(10 of 10)
Political observers will of course be watching the new Pope's every move in relation to the Communist nations. But he is not likely to change the general lines set by Pope Paul. In the long run it may be far more significant that the Pope is a non-Italian, and that he has lived in a relatively impoverished land, than that he comes from the Soviet bloc.
Some believe that an outsider will be eaten alive by the Vatican bureaucracy. But those who have observed Wojtyla's career know that he is no pushover. He knows the art of byzantine maneuver and long-range tactics, having learned it in confrontation with a Communist bureaucracy at least as formidable as that at the Vatican. He has already thrown the Curia off balance, in fact, by failing so far to reappoint all major officials, as is customary. On Saturday the Pope addressed the Vatican press corps, then to the consternation of his aides waded into the throng of 1,000 like a U.S. presidential candidate, shaking hands and answering questions in five languages for more than a half-hour. The next day he was installed in an open-air Mass without being crowned with a tiara—a precedent of humility set by John Paul I.
Just before the conclave began, Joseph Malula, the stocky black Cardinal from Zaire, sat dejectedly on a wooden chair in a bare seminarian's room and scornfully waved his hand at the Vatican vista outside the window. "All that—all that imperial paraphernalia. All that isolation of the Pope. All that medieval remoteness and inheritance that makes Europeans think that the church is only Western. All that tightness that makes them fail to understand that young countries like mine want something different. They want simplicity. They want Jesus Christ. All that, all that must change." Fifty hours later, Karol Wojtyla stepped into the fisherman's shoes and, in incalculable ways, perhaps the change has begun.
*His other titles: Vicar of Jesus Christ, Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, Patriarch of the West, Primate of Italy, Archbishop and Metropolitan of the Province of Rome, Sovereign of the Vatican State.