Event: Agostino Casaroli

Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, Vatican secretary of state from 1979 to 1990—and before that, the architect and chief diplomatic agent of the Ostpolitik of Pope Paul VI—initially played hard to get when I tried to interview him for the first volume of my John Paul II biography, Witness to Hope. The cardinal was not a fan of my 1992 book, The Final Revolution: The Resistance Church and the Collapse of Communism, in which I was firmly, but I hope politely, critical of the Ostpolitik’s strategy of accommodation with communist regimes behind the Iron Curtain. The cardinal finally agreed to speak with me, however, and we had a terrific conversation for over an hour and a half. He was full of wit and charm and even had some serious praise for his old Polish sparring partner, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński. It seemed that Casaroli found me agreeable, for he urged me to return for a second session. Alas, he died before that could happen. May he rest in peace. Casaroli did an able job negotiating the terms of John Paul II’s first papal pilgrimage to Poland in June 1979, getting the communist authorities to agree to a nine-day visit in June rather than the briefer visit the Church had first proposed for May; the communists rejected that May timing because it included the liturgical feast of St. Stanisław, a martyr to state power whose example the authorities found unsettling. Once the June 1979 visit was underway, however, Casaroli tried to assuage communist grievances over the pope’s famous homily in Warsaw’s Victory Square on June 2 (in which he called on the Holy Spirit to “renew the face of the earth . . . of this land”) and his address in Gniezno on June 3 (in which he asserted the spiritual unity of the…