The Christ-Nation
Sources:
Ramet Sabrina P. 2017. The Catholic Church in Polish History : From 966 to the Present. London: This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature.
Kengor Paul. 2017. A Pope and a President : John Paul II Ronald Reagan and the Extraordinary Untold Story of the 20th Century. Wilmington Delaware: ISI Books.
Felak James Ramon. 2020. The Pope in Poland: The Pilgrimages of John Paul Ii 1979-1991. Pittsburgh Pa: University of Pittsburgh Press. https://muse.jhu.edu/book/89904/.
Mazgaj Marian S. 2010. Church and State in Communist Poland : A History 1944-1989. Jefferson N.C: McFarland.
Brien Bernard Charles Wright and Michael J Miller. 2018. Blessed Jerzy Popiełuszko : Truth Versus Totalitarianism. San Francisco: Ignatius Press.
Kunicki Mikołaj Stanisław. 2012. Between the Brown and the Red : Nationalism Catholicism and Communism in Twentieth-Century Poland : The Politics of Bolesław Piasecki. Athens: Ohio University Press. http://site.ebrary.com/id/10611347.
Knab Sophie Hodorowicz. 19961993. Polish Customs Traditions and Folklore Rev. ed. New York: Hippocrene Books.
Prologue:
I don’t have a clear memory of when I decided I had questions about Poland. I’ve always had a fascination with the Cold War era, and Poland, increasingly stood out as an anomaly. Statistically, today, Catholics remain around 90% of the Polish population. In comparison with other nations, when you remove smaller outliers (like Vatican City at 100% Catholic with a population of less than a thousand people), Poland is arguably the most Catholic nation in the world. There are a few surprising things about that statistic in the context of its history as an eastern European people – the Orthodox Churches have left virtually no lasting mark on the Poles, which being Slavic, is remarkable. But even more remarkable is that after five decades of forced atheist indoctrination and Soviet oppression, Poland stands today as the most Catholic country in the worlds? Why? That makes no sense on face value. Hungary is just due south, shares a nearly identical history of Soviet oppression, and since they aren’t a Slavic people, they should naturally be oriented toward Rome. And yet less than 40% of Hungarians call themselves as Catholic, with almost 50% claiming to be irreligious or outright atheist. I’m not knocking Hungary, but I am using it to highlight the genuine uniqueness of Poland.
In researching Polish history, I decided to focus on the Soviet era for a couple reasons. It still exists in living memory and therefore can be a tangible, easy-to-grasp, and somewhat relatable story, despite its over thousand-year dance with its faith. For guides through these five decades, we have at hand a cast of characters that ranges from local hardline communists and atheist to the common priest, and all the way up to the pope himself. But first, before we can discuss what Poland was from the end of World War II to the fall of the Soviet Union, we must understand how it got there, for before it earned the reputation as the lynchpin of the Soviet Union, it was known as the Bulwark of Christendom.
Part One: Antemurale Christianitatis
I’d like to begin with a tale. Long ago, in agrarian Poland, the first mechanical alarm clocks were brought into the markets. A certain farmer, who, coming off a fruitful harvest decided his expendable income now allowed him to purchase one of these novelties from a traveling salesman. That evening, the farmer, his wife, and his children invited their neighbors over for an impromptu party to view this new contraption. They marveled at its design, its mechanics, its precision, its discipline, its… perfection. This newest invention of man allowed the farmer’s family to measure with precision that which before was never measured by the second: their time.
As the evening wore on the novelty of the bells and gears wore off. The neighbors went home, and the farmer and his family prepared for bed, yet not before setting their new alarm clock to awaken them in the morning to begin their daily work – that was its purpose, after all. The next morning as the barely perceivable soft, blue glow of daylight crept over the horizon, the birds awoke first and began their day. This ruckus, as it had for time immemorial, awakened the mother of the house. She stepped into the kitchen and began mixing the rye flour for the day – the loafs she prepared would sustain the family as they toiled in the field. The smell of the rising bread wafted its way towards the sleeping father, beckoning him from his slumber. He then, in turn, awoke his beloved children. One by one the family members stepped groggily toward the kitchen table just in time to behold the splendid sight of freshly cut bread and warm butter made from milk from their own cow. As they sat and gave thanks to God for their bounty, the jarring noise of bells filled their home. It was the farmer’s alarm clock. The oldest daughter rushed to disarm the thing interrupting the most important part of the day. By the time she returned to the table, the sun’s golden rays had breached the rolling rye fields and flooded the humble kitchen with its morning light. The father then began to laugh. His family looked at him, puzzled at his amusement. Through his laughter, he asked, “Who will wake us up tomorrow, the clock or the sun?”
The measure of time by mechanical precision was a novelty to all people at some point in history. Yet in this tale of a poor agrarian Polish family, this novelty was not to be regarded seriously, laughed at as superfluous. For they did not need it. They, like their neighbors, measured time by the changing of the season, by the position of the sun and moon, by height of the crops and the blowing of the wind. The winter they knew would bring long nights, the summer: hard work. They measured the passing of time in their households by the hunger felt in their bellies, by the growing anxieties of a woman with child, by the deaths of grandparents. The year was measured by the liturgy. Each week had its day of “un-work” as the Polish called it, or niedziela. Each month had its holy days, or swieta. These holy days of course carried with them specific venerations prescribed by the Church, but also gave bearings on the harvest – one holy may have meant it was time to harvest the beets or another, to sow the grain. Along with these holy days were feasts and festivals. Each feast had its favorite song, food, and superstition. Weddings were always the biggest feasts. After the beeswax candles would be blown out, young women would pay attention to which way the smoke travelled to see who was the next to be married. At Christmas, hay was placed under the tablecloth to herald the next harvest. The coming of easter meant a suitor could expect the gift of a dyed egg from the young girl who captured his heart. When the skies darkened and grew violent, it was time for the thunder candle, a blessed sacramental lit during storms to beg the Lord to spare them his wrath.
From these blended customs of the Christian and the pagan, and amidst the never-ending and ever-present cycle of life and death, the Pole would pass through each of these events transformed spiritually and emotionally, drawing from the past the healing salve of the rugged enduring truth of their ancestors. Time, for agrarian Poland was not linear. It was measured in meaning, not a commodity of seconds to be bought or sold.
I don’t have a drop of Polish blood in me, and as such my genealogical research has never directed me to Polish history – to my detriment. Yet I find through my Irish ancestry kindred spirits. If I were to tell you of a nation with a several hundred year history of domination by a large imperial, once Catholic nation intentionally impoverishing a people into submission, creating artificial partitions, liquidating monasteries and churches, making the ancient local language illegal, opening fire on liturgical processions, executing priests, forcing the conversion of Catholics to schismatic and heretical doctrine, you would be forgiven if you thought I was describing Ireland’s history with England. In fact, during World War II when Polish pilots proved themselves invaluable assets to the RAF, Winston Churchill asked what the Polish were like. He was told, they are like the Irish, but even more so.
By the first half of the 10th century almost all of Europe had been Christianized. There were three main hold outs: the Nordic nations, the Baltic nations, and the Slavs in Poland. These pagans, occupying now a lower stratum of European class were thus subjected to raids, pillaging, killing and enslavement. A few hundred year prior, this behavior was more mutual, but not anymore now that the Christians had come to dominate the continent. The inevitable political nature of religion eventually achieved influence in the Polish aristocracy. Duke Mieszko, who ruled Poland in the late 10th century had decided that converting to Christianity would be expedient for his dynasty. In 966, he along with his subjects allowed themselves to be baptized in the Faith.
Catholic missionaries had been working on Poland for some time already. Bohemian, German, and Irish monks and priests had been pressing to finally bring Poland across the baptismal finish line. Poland could have gone Orthodox easily, but existing political entanglements with Germany influenced its orientation toward Rome. As a result of Mieszko’s decision, 966 is recognized in Poland as its baptism in Roman Catholicism.
The establishment of Christianity got underway quickly. An archbishop of Poland was established in Gniezno – the residence of all the future primates of Poland. More bishoprics were set up in Krakow, Wroclaw (VRAHTS-lahf), Kolobrzeg (kolobshreg), and Pomerania. Yet converting a nation isn’t as simple as installing a diocese. In 944 while Bishop Adalbert was baptizing pagans in a traditional location for polytheistic worship, he was beheaded. By 999 Adalbert was canonized as Poland’s first saint. Monks who followed Adelbert in setting up monasteries were also killed. Yet monasticism eventually spread throughout the land of the Poles, converting each hill and valley one by one. By the end of the 12th century, paganism was mostly gone.
Pagan assaults on churches were regular. Strangely, relics were a prime target of these raids, like those of St. Adalbert. Then a Polish ruler named Kazimierz the Restorer lead the country through a rebuilding phase and elevated the Polish church up to the heights of the great powers of western Europe. He founded abbeys across the nation and funded evangelization among the remaining pockets of pagans. His son Boleslaw II donated huge properties and castles to the church to make it financially viable and independent, invigorated the local ecclesiastical hierarchy.
Boleslaw was a complex figure, however. He famously ordered the execution of Bishop Stanislaus of Krakow on the charge of treason, having the bishop killed while he celebrated Mass. In response, the Poles erupted in anger. How dare the king kill one of their bishops. Such was the public outcry that Boleslaw was forced to leave his own kingdom. And Stanislaus was canonized as a martyr of the Church.
During the years of papal reformers like Gregory VII and Urban II, which we covered extensively in the previous episodes on the Crusades, Poland had trouble deciding on how on board it was with papal ascendancy. Yet eventually, like all the Latin church, it acquiesced and stayed in the holy father’s good graces. In 1140, the Cistercians arrived on the scene bringing with them western educated bishops and improved agricultural practices. The reward for this increase in Church competence was juridic immunity from the governing kings and dukes, a welcomed evolution by the likes of Pope Innocent III who was busily consolidating the international bureaucracy of the Church, of which Poland would now be in communion with.
By the 13th century Europe was suffering a full-scale invasion from the east. In 1241, the Tatars, built from remnants of Turks and Mongols, under the leadership of Genghis Khans grandson, Batu Khan, had completely overrun Hungary. Simultaneously, his uncle, Chagatai Khan had swept into Poland burning, pillaging, and plundering along the way. He took control of Krakow and Wroclaw (VRAHTS-lahf) and massacred its inhabitants. On April 9th, 1241, a Catholic army of Poles, Czechs, and Teutonic Knights assembled to protect the lands of their fathers and the fates of their families. They were annihilated by the Tatars. Duke Henry the Pius, of Poland who commanded the army was found bleeding to death on the battlefield. As he died, he was quoted to utter, “Misery has befallen us.” This moment introduced for the first time a nationalistic sense of martyrdom into the Polish consciousness.
In 1337, the enemy from the East returned to ravage Poland once again. King Kazimierz III assembled an army and gave battle to the Tatars. He turned back their campaign and kept the horde from crossing the Vistula River, vital artery of Poland. He then handed them a decisive defeat at Lublin. Western Europe was not only stunned by the longshot victory, but also indebted to the martyr-land. Poland itself then added another epitaph to its national image, that of protector and defender of Europe against the terrors of the east. Poland came to be called the bulwark of Christianity, the antemurale Christianitatis.
This identity of Christianity’s bulwark lasted hundreds of years. In the 17th century an emissary from the King of Poland stood before the pope and reminded the holy father of the unique historical position Poland played in the defense of western Europe:
“…For centuries Poland had protected Europe against wild and terrible enemies of the name of Christ. Poles with their bare breasts are holding back the Ottoman Crescent.”
Nearly 50 years to the day this boast was made, the Ottomans returned to lay siege to western Europe in July of 1683. The target was Vienna, the capital of the Holy Roman Empire. Christendom recognized the geopolitical and moral disaster the fall of Vienna would have been, and so a grand alliance of eastern European armies was formed, dubbed the Holy League. Poland’s King Sobieski was already a well know military commander and a respected tactician. His Poles were critical in this alliance – made apparent the location of the treaty: Warsaw. On July 25th, 1683, the King visited the monastery at Jasna Gora, which translates to “bright hill”. Housed in that monastery is the single most important national treasure the Polish have, the Black Madonna of Czestochowa – an icon that, if you believe the legends, was painted by Luke the Evangelist himself. This image of the Blessed Virgin was a perpetual comfort for the Polish, especially in times of need. After praying before the blessed icon, King Sobieski received Holy Communion, and then marshalled his forces against the Ottomans laying siege to Vienna.
The King arrived at the battle as the highest-ranking military commander and added his 25,000 Poles to the Holy League, bringing the total force to around 80,000. At the front of his army were his Winged Hussars. And if you’ve never seen what these guys look like, I highly recommend googling them. Apart from their glittering plated armor and bright red tunics, they bore upon their backs two enormous wings of ostrich and eagle feathers that shot up straight above their helms. The Hussars were known for having a devastating cavalry charge, and rarely lost battles.
The accounts say that when the Winged Hussars arrived at the battle of Vienna, emerging from the woods overlooking Ottomans laying siege to the city, the other European armies cheered with relief and joy, that Poland, the antemurale Christianitatis had arrived. King Sobieski recognized the vulnerability of the Ottomans and decided to attack at once. He quickly assembled the other European cavalry units together – 15,000 of them and put his 3000 Winged Hussars at the front. The king led the charge himself, smashing into the Ottoman lines, driving them from the battlefield. It was the largest cavalry charge in military history. As the enemy fled the field, King Sobieski was recorded paraphrasing Julius Caesar’s famous “veni, vedi, vici” to “Venimus, vidimus, Deus vicit”. We came, we saw, God conquered.
Sobieski’s renowned charge and liberation of Vienna earned him a hallowed place in Polish history and further added to the national cult of veneration that surrounded the Icon of the Black Madonna. The Polish people too felt they too had achieved their place among the great European Kingdoms. Just a few years earlier a professor in Krakow had predicted this status when he proclaimed Poland to be a:
“Gem of Catholic kingdoms, a temple of freedom, a bastion of the true faith, the most faithful pupil of the Roman Church, the strongest defender, the most devoted propagator, the rampart of the Christian states (antemurale Christianorum imperiorum), the seat of justice, power, prudence, immortality, fame of its citizens.”
It’s worth discussing that it’s borderline miraculous that King Sobieski fostered a Marion devotion at all. The protestant reformation had gotten under way more than a century earlier, sweeping up much of the Polish gentry and nobility. While the intellectual class in the towns and cities devoured and dissected the writings of Luther with great interest, the illiterate peasant farmers found the entire movement… irrelevant. Roman Catholicism was now half a millennium entrenched in their psyche and blended with their agrarian customs and superstitions. The salt of the earth cares not for novelty, as we have already discussed.
By 1540, Calvinism arrived in Poland, capturing more of the upper class than Lutheranism. As Polish society became increasingly fractured between Catholics and Protestants, both groups looked to influence the Polish crown for protection. The Catholic Church meanwhile naturally pushed for a blanket ban on populist heresy. The kings of Poland during this time largely opted for toleration of religious plurality in society. This tolerance had, of course, political ramifications. After a short while the Protestants had gained near parity with the Catholics in the governing body of Poland, the Sejm.
By the time confessional equality in Poland had been achieved in 1573, Protestantism was already on its way out. The reason, first and foremost, was due to the peasantry never converting, leaving enormous blocks of the population remaining stubborn Roman Catholics. Secondly, the moral and theological fissures that erupted between all the various protestant sects created serious political disunity. The reformation, no longer the new shiny object, had ceased to be attractive.
There was another reformation underway, though its origins were hundreds of years before the protestant reformation. Ironically labelled the “counter reformation” of the Catholic Church, this counter reformation began with the papacy of Innocent III and his codification of papal supremacy. Over the subsequent decades and centuries, papal supremacy of both the spiritual and political brought tremendous organization strength to the Church that manifested most consequentially in the establishment of Catholic Universities. The graduates of these universities ushered in the era of scholasticism in Europe, unifying Catholic philosophical thought and apologetics. The maturation of this intellectual percolation produced a Church hierarchy with the will and skill to dismantle the various theologies of the reformation. With more educated bishops came greater pastoral care for the laity, more scrutiny for seminarians, more rigorous and theologically sound sermons, and most significantly, an increase in devotion towards and promotion of the cult of the Blessed Virgin – a movement that had great appeal with the agrarian Polish.
Just as Catholic hegemony in Poland was on its way to being restored, conquest by the Russians and Swedes commenced fueled both by religious differences and financial gain. These conquests taking place in the middle of the 17th century are collectively known to Poles as “the deluge”. During these wars, the Polish commonwealth, lost a third of its population and its entire military.
In the winter of 1655, a Swedish army, along with German mercenaries totaling about 3000 strong arrived at the monastery of Jasna Gora, that same monastery where King Sobieski had prayed for victory against the Ottomans before the sacred Icon of the Black Madonna. The holy icon was still there, along with other relics of Polish-Catholic heritage. Held up at the monastery were about 70 monks and 250 poor agrarian farmers who had bravely turned up to defend to the death their beloved relic of the Queen of Poland. Amazingly, the monastery had a small arsenal of cannons and muskets but were nonetheless vastly outnumbered. Yet every time the Swedes and Germans attacked, the monks and farmers repelled them. Finally, two days after Christmas, the attackers abandoned the siege of Jasna Gora. For the Poles, they believed the cause of their victory was obvious, the intervention of the Blessed Mother, their Queen. Despite this unlikely victory, by the end of the deluge period, Poland remained, but both the nation and the Church hierarchy therein were shadows of their former selves.
The commonwealth of Poland lay at the crossroads of Europe like injured prey. Russia was the first to recognize the easy pickings on its doorstep. Catherine the Great, empress of Russia had infiltrated both the ruling monarchy of Poland and the Sejm - the governing body, bending both to her will. Next to have their eye on Poland was Frederick the Great of Prussia. Frederick described Poland as “an artichoke, ready to be consumed leaf by leaf.” The third nation to desire a piece of Poland was Austria, currently run by Empress Maria Theresa. By 1772, these three great European powers had reached an agreement detailing a complete partition of Poland, redistributing its lands amongst themselves. King Stanislaus Augustus of Poland didn’t have the sinew to fight all three powers and was told by Russian emissaries that if he resisted, Warsaw would be leveled. His acquiescence to the overwhelming union against him marks the beginning of the partition era when Poland ceased to exist on any map of the world.
For the first time now we see underground independence movements arise in Poland, particularly in the Russian Partition, where religious persecution at the hands of the Russian orthodox was violent. Whie Catholicism suffered a form of persecution in the Prussian Partition by Calvinists and other protestants, the Faith was largely left alone in the Austrian partition, since those monarchs were Roman Catholic. The Russians on the other hand were out to eliminate the Roman Catholic faith in Poland and replace it with the Orthodox Church. In defiance, the Polish Sejm convened and declared Roman Catholicism their official religion. They pushed the envelope even further and drafted their very own constitution, asserting their right to exist as an independent nation - remember, this is the height of enlightenment. These moves of autonomy infuriated Catherine the Great, but being tied up in a war with Turkey, she had to postpone dealing with Polish independence.
Eventually Russia signed a treaty with Turkey, and on May 18th, 1792, 100,000 Russian troops crossed into Poland. Poland mustered its forces, but the Polish King waffled, and refused to resist the Russian force. And at the point of a 100,000 Russian bayonets, the Polish Sejm annulled their recent constitution and ratified the Russian partition.
Two years later, a polish veteran of the American revolution, Tadeusz Kosciuszko helped kick off a new revolution against Russian rule. He was surprisingly successful at first, liberating Warsaw and Krakow. But the Russians would not give in so easily. With overwhelming might they crushed the Polish rebellion and upon entering Warsaw massacred its civilians as punishment. The short-lived rebellion was over. During these years of Russian occupation, persecution, and oppression, six million acres of Polish Church property was seized and handed over the Russian Orthodox. Forced conversion to Orthodoxy was implemented and Roman Catholic clergy was put under government surveillance. The Polish language and Polish education were outlawed.
In 1825 Tsar Nicholas I ascended to the Russian throne and threw all eastern Europe into chaos. He was completely insane, and the entire Russian government fell into corruption and arbitrary brutality. Russian contemporaries recall that during the reign of Nicholas, on the streets of Russa only silence could be heard.
Eventually the combination of revolutionary spirit sweeping through Europe and the weakness of Nicholas gave the Poles their moment to rise. Revolutionaries in Warsaw seized 30,000 rifles and began handing them out to the citizenry. Soon they had 200,000 Poles joining in on the fight. Bishops began lending their support to the cause as well, signing a manifesto declaring Nicholas their illegitimate ruler. But Russia’s key strength had always been its massive numbers. They will simply throw bodies at any problem that arises under its dominion. Their offensive against this Polish revolution commenced on February 5th, 1831, eventually dismantling Polish military resistance. Polish soldiers and officers instead of surrendering went into exile. The semi-autonomous Polish government was disbanded, and 100,000 Russian troops were permanently installed in Poland. Secret police and surveillance forces were introduced. Authentic Polish institutions were replaced with Russian bureaucracy. Poles in civil leadership positions were replaced with loyal Russians. The Church feared that its revolutionary sympathies were now a liability to its position in Poland. To rectify the situation, Pope Gregory XVI quickly issued an encyclical on civil obedience, declaring the Tsar “Appointed by God” to rule over the Poles. Then martial law was imposed and would not be lifted for another 25 years.
During martial law, two thirds of Catholic monasteries were liquidated. Hundreds of Polish Catholic schools, hospitals, and philanthropic institutions were shut down. The Catholic Church, so desperate to stay in the good graces of the Russians even went so far as to sign a Concordat with the Tsar, giving him discretion over the appointment of bishops, now doubt causing the medieval papal reformers to roll over in their graves. To the Poles, these most loyal of Roman Catholics, the pope was now a traitor.
During these dark days for Poland, many abandoned their beloved fatherland altogether. 1.25 million Poles emigrated from the Russian partition alone, with the bulk of them going to the United States. Millions more from the Austrian and Prussian partitions followed them to the land of the free. Chicago quickly became the Polish capital of the New World. By World War I, there were 3 million Poles living in America, establishing ethnic neighborhoods, ministered by Polish priests, preserving their folk culture and customs as best they could in the new world.
Those who remained in Poland, feeling neglected by the Holy Father, and seeing their lamentations ignored for political expediency, abandoned the ultra-montane flavor of their Roman Catholic discipline and replaced it with internal patriotism. The next generation, imbued now with this patriotic Polish Catholicism ignited a religious revival. Monks and missionaries labored to remind the Poles of their spiritual and cultural heritage and to take pride and solace in its richness. The Polish Church too embraced more nationalistic, more anti-Russian sentiments. And patriotic hymns filled the churches of Poland.
In April of 1861 a crowd of nationalist Polish Catholics assembled in Warsaw to pray for the independence of both faith and country. As they knelt in prayer Russian troops opened fire in cold blood, killing more than 100 unarmed citizens. Martial law was declared again, giving the Russians cause to kick open the doors of the Catholic churches and arrest the faithful by the thousands. Now to be Catholic was to be an enemy of the state.
Over a thousand Polish Priest were exiled to the frozen hellscape of Siberia. Poles were prevented from occupying any teaching positions in their own country. Their national language was still illegal. Monastic orders were completely dissolved and whatever property the church still owned in Russian occupied Poland was now gone.
By the late 19th century, the concealed illegal Faith in Poland was its people’s unifying identity, sustained with the pride of hundreds of years of national martyrdom. Once again, Poland was on its knees as a sacrificial offering to an enemy to the east. This collective sentiment manifested itself in processions, pilgrimages, retreats, and the underground celebrations of Roman Catholic feast days. Reports of apparitions by the Blessed Virgin were everywhere. Sanctuaries housing old forgotten holy relics of Poland drew pilgrims from its four corners with Jasna Gora being the busiest – in a span of 30 years during this period of oppression the number of pilgrims to Jasna Gora rose from 46,000 annually to 200,000.
Many Poles during the late partition period began turning to political solutions to their misery. There was a brand-new ideology making its way into the town squares and cafes that promised a utopia of sorts for the poor. Socialism had gained its first beachhead.
At the onset of World War I, the Poles had been partitioned and occupied for nearly 150 years. Through these partitions they largely maintained their cultural distinctness and spirit, but politically now, many had conflicting allegiances. In exchange for support against the new German empire, formerly Prussia, the Russians dangled the carrot of greater political autonomy before the Poles, once the war was over. Other Poles, however, saw German allegiance as the best path towards independence. The Polish Socialists, now a formidable political organization sided with Austria and the Hapsburgs. This alliance with the Catholic empire was entirely parasitic, and a means to an end for a larger socialist goal. Leader of the Polish Socialist, Jozef Pilsudski spoke of his justifications for such an alliance:
“When the war broke out, I asked myself what Partition offered this possibility of creating an armed force, which would count when all, both conquerors and conquered, were weakened under the destiny of war. I saw immediately that the only country where it was possible to begin and carry through such work was Austria. I reckoned that Germany with her iron state organization and her machine would at once put in every man capable of fighting. Russia was of no use – she was too confident in her own strength and in her policy of force in dealing with her subjects. Austria remained the weakest state, maintaining herself alive as a type of political tight-rope walker, dependent on her subjects. Austria was the easiest to talk to.”
The Holy See, when prognosticating on the fortunes of this new war looked very closely at Poland. There were two sides to the Poland question for them. On one hand the Church would willingly support an overwhelmingly Catholic nation’s independence. On the other, since such independence required the return of vast stolen lands by Austria-Hungary, it was doubtful that that empire would survive Polish independence. When an advocate of Polish independence sought support from the Vatican, he was rebuffed by the pope’s secretary of state as a dreamer and was told his future lies with Austria. But by 1917, it was clear Austria-Hungary was sliding towards collapse, and Pope Benedict XV issued a statement calling for Polish Independence. The very next year with the Catholic empire in its death throws, it transferred autonomous power of its partition of Poland back to the Poles and gave ruling authority to the socialist Jozef Pilsudski – mission accomplished. Europe and the Vatican quickly and officially acknowledged the autonomy. And Poland was suddenly back on the map.
1917 was an eerie year for all the world. Empires that should have lasted a thousand years came crashing down. Nations, like Poland, that had no chance of existing, suddenly existed again. Then rumors sprang up from Portugal that three small children had been seeing apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Fatima. The apparition warned of future and worse cataclysms to come, particularly from Russia. These apparitions culminated in tens of thousands of people witnessing a still inexplicable event known as the Miracle of the Sun. The specifics of Fatima are a bit outside the scope of this narrative, but it is such a strange, alleged event to occur at such a pivotal year in human history. And its mentioning is relevant to the discussion, as you’ll see.
World War I brought the old powers of Europe to their knees, and everything had now changed. Germany was no longer an empire. Austria was no longer an empire. Russia was no longer an empire. These former slave masters of Poland were unrecognizable. The biggest change was Russia. The Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin has successfully thrown down the empire and converted Russia to Communism. As Lenin looked west for fertile revolutionary ground to spread the doctrine of Marx, he saw Poland as it had been seen by conquerors from the east for a thousand years now – the bridge to western Europe. The shortest route from Moscow to Berlin and Parish was through Warsaw.
