Joyous Welcome for a Native Son

Religion

In Poland the Pope confronts a troubled party and an impassioned church

He went away to Rome last Oct. 3 as Karol Wojtyla, a Cardinal-Archbishop warmly admired by his countrymen but little known elsewhere in the world. Last week he returned in triumph as John Paul II, a dynamic new Pope whose skill, originally tried and proved in day-by-day contest with Poland's Communist rulers, would be tested once again.

On the flight from Rome to Warsaw, John Paul was able to eat hardly any breakfast and told the 60 reporters and photographers on his plane that he would need to "contain my emotion" during the trip. As soon as the papal jet landed, black-robed Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, 77, the Primate of Poland, mounted the steps into the plane. John Paul's shrewd former mentor has maneuvered for three decades to guide the Polish church through the darkest days of Stalinist repression into an era of uneasy coexistence with the country's Communist rulers. The extent of the church-state detente was immediately apparent: figurehead President Henryk Jablonski came to the airport to welcome John Paul, and the Pope later conferred for 30 minutes with Communist Party Secretary Edward Gierek.

As soon as the Pope stepped from his plane he knelt to kiss his native soil, then bussed a little girl in traditional dress who handed him a bouquet. Obviously moved, John Paul spoke of "my native land, to which I remain deeply attached by the roots of my life, of my heart, of my vocation." Poland, he told the group at the airport, "through the course of history has been linked with the Church of Christ and the See of Rome by a special bond of spiritual unity."

As the Pope rode into Warsaw aboard an open, bus-type van, hundreds of thousands of Poles cheered and threw bright flowers in his path. One youth was applauded when he held up a placard: NATION WITH THE CHURCH AND CHURCH WITH THE NATION. At the historic St. John's Cathedral, the congregation broke through ropes and mobbed the Pontiff. The day's climax was an open-air Mass for up to 500,000 people at downtown Victory Square. When John Paul declared, "Without Christ it is impossible to understand the history of Poland," the crowd burst into applause that lasted fully ten minutes, while spontaneous singing of the hymn Christ Conquers spread like a tidal wave.

The Pope's nine-day visit represents a rendezvous not only with people and politics but with Poland's past pains and glories. The tour was to include his home town of Wadowice, Cracow, where he served as Archbishop, and Czestochowa, his country's holiest shrine, which contains the painting of the Black Madonna. Temporal leaders have come and gone, but the Virgin has remained for 323 years "Krolowa Polski"(the Queen of Poland).*Finally the Pope will visit Auschwitz, a symbol of Nazi infamy and to Poles a reminder of the estimated 6 million Poles, 3 million of them Jews, who died during the second World War.

The tour, the first ever by a Pope into a Communist nation, dramatizes before the world the vitality of Polish Catholicism, despite attempted repression, and its peculiar mutually dependent relationship with would-be Communist oppressors, still ideologically committed to the suppression of religion. The church is in many ways the strongest force in the nation. Some 70% to 80% of the 35 million Poles are practicing Catholics. Cardinal Wyszynski and now Pope John Paul II are the undisputed popular leaders of the Polish people.

Elsewhere in Eastern Europe the state of the church is various and mostly weak. But in Poland the Communists failed in early attempts to eradicate the church, in large part because they could not eradicate Polish history. For a thousand years the church has suffered alongside the people, ever since the baptism of the first ruler of a Polish state, Prince Mieszko I, in A.D. 966. Even when Poland disappeared entirely from the map, dismembered by the Prussians, Austrians and Russians in the 18th and 19th centuries, the church preserved the national language and culture.

In 1939, when the Nazis and Soviets overran the nation, the church defied them. Since the war it has refused to submit to a Communist regime that exists with tenuous popular support. Says one Polish bishop: "For 200 years, except for an interlude between the two World Wars, the Poles have been under governments imposed from outside. Loyalty to the church became the only means of defending national identity." Even Kazimierz Kakol, the Communist Minister for Religious Affairs, concedes that "the church has held a very important role in the history of Poland, a very positive role."

The Communist repression began in 1948 under the Soviet-backed United Polish Workers' Party. The government nationalized Catholic publishing houses, censored church publications, banned broadcasts and youth associations and largely expropriated church property. In 1953 Cardinal Wyszynski was placed under house arrest, and by that year's end eight other bishops and 900 priests had been imprisoned. Seminaries and monasteries were shut down. The number of churches dropped by nearly a third. Trying a divide-and-conquer tactic, the Communists sponsored the Pax Movement for "progressive" priests and laity who backed the party against the hierarchy.

But since 1956, when worker riots and a loosening of Moscow's grip brought in the more liberal regime of Wladyslaw Gomulka, the Polish party has been caught between the threat of Soviet intervention and the need for popular support. From time to time it has sought to strengthen its ties with the populace by easing repression of the church. Taking advantage of every chance, the church today boasts about 20,000 priests, compared with a prewar 13,000. More than 500 graduated from the country's seminaries last year, while most countries in the democratic West face a growing shortage of new priests. The church also educates both priests and laity at the Catholic University of Lublin, the only religious university allowed to exist anywhere in the Communist world.

Though Stalinist-era oppression has ended, there is still tension. Said one Polish Catholic intellectual from Cracow: "You can't talk about persecution, but there is constant harassment." Religion classes remain outside the schools, and, more important, parents are pressured not to send their children. Religious broadcasts are forbidden, even of Masses that could comfort invalids. A notable exception was the four-hour telecast of Figure of crucified Christ in modernistic Nowa Huta church John Paul's installation at the Vatican. National coverage of three of this week's events has been scheduled.

As in other Communist countries, the state maintains a strict monopoly on publishing and paper supplies. Last November the bishops had to plead for paper for catechism texts, prayer books and church documents. The Pax Movement has its own daily newspaper, but the hierarchy is not able to publish periodicals. The independent Catholic press is led by the respected Tygodnik Powszechny (General Weekly), produced by John Paul's friend Lay Editor Jerzy Turowicz. The pa per is artificially limited to eight pages an issue and a circulation of 40,000. Editor Turowicz routinely prepares twice as much copy as he needs because censors are unpredictable.

The regime also holds the power to veto assignments of bishops to particular cities. In an outrageous case, the Communists rejected 20 candidates for Archbishop of Wroclaw before accepting the supposedly "safe" Henryk Gulbinowicz. Jokes Minister Kakol: "The church knows the way we function, so the simplest thing would be for them to put their favorite candidate in last place."

Throughout the Communist period, the shortage of church buildings has been the most nettlesome problem. After the war's destruction, an increase in population and the move of peasants to industrial "new towns," Polish Catholics needed large numbers of new buildings. But the Communist government, which has total control of building permits and supplies, played a maddening cat-and-mouse game of rejection and delay. John Paul's most telling achievement in Cracow was the erection of a modernistic concrete-and-steel church at Nowa Huta (New Foundry), a steel town designed to provide no church for its 200,000 residents. Getting permission and putting up the church took 20 years.

During the building battle, Bishop Ignacy Tokarczuk of Przemysl called on the people to "break the line of fear." No Catholic in his diocese, he decided, should have to walk more than 2 1/2 miles to church. Starting in the mid-1960s, his parishioners would secretly assemble small, prefab churches, then put them together overnight without permission. In the morning the authorities would be presented with an act of faith accompli. A day came when the bishop was led off to be fined at the prosecutor's office for his actions, but such a noisy phalanx of Catholic housewives followed along that the harried official finally told the bishop to forget the fine. Said he: "Just get these women out of my office." Tokarczuk has put up more than 100 illegal new churches. His philosophy: "The law that is against human rights is not binding, so we do not feel guilty."

The law is precisely the problem. Polish Catholicism exists in legal limbo, with no guaranteed rights. Four months before his election as Pope, Karol Wojtyla declared, "Being such a vast community, a community almost as large as the nation itself, we cannot be outside the law. Definition of the church's legal status is at the same time the definition of our place and of all of our rights." The church does not expect or even want the political powers that it wielded in former times. It seeks only elemental human freedoms, which John Paul has enunciated from his universal pulpit.

But the granting of even a few simple freedoms, as the Communist world has occasionally discovered, can be politically explosive in countries where the people feel oppressed. That is one reason why there are still three Soviet divisions stationed in Poland. In bargaining for further concessions, the papacy today has no more divisions than it had when Stalin first sneered at its lack of them. Where Poland is concerned, however, John Paul II does have considerable secular as well as spiritual clout. It derives not merely from the strength and solidarity of Polish Catholics or from his own toughness and experience in struggling with Communists. To a considerable degree, it also results from the political and economic morass in which Poland finds itself.

Gierek came to power with a mandate for change. Worker riots in 1970 over increased food prices had toppled the Gomulka regime. The new government tried a policy of rapid economic development, heavily dependent upon Western technology and credits, to bring Poland out of economic stagnation. An international recession and a string of bad harvests led instead to an economic slump; and Gierek, like his predecessor, attempted to end artificial price controls in 1976. Workers took to the streets, and the regime backed down. With no solution in sight, Polish consumers now suffer from endemic shortages of meat. Necessary consumer goods like pins and shoe polish are sporadically unavailable. Meanwhile, Poland has managed to roll up an international debt of $15 billion.

Today the regime, almost entirely cut off from popular support, tolerates a degree of open dissent on matters economic, political and religious that is virtually unprecedented under Communism. Much dissent, naturally, has the church's moral support. Illegal "flying universities" schedule home lectures on topics like the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland that state classrooms never mention. There are some two dozen illegal samizdat periodicals and dissident organizations for intellectuals, workers and peasants. In its present need to ensure a measure of political order, the Gierek government devoutly