The End and the Beginning

by George Weigel

  Thus from the communist point of view, the difficult business of fitting the Polish cow with the saddle of Marxism-Leninism was made far more difficult by Poland’s intense Catholic faith and Catholicism’s links to Polish national identity and Polish patriotism. But there were further complications, involving recent history. The Soviet suzerains had made a deal with Hitler to divide Poland; their Polish communist vassals had not been deeply involved in anti-Nazi resistance in World War II Poland. The Catholic Church had been, however, and had acquired a substantial moral credit by its sacrifices. That heroism, which the communists could not match (despite relentless propaganda to the contrary), posed one set of challenges to the communization of Poland. So did ideology. And so did postwar geopolitics. For, given their assumptions and their fears, Soviet and Polish communist leaders in the immediate postwar period took the intensity of Poland’s Catholic faith to be, not so much the natural cultural and historical phenomenon that it was, but the local expression of the pro-Western, anticommunist polemics and policies of Pope Pius XII and the worldwide Catholic Church—in Bolshevik eyes, a global conspiracy bent on undoing the achievements of Lenin’s revolution.

  In the months immediately following World War II—the months in which Polish Catholicism could come out from the catacombs—public Catholicism in Poland was divided. Some Catholic intellectuals tried to maintain a certain distance from politics, even as the communist regime and the Polish primate, Cardinal August Hlond, came into conflict. Other lay activists tried to find an accommodation with communism that would allow them to play a political role. Still others invested fruitless efforts at forming Catholic political parties. Adam Stefan Sapieha, the heroic archbishop of Kraków who had defied the Nazi gauleiter Hans Frank, was allowed to go to Rome and receive his cardinal’s red hat in 1946. Still, the enthusiasm with which the old prelate was received on his return to Poland—students picked up his car at the main train station and carried it (and the seventy-nine-year-old cardinal) to his residence—must have reinforced the communist sense that the heroism of Cracovian Catholicism during the war, and the general disdain for communism in Poland’s cultural capital, were going to pose a particularly difficult set of cow-saddling problems.

  It was in these years—1945, 1946, 1947—that a young churchman named Karol Józef Wojtyła first came to the attention of the Polish communist secret police.

  A YOUNG MAN OF CONSIDERABLE PROMISE

  Karol Wojtyła’s vocational discernment was profoundly shaped by his experiences of the Second World War, in that part of Poland that historian Norman Davies described as “Gestapoland”: his daily life amidst brutality and random death; his resistance activities; his first experience of manual labor and his first steps in Carmelite spirituality; the death of his father and the murder of his friends. As he would put it later in a memoir of those hard days, the combination of “humiliation at the hands of evil” and the heroism he had encountered in the face of such mortal danger gradually led to “a detachment from my earlier plans”: the priesthood, he came to understand, was a way of life in which he could resist the degradation of human dignity with spiritual and cultural weapons. As he pondered his situation, Karol Wojtyła’s conviction that there are no mere coincidences in the world—that what appears to us as “coincidence” is in fact an aspect of God’s providence we don’t yet grasp—grew, and began to bend his discernment in the direction of the altar. As he would write a half century later, it was not so much a choosing as a being chosen, to which there could only be one answer.11

  After six months in Archbishop Sapieha’s underground seminary, the “house arrest” period of Karol Wojtyła’s extraordinary preparation for the Catholic priesthood ended in mid-January 1945, when advancing Red Army troops forced the Germans to abandon Kraków. The 1945–46 academic year was thus the only reasonably normal period that Karol Wojtyła spent in the seminary. Those were also the years in which his name first appeared in Polish communist secret police files, along with those of fellow seminarians Andrzej Deskur and Stanisław Starowieyski, both of whom had lived underground in the archiepiscopal residence at Franciszkańska, 3. Why the attention? Sapieha’s headquarters, to which evidence had been brought during the war of NKVD complicity in the Katyń Forest massacres, was under regular surveillance, and the seminarians would have been seen coming and going in the weeks after the Red Army “liberation” of the city. Wojtyła may also have become an object of suspicion because of his work as vice president of a Jagiellonian University student organization called Bratniej Pomocy [Fraternal Aid], which helped get Western relief aid to needy students. Perhaps of even greater interest to communist internal security ferrets was the patriotic demonstration mounted by Bratniej Pomocy on May 3, 1946, a traditional national holiday the communists were intent on stamping out. A riot ensued when student marchers were attacked by the police (aided by the Soviet NKVD); many were beaten, some were shot when the regime used live ammunition, and there were arrests. As one historian of the city of Kraków puts it, “it was on this occasion that the new powers revealed their true intentions, and took the opportunity to incite an anti-intelligentsia witch hunt.”12

