Cardinal Franz Koenig was a remarkable figure in the Catholic Church for over a half-century beginning with his ordination as a priest in 1933, until his death in 2004 at the age of 98 – dying just a year before the death of John Paul II.
Chapter 3 is used to introduce the Cardinals who played a major part in the October 1978 conclave, to describe something of their personalities — as many reports have portrayed them, to detail their pathways to church leadership, and to indicate their personal interests.
There is one liberty I took in the section introducing Koenig, by giving his assistant the name “Manfred Kuhr.” Colonel Manfred Kuhr commanded my German Army sister unit when I commanded an artillery battalion in Germany during the early 1990s. Manfred was a tremendous soldier, as well as a skilled and insightful leader regarding developing political affairs as the Cold War ended. And, I always loved his name, so felt compelled to use it someplace in the book.
Koenig had clearly become a trusted agent in dealing with the intricate relationship between the communist regimes of Eastern Europe and the church. In Chapter 2, when introducing Yuri Andropov, the famous head of the Soviet KGB who would later briefly become the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, I set the stage for the fundamental, if largely unrecognized, struggle between the Soviet Union and the Catholic Church. Andropov had been the Soviet Ambassador in Hungary during the revolt of 1956 – as discussed in Chapter 2, and the experience had given him a hardened view on dealing with the Soviet’s eastern European satellites, and had also given him pause over the power of the Catholic Church and the steely determination of its local leaders, such as Hungarian Cardinal Mindsvinty.
Koenig had played the key role, at the request of Pope Paul, in securing Mindsvinty’s departure from Hungary. Being an Austrian, Koenig was very conscious of the vulnerability of the countries that bordered what Churchill had called the “Communist sphere” and held captive behind the Iron Curtain. Whether Koenig colluded with Krol as depicted in the book is not fully known, but it is known that the two of them were seemingly working towards the same end if perhaps for different reasons. In any event, numerous reports suggested that Koenig’s role in influencing the October 1978 to seriously consider Cardinal Wojtyla of Kraków was significant.
Interestingly, in German “Koenig” means king, and in Polish “Krol” means king. So, this created a easy path for me in uniting Koenig and Krol together in being the primary “king-makers” of the October 1978 conclave, a role several observers suggested they played.