Keys of This Blood (7 page)

At the same time he was making such geopolitical headway, however—and despite urgent advice from some of his most trusted and certainly his most loyal advisers, as well as a mounting cry of anguish from ordinary believers who were subjected to extraordinary displays of un-Catholicity among bishops, clergy and religious around the world—the Pontiff neglected almost totally what many argued was his primary problem and responsibility. He put off indefinitely any attempt to reform his own Church, or even to arrest the accelerating deterioration of its universal integrity.

The surprising thing was that this was not negligence in office occasioned by the heat of his geopolitical agenda. As in the case of his choice not to abrogate the Vatican's formal
Ostpolitik
, it was a conscious decision on the Pontiff's part. As early as 1980, in fact, John Paul was frank
in declaring that a reform of his rapidly deteriorating Church—or even an attempt to arrest that deterioration—was an impossibility at that stage of his pontificate. In his gradation of papal values, the geopolitics of power took precedence over the geopolitics of faith. Reform of his churchly institution would he vehicled on the global change he was pursuing with such intelligence and vigor.

That was essentially the agenda and the climate in Pope John Paul II's Vatican for the first two and a half years of his pontificate. As revolutionary as his geopolitical vision was, it was keyed to and gridded upon nothing more astounding than an educated understanding of human affairs. Like the Wise Men of the West, in a certain sense he took time for granted. He remained comfortable in the persuasion that the shift from the old internationalism to a more truly geopolitical globalism would be a gradual affair: that it would come on the long finger of slow and laborious historical changes. He presumed that as the gradual changes he was sowing within the geopolitics of power would bear more and more fruit, so too the preeminence of the geopolitics of faith would emerge.

Nothing short of the rudest shock of ultimate reality—of life and death and the inescapable will of God—would change that mind-set.

At a certain moment on May 15, 1981, during an open-air papal audience in St. Peter's Square, in the presence of some 75,000 people and before the eyes of an estimated 11 million television viewers, Pope John Paul spied a little girl wearing a small picture of Christ's mother as Our Lady of Fatima. Just as he bent from his slow-moving “popemobile” in a spontaneous gesture toward the child, hired assassin Mehmet Ali Agea squeezed off two bullets, aimed precisely where his head had been. As two pilgrims fell wounded to the ground, two more shots rang out, and this time John Paul's blood stained his white papal cassock.

Robust though he was, it took six months of painful convalescence for the Pope to recover. During that time he had the strength and the nobility of soul to receive in private audience the sorrowing mother of his Turkish assassin-designate. Motivated by the love of Christ, and by that ancient principle of powerful men to “know thine enemy,” he also went to see Ali Agca in his prison cell. In quasi-confessional intimacy, John Paul talked with the man who knew the enemy who had commissioned so grisly a desecration.

The attempted assassination of John Paul shocked the world as a planned act of high sacrilege. In its immediate intent, however, that most
vile act had no religious significance. For it was an act committed against the Pope not as a religious leader but as a geopolitician well along on the highroad of success. The wrath that had boiled up in homicidal anger, and that by the remotest and most covert control had guided the actions of Ali Agea on that day, was the wrath of important hegemonic interests separated from St. Peter's Square by huge distances of land and water. Interests unwilling to see this Pope reintroduce the Holy See as an independent and uncontrollable force in international affairs.

Already John Paul's successes in Poland had jiggered alliances presumed to have been inviolable. As he had widened the ambit of his attention and his energies, he had consistently shown himself to be a leader capable of carrying out his intention to shape events, and to determine the success or failure of secular policies for the new world order. He had not opened the new game of nations by chance, as some had originally thought. He was not some papal Alice who had carelessly fallen down a geopolitical rabbit hole and then wondered where he had landed. He was a purposeful contender for power, who cast a shadow that already blocked the light of success from the eyes of some with diametrically opposed plans for the geopolitical future of the society of nations. Better, then, to cut that shadow down to the abject shades of death in the noonday glare of the Italian sun.

Given the fact that the attempt to murder him was itself a badge of his geopolitical success, there was no earthly reason to expect John Paul to change his vision of the new world order or his agenda to influence it. It was not lost on him, however, that the attempt on his life had taken place on May 13. Or that a series of very curious supernatural events—events of intimate interest to the papacy—had begun on May 13, 1917, in the obscure Portuguese hamlet of Fatima, and had ended there on October 13 of the same year with a miracle centered on the Virgin Mary and her apparent power to control the sun in spectacular ways. Nor, finally, was it lost on him that, but for the picture of the Virgin of Fatima pinned to the blouse of a little girl, his skull would have been shattered by the first bullets out of Ali Agca's gun.

Given such circumstances, it would have been a stony papal heart indeed that could have refused to reexamine the compelling events that had taken place at Fatima over five months, from spring to fall, in 1917.

Like most Catholics the world over, Karol Wojtyla had been acquainted for as long as he could remember with most of the facts about Fatima. The Virgin Mary had appeared several times to three peasant children; she had confided to them certain admonitions and instructions, including a detailed set of instructions and predictions that were intended
for papal action at a certain time in the future; and she had ended her visits in October with a miracle that recalled for many the Bible verse that tells of a “Woman Clothed with the Sun, and giving birth to a Son who will rule the Nations with a scepter of iron.”

Once elected Pope in 1978, John Paul had become privy to the papal instructions and predictions Mary had entrusted in confidence to the children at Fatima. That part of her message dealt with matters of tribulation for the Roman Catholic institutional organization, and with the troubled future of mankind in general.

