When, always mindful of the wider role they saw for Poland, Wyszynski and his bishops wrote a letter to the German bishops suggesting a postwar reconciliation between Germans and Poles—“We forgive, and we ask forgiveness,” the letter proposed—the Bierut government tried to use the Archbishop’s tactics against him. The Primate was a stooge of “Wall Street bankers” and the CIA, they charged; in league with the Vatican, he was plotting against Polish nationalism—the racja stanu he professed to hold so dear.
Wyszynski was not about to be had up on any such charge, however; and, in return, he hauled his accusers into the cold and rarefied sea of geopolitics. “The sooner the government realizes that our letter [to the German bishops] has paved the way for a Polish-German Republic agreement, the better for their own political health. By that agreement, the USSR is helped. For it is bedeviled by the rise of an inimical China. The USSR needs to put its European back garden in order, achieve some unification there. Our letter has helped that policy.”
Not all of Wyszynski’s arguments and ploys won the day in terms of this or that particular issue. But what was going on was not entirely about those particular issues. For Wyszynski, it was about the relationship of Poland—Poles, their Polishness and their territory—with Heaven. And for Boleslaw Bierut and his regime, it was about brute power and the position of the “Democratic Republic of Poland” in the march to the “Paradise of the Workers.”
Bierut had brute power; there could be no doubt about that. But Wyszynski seemed stubbornly to ignore that fact. He was tireless in the face of constant and often dangerous government harassment. And he understood that under the ragged surface of the government program, there was always the intention to trap him into some precipitous decision, some unwise move or some situation that would justify his removal from the primatial residence, and from the public scene altogether.
To the government’s consternation, however, there was no trapping this Fox of Europe—for so he was widely known by now. Time and again, one or another outflanking maneuver by Wyszynski set this or that government plan on its ear. And, time and again, Prime Minister Jozef Cyrankiewicz would mutter in frustration, “Again, that Bishop! That Bishop again!”
The Polish government was not pleased to learn that in November of 1952 Archbishop Stefan Wyszynski would be elevated to the rank of Cardinal, with public ceremonies to be conducted by Pope Pius XII in Rome in January of 1953. As was more than once the case, Bierut’s government knew of the secret decision taken in Rome before it was publicly announced, and even before Wyszynski knew; for the Vatican had long since been penetrated by Eastern bloc intelligence.
Of course, “that Bishop” would not be allowed to go to Rome to receive the red hat. But, as Wyszynski’s presence in Rome was not required for his new dignity as Cardinal to be valid, the victory for the Communists was a poor one indeed. His nomination by the Pope made him a cardinal. The public ceremony was merely solemnization of the fact.
In the face of such a slap against their own policies, the Polish government ratcheted its policy of harassment up to a new level. By government decree, monasteries were dissolved and plundered, and whole classes of seminarians were drafted into the army for national service. Printing and publishing were crippled by drastic cuts in the supply of paper. Onerous taxes were assessed against Church institutions. Religious teaching was thrown out of a third of all schools.
Wyszynski and his Polish bishops later wrote one of their letters to the Polish people in which they set down the pith and nub of the havoc continually wrought by the Bierut government in Poland: “Whatever served the system or certain persons was called moral, and whatever bothered them was called immoral or evil. In this way, morality was made a slave to people and the system…. Words lost their value. Untruth reigned in the means of social communication, information was falsified, the truth passed over in silence, perverse commentaries given. Everyone said that the press lies, the radio lies, the television lies, the school lies. Until, in the end, the lies turned back on the liars.”
Thus, on and on went the struggle, until one day the government tried the impossible. It moved to take direct and legal power in the appointment of bishops and other diocesan officials.
This time, Wyszynski would not budge an inch. There was no diversionary tactic, no refuge in the premise of racja stanu, no warnings about international consequences or geopolitical benefits. The only premise at stake now was the right of the Church to govern itself. The Cardinal and his bishops replied to the government move with a quick-fire response in unmistakable Roman terms.