  A month after that melee, Karol Wojtyła passed the examinations required to complete his preordination theological training. Cardinal Sapieha decided to ordain Wojtyła a priest on an accelerated schedule so that he could begin graduate theological studies in Rome in the fall of 1946; the cardinal, who had an acute sense of the local political situation, may also have been concerned that his prize student, a brilliant young man and a natural leader, was drawing too much attention from the secret police because of his Bratniej Pomocy activities. Thus Sapieha ordained Wojtyła on November 1, 1946, the Solemnity of All Saints; two weeks later, Father Karol Wojtyła left for Rome and two years of graduate study in theology. When this young man in whom Cardinal Sapieha saw considerable promise returned to Poland in the summer of 1948, he came back to a country struggling to breathe in the thick fog of Stalinist repression.13

  HARD TIMES

  In Rome, Karol Wojtyła missed Poland’s rigged parliamentary “election” on January 19, 1947: a charade in which “some people voted, but other people counted,” as acerbic Poles put it. By some estimates, the principal anticommunist party, the Polish Peasants Party [PSL], received almost 70 percent of the vote. According to the official tally, the PSL garnered 10.3 percent of the suffrage, with the communist bloc gaining 80 percent of the vote.14 Kraków returned an especially heavy anticommunist vote, which led the regime to brand the city as a “bastion of reaction”; in their distinctive style of deprecation, the communists pledged an “uncompromising fight against Kraków’s narrow-mindedness, its reactionary clergy, Krakow’s backward bourgeoisie, Kraków speculators, and [the] pre-war epigones of a bureaucratic world.”15

  The first years of Polish communism were not without their farcical elements. The traditional Polish taste for mordant humor, honed during more than a century of resistance against the loss of independence, flourished in the sometimes-madcap atmosphere of Polish communism’s early Stalinist period: wits noted that among one hundred so-called Bolsheviks you’d likely find one committed Bolshevik, thirty-nine criminals, and sixty idiots.16 Yet for all the farce, the regime’s principal characteristic in its early days was its brutality, which reflected both the pathologies of its Soviet master, Stalin, and the regime’s own fears of illegitimacy. Thus former members of the AK paid for their patriotism by becoming special targets of a fierce persecution, the first victims of which were Poles like Witold Pilecki—patriots whose wartime heroism might have given them a claim to a voice in the nation’s future, and who therefore, in the logic of Stalinism, had to be, and were, liquidated.

  A vast bureaucracy was quickly built to manage, or mismanage, a command economy; according to one historian, it was noteworthy for “a strictly observed hierarchy” and “a total lack of competence.” Virtually every form of independent social activity—from unions to sports clubs to youth groups to
patriotic associations—was sucked into the insatiable maw of the party-state, which was determined to substitute itself for civil society in a “progressive sovietization of all of public life.”17 The rule of law, in any meaningful sense of the term, ceased to exist. Courts were corrupted; the “degree of social harmfulness” of an alleged crime was taken into account in sentencing, especially with political prisoners; politically acceptable judges with only secondary educations were given a fifteen-month cram course before joining the bench and meting out such sentences.18

  Needing an enemy, communists throughout the new Soviet bloc tried to foment popular hysteria against alleged Western warmongering—and in Poland, against German revanchism in Poland’s western “recovered territories” (which had been German during the interwar period). This external process had its domestic parallels: decrees on “official secrets” and “state secrets” helped ensure a permanent dragnet for putative spies, foreign and Polish.19 In less than a decade, communist organs of internal security recruited or suborned some 75,000 “pairs of eyes,” men and women who would keep their controllers informed of any untoward comment or activity by a neighbor or coworker. The net result was that, by 1954, six million Poles—one in every three Polish adults—were listed on the “register of criminal and suspicious elements.”20