Like his two predecessors, John XXIII and Paul VI, Pope John Paul had long since accepted the authenticity of the Fatima events of 1917. In fact, he had been rooted and reared in a certain special intimacy Poles have always cultivated with Mary as the mother of God; and his papal motto reflected his personal and public dedication to her. Still, as those same predecessors had done, John Paul had always taken the papal instructions and predictions of Fatima as a matter for the future. “This matter,” John XXIII had written of Fatima in 1960, “does not concern Our time.” This matter, Pope John Paul had concluded in 1978, does not concern my pontificate. Based on the facts available, it seemed a legitimate judgment call at the time.

Now, however—after what were arguably the very pointed events that had taken place in St. Peter's Square; after exhaustive examination of the documents and living witnesses and participants connected with the Fatima events themselves; and after nothing less than a personal communication from Heaven during his long convalescence—John Paul was all but forced to face the full meaning of Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski's familiar maxim that “certain events are willed by the Lord of History, and they shall take place.”

More, he came face-to-face with the realization that, far from pointing to some distant future time, the contents of the now famous Fatima message—and, specifically, the secret contents directed to papal attention—amounted to a geopolitical agenda attached to an immediate timetable.

Gone was the Pope's agenda in which Central Europe figured as the primary springboard for lasting geopolitical change, or as the strategic base from which he could slowly interact with and leaven the policies of East and West alike to satisfy the patient demands of God's justice. Instead, there was now no doubt in John Paul's mind that Heaven's agenda had located the catalyst of geopolitical change in Russia.

Gone, too, was the Pope's presumed time frame involving a leisurely and relatively peaceful evolution from the traditional system of sovereign
and interacting nation-states to a veritable new world order. Instead, there was now no doubt in John Paul's mind that in Heaven's agenda, all would be thrown into the cauldron of human judgment gone awry; of human evil sanctioned by men as normal; of unparalleled natural catastrophes, and catastrophes caused by the panic of once regnant power brokers scrambling to retain some semblance of their once secure hegemonies, and for their own very survival.

When Pope John Paul had left the Apostolic Palace to greet and bless the people in St. Peter's Square that May 13 of 1981, he had done so as the leading practitioner of the geopolitics of power. By the time he took up his full papal schedule again six months later, his entire papal strategy had been raised to the level upon which the “Lord of History” arranges the geopolitics of faith.

This is not to say, however, that he was out of the millennium endgame; or that Fatima had done what Ali Agca's bullets could not—removed him as a leader to be reckoned with in the contention for power in the new world order.

On the contrary, it would seem that all through history, Heaven's mandates appear to involve the servants of its designs more deeply and more confidently than ever in the major affairs of the world. In its essence, in fact, Fatima became for John Paul something like the famed Heavenly mandate and guarantee of success proffered to Constantine on the eve of his battle at the Milvian Bridge. Suddenly, Constantine had seen the Sign of the Cross appear in the sky, accompanied by the Latin words
In hoc signo vinces
. “In this sign you will conquer.” Improbable as it was, Constantine took that sign as anything but unrealistic or unworldly. He took it as a guarantee. With miraculous confidence, he not only conquered at the Milvian Bridge but proceeded to conquer his entire world, transforming it into what became the new civilization of Christianity.

True, Pope John Paul was not a sword-toting conqueror; and at Fatima, Mary hadn't exactly said, “In this sign you will conquer.” But she had given a mandate that was every bit as clear. And as a consequence, in the light of what he now understood his situation to be, the millennium endgame became as important and as urgent for John Paul as the international situation had become for Constantine in his time.

With stunning clarity, the Pope now knew that there was even less time left than he had thought for the old adversarial juxtaposition of East and West that still held sway in 1981 across the face of Europe and the wide world.

Moreover, he knew with equal clarity that his careful and detailed
assessment of the contemporary geopolitics of power was correct, but that its significance lay in the fact that the game of power itself would be played out in a totally different manner than he had previously expected.

And finally, he knew that he could not be less involved than before in the millennium endgame. Rather, with supreme personal confidence, and with a tranquillity that would confound many of his adversaries, he would plunge his pontificate with ever greater energy into the game of nations that would soon enough engulf the entire world, before spending itself like raging waters poured out on cement.

If the Pontiff's understanding of Heaven's geopolitical agenda for our time—his outlook and expectations for the near term of history—seems too stark and unsettling to fit today's common superstition that God is incapable of anything but acceptance of man on man's own terms, John Paul knows something about man's own terms. He knows from long and bitter personal experience that the raw exercise of the geopolitics of power inflicts far deeper hurt and barrenness in suffering and death than the God of Love would wreak on his children through the geopolitics of faith. He knows that the greatest divine punishment would be like balm compared to the inhumanity and ruthlessness of such a godless society as either Leninist Marxism or democratic capitalism is capable of generating.

And if, to the modern mind of his competitors in the millennium endgame, John Paul's finalized geopolitical stance seems too deeply based on transcendental matters, too dependent on invisible reality and on “the substance of things to come,” that is a problem that time and events have already taken care of. For, within a scant four years of the change in John Paul's geopolitical outlook, thrust so brusquely upon him between the spring and the fall of 1981, Mikhail Gorbachev emerged from the heartland of Russia, right on schedule, as the agent of unimagined and unimaginable change in the old world order. Suddenly, nothing—not even the Kremlin fortress in Moscow itself—seemed permanent. Suddenly, the whole world was expectant.

Clearly, the new agenda—Heaven's agenda; the Grand Design of God for the new world order—had begun. And Pope John Paul would stride now in the arena of the millennium endgame as something more than a geopolitical giant of his age. He was, and remains, the serene and confident Servant of the Grand Design.

While Pope John Paul engages himself in the totally new agenda for a totally new world order, there is one area crucial to his success where his
early policies have not changed at all. Anybody who examines the Pontiff's governance of his Roman Catholic institutional organization since 1978 must come away stunned at the deterioration that began during the fifteen-year reign of Pope Paul VI, and that the present Pope has neither reversed nor arrested.