
Photo: Signs and Wonders for Our Times
The struggle for moral survival
Karol Wojtyla’s {Saint Pope John Paul ll) early life was forged in a crucible. The phrase is no overstatement for the man born in 1920 Poland. By the age of twenty-one Karol was expert in the terror tactics of Nazi Germany. Upon “liberation” Wojtyla witnessed the inablity of the best of us to stay steadfast in the face of evil.
Pope John Paul ll’s biography by George Weigel, Witness to Hope is a tome: over 1000 pages. The book warrants our time and reflection.
Polish life between 1939 and 1945 had a bizarre, even surreal quality. It
was not a question of knowing whether you would be alive next year. Given the
arbitrary terror meted out by the occupiers, the question was whether you
would be alive tomorrow. The pressure was unrelenting: “they” could make as
many mistakes as “they” liked; you could make only one. Criminals once
thought that way; three months into the Occupation, virtually every Pole
thought like that. The official ration was clearly inadequate for survival, so
everyone was by necessity an outlaw, living on the black market. When news of
the French collapse before the Wehrmacht reached Poland, suicides took
place in Warsaw, Kraków, and the manor houses of the Polish intelligentsia.
There would be no help. There would be no spring. A seemingly endless win-
ter had set in. Poland was a nation under ice.
When Poland was “liberated” in 1945, the Yalta Conference ensured “communist totalitarianism spread over more than half of Europe and over other parts of the world. Yalta was a grave injustice, and no enduring peace could be built on that kind of foundation.”
Author George Weigel’s descriptive phrase for the Poland of Karol Wotjoyla’s early life, “the struggle for moral survival,” precisely fits 21st-century America.
Betrayals, the stuff of life
Witness to Hope isn’t a book one can breeze through. Only by reading the background story can we feel the embrace by the crucified Christ upon the young, talented, maybe brilliant, Karol Wotjoyla. Without a careful read of the first two hundred pages, it isn’t possible to glimpse the shock and horror that befell Poland after ‘liberation’ by the Allied forces.
He was a Polish patriot, but like his father before him, he was untouched by xenophobia. He knew the special cultural and intellectual connection between his country and the universal Church, even as he thought that his hard-pressed country might have something to offer the West that had betrayed it twice in six years. He had learned totalitarianism from inside. As he later said, “I participated in the great experience of my contemporaries—humiliation at the hands of evil.”
Yet he had found a path beyond humiliation and bitterness. It had led him to the altar, where he had pledged to spend himself in service to his people.
He was, his seminary confessor remembered, a man “who loved easily.”
There is an existential loneliness in each person that cannot be filled by spouse, parent, or another human being. Who has lived past the age of thirty and not been betrayed by a trusted confidante? Pondering the early life of the man born to be “great” in the eyes of the world reveals the imperative to embrace the suffering that comes to us. Although I’ve read and written before about Pope John Paul ll’s encyclicals, only now can I see the enormity of the grace poured upon Karol Wotjyla.
Grace that looked like a curse and abandonment.
Recently, I gave a very young friend about to marry, a copy of Edith Stein’s Essays on Woman as a gift for her bridal shower. Stein’s, (Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross) writing cuts through our illusions like a sharp, swift sword.
The deepest longing of woman’s heart is to give herself lovingly, to belong to another, and to possess this other being completely. But this surrender becomes a perverted self-abandon and a form of slavery when it is given to another person and not to God; it is an unjustified demand which no human being can fulfill. Only God can welcome a person’s total surrender in such a way that one does not lose one’s soul in the process but wins it.
Essays on Woman
In our struggle for moral survival, it’s imperative that we rid ourselves of the lies and deceptions of the enemy. And that we refuse to play in a culture, more accurately, a world, that not only refuses to look and see evil, but that also demands the evil be renamed. The reality of the thing is obscured through use of mild, vague and indirect labels-euphemisms. Like “affair” for adultery or “reproductive justice” for murder. Or “cohabitation” for fornication.
“Under these robes
is a California surfer.
Lin, everything you’ve done, I’ve done too, or thought about doing.”
Then Benedictine monk Brother Andrew spoke into my uncontrollable sobs, giving me time to collect myself. I was rehearsing the confession scheduled the following day. And halfway through my endless list, flattened by the weighty horror of speaking aloud my sins, I broke down.
Jesus said to him in reply, “What do you want me to do for you?”
The blind man replied to him, “Master, I want to see.”
When Bartimeus rose, he “threw off his cloak.” This small detail is significant.
This was a poor beggar- his cloak his only property. It kept him warm during the chill of the night. Throwing it aside rendered him capable of surrendering, receiving, emptying. We too are poor. But our poverty is not material.
We are weighed down by knowledge, Fr. Paul Scalia writes that St. Patrick wore a breastplate with a prayer against “Every knowledge that blinds the soul of man…”
Freedom from blindness requires poverty, the willingness to lose our wealth and supposed control. In the 19thcentury South, the financial benefits of slavery blinded men to the grave evil of that institution. Similarly, we have arranged comfortable, autonomous lives around Scientism, a false notion of freedom, and the contraceptive mentality.
We wear a heavy cloak, not easily thrown aside. We will regain our sight only when we are willing to divest ourselves of all that our “knowledge” has gained us. In short, our problem is not only one of the intellect but of the will. We must be willing to change our lives radically in order to see clearly.

4 thoughts on “The Struggle for Moral Survival”
Oh so many gems in your writing. I must read more than once. Thank you for sharing your gift.
Happy Happy Sunday Mary!!! Thanks for taking time to write!!
Amen 🙏
Happy Sunnday Michael!