Soon after Karol Wojtyla was installed as Pope John Paul II on Oct. 16, 1978, Yuri Andropov, the head of the Soviet KGB, telephoned his chief agent in Warsaw to vent his rage at this unprecedented turn of events. The Kremlin leadership realized full well that the election of a Polish pope posed a serious threat to the stability of the Soviet Union and to its Communist empire in Eastern Europe. "How could you possibly allow the election of a citizen of a socialist country as pope?" he railed. The hapless rezident in the Polish capital timorously suggested that Rome might be a better place to start looking for answers, according to papal biographer George Weigel.
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Our photo gallery spans the pope's youth to his last days at the vatican.
Andropov then ordered up a report on the papal election from the KGB's Moscow analysts. Their conclusion, predictably, was a byzantine conspiracy fashioned by two prominent Polish-Americans, Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, and Philadelphia's Cardinal John Krol. Their aim, concluded the report, was to destabilize Poland, weaken the Warsaw Pact, and undermine the Communist system. "The analysis was almost comical," writes Weigel, "but the threat analysis was acute."
Some eight months after his election, the pope returned to his native land for a nine-day visit. The Polish regime had attempted to keep his trip as brief and low profile as possible, but it was helpless to prevent or control the pilgrimage to the predominantly Roman Catholic nation. Warsaw's fears were well founded. Instead of innocuous prayers and polite homilies, the pope launched an aggressive religious and political offensive. At open-air masses attended by vast crowds, he challenged Poland's totalitarian system, demanded freedom for the church, and called for an expansion of workers' rights. At every appearance, the people responded wildly to his open challenge to Communist rule, and their reactions made clear their widespread unhappiness with the government.
When John Paul delivered a major speech in Warsaw's Victory Square, he told the throng: "Christ cannot be kept out of this part of the world: To try to do this is an act against man." The response was electrifying. "We want God, we want God in the family circle, in books, in schools, in government orders," the faithful roared. An anonymous Polish miner, asked why he was a practicing Catholic in a Communist state, replied: "To praise the Mother of God and to spite those bastards." It was obvious to many observers of that June pilgrimage that the KGB's prediction was remarkably prescient. The response of the Polish populace to Kremlin ears and eyes was an unprecedented challenge, an upraised middle finger in Moscow's face.
As these astonishing events were unfolding in the summer of 1979, Ronald Reagan was campaigning for the United States presidency. He watched televised scenes of the papal visit and the crowd reaction from the living room of his Santa Barbara home, and it was a seminal moment for him. Here was evidence of massive dissatisfaction with a Communist government, revolutionary passion that perhaps could be nurtured and exploited. "He had enormous respect for the Holy Father and was profoundly moved," recalls Richard Allen, who went on to serve President Reagan as national security and foreign-policy adviser. "He knew instinctively that the pope and we were singing from the same sheet of music, and we viewed Poland as the most likely place to start a resistance movement that would metastasize into communism's demise."