  Despite having gained control of the machinery of governance while murdering or interning tens of thousands of political prisoners, Poland’s communist masters nonetheless remained worried about the Catholic Church. Secret police memoranda of the time stressed the need to counteract the bad influence of “reactionary” clergy, and divided Poland’s priests into three categories: enemies, neutrals, and “positives.” Perhaps not surprisingly, given the strong leadership of Cardinal Sapieha and their resistance to the prior totalitarian regime, the Cracovian clergy were almost uniformly slotted as “enemies.”21

  By the end of 1947, the Polish communist regime had destroyed virtually “all institutions capable of crystallizing and articulating anti-communist sentiments,” according to historian Andrzej Paczkowski.22 Yet those sentiments were real, and, in the vacuum, the Catholic Church increasingly came to embody them. Church leaders wisely declined to take a direct political role. But their criticism of the bogus election of January 1947, their proposals for constitutional reform, their defense of civil liberties, their protests against the elimination of religious education from the schools, and their complaints against arbitrary police power and unnecessary nationalization of Church property (including several Catholic printing presses) turned the Catholic bishops of Poland into a de facto opposition. Having eliminated every other form of anticommunist political activity, both overt and covert, Polish communism could turn its attention to battling the Church for the hearts, minds, and souls of the Polish people.

  The secret police maintained a file on every parish in the country, with “pairs of eyes” identifying the most active parishioners and describing their plans. From the day he entered the minor seminary, every young Pole studying for the priesthood had a secret police file and watcher, as did every priest. Children were warned not to discuss what they had heard in catechism class, even if the man questioning them wore a cassock and a Roman collar.23 The Catholic press, including such intellectually assertive vehicles as the Kraków-based Tygodnik Powszechny [Universal Weekly] and its allied monthly Znak [Sign], were closely scrutinized and subjected to constant censorship.

  The Polish Church’s position was sometimes made more difficult by the Vatican. A 1948 letter from Pope Pius XII to the bishops of Germany, in which the Pope expressed concern for the twelve million Germans who had been expelled from Poland’s “recovered territories,” was used as a club against Polish Catholicism by Polish communism. A year later, Pius XII threatened those who joined communist parties with excommunication. The threat was aimed primarily at Italy, where the practice was not uncommon, but it was eagerly seized upon by Polish communists as an excuse to ratchet up pressure on Polish Catholics—5,500 priests were called in for “explanatory and cautionary talks.”24

  Yet for all the pressure and the intense surveillance (which involved a vast expenditure of state resources, and thus constituted a form of theft from civil society), Stalin-era Polish communism never quite “got” the Catholic Church. Raw intelligence is only as good as the analysis that filters and explains the data. And throughout the extended Soviet empire, the insistence by communist spymasters on reading the Church through their own experience—that is, as another political mafia bent on power—proved a serious impediment to grasping the internal dynamics of communism’s principal ideological enemy.

  So would the exceptional political skills and unshakable courage of the man who would lead Polish Catholicism through these hard times: Stefan Wyszyński.

  THE PRIMATE

  Wyszyński kept one step ahead of the Gestapo throughout World War II, serving as a kind of roving chaplain after the occupation closed down the seminary in which he was teaching. At the end of the war, the man known by the underground name of “Sister Cecilia” returned to Włocławek to reopen the seminary as its rector, but was quickly plucked from that post in order to become the bishop of Lublin in March 1946; he left the seminary on the day five of his prewar colleagues returned from the Dachau concentration camp. The young bishop’s days in Lublin would be brief, however, for two and a half years later, on November 12, 1948, Pope Pius XII appointed the forty-seven-year-old Wyszyński as archbishop of Gniezno and Warsaw and successor to Cardinal August Hlond as Primate of Poland.

