Beyond the Myth of Ostpolitik: A Lesson for the Challenge of Islamism
In 1964, the first accord between the Holy See and a communist government was signed. And the myth of dialogue was born. A book by Cardinal Casaroli, published after his death, dismantles it. The same dilemma arises today: resistance, or surrender?
by Sandro Magister
ROMA - One September morning forty years ago, a prelate left the Vatican for Budapest. On the 15th of that month in 1964, he signed in the capital of Hungary the first in a series of accords between the Holy See and the communist regimes of the East.
The man was Agostino Casaroli (in the photo with Ronald Reagan), the future cardinal secretary of state for John Paul II, from 1979-1991. That politics of negotiation was called Vatican Ostpolitik, and marked the Holy See's international relations until 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell and the soviet empire collapsed.
Four decades have passed since that first accord, but the dilemma that the Church had to face then with the communist enemy is still present on the horizon, in the new global challenge represented by Islamism.
The dilemma was whether to resist, or negotiate - with the risks and sacrifices that each of these could bring.
One of the sacrifices involved in negotiation - also called dialogue - was silence regarding the persecuted Churches, and regarding their persecutors.
Paul VI was painfully aware of this. On September 12, 1965, precisely one year after the first accord signed in Budapest by his foreign minister, Casaroli, he went to the catacombs of Domitilla, a place symbolizing the first Christian martyrs, and spoke grief-stricken words for "those parts of the Church that still live in the catacombs today," that "Church that now toils, suffers, and barely survives in countries with atheist and totalitarian regimes." But then he added:
"The Holy See abstains from raising its voice more frequently and vehemently in legitimate protest and disapproval, not because it ignores or overlooks the reality of the situation, but for the sake of a mind inspired by Christian patience, and in order not to provoke worse evils."
During the same period of the mid-1960's, accusations ran wild – unleashed by the drama of Rolf Hochhuth, "The Vicar" – against the analogous prudential silences of Pius XII in the face of Nazism. But it was different for the Vatican's Ostpolitik.
One the one hand, the catacomb Churches of the East saw it as a betrayal. On the other, the progressivist Western Catholic intelligentsia – the same one that subjected the silence of Pius XII to relentless criticism – exalted Ostpolitik as the necessary and epoch-making way of reconciliation between the Church and the "human face" of communism.
For this strain of Catholicism, the silence of the Vatican on the misdeeds of the communist empire was a virtue. The only legitimate word was "dialogue." And Casaroli was considered the prince of the righteous.
When Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, during the reign of Pope John Paul II, defined communism as "the disgrace of our time," a chorus of indignation was raised from the progressivist Catholic camp. And there was born the urban legend of the resignation as secretary of state presented in protest by Casaroli.
But who was Casaroli, really? Even today opinions about him and his Ostpolitik repeat the two opposing assessments – of condemnation and of exaltation – that were current before the Wall fell.
In 2000, two years after the death of Casaroli on June 9, 1998, a book of his memoirs was published in Italy, edited by the historians Giovanni Maria Vian and Carlo Felice Casula, with an introduction by Cardinal Achille Silvestrini.
A barrage of reviews and presentations followed the publication of the book, almost all of them glowing, which again repeated the usual prefabricated judgments.
In reality, the book shouted these down. And it traced a profile of Vatican Ostpolitik – through the pen of its principal architect – that was the polar opposite of the one cherished by the proponents of dialogue.
It is this profile, beyond the paradigms, that appears in the review that follows, published in the weekly magazine "L'espresso" at the time of the book's release. In it, all of the words in quotation marks are exactly quoted from the book.
Reread in the light of critical reason, the war that the Church fought in past decades against communism is an unavoidable lesson for the Church of today, which is called to confront the new Islamist challenge, but remains uncertain between resistance and dialogue, between proclamation and silence.
Is This What You Mean by Dialogue? The Startling Memoirs Of Cardinal Casaroli
[From “L’espresso” no. 25, June 22, 2000]
Agostino Casaroli, when he was alive, was known as the reddest of the cardinals: not for the scarlet color of his mantle, but for the political line that was attributed to him: a line of dialogue between the Church and the good side of communism.
It's not so. Today he assures us from heaven, in this book of memoirs, that the opposite was true: that for him, the cardinal secretary of state of the Holy Roman Church, the famous architect of the Vatican's Ostpolitik, communism was entirely and solely an "abominatio desolationis": the biblical phrase, taken from the Old Testament, that designates the most tremendous destructive impiety, against God and against men.
His is a book of memoirs written in the retirement of the last years of life. They were gathered from his desk by his niece Orietta. Entrusted to a cardinal friend, Achille Silvestrini. And published in 2000, two years after Casaroli's death, under the title "The Martyrdom of Patience."