On September 22, 1953, six of Poland’s bishops were arrested on trumped-up charges. All were imprisoned, and one of them, Bishop Czeslaw Kaczmarek, was sentenced to twelve years.
Wyszynski knew his turn would come soon. Five days before Bishop Kaczmarek and his companions were taken, in fact, the Cardinal told his bishops, “Granted a choice of alternatives, I will choose imprisonment over privilege, because in prison I will be at the side of the most tormented ones. Privilege could be a sign of leaving the Church’s proper road of truth and love.”
On September 25, as the Cardinal was preparing for bed just after ten in the evening, seven cars with windows obscured by caked mud drew up at his residence on Miodowa Street. Within minutes, police officers were inside the house.
Wyszynski knew at once what was happening. He came down from his bedroom and was handed a government decree ordering his “removal” from the city of Warsaw. No reason was assigned; no law was invoked. His signature was required on the decree. Wyszynski refused to sign. “I cannot acknowledge a decision for which I see no legal basis…. I will not thus voluntarily leave my residence.”
“At least read the decree, sir,” came the response. “And sign it.”
He had read the decree. Instead of his signature, he wrote: “I have read this.”
The Cardinal fetched his Breviary and his Rosary. His coat and hat were brought to him. He was escorted to one of the waiting cars, and within minutes the convoy was swallowed up in the darkness of Warsaw’s streets.
Some details of Wyszynski’s arrest are now clear to us from government records and the diaries of government officials. It is clear that the decision to seize him was hatched in Warsaw and that it was approved in Moscow. It was to the Minister of the Interior himself that the Primate had said, “I would rather sit in a Polish prison than be comfortable in Biarritz.” Now it is clear that, in the words of that same minister, Wyszynski’s removal was to be “final and irreversible.”
Except perhaps as a declared public enemy who had at last been unmasked by the vigilant guardians of socialism, the Cardinal was not to be allowed to surface again as a public figure in Poland.
With Wyszynski’s voice stilled and his directive functions terminated, the government moved swiftly. President Boleslaw Bierut’s terror machine went into action throughout Poland, demoralizing, harassing, interrupting, blocking all Church-related activities. Karol Wojtyla moved swiftly in counteraction. He communicated with all the bishops, gave special instructions to all his priests, communicated privately with the Vatican, and established a monitoring system to track the Cardinal’s movements and location.
On September 28, just three days after Wyszynski’s “removal,” his interim replacement, Bishop Michal Klepacz, terrorized by hours of menaces and threats, was forced to issue a pro-Communist declaration. Menaced still further, on October 17, Klepacz vowed obedience to Communist rule. Wojtyla made sure that everyone knew what was afoot in this government charade.
Letters smuggled out of Poland to Rome and to Western capitals told the whole truth. On top of that, a former aide to the brutal Boleslaw Bierut—none other, in fact, than the Jozef Swiatlo who now compared Poland in its early years under Stalin to a virgin whose bedroom had been invaded by rapists—had become a well-known and exceedingly well-informed expatriate and anti-Communist commentator, who broadcast daily reports over Radio Free Europe about the internal state of Po
land.
As to Wyszynski himself, meanwhile, several possible ways to dispose of him were considered. For a brief time, serious thought was given to direct assassination—an “accident” on the road could be arranged. But it was decided instead to milk his arrest to the fullest. His confinement would be such that if it did not kill him, it would enfeeble him physically and unbalance his personality. He would be putty in the hands of his captors.
While the brainwashing was going on, government propaganda would prepare the public mind in Poland and abroad for a huge show trial to convict “Mr. Wyszynski” of “sins against the people”—gross currency violations, for instance, plus collaboration with the CIA, plotting with the Vatican to overthrow the People’s Republic of Poland, and moral turpitude among his entourage and in his own private life.