  Throughout Polish history, the primate had been the “Interrex,” the “king between kings,” during those periods when the nobility was deciding who should be Poland’s next elected monarch. There were no more kings, of course. But Stefan Wyszyński, a strong personality whom an admirer once described as a “fantastic, almost medieval character,” took to the role of Interrex with conviction.25 Just as important, Primate Wyszyński brought to his unchallenged leadership of Polish Catholicism a carefully considered view of the postwar situation, which he regarded as dire in the extreme. The Church had suffered terribly during the war—and had shown, in venues ranging from Dachau to the Warsaw Uprising, that it knew how to suffer, to sacrifice, and to die if necessary. Now, Wyszyński believed, the Church had to show that it knew how to live, even in a Stalinist environment. As a thinker, he stood well to the left of the conservative Polish clerical establishment and was an acknowledged expert in Catholic social doctrine, with its emphasis on workers’ rights; yet he was also an ardent anticommunist. At the same time, however, he believed the Church had to find some sort of modus vivendi with the new regime, gaining breathing room in which to rebuild its pastoral strength.

  Wyszyński held firmly to three other convictions that would shape his governance of Polish Catholicism and his political strategy for three decades. He was convinced that Polish popular piety—especially Polish devotion to Mary, Mother of God—was far stronger than communist propaganda and could be drawn upon as a font of cultural resistance. He believed that he understood the Polish ecclesiastical and political situation far better than anyone in the Vatican. And, as a Polish patriot, he was determined to prevent Poland’s extinction by the Soviet Union, if the cost were at all morally bearable. These convictions did not always sit well with Church authorities in Rome, who tended in the late 1940s to prefer a directly confrontational approach to communism. Wyszyński was not afraid of confrontation, but he wanted to be the one who defined the terms and terrain on which battles would be fought; indeed, during the long struggle that lay ahead, he would sometimes deliberately provoke a confrontation, when he thought that things had gotten a bit slack and that the moral tension of Catholic life under communism had to be recharged. His initial instincts on becoming successor to St. Adalbert and primate in 1948, however, were to try to work out some sort of deal by which the Church could gain time.

  Thus in 1950 the Church and the Polish government agreed on a set of ground rules for a te
nse coexistence. The regime recognized the Church’s internal autonomy, its religious links to the papacy, its liturgical and ceremonial life (including public manifestations of faith, such as pilgrimages), its independent publications, and its pastoral ministries in schools, hospitals, and prisons; the communists also agreed that monastic orders (always a Bolshevik bugaboo) would be permitted, as would the Catholic University of Lublin, the only Catholic institution of higher learning behind what Churchill had begun to call the Iron Curtain. The Church, for its part, recognized the communist regime as the legal government of Poland, acknowledged the western “recovered territories” as legitimately Polish, committed itself to work for national reconstruction, and pledged to avoid “activities hostile to the Polish People’s Republic.”26 Some in Rome thought that Wyszyński had conceded too much. The Primate, no fool, knew that the communist authorities would bend, twist, and, if necessary, ignore their agreements, such that constant vigilance would be required; but he also believed that the ground rules for an ongoing struggle had been set, and that he had defined the ground he could successfully defend. Rome eventually came around to the Pole’s point of view and Wyszyński was created cardinal in 1952.

  By that time, however, he was neck-deep in confrontation with a regime that had already begun violating the 1950 agreement. Parents were threatened with loss of employment if they didn’t send their children to communist schools and youth groups. Catholic publications, already censored, were frequently harassed by “paper shortages,” and some were eventually closed. Large numbers of priests were arrested, and the bishop of Kielce, Czesław Kaczmarek, was sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment after a classic 1951 show trial. Bolesław Piasecki, leader of a communist-friendly pseudo-Catholic association, “PAX,” was a regular propaganda mouthpiece for the regime, accusing the Vatican (and, by implication, the Polish Catholic hierarchy) of collaboration with “German revanchists”—a favorite NKVD/KGB slander. The direct confrontation Wyszyński had sought to avoid became inevitable when, in May 1953, the regime ordered the implementation of a law by which it, not the Church, would appoint and remove pastors, vicars, and bishops. The Church would become, de facto, a subsidiary of the Polish communist state.