Pilsudski, despite being a socialist, was a Pole first. He quickly formed an alliance with Ukraine and assisted them in liberating Kyiv from Lenin. In response the Red Army went on the march and steamrolled Ukraine, forcing the Polish to retreat across their borders. After Kyiv, the red army pushed on towards Warsaw.
As the Russians approached Poland in August of 1920, the Polish army mustered and prepared to fight for their newly won independence. There is an account called the Miracle on the Vistula, the main river in Poland. It is said that prior to the battle, the Blessed Virgin appeared in the sky assuring the Poles of their victory. After the battle, the result for the Red Army, in Lenin’s own words, was “an enormous defeat”. Polish casualties were around 40,000 while Russian casualties reached over 100,000. Many of the historians were quick to point out that this battle was critical for all western Europe because at this time Lenin had serious communist strongholds in Germany, Romania, Hungary and Italy. His strategy of taking Warsaw was meant to eliminate the only bump in the road toward military communist overthrows of those governments. The road to the west would have been wide opened had Warsaw fallen. Poland again added another notch in its belt of antemural christianatitus.
Peacetime allowed this resurrected nation to focus on building its government. Pilsudski abdicated his authority to the new Polish Sejm, allowing for a new Polish constitution to be adopted. By 1925, the Church had negotiated a fresh concordat with the new government. A concordat for the Vatican was always the goal with any nation – it was a political agreement of legal operation withing a country. It set aside official functions for the Church vis-a-vis the state and granted the Church unique status therein. For us Americans, if this type of arrangement makes you shift in your seat a bit, that’s ok. That’s not the type of society we have. But for Poland, they historically cherished this legal bond with Rome as a matter of national pride.
In the early 20th century apart from being a constitutionally Catholic nation there were a range of competing visions for the political direction Poland should go. National ethnic purity was very cutting edge and attractive at the time. The National Democrats of Poland were actively pushing this agenda. In practice, this meant two things needed to happen: Non-Polish Slavs must be assimilated into a Polish society, and Germans and Jews must either self-emigrate, or face forcible removal. As often happens when a country leans into ethnic nationalism, the Jews are the first to suffer. Over the course of three years, mobs aligned with the National Democrats arose and murdered around 2000 Jews in the streets and levelled three synagogues.
Another vision for Poland was Pilsudski’s socialism, which took marching orders from the influences of the international socialist movement. To socialists, a nation’s borders meant little. Pilsudski saw Poland’s future as a grand commonwealth, encompassing diverse nationalities and creeds. His relationship with the Church was complicated. He was born and raised Catholic, converted to Protestantism so that he could divorce and remarry, and the reverted back to the Faith after his second wife died. People who knew him best described him, enigmatically as a typical Pole, that is, having considerable doubts about the existence of God, and yet was fervently devoted to Mary the mother of God. For the nationalists, Pilsudski’s vision of Poland was too anti-Catholic, too pro-Jewish, and just overall soft, especially in the context of the trending dictatorships of the 20th century.
A third vision for the future of Poland belonged to the Catholic hierarchy – already wildly successful toward their goals. Catholicism was the state religion, religious education was mandatory in the schools and subsidized by the new government. Businesses were not allowed to be opened on Sundays, and most recently, the Church successfully negotiated their concordat with the Holy See. The particulars of the head of state and legislature weren’t important, so long as the government was informed by the See of Warsaw.
Despite the best efforts of what we can simplistically refer as left vs right political factions, it was the Church-lead vision that most Poles, especially rural Poles, saw most authentic to Poland. With popular support, the infrastructure of the Polish clergy expanded and solidified. By 1939 there were over 10,000 diocesan priests, 7000 monks, 22,000 nuns, and an additional 1200 churches and priestly residences under construction. A Polish Youth Association, baptized by the Polish Hierarchy, quickly grew, drawing in over 500,000 members immediately and rising to 700,000 by 1939. 228 Catholic periodicals were in production with some have a circulation of 10,000 readers per issue. Catholic schoolchildren were required by law to go to confession at least three times a year, and the clergy was immune from civil prosecution, subject only to the international laws of the Church.
Yet below the surface, Polish politics, succumbing to the trend of greater European politics, was turning violent. In eight years, there were 14 different governments in Poland, multiple assassinations, endless economic and political crises, recurring labor strikes, and even a three-day civil war. Socialists, atheist, and freemasons were fighting in the streets for political hegemony, while the ethnic purists were pressuring the Church to condemn the Jews and secular government. On the eve of World War II, the Polish question was multiple choice one: The primacy of the state, vs the primacy of the nation, vs the primacy of the Church.
The Jews in Poland were now under serious scrutiny, not because of anything they were doing but largely because of the European political movements across Europe, led now by the Nazi party next door in Germany. Many now branded the Jews as politically and ethnically problematic to the causes of nationalism. Cardinal Hlond, primate of Poland wrote a letter to his flock declaring: “a Jewish problem exists and will exist so long as Jews remain Jews.” The fear was a that Poland’s 3.5 million Jews were keeping the nation from its purer destiny as a Catholic nation.
Radicalism, antisemitism, and street-level militancy had manifested itself upon the Polish political landscape. “Collective thinking” and “national purity” were the buzz phrases of the day – phrases I like to call red meat for dogs. Tell the mob what they want to hear, and the mob will vote for anything.
The first character who will begin escorting us through the main narrative of this podcast is a fascinating product of this volatile political landscape. His name is Boleslaw Piasecki. He was a radical, a revolutionary, a nationalist, a militant, and a devout Roman Catholic. Piasecki came of age during a Polish youth movement in the early 20th century that desired Poland to not only be ethnically pure but also exist under the banner of the papacy. He and his generation generally leaned away from socialism and leaned into fascism.
One of the reasons early 20th century Polish Catholics were skeptical of communism went beyond the recent history of Lenin’s attempted invasion and came straight from the chair of Peter itself. As early as 1846, two years before Karl Marx would release his Communist Manifesto, Pope Pius IX condemned communism as a “unspeakable doctrine,” and “opposed to natural law”, that it would lead to “the complete destruction of everyone’s laws, government, property, and even of human society itself would follow.” He forecasted a dark future to the doctrine, calling it:
“The most dark designs of men in the clothing of sheep, while inwardly ravening wolves… by means of a feigned and deceitful appearance of a purer piety, a stricter virtue and discipline; after taking their captives gently, they mildly blind them, and then kill them in secret. They make men fly in terror from all practice of religion, and they cut down and dismember the sheep of the Lord… filled with deceit and cunning… spread pestilential doctrines everywhere and deprave the minds especially of the imprudent, occasioning great losses for religion.”
It’s worth noting that Pius IX’s warnings come before anyone had yet died at the hands of a communist government. He goes on:
“As a result of this filthy medley of errors which creeps in from every side, and as a result of the unbridled license to think, speak and write, we see the following: morals deteriorated, Christ’s most holy religion despised, the majesty of divine worship rejected. The power of the Apostolic See plundered, the authority of the Church attacked and reduced to base slavery, the rights of bishops trampled on, the sanctity of marriage infringed, the rule of every government violently shaken and many other losses for both the Christian and the civil commonwealth.”
Pius IX’s immediate successor, Leo XIII went after communism immediately. He called it a “fatal plague which insinuates itself into the very marrow of human society only to bring about its ruin.”
Leo didn’t stop there:
“That sect of men who, under various and almost barbarous names are called socialists, communists, or nihilists… they leave nothing untouched or whole which by both human and divine laws has been widely decreed for the health and beauty of life. They refuse obedience to the higher powers, to whom, according to the admonition of the Apostle, every soul ought to be subject, and who derive the right of governing from God.”
The successive popes of the church went on year after year, ringing this bell, crying out from atop the walls of the looming horrors of communism. Reaching the era we are dealing with now, Pope Pius XI declared that “Socialism is irreconcilable with true Christianity. Religious socialism, Christian socialism, are contradictory terms; no one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist.” In 1937 on the solemnity of St. Joseph, Pius XI released an intense attack on communism called Divini Redemptoris, calling communism a “collective terrorism”, “savage barbarity”, “a plague promulgated by the powers of darkness”, “a satanic scourge”. He warned further that it would lead to:
“a class-warfare which causes rivers of blood to flow… The evil we must combat is at its origin primarily an evil of the spiritual order. From this polluted source the monstrous emanations of the communistic system flow with satanic logic.”
Toward the end of 1930s, looking ahead to the coming cataclysm of a second world war and the onset of international communism, Pope Pius XII looked for the Church’s future allies in this spiritual warfare. Surprisingly, he looked across the Atlantic Ocean. It was an ally he himself predicted Europe would have to turn to years earlier as a bishop when he toured America, saying: “Into the hands of America, God has placed an afflicted mankind.”
Later, Pius XII would call before him American Bishop Fulton Sheen and give him a specific mission to ring the alarm of Marxist ideology, telling him to take: “every opportunity warn the Americans of its dangers.” Bishop Sheen took his orders seriously and went on to be one of the most recognizable bishops in the world and used every available media to denounce an economic model he declared “inspired by the serpent of the spirit… the Mystical Body of the Anti-Christ.”
Back in Poland, the spirit of fascism had declared victory over socialism. Its bishops had proclaimed in April of 1939 that they had:
“Pushed godless communism away from the borders of Poland and prevented it from taking refuge in Polish society under the pretense of non-Christian culture. We are casting away godlessness, freethinking, and positivism. We are recovering from laicism, materialism, and religious indifference. We are successfully defending ourselves from out neighbors’ neo-paganism.”
What they did not know… what they could not know… was that this was the last year of existence for the new Polish republic. Poland’s fate again as a sacrificial victim of European conquest was sealed on the night of August 23rd, 1939, when Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s USSR signed a pact that would allow the Nazis and Soviets to invade and partition Poland. Hitler knew this pact was critical to his idealized version of Germany. Poland, despite all the political novelty of the age was still a geopolitical key to controlling Europe. Hitler himself awaited news of the signing of this pact at his Berghof residence, surrounded by his entourage. But the tone was far from triumphant, for what was probably the northern lights, the sky seemed to be displaying terrifying omens over the mountains. Hitler’s housekeeper, Herbet Doring recorded:
“The entire sky was in turmoil. It was blood-red, green, sulfur grey, black as the night, a jagged yellow… Everyone was watching.”
A woman in the group approached Hitler and said:
“My Fuhrer, this augurs nothing good. It means blood, blood, and again blood.”
Doring recalled that Hitler was nearly shaking with fear.
One week later, Hitler invaded Poland from the west, followed by Stalin from the east. The Catholic Poles were violently pinched between the legions of neo-pagan Nazis, and atheist communists, both hell-bent on the conquest. The Poles were woefully outnumbered and yet against Germany they killed or captured 50,000 soldiers, shot down 500 German aircraft, and destroyed over 1000 armored vehicles of the Wehrmacht. In their vigorous defense, 200,000 polish soldiers were killed or captured in the first month alone and God knows how many civilians died from ariel the bombings. The city of Warsaw held out against air raids and panzer divisions for four weeks, knowing that the French and British had promised to attack Germany if Poland was attacked. But any allied mobilizations were at best months away. The Poles denounced the nonexistent assistance from the allies as the Phony War. With the capital 40% destroyed by the Nazis, it finally surrendered on September 27th, 1939. With the capitulation of Warsaw, the Soviets quickly annexed the eastern portions of the country. After a mere 20 years of self-governance as an independent Catholic nation, Poland once again ceased to exist.
The collective manifestation of early 20th century hatred for the Jews and desires of national purity found its man of action in Adolf Hitler. By February of 1940, in Poland, a million Jews and Poles were forcibly deported from the newly conquered German territory. Another 2.8 million were sent to German labor camps for the coming war effort.
For the Soviet’s part, the first thing they did in their new Polish territory was abolish religious instruction in schools and prayers in public, such things were not befitting of good communists. Further, students were forbidden from attending Sunday Mass, as Sunday was now declared an official working day. An eyewitness to this Soviet takeover recounts:
“The league of the Godless arrived with the Government grant of three million rubles with which to start its program. Special commissions were appointed for the propagation of atheistic doctrine in the schools. The whole story of schools, the ordeal of the school children generally, and of the immense fortitude and determination of those children displayed in their resistance to the new teaching, must be told elsewhere. I have no space here to do more than record the fact.”
I spoke earlier of Boleslaw Piasecki – that radical polish nationalist youth who wanted the Catholic Church to claim its rightful ruling place in Poland. He like the rest of his generation took up arms against the Nazi invaders. It was brave, but hopeless, and Piasecki, along with hundreds of thousands of other patriots, were captured.
Hitler utterly rejected any idea of a collaboration government in Poland, he famously despised the Slavic peoples, considering them racially inferior, and opted instead for complete occupation. The Poles rejected Germany’s proposal and offered armed resistance in return, going underground. This underground Polish resistance was of no small matter. During the war they were responsible for massive rail disruptions for the Nazis and provided the allies with nearly half of their intelligence on Nazi occupied territories. At its peak, the various resistance groups could count around 650,000 members.
The Nazis understood that during the partition period the Catholic clergy supported the oppressed people and blessed at least two insurrections against Imperial Russia. Thus, patriotic priests stirring up nationalistic sentiment was verboten. So, the arrests of priests began. Seminaries were shut down, along with all the various religious weekly publications. Polish songs and hymns, the very fiber of the Polish culture was outlawed. National monuments were destroyed. Hearing confession in the Polish language was illegal. The Gestapo entered the Catholic University of Lublin and arrested whatever professors and clergy they could find – all sent to concentration camps in Germany. Before the end of 1940 in Poland, over a thousand Catholic priests were either arrested or shot. To continue the Faith in Poland, the bishop’s seminaries were likewise forced underground.
The Soviets on the other hand had no shortage of labor and as such, had no use for labor camps. Captured soldiers and troublesome clergy dealt with more efficiently than their Nazi counterparts. One particularly grizzly memorial of Soviet cruelty is in the woods of Katyn, just across the border into Russia. Over the course of two months 22,000 young men were shot, stacked into trucks, and driven to a mass grave. Before long, in similar fashion the Russians would execute around 100,000 Polish men. Many of the young Russian soldiers, acting under orders and unable to cope with their own evil, shot themselves.
Back in America, Bishop Fulton Sheen would not have been surprised by these atrocities on both sides of re-partitioned Poland:
“There is not a vast difference between them. What is class to Russia is race to Germany.”
For some Catholic nationalists, what was being done in Poland was not all that undesired. Bishop Kaczmarek of Kielce published a shockingly tone-deaf pastoral letter in 1941, still warning of the potential corruption the Jews might have on Catholic children, and further, preached loyalty to the new occupiers. Remember Bishop Kaczmarek, he comes up later.
The Polish government now in exile, not to be outdone in irrationality by Bishop Kaczmarek, had the gall to put out the following statement in 1941:
“As far as the Jewish question is concerned, it must be viewed as a special sign of Divine Providence that the Germans, regardless of the many injustices they have inflicted and continue to inflict upon our country, did well to demonstrate that it is possible to liberate Polish society from the Jewish plague and to show us the path that we should follow unrelentingly, albeit in a less cruel and brutal fashion. It is clearly God’s will that the occupiers themselves have contributed to the solution of this burning question, because the Polish nation itself, weak and unsystematic, would never have taken the energetic steps that this matter demands.”
Fortunately, many of the Polish-Catholic citizenry ignored the councils of their clergy and political leaders in that well-planned path to hell, and instead risked their lives to save Jews under persecution. Between the nuns, priests and average citizens in Poland, its estimate up to 35,000 Jews’ lives were saved during this time.
By 1944, the Red Army of the Soviets had “liberated” all of Poland from the Nazis and installed a national communist government. With the sudden change of institutional ideology and the waning youthful vigor of Catholic nationalism, former fascists now willingly accepted academic theories of Catholic national communism. Boleslaw Piasecki was one of these. Russia, being intimately familiar with Poland, knew that nationalism was an easy inroad to win over the citizenry and so they experimented with a uniquely patriotic form of communism that appealed to guys like Piasecki. Piasecki, once in Nazi custody and now is in Soviet custody was about to directly benefit from this new policy. He knew the Soviets weren’t going anywhere any time soon and that political realities would be shaped by them for the foreseeable future. Most of his countrymen were not so lucky, however.
In the wake of World War II, approximately 20 percent the Polish priesthood was dead or missing. 15 percent of Polish teachers were dead. 45 percent of its physicians, 50 percent of its engineers, and 57 percent of its lawyers were all dead. In all, 6.3 million Poles were gone. The bloodletting had been horrific. From Auschwitz, nearby Poles could still smell the ovens on a windy day.
When I contemplated the subtitle for this podcast, The Gates of Hell, I toyed with the phrase Dante placed above his gates of hell: “abandon hope all ye who enter here”, but I thought that might dissuade listeners. Yet I can’t think of a more fitting subtitle for the gates of Auschwitz. It would be gratuitous and off topic to detail the horrors of what went on there, but it is tremendously relevant to discuss one Polish prisoner.
When Maximillian Kolbe was 12 years old, after an argument with his mother, in which she cried, “what would become of you”, young Maximillian went searching for the answer to her cry at the local church where he sought out the presence of the Blessed Sacrament. According to Kolbe’s account the Virgin Mary, protectress of Poland, appeared to him. He asked her, “what will become of me?” And in her hands, she held out two crowns, one white, the other red. She asked if Maximillian would accept one of these crowns. He perceived the white crown meant that he would preserve his purity. The red meant that he would become a martyr for the Faith. The 12-year-old boy accepted both crowns.
On February 17th, 1941, the Nazis arrested Father Maximilian Kolbe and sent him to Auschwitz where he became prisoner #16670. His Franciscan habit was replaced with a striped uniform. He was ridiculed, beaten, worked to exhaustion, and targeted for humiliation. In July a prisoner had escaped. In response to the breech the prison warden declared that ten prisoners would be sent into an underground cell, deprived of air and starved to death. The cell was known as Death Block 13. One the ten selected for death was a young father named Francis Gajowniczek, who pleaded with the Germans for mercy. He pleaded for the guards to spare him so that his wife and children could see him again. Father Maximilian Kolbe calmly stepped forward and declared that he was a priest and would like to die in place of the young father.
In Death Block 13 Father Kolbe continued his priestly duties, saying Mass for his fellow inmates and leading prayers and hymns. After two weeks of no food and no water, Father Kolbe remained the only one still alive. This was problematic for the Nazi prison guards as they needed the space for further liquidation. And so, they decided it was time to terminate the problem. They brought in a syringe loaded with carbolic acid. Father Kolbe lifted his left arm in compliance, accepting his fate. Knowing he had already attained the white crown given to him by Our Lady, he was now ready to don the red crown of martyrdom. A fellow prisoner ordered to assist with the execution, Bruno Borgowiec could not stomach the sight of Father Kolbe offering his own arm up to his executioners:
“Unable to watch I left under the pretext of work to be done… Immediately after the S.S. men with the executioner had left, I returned to the cell, where I found Father Kolbe leaning in a sitting position against the back wall with his eyes open and his head drooping sideways. His face was calm and radiant.”
The next day, Father Maximilian Kolbe’s remains were cast into the ovens of Auschwitz. It was August 15th, the Feats of the Assumption of Mary. Four decades later this Polish martyr would be canonized by a Polish pope. Present for that ceremony would be Francis Gajowniczek, the young father saved by the saint.
Post World War II Poland is called by historian Timothy Snyder, “the Bloodlands” - that is, the land between Hitler and Stalin. In these bloodlands the Polish citizenry and Church hierarchy were obliterated. Whatever was left of this once great nation was now under the occupation of the largest military industrial machine mankind had yet conceived. Poland, in both nation and church had yet another shared experience of martyrdom. With the approaching peacetime many might have thought the gates of hell had finally passed. For the most part, the war of guns and borders was over, but the war for the soul of Poland was just beginning.
Part Two: Church or State?
With World War II behind them, both the Polish hierarchy and the Soviet government could now focus on reconstruction. Cardinal-Primate Hlond returned to his See to organize the Church’s efforts. The Krakow curia immediately launched a new weekly periodical called Tygodnik Powszechny, which translates to, The Common Weekly. It commanded a large audience right away.
Pope Pius XII granted the Cardinal Hlond the title of papal legate which gave the primate special powers to operate on behalf of the pope himself and represent the Vatican before whatever government the Soviets intended to impose. Hlond had his work cut out for him. The Polish church was literally in rubble with much of the clergy dead or missing. He also now had new, formerly German bishoprics under his control – and with Soviet-fueled hatred towards anything German, the Cardinal had to tread carefully.
In these early years of Russian occupation, the Church was left mostly to its own devices to rebuild as it saw fit. This latitude for the church to operate existed nowhere else in the Soviet Union. Recognizing this rare and no doubt fleeting window of opportunity, Primate Hlond quickly consecrated 10 new bishops to assist him. Among them was a priest name Stefan Wyszynski, who will come up again in a big way. With this new class of bishops, the important work of administering the sacraments and rebuilding the Church in Poland could begin in earnest.
The Soviets were not idle for long, however. On September 12th, 1945, the 1925 concordat with the Vatican was declared null and void. They then declared that a referendum would be held to determine if Poland would continue with its historical bicameral legislature (meaning two chamber) or switch to the typical Soviet model of unicameral. After the referendum, the Soviets, overseeing the electoral commissions, declared that an overwhelming majority had voted in favor of the unicameral model. Decades later when the archives were opened and the ballots could be recounted, it turns out, of course that unicameral legislature lost 3 to 1.
With control of the legislature, the real work for the Soviets could begin. Ecclesiastical marriages were made illegal, only state sponsored unions were officially recognized. Then the regime reduced the age of consent for marriage age, incorporating highschoolers: the goal was to dissuade higher education. A new cause for divorce was added to the law – the practice of religion by one’s spouse. Catholic printing presses were nationalized and turned into propaganda machines. Catholic books were removed from the libraries. Childrens prayers before the school day were outlawed and crucifixes were removed from the classrooms. Liturgical feast days were replaced by Soviet military holidays. Catholic lay organizations were dissolved. And nearly a million acres of Church owned property was seized - does any of this sound familiar?
In September of 1948 the bishops of Poland published a strongly worded, yet impotent protest. And this is where we can come back to Bishop Wyszynski. The very next month after this letter of protest was issued from the Polish See, Cardinal Hlond died of pneumonia. His successor as the Primate of Poland was Wyszynski. Wyszynski was a very different type of primate. He was a journalist in his youth and raised among the peasantry, yet familiar with the gentry - his father was nobleman who lost his property. Wyszynski‘s dissertation at the Catholic University of Lublin was titled “The Right of the Family, the Church and the State to Education.” He believed strongly in supporting and ministering to the working class of Poland. Also worth noting, during World War II Cardinal Hlond left Poland, but Wyszynski stayed behind to suffer its fate in solidarity. During that time, he did what he could to aid the various underground resistance movements against the Nazis. He is described as patriotic, principled, organized, courageous, and wise. He was a natural leader.
The emerging de facto leader of the Polish government underwritten by Russia was a man named Wladyslaw Gomulka. Gomulka was a plumber at the age of fourteen, then he turned radical, becoming an organizer of the early 20th century Polish trade unions. During the war he was a resistance organizer against the Nazis. Now in the late 40s, he was Prime Minister of Poland and helped the Soviets obtain their fraudulent election results.
And so, it was these two men, Wyszynski and Gomulka who would represent the front lines of a new yet long forecasted confrontation: Communism VS Roman Catholicism. Prior to occupying Poland, the Soviets had a relatively easy time of taking over state churches. The Orthodox disciplines of the east were already highly nationalistic with few, if any, external allegiances. The Roman Catholic Church, on the other hand, was highly centralized and historically resistant to nationalistic flavors of the faith – this can be traced back to the investiture contest a thousand years ago with Pope Gregry VII. For Russian communism, the attempted conversion of Poland to atheism would be new territory.
These first few years of communist Poland demonstrate clearly for the Soviets that their usual tactics were failing to create atheists. Even Stalin was remembered to say that communism fit on Poland as well as a fine horse’s saddle fits on a cow. Yet where Stalin was surprised, former Polish nationalists now cooperating with the Soviets, men like Gomulka, were not surprised. They knew the sinew of their countrymen.
Another man who, like Gomulka knew these typical Soviet tactics would fail was the previously mentioned Catholic nationalist Boleslaw Piasecki – who had now decided to play the part of a cooperator. Like Gomulka, Piasecki was an active leader in the underground resistance during the Nazi occupation. After the war he found himself in the Red Army’s custody. In their interrogation of this radical, the Soviets were trying to figure out just what sort of radical he was, and if his radicalism could be useful. Piasecki for his part was determined to be useful. He knew the way to the Poles’ hearts was through the Roman Catholic Faith. He further knew the Soviets refused to comprehend this simple reality. He also calculated that they were the most expedient vehicle for him to realize his dream of a Catholic Totalitarian state. Thus, Piasecki sought to convince his inquisitors of his value to their cause. He convinced them that he could convert Poland to Marxism through Catholic Social Teaching. The Soviets were intrigued, and having nothing to lose, they released him. Piasecki went to work immediately and founded the lay organization and newspaper PAX that would serve as the megaphone of his mission.
Through PAX, Piasecki was able to run dual narratives: one of Polish manifest destiny to be a great Catholic nation, all while linking their future success to Soviet communism. He began declaring Marxist-Leninist ideology as the avant-garde of thought, progress, and charity, that would be the groundwork for Catholic totalitarianism. He claimed these dual paths worked for the good of humanity. Communism protected the material needs of the poor and downtrodden, while the Church cared for their spiritual needs. Author Mikolaj Stanislaw Kunicki, who document Piasecki’s rise to political prominence says he was aiming for nothing short of an ideological trinity of Marxism, Catholicism, and Nationalism. As the communists further secured their rule, Piasecki argued that the Catholics should share in that power and enrich Marxism spiritually, and eventually, the nationalists would convert the communists into Polish patriots.
On the international stage, the western world was watching eastern Europe slip into darkness behind what Winston Churchill dubbed the iron curtain. It was the end of a process that had begun before World War II ended, at the Yalta conference when millions of eastern Europeans were handed over to soviet control, by the west, beguiled with pledges from Stalin to hold free and fair elections of self-governance. A military advisor to Churchill and Roosevelt argued that the agreement the president signed at Yalta with Stalin is so elastic that it can be stretched from Yalta to DC without breaking it. All Roosevelt said in response was that it was the best he could do. Fulton Sheen, ever increasing his mission against communist ideology said of this agreement:
“At Yalta, three men with a stroke of a pen delivered the eastern part of Europe up to a Godless nation.”
For Bishop Wyszynski, all he could do was deal with political realties given to him locally. Right now, he needed to continue rebuilding of the Polish Church. He proposed to the communist regime and joint commission between church and state to achieve an operating agreement between the two entities. After some back and forth the government agreed to not interfere in church affairs so long as the clergy kept out of anti-state politics. Most importantly for Wyszynski, he secured the continuation of religious education in schools.