The book is unfinished. It says almost nothing about Karol Wojtyla as bishop of Krakow and pope of Rome. It hurries past Poland during the 1980's. It is silent on the USSR. But it is enough to demolish at a stroke the heap of articles, essays, and volumes, written even by acclaimed historians and scholars of the Vatican, that for a quarter of a century substantiated the public image of Casaroli as a cryptocommunist, a trailblazer of the conciliar Church.
While he was alive, he did nothing to repudiate this reputation. Instead, savvy diplomat that he was, he used it to his advantage. John Paul II wanted him at his side as secretary of state precisely "to pacify Moscow," terrified by the arrival of the new pope.
But behind the graceful profile of Casaroli the negotiator, there is the mettle of an undaunted defender of the vital outer limits of the Church. The "martyrdom" of which the title of the book speaks was twofold. The Church in the communist countries was a martyr, subjected to a "systematic process of demolition that no partial accord ever interrupted." And he was himself a bit of a martyr, forced to endure the accusations of abetting the enemy.
Casaroli suffered in silence. He learned to remain silent even in that "prison world" crammed with spies and informants that was Eastern Europe before the Wall fell.
When he met in Budapest with Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty, in his refuge at the American embassy, the two enclosed themselves "within a sort of cube with thick walls made of plastic, which was hoisted up on a pulley, and which could be touched only by the Marines employed at the embassy." Even there, there was always the suspicion that someone was spying on them.
His last conversation with another reclusive cardinal, the Czechoslovakian Josef Beran, took place in a hotel room "in oppressive silence, the dialogue being carried out by writing on scraps of paper."
On the other hand, there was the "insolent" eloquence of the functionaries of the regime, their "effrontery," their "treacherous duplicity," which reached the point of excess with the churchmen placed in their power. For example, with the aged and ill cardinal Stepan Trochta, who died of heart failure "after six straight hours of the rage of a certain commissar, Dlabal, unmanned by the fumes of alcohol," who had burst into the house shouting: "You nasty old dog, I'm going to break your paws."
The Ostpolitik of Casaroli was also made up of this: meetings with priests and bishops weakened by years of persecution, "galley leftovers still freshly out of prison," bishops hidden away from the world who, as soon as they embraced the man who had come from Rome, whispered to him in Latin their impossible hope: "We're all waiting for the great war that will liberate us."
And he would hush them, having at his heels for years bad characters like the functionary of Prague assigned to Church matters, Karel Hruza, "whose last name means 'terror'."
Not one of these functionaries redeems himself, nor do any of the higher ranking politicians. Casaroli never shows any spark of light in them, even though his account is written in a placid style.
Not even the ephemeral springtime of Prague, in 1968, leaves any trace of itself. Casaroli writes that, even to the end, right up to the fall of the Wall, in 1989, the regimes proceeded "blind," unaware that they were going to their death.
Well then, why did Moscow, Prague, Budapest, and Warsaw, beginning in 1963, during the last months of John XXIII, offer those little glimpses of dialogue that the Vatican immediately welcomed and transformed into Ostpolitik?
Casaroli gives a clear response. They did this, he writes, only out of self-interest. To attenuate the international criticisms in regard to human rights. To silence the Church and the pope. To ease tensions back home. But without ever touching their plan of annihilating Christianity. The concessions they made from time to time were minimal, if not utterly empty. Unreliable.
In Hungary, antireligious persecution resumed its cruel course right after the signing of an extremely risky preliminary accord in 1964.
The following year, a speech by Paul VI in the catacombs of Domitilla, in which the pope said that he did not "raise [his] voice in more vehement protest only out of Christian patience, and in order not to provoke worse troubles," unleashed furious reactions in the regimes of the East.
Yugoslavia was more mild, but only because Tito wanted to distance himself from Moscow.
And Poland? It was a special case, thanks to the strength of its populist Church, guided by that great warrior, cardinal primate Stefan Wysynski.
To "calm" Wysynski, the Polish government placed its bets on Casaroli himself, accompanied by "an Italian gentleman, very dignified and in close relationship with the Holy See, even my spokesman for the case in question – which was not true. But I had to disappoint him."
For the sake of diplomatic fair play, Casaroli does not give the gentleman's name. A minor omission, in a book intended to reshape the great outlines of history.
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The book:
Agostino Casaroli, “Il martirio della pazienza. La Santa Sede e i paesi comunisti, 1963-1989”, Einaudi, Torino, 2000, pp. 335, euro 15,50.
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On this website, a testimony from the Eastern Church, during the years of the communist empire:
> The Gulag Archipelago in Romania: The Story No One Has Told Before (30.3.2004)
And a contemporary testimony from a country under Muslim rule:
> Enemy Islam. An Interview with the Bishop of Rumbek, Sudan (3.6.2004)
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English translation by Matthew Sherry:
> traduttore@hotmail.com
Go to the home page of
> www.chiesa.espressonline.it/english, to access the latest articles and links to other resources.
Sandro Magister’s e-mail address is
s.magister@espressoedit.it
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10.9.2004
