of Karol’s intensified dramatic activity involved the famous Polish
actor and director Juliusz Osterwa, whom the Nazis had forbidden to practice
his craft. Like Mieczyslaw Kotlarczyk,
Osterwa thought of theater as a vocation as well as a career. During the Second Polish Republic he had
founded a theater company, Reduta, to bring the classics of the Polish stage to
a mass audience. The members of the company
lived as a community, in an almost monastic style, and were deeply committed to
the ideals expressed in nineteenth-century Polish Romantic literature. Meeting Osterwa through Juliusz Kydrynski,
Wojtyla soon found himself involved in various of the older actor’s projects,
including fresh translations of the world’s dramatic masterpieces into
contemporary Polish.” (63)
This
theater came to be called the Rhapsodic Theater. Weigel sums up the meaning of this time in
Wojtyla’s life:
“The
word of truth, publicly, indeed almost liturgically, proclaimed was the
antidote the Rhapsodic Theater sought to apply to the violent lies of the
Occupation. The tools for fighting evil
included speaking truth to power. That was
what Kotlarczyk and his Rhapsodic Theater believed, and lived. That belief and that experience made an
indelible impression on Karol Wojtyla, who would not forget when, on a
different kind of stage, he would confront another totalitarian power in the
future.” (66)
More:
“Some
have suggested that, confronted by the horror of Nazi-occupied Poland, Karol
Wojtyla retreated into a religious quietism.
In the light of the evidence, it is clear that he had a decision to
make. Some young Poles chose armed
resistance or clandestine sabotage. The
evidence makes clear that Karol Wojtyla deliberately chose the power of
resistance through culture, through the power of the word, in the conviction
that the “word” (and in Christian terms, the Word) is that on which the world
turns. Those who question the choice he
made are also questioning that judgment about the power of the Word and words.”
(66)
The
Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky once made the mysterious remark that although
politics wouldn’t, “beauty would save the world.” It sounds as though the young Karol Wojtyla
and future Pope John Paul II would have had some thoughts about that.