Wyszynski’s real politik strategies at home were not met with enthusiasm by the Vatican, particularly by Pope Pius XII. Four months after Wyszynski’s church-state agreement the Vatican issued Acta Apostolicae Sedis, which threatened all Catholics with excommunication for defending or advocating communist ideas. The Soviet Union was furious with the Church. In Poland, retribution came two months later when the regime nationalized Church hospitals. The Pope and the primate of Poland had very different goals. The Pope wanted to contain the spread of communism to other countries, while the primate had to find a working relationship with which he could minister to his flock. Likewise, Gomulka and Stalin had very different goals. Stalin was hoping the Faith in Poland would die of suffocation. Gomulka on the other hand new that overreaching against the thing held nearest and dearest to his fellow Poles could turn very violent, very fast.
Gomulka was a pragmatist as much as he was an atheist. He paid several visits to the Polish clergy, enlisting them to help spur construction in new government residential projects. He needed the support of the clergy for these developments to be successful. Without the sacraments one would liver in these communities. Nonetheless, the goal was pure communism. Toward that end Gomulka himself promoted the efforts of Boleslaw Piasecki and his progressive brainchild, Pax. Gomulka was outspoke against the Faith but was careful to only aim his critiques at Rome, rarely rebuking his fellow Poles. His pragmatism, for a time at least successfully convinced Moscow that an all-out war on religion would not be necessary. This idea came to be referred to as the Polish path to socialism.
Gomulka could not sideline the Church and Wyszynski could not mobilize meaningful resistance to the regime, while both had mutual gains to be made in reconstruction. This reality led to a semi-official attitude of cooperation between the Church and the communist state, contradicting the public posturing of Pope Pius XII.
Since the communist regime tossed out the concordat with Rome, the legal and bureaucratic cooperation between the Polish episcopate and the Vatican drew farther apart, leading to a more independent Polish Church. This was a calculated divide and conquer strategy by Soviets. And yet, it soon turned into a strength for the Polish Church. The lack of a concordat had zero effect on the faithful who remained ardent Roman Catholics, devoted to the papacy. The episcopate, however, now had room to maneuver. The result was a flexible Polish Church that remained always a step ahead of the Soviets.
Blinded by their hated Pius XII, the Soviets failed to see the growing strength of the Polish hierarchy. Pius XII was always seen by them as a way too friendly with the Germans – this was made worse after the war when he seemed overly eager to appoint German bishops in Polish episcopates, forcing the Polish Church into constant damage control efforts.
One thing to keep in mind with Pius XII was his encounters with communism thus far in his life. He knew their street level tactics from his day as Bishop of Munich, Germany. One day, as bishop, he discovered his nunciature was riddled with bullets intended for him by communist revolutionaries. He then found himself surrounded by a mob wielding butcher’s knives and handguns. The future pope was not deterred and walked towards them. He was tall, dressed in black with a violet sash, with a glistening cross dangling across his chest. He demanded they leave immediately as they were trespassing on the property of the Holy See. One among the group said that they don’t care about the Holy See. They further demanded that he show them where his hidden money and food is. He replied that he had given it all to the poor in Munich. This enraged the crowd. But instead of shooting the bishop one of them threw his pistol at him, denting the cross on his chest. The bishop stood his ground, and one by one the mob slinked away.
A few days later, on his way home, being driven by his valet at twilight, the mob once again appeared. The valet had no choice but to stop. They surrounded the vehicle and began shaking it violently. The future pope ordered his driver to put the top down. The valet refused. “Do as I say,” he repeated. “Put the top down.” The driver at last relented, and the bishop stood up on the back seat of the car for all to see. If anyone would have dared to shoot him, they would have had a clear target.
“My mission is peace,” he announced to them. “The only weapon that I carry is this holy cross. I do no harm to you, but only good things. Why should you harm me?” He then raised his right hand and blessed them all, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. The crowd went silent. As Pius XII sat back down, a lane opened before him. Idealism, not pragmatism in the face of radicalism, was the only way Pius XII knew how to deal with communists, and it had worked for him in the past.
On All Saints Day, 1946, another future pope was learning the street realities of communism. At 26 years old Karol Wojtyla knelt before a Polish cardinal in an illegal underground seminary. He was the only priest being ordained on that day. With a white candle in his hands, Wojtyla was admonished to be perfect in faith and actions, and well-grounded in virtue. He then laid himself down on the floor, as those around him chanted the litany of the saints. Wojtyla then knelt before his bishop who laid his hands on the young man’s head, as those present sang Veni, Sancte, Spiritus.
As the 1950s dawned there was a change in the air across the Soviet sphere. Communism was now less an ideological product of Marx, but more an extension of the will of Stalin. In Czechoslovakia, Primate Josepf Beran was detained in a monastery. In Hungary, Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty was arrested and convicted of espionage, sentenced to life in prison. Primate Wyszynski was shrewder than both those men. He saw little good to be done from prison. Instead, he aimed to thread a needle between cooperation and resistance, making the two hard to tell apart for the Soviets, by design. When thinking of his counterparts languishing in prison in the other blocs, Wyszynski said:
“Martyrdom is undoubtedly an honorable thing, but God leads His Church not only along an extraordinary way, that of martyrdom, but also along an ordinary one, that of apostolic work.”
Wyszynski’s public policy was manifested in limited appeasement. He travelled the country often and steered the faithful away from revolutionary and violent directions. He exhorted them to spiritual goals, not revolutionary ones, guiding their thoughts upwards, towards God, towards the salvation of their own souls. His priests were strictly forbidden from political involvement, and he constantly engaged in communication with the local regime. Yet for all of Wyszynski’s pragmatism vis-à-vis communism, he had no answer for Stalinism.
The Polish minister of education soon announced the full removal of religion in school, proclaiming:
“The youth must be educated not only according to the wishes of the government but must become communists as well. I am aiming at this and will do this. If I will not succeed, I will call for the help of the security police.”
Kindergarten was especially targeted, for they were the most malleable, and next generation must be Godless. Parents then took it upon themselves to create underground religious schools, which subjected them to investigations by the security police.
The Polish regime then cut off communication with Wyszynski and seized the nation’s largest Catholic charity organization, Caritas, under the pretext of misused funds, handing over its control to none other than Pax, Boleslaw Piasecki. Caritas was a goldmine, briming with stockpiles of medicine and provisions meant for the poor, but now free to sell on the black market. The public face of Caritas attempted to keep up appearances as the same old charity organization to rake in donations from the Catholic laity. But with zero public trust the jig was up almost immediately. As Caritas collapsed, so did the orphanages and hospitals it supported.
Primate Wyszynski found himself in a desperate position. All the work of reconstruction after World War II was being cannibalized by Stalin. Boleslaw Piasecki found himself in a newfound position of prominence. But remember, he wasn’t a true communist. He considered himself a Catholic first, and still aimed to have this vehicle of communism usher in a Catholic dictatorship. Sensing the weakened position of Cardinal Wyszynski, Piasecki shrewdly stepped in to mediate negotiations between the hierarchy on its heels and the ascending state. His mediation worked, and on April 14th, 1950, the first accord between a hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church and a communist government was singed. The agreement was simple: the regime would promise to respect ecclesiastical rights of the Church, which in turn would respect the regime’s secular authority. The church was required to support the government’s economic policies, condemn any anti-state activities, resist the political use of religion, and only recognize the Vatican’s authority within a doctrinal and canonical context.
For its part, the state would guarantee religious freedom, permit religious instruction in schools, allow Catholic educational institutions, and refrain from interfering with monastic orders, Catholic publications, or charity organizations. The problem of course was that much of this damage had already been done, and by definition communism is not restrained by the rule of law anyway. An agreement signed could easily be broken for any pretext. Wyszynski no doubt was aware of this reality. He was simply buying time.
Within two years of signing this agreement the regime began shutting down seminaries. In 1953, they demanded the control of ecclesiastical appointments at all ranks – both open violations of the recent accord. Wyszynski publicly rejected these decrees threatening to leave these positions vacant rather than let the communist have a hand in them. The regime responded by nationalizing whatever remaining church hospitals still existed.
Despite the betrayal of the agreement the hierarchy made with the regime, the clergy’s command of the faithful in Poland did not weaken. It increased. This Church suffering resurrected that martyrological residual self-image of Poland for the Poles. The perseverance of the clergy in keeping their flock’s eyes on heaven only strengthened this culture. This vigor once again confounded the Soviets. To them, the source of their strength seemed to rest in a single boundlessly energetic man, Cardinal Wyszynski, who commanded the undying loyalty of the faithful.
Then there was a watershed moment. On March 5th, 1953, Stalin died. The state-run newspapers in Poland of course ran glowing sentimental obituaries. But the previously mentioned Tygodnik Powszenchny, that ecclesiastical weekly publication started immediately after World War II, refused to publish the tyrant’s obituary or even mention his name at all. And so, the diocesan weekly journal was nationalized, with control given over Boleslaw Piasecki’s Pax organization again, who was over the moon to be in control of the bishop’s magazine, a competitor to his own.
Later that same year, the regime brought forward the trial of a bishop they had arrested, Bishop Kaczmarek, our old friend who suffered from Jewish paranoia as his country was being rolled over by Nazi and Soviet tanks. In communist custody a confession was beaten out of him. He declared he had been Nazi collaborator and named Cardinal Wyszynski as a co-conspirator. The energetic Primate of Poland was immediately arrested and held without trial. The Russians had finally gotten their man. Along with the primate, other priests and bishops loyal to the Church suffered the same fate, all with bogus charges of espionage, sabotage, hiding arms and foreign currencies, and being in service to the United States.
During these waves of arrests, the remaining bishops of Poland publicly called out the signs of the times:
“Poland, which for a thousand years has been a Catholic country, where more than 90 percent of the people are Catholics, strongly attached to their faith, the children of Catholics are educated and trained, contrary to the wishes of their parents, in the Marxist spirit and in an atmosphere, which is not only indifferent to religion, but is directly anti-religious and anti-Christian… Through the application of diversified methods, the present school policy in Poland encroaches upon the freedom of conscience of the younger generation; destroys in the young people all the values implanted in them by home and church education; and teaches them to lie and to foreswear the most sublime ideas and principles. There is no need to explain that such educational policies, despite the formal guarantees contained in the Agreement, are in glaring contradiction to natural law, to universal human laws, to rights guaranteed in the Constitution of the Peoples’ Republic, and to the Decree on the Freedom of Conscience and Religion.”
Piasecki’s Pax organization was on the ascendency, doing its part in chipping away at Catholic intellectual opposition to communism. It had established a new organization called the Progressive Catholic Movement, which in 1955 could claim 5000 priests and 2500 lay Catholics, pushed apologetics for a kinder, gentler communism based on Catholic principles. Piasecki could feel his moment was nigh and published a book called Vital Issues codifying his position, and put forward his argument for his end goal of a totalitarian Catholic state.
With the wave of Stalinism, the arrest of Cardinal Wyszynski, and the subversive growth of Piasecki’s Pax organization, what remained of the Polish Church was brought to its knees, and on December 17th, 1953, the bishops that still enjoyed freedom took an oath of allegiance to the Polish People’s Republic.
Now, with the bishops finally neutered in Poland, Piasecki and Pax ceased to be useful to the communist regime. Soon gone were his high-ranking political invitations to dinner parties and lucrative handouts of seized Church property. Piasecki was also weakened by the receding wave of Stalinism. Nikita Khrushchev was now in charge of the Soviet Union and was hellbent on de-Stalinization. Then the Vatican had its say on the progressive political junky and his dodgy patchwork of ideologies. He was found guilty by a Vatican commission of undermining Catholic doctrine and serving the enemies of the Church. His writings were placed on the index of forbidden readings. On June 8th, 1955, a public statement by the Vatican was put out:
“At a time when Cardinal Wyszynski and other Polish bishops remain in jail... we are witnessing a despicable initiative, which tries to present the communist regime as fully respectful of the freedom of the Roman Catholic Church. Writer Boleslaw Piasecki – a leading personality among Polish progressive Catholics – is among the staunchest advocates of this fallacy, which they also propagate on the eastern side of the iron curtain.”
Piasecki, though a radical idealist, was, as we’ve said a devout Catholic first, and to his credit, in the face of excommunication he withdrew his book from circulation and recanted his favorable opinions towards communism. There is no direct evidence of an official retaliation by the communist regime against Piasecki, but not long after his recantation, his teenage son was abducted by a man with a briefcase while walking home from school, never to be seen again.
From here, it is time to leave our very unfortunate friend Boleslaw Piasecki. Though he remained a public figure and Pax continued, his status as both a Catholic thinker and a good communist was diminished to the point of public irrelevance, proving true the admonishment of Pius XI, that one could not be a good Catholic and a true socialist at the same time.
In the mid-50s, Nikita Khruschev was looking for a reasonable place to land the Soviet Union from the terrors of Stalin. However, atheism as a means to breaking down the strength and structure of the family unit was still very much a real effort, especially under the guise of progress. On April 27th, 1956, the Council of the State made abortion legal in Poland. Yet without Cardinal Wyszynski, there was no formidable leadership in the Polish hierarchy to combat these assaults on the family, in this case morally, but also financially. The economy was a mess. Food was scarce. Housing options were dreadful. In June, in the city of Poznan an insurrection began. When the government stepped in to crush the uprising, as many as 78 striking workers were killed, including a 13-year-old boy. Hundreds more were wounded and arrested. Going into fall, more protest erupted across the country. Police headquarters and state-run radio stations were broken into and vandalized. Red Army monuments were destroyed. Among many of the demands of the protesters was the removal of Russian language from the curriculum of their schools, and an explanation of the mass execution sites of Poles at the hands of the Russians, like the Katyn forest. These street protests and clashes with police now suddenly threatened the stability of the entire nation. Poland appeared to be taking steps down the bloody path of armed revolution against the largest army in the world. Nikita Khrushchev responded decisively. The red army crossed into Poland and halted just outside Warsaw. Khrushchev himself arrived at the capital to take control of the situation. He immediately brought Wladislaw Gomulka back from retirement and put him in charge of Poland. Gomulka had been forced out of office a few years back as he was not a loyal Stalinist. Khrushchev knew Gomulka had the confidence of the average Pole and was a man who knew how to reach agreements. The first thing Gomulka did was warn Khruschev that the Poles were so fed up with Russian communism that if those tanks continued into the capital streets, they would be met with popular armed resistance.
Gomulka reminded the Soviet Premier that Poland was on its own road toward communism, and that if it was to succeed it must be more Polish and less Russian by necessity, due to Poland’s complicated history with Russia. In the end, Gomulka secured not only the withdrawal of most of the Red Army, but also won significant economic relief from the Soviet Union. He further secured permission to ease persecution of the Church and to abandon collectivized farming, which was literally starving people. This emotional prudence and faith in negotiation allowed Poland to enter what period historians call the thaw, where things for the faithful looked up. The flare up and success of Polish worker strikes and protests spurred on similar actions by the workers in Hungary, sparking a hot revolution in the same year, leaving thousands dead, flattened by the Red Army.
Within two years after Poland’s frozen revolution (as it came to be called), hundreds of new seminaries were established. With this growth in freedom of the Church, thousands of young Poles now saw a real future in the priesthood. Despite the thaw, this growth in the priesthood was still very much an ideological to the diehard communists. One priest, Father Mazgaj, author of Church and State in Communist Poland, a principal source for this podcast, went into personal accounts of the regime hiring prostitutes to go to churches and confessionals to compromise the integrity of the Polish priesthood.
Cardinal Wyszynski had now been under house arrest for three years at a convent with Franciscan sisters. In the wake of the Frozen Revolution, Gomulka released him to bring calm to the people. During his captivity Wyszynski read a historical novel called “The Deluge”, published in 1886. The Deluge told the story of the wars against the Swedes under the same name when a weakened Poland was invaded 300 years prior. The book recounted that Poland was saved through the intercession of the woman enshrined in the icon of the Black Madonna at Jansa Gora, the mother of God. Cardinal Wyszynski, inspired by this book decided that his country would indeed turn to the Queen of Poland again, and the time was nearly perfect to do so. For as he finished this book, Poland was just 10 years away from the 1000-year anniversary of its baptism.
On May 3rd, 1957, the Primate announced a Great Novena would commence, lasting 9 years, ushering in the new millennium of Polish Catholicism. With his novena, he aimed to direct all the prayers and intentions of his flock, of Poland, to the renewal of their Christian society, and beg for Our Lady’s intercession in their great struggle to keep the faith. The Polish clergy and faithful, already steeped in Marian devotions took up Wyszynski’s Great Novena with a zeal that truly frightened the regime. Sermons calling for the renewal of faith, the renewal of marriage, the defense of the unborn, the renewal of true education exploded from the pulpits across Poland. Gomulka freaked out. He comprehended the enormity of this call to prayer for better than his Soviet overlords. He felt betrayed by the Primate. He released Wyszynski to calm the people, to reinstitute a working relationship between Church and government, not to launch a crusade. This was not what he released the Primate of Poland to do. Gomulka’s previous attitude of ambivalence toward the Church and its faithful was now soured. The monastery at Jansa Gora was raided and ransacked by police forces. Religious education, where it had been reimplemented, was once again removed. And when religious instruction was moved to parishes and chapels to make up for the lack of instruction in the schools, this too was made illegal and shut down.
Gomulka had other problems on his hands as well. The Soviet Union was unhappy with the statistical growth of Poland’s population. Of all the nations behind the iron curtain, Poland was the last one the Soviets wanted to see be fruitful and multiply. Poland, a country of 30 million plus, and already proven to immune to atheism, and influential enough in the Soviet block to spark revolutions among its neighbors, was going through a population boom. In December of 1959, the laws concerning abortion were amended from limited legalization in 1956 to virtually no restrictions. Contraception was encouraged at doctor visits. Physicians were required to hand out birth control along with maps to abortion facilities. And of all the western institutions the Soviet Union refused to allow within its borders, an exception was made for Planned Parenthood, which was permitted to advertise its services schools.
In response to these attacks on the family, Wyszynski began upping his rhetoric. While he called for the Poles to exercise “peace and patience”, he also reminded them they were in the midst of a battle between “God’s empire and the Devil’s empire.” Since the government now was aiming for the utter destruction of the family itself, the Primate pushed his faithful to take responsibility for their children’s religious education – the regime was furious with these calls to throw education underground.
As the 1950’s was drawing to a close, and with both Church and state hardening in their position, reversing the thaw from a few years ago, Cardinal Wyszynski called Father Wojtyla into his office in Warsaw. He told the 38-year-old priest that the holy father has decided to elevate him to be a bishop of the Church. Wojtyla was stunned. When he left the Primate’s office, he knew not where to go, so he sought out the presence of the Lord. He went to the closest convent he could find where he knew the Blessed Sacrament would be exposed. The sisters there did not recognize him, but since he was a priest, they let him in, and escorted him to their private chapel, where they left him alone to pray.
Hours later the nuns, somewhat concerned that they had not heard from the windswept priest peaked into the chapel to check on him. They found him lying face down in front of the tabernacle. One of the sisters carefully approached the priest saying, “Perhaps father would like to come in for supper?” But the priest only answered, “My train doesn’t leave for Krakow until after midnight. Please let me stay here. I have a lot to talk about with the Lord.”
To deal with the rising authority of the Polish priesthood, Gomulka determined the best path was still indirect mitigation, especially towards Wyszynski. One of those methods was to circumvent the primate entirely and negotiate directly with the Vatican, for at this time John XXIII and his successor, Paul VI were far more open minded and less hardened against communism than Pius XII and his predecessors. The post-Pius XII Vatican had leaned into a policy called Ostpolitik, or open communication with the Soviets. Yet due to the autonomy Wyszynski enjoyed, these attempts failed to launch.
Gomulka’s pragmatic atheism was failing him. He was losing control of his own fate. He knew if he was too lenient, Russia would eventually roll in with tanks like they did with Hungary. Yet if he amped up persecution of the clergy, he may have a revolution on his hands – and Russia would roll in with tanks anyway. In 1961 he proclaimed to the press that the conversion of the Polish people to communism is illogical. He warned his colleague, Fidel Castro in Cuba, to not underestimate the power of the Church. When the east German communist leaders encouraged him to simply crush the bishops with imprisonment and violence, Gomulka told them that here in Poland:
“…Things are not so simple. Religious fanaticism is very powerful in this country. Many religious people even refuse to debate the subject as the very idea is taboo for them. And the only words that they have for those who do not share their beliefs are curses.”
Finally, in 1966, Gomulka had to contend with the culmination of Poland’s Jubilee, the anniversary of its baptism, and the crescendo of Cardinal Wyszynski’s Great Novena. To combat this dangerous spiritual initiative the regime launched a massive propaganda campaign of distraction. New secular holidays were announced reminiscing famous Polish battles in history – especially those that were victories over the Germans. In the stadium of Katowice (ka·tuh·veet·suh), new sporting events were scheduled. The Hungarian soccer team was brought in to play against the Polish soccer team. Military parades, with tanks and goosestepping soldiers were put on display. Socialist agitators were bussed in from God knows where and dispensed into the streets of Warsaw. Once outlawed American western films were suddenly screened in public to draw people away from the Masses being celebrated in communion with the Great Novena. One contemporary Pole for these events remembered that these events were the greatest concentrations of secret agents and informants for the Soviet Union in Poland.
The Polish Catholic celebrations began on April 14th, in Gniezno. Where now Archbishop Karol Wojtyla began preaching, yet was interrupted by a 21-gun salute by the regime to honor the minister of defense of Poland. The archbishop waited patiently for the noise to stop, before continuing his sermon. On May 7th, at the Jasna Gora monastery, more than a million people turned up for the Mass to venerate the image of the Black Madonna. Wojtyla spoke there too and gave what witnesses called an unforgettable defense of religious freedom, directly incriminating the regime’s persecution of life and faith.
Behind closed doors, Gomulka was under intense pressure from the Soviets to crush this Great Novena. These peaceful yet powerful spiritual events were undermining 20 years of communist blood, sweat, and bullets in Poland, and putting the gospels of Marx and Lenin under direct assault. In hopes of sabotaging the Great Novena, a secretive quasi-government militia unit was dispatched to capture the Black Madonna but failed. When copies of the Black Madonna began popping up everywhere in windows and street corners, the image was made illegal, banned from display anywhere. And so, in brilliant protest, Poles hung empty frames in place of the sacred image, making more impact than the image itself.
On June 20th, a replica of the Black Madonna was supposed to arrive at the head of a procession in Warsaw, completing the jubilee festival. The communist authorities were hellbent on preventing this. The police came out in force and blocked off the route the procession was scheduled to take, forming a barricade of men. Approaching the police was the procession of the faithful, carrying before them an empty frame of what should have been a blessed icon of the Queen of Heaven. Now, they were denied entrance to the summit of their pilgrimage after nine years of the Great Novena. And after seeing a thousand years of Christian culture systematically stripped from their very lives, these faithful had at last reached a boiling point. The space between the two armies was full of violent, pent-up energy, a small spark might literally ignite a full-on riot. Shouts could be heard among the faithful crying “down with communists” and “Long live Cardinal Wyszynski”. Cardinal Wyszynski himself recognized the tinder box was ready to blow, and so to calm the people he broke the law and gave them what they desired. The Primate had a replica of the image of Our Lady of Czestochowa displayed in a window overlooking the crowd. The mere sight of this image before the procession of Polish Catholics cooled tempers for the moment and saved Warsaw from what could have been a deadly day.
Wladyslaw Gomulka, that pragmatic atheist who devised the Polish path towards socialism was losing control of his position and his temper. His aids note during the period of the Great Novena the very mention of Cardinal Wyszynski would arouse violent reactions.
Cardinal Wyszynski on the other hand was deftly tightening the chess board against the regime. Before closing the jubilee celebrations, he told his fellow Poles:
“In the face of a totalitarian threat to the Nation… in the face of an atheistic program… in the face of biological destruction, a great supernatural current is needed, so that the Nation can consciously draw from the Church the divine strength that will fortify its religious and national life. Nowhere else is the union of Church and nation as strong as in Poland, which is in absolute danger. Our “temporal theology” demands that we dedicate ourselves into the hands of the Holy Mother, so that we may live up to our task.”
Wyszynski had proven to be a formidable foe against Gomulka. And though Gomulka had the regime’s resources on his side and the backing of the Soviet Union, Wyszynski was smarter, and more patient. Over 20 years into domination by the largest military force on the face of the earth, it was the Church hierarchy who held the initiative in the battle for Poland’s soul. And there was another enemy the Soviets had to contend with now – this new, young, charismatic archbishop, Wojtyla. His sermons had earned a reputation for popularity beyond the Primates. On the surface he seemed to speak in an innocuous conciliatory tone yet woven into his words were razor sharp condemnations of not only the current regime, but the entire philosophy of Marx. Subtle attacks are the most difficult ones to counter.
Like Wyszynski, Carol Wojtyla had lived through the Nazi years and saw firsthand the onset of communism in his beloved nation. He had no living family left on earth, his father being the last, dying when Wojtyla was away at college. He studied polish literature and language. He had a sense of the ordinary Pole and grasped agrarian spiritual patriotism, history and culture. He performed in plays and was naturally charismatic. He had an actor’s timing for wit and humor. He treaty rural piety and culture with admiration yet knew how to work a room of intellectuals. He was affable and athletic – a natural leader. The KGB was watching Wojtyla. Some felt that the archbishop was going to be their most significant adversary in the coming years for control of Poland, but not with their greatest imaginations, or darkest nightmares could they have predicted how powerful a force he would become for Poland.
Part Three:
In 1947, on the Feast of the Exultation of the Holy Cross, September 14th, was born a boy in a remote hamlet of northeast Poland. The boy’s name was Jerzy Popieluszko. His family had lived in this same hamlet for generations, raising grains, potatoes and poultry. He was the fourth child to his parents. The small church where he was baptized was also where he would eventually learn his catechism as he advanced in age. Though as he aged it became clear to his parents that Jerzy was destined to be a frail man, for he was always so weak and sickly that helping with farmyard chores was out of the question. Despite this frailness, so strong was little Jerzy’s desire to be in the presence of the Lord that he would walk three miles every day for Mass. The priest who catechized Jerzy recounted:
“You had the impression that he wanted to swallow in one gulp all degrees of holiness. The boy was religiously insatiable and appreciated the value of the interior life.”
When he was 8 years old, he made himself his own alter and mimicked the gestures of the priests during Mass. When he announced to his parents that he believed he had a vocation for the priesthood, no one was surprised. As a teenager in boarding school, Jerzy kept his nose in books about Polish history, the lives of the saints, especially Maximillian Kolbe. He earned the nickname, the philosopher among his friends. At the age of 17, Jerzy decide it was time to join the seminary, but instead of staying close to home, he opted for Warsaw, to be nearer to Cardinal Wyszynski, the great Primate of Poland who defended the Church from the atheists and communists.
