One of the more complex issues he raised involved the so-called Western Lands—territories lying west of the line drawn between the Oder and Neisse rivers, plus a small portion of East Prussia. Originally part of the First Polish Republic, the Western Lands had been inhaled by the German Empire, and had been returned to Poland in 1945. But it still remained to arrange an international treaty with Germany to secure those lands to the present Polish government. Such a complication was perfect grist for Wyszynski’s mill.
How, he wondered, could the Polish Communists hope to secure that treaty for the Western Lands if the influential German hierarchy, repelled by the anti-Catholic attitude of the Polish regime, should decide to pressure for endless delays? Or perhaps the German hierarchy would manage to kill the treaty altogether.
And then, of course, there would be the complication that international acceptance of Poland’s claims to the Western Lands would be impossible unless the Vatican appointed Polish bishops to the dioceses in that territory. Wyszynski granted that the government might hate the Vatican. But let’s be realistic, he said in effect. How could the Polish Communists hope to secure the treaty if the Holy See, also repelled by Warsaw’s anti-Catholic attitude, refused to replace the present German hierarchy with a Polish cadre instead?
And there was still more, as Wyszynski pointed out. For both of those matters dovetailed with the desire—the downright need, in fact—of the Polish government to sign a purely commercial treaty with West Germany. Already by 1948 the Americans had got the West Germans on fairly solid footing compared to the East bloc nations. It seemed only likely that if the German bishops and the Holy See chose to stall or kill one treaty, the other would probably go aglimmering as well.
All in all, in a series of meetings to wrangle over Wyszynski’s proposal for the establishment of the Mixed Commission, the Archbishop not only taught his misguided and delinquent children a lesson or two; he conducted a clinic in brash negotiations.
For the four preceding years, since the Bierut government had been installed by Stalin’s army in Warsaw, that government had pursued its ham-handed policies in Poland on the assumption that it was tackling a purely parochial problem. But for all its history and in all its bones, Poles had never been a parochial nation.
Now, having opened the door to Wyszynski—something it could not have avoided—suddenly the government began to see chasms opening up on every side. For openers, chasm number one: a cleric-fomented, never-ending revolt of the Catholic Polish population. Chasm number two: loss of the Western Lands. Chasm number three: more trouble with the Vatican. Chasm number four: failure of the desired good relations with West Germany for commercial purposes.
As far as the agenda went, that was an impressive survey. But off the record, there was another chasm. The chasm between what Soviet and Polish government officials expected to find in the Primate of Poland and what he turned out to be.
Explicitly in words and implicitly in his actions, Stefan Wyszynski was refusing any notion of passive martyrdom or of active corruption. He would not compromise like the Orthodox clergy of Russia; or be a martyr like the Primate of Hungary; or be like any of the rest of them. How were the Communists to deal with him, then?
In that regard, in fact, Wyszynski minced no words and left nothing to the imagination. “If God demands our martyrdom yet again,” he said, “we will not hold back our blood…. But today’s ideal must be the ability of the Church and of Poland to live rather than the ability to die—we have already shown our ability to die in Dachau and in the Warsaw uprising….
“I want my priests at the altar, in the pulpit and in the confessional. Not in a prison…. I want martyrdom only as a last resort—always a grace and an honor.”
As to himself, Wyszynski would add later: “It is all the same to me whether I have to sow words or my own blood—as long as Poland remains Christ’s kingdom.”
In the end, apparently the government felt that the best way to deal with this fox was to do just that. Deal with him. Despite the enormous odds against him, within five months of his consecration as Primate of Poland, Wyszynski sat as a member of the Mixed Commission of government representatives and Polish bishops, to begin hammering out an “understanding,” just as he had proposed.
It is a measure of the enormity of the miracle Wyszynski had achieved that in occupied Germany of the early Cold War years, run as it was by the Allied commissioners, the powerful American, British and French contingents found it hard even to get the Soviet Kommandantur to meet with them to discuss the sewage-disposal problem in Berlin.
In truth, the Mixed Commission in Poland was as nervous-making a proposition for many who took an interest from afar as it was for the Polish Communists on the scene. Acrid and sometimes lethally intended criticisms were hurled against Wyszynski from progressive-minded circles in Western Europe and America. Animus against any Catholic-Polish success cropped up again in various predictable quarters. And not least, there were rumblings in Rome among those Vatican authorities who shunned diplomatic pleasantries with even the humblest Soviet official.
One element in Wyszynski that was particularly baffling for his adversaries, whether at home in Poland or abroad, concerned the question of his attitude toward Marxism, and where he stood on the political spectrum in general. For, after all that had gone on in Central Europe and in Poland in particular over the past two centuries, there weren’t many left in the world who were naive enough to swallow some tomfoolery about separation of church and state.
Marxist philosopher Leszek Kolakowski tried to pin the Archbishop down by asking him whether he was against the Polish Communist system because it was atheist, or because it permitted only the Communist Party and was not politically pluralistic.
Wyszynski never answered Kolakowski directly. But in point of fact, he rejected Communism, and he fought tooth and nail against bureaucratic Marxism built on a materialist ideal. As far as he was concerned, moreover, that Marxist ideology was totally impractical and unworkable for Poland. In fact, he would see to it that it was.