That, it was hoped, would write an end to the troublesome presence of Stefan Wyszynski as Primate and Interrex; thus the frustrating opposition among his clergy and laity would fall to pieces. Of course, none of this was going to happen. Wyszynski, far from being reduced to putty and brainwashed into admitting horrible crimes, only seemed to wax mentally stronger and more active than ever. Then there was the ecclesiastical mechanism he had created, and the intricate ramification of Catholic organizations he had created and prepared precisely for such a government tactic. There also was Father Wojtyla. Junior in years to all of the bishops, he rapidly came to the fore as the leader during Wyszynski’s imprisonment. He was confident and tranquil, thus evoking confidence and tranquillity in those around him. The reports to Rome were clear-minded and balanced. He obviously understood all the factors, national and international, that were at play in this crisis.
Wyszynski’s first place of imprisonment was in the cold northern reaches of Poland, at a Capuchin monastery in Rywald. Then, in October, he was taken to another dilapidated monastery, at Stoczek. Location in the north, with inadequate protection against the frigid temperatures and dampness of the Polish winter, was intended to ensure at least the Cardinal’s physical breakdown; the more so since, as the government was aware, Wyszynski had suffered from a weak chest in his younger days. If the government was lucky, he might even die.
The government should have known better. But even after all their years of dealing with “Mr. Wyszynski,” it is fair to say that, except for the faith they refused, there was probably nothing that could have prepared them for what was to come. For it would belong to a terrain made accessible to the human mind only by the special grace of the God Wyszynski adored, by the Christ he worshiped as Savior, and by the special privileges granted by God to the mother of Christ as the Queen of Heaven.
In the face of a hopelessness as bleak as the winter landscape of Stoczek, Wyszynski searched for strength and perseverance in his pain. Cut off from his Church, from Rome, from his people, from his country, he searched for the confidence to maintain optimism in the darkness that enveloped his life as a prisoner.
In the deepening misery of this “final and irrevocable” banishment from his work, this Pole of the Poles entered into the only dimension left to him; into the largest dimension of all: Poland as the sacred possession of God; Poland as the nation that had confided itself, in the intimacy of faith, to the protection of the woman who had been chosen by God to protect his Son; Poland as the Kingdom of Mary.
On December 8, 1953—the day on which the Church commemorates and celebrates the special sinlessness of Mary, which had been granted her by a “unique grace and privilege of Almighty God,” as Pope Pius IX had written nearly a century before—the imprisoned Cardinal, as Primate and Interrex of Poland, made an act of devotion and consecration to Mary.
In that act of “voluntary servitude,” Wyszynski affirmed for himself, and for Poland in the mid-twentieth century, the same Pact of Polishness that had been declared by King Jan Kazimierz in 1655, after he defended the Bright Mountain of Jasna Góra against the Swedes. Wyszynski linked himself and Poland with Jan Sobieski’s victories over the Turks at Chocim in 1673, and in Vienna in 1683. In the intimacy of faith, and in tangible history, he followed the same path that had led to the Polish rout of the vastly superior Soviet army at the “Miracle of the Vistula” in 1920.
In sum, as each of those predecessors had done, Wyszynski was asking Mary, within God’s will, to use him still for the task of saving souls and saving Poland. He was drawing down upon himself and upon his nation the supernatural protection of Poland’s great Queen.
And so it was that the avowedly atheist government in Poland—by violating the Cardinal’s persona as Primate and by rendering him impotent to deal with them on the tangible plane of their contention—had led him to a renewal of Poland’s immemorial Third Pact of its national identity. They had forced him onto the high ground of Heaven’s terrain.
Over the next two years, the Council of Polish Bishops under the acting head, Bishop Michal Klepacz, and following Wyszynski’s directions from his prison, reactivated the Mixed Commission, organized pilgrimages and prayer meetings—the theme of which was the unjust imprisonment of the Primate—and kept up a barrage of requests that he be released on legal and constitutional grounds. The ground swell of protest about the imprisonment, over the two years, was one contributing factor in Wyszynski’s final release. But just as important was the hard lesson learned by the government: The religious machinery created by Wyszynski only doubled its energy and performance because of the harsh treatment the Primate had received. It was a no-win situation for the government.