Jerzy’s fellow seminarians recall that because he was constantly sick and weak, he possessed a special charism to care for the sick and weak, and in post WWII Warsaw, there were plenty of those around. In October of 1966, a few months after the Great Novena, Jerzy received the cassock of a seminarian, only to be called a few days later to put on another uniform. The regime had a special military unit for seminarians, in which they were required by law to serve in. The goal was of course to break the young men, to make them cast off their black robes and drive away the idea of vocation. The regime force fed them Marxist and Lenin philosophy and paraded young pretty girls around them, hoping that if they couldn’t appeal to their intellects, perhaps they would give in to their lower appetites. They were bullied and threatened with being shot on sight. Jerzy recounted in a letter to his parents:
“They try to break us with fatigue, they drive us relentlessly and hound me, but I am very tough; they will not ruin my vocation either by threats or torture.”
One day an army officer asked Jerzy whose face was on the medal that he wore. It is the Queen of Poland, the Blessed Virgin Mary, he said. The soldier ordered that Jerzy take off the medal, throw it to the ground and trample upon it, and if he didn’t comply, he would be beaten. When Jerzy refused to obey, the officer grabbed the medal, giving it a yank to rip it from the chain, but neither the medal nor chain broke. Jerzy was then beaten to a pulp and thrown into solitary confinement. For two years he endured this suffering, and his health never fully recovered from this time.
For Cardinal Wyszynski, relations with the regime were at an all-time low. A year after Jerzy received his cassock, the Primate was denied permission to leave the country to attend a synod in Rome. It was a petty punishment for the Vatican not inviting Pax or any of the socialist Christian groups to the synod.
Since the Great Novena the Soviets had only doubled down on their insistence of an atheist Poland. They had just finished construction of an entire new city called Nowa Huta. Nowa Huta was designed to facilitate the utopian labor lifestyle of the proletariat workers of the enormous Nowa Huta steelworks facility. It was advertised as cutting-edge communists society. And most importantly, it was the only city in Poland without a single church. The planners designed it specifically to not have one. The residents of Nowa Huta however were of course your average Polish laborer, not atheists, and quickly demanded a church. Repeated requests to build one were naturally met with repeated denial. Finally, the citizens took it upon themselves to build thier church. When they settled on location, they erected a huge cross marking the future place of their worship. And they had a significant ally on their side. The brand-new city of Nowa Huta was built in the canonical territory of Krakow. And the bishop of Krakow was now Karol Wojtyla, who had just been elevated to Cardinal. He took up their cause and began prodding the regime to approve the proposed building site. When they refused again, the archbishop began celebrating outdoors masses at the site, rain or shine. The regime was checked. Nowa Huta was built by atheists for atheists. But no one who lived there was an atheist. And now not only did a huge cross stand tall in defiance against their best laid plans, but the second most powerful bishop in Poland was acting as if a church was already there. Their reaction was predictable. In 1967, police tied a noose around the cross. They attached the other end to a tractor and brought the symbol of faith down to the ground. There was to be no church in Nowa Huta.
Wojtyla continued to leverage the full apostolic and political weight of his office and popularity that the regime had no choice but to respect on some level. And over the course of the year, Cardinal Wojtyla wore down the regime, securing a permit for the people of Nowa Huta to build their church. He himself broke the ground with the first shovel of dirt. Father Dziwisz, friend and aid to Wojtyla recalled that this victory at Nowa Huta was the beginning of a new forward-facing posture of the Polish hierarchy against the regime. They had the initiative, and they knew it. The workers of Poland, seeing their bishops now stand up to the regime, stand up and win, were also emboldened.
Other than the undeniable rise in the hegemony of the Church in Poland, Secretary Gomulka had another issue to contend with - The economy. For decades, to maintain calm he had been keeping prices artificially low - remember in communism prices and wages are not dictated by supply and demand, but by machinations of party officials. On December 12th, 1970, an economic crisis could be delayed no longer, and decisions had to be made. Food and fuel were suddenly raised 30%. In response, the workers across the nation took to the streets in protests. Gomulka ordered the army out. 40 workers were shot and killed, over a thousand injured. This violence finished Gomulka. Both the people of Poland and their Soviet overlords had lost faith in their pragmatic man, and just eight days later, he was forced into retirement, replaced by a rising star and political opponent of Gomulka, Edward Gierek.
Gomulka’s time in power had effectively terminated attempts at actual Marxism in Poland. As Stalin himself predicted, the saddle simply didn’t fit the cow. Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski observed that the great experiment and moral bankruptcy of Marxism had caused it to be a problem for more than just intellectuals. The rural salt of the earth farmers didn’t want it, didn’t ask for it, weren’t curious about it, and had no use for it. So, now without the urgency of implementing Marxism, what was Edward Gierek’s role for the Soviet Union?
Well, the Soviet Union still pulled the strings of the Polish regime, and the organizational structure of the communist single party system still functioned to one degree or another, if only as a means to hold on to power. The party, like in Poland had at the dawn of the 70’s abandoned much of the purist ideals of Marx and Lenin at the dawn of the 70s, and pivoted towards the larger geopolitical goal of Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe. The revolution was over. For some of the Soviet bloc countries, this shift meant relying on internal authoritarian nationalism. Poland was no exception.
The first thing Secretary Gierek did was pledge better relations with the Church. His prime minister put out a shocking statement within days of Gierek taking over the government, saying:
“We will work for full normalization in church-state relations, with the expectation that the government efforts will meet with true understanding on the part of the Catholic clergy and the lay Catholic circles.”
Gierek efforts were real too. His legislature authorized the return of some of the confiscated church property from the 40s. Several pending permits for church construction were allowed to commence. In 1971 thousands of Poles were allowed to travel to Rome for the beatification of St. Maximilian Kolbe. With Marxists idealism out of the way, Gierek exercised this freedom to the fullest to increase economic stability in Poland by opening trade with the West, in particular, with the United States.
On May 28th, 1972, Jerzy Popieluscko and 30 other seminarians processed through St. John the Baptist’s Church in Warsaw. Jerzy was 25 years old. As he approached, standing before the altar was his hero, Cardinal Wyszynski. The primate placed upon the young man the stole and chasable and anointed his palms with sacred chrism. Jerzy was now a priest. For his first Mass, Father Jerzy’s handed out commemorative cards that read: “God sends me to preach the Gospel and to bind up the brokenhearted.”
His health was still declining. He was anemic, and subject to feinting. During one of his early Masses, he feinted and cut himself as he fell, hemorrhaging so badly that he needed to spend weeks in the hospital. Despite his illnesses Father Jerzy’s flock grew accustomed to frequent personal visits by their pastor, who they came to love.
Secretary Edward Gierek, like Gomulka before him, had two main political lightning rods to… handle with care – the Church and the economy. Both could go hot at any moment and either bring in Soviet tanks or fill his streets with blood. For the Church, through liaisons, he maintained a close working relationship with Cardinal Wyszynski’s office, giving the primate tacit approval to tend to his flock without restrictions. Wyszynski in turn commanded the Poles to keep civil, and not protest the regime for the time being. As for the economy, it was a simple equation, keep wages high and prices low. The problem was how. The Polish economy, even with support from the Soviet Union could not accomplish this on its own, forcing Gierek to borrow money from the West, allowing him to raise wages 40% from 1971 to 1975, and keep food prices frozen.
But by the end of 75 and into 76, this whole scheme was failing, and again like Gomulka before him, Gierek had to act to keep the economy from crashing. The freeze on food prices was lifted. Meat went up 70%, butter 50%, sugar 100%. The protests again began in Poznan. The police came out in force and began arresting the protestors. Who were subjected to what the regime officers called “paths to health”, which meant they were forced to run through two lines of club wielding police officers.
Wyszynski, smelling weakness, went on the spiritual offense, telling his country:
“Man has a right to engage in economic activity… to be paid according to the dictates of justice, and to have his family provided for… and from the nature of man flows the right to possess private property in such measure as to ensure the freedom and dignity of the human person.”
He wrote to Gierek, personally insisting that Poles have a right to protest a government that would suppress its faith and its wages, insisting that a nation without God will never survive. Wyszynski then fully flexed his status by demanding the release of and amnesty for all the protestors arrested. Both requests were granted.
During this time, Cardinal Wojtyla was touring America on a mission to remind the American Catholics of the spiritual warfare being waged across the Atlantic. In Philadelphia, he said:
“We are now standing in the face of the greatest historical confrontation humanity has gone through. I do not think that wide circles of the American society or wide circles of the Christian community realize this fully. We are now facing the final confrontation between the Church and the anti-Church, of the Gospel versus the anti-Gospel. This confrontation lies within the plans of divine Providence; it is a trial which the whole Church, and the Polish Church in particular, must take up. It is a trial of not only our nation and the Church, but in a sense a test of 2000 years of culture and Christian civilization with all of its consequences for human dignity, individual rights, human rights, and the rights of nations.”
It’s important to examine these words in the cultural context of the 1970s. The western world’s general attitudes towards communism to a large degree could be summed up as “apathetic”. None one could predict the future, and the Soviet Union appeared to be quite stable. Thus far the cold war hadn’t gone hot. Western intelligentsia was promoting moral relativism. We have our truths, and they have their truths. Yet Cardinal Wojtyla came to the United States and presented the conflict in Poland against the rest of the soviet bloc in terms of clear good, and clear evil, evoking cosmological magnitude to the present circumstances. There was no middle ground for the Cardinal. No lukewarmness. It was a message that, for the time, was socially and politically out of step with mainstream western discourse.
Less than a year after Wojtyla’s remarks in Philadelphia, there was another future player on the world stage who shared a nearly identical ideological attitude toward the Soviet Union. In 1977 Ronald Reagan was licking his wounds from a primary defeat by Gerald Ford. He was in his private office with foreign policy guru Richard Allen discussing a strategy for his next potential run for the White House. When the conversation came to a future policy towards the Soviet Union, Reagan told Allen that his policy was simple: we win, and they lose.
Richard Allen was shocked. For all his tenure in DC serving presidents committed to detente policies, he had never heard cold war policies put into a context of winning and losing anything. Allen told Reagan that if he decided to run again for president, he would be there for him.
A thousand years before to the Jimmy Carter Presidency, Pope Sylvester had fashioned for King Stephen of Hungary a crown, that would become a symbol of Hungarian Independence. During WWII this crown was smuggled out of Hungary to keep it out of the hands the Nazis. The relic made its way to the United States where it was placed in Fort Knox with the intention of one day returning it to an independent Hungarian nation. Jimmy Carter had decided that the puppet government in Hungary under Soviet domination was close enough. In reality, he hoped it would be a foot in the door for some sort of meaningful negotiation on human rights. Hungarians on both sides of the Atlantic were furious.
After the olive branch to Hungary, the President flew to Poland. On December 29th, 1977, Carter stepped off his plane and declared to the Polish audience that “old ideological labels have lost their meaning” - a surprising statement no doubt for both Catholics and communists alike. After a Potemkin village tour of Poland, Carter praised Edward Geirek and the Soviet installed regime, saying:
“I think that our concept of human rights is preserved in Poland… There is a substantial degree of freedom of the press… and a substantial degree of freedom of religion demonstrated by the fact that approximately 90 percent of the Polish people profess faith in Christ.”
The collective Polish eyerolling must have been extreme.
After promising a gift of 200 million dollars of food and imports to the Gierek regime, Carter was invited for a sumptuous dinner at a 17th century Polish palace with the communist leadership. Outside, a crowd of protestors gathered, pushing closer and closer to the windows shouting towards the America president: Carter, save us.
The political ineptitude of the Polish-Russian regime towards the working class, the erratic and desperate tug of war against the church hierarchy, the brainless economic policies, and the brutal, criminal beatdowns of protestors was inadvertently forcing the people of Poland into an increasingly singular residence movement. Cardinal Wyszynski was now not just a religious leader, but also a labor leader and political leader. The détente presidents of the west had zero sway on his flock and the Vatican’s friendly overtures towards the Soviet Union had zero effect on his status. Poland belonged to Cardinal Wyszynski. Aware of this ultra unique status for a people behind the iron curtain, Wyszynski’s episcopate dared to state:
“We all know the spirit of freedom is the proper climate for the full development of a person. Without freedom, a person is stunned, and all progress dies. Not to allow people with a different social and political ideology to speak, as is the practice of the state is unjust. State censorship has always been and remains a weapon of totalitarian systems. With the aid of censorship, the aim is not only to guide the mental life of society and public opinion but even to paralyze the cultural and religious life of the whole people.”
The hierarchy’s attacks on censorship and use of the word freedom, infuriated Gierek, and would have elicited demands from Moscow to tighten the screws on the loudmouth bishops, but they were distracted by another group of bishops. A few weeks before this statement was published, a new pope was elected, cardinal Albino Luciani. Luciani styled himself Pope John Paul the first. When told that he could not be called ‘the first’ until there was a second, he reassured his critics that soon he would go, and another would come. A few weeks later, Pope John Paul I was dead.
On October 14th, 1978, the enclave of cardinals met again. Two Italian archbishops were favored early, of course, but soon there was murmur of a Wojtyla papacy. When Cardinal Wyszynski caught wind of this, he urged his padawan to accept if chosen, that Poland would need him. After several rounds of voting Cardinal Wojtyla was elected pope – the first non-Italian pope in 455 years. At 58 years old, he was the youngest pope in over a century, and the first Slavic pope ever. As we all know, he took the name John Paull II. When Wojtyla heard the news for himself, he leaned in close to is aid, Father Dziwisz and whispered, “What have they done?”
In the battle for the soul of Poland it’s not hard to imagine how the charismatic Polish cardinal’s elevation to the papacy would be alarming for the communist regime in Poland specifically, but a little harder to comprehend is why this news shook the Soviet Union to its core. The Polish path towards communism was already an elusive enigma. Despite their best-efforts Poland remained a bastion of Roman Catholicism. Religious vocations were off the charts – tens of thousands of priests walked the streets with over 5000 seminarians getting ready to join their ranks. And these priests were some of the best and brightest Poland had to offer – from the communist perspective, educated people were not supposed to believe in superstitions. What if this trend spread beyond Poland?
Karol Wojtyla was already a known quantity – the Soviets had been monitoring him for years. He had at least three illegal homilies on his official record. His entire residence was bugged with listening devices. Father Stanislaw Dziwisz recalls finding them in the study, the dining room, the parlor, and even the bedroom, behind wall coverings, in the telephones, and under furniture. The aid to the cardinal remembered the communists’ spies being outrageously incompetent. A group of “workers” would suddenly show up and declare that the house had an electrical problem that needed fixing. When Wojtyla wanted them to hear something, he would speak loudly. But when the issue was more sensitive – he would leave for the mountains. They knew he was an ardent anticommunist and had victories against them under his belt, Nowa Huta being the most public.
Poles heard of the news from illegal radio broadcasts being sent eastward from Radio Free Europe, the BBC, and Voice of America. Some Poles couldn’t believe it and wanted more verification. They got it when state-controlled newscasts couldn’t ignore reality any longer. A Polish physicist recounted:
“An announcer came on with a very, very sad face and said a new pope had been elected, and that it was Cardinal Wojtyla. That was it. Nothing else. Then the announcer switched quickly to the harvest figures or whatever, the potato crop. It was absolutely amazing.”
Bells, from all the church steeples of Poland rang out in a singular voce of thanksgiving to Heaven. Together the Poles gathered for vigils, singing hymns of praise before the Blessed Sacrament. For the Polish regime and communist governments in eastern Europe, their silence was as loud as the church bells. No official comments, no public statements until three days after the election, when TASS, the official Soviet news agency put out a single announcement:
“Rome, Oct. 16 (TASS) – The election of the new head of the Roman Catholic Church was announced here. He is a Polish Cardinal, Archbishop of Krakow Wojtyla. He took the name John Paul II.”
Russian fears were, however, betrayed privately. Both the Soviet ambassador in Warsaw and the head of the KGB in Warsaw independently warned Moscow that the new pope held extreme anticommunist views. The KGB further put out a report noting that Wojtyla was often highly critical of the state’s agencies and administrators, proclaiming that they had committed violations against basic human rights and unlawfully restricted activities of the Catholic Church, that Soviet policy was an extensive campaign to convert society to atheism and impose an alien ideology upon the people. The KGB was correct. He did say all those things.
The head of the KGB in Moscow, Yuri Andropov, telephoned the KGB office in Warsaw and demanded to know how they could possibly let this happen. They responded that Mr. Andropov should direct his questions to Rome, not Warsaw. When Polish communist politician Stanislaw Kania read the news that Wojtyla had been elected pope, he uttered under his breath: Holy Mother of God. In his shock it seems Comrade Kania had forgotten he was officially an atheist.
Back in Rome, Monsignor Jarek Ceilecki recalled:
“There, on Saint Peter’s Square, when Wojtyla came out on that balcony – that was the end of communism.”
On that balcony, the first public words of the Polish pope to the world were:
“Be not afraid! Open the doors to Christ, open them wide! Open the borders of states, economic and political systems, the vast domains of culture, civilization, and development – open them to His saving power.”
Mere weeks after his election, the new pope was unhappy with the episcopate in Hungary, feeling they had not done enough to resist the regime there after the arrest of Cardinal Mindszenty. The Hungarian bishops had buckled under the oppression of the Soviet puppets and the faithful waned as a result. He wrote a letter to those bishops reminding them of the people’s need to be catechized. Later, when asked if he would visit Hungary, pope John Paul II responded that the pope will visit Hungary when its cardinal learned how to bang his fists on the table.
Around him, John Paul dislodged from the Vatican any administrators interested offering olive branches beyond the iron curtain and replaced them with ardent anticommunist like himself. The post-Pius XII policy of Ostpolitik was gone. Vatican radio was broadened and expanded further into Soviet countries where strong blocks of Catholic lived: Belarus, Czechoslovakia, Latvia, Lithuania, and especially Ukraine where anti-Soviet sentiment was higher than anywhere else. Alex Alexiev, contemporary Russian specialist noted at this time:
“It has now become clear that in the person of the Polish Pope the long-suffering Soviet Catholics have found a determined champion.”
Poland was leading the fight against communism for the world – it was again, as it was before, Antemurale Christianitatis. Across Soviet bloc countries Catholic intellectual resistance groups sprang into existence, making public protests of the abuses against the believers by the unbelievers. The new pope then declared Saint’s Cyril and Methodius co-patrons of Europe alongside Saint Benedict. The brothers Cyril and Methodius were responsible for preaching the gospels to the Slavs and creating the Cyrillic alphabet, reminding the Slavic peoples that their language, literacy, and ultimately their culture is inseparable from the Faith of their fathers.
These pseudo-patriotic statements, Vatican appointments, and radio broadcast were damaging enough for the Russians, but the new pope decided to push the envelope even further. He decided that he would return to his homeland.
This fear was already on the minds of the communist authorities in Poland. Leonid Brezhnev, who took over the Soviet Union after Khrushchev, already made up his mind that the pope should not be allowed to return home. He personally called Edward Gierek to tell him as much. Gierek told Brezhnev it would be impossible, legally speaking, to prevent a native Pole from returning to his country. Brezhnev suggested that Gierek tell the pope to announce that he has taken ill and cannot visit. Gierek explained the futility of that, rather rediculous lie since the pope would naturally get well and reschedule. And further, he reminded Brezhnev that most Poles are Catholic – how could he not allow them to receive a visit from the pope? Brezhnev was incensed, shouting that Gierek can do whatever he wants but he’ll regret it later, and ended the phone call by telling him that Gomulka was a better communist.
Pope John Paull II was granted nine days to return to Poland in June of 1979. Gierek and Wyszynski met at the beginning of that year to begin coordinating the details of the trip between Church and state. Gierek was hopeful that by facilitating the visit the position of his regime would be legitimized in the eyes of the Poles. And further, it would show the West that he was allowing for religious freedom in Poland, which he knew was the best way to open western wallets, something he desperately needed to keep his nation’s food prices from doubling.
As Poland was preparing for the new pope’s visit, father Jerzy Popiełuszko now 32 years old was preparing for his new role as the chaplain for the hospital in Warsaw. There he was able to focus on catechesis for the medical students but also care for the sick and dying, he recalled:
“The medical milieu deserves more pastoral care. The professions of nurse and physician are a true vocation, the ones closest to the priesthood in fact; they bring mercy to those who need it the most: the sick and the suffering. The latter are the most valiant part of the Church: through their sufferings and crosses, they are the closest to Christ.”
When news of the upcoming papal visit hit Warsaw, Father Jerzy was no doubt ecstatic and wanted to assist in whatever way he could. Cardinal Wyszynski put the young priest in charge of organizing all the first aid stations for the millions of pilgrims that would follow the holy father along the nine-day route.
On the morning of Saturday, June 2nd, 1979, the pope’s plane touched down in Poland. As the Pontiff stepped off the stairs, he knelt and kissed the ground of his homeland as church bells rang across the nation. Cardinal Wyszynski was there to greet him along with high level government officials, whom he reassured that his business in his homeland was strictly religious in nature.
The pope’s motorcade left the airport for an 8-mile trip to the older parts of Warsaw. Hundreds of thousands of people lined the streets the entire way, cheering, singing, laying down flowers, carrying both Polish and Papal flags, and waving banners welcoming the pope home.
The motorcade’s destination was a meeting with Edward Gierek. Gierek treated the pope like an old friend and spoke about the progress of communisms throughout the world, how Poland has benefited from its 35 years of utopia. John Paul reminded Gierek that genuine peace can only be built upon the rights of nations, such as the right to existence, to freedom, and to their own culture and civilization. He went on to recount what he called the bitterness of the partition period for Poland, but also the bitterness they still felt for not being spared from the ravages of WWII.
To a modern listener, those comments may seem benign, but to a Pole in 1979, they knew he was implicating Russia in both events – its persecution of Catholics by the Tsars, its cooperation with the Nazis: its massacres in the forests of Katyn, and its forced deportations of hundreds of thousands of citizens. To say there was tension in this meeting was an understatement.
The popes first public event was a Mass at Victory Square in Warsaw before a huge 36-foot wooden plywood cross. It’s estimated that a million people were present at this mass, which is simply impossible to even comprehend. The photo of John Paul II standing before this cross with outstretched arms toward his countrymen and fellow Catholics is iconic. During the Mass, many in the crowd openly wept. He reminded the people that his trip coincided with the 900th anniversary of the martyrdom of St. Stanislaus, who he said purchased his mission of the see of Krakow with his blood – a Polish Catholic bishop murdered by the government of Poland. These were specifically the types of remarks the communists were hoping he would avoid. He continued:
“After so many centuries of a well-established tradition in this field, a son of a Polish nation, of the land of Poland, was called to the chair of Saint Peter. Christ demanded of Peter and of the other apostles that they should be witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth. Have we not the right, with reference to these words of Christ, to think that Poland had become nowadays the land of particularly responsible witness?”
He then turned his attention back to the historical atrocities mentioned earlier with Gierek. He placed the blame of not aiding the Warsaw uprising against the Nazis squarely on the Russians, who after making a deal with the devil, decided not to interfere. He then asked the crowd to consider how there could be justice in Europe without a free and independent Poland. He criticized the emphasis that communism puts on man in a material sense, telling his flock that “it is impossible to understand the human person fully without Christ.”
He told the people of Poland to remember their saints, Stanislaus, Wojciech, Maximilian Kolbe, and to:
“Give honor to each seed that, falling in the ground and dying, in it bears fruit. Whether this be the seed of the soldier’s blood spilled on the field of battle or the martyr’s sacrifice in camps and prisons. Whether this be the seed of heavy, daily work in the sweat of one’s brow in the fields, in the workshops, in mines, in foundries and factories. Whether this be the seed of family love, which does not shrink before the gift of life of a new person and takes up the whole labor of upbringing. Whether this be the seed of creative work in the schools, institutions, libraries, in the workshops of national culture. Whether this be the seed of prayer and service to the sick, suffering, abandoned. Whether this be the seed of suffering itself in hospital beds, in clinics, in sanatoria, in homes; in everything that constitutes Poland.”
John Paul II was reaching deep down into the soul of Poland and beckoning it to arise again and remember itself, to remember its own greatness that lie not in grand armies or violent conquest, but in its goodness, its simpleness, its faithfulness to the Truth. This dramatic sermon being delivered on the eve of Pentecost gave the pope cause to remember that just a decade ago this nation celebrated the thousand-year anniversary of its baptism with their Great Novena to Our Lady. Invoking the liturgy for Pentecost, the pope directly appealed to the Third Person in the Holy Trinity, that being already baptized, Poland should now be confirmed in the Faith:
“Let your spirit come down! Let your spirit come down! And renew the face of the earth and of this land.”
The crowd broke out into roaring applause. The chant grew into a unified call among the people. “We want God” they cried.
The communist authorities were beside themselves with anger, but they were also afraid. What was he doing? This had all the marks of an anticommunist political rally. They accused the pope of invoking a “exclusivist Christology”, creating an “us vs them” dynamic, and perpetuating the stereotypical Polish Catholic caricature that the Soviets had been trying to destroy for so many decades now. The regime’s official report of the sermon written up immediately afterwards deemed it “inappropriate”.
Later that same evening John Paul met Cardinal Wyszynski at his private residence for a dinner with Polish intelligentsia. He recalled his own remarks:
“Everything that lies on my heart I said at Victory Square. We said it together – me and you; the people of Warsaw said it. Perhaps I said a little too much, or said it too sharply, but one must stand up for what one believes.”
The next day, Pentecost, the pope spoke at Gniezno, where he recounted all the historical mass conversions of all the Slavic peoples and demanded the spiritual unity of Christian Europe. Then he went to a farm community where still half a million Poles turned out to see their pope. After addressing the farmers, he went to the Polish youth, reminding them of the words of Polish writer Adam Mickiewicz, that a civilization, genuinely worthy of man, must be Christian.
The regime kept up its reporting on John Paul’s words, accusing him of trying to establish a Christian pan-slavish state. They said it smacked of imperialism and had the flavor of a crusade. The concerns were serious enough that the regime officially presented the Polish hierarchy with a list of transgressions that they demanded be stopped. In response, the hierarchy reminded the regime that so far, the Polish crowds have been disciplined and peaceful. When the regime insisted on knowing the text of the pope’s future speeches, the hierarchy assured them that they are, “not bad”.
John Paul then made his way to Czestochowa, the sight of the Jasna Gora monastery that housed the icon of the Black Madonna. He planned to stay there for three full days with over 20 speaking engagements. Half a million poles were there waiting for him. Polish Catholic pageantry, as one author puts it, was on full display: Red and white polish flags, yellow and white Vatican flags, alongside blue flags for Marian devotions. Flowers were everywhere and the children came out dressed in their traditional provincial feasting costumes. Giving a speech under a red and gold canopy the pope joked with the crowd and encourage them to sing hymns and folksongs. Despite all the singing and merriment, one observer remembered that in typical Catholic fashion, when the pope commanded that they pray, the entire crowd fell to their knees like “instantly scythed wheat”. After saying Mass, the pope entered the crowd, blessing them individually, shaking their hands. Long live the pope, they cheered.
