Resistance by Theater

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.