In the fall of 1954, Wyszynski was transferred from Stoczek in the north of Poland to Prudnik Slaski in the extreme south. Then, in October of 1955, he was taken to his final place of imprisonment, at Komancza, in Sanok Province, near the Czechoslovak border.
With the onset of spring in 1956, the national and political landscape of Poland began to change. Communist mismanagement in general had now produced breadlines, hunger, a shabby and broken-down condition in cities and towns, inflation, unprofitable enterprises and a crumbling industrial infrastructure.
In March, the First Secretary of the Communist Party, President Boleslaw Bierut, went on a visit to Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow to account for his dismal record. Aside from Bierut’s failure, and Khrushchev’s personal dislike of Bierut, the Soviet dictator did not take kindly to his visitor’s oily and ill-timed hints that he knew much that was damning about everybody in Moscow’s leadership, including Khrushchev himself. Bierut was given a bullet in the back of the head.
At Komancza, Cardinal Wyszynski prayed for the eternal soul of Boleslaw Bierut, the man directly responsible for his imprisonment. The top spot in Poland’s government, meanwhile, was given to the lugubrious, ruthless, skirt-chasing Soviet security agent Edward Ochab, who had earned the sobriquet “Gloom-and-Doom-and-Boom” Ochab among the Polish populace.
Ochab had his hands full. Poland’s economic misery was finally beginning to erupt in the sort of discontent that would lead to the defeat of political Communism in the 1980s. In June of 1956, “bread and freedom” riots of workers broke out in Poznan. Communist Party offices were destroyed, secret police files were burned; and, in the city’s unrest, fifty-three people were killed.
Sparked by the Polish example, Hungarian workers exploded in riots, and finally rose up in full revolt against their Soviet masters. Red Army tanks rumbled across Hungary and crushed the revolt. But the lesson was not lost on Moscow.
In the midst of the Eighth Plenum of his Central Committee, Nikita Khrushchev took some of his top men and flew to Warsaw. Simultaneously, Soviet tank corps moved westward toward that city. In talks held in the Polish capital on October 19 to 21, the Soviet and Polish comrades agreed to cool things down. More exactly, Khrushchev made it clear that he would have no further riots. The country was to be pacified. After the bloody quelling of the Hungarian uprising, they could not take a second international black eye in Poland.
Wyszynski’s isolation at Komancza was not so complete that he was unable to follow the unfolding sit
uation. And he clearly saw something new in these events; something more than the troublesome sociopolitical unrest in Poland was now motivating Moscow’s policy and behavior. Gradually, news filtered through the underground pipelines undergirding all political and social life in the Soviet empire. The Party-State in its inner councils was going through a deep upheaval. The Kremlin geopoliticians were in a profound reassessment of their world situation.
On March 15, 1956, as he contemplated the changing panorama, the Cardinal came to a simple-seeming but grave decision that was unique, and at the same time totally in keeping with the permanent worldview inherent to his Polishness. This decision was, as he told two visitors to his prison on that day, not simply the only remaining solution to Catholicism’s peril in Poland, but the only proviso against the unsure future of the USSR. He would dedicate Poland as a nation, as a people and as a territory in voluntary servitude to Mary for the sake of Europe and the world—and he would do so together with all of Poland’s bishops, and with all Polish Catholics. It would be a truly national act of voluntary servitude for the sake of the world.
There was thus something more to Wyszynski’s decision than mere private devotion. His proposal contained a unique element that lifted the whole plan and vision from the outset onto the unmistakably georeligious and geopolitical plane that had always been implicit in Poland’s outlook. His proposed dedication would not be for his personal freedom, or for Poland’s national freedom. The intention now would be for the whole Roman Church, and for the world in which that Church now found itself. More, the intention would be that the slow torture of the Church and of the world by Leninist Marxism would cease; that the hate would be ended; that the cancer of Marxism would be removed from all of humanity.
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