Speaking again, he reminded them that the mother of God, whose shrine they were gathered round, has maternal concern over Poland, and in their distress, they must bring their troubles to her and lay them at her feet. That their greatest freedom was their servitude to Mary. At Jasna Gora, the pope said, we are always free. That here a Pole could:
“Feel how the heart of the nation beats in the heart of the mother… how many times it beats with the groans of the historical Polish suffering. But also, with shouts of joy and victory!”
Days later the Pope addressed the workers of Poland. He received sustained applause when he demanded that prayer be a part of the daily toil of labor. He praised the industrial developments of Poland yet gave credit not to the regime, but to the faithful workers who strong hands wrought these improvements.
Then the pope was off to his old episcopate, Krakow. There he told the million-person crowd that:
“You must be strong with the strength of faith. You must be faithful, today more than in any other age you need this strength. So, before going away, I beg you once again to accept the whole of the spiritual legacy which goes by the name of Poland. Never lose your trust, do not be defeated, do not be discouraged. I beg you, always seek spiritual power from Him from whom countless generations of our fathers and mothers have found it. Never detach yourselves from Him, never lose your spiritual freedom, with which he makes a human being free.”
The next stop for the pope in Poland was his nation’s own hell on Earth – Auschwitz. John Paul walked through that infamous, ghastly gate bearing the words, “work sets you free”. He went directly to the cell where Saint Maximilian Kolbe offered up his life for a stranger. The pope knelt to the ground and kissed the cold prison floor. In it he left behind a bouquet of red and white flowers - red for martyrdom, white for purity. Leaving that hallowed dungeon, the pope walked to the wall of death – a placed remembered for the execution of some 20,000 prisoners. Accompanying the pope for this visit was Franciszek Gajowniczek, former inmate of Auschwitz, who was alive for this moment because it was he who’s life Maximilian Kolbe saved. Upon meeting the 78-year-old holocaust survivor, the pope embraced him as a father embraces a child.
Leaving the deathcamp section of Auschwitz, the pope moved to the concentration camp side where he was to offer public Mass. The altar was built upon the terminus of the railroad tracks entering the camp. Above the altar was a large cross ringed with barbed wire at its center, evoking the crown of thorns. Hanging from the cross was a piece of cloth that resembled a prisoner’s uniform bearing a red triangle identifying its owner as Polish. It was inscribed with Kolbe’s number – 16670. Camp survivors who attended the Mass were given a place of honor, wearing replicas of their prison uniforms. They received Holy Communion directly from the pope – some two hundred of these former prisoners were priests. The crowd for this solemn celebration again could easily have been up to a million. The pope told them all that this place was built for hatred and for the contempt for man. A place built for cruelty. He likened Kolbe’s spiritual victory over the Nazis to that of Christ’s victory upon the cross. And how in the grimmest of circumstances, martyrdom bears fruit.
“Once again,” he began “a stage of the age-old struggle of this nation, my nation, for its fundamental rights among the nations of Europe. Once again, a loud shout for the right to its own place on the map of Europe.”
The Polish communist regime was done with this pope’s pilgrimage and began putting up literal roadblocks to his plans. He was prevented from entering Nowa Huta, where he himself had established the new church for the workers. So, he flew over in his helicopter and dropped flowers down below.
His final public Mass was at the Commons in Krakow on Trinity Sunday. Estimates put the crowd between 2 and 3 million. He told the crowd that though they lived in a “difficult epoch” they must still “pray for the victory of moral order.” Twice he demanded that, by necessity, Poland’s borders must be opened to allow solidarity with the other Slavs. He then again as he did when he arrived reminded them of their spiritual baptism a thousand years prior and again offered them a spiritual confirmation, reaching out he performed a symbolic laying of hands. He called Polish history a spiritual treasure, a fund, a great common good confirmed by each choice, each noble deed, each life lived in an authentic Christian way. That this Polish Catholic identify is what had sustained them for centuries and that they reject it at their own peril.
The feelings permeating Poland after the holy father left his homeland was that of extreme patriotic and spiritual unity. A group of psychology professors who wanted to study the effects of the papal visit beyond the iron curtain collected hundreds of personal accounts from attendees. The participants used phrases like “feeling part of a greater whole” and “not being lost among the multitudes” or “not feeling anonymous” and sharing similar values, such as Polish, Christian, Western. Their experience was described as divine euphoria, especially during the waves of clapping, cheering, and chanting, passing like a spirit through the millions.
The results of studying the events left researcher Josef Makselon to say a:
“Hitherto unprecedented explosion of positive feelings took place. Each site visited by the pope produced a unique psychological microclimate where feelings of security and mutual affinity dominated.”
Polish poet Anna Kamienska stated:
“We lived through some kind of great visitation. It was as if a perpetually open place of longing and loneliness became filled.”
She went on to lament the weeping upon his departure, but still calling the visit a necessary therapy of joy and love. Jan Jozef Lipski, renowned Warsaw uprising veteran said that everyone in Poland was impacted, even the atheists. That even they were left spellbound by the magnetic presence of Pope John Paull II, that every soul in the country comprehend the historical gravity of the moment they were living in. Early nay sayers to the pope’s visit acknowledge that all the logistical fears of food and transportation for the millions of pilgrims, vandalism, piles of liter and trash, violence, bigotry, and fanaticism – none of it came to pass.
It is estimated that a total of 12 million individual poles showed up to see the pope during his trip – one third of the entire population at the time. The communists, from Moscow to Warsaw were in full on damage control mode. The future of Poland now seemed completely up in the air. Some feared they were on the verge of watching a spiritual revolution convert into a political one – like the recent events in Iran led by the Ayatollah Khomeini. They first attempted to portray the visit as something small, and irrelevant, and just the pope authenticating their just overlordship of his homeland. But in secret they were cut to the quick. It was impossible for even the communists to deny, as papal biographer George Weigel put it, a dramatic pivot in history had just occurred, in these nine days the history of the 20th century turned in a fundamental way. He said the pope handed the poles the keys to their own liberation – the key of aroused consciousness.
Across the Atlantic, another man we discussed briefly felt the Pope was the key to the 20th century as well. Ronald Reagan and Richard Allen were together again watching the news feed of the Pope’s pilgrimage to the millions upon millions of Polish Catholics. Allen said:
“Reagan remained silent for the longest time… and then I glanced at him, saw that he was deeply moved, and noticed a tear in the corner of his eye… He then was overcome by the outpouring of emotion that emanated from the millions who came to see him… solidifying a deep and steadfast conviction that this pope would help change the world.”
Reagan took this energy and directed it towards his syndicated radio broadcasts:
“These young people of Poland who greeted the pope had been born and raised and spent their entire lives under communist atheism.”
Regan then recalled that moment when Stalin once contemptuously asked how many divisions the pope had… Reagan said that question has just been answered by John Paul II.
The future president went on:
“For 40 years the Polish people have lived under first the Nazis and then the Soviets. For 40 years they have been ringed by tanks and guns. The voices behind those tanks and guns have told them there is no God. Now with eyes of all the world on them they have looked past those menacing weapons and listened to the voice of one man who has told them there is a God and it is their inalienable right to freely worship that God. Will the Kremlin ever be the same again? Will any of us for that matter?”
After this, Reagans best friend and closest aide, Bill Clark recalled:
“He had a preoccupation with Poland. He had mentioned Yalta as far back as I go with him as being totally unfair and having to be undone someday… He had a tremendous interest in Poland and its strategic importance… He knew Poland would be the linchpin in the dissolution of the Soviet Empire.”
The Church in Poland, under the protection of John Paul II had shone a lamp upon the path of resistance, peaceful resistance to the communist state which was now totally discredited. The regime’s monopoly on public discourse was broken by the pope. The Poles had gotten a taste of freedom and self-governance – they ran their own rallies of millions of people, administered their own first aid, provided their own security, and did it successfully.
Jan Jozef Lipski remembered that:
“People acted differently: kinder to one another, disciplined yet free and relaxed, as if people had been transformed. The nation showed its other face. These were truly unusual and extraordinary days.”
Another politician recalled:
“Something very strange happened here. The same people who are so frustrated in everyday life, so angry and aggressive when queuing for goods, suddenly transformed themselves into a buoyant collective of dignified citizens. Discovering dignity within themselves, they became aware of their own power and strength. The Police vanished from the main streets of Warsaw as a result, exemplary order prevailed all around. A society deprived for so long of its rights suddenly recovered its ability to take care of itself. Such was the impact of Pope John Paul II’s pilgrimage to Poland.”
Lipski further said the visit left its mark upon the consciousness of the entire nation, above all the young. That spiritually Poland before June of 79 and Poland after June of 79 were two different countries.
Author James Felak, who documented John Paul’s speeches across his homeland sums up nicely the frame of mind he left Poles with:
“He presented an alternative worldview to the regime’s, speaking of concepts such as human rights, the dignity of the human person, and the dignity of labor in ways the political authorities did not and could not. He approached history and morality from a Polish Catholic point of view, challenging conventional communist understandings and breaking certain taboos. For example, he spoke of the “unbreakable” link between the Polish nation and Catholicism, the primacy of Jesus Christ for Poland’s history, the connection between the Blessed Virgin Mary and Poland, the European and Christian roots of Polish culture, and the unity of Europe based Christianity. As Jan Kubik notes, he reinvigorated national and religious symbols and demonstrated that social and political problems could be articulated within a non-Marxist discourse.”
Despite the post papal spiritual high Polish Catholics were riding on, the cold hard reality of communist domination and economic impotence still gnawed at the everyday life of the Pole. Huge foreign debt, extreme supply shortages, long lines at the grocery stores, all continued into the 80s. With foreign debt from the west mounting, and more money still needed, the regime could not afford bad international press – the police were neutered and violent tactics by the regime halted. This environment of totalitarian reluctance to act became the fertile ground with which opposition activity could sprout.
An underground Polish press association developed and quickly spread, ranging from intellectual editorials to farming digests. With the Polish citizens now connected by an secret information network, various resistance groups could now… communicate. Most significantly, labor unions. The tapestry of Churches across Poland became the meeting spaces for these underground labor unions who had an ally sitting in the chair of Peter.
Edward Gierek unwittingly lit the fuse that would demonstrate the latent power brewing among the Polish workers since the elevation of one of his own to the Papacy. On August 14th, 1980, Gierek raised food prices again. The workers across the country suddenly went on a highly organized nationwide and unified strike. Laborer and longtime political activist for workers’ rights, Lech Walesa, had organized one of these strikes at the Lenin shipyards in Gdansk. He quickly rose to the top of the strike movement nationwide and formed a strike committee to spearhead the inevitable negotiations with the government that would come.
As these workers put down their tools and walked out of their factories, they turned first to their eternal Father. A delegation of workers in Warsaw called the office of Cardinal Wyszynski and demanded a priest be sent to minister them. They didn’t ask for guns, or muscle, or picket signs – they asked for the Mass. The primate’s secretary canvassed several of the various pastors, looking for just one to these men. But none would dare. For all they knew the regime’s police would arrive at any moment to bust skulls or even open fire – it had happened before. And with the entire country now in on this worker’s strike, blood was sure to run in the streets.
At a local parish, St. Stanislaus, a young priest and assistant pastor, Father Jerzy Popieluszko volunteered. He timidly approached the factory gate, later remembering:
“I will never forget that day or the Mass that I said. I was terribly nervous; I had never been in a situation like that. What sort of atmosphere would I find? How would they receive me? Where would I celebrate the Mass? Who would read the reading, who would sing? Questions like that, which today appear naïve to me, tormented me then as I was heading toward the factory. At the doors of the steelworks, I had my first major shock. A dense crowd was waiting for me, smiling and in tears at the same time. They applauded me, and I thought for a moment that a celebrity was walking behind me. But no, the applause was actually meant for me, the first priest who had ever walked through the entrance of the steelworks. I told myself then that they were giving an ovation to the Church that for thirty years had been knocking on the doors of the factories. All my apprehension proved to be groundless: the altar had been prepared in the middle of the square as well as a cross that then was erected at the entrance and, after surviving the darkest days, still stands there, surrounded by flowers. Even a makeshift confessional had been set up. The lectors were there too. You had to listen to them, those hoarse voices accustomed to swear words, solemnly reading sacred texts. Then from thousands of mouths came a cry like thunder: “Thanks be to God.” I noticed also that they knew how to sing, and better than in the churches. Before beginning, they went to confession. I was sitting on a chair, with my back leaning against the heap of scrap iron, and these rough men in blue work clothes spotted with grease knelt down on the dirty, oil-stained floor.”
Edward Gierek had no choice but to negotiate with this movement. After two weeks Lech Walesa emerged from those meetings with a signed agreement between his labor movement and the communist regime that recognized the rights of the workers to form their own unions – something anathema to Marxism and destructive to the very pillars of communism. Walesa signed the papers with a souvenir pen bearing the image of John Paul II. At this signing the polish labor movement Solidarity was born. The triumphant and beaming Walesa told his workers:
“We got all we could in the present situation; and we will achieve the rest, because we now have the most important thing: Our independent self-governing trade unions. That is our guarantee for the future… I declare the strike ended.”
Edward Gierek had committed the principal sin against Marx – recognizing that any other legitimate workers movement could possibly exist, and worse, acknowledging that those living under communism could possibly want something other than what it offered. A week after the Gdansk accords were signed, Moscow stripped him of his party leadership and expelled him from the politburo. Gierek’s career was over. For his replacement, the Soviet Union would look to the military brass.
Shortly after the Pope’s visit to Poland, he travelled to the United States. In Washington DC, at a party he met Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. The ambassador knew that the pope spoke Russian and so he politely asked the pontiff if he preferred to convers in Russian or Polish. John Paul II suggested the ambassador speak Russian, while he would speak Polish. At some point during their conversation the Pope took the ambassador by surprise by asking him if he could bless him, suggesting that since he represented such a great country it might help expedite world peace. Dobrynin was startled, for being a good communist he was supposed to be atheist, and further this pontiff was quickly becoming public enemy number one for the Soviets. The ambassador recounted:
“I replied that I would be pleased to receive his blessing, especially in the great cause he mentioned. Thus, I believe I am the only Soviet ambassador throughout the history of our diplomatic service to have received a blessing from the pope.”
The very next month nine members of the Soviet Union’s Secretariat of the Central Committee assembled at their Moscow headquarters to discuss what was to be done about this Polish Pope. The speed at which he was unraveling the legitimacy of their power and ethos was breakneck. By the end of their meeting, they agreed upon an edict that would dictate their course of action:
“Use all possibilities available to the Soviet Union to prevent the new course of policies initiated by the Polish pope; if necessary, with additional measures beyond disinformation and discreditation.”
In case there’s any confusion about what this meant, John Koehler, a cold war journalist called this edict an order for assassination. The security service of Italy agreed with that assessment, labelling it Moscow’s plan for the “physical elimination of JP II”.
An enemy is most dangerous when it is cornered. The Soviet Union was watching its relevance in Poland wane, but they could not stand idly by and let Poland turn. Communism in Poland, a country forever the crossroads of Europe, was existential in nature for the Soviets. All measures were now on the table. And as we begin to look at the 1980s, it’s important to remember that all of us are armchair quarterbacks. We know the Soviets are in their death throws by this point – but almost no one else for saw the coming collapse, especially those living under Soviet domination. As Russia desperately clung to power in Poland it would turn up the pressure on the workers, the faithful, and the clergy. Yet all three were armed with a new ally in the office of the papacy, but another ally would soon join them, the office of the President of the United States.
After the Church and the Solidarity movement had beaten the Gierek regime into total submission, Lech Walesa was interviewed by an Italian Journalist about the recent victories. He told the newspaper man:
“If you choose the example of what we Poles have in our pockets and in our shops, then… communism has done very little for us. But if you choose the example of what is in our souls, I answer that communism has done very much for us. In fact, our souls contain exactly the opposite of what they wanted. They wanted us to not believe in God, and our churches are full. They wanted us to be materialistic and incapable of sacrifice. They wanted us to be afraid of the tanks, and guns, and instead we don’t fear them at all.”
Part Four: Solidarity
Solidarity had swept across the Polish nation, not only as a worker’s movement, but also as a movement of faith and freedom in opposition to communism. Outside the factories of the workers, one could see open air masses taking place. Over the entrances to their steel yards were images of Our Lady. The aging Cardinal Wyszynski praised the Solidarity movement, but also urged prudence. On his mind was the necklace of tanks and bombs that could strangle the country on a whim. His fear was well placed.
The news of Solidarity in Poland shocked the western world. Historian Arthur Rachwald said:
“The idea of an independent labor organization functioning freely is totally incompatible with the Soviet system.”
Pravda, the official newspaper of the Soviet Union objected entirely to the Gdansk accords, reminding its comrades that Lenin insisted the party remained in control of all unions. Yet Solidarity caught on fire. Within three months the movement went from zero to ten million members. We said a few episodes back that nothing like the status of the Catholic Church in Poland existed anywhere east of the iron curtain. The same could be said of Solidarity - It was officially anti-communist, pro-Roman Catholic, pro free speech. It pressed forward the freedom to practice one’s faith, argued for a free press and most critically, free elections. It was only a matter of time before the Soviets intervened.
As Ronald Reagan campaigned again for the Presidency, he privately told his advisors that if elected, he would do everything he could to keep Solidarity from being destroyed. Reagan knew a thing or two about unions and labor movements. He was once president of the Screen Actors Guild and fought to protect it from a hostile takeover by American communists. While campaigning, he told the Teamsters:
“Those of us who know what it is to belong to a union have a special bond with the workers of Poland.”
On November 4th, 1980, Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter in one of the largest presidential landslide victories in American history. His election, on the heels of the election of a Polish Pope was a double whammy of unbelievable bad luck from the Soviet perspective. When Lech Walesa was asked what he thought of the results, standing on a windswept plain of Gdansk, he said:
“It was intuition perhaps, but one year ago I envisioned what would happen. Reagan was the only good candidate in your presidential campaign, and I knew he would win. Someday the West will wake up and you may find it too late, as Solzhenitsyn has written. Reagan will do it better. He will settle things in a more efficient way. He will make the U.S. strong and make it stand up.”
Lech Walesa, for his part, had risen to be a significant threat as well, as significant as John Paul the II, for the Soviets. On January 19th, 1981, the day before Reagan’s inauguration, Walesa was permitted an audience with the pope himself. Being brought to the presence of the holy father, Walesa reverently dropped to one knee, before John Paul lifted him back up. Walesa and his entourage then had the opportunity of celebrating Mass with the Pope in his private chapel. At one point the Pope said:
“I want to gather around this altar all working men, and all that their lives contain, all Polish labor.”
The Pope’s spiritual intervention may well have been lifesaving for Walesa personally. He didn’t know it but during his Italian trip he had a hit man on his heels the entire time, a young Islamic Turk named Mehmet Ali Agca who was paid $300,000 for the job. Agca was hired by a Bulgarian spy ring, operatives of the Soviets. The young assassin knew when Walesa would arrive, he knew where he was going, he knew where he was staying. He had with him a suitcase bomb that was kept in a car parked outside the hotel. When Walesa walked by, the hitman was supposed to detonate it with a radio signal. Not everything is entirely clear as to why the job didn’t proceed, but the young man did later admit that the Bulgarians called it off because the Italian police were picking up their trail.
As Ronald Reagan entered the White House, despite being raised protestant by his mother, he brought with him a team of Catholics. His closest friend and advisor was Bill Clark. Clark grew up on a ranch as a shepherd and slept under the stars. Unable to attend Mass in the wilderness of California he would recite the prayers of the Mass on days he guessed were Sundays. He attended seminary but ultimately went into law and politics. As for his views on communism, he considered himself a disciple of Bishop Fulton Sheen, who had carried out his mission well. For the Reagan administration Clark would eventually head the National Security Council.
To run the CIA, Reagan brought in another Irish Catholic, Bill Casey. Casey worked in intelligence during WWII and went on to become a successful corporate attorney and venture capitalist. Casey, a grumpy old, retired Irishman reluctantly took the job, but once in, he became a fierce advocate for the president’s vision. Casey often said the Soviet Union released the four horsemen of the apocalypse upon the world. When asked why he accepted the position, he claimed he felt God was giving him one final shot at the Soviets.
The emphasis on the religiosity of those Reagan surrounded himself with is important for us in this podcast for a couple reasons. It is first striking because Reagan himself was not Catholic. His father was, but it is difficult to discern what impression his father’s faith left on him. His father had terrible bouts with alcoholism that distanced him from his family. And yet the president was obsessed with the Catholic faith in Poland, and further knew the head of the Catholic faith was an important piece in resisting communism.
In Reagans estimation, when it came to Poland, there was a spiritual front to the battle. He surrounded himself with those who shared the same view as him, and the same faith as Poland. Remember, when the workers of Solidarity stood up to the Soviet machine the first thing they asked for was a Catholic priest. And in those darkened streets, ministering to them were fearless priests like Father Jerzy. Remembering those days in 80 and 81 Jerzy says:
“We were kneeling, rosary in hand, in front of makeshift altars, with patriotic and religious songs on our lips. Born of the patriotic surge of the workers, supported by the intellectuals and the cultural circles, Solidarity is a union of hearts, minds, and hands, rooted in ideals capable of transforming the world. It is the hope of millions of Poles, a hope that is much stronger because it flows from the source of all hope.”
Everyone sensed danger in Poland. How would the Soviet Union react to Solidarity? They certainly would not stay idle. Trying to get ahead of any violent response, Pope John Paul released a statement saying Poland had the moral right to be sovereign and independent, and prayed his country would not be the victim of any aggression from whatever source.
The first response came from the Polish Regime. The Soviets had a new man in charge. General Wojciech (voy-chek) Jaruzelski. Jaruzelski is an interesting man. As a teenager he was deported with his family to Siberian labor camps where he was indoctrinated in communism. He eventually returned to fight for the Soviets against the Nazi invasion. From the sun-bleached landscape of Siberia, he developed a lifelong ailment in his eyes that forced him to where these horribly thick coke bottle glasses. This, combined with a receding hairline, military uniform, and stiff apathetic demeanor made him a woefully unphotogenic character on television when addressing his people. He was however a military man, and a known quantity for the Soviets. They knew he would follow orders.
The Polish government publicly rejected the Gdansk accords. Rumors of arrests against Solidarity leaders began spreading. In response, work strikes resumed. In this environment Father Jerzy was officially appointed chaplain of the steelworks in Warsaw. Every morning he heard their confessions and offered them that little bit of faith they needed to just get through another day – another day of living in a country that was not their own, another day of being denied a fair wage to feed their families with, another day of Poland not being Poland. Author Fr. Bernard Brien, who wrote a biography on Father Jerzy, says the chaplain channeled their inclinations towards violence and purified their hatred, encouraging them never to give in to fear and anger, to remain as lambs in the face of persecution. He told them the only fear they should harbor is being cut off from God. If Lech Walesa was Solidarity’s leader, Father Jerzy emerged as its moral compass, a guide through the valley of persecution and a symbol of union between the Church and the workers of Poland.
The tension for the average pole in the early 80s was intense. They struggled to find bread on the store shelves, there were always rumors of war and arrests, and invasion by the Soviets increased every day. The state media broadcast videos of tanks rolling down the streets of Warsaw. Ammunition and supplies were being delivered to the Soviet troops surrounding the country’s borders. Political scientist Arthur Rachwald, who studied Poland tells us that plans were in fact being drawn up for a full-scale invasion by Soviet, East German, and Czech units. Russian reservists were called up and all military leave was suddenly canceled. The Soviet invasion plans assumed a fierce Polish defense of their homeland – half a million troops on either side fighting in urban centers. It was expected to be bloodier, and longer than the Soviet invasions of Czechoslovakia and Hungary.
On December 5th, 1980, Soviet leaders met to discuss the Polish crisis. They agreed that an immediate crackdown was needed on both Solidarity and the Catholic Church. Soviet leadership was however split on the invasion plans. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was turning into a quagmire, making them reluctant to use force. Yet Poland, unlike Afghanistan, was an existential piece of the Soviet Union. The communists needed its trade, its industry, its workers, its territories, and perhaps most importantly, it needed to show the world that Poland would remain communist. If communism can be abandoned, then the whole thing comes crashing down.
Within the Polish military, the United States had a mole - Colonel Ryszard Kuklunski. He was a liaison between Moscow and Warsaw and was tasked with drawing up plans for a hot war with the west. Buried in these plans was a program to round up Solidarity leaders in the middle of the night and have them shot. The man in the White House who communicated with this Polish mole was Zbigniew Brzezinski – an ethnic Pole who also had connections to the Vatican. Colonel Kuklunski notified Brzezinski of the plans he was being asked to draw up. On December 7th, 1980, Brzezinski, acting on behalf of the White House personally called Pope John Paul to brief him on the apparent pending invasion and squashing of Solidarity. Pope John Paul then made a direct appeal to Chairmen Leonid Brezhnev, himself sending him a personal letter. The official text of the letter is not public, but people who read it say the John Paul II threatened to use all the moral power at his command to direct the world’s attention upon him, further, he threatened to publicly support solidarity, and offered to use his papacy as a mortal threat to the entire Soviet Union by aligning itself with the incumbent anti-communist Reagan administration in the United States.
As the Reagan administration took control of the White House, it had another native Pole briefing the president. Richard Pipes was appointed as NSC’s director of Eastern European and Soviet Affairs. He was Harvard’s leading Sovietologist for years, leaving to serve in the Reagan administration. By March of 1981, Pipe was absolutely convinced of a pending soviet invasion.
General Jaruzelski, Moscow’s man in charge of Poland, discussed the use of force against Solidarity with his general secretary, Stanislaw Kania. Kania, to his credit recognized that Solidarity was not just a few striking workers, that it had now grown to encompass most of the Polish population. At a Polish politburo meeting he responded to calls for military intervention by saying:
“In spite of the pressure from Moscow, I don’t want to use force against the opposition. I don’t want to go down in history as the butcher of the Polish people.”
On March 27th, Solidarity staged the largest workers strike since WWII. It lasted four hours and was nationwide. It was in protest of the regime’s continued beat downs of Solidarity members. The entire economy was brought to a grinding halt, and even though it was scheduled only for four hours, it showed Moscow the power and organization competence of the Polish citizenry. They declared that if the beatings did not stop, the strikes would continue indefinitely. The White House was on full alert, fearing a Soviet invasion was imminent. In public Reagan only confirmed that the situation in Poland was very serious.
Lech Walesa again went into talks with the regime and emerged with a temporary agreement to go back to work. While Warsaw had averted a strike, Moscow’s faith in the regimes ability to handle Poland was waning.
Just over the western border of Poland, across the city of Berlin, over the wall that divided the city, was a military field station facility run by the US government. It was the epicenter of western information- gathering on the Soviet Union and the best opportunity to pick up wayward intelligence via air traffic interception. The military personnel based at field station Berlin were called the eyes and ears of the West. For the moment these military personnel were monitoring necklace of tanks and artillery that ringed the Polish border – 18 divisions in all. The technicians who received this information were tasked with dissecting it, disregarding most, but sending up the chain anything that might be of interest. On March 29th, 1981, a Field Station Berlin technician intercepted communication that sent him running down the hall to his supervisor, shouting: you’ve got to hear this.
