[Catholic Caucus] Clandestine Ordinations Against Church Law: Lessons from Cardinal Wojtyła and Cardinal Slipyj

Cardinal Wojtyła never doubted the good intentions of Paul VI in his Ostpolitik, and he certainly knew of the Pope’s personal torment, torn between his heart’s instinct to defend the persecuted Church and his mind’s judgment that he had to pursue the policy of salvare il salvabile [“to save what could be salvaged”]—which, as he once put it to Archbishop Casaroli, wasn’t a “policy of glory.” The archbishop of Kraków also believed he had an obligation to maintain solidarity with a persecuted and deeply wounded neighbor, the Church in Czechoslovakia, where the situation had deteriorated during the years of the new Vatican Ostpolitik. In the midst of a mid-century Church held in the grip of an unquestioned ultramontanism, Cardinal Wojtyła simply defied the papal interdict on such ordinations and proceeded nonetheless, with the involvement of an auxiliary bishop and with the knowledge of the superiors in question. Here in exile, here in the Rome for which he and his church had sacrificed so much, the Ukrainian metropolitan felt increasingly hemmed in by what he called, in one of the subtitles of a document submitted to the pope, the “negative attitude” he continued to encounter from “the sacred congregations of the Roman curia.” Sometimes, in his exasperation at that attitude, he would even resort to the hyperbole of declaring that he had never experienced such mistreatment from the atheists in the Soviet Union as he was experiencing now from fellow Catholics and fellow clergy in Rome.

Author: One Peter Five

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