What of capitalism, then? Was Wyszynski going to try to inject that hated element into the “agreement” he wanted between the Church and the government?
Again, the Primate’s position was unsettling for many who monitored these discussions and events from abroad. For the practical and unswerving materialism of raw capitalism repelled him, just as Marxist materialism did.
The fact was that Wyszynski never veered from his idea that there surely should be a middle road—a third road, as he called it, between Marxist Communism and materialist capitalism: the third road that would permit genuine democracy while not fomenting materialism. For in whatever form it came, and whatever its sociopolitical trappings, materialism had always led to practical atheism.
Despite all the theoretical questions in the world, however, Wyszynski’s immediate problem was a pragmatic one. He had to fashion a course of action in the face of a statal power with which the Poles had to live, like it or not. There had to be an agreement that would serve as a working base between him, as Primate and Interrex, and the Communist state government.
In the two years of interminable discussions and haggling of the Mixed Commission between 1948 and 1950, the government showed how much it detested the whole idea of having to contend with this upstart bishop. The negotiations were always inimical, contentious horse trading, and sometimes bordered on something very close to warfare.
The government members of the Mixed Commission hurled insults at Wyszynski, threatened him, vilified him in propaganda published in local newspapers, and not infrequently they stomped out of meetings vowing not to return.
For his part, Wyszynski gave as good as he got. He cared nothing for the insults and never returned them. But he made it plain that he was prepared to respond to threats with information that, if made public, would disgrace government members in the eyes of Poland and the world. And when the members of the government delegation stormed out of meetings, he
knew they would have to come back. For it was true that they needed Wyszynski, and he didn’t lack for ways to show them how much.
They needed him chiefly as a stabilizing factor in a very restive, inimical population. Wyszynski, ably backed by Wojtyla, was always in contact with the population through sermons, addresses, newspaper articles, continual visits to various parts of the country. The cultural and social machine he was always abuilding kept his visibility high among the people and his accessibility wide open. No member of government was as well known as he at the grass roots. He was trusted—uniquely trusted—always to tell the truth, always to protect the people.
Having progressed a miraculous inch in getting the Mixed Commission negotiations going at all, and despite all the difficulties over the next two years, Wyszynski proceeded to mark off a mile. His propositions right through were as brash as his original proposal had been.
During one six-hour meeting at Wilanów Palace with Franciszek Mazur and the government contingent he headed, the Primate argued openly, albeit with some subtlety, against Marxism. He characterized it as something indigenous to the Anglo-Saxon background that had been applied to a people—the Russians—whose souls were Eastern Orthodox. This Russian variety of Marxism was rife, therefore, with three elements that made it impractical for Poland: It was Eurasian; it displayed an enmity for Roman Catholicism; and it was anti-individualistic.
Poland, on the other hand, was Western, Latinate and individualistic. If Marxism was to be applied to the Poles, Wyszynski argued, it could not be the Russian variety. And it could not be hostile to the Roman Church. He insisted now, as he had always done, that there was no theoretical connection necessary between atheism and Marxism. More important, he insisted that there was no practical connection necessary between atheism and Poland’s new system.
Subtlety, however, was not always the order of the day for Wyszynski in the heat of these meetings. “There is nothing more vile than state religion—the worst form of slavery,” Wyszynski fired at the government negotiators at one point. Why would they want to evacuate the Polish mind and soul of their vital energy—a vibrant Catholicism? Couldn’t they see they would be cutting off their collectivist noses to spite their Marxist faces?
Mixing insult and implication in a rhetorical question, Wyszynski asked his adversaries on the commission if, when it came right down to it, the government would rather have the independent and practical morality of Roman Catholicism or the craven subjugation of Polish con, sciences to worship of the state, and the sheer venality that would go with it.
Would it not be better, he argued—would it not in fact be wiser and more practical—to use Polish energies in reconstructing the cultural life and the political vigor of Poland?
Worse, he accused the government of a kind of backwardness that was particularly odious to them as Poles, given the history of the Three Partitions. “Forget all that ‘salad,’” he charged with open contempt, “of Freemasonry and individualist philosophy picked up by mentally impoverished Polish nineteenth-century politicians and intellectuals in France. It is unworthy of twentieth-century reality.” Wyszynski abhorred the potpourri—the “salad”—of half-baked democracy, popular totalitarianism, rabid anticlericalism and Utopian ideals that became a staple of French radical politics in the nineteenth century and filtered into Poland through its émigrés.
Finally, with the constant activist backing of his clergy all over Poland during two years of what amounted to sociopolitical guerrilla warfare, Wyszynski and his bishops on the Mixed Commission finally corralled their adversaries and dragged them, kicking and screaming and still viciously opposed to him, to the point of at last signing an agreement with the Polish Episcopate.
On April 14, 1950, it was officially agreed in a legal document that religious education in the schools would be guaranteed. Guaranteed in the status of Catholic institutions and associations like Lublin University and all charitable organs of the Church. The Catholic press and Catholic publishing houses were free to function. The building of new churches was to be unhindered; seminary education and Church nominations and appointments of clergy to ecclesiastical positions were to be unfettered by government interference.