A conversation was recorded between two high ranking Soviet officials, one in the Kremlin and one on Poland’s border, discussing that these divisions were elevating to their highest state of combat readiness. World War III looked as if it would begin in Poland. All night on the 29th, and into the 30th, Soviet communication channels were buzzing with information. If the promised nuclear war commenced in Poland, Field Station Berlin would be ground zero for nuclear war. Thus, all non-essential personnel were evacuated from the facility.
The next morning, March 30th, 1981, as these remaining technicians nervously listened to the chatter of the impending invasion, they were left shocked when the radio transmission suddenly fell dead silent. All communication collapsed. The frequencies were quiet. Something had happened. Something had suddenly changed in the Soviet wargame. Something was now different.
On the other side of the world, that same day, in Washington DC, at 2:55 pm to be precise, President Reagan, some staffers, and his security detail were exiting a hotel through a side door after a speech delivered to the ALF-CIO. Lurking in the crowd outside was a mentally unstable man named John Hinkley, who was also carrying a gun. He was obsessed with actress Jodie Foster and thought that if he assassinated the President, he would gain her undying affection. As Reagan was entering his car, waiving off reporters, shots rang out, followed by screaming. Reagan’s press secretary James Brady was now face down on the pavement, bleeding from his skull. Secret service agent Jerry Parr shoved Reagan into the presidential limo and threw his own body on top of him. Parr noticed frothing blood oozing from the president’s mouth, and he ordered the driver to head straight to the nearest hospital.
Then a stroke of luck. The hospital they went to happened to be holding its monthly meeting of department heads. Its best and brightest were in town. But Reagan was losing a lot of blood fast. The chief surgeons rushed to intercept the president, who amazingly had the presence of mind to joke, telling them that he hoped they were republicans.
Yet underneath his cool actor’s confidence, the president was scared. He recalled in his diary:
“My fear was growing because no matter how hard I tried to breathe, it seemed I was getting less and less air… I focused on that tiled ceiling and prayed. But I realized I couldn’t ask for God’s help while at the same time I felt hatred for the mixed up young man who had shot me.”
While the president prayed to God and forgave his would-be assassin, the surgical team was preparing for the removal of a .22 caliber bullet from his lung, centimeters from his heart.
After his surgery, the recovering Reagan wrote:
“I know it’s going to be a long recovery. Whatever happens now, I owe my life to God and will try to serve him in every way I can.”
The president emerged from this ordeal believing that divine intervention had saved him. He told everyone around him, his family, his aides, and he would even bring it up in speeches. While waiting for the doctors’ orders to fully resume work, his thoughts turned increasingly towards Moscow and was determined to jumpstart the negotiation process with the Soviets:
“Perhaps having come so close to death made me feel I should do whatever I could in the years God had given me to reduce the threat of nuclear war; perhaps there was a reason I had been spared.”
He wrote a four-page letter to Leonid Brezhnev, and as was custom, sent it to the state department for review. It was returned completely rewritten. For a moment the president second guessed his new diplomacy. One of his aides reminded him that the American people had elected him, not some anonymous state department bureaucrat. In that moment, Reagan decided he would rely on his own instincts on geopolitics moving forward. A few weeks later, Reagan gave a speech to the US military academy, invoking words spoken by pope Pius XII during his visit to the United States after World War II:
“Into the hands of America, God has placed an afflicted mankind.”
While it’s easy for us the 21st century to wince at statements like this from a president, for the Soviets in 1981, this was exactly the type of crusader they feared Reagan would become. Kremlin news commentator Viktor Nikolayevich Levin accused the president of having the Catholic Church too close to his heart, saying:
“It is precisely this Pius XII postulate that he is attempting to pursue in the realm of practical politics. This is the origin of the problem that we are encountering.”
While appearing to have cooled a bit, thanks in part to the attempted assassination by a mad man, the threat of Soviet invasion into Poland still loomed. Both Reagan and Pope John Paul II were derided in Soviet news as “Nazi remnants”. They were called cunning and dangerous ideological enemies. The pope was deemed a toady of the Americans, and Reagan was called the pope’s new boss in the white house. Then, a direct result of Reagan quoting Pius XII, the Soviets launched a posthumous character assassination campaign against Pius XII, drawing on his German sympathies, labeling him a Nazi sympathizer and cooperator, ignoring the fact the Pope had intervened to save 700,000 Jews from concentration camps.
On May 13th, 1981, a few weeks after the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II was riding through Saint Peter’s Square in his open-air vehicle greeting the crowds. It was the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima. In the crowd was Mehmet Ali Agca, that Muslim Turk, who, at the behest of the Bulgarian covert operatives, nearly took out Lech Walesa. Now he had a new mark. To help him, he had an accomplice, another Turk named Oral Celik. The Bulgarian spies gave the Turks two 9-millimeter handguns and a package with a bomb in it to send the crowd into a panic, allowing them to make their escape.
After 5pm, the Pope, in his vehicle was a few yards from Agca. At 5:13, the assassin raised his pistol and fired four shots. Two bullets hit the pope, one in the left hand and the other in the abdomen. As the pope collapsed backwards, he fell into the arms of his longtime and faithful aide Father Stanislaw Dziwisz.
In the embrace of his closest aide, the pope began reciting the Hail Mary. Later, John Paul would remember:
“At the very moment I fell, I had this vivid presentiment that I should be saved.”
As chaos exploded all around St. Peter’s Square, Father Dziwisz asked his friend, “Where?”
“In the stomach,” the pope replied.
“Does it hurt?” his friend asked.
“It does.”
The blood was pouring, and the pope’s consciousness was fading, now only muttering under his breath, “Jesus, Mother Mary,” Father Dziwisz then administered extreme unction to his friend.
As the surgeons got to work, they had much to do. Damage was done to the colon and small intestines. The pope lost six pints of blood and two feet of his intestines had to be removed during the long and intricate surgery.
The co-assassin, Oral Celik, never detonated the bomb and fled the scene. Mehmet Ali Agca tried to flee but was wrestled to the ground by a Franciscan nun. The nun it turns out saved his life, for the communist Bulgarians were planning to execute Agca once they had him back in their possession.
A few weeks earlier, President Reagan’s bullet missed his heart by centimeters. Pope John Paul’s missed his main abdominal artery by about the same distance. On the operating table, Reagan forgave his assailant. Arriving at the hospital in Rome, the Pope told father Dziwisz that he had forgiven his.
The first few days of his recovery were spent in miserable pain. It was made worse when the pope received news that Cardinal Wyszynski, that great hero of the Polish faithful, was dying. The two old friends were able to have one last phone call together, where the fading Wyszynski said:
“We’re united in suffering, but you will be ok… Holy Father, give me your blessing.” It is said that when the Primate of Poland heard that his former underling had been shot, the primate refused to die until he was sure the pope would survive. Father Dziwisz recounted:
“He closed his eyes for the last time only after receiving confirmation that the Pope was out of danger.”
Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski died on May 28th, 1981, two weeks after the pope’s attempted assassination.
The Italian police and the CIA independently traced the assassination order to the GRU, the military intelligence organization that survived the fall of the Soviet Union and still exists today. Reagan, who was still recovering from his own bullet wounds was continually worried about the well-being of the pope, asking for updates nonstop. A few days after the assassination attempt, the pope celebrated a birthday. Reagan had a note delivered to the pope personally:
“Happily, few leaders in the world today have the dubious distinction of knowing with some precision the kind of event you have just experienced. Fewer still can appreciate, as can I, the depth of courage and commitment on which you must have called, not only to survive that horrible event but to do so with such grace, nobility, and forgiveness. Your heroism, and the universal outpouring of love and concern which it evoked, is proof that a single irrational act cannot prevail against the basic human decency which continues to inspire most people in most places. The qualities you exemplify remain a precious asset as we confront the growing dangers of the moment – confront them with confidence and faith. My prayers, and those of all Americans, are with you as your recovery progresses and as you resume the passionate leadership which has given so many parts of the world a spirit of optimistic renewal.”
The pope however, was thinking little of his birthday, but was instead immersed in spiritual contemplation. Two May 13ths, he was heard to say again and again. Two May 13ths. One in 1917, the other in 1981. The Pope finally requested to see personally the third secret of Fatima, which remained sealed in the archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. On July 18th, a Cardinal delivered two envelopes, one containing Sister Lucias original Portuguese, and the other an Italian translation. From Dziwisz:
“When he was finished, all remaining doubts were gone. He recognized his own destiny.”
With firmness, Pope John Paul II believed his life had been spared by the Lady of Fatima, the Lady of the Rosary, the Mirror of Justice, the Queen of Poland, the Queen of Heaven, the Mother of God. The third secret described a vision of a bishop dressed in white, killed by a group of soldiers firing arrows and bullets. For John Paull II, this was a symbolic vision (and nearly a literal one) of his crusade against communism.
The Pope emerged from his brush with death with a renewed confidence in the will of Heaven. Reagan too, had emerged with the same epiphany. For both, the Soviet Union was no longer a thing to be tolerated, but a thing to be defeated. The president’s first major speaking engagement after the attempted assassination was a commencement speech on May 17th, at Notre Dame University in South Bend Indiana. There he told those young graduates about to enter the real world:
“The years ahead are great ones for this country, for the cause of freedom and the spread of civilization. The West won’t contain communism, it will transcend communism… it will dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written…. When great causes are on the move in the world, we learn we are spirits, not animals, and that something is going on in space and time, and beyond space and time, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty… One who exemplifies those traits so well, Pope John Paull II, a man of peace and goodness, an inspiration to the world, would be struck by a bullet from a man towards whom he could only feel compassion and love…. It was John Paull II who warned in last year’s encyclical on mercy and justice against certain economic theories that use the rhetoric of class struggle to justify injustice… In the name of the alleged justice… the neighbor is sometimes destroyed, killed, deprived of liberty, or stripped of fundament human rights.”
The confidence of this papal encyclical-reading president in the fall of the Soviet Union struck everyone has overconfidence. Reporters seized on it and demanded he elaborate. The president answered:
“I just think it is impossible… for any form of government to completely deny freedom to people and have that go on interminably. There eventually comes and end to it. And I think the things were seeing, not only in Poland but the reports that are coming out of Russia itself about the younger generation and its resistance to long-time government controls, is an indication that communism is an aberration. It’s not a normal way of living for human beings, and I think we are seeing the first, beginning cracks, the beginning of the end.”
Back in Poland, the year 1981 the pressure cooker was ready to blow. In November, General Jaruzelski finally agreed to sit down and talk with Lech Walesa and the new Primate, Cardinal Glemp. The goal for them was an agreement that would allow the rights of the Church and the workers to exist in some meaningful way. But under pressure from Moscow, and more than likely with his own life on the line, Jaruzelski would agree to nothing accept unconditional surrender to the terms of their Russian overlords. They were at an impasse. Of those three men, only Jaruzelski knew what was going to happen next.
On the dark night of December 12th, as most Poles were preparing for the coming Christmas season, Operation Azalea commenced. Phone lines in Poland were suddenly cut. Radio and television stations were swarmed and commandeered by military police who came out of nowhere. At exactly midnight, military reserves loyal to Jaruzelski combined with Soviet forces began Operation Fir. The homes of Solidarity leaders were invaded. The targets were arrested in the dark of night and shuttled off to unknown detention facilities. Lech Walesa, their primary target, was among them. Over 100,000 soldiers, 1800 tanks, 2000 armored vehicles, along with thousands of military cars, trucks and helicopters doing the bidding of Soviet puppet Jaruzelski flooded Warsaw and other major cities. The Polish people awoke that morning to find their beloved country under complete military lockdown.
At 6 am, they tuned in their radios and televisions to hear the general explain the situation:
“Today I address myself to you as a soldier and as the head of the Polish government. I address you concerning extraordinarily important questions. Our homeland is at the edge of an abyss…”
He went on to discuss the terrible state of the economy and social politics of Poland which he linked indirectly to Solidarity. And that the only way to fix this problem was to put the country into a state of martial law for an indefinite amount of time. Curfew was imposed. All Schools and universities were closed. All trade unions, youth organizations, Catholic lay groups, and professional associations were now illegal. Oaths of loyalty were now required by state employees. Lech Walesa was moved to an undisclosed location. Solidarity’s funds were seized. Military checkpoints were established at major inroads. Civilian governors of regions were replaced by colonels and generals. All flights in or out of Poland were banned. All citizens were required to carry identification. A military committee of 15 generals would now run Poland, referring to themselves with a name straight out of Orwell: The Military Council of National Salvation.
Three days after martial law was instituted a group of Solidarity coal miners went on strike to protest Jaruzelski’s actions. The military reserves swept in and violently dispersed them. 21 were wounded, 8 were killed instantly, and one more died in the hospital.
Cardinal Glemp condemned the injustices against the Polish people but also urged the faithful not to engage in fratricidal conflict – to the cardinal and everyone watching, a bloody civil war seemed imminent. Father Dziwisz recalls the pope’s reaction at hearing the news of martial law:
“It was a real shock. The Holy father was anguished and surprised. It was a profound humiliation for Poland. After all that it had suffered throughout its history, Poland didn’t deserve this new martyrdom. It didn’t deserve to be punished so severely.”
The remaining underground leaders of Solidarity released a plea for help to two places, the White House and the Vatican:
“We appeal to you: help us in our struggle by mass protests and moral support. Do not watch passively at the attempts to strangle the beginnings of democracy in the heart of Europe. Be with us in these difficult moments. Solidarity with solidarity. Poland is not yet lost.”
Richard Pipes recalled Reagan being livid at the institution of martial law in Poland. He wanted to do something, but he had so few options available to him. His advisors recalled that he wanted to hit the Soviets hard, but any military action might trigger nuclear war, something the president had solemnly vowed to God that he would prevent. The more Reagan and his advisors discussed Poland, the more they took stock of its potential larger geopolitical role. We’ve already covered how before Reagan was even president, he felt Poland was the key to the Soviet Union. They began to devise plan to use that key, or as Richard Allen put it, they:
“Thought of Poland as a means to the disintegration and collapse of the main danger, the main adversary, the Soviet Union.”
The first thing Reagan did was pick up the phone and call the pope – which is a nice option to have. He assured the pontiff that American sympathies are with the people of Poland and not the Government, and that he looked forward to meeting the pope in person someday. The next day Reagan met with Cardinal Augustino, the Vatican’s secretary of state. The Cardinal delivered a letter from the Pope to the president. Today we still have no idea what it contained. When author Paul Kengor made a FOIA request for the letter – the body was redacted. Whatever the letter said, the discussion with the Pope’s secretary of state was disappointing. He found the Vatican official to be of the school of Ostpolitik, preferring a path of appeasement toward the Soviet Union. Reagan’s aided noted “strikingly different views”.
From then on communication between the pope and the president was kept as high level as possible. When Reagan would send a cable labeled “secret” to the Vatican, only father Dziwisz was allowed to receive the messages for the pontiff. The first of these cables has been declassified since:
“Your Holiness – I am following the fate of your countrymen in Poland with mounting concern…I strongly urge Your Holiness to draw on the great authority that you and the Church command in Poland and urge General Jaruzelski to agree to a conference involving himself, Archbishop Glemp, and Lech Walesa. The United States is prepared to support the search for peace in Poland in any way it can. With deep respect and high regards. Ronald Reagan.”
Later, another declassified cable assured the Pope that the United States would not let the Soviet Union dictate Poland’s future. The pope responded:
“The two planes (politics and morality) can be complementary when they have the same objective. In this case they are complimentary because both the Holy See and the United States have the same objective – the restoration of liberty in Poland.”
A flood of correspondence between the two leaders went on for some time: phone calls, letters, cables, diplomats, liaisons – most of these communications remain classified today, despite both men being dead and the Soviet Union nonexistent. Some of what has not been redacted reveals that the two were very much mystics, sharing deep beliefs in Divine Providence, and the will of Heavan guiding the affairs of the world. They exchanged thoughts on politics, liberty, freedom, and the fate of the billions of souls behind the iron curtain. In one memo written by Reagan for the pope he recounted all the terrible deeds committed by the communists against the faithful. This memo still bears a handwritten amendment by what is assumed to be Reagan’s own:
I tremble to think of God’s verdict on those who acquiesced in these deeds, as well as those who perpetrated them.”
On December 21st, Reagan held a private National Security Council meeting where he told his team that this is the first time in 60 years they have had an opportunity to strike a fatal blow against communism. And that the chance may not come again in their lifetime. For the many Catholics in the room, including Bill Casey and Bill Clark, as well as native Poles like Richard Pipes, Reagan was speaking their language. He then invoked our own nation’s Declaration of Independence, when in the course of human events. He said this is that moment the Poles have arrived at. Reagan then unveiled a plan of all out economic quarantine of the Soviet Union. He demanded that all of NATO join in on it and that for any who didn’t, their alliance with the United States would be subject to reevaluation. The next day Reagan reiterated his determination that Poland was the chance of a lifetime to go against that “damned force”. Then, the following morning Reagan cabled the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev directly:
“The recent events in Poland clearly are not an “internal matter” and in writing to you, as the head of the Soviet government, I am not misaddressing my communication. Your country has repeatedly intervened in Polish affairs during the months preceding the recent tragic events… Attempts to suppress the Polish people – either by the Polish army or police acting under soviet pressure, or through even more direct use of Soviet military force – certainly will not bring about long-term stability in Poland and could unleash a process which neither you nor we could fully control.”
The pope, for his part then publicly made two demands. He urged his countrymen to turn again to the Virgin of Jasna Gora as they always had, that the mother of God would not abandon them in their time of distress. To General Jaruzelski, he demanded that he ceased the shedding of Polish blood.
During these pivotal days in late December, Polish Ambassador to the United States Romuald Spasowski and his wife defected to America. Three days before Christmas, and the day before Reagan had sent his cable to Brezhnev, Reagan hosted the former ambassador and his wife in his office. The ambassador’s wife was grief stricken at leaving her beloved Poland behind. Her head remained in her hands as she wept as silently as she could, during the meeting. The former ambassador implored Reagan not to give up on Poland, to continue speaking directly to the Poles and to the faithful there and keep up the pressure on the Soviet Union. He then brought up Radio Free Europe, the anticommunist radio station broadcast over the Berlin Wall from the West. He said:
“You have no idea. Please Sir, do not ever underestimate how many millions of people still listen to that channel behind the Iron Curtain.”
The ambassador himself was then brought to tears. But went on:
“May I ask you a favor Mr. President? Would you light a candle and put it in the window tonight, for the people of Poland?”
Reagan’s aides recall that Reagan immediately rose and placed a lit candle in the window of the White House dining room. The next evening, December 23rd, Reagan addressed the nation:
VIDEO
The president had communicated to the world that economic warfare against the Polish regime would commence, and solidarity with the Polish people would begin.
Responding to the president’s message, by Christmas eve, the mayor of Chicago, home of the largest US Polish population, implored his residents to place candles in their windows in solidarity with their persecuted brothers and sisters. 3000 people turned out for midnight Mass in Pennsylvania at the National Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa, where the Christmas star in the nativity was replaced by a single candle. In Boston and Maine red and white ribbons bearing the name “solidarity” were handed out. In Colorado, a candle burned in the window of the governor’s mansion. In New York a procession from St. Patrick’s Cathedral to the Polish consulate bore black armbands of mourning.
Soviet press responded with rage:
“What honey-tongued speeches are now being made by figures in the American administration concerning God and His servants on earth. What verbal inventiveness they display in flattering the Catholic Church in Poland. Does true piety lie behind this?”
The Kremlin called it a “rather doubtful Christmas gift”. Polish military regime newspapers referred to Reagan’s speech as “blatant interference in the internal affairs of independent and sovereign Poland”. They called the former Polish ambassador a traitor, giving the Americans “impudent slanderous verbiage that testifies to that man’s moral degradation.” That former Ambassador, Spasowski, would eventually be baptized a Catholic by a Polish American Cardinal and join Reagan’s National Security Council.
It’s amazing to me that for all the bombs, guns, and military might wielded by the president of the United States, a single lit candle did more to enrage the communist regime more than any weapon of war could.
A polish woman who lived through these events later recalled that this Christmas event was the symbol the Poles needed to know that:
“Reagan was going to help us until we could be free like the United States. He was going to end this.”
In Rome, at the Vatican, another Pole felt the same way about this president. At 6 pm on Christmas Eve Pope John Paull II lit a candle for his homeland and placed it on the windowsill of the papal apartment overlooking Saint Peter’s Square.
Part Five: Whispers of Freedom
As 1982 dawned for Poland, thousands of workers were still imprisoned without trial. Anti-riot military units patrolled the streets. Sidewalks, bridges, and buildings bristled with that damned barbed wire. A casual stroll out in public subjected you to random searches. Your house could be raided on a whim – as a reminder – don’t you dare even have a thought about anything anti-state.
The armed takeover of the country by General Jaruzelski was a frightening success. Order was restored to Poland. The streets were quiet. The workers worked.
But there was resistance. It wasn’t underground or even clandestine, it was loud, public, and could be heard by anyone – all one had to do was go to Mass. Father Jerzy Popieluszko was still chaplain to the workers in the steelyard in Warsaw. And solidarity or no solidarity, martial law, or no martial law – he was determined to speak the truth. In his own words, he said:
“Truth is unchangeable. It cannot be destroyed by decrees.”
A priest and friend of Father Jerzy recounts that martial law effected a change in the chaplain:
“Thanks to the tragic events of December 1981, a timid, somewhat awkward young man became a confident, courageous leader, as though a new spirit had entered into him.”
Father Jerzy, at the direction of his superior, had decide to resurrect a liturgical tradition in Poland from the 19th century - during the time Poland ceased to exist on world maps. During that period certain Masses called Masses for the Fatherland would be celebrated. Under Russian occupation, the Roman Rite and Polish traditions were banned, so the masses were often celebrated in crypts. These Masses for the Fatherland were resurrected earlier in the 20th century, during the years of Nazi occupation.
Father Jerzy invoked in the Masses the intercession of the Queen of Poland:
Mother of those who hope in Solidarity, pray for us.
Mother of the deceived, pray for us.
Mother of those arrested in the night, pray for us.
Mother of prisoners, pray for us.
Queen of suffering Poland, pray for us.
Queen of fighting Poland, pray for us.
Queen of Independent Poland, pray for us.
Queen of always faithful Poland, pray for us.
We beseech you, Mother, who is the hope of millions, let us all live in freedom, truth, and every day faithful to You and Your Son. Amen.
Hundreds of workers would turn out to hear the sermons of Father Jerzy before beginning their faithless workday:
“A regime that needs weapons to stay in existence dies by itself. Its violence is the proof of its moral inferiority. If Solidarity won hearts, it was not by struggling with power but by offering resistance on its knees, with a rosary in hand. In front of outdoor altars, it demanded the dignity of human work, freedom of conscience, and respect for man. Solidarity is a mighty tree: its top has been removed, and its branches have been cut, but its roots are deeply rooted among us, and new branches will grow back.”
Father Jerzy new that with Solidarity outlawed, the hope of Poland was the Church through its priest and bishops. They had to minister to the lost, dreary, and hopeless faithful. Cardinal Glemp ordered his clergy to minister first to the destitute families of those imprisoned. Clothing, food, and supplies were taken up in collections. Remember, these are people who could not find what they themselves needed on the grocery store shelves and still gave to the poor. The bishop also urged caution in political activities, to not make the present situation any worse. Father Jerzy, while celebrating his masses for the father land did not get the memo:
“You can imprison the body but never the spirit! No, nobody can lock up lofty human thought, or the heart that suffers for its native land, or the faith of our ancestors, or the expectation of the children, or the feelings that weld together the unity of a people. May neither simple solidarity nor the faith ever be lacking! And the Lord will say: Let there be Poland!”
Often, Father Jerzy’s masses resembled history lessons, walking the faithful back through a thousand years of their heritage. Beside the altar would often be some artwork that depicted all the popular uprisings, reminding the Poles, we’ve been here before. “As children of God,” he said “we cannot be slaves. Our divine affiliation bears within it the heritage of freedom, especially freedom of conscience and of opinion.”
As word of these Masses for the Father land spread, informants and spies of the regime would slink the pews in to listen, and they would hear:
“It is impossible to speak about justice… where the word God has been officially eliminated from the life of the fatherland. Let us be aware of the unlawfulness and prejudice that are inflicted on our Christian nation when it is made atheistic by law, when they destroy in the souls of the children the Christian values that their parents have instilled in them from the cradle… the prevalent policy is an absurd stubborn attempt to take God away from people and to impose on them an ideology that has nothing in common with our Chrisitan tradition. This programmed atheism, this struggle against God and all that is holy, is at the same time a struggle against human greatness and dignity; for man is great because he bears within himself the dignity of the children of God… Truth contains within itself the ability to resist and to blossom in the light of day, even if they try very diligently and carefully to hide it. The men who proclaim truth do not need to be numerous. Christ incidentally surrounded himself with a small number of individuals. Falsehood is what requires a lot of people, because it always needs to be renewed and fed. Out of duty a Christian is always to abide in truth, even if it costs us dearly.”
Father Jerzy was quickly becoming a rockstar. Family members and friends of those imprisoned, who appeared to be hopelessly bent and broken by their oppressors found their faith and zeal renewed at his Masses. They said they came to these Masses because there, in front of the steelworks, they felt free, if but for a few fleeting moments. They prayed together with their fellow poles. They sang and cried out to the Lord that he would hear their lamentation. It was true solidarity.
Other priests, inspired by Father Jerzy began to follow in his example. Soon, from all the pulpits in Poland you could hear martial law along Jaruzelski himself being condemned as evil. The context was again shifted into black and white terms - good against evil, love against hate, truth against lies.
Back in DC, the president was espousing similar feelings. He kept the rhetoric against communist Poland a top priority. In April, of 82, he delivered a speech to the AFL-CIO saying:
“Poland’s government says it will crush democratic freedoms. Well, let us tell them, you can imprison your people. You can close their schools. You can take away their books, harass their priests, and smash their unions. You can never destroy the love of God and freedom that burns in their hearts. They will triumph over you.”
On the international stage, the Reagan administration took an unprecedented diplomatic step. They became the first administration in United States history to officially establish diplomatic relations with the Vatican, and exchange ambassadors. The cooperation between the two leaders, which had already been close, became closer. CIA director Bill Casey was now known to often commandeer a military aircraft and visit the pope personally to exchanging intelligence information. Once, as a gift, he gave the pope a satellite image of his visit to Poland in 79 – a small white speck amid a sea of faithful poles.
