All during those years, the two Churchmen — the Cardinal and the future Pope — already thought and worked in terms of what Wyszynski called the “three Internationales.” That was the classical term he used to talk about geopolitical contenders for true world power.

There exist on this earth, Wyszynski used to say, only three Internationales. The “Golden Internationale” was his shorthand term for the financial powers of the world — the Transnationalist and Internationalist globalist leaders of the West.

The “Red Internationale” was, of course, the Leninist-Marxist Party-State of the Soviet Union, with which he and Wojtyla and their compatriots had such long and painfully intimate experience.

The third geopolitical contender — the Roman Catholic Church; the “Black Internationale” — was destined in Wyszynski’s view to be the ultimate victor in any contention with those rivals.

Surely such a thought seemed outlandish to much of the world—including much of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in the Vatican and elsewhere. Nonetheless, it was a view that Karol Wojtyla not only shared. It was one that he had helped to prove against the Soviets and that he now carried into the papacy itself.

According to the outlook Wojtyla brought to the office and the role of Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Church, it was unthinkable that the Marxist East and the capitalist West should continue to determine the international scheme of things. It was intolerable that the world should be frozen in the humanly unprofitable and largely dehumanizing stalemate of ideological contention, coupled with permissive connivance that marked all the dealings between those two forces, with no exit in sight.

In a move that was so totally unexpected at that moment in time that it was misread by most of the world — but a move that was characteristic in its display of his independence of both East and West — Pope John Paul embarked without delay on his papal gamble to force the hand of geopolitical change.

In the late spring of 1979, he made an official visit as newly elected Roman Pope to his Soviet-run homeland of Poland. There, he demonstrated for the masters of Leninism and capitalism alike that the national situations that obtained in the Soviet satellites, and the international status quo that obtained in the world as a whole, were outclassed and transcended by certain issues of a truly geopolitical nature. Issues that he defined again and again in terms based solely and solidly on Roman Catholic principles, while Soviet tanks and arms rumbled and rattled helplessly all around him.

It is a measure of the frozen mentalities of that time that few in the West understood the enormous leap John Paul accomplished in that first of his many papal travels. Most observers took it as the return of a religious leader to his beloved Poland; as an emotional but otherwise unremarkable apostolic visit, complete with sermons and ceremonies and excited, weeping throngs.