In effect, Wyszynski had proposed, fought for and got a legal agreement that covered the main needs of the Church. Whatever happened from now on, the Church and the people in Poland had an unassailable position to hold up to the government and the world. They had a leg to stand on.
Now, as Wyszynski understood, the real war would begin.
Over the next twenty-five years and more, the tactic of the government was systematically to violate each provision of the April 1950 agreement by every means at its disposal. The government set about an orchestrated program of scraping away every vestige of freedom they had granted: the freedom to worship, to associate religiously, to learn about Catholicism, to exercise that Catholicism in its traditional forms, and to act as living members of the Roman Catholic Church.
New government regulations and prohibitions were aimed at every sector—education of children, training in seminaries, publishing of books and newspapers, pastoral activity of priests and bishops and religious orders. Passports that would have enabled Wyszynski and his bishops to pay their bounden visits to Rome were not forthcoming. Entire editions of Catholic books were seized and shredded—sixty thousand copies of three books written by Wyszynski met this fate in a single day. Trucks and vans equipped with blaring loudspeakers would circle around churches during Mass so sermons couldn’t be heard.
To those in Poland and elsewhere who called this duplicitous policy of the Polish government a policy of bad faith, Wyszynski had a blunt and practical answer. In his mind, it made about as much sense to speak of “bad faith” or “good faith” in Leninist Marxists as it would to speak of “hygienic” or “unhygienic” policies among wild polecats.
For the Leninist-Marxist mentality, there is neither truth nor falsehood. There is only expediency. In Leninist-Marxist thinking, if it served the purpose at hand to make certain solemn promises on Monday, then they would make those promises. Come Tuesday, if it no longer served the purpose to keep those promises, they would not be kept. In Marxism, crass expediency is the rule for him who is not a fool.
On a certain level, Wyszynski’s response to this government rule of crass expediency was simplicity itself. He would make it expedient for the government to come to heel and keep its word. In a protracted and difficult struggle, again and again the Primate would find ways to use the legal agreement he had won to hold the government’s feet to the fire of its own burning failure.
· · ·
Wyszynski and his entire body of clergy set about building that fire at the grass roots. For the strength of Poland has always been in its people and its pacts. The genius of Wyszynski as Intenex was never to break definitively with the government, but never to permit government infractions of the agreement to pass without hurling violent protests.
As has always been the case, however, the true tour de force of Poland’s fight for survival as a nation was to unleash on the alien government all the forces of the supernatural, all the forces that are today inconceivable by many otherwise enlightened observers, commentators and analysts.
By sheer organization, and a febrile activity that defies the imagination, the Polish bishops and clergy worked in close phalanx fashion under Wyszynski’s constant and canny leadership, in order to mold and forge that basic strength of Polish religious belief into a blazing torch that came, in time, not only to threaten the Communist government in Poland, but to shatter the very grip of the Soviet Union in Central Europe. Intense pastoral activity kept them all in close contact with the people virtually twenty-four hours a day every day of every year. Archbishop Wyszynski alone delivered at least six hundred sermons a year, and gave uncounted public addresses, in addition. He made pastoral visits to every part of Poland. And from his chancery on Miodowa Street in Warsaw there poured out a flood of personal letters, memorand
a, aides-mémoire, telegrams and instructions.
The Polish regime probably needed no such activity as an excuse for the brutal and treacherous tactics that became a standard part of their anti-Church arsenal; for President Boleslaw Bierut and his government displayed authentically deadly enmity in the physical sense. Priests and bishops were arrested and temporarily imprisoned. Nuns were harassed. Priests and prominent Catholic lay people were mugged. Organized bands of toughs looked for threatening confrontations. Sudden and rude government inspections were visited on Church installations. Seminaries were disrupted with sudden violations by inspectors.
Through all of it, however, Wyszynski stood his ground with the Bierut regime in Warsaw on the basis of the agreement they had signed with him. Whether they liked it or not, that “understanding” was an unassailable legal instrument that could be held up to the world.
When a new oppressive legal sanction was clamped on Church activity, he went on the offensive with a reminder of what was truly expedient for the government. “These restrictions,” he warned, “will be harmful to Poland’s image abroad.” If they couldn’t be counted on to respect so simple a matter as the official agreement of April 1950 at home, how could other nations have the confidence to deal with them?
When government officials claimed the right to carry out intimate surveillance of all Church associations and to permit or forbid them, he came back at them with a charge of violating the fundamental and internationally recognized right of free association. “Nobody can give anybody the right to free association—or deny it. By merely existing, each man has this right. The United Nations says so. The constitution of the USSR states this.”
When the government denied Wyszynski and some of his bishops their passports, he reminded them that the expedient thing for them was to think of the matter in terms of Polish territorial integrity. “Does this government really expect the Vatican to give canonical recognition to the Polishness of the Western Lands? Well, then, why can’t we, the Polish bishops, go legally to talk with Vatican officials about this crucial issue?”
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