In actual strategy, Reagan’s National Security Director Bill Clark formulated a plan called National Security Decision Directive, or NSDD. Within it they codified NSDD 32, 54, 66, ad 75 - detailed plans for the complete liberation of eastern Europe from Russian influence and replace it with political pluralism. Further it explicitly detailed a full reversal of Soviet influence on a worldwide scale. This was far different from containment, or detente. Instead, these directives initiated a wholistic anti-Soviet foreign policy, officially authorizing clandestine financial, intelligence, material, and logistical support for the Polish Solidarity movement. The Pope was kept abreast of all these happenings through CIA director Bill Casey.
A month after Reagan’s speech to the AFL-CIO, the pope visited Fatima, Portugal on May 13th to thank Our Lady for sparing his life. He then crowned a statue of Our Lady and set within the crown the bullet which he believed her hand had guided.
On June 7th, 1982, pope and president would meet at last. Receiving the American president at the Vatican, the Pope spoke first:
“Mr. President, I am particularly pleased to welcome you today to the Vatican. Although we have already had many contacts, it is the first time that we have met personally.”
The pair then went behind closed doors in the Vatican library for 50 minutes. No aides, no translators. What has been gathered from staffers briefed on the meeting is that the two agreed that both men had been sparred by Heaven for some purpose. They reportedly talked about life and death and even prayed together. They discussed the scourge of atheistic communism, both agreeing the Soviet empire was not long for the world. They then agreed on certain actions that could expedite the end of this evil empire - actions that would begin in Poland. That if Poland could be broken out of the Soviet sphere of influence, then the whole damn thing would come crashing down. Poland would be a dagger to the heart of the Soviet empire. The liberation of Poland was the basis of a spiritual bond and cooperative mission forward.
At the end of their private meeting, the pair addressed the press corps. In sending the President off, the Pope reminded him:
“At this present moment in the history of the world, the United States is called, above all, to fulfill its mission in the service of world peace. America is in a splendid position to help all humanity enjoy what she herself is intent on possessing. With faith in God and belief in universal human solidarity may America step forward in this crucial moment in history to consolidate her rightful place at the service of world peace.”
From that day forward, for American and Vatican international policy, Poland was everything. Catholics Bill Clark and Bill Casey, when they couldn’t fly to Rome would engage in what they called “cappuccino diplomacy”. The local Italian cardinal, Casey and Clark said, made delicious authentic Italian cappuccino. Remember this was before Starbucks. And so, when there was an imminent matter of national security at hand, and fearing bugged phone lines to the Vatican embassy, Clark and Casey would phone the cardinal and ask him if they could come over for a cappuccino – where sensitive matters could be discussed.
Often, information was provided to the CIA from the Vatican ambassador. It has been said that the Vatican is unrivaled as a listening post. Without breaking the seal of confession, the clergy of Poland would report various upsurges in certain confessions from government employees that portended government operations. These were reported to the Polish Primate, who reported them to the Vatican, who reported them to the CIA.
In Poland in 1982 as the Masses for the fatherland gave the poles a small glimpse of freedom and hope amid a hopelessness, the Pope officially announced that he would be returning to his homeland, this time, during a state of martial law. Jaruzelski had no idea what to do. His generals were split. On the one hand, allowing the pope to visit his flock at peak tension and during martial law could cause even more unrest and lead to a full fledge uprising. On the other hand, the visit might add legitimacy to the extreme tactics, and calm the people. Further, if the regime demonstrated openness, the west might reopen its checkbook, end the sanctions crushing the Polish economy, and turn back on the flow of aid that Poland so desperately needed.
Jaruzelski first tried to delay to a future unknown date, but the Primate of Poland and the Vatican insisted on as soon as possible. The regime eventually relented and began drafting operational plans to deal with the millions upon millions of faithful Poles that would certainly turn out.
Jaruzelski was in over his head. He had a growing situation in the summer of 1982. Father Jerzy Popieluszcko was now nationally famous. His sermons were being recorded and transcribed in illegal newspapers throughout Poland. As many as 20,000 people were turning out in person for his Masses. Surrounding these crowds were police vehicles and military personnel, seething with hatred at these holy sacrifices that completely delegitimized anything and everything the regime was trying to do. A security officer, and card-carrying atheist for the regime confronted a laborer and admitted:
“For us communists, each of these Mass is like a lost battle, and if I could, I would kill you with one blow, you and your Father Popieluszko, and that would be the end of it.”
Father Jerzy had also recently made it a habit to show up at the kangaroo courts sending laborers to prison for opposing the regime. When the verdicts were read aloud, Father Jerzy would stand up, turn his back to the judge and begin singing the Polish national anthem. His parish at St. Stanislaus became a chief import/export hub in Warsaw for medications and supplies for these poor prisoner’s families. He was, as one laborer put it, helping the polish faithful discern the signs of the times. They knew they were suffering persecution and were called by Father Jerzy to be saints.
Father Jerzy was determined to keep his flock in active battle in the spiritual realm, not the worldly. When some of his parishioners would cry out in anger, or desire to lash out with violence that the regime so deservingly had coming its way, Father Jerzy would tell them:
“Go your separate ways in recollection; do not listen to the provocateurs who are trying to get you to demonstrate or to chant. Only one thing brought us here: the good of our fatherland and our common prayer for it.”
One of his parishioners at which father’s words were directed remembered:
“Sometimes we were aggressively, combatively standing up against the government. Then Father exhorted us to love our adversaries, and the people gave up their hatred. I personally was truly disarmed by that priest.”
After such astounding sermons of patriotic zeal for their beloved country, to follow them up with these appeals to love your enemy added insult to injury to the communist regime. A Solidarity laborer remembers:
“The regime detested these Masses because the people came to them to gain strength, like a man who comes to drink water at a well and leaves reassured and courageous.”
Every step of the young priest’s life was now under extreme surveillance. And then of course came the falsification of sermons, calling for violence and revolution, and attacks on his chastity and personal piety. And then worse things began happening. A government vehicle veered off the road while he was walking and tried to run him over. He learned General Jaruzelski was considering an arrest warrant. Despite being a hunted man, Father Jerzy reiterated his resolve in his private journal:
“They can imprison me, arrest me, and cause scandal, but I cannot stop my activity, which is a service rendered to the Church, the fatherland, and my people.”
One night, in December of 1982, while he was sleeping, a bomb was thrown through his window and detonated. Miraculously, the frail priest survived uninjured. One of his friends confronted him about taking more precautions for his safety. Father Jerzy only replied:
“If they want to kill me, they will kill me. On the way to church, or at the rectory, someone will jump out from behind a bush and stab me in the back. They will say that it was a madman. Believe me, if they want to kill me, nothing and no one will prevent them from doing so.”
The status of a living breathing martyr for the faith only increased his magnetism. Even atheist now sought him out and were converted by his presence and his stirring zeal for faith and country. At hearing of these conversions father Jerzy wrote in his journal:
“What great things you accomplish, O God, through the intervention of such an unworthy creature as I am. Thank you for making use of me this way.”
From D.C., the president had taken the plea of the former Polish ambassador about Radio Free Europe seriously. Everything about the broadcasts was being amped up during 1982. For the first time ever across the iron curtain, Church services were now being blasted into the airspace in places where religion was illegal.
To combat this, the Russians put the Polish regime in charge of concocting a disinformation campaign against the Polish pope. They forged a diary written by a dead woman that claimed a romantic relationship with John Paul while he was a bishop. Then four Polish secret police officers, led by Captain Grzegorz Piotrowski secretly planted the diary in the apartment of a local priest, where it would be “discovered” during a random search. However, after they planted the diary, Piotrowski went to the bar and got drunk, then he crashed his car on the way home and was arrested. At the police station, he bragged about the plot, spilling everything. Word quickly got out about the planted evidence. During all this the priest whose apartment the diary was planted discovered it prematurely and delivered it to his superiors, who quickly understood what was happening. The entire thing unraveled. I wish I could say that was the end of Piotrowski’s nefarious deeds, but it was just the beginning. He will come up again.
Reagan meanwhile was not only amping up Radio broadcasts, but also his rhetoric against the Soviets. In a now famous speech dubbed “the evil empire speech”, he declared Soviet Russia the “focus of evil in the moder world”.
Behind the scenes, with only a few key people in his cabinet privy, supplies and money were flowing into the underground Solidarity movement to Poland. In the summer of 1983 Reagan declared that Americans were bound to Poles and would never forget those brave people who have a spirit no one can crush. An index search of Reagans public documents puts Poland as the single most mentioned country –the Russians noticed this. One Kremlin newspaperman wrote:
“One has the impression that it will not take much more for Reagan to start speaking fluent Polish.”
In early 83, Cardinal Glemp was handed a list by the regime of 69 extremist priest. Father Jerzy was of course on this list. The Cardinal, who had more concerns for preservation of the sacraments, and too probably out of fear for the lives of his clergy, did what he could to reign them in. Some he transferred; some had their duties suspended. Father Jerzy was reprimanded for the political nature of his Masses. The regime had their own way of dealing with these priests as well. None on this list escaped beatings, torture, harassment, or attacks on their character in the press.
Everywhere Father Jerzy went, he was followed. He would be stopped and searched at random. Any of his friends or fellow priests that were with him would be subject to the same. As a torture tactic to keep the priest from sleeping, the regime would send a parade of vehicles to drive in circles around his apartment all night, honking their horns. It was all wearing on him. He began noting in his journal that the mental toll of no sleep at night and constant surveillance and harassment by day was deteriorating his spirit – it was by design.
He eventually got to the point where he would directly acknowledge the obvious government moles in his congregation:
“I address those who come to these Masses in obedience to orders issued to them. Have a little honesty with your superiors: inform them accurately about what you hear and see here, so that your superiors do not make themselves ridiculous by accusing us of false, fabricated things.”
Father Jersy was not only surrounded by spies, but also now, surrounded by a group of faithful laborers who formed a rotating guard to protect their priests. They installed grills on his windows to prevent any more bombing attempts and always posted at least one guard at his residence at night.
But Father Jerzy was deteriorating, nonetheless. His ceaseless work, the constant surveillance, and the weight of assassination at any moment caused him to write in his journal:
“I am at the limits of my physical and psychological resistance. I feel increasingly oppressed by them. But God is good: he gives me mental and physical strength, so much so that it astonishes me, even though I do spend tormented nights.”
Morale in Poland was at an all-time low. Martial law seemed as If it would never end. Father Jerzy sensed this and turned his sermons toward reviving his flock’s spirit:
“Jesus Christ is our companion in misfortune. He shows us how never to lose confidence. And as often happens, our hope, the hope of unions, of our fatherland, is weakened today. We need you, Lord, to strengthen our hope that victory always belongs to what is good, to what is great, to what is noble, to whatever lies in union with you.”
Shortly after this sermon, an 18-year-old cantor in Father Jery’s parish was assassinated by the regime. A mother was deprived of her only son. A shepherd had lost a sheep. In the young man’s memory Father Jersy set up a cross in the church garden.
The spirit of the polish people was nearly extinguished. The atheist communist regime after forty years was on the verge of total moral victory over Poland. It was in this gloomy, grey, and oppressive climate of submission that Pope John Paul II returned to his homeland on June 16th, 1983. General Jaruzelski received him at the presidential palace. At meeting this Polish successor to the chair of Peter, Jaruzelski himself later remembered:
“My legs were trembling, and my knees were knocking together. The pope, this figure in white, it all affected me emotionally. It was a feeling beyond all reason.”
The pope was calm, yet cold toward the dictator. Jaruzelski listened with clenched fists as the pope recounted that when he arrived, he had kissed the ground of his homeland again, and likened it to kissing the hand of his earthly mother. When it was Jaruzelki’s turn to speak his hands were visibly shaking. The political spin of the visit began immediately. A party leader praised the pope’s visit as “evidence of the far advanced normalization of the life of the country.” A laughable statement.
Like his first pilgrimage, John Paul traversed all of Poland, this time adding the grave of his mentor Cardinal Wyszynski to his stops. At Saint John’s Cathedral in Warsaw, the Pope looked out at his broken countrymen in despair. He told them he knew of their:
“Bitterness of disappointment, of humiliation, of suffering, of the loss of the freedom, and of human dignity being trampled underfoot.”
Days later, back at Jasna Gora, before the icon of the Black Madonna, Pope John Paul proclaimed:
“I want to stand before the mother of God. I want to bring her all the sufferings of my nation, and at the same time its desire for victory that does not abandon it.”
It was a healing balm the Poles needed to hear from their pope.
At a stadium before over a million people, the pope reminded his flock that 1983 was the 300th anniversary of King Sobieski’s victory over the Ottomans at Vienna, when the winged hussars arrived and preserved freedom for all of Europe, Antemurale Christianitatis. He recalled how after the victory the Poles and the Turks had become close allies, with Turkey joining NATO against Russia. During the partition period, when Poland did not exist, the Turks had such respect for Poland that when Russian envoys would arrive in Turkey, the Ottomans would ceremonially ask, is the envoy from Poland here? To which the Ottomans would reply, “not yet”.
The pope then spoke words anathema to Soviet geopolitical policy, that Poland has a:
“Right to a sovereign existence and normal cultural and socioeconomic development. The fate of Poland in 1983 cannot be a matter of indifference to the nations of the world – especially of Europe and America.”
In a speech to the Polish youth in Warsaw the pope urged them to be patient and vigilant, causing the regime to lodge an official complaint with the church hierarchy. What exactly were they to be patient for? The complaints were ignored. Further antagonizing the regime, the pope peppered all his speeches with the word “solidarity”, with a lowercase “s”, yet each time drawing thundering applause.
Next, the pope returned to Krakow, his old see, where he beatified two new saints who participated in an uprising against Tsarist Russia in 1863. Illegal solidarity banners were unfurled, and the crowd marched the seven miles to the next sight the pope was to visit, the consecration of the eighth church in Nowa Huta – that city that was specifically built to exclude churches, where the soil of its first was broken by John Paul himself.
The following day, the pope was scheduled to meet with the imprisoned Lech Walesa. The regime had tried numerus times to interfere with this meeting. When roadblocks were put up, the pope’s entourage insisted the Holy Father had the right to meet with whatever pole he wanted. The pope himself told the regime that he would promptly return to Rome if he were unable to visit the imprisoned.
Wherever the pope went, as before, the streets were lined with papal banners and polish flags, but now mixed in were signs bearing that banned word, Solidarity, and others that read, Free Lech Walesa.
Father Jerzy, who again had resumed his medical service for the visit, remembered:
“Despite the pitch-black night in which we were plunged, despite the fading hopes, despite our sufferings, a ray of God’s grace shone on our fatherland: the visit of our Holy Father John Paull II. Let us thank the Lord for having strengthened us, through him, in the assurance that we are on the right track.”
After the Pope had departed his homeland once more, he left the poles with a renewed sense of themselves. The underground press reported the pope arrived as a candle in the dark, calling on Poles to stand up tall and proud of how far they had come against the regime. That the barrier of hopelessness had been broken, allowing them to walk forward in martyrdom:
“For all the depression and repression, Poland may be said to be in a better condition than any of its neighbors – including even Hungary. This transformation of consciousness, this moral revolution, is a lasting achievement of the Pope and Solidarity. Whatever develops in Poland over the next few years, it will be different from anything we have seen before. Though the police rule the streets, the country cannot be normalized – i.e. returned to Soviet norms. Though the totalitarian Communist system remains in outward form, in reality it is still being dismantled from within.”
Prophetic words. One month after the Pope’s visit, martial law was lifted. Solidarity was still banned yet many of those imprisoned illegally… were released. Lech Walesa was allowed to return to the Gdansk shipyards as an electrician. But for Father Jerzy Popieluszko, life, however, would not go back to normal:
“It was becoming difficult for me to appear in public. Right away there are ovations: I have to autograph books and pictures. I would like to be alone, to be able to work in recollection, but now it is a steady grind from morning to evening.”
On December 12th, 1983, communist regime prosecutors had decided they had enough of a case to put Father Jerzy behind bars. They called him to police headquarters for several hours of interrogation. He was then escorted to his apartment for what the police said was a “routine search”. It was a trap. During his interrogation the police filled his apartment with an absurd number of explosives, ammunition, detonators, tear gas, Solidarity leaflets and illegal books. It was so over the top that Father Jerzy’s first instinct was to laugh. He turned to the police and said: “Gentlemen, you exaggerate.”
Despite the idiotic charges, Father Jerzy was subjected to a sham trial and thrown in jail. Cardinal Glemp, however, stepped in quickly for his priest and secured his release, a testament to the growth in authority of the Church hierarchy. Remembering his release, Father Jerzy said:
“The news was so important that radio and television reporters were waiting for me at the exit. I went right away to St. Stanislaus Church, where in my honor there was a large cross made of candles, topped with the V of victory. A crowd stood in front of the rectory, and at the window was Father Bogucki, who waved to me, tears in his eyes. My room was full of flowers.”
Yet, after his release, Cardinal Glemp, who had earned the nickname Comrade Glemp, strongly rebuked Father Jerzy for his propensity for politics. Jerzy was distraught, writing in his journal that the primate’s words hurt him more than the communists.
As 1984 got underway, the street level police gangsters of the regime were enraged at the failure to keep Father Jerzy behind bars. The threats amped up, the slander, the intimidation, all of it increased. He received dark phone calls at night, warning him that soon he would be hanged, thrown from a train, or crucified. One day, while sitting with a friend, an Ursuline nun, he confided:
“I have no strength left, physical, psychological, or spiritual.”
To help her friend, the nun invited the priest to visit their convent far up in the mountains. Father Jerzy accepted and spent 10 days in solitude, and silence:
“Today, before lunch, I went to the choir of the church to say my Rosary. A blessed silence. On the ambo was a gilded cross. From time to time a ray of sunlight got through, and the cross was illuminated as though it were made of gold. A divine warmth. Then dusk fell. My God, how that resembled everyday life: grey, heavy life, occasionally dismal and often unbearable. Fortunately, there are rays of joy, of Your presence, a sign that You are there, in the midst of us, always the same, good, and merciful… There my spiritual rebirth began.”
When Father Jerzy emerged from that convent, he walked now with the peace of knowing his life was entirely in God’s hands. His friends noted he was happy again, cheerful, radiating assurance, serenity, and calm strength. His presence was edifying to others. Capuchin father and friend of Father Jerzy Gabriel Bartoszewski remembered:
“We mentioned the possibility of him receiving a different pastoral assignment. Then, after a brief reflection, he uttered this decisive, poignant sentence: ‘I have dedicated myself, and I will not withdraw.’ Then a very long silence set in among us. His face, still calm and serene, had darkened momentarily. The words that he had uttered expressed profound determination. Personally, I felt something like an intense shudder. This event is engraved on my memory, and the recollection of that shudder is still with me.”
Over the next few months, he was arrested 13 more times and survived another assassination attempt: “Genuine oppression, but almighty God gives me spiritual fortitude. Psychologically I feel well. I no longer am afraid, I am ready for anything. The people are wonderful. Always flowers, always letters of solidarity.”
In this state of complete surrender to divine providence, Father Jerzy stood before his congregation at one of his Masses for the Fatherland, and looked upon the two eagles of the Polish flag, and invited those present to meditate upon them:
“You must fortify your soul and raise it very high so as to be able to fly above everything, like them. Only by resembling eagles will you brave the winds, the storms, and the tempests of history, without allowing yourselves to be enslaved to falsehood. The duty of a priest is to speak the truth, to suffer for the truth, and if he must, to give his life for the truth. Let us pray that our whole life may be permeated with truth.”
On October 19th, 1984, Father Jerzy was sick, aching from head to toe. He had a fever too, but he had promised to celebrate a Mass at a parish some distance away, 190 miles. He and his driver, Waldemar Chrostowski hopped in father’s Volkswagen and began their trip. They immediately noticed the tail. The car behind them had three men inside. Chrostowski, wisely made note of the make, model, and license plate number. The Fiat followed them for the entire trip.
Arriving at the Parish of the Holy Polish Martyrs, the pastor was nervous for Father Jerzy and asked him to lead a rosary amid the people, instead of saying Mass – as he would be a harder target that way. After leading the sorrowful mysteries for the huge crowd that turned up, he led another prayer:
“Mary, Mother of the land of the Poles, you are our hope; we kneel before you. Today we wish to take up our cross, the cross of our work, our sorrows, our problems, and to follow the way of your Son to His Calvary and His agony.”
In the back of the Church a man whose face was contorted with anger, furiously stamped his feet, disrupting the prayer. Father Jerzy recognized him as one of the men in the car tailing him. That man was in fact was Captain Grzegorz Piotrowski – the same man who botched the phony journal plot against Pope John Paull II.
Father Jerzy continued:
“Let us pray that we may be freed from fear and intimidation, but above all from the desire for revenge and violence.”
Those were the last words Father Jerzy Popieluszcko ever uttered in public.
The pastor at Holy Martyrs urged Father Jerzy to stay the night but he was determined to hit the road so that he could say Mass in Warsaw at 9am the next morning. Back now on the lonely road, Jerzy and his driver regained their tail. This time it aggressively tailgated them and flashed their high beams of and on. Then it passed alongside them and waived for them to stop. Chrostowski feared the worst and hit the gas, but Father Jerzy urged him to obey, saying that it was probably just another inspection. And so, both vehicles came to a stop in the middle of nowhere on a forest road.
The three men got out of their car. One was in a police uniform. He told Chrostowski to get out for a field sobriety test. As Chrostowski stepped out of the driver’s seat he was immediately seized, gagged, put in handcuffs and thrown into the front seat of the Fiat. One of them men pressed a revolver against his temple and threatened to kill him if he resisted. Chrostowski could not see what was happening, but he heard his priest beg the police why they were doing this? He then heard the distinct sounds of flesh being beaten. Chrostowski could only sit there and listen to blow after blow until the beating ceased. It ceased, because one of the blows from a night stick had hit Father Jerzy in the back of his head, knocking him out. Piotrowski and the other man then dragged Father Jerzy to the trunk of their fiat and slammed it shut. They then drove off, leaving the empty Volkswagen on the side of the road.
Chrostowski recalled:
First, I thought of grabbing the steering wheel to make the car roll over, but then I realized that the priest would not survive it. At all costs I had to appear calm so as not to draw attention of the attackers, but my mind was agitated, seeking a way to escape and to save Jerzy.”
Finally, when the car entered a well-lit part of town, Chrostowski, opened the passenger door and flung himself upon the pavement. The fall broke his handcuffs freeing him, but he was uninjured and ran for help. The men let him go, the priest was their quarry.
Meanwhile Father Jerzy had somehow loosened the ropes around his hands inside the trunk, and when he sensed the car slowing, he managed to open the trunk and make a break for it. Piotrowski ran down the injured and disoriented priest and smashed the back of his head again with the night stick, knocking him to the ground. Then another beating commenced. Blow after blow after blow, more unhinged this time. His accomplices looked on stunned, thinking the captain had gone mad. Once unconscious again, the three wrapped Father Jerzy’s bleeding nose and mouth in tape and threw him in the trunk again. Still Father Jerzy again managed to reopen it but didn’t have the strength to jump out. Piotrowski was wrathful now. He walked around the vehicle, shoved his revolver in the priest’s face and told him that if he made one more sound, he would strangle him with his bare hands. He then lifted his night stick into the air and smashed in the priest’s face, breaking through the cartilage and bone. It was the death blow.
Ten minutes before midnight the three men drove to the Vistula River, tied two bags of stones to the body of the priest and dropped it into the water. The other two men were police lieutenants, Pekala and Chmielewski. Pekala turned to the group and declared “Popieluszko is dead.” Chmielewski replied, “that’s right.” Pekala went home to drink, and remembered thinking to himself, “now we are murderers.”
When Captain Piotrowski was eventually arrested for his crime, he recalled beating the priest with an unnatural rage:
“I hit him near the head. He fell limp again. I think he must have been unconscious. And then I became – never mind, it doesn’t matter.”
This at least is the official story of the death of Father Jerzy. His torture wounds, and conflicting statements from the Soviets suggest much higher up involvement. I have found that historians seem to be trusting the official story less and less – but we can’t speculate on this podcast. We will have to make do with the best information we have.
When Father Jerzy did not show for Mass the next morning, everyone knew in their hearts what had happened. Within hours all of Poland was searching for their beloved priest. Masses at St Stanislaus were being said every hour. Then news of the abduction hit. A fellow parish priests of Father Jerzy recounted:
“What a shock that was. Then the information was broadcast on television. Immediately afterward, people converged on the church. They were weeping, reciting the rosary. The emotion was a tremendous pitch.”
Lech Walesa pressed everyone to remain calm, specifically telling his fellow laborers to not react with violence. General Jaruzelski had a nightmare scenario on his hands – his entire nation was on the verge of revolting against him in righteous anger. They demanded to know what he had done with their priest. The General immediately went before the press and said that the police were looking for him, and that everything would be brought to the light. Pope John Paul II sent a note to the regime – find Father Jerzy.
Finally on October 27th, a general for Jaruzelski went public and declared the arrest of the three men who committed that horrible crime. He also implication a senior officer to Piotrowski. The statement was one of embarrassment for Jaruzelski, who either had to now either admit complicity in the murder, or incompetence in his rule, that his underlings were operating without and beyond his control. Three days later, Father Jerzy’s body was recovered from the Vistula. It was so unrecognizable from decay and mutilation, that only the priestly clothes gave him away. The regime police who discovered the body searched for his ID. When they saw that the profession said “priest”, they laughed amongst themselves, amused that one could call the priesthood a profession.
Father Folejewski was directed to deliver the news to the parishioners of St Stanislaus:
“Right after Mass we announced Jerzy’s death to the faithful. The first reaction was tears, outbursts of emotion, cries of sorrow that still echo in my head. Then I went up to the microphone and started the prayer Our Father, which was immediately taken up by the crowd. I remember that we stumbled on the petition: ‘Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.’ We needed to be disarmed, and so I asked the congregation to repeat that verse several times. But I sensed the effort that it cost us. The parishioners were so angry that if I had said, ‘let’s go into the streets and break up everything’, they would have done it.”
A solidarity member recalled:
“We naturally thought of revenge, but then Jerzy’s words calling us to overcome evil with good came to mind. If we resorted to violence, would it not contradict everything he had taught us and kill him a second time?”
The pope also cautioned his brothers:
“Let us pay our final respects to Father Popieluszko in Christian dignity and peace. May the great significance of this death not be troubled or darkened in any way.”
The mortician team did what they could with the remains. The Sisters of Charity clothed his body in a white shirt and cassock. He was then covered in a red chasuble. A cross and rosary given to him by the pope were placed in his hands. The casket was transported to a chapel where the archbishop blessed it with holy water. The pallbearers, all priests, then took up the coffin and brought it outside to the head of an awaiting procession. Outside the crowd was singing hymns and holding funeral candles and led the coffin to the hearse. The convoy then set out to the cemetery. Just as the Poles had come out to the streets to welcome their pope, they now came out dressed in black to mourn their priest. One of them remembers:
“Hundreds of taxis and automobiles followed the hearse to the city limits. It was a concert of horns. The procession moved slowly westward, so that the setting sun illuminated the way. I will never forget that red sun. At the village of Zoltki, the limit of the archdiocese… the convoy stopped. Everyone got out of the cars to recite the angelus with the inhabitants of the village who were waiting for us, kneeling on the roadway. Emotions were high. Even our driver was weeping.”
It was dusk when the convoy arrived at Jerzy’s beloved Saint Stanislaus. Tens of thousands of people awaited his arrival, as they had awaited his Masses for the Fatherland. The church bell was tolling the death knell. The laborers from the steelworks lifted the coffin bearing their chaplain upon their broad shoulders and carried him into the church. During the Mass, the congregation once again audibly stumbled at the Our Father verse commanding us to forgive. Father Jerzy’s mother then stood up and turned to face the congregation, saying, “I forgive”. She then approached the casket, and bent over it in grief saying:
“It is very emotional for the others, but for the mother it is lifelong suffering. I do not wish on those who persecuted him that they should suffer as they made him suffer. May Jesus forgive them, may they be converted, and may they realize against whom they were fighting: not against my son, but against God.”
The Primate of Poland, Cardinal Glemp presided over the official solemn funeral Mass. Half a million people turned up for this event. Numbers not seen since the pope was in Poland. Candles, flowers, crucifixes, and Solidarity banners waived amidst the sea of mourners. Lech Walesa, who was present for the first Mass Father Jerzy’s ever offered for the steelworkers now gave his final goodbye to his friend:
“We bid you adieu, Servant of God, while promising not to bow to violence. In solidarity in the service of our country, we will respond to falsehood with truth and to evil with good. Recollected and with dignity we say farewell to you with the hope of a just social peace in our country. Rest in peace. Solidarity lives, because you gave your life for it.”
The moment the coffin was lowered in the ground, Father Toefil, friend of Father Jerzy, proclaimed:
“The Polish ground has just received a new martyr.”
While he lived, steelworkers and parishioners guarded Father Jerzy from assassination attempts. They kept a nightly vigil at his residence. Now in death, they maintained that vigil. Today they take turns guarding the resting place of Father Jerzy, day or night, rain or shine. These simple guardians have seen the most powerful and most famous people in the world come to the grave of this simple priest, to pray.
President Reagan was outraged at the crime. The pope was heartbroken. The Soviet Union was indifferent. General Jaruzelski knew that Poland would never be the same again. Any command he thought he once had through threats of violence were now gone. The Poles had been pacified by truth, not by soviet tanks. To turn the barrels of guns towards these people would draw the ire of the entire world. The message was clear, the Polish people were unified in solidarity against their historic oppressors, against atheism, against communism, against violence, against statism, against anything and everything that would keep them from being Poland. The regime that oversaw these people had lost control. The destiny of Poland was no longer in the regime’s hands.
In November of 1984 Ronald Reagan was reelected in a larger landslide than four years earlier. After his reelection success he went on a massive tour of Europe. When it was time to visit Portugal, he called it “the journey of our time, the journey of the century”. It was an odd statement. The speech that included that line was written by his chief speechwriter Tony Dolan, Roman Catholic who had a personal devotion to Our Lady, had an interest in Marian apparitions and wholeheartedly believed in the messages of Fatima. It is noted by Reagan’s biographers that he often discussed Fatima with his closest advisors. Pope John Paul II allegedly personally gave the president books on the subject. Frank Shakespeare, ambassador to the Vatican spent an entire flight in a private meeting with Reagan, briefing him on the miracle of Fatima, for an hour and a half, commanding Reagan’s complete attention. While in Portugal, with the errors of Russia at the forefront of his mind, he said:
“When I met Pope John Paull II a year ago in Alaska, I thanked him for his life and his apostolate. And I dared suggest to him that in the example of men like himself and in the prayers of simple people everywhere, simple people like the children of Fatima, there resides more power than in all the great armies and statesmen in the world.”
As a Catholic, one is not required to believe in the apparitions of Fatima, the messages, or the miracle of the sun, but whether you believe them or not isn’t important in a historical context, what is important is that Reagan and John Paul both fervently believed in Fatima – that the hand of the Queen of Poland, at the bidding of Heaven was guiding geopolitical events on earth.
Reagan then had a chance to meet the pope again in Rome, where the pair privately spent over an hour together. Again, no witnesses, no notes. Afterwards, standing before the press Reagan drew attention to the pope’s intentions to return to Poland:
“As you embark on a pastoral visit to the land of your birth, Poland, be assured that the hearts of the American people are with you. Our prayers will go with you in profound hope that soon the hand of God will lighten the terrible burden of brave people everywhere who yearn for freedom, even as all men and women yearn for the freedom that God gave us all when he gave us free will. We see the power of the spiritual force in that troubled land, uniting a people in hope, just as we see the powerful stirrings to the east of a belief that will not die despite generations of oppression. Perhaps it’s not too much to hope that true change will come to all countries that now deny or hinder freedom to worship God… For despite all the attempts to extinguish it, the people’s faith burns with a passionate heat; once allowed to breathe free, that faith will burn so brightly it will light the world.”
After a revolving door of soviet leaders, there came a watershed moment in Soviet history – the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev was a reformer. He was determined to save communism from the parasitic economic policies of his predecessors and stop the senseless war on religion. Reagan and John Paul instantly recognized the opportunity, both engaging in diplomatic overtures.
Jaruzelski too recognized the winds of change and embraced Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika and glasnost: progress and transparency. Jaruzelski desperately needed an off ramp from where he had taken Poland. After the kidnapping and murder of Father Jerzy, his regime was completely delegitimized, and only sustained itself by tanks and guns. So, he suddenly eased censorship, and allowed for new associations for artists and intellectuals. Hundreds of new churches were suddenly approved and began construction. Catholic activists were then invited to work with the regime to create an advisory council to the Council of State.
Despite these efforts, the self-sustaining momentum of the communist regime in Poland had finally run out. The economy spiraled – and now, there was no one left to blame. Prices skyrocketed. Store shelves were empty. Foreign debt was off the charts. The communist party began to fracture between hardliners, reformers, and those who wanted to pretend to be reformers.
Solidarity still existed underground, supported by the Vatican and America, and wielded massive influence – best estimates say solidarity connected around 200,000 Poles who actively engaged in coordinated political resistance. Jaruzelski resigned at last as Prime Minister in 1985 but moved over to Poland’s First Secretary of the Communist Party, thereby retaining decisive power.
As the economy continued to collapse, Gorbachev himself visited Poland in the summer of 1986. His advice to Poland sent a shudder through the whole world: Reform within Poland from within and improve relations with the United States. Congruently, the Reagan administration was little by little lifting sanctions and restrictions on Poland instituted at the onset of martial law. Jaruzelski himself was invited to Rome and given an audience before Pope John Paul.
The Communists regime in Poland now was forced to admit the obvious – it could not govern Poland without the Church. Pope John Paul was in a position of significant leverage – morally, ethically, economically, and of course spiritually. This was the context of the third papal visit by the pope to his homeland.
During the negotiations between the Polish regime and the Vatican for the papal visit, one of the sticking points was the visitation of the grave of Father Jerzy Popieluskco. In the end, the regime relented and allowed the pope to visit the hallowed grave, but insisted it remain an unofficial calendar event. Hearing of the pending visit, Lech Walesa sent a letter to the pope, telling him Poland needed bread and freedom.
On June 8th, 1987, General Jaruzelski found himself again welcoming the pope to Poland. In their public meeting, the general reviewed Polish history and even acknowledge that the Church did indeed have a special place there. Yet his remarks were of course calculated to promote the necessities of the martial law years.
The pope listened to the speech, while grimly staring upon the ground.
As he commenced his tour, he stuck largely to spiritual matters of faith and morals, he reminded Poles of their obligation to the Faith and to truth, in the event freedom soon comes. The pope mentioned the recent martyr of Poland, Father Jerzy, and even quoted his reflections on the cross in his homilies. He then went on to ordain 46 new priests and beatified two new Polish saints. When he went to the farmers, he referred to their pre communist period, a time when they sustained Poland and Poland sustained them. It harkened back to a past when no outside overlord was needed. The pope reminded the clergy in Poland to always remain close to the people, to the faithful, to share in their suffering, as Father Jerzy had done – third day in a row now recognizing the murdered priest, something he was not supposed to do.
Then to Krakow – his old bishopric. Among the millions that showed up were banners bearing a V for victory, and pro-solidarity slogans. He spoke to these Poles of their future, calling on them to: “write a new chapter, a new part of a fragment” in Polish history. He then invoked a prayer written by a Polish Jesuit in the 16th century, thanking God:
“That you have taken our fruits from the hands of oppressors, invaders, and enemies… that after years of bondage you have bestowed upon us once again freedom and peace…. Defend us from individual, familial, and social egoism. Do not allow the more powerful to despise the weak. Protect us from hatred and prejudice toward people of different convictions. Teach us to fight against evil, but to see a brother in the person who behaves evilly and not to take from him the right to conversion. Teach each one of us to perceive our own faults, so that we don’t begin the work of restoration with the removal of the mote from our brother’s eye.”
He then warned Poland of their coming freedom – that they had had freedom before, and it had turned out to be rotten. They must use their freedom to choose God above all else. Freedom for the Poles was a task, and responsibility, not a guarantee. He noted the growing sins in Poland, alcoholism, and drug abuse, and sins of commission with regard to suffering – help your brothers in their suffering he told them.
The regime was freaking out again and lodged official complaints. The pope, in their view had not acknowledged all the amazing progress they have accomplished in Poland. Martial law had been lifted, why was he not giving them public credit for that fact? And further, the pope kept referring to some imminent future existence in freedom. Why?
Finally, the pope reached Gdansk, where Solidarity was born. An alter 28 feet high and built to look like the prow of a ship with three crosses as its masts was erected. He spoke of the right of his people to chart their own course, denying that humans were a commodity as communism suggests, and then quoted Saint Paul, exhorting them to bear one another’s burdens. The crowd erupted in chants of Solidarity, solidarity. Then the pope finished his homily:
“I have tried in my own words to speak about you and speak for you.”
As the pope was in Gdansk, Poland devastating communism from the inside, his friend and ally president Reagan was launching his own offensive from outside. That same day Ronald Reagan stood before the Brandenburg Gate at the Berlin wall and made history:
VIDEO
Finally, before ending his trip, the pope laid flowers at the grave of Father Jerzy Popieluszcko, and kissed the priest’s parents. But he still had one last meeting – Jaruzelski, who was fuming by this point. They met for 45 minutes, but no record exists of the meeting. All we know is when the meeting wrapped up, the general slammed his car door shut and sped away.
The president had thrown down the moral gauntlet for Gorbachev. The pope had transcended the Jaruzelski regime, rendering it impotent. The pope called on Poland, especially its youth to look past the grey of communism, and the receding hairline and coke bottle glasses of the leader whose only fountain of authority were Soviet nuclear threats. The pope urged them to look ahead and within and discern what the future of their nation might be once this fleeting aberration had finally passed, when Poland might once again be Poland. The irrelevance place upon the Jaruzelski regime by Pope John Paul II was damming.
Western media reported that Jaruzelski “bristled with frustration and bitterness” while the pope maintained an ironic smile during his exit. He knew the damage wrought.
After the visit, a polish journalists declared that there are now three Polands: Poland of the Jaruzelski regime, Poland of the tired and pathetic masses, and the Poland of John Paull II. And the third was prevailing. Police reports note that during this third visit of Pope John Paul, a banner was unfurled that read: “Let the fourth pilgrimage be in an already free Poland.”
The pope’s fourth pilgrimage in June of 1991 would indeed fulfill that prophecy.
Seven months to the day after the Pope arrived in Poland for the third time, on the feast of the Immaculate Conception of the blessed Virgin Mary, Ronald Reagan and Mikail Gorbachev signed the historic INF treaty, for the first time in history decreasing the nuclear armaments they had pointed at one another, the first real and significant de-escalation of the cold war.
The dual effect of political momentum from within and without was forcing a change upon the Soviet Union. By 1988 Mikhail Gorbachev allowed 800 Orthodox churches in Russia to reopen and begin worshiping God. Monasteries were next. The Kremlin Museum began returning mountains of stolen relics and sacred items. Then, the thousand-year anniversary of the Russian Orthodox Church was allowed to be celebrated in 1988. At these events, Gorbachev invited the Vatican to send a delegation. Pope John Paul sent two – one religious and one political. Reagan too had been in Moscow recently where he quoted scripture to an audience of Russian students.
In this environment, Poland was rising. As 1988 commenced, strikes broke out nationwide and this time the regime had not the clout to counter them. They could only yield. Jaruzelski reached out to his old nemesis, Lech Walesa for help. Solidarity began stepping out from the shadows with Walesa leading negotiations against Jaruzelski. In August of 88, Dominican friars in Gdansk organized a Solidarity rally with 3000 people. In October of the same year, the intelligentsia communities put out a statement calling for the legalization of Solidarity and complete democratization. The Polish Church hierarchy donated its spaces at its churches for Solidarity to operate its headquarters. When the Polish communist regime asked for renewed diplomatic ties to the Vatican, the legalization of Solidarity was required as a non-negotiable.
In the spring of the next year, 1989, in the Polish Sejm, Solidarity was relegalized, religious freedom was again guaranteed by law, and for the first time since World War II, the Church was given back its legal status within the country, along with full freedom to operate its seminaries and universities. The Church now had full right to organize radio and television broadcasts and took back control of Caritas, its robust charity organization. Hospitals, elderly homes, schools, orphanages where all handed back to the Polish hierarchy. The requirement of military service for seminarians was abolished. Religious instruction was again now allowed in all schools. Sunday was reinstituted as a day of rest, and further, January 1st, All Soul’s Day, Christmas day, Easter Monday, Corpus Christi and the Feast of the Assumption of Mary were officially recognized as holy days of obligation and state holidays.
The death pangs of communism weren’t entirely unviolent. Three more priests were murdered during these times of change. Nonetheless, a free election was announced to commence. In anticipation of the election, the office of General Secretary was abolished in favor of a president. Solidarity was recognized an as official political party of Poland. And further a ruling chamber in the Sejm was declared, in which all 100 seats were up for election. In the lower chamber, one third were up for reelection. Poland had reverted to bicameral legislation.
With the election just weeks away, a group of Poles visited the now retired Ronald Reagan for words of advice in their pending campaigns. But instead of political advice, he told them:
“Listen to your consciences, because that is where the Holy Spirit speaks to you.”
One of the Polish guests then handed Reagan a hand carved image of the Black Madonna, carved in his homeland during the past 50 years of communist rule.
On election day, June 4th in Poland, Solidarity candidates claimed every single seat in the lower house up for election and 99 out of the 100 seats in the upper house. Not one single communist candidate claimed a seat. In December of 1990, Lech Walesa was elected President of Poland
Communism had been voted out of Poland. It was finished. It was a thing never supposed to happen. No people would ever reject the utopia of communism. And yet, Poland was now, as John Paul and Ronald Reagan predicted, the first Soviet bloc state to flip. After Poland, Hungary followed suit, with communists losing control of the electoral system in March of 1990. Then the Berlin Wall came under attack by average Germans chiseling apart the hideous monument to oppression with sledgehammers. In East Germany, the Stasi were stormed by protestors, forcing free elections the same month as Hungary. In May, Romania flipped. Czechoslovakia then held free elections in June. Bulgaria a month later. Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia, Armenia, Mongolia, Georgia, Serbia, and many more now followed in the footsteps of Poland, taking back control of their countries. By the summer of 1991, the Warsaw pact which damned Poland to Russian overlordship was officially dissolved. Then, later that year, the day after Christmas of 1991, the Soviet Union dissolved itself, and ceased to exist on world maps.
In 2012, French priest Father Bernard Brien was taking a tour of Poland at the suggestion of a friend, to following in the footsteps of John Paull II. He knew very little about Poland or its recent history. His friend recommended that before he visits the Shrine of Jasna Gora, that he first stops into St. Stanislaus Kostka in Warsaw, and visit the grave of Father Jerzy Popieluszko. The name meant nothing to Father Bernard, but he took up his friend’s suggestion anyway. As he browsed the various plaques recounting the harrowing story of Father Jerzy, he realized both he and Father Jerzy had been born on the exact same day, September 14th, 1947. Father Bernard was astounded, and instantly impacted by the life of this brave, yet frail chaplain to the Polish workers. Returning to France Father Bernard bought every book he could on the period Father Jerzy lived through. He wanted to understand the context of his life as much as possible, feeling an invisible connection to Jerzy. During his morning prayers, he even began praying for Father Jerzy’s canonization.
Two months after discovering Father Jerzy, Father Bernard was eating his lunch at his church’s rectory when he received a phone call. Sister Rozalia from the nearby hospital needed him to give last rites to a dying cancer patient. He went immediately. Arriving in the hospital room, he saw the poor man stretched out on the hospital bed. Francois was 56 years old and had been battling a rare form of leukemia for 11 years. He was now in a comma, and very near death. His wife, Chantal and sister Rozalia were praying at his bedside. Chantal explained how aggressive the cancer spread in those 11 years despite three chemotherapies and a bone marrow graft. She told Father Bernard that last August, the doctors finally advised her to transport her husband to a hospital that specializes in palliative care and prepare for death. There was nothing else to be done. By the time Father Bernard arrived, she had already scheduled an appointment with the funeral home.
Father Bernard placed a candle, a crucifix, holy chrism, and a photo of Father Jerzy Popieluszko at Francois’ bedside table and administered the sacramental rite. During a moment of silence, he realized that today was September 14th, both his and Father Jerzy’s birthday. He spontaneously suggested that Chantal entrust her husband to Father Jerzy, and that they both pray for his canonization. After the brief prayer, Father Bernard turned inward, saying to himself:
“Listen, Jerzy, today is September 14th, your birthday and mine, and so if you are supposed to do something for our brother Francois, this is the day.”
After that, Father Bernard bid the husband-and-wife adieu.
The next day, Father Bernard received a panicked phone call from Sister Rozalia. She had just come from Francois room, where she had expected to find him already passed. But instead, he was sitting up on his bed. He had gotten up early in fact, and shaved, and showered. Francois wife, Chantal then told the priest:
“As soon as you had left his room, Francois opened his eyes, smiled, and asked what had happened. I had the impression that a veil was being torn, that my husband, like Lazarus, was emerging from the tomb.”
Francois cancer had gone from one day attacking his bones, to the next being completely gone, as confirmed by dozens of medical tests. By the end of September, Francois was back home living his life again. His doctor, Jean Michel Dormont then signed a statement saying:
“After an in-depth examination, I certify that his rapid cure, starting on September 14th, 2012, when he was in palliative care, has no medical explanation.”
When Father Bernard made his bishop aware of the potential miracle, things happened fast. The archbishop of Warsaw immediately took up Jerzy’s cause for canonization and placed the investigation file into the hands of Rome, where it still sits today.
We began this narrative ages ago in a time before tanks and guns, before fossil fuels, before capitalism, communism and mechanized or nuclear warfare. We began in the humble home of an agrarian Polish famer, and his family, as they marveled, and laughed at the novelty of an alarm clock, a novelty that despite its ringing bells and machine precisions, did not change the realities of what the future portended, hard work, and one more day in the seasonal, liturgical cycles of life and death.
One of the most difficult times for these agrarian people, and yet most vital, was the harvest season, when the entire community would go out to the fields as one, shoulder to shoulder, in solidarity to collect what bounty their spring plantings yielded. From first light of the day till moonlight, under the heat of the waning summer, all would labor intensely without complaint, for as it was said in old Poland, “he who looks for coolness during the harvest, will suffer hunger during the winter”. Then across the moonlit fields all the men, women, and children would wander back to their homes carrying the harvest upon their backs, offering to God their labor, singing:
“All of our daily happenings, I accept dear God, and when I fall asleep, let our dreams praise you father.”
At the end of the harvest, the last few stalks of grain to be cut held deep spiritual significance. Different parts of Poland called the custom of the last cutting different things, but all regions, rich and poor, held these customs to be sacred. A small patch of grain was always left uncut, standing alone in the field. Then at last, when the entire harvest was complete, the townspeople would gather around that last patch of grain. The reapers with scythes in hand would ceremoniously move in. Then the would begin, stalk by stalk, motion by motion, cutting those last standing grains to the ground. Death had at last come.
These last few stalks, now removed from the field were brought to the women and divided into three parts. Each part was carefully braided, and then each braid was tied together at the top of the ears, forming something like a dome. A flat stone was placed underneath and covered with a white cloth, as if it were a table. Upon this altar of sustenance, the townspeople would place their bread, their salt, and their money, and leave them the middle of the baron field until the spring, as a sign of their toil, and labor, offering it all up so that the next year, they may be blessed with bounty yet again.
One final stalk of grain would be left apart from this tradition, however, and used for another. The women would weave into this last stalk with the wildflowers of the earth and braid them into a bouquet. It would then be brought to the most senior reaper, who would relinquish his scythe to be adorned with their bouquet – consecrating this tool of death with the very things it was built to destroy.
The question I sought out to answer at the onset of this series was, how did the Faith thrive during five decades of institutional communism. I believe the answer to that question is mysteriously wrapped up in the historical, agrarian strength of the Polish nation, particularly in this striking image of a scythe adorned with wildflowers.
When Poland converted to the Faith it permanently altered their national soul. Their agrarian pagan customs instantly blended with this new doctrine and over the course of a thousand years they proved themselves an essential force in Europe, militarily, culturally, spiritually. Both east and west recognized Poland as the critical crossroads of Europe. They gave the Church some of the greatest saints and martyrs in its vast communion. They saved Europe, more than once from the Islamic forces of the east, bent on conquest, and did it in remarkable, Tolkienesque fashion with their glorious, winged hussars. It’s a nation that knew where it was on a map, knew its vulnerability as the doorstep to Europe and rose to the occasion. Poland accepted its place in history as the martyr of Europe and accepted it with grit. Its repayment for this martyrdom was partition, and suppression of the Faith.
After World War I it reemerged, only to fall again to the Nazi’s. The Warsaw underground rose, unified in resistance. Polish pilots made a significant contribution to the battle of Britain and the RAF during the war years. Winston Churchill never forgot their critical part. Before the Nazi madness receded, they left behind possibly the greatest martyr of the 20th century. Saint Maximilian Kolbe became an enduring source of strength for Poland in the years to come.
At long last the armies of the Soviet Union rolled in and entirely subjugated Poland. There’s almost no more perfect antithesis of the Catholic faith in the material world than communism. It rejects God. It holds no value of the human soul, and thereby casts aside the value of the human person, allowing for terrible crimes in the name of the greater good. In communism, the ends justify the means. This is anathema to the Catholic Faith. No political ethos is sacred, no politician is above truth. The Catholic of the 20th century that endured communism is the closest thing in practice and yet the farthest thing in time from the early church and its martyrs. The Polish Catholic was hated for their faith, for their joy, for their eternal hope, for their willingness to die for something unseen by the legions of the material world. The impotence of guns and tanks against such a meek people only fueled the communist hatred and fear of the Polish Catholic.
When one reads the stories of the martyrs, one finds sublime, peaceful resistance. When the enemy put a gun to their temple, they did not fight, they did not beg for their life, they simply declared that they were ready, that they had made their peace. This recurring story of Christian martyrdom is Poland’s story as well.
I think some people may find the end of this narrative on Poland a bit anticlimactic. There was no armed revolt, no decorated general giving speeches of death and glory, rallying the men into an army of rebellion. There are no secular martyrs to be forged into bronze statues. There was no distinctive document whose authors pledged their lives to defend. No trials, no execution against government collaborators. No, the victory of Poland was its long martyrdom. It was a victory in the spiritual realm first, then manifested in the material. The Faith cannot be destroyed – it can be suppressed, and for time exist in private places. Yet in these private places where the faith burns dim, it illuminates in its small way those enduring customs and dreams of a nation simply waiting for the novelty of this age to pass, so that it could one day get back to its hard work, its labor for the day, its sacrifice for its children, and its worship of God.
This, I think, is the secret sauce of Poland. I can only read the history and repeat it here. I can’t say for certain what is on the hearts and minds of the people we’ve discussed here. But I’ve learned something about their spirit. They endure and endure with saintly grace. They never lost the faith. They never even came close to losing faith. The toughest, cruelest, most oppressive periods in Poland were the breeding ground for zeal, from which we get great men, like Father Jerzy. Yet great because they were meek.
Of all the communist bloc nations, from the very beginning Poland was the one Stalin declared communism fitted like a saddle on a cow. Of all the soviet states, Poland is the one where the Church hierarchy maintained legitimate, authoritative control in opposition to the regime, and used this strength to disarm the patriotic zeal that could have led to an urban warfare bloodletting.
This meekness, in the classical sense, as a virtue is the strength of Poland. In its meekness Poland recognized itself as the martyr-nation of Europe. The nation that would allow itself to be led to Calvary, in imitation of Christ.
The story of this Christ-nation begins over a thousand years ago with the conversion of this agrarian people and ends in the offices of the most powerful people in the world. The pope, representing a Vatican at peak world-wide influence, and the president of the United States, at peak geopolitical consequence, when at any moment the world might well end in nuclear war – the central, significant, centrifugal, geopolitical, spiritual focus of all these energies lay withing the meager borders and daily struggles of this eastern European nation that sought, century after century to simply be itself. To exist according to its designs. To be free. To be Catholic. To be Poland. That is an astounding story, and one I felt very much needed to be told before I even comprehended its scope and breadth.
To say nothing of its pre-20th century history, if we simply look at the age of the Soviet Union, Poland’s contribution to the world is simply this: in following in the footsteps of Christ, and fully embracing the gospels, and the Roman Catholic discipline, Poland landed the world’s death blow to that evil empire. Its volleys went farther and pierced deeper than any arsenal of the west. It was the first chink in the armor against, what Our lady called the errors of Russia. As it dislodged itself, against all odds and without a shot being fired, from that union of atheism, it precipitated the greatest geopolitical collapse in the history of the world. And in doing so, freed over 200 million people from bondage, and allowed in those nations for the worship of God to resume.
A survey taken at end of the 19th century revealed that most Poles felt their nation was destined to be a martyred nation for the West. Today, if you ask a Pole what its contribution to the 20th century was, they will tell you they gave you a pope and rid the western world of communism. In the 1830’s when uprisings against Russian oppression was ignored by western Europe the first time, authors and poets began referring to their beloved nation as the Christ of Nations.
One of these authors was a Pole named Adam Mickiewicz. He referred to the Polish as the Apostles among the Idolaters. In a work he titled Books of the Polish Nation and Polish Pilgrimage, published in 1833, he gave a voice to his fatherland:
“And Poland said, ‘Whosoever will come to me shall be free and equal for I am Freedom.’ But the Kings, when they heard it, were frightened in their hearts, and they crucified the Polish nation and laid it in its grave, crying out ‘We have slain and buried Freedom.’ But they cried out foolishly… For the Polish Nation did not die. Its body lieth in the grave; but its spirit has descended into the abyss, that is, into the private lives of people who suffer slavery in their own country… For on the third Day, the Soul shall return to the Body; and the Nation shall arise and free all the peoples of Europe from Slavery.”