In the programme, the broadcaster Edward Stourton,
who is a Catholic, investigated the relationship between the Polish Pope and
the Polish-born philosopher Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka who, he says, were ‘more
than friends and less than lovers.’ The
title of the programmes refers to letters spanning thirty two years which are
stored in the National Library of Poland.
The friendship between Karol Wojtyla and Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka was
hardly secret. A number of biographers
of Pope John Paul have written about it, including Carl Bernstein of Watergate
fame. They met in 1975 when Wojtyla was
Archbishop of Cracow. It is worth noting
that at that time the Polish Secret Service had over eighty thousand
informants, among them two thousand, six hundred priests. The slightest hint of any impropriety in the
conduct of the Archbishop, who was such an outspoken critic of the communist
regime, would have been eagerly seized on to discredit or blackmail him. Did Cardinal Wojtyla ever appear to be
discredited or blackmailed?
We can misrepresent a person or a situation not
only by what we say but also by what we fail to say. There is a lot in this programme that has not
been said – perhaps has deliberately not been said. Programmes are often more entertaining as a
result of this filtering process. Edward
Stourton tells us of a visit made by Wojtyla to a holiday home owned by
Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka and her husband in North Pomfret in 1976. No mention is made of the fact that the
Cardinal was accompanied by Father Stanislaw Dzowisz, later Secretary to the Pope
and now Cardinal Archbishop of Cracow.
Nor is there any mention that Anna-Teresa’s husband and their youngest
son were also there. Holiday photographs
can be used very selectively and suggestively.
Anna-Teresa and her husband were happily married for fifty-two
years. He was Hendrik Houthakker, a
Dutch born professor of economics at Harvard.
Tymieniecka was an internationally recognised philosopher. They had three children.
The programme places great emphasis on the fact
that Cardinal Wojtyla gave Anne-Teresa a scapular. The programme infers that this was the
scapular that he had received from his father.
Yet in 1981 when John Paul was involved in the assassination attempt on
his life by Mehmet Ali Agca the Pope requested his medical team not to remove
his scapular. He mentions his scapular
in a 1996 book, ’Gift and Memory’. He
says: ‘I too received the scapular, I think at the age of ten and I still wear
it.’ In the letter where he mentions the
gift of the scapular to Anna-Teresa, he simply says a scapular, not ‘my own
personal scapular’.
Many Catholics will be familiar with the brown
scapular dedicated to Our Lady of Mount Carmel.
It is a way of encouraging us to imitate Mary in her humility and spirit
of prayer. Somehow Stourton makes it
appear to mean something else when the Pope gives it to a friend.
Of course they were great friends. Why should they not be! Another of his closest friends was also a
happily married woman, Wanda Poltawska, who was captured by the Nazis at the
age of eighteen and was taken to Ravensbruck concentration camp and
experimented on medically and was lucky to survive. She was friends with Wojtyla for fifty-five
years. He told her that she was an
inspiration to him because her experiences of life had been so difficult. There are many photographs of the Pope
walking arm in arm with people or holding their hands; people like Mother
Teresa and Mary Robinson, the Irish President.
Wanda Poltawska rushed to his bedside in 1981 as
did Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka and, no doubt, many others. Tymieniecka visited the
Pope the day before he died. So did many
others. That is what friends do when
they can! I would like to give the final
word to Carl Bernstein, a truly great journalist. He said that reporters scoured the earth
looking for a woman who had been Karol Wojtyla’s ‘lover, wife or
companion. They found none because there
were none.’
