Cardinal John Krol was a real person, one of many in the book, but the one I have given the most prominent role in the story. As he is described in Chapter 6, when Carter and Katherine meet him in Philadelphia, he was a fascinating figure, born in Cleveland in 1910. His parents had immigrated from the southern region of Poland, and briefly returned there for a year before settling permanently in Cleveland where Krol grew up. Cardinal Krol is pictured above at a 1969 ceremony with his good friend, Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, Archbishop of Krakow, Poland.
Krol was ordained as a priest in 1937, and afterwards went to Rome where he studied Canon Law, later returning to the United States and earning a Doctorate in Law from Catholic University in DC. He eventually became President of the Canon Law Society of America.
Following the death of Cardinal John Francis O’Hara in 1961, Krol was appointed Archbishop of Philadelphia by Pope John XXIII, and he was installed in office at the Cathedral of Saint Peter and Paul on March 22d of that year, becoming the first Polish-American archbishop, and at the age of fifty, the youngest archbishop in the United States.
Krol attended all four sessions of the Second Vatican Council between 1962 and 1965, where Bishop Karol Wojtyla was also in attendance. Although he tended to be a social liberal, Krol was sternly conservative regarding church doctrine and government. He was concerned about the nuclear arms race, and favored some form of gradual and balanced nuclear disarmament – views that are raised in the book in his first discussion with Carter and Katherine. Krol was tall and erect with an athletic physique, and although some considered him to be authoritative and distant, many of those who worked closely with him said this was a misperception, and that he was actually personable, smoked cigars, enjoyed an occasional shot of bourbon, and liked to play golf. I emphasized those dimensions of his personality.
Interestingly, Krol was elevated to Cardinal in 1967 at the same consistory (a gathering of the cardinals of the church in Rome for reasons that do not involve the election of a pope) that elevated Karol Wojtyla, the Archbishop of Krakow. Both had known each other for some time, dating back to the attendance at the Vatican II conference, and were electors in the August 1978 conclave, where Wojtyla had drawn the duty of being one of the scrutineers, one of the electors who count the votes. According to numerous sources, including some not particularly flattering comments by the well known American priest-journalist Father Andrew Greeley, Krol played a significant role, along with Cardinal Koenig, in getting the other cardinals to give serious thought to Wojtyla as a papabili. After John Paul II’s election, Krol would become one of his closest advisors, although in following years he would be greatly criticized for not aggressively dealing with charges of sexual abuse by priests in his archdiocese.
Cardinal Krol kept in touch with events in Poland as they developed in the 1970s, and had made a well-publicized pilgrimage there in 1972. He would have quite naturally been a close friend and confidant to Cardinal Wojtyla well before the October 1978 conclave. Would he have played the aggressive role in coordination with anyone in the United States Government to elect Cardinal Wojtyla? That, of course, is highly unlikely. But, did he play a major role in Wojtyla’s selection? That is certain.