On Papal Humor

Life around John Paul II must have always been an adventure:

The distinguished Polish actor Jerzy Stuhr was in Rome at one point during John Paul’s pontificate, and the pope invited him to dinner in the papal apartment. When they were seated at the table, the pope asked Stuhr what had brought him to Rome, and Stuhr replied that he was playing in a production of Adam Mickiewicz’s “Forefather’s Eve.” The pope spoke about the importance of this drama in Polish history—“Forefather’s Eve” was considered such an emotionally inflammatory evocation of Polish nationalism that its performance was banned in the Russian- and Prussian-occupied parts of partitioned Poland during the 19th century—and then asked Stuhr what role he was taking in the Roman production of Mickiewicz’s classic. Stuhr replied, “Your Holiness, I regret to report that I am Satan.” To which the pope, on reflection, said, “Well, none of us gets to choose our roles, do we?”

On another occasion, John Paul II turned his own humor against that unhappy attempt at humor known as the Polish joke: in this case, the habit that Germans had, in the 1970s, of calling shabby goods, shoddy work, or any kind of foul-up “polnische Wirtschaft”—“Polish business.”

In the wake of the Banco Ambrosiano scandal of the early 1980s, in which the Vatican bank was embroiled, the pope summoned several cardinals known to be knowledgeable about finance to the Vatican to sort through the wreckage. After spending the morning listening to a tale of corruption, incompetence, bureaucratic self-preservation, and general stupidity, John Paul decided it was time for lunch. As he was walking with the cardinals toward the meal, he spotted the German Joachim Meisner, cardinal archbishop of Cologne, and walked up beside him: “Tell me, Eminence,” John Paul said, with that signature twinkle in his eye, “do you think we have some polnische Wirtschaft in the Vatican finances?” As Cardinal Meisner told me years later, his jaw dropped and he was “speechless.” Later, after lunch, several of his brother cardinals asked Meisner what the pope had said. “It can’t be translated,” was the German’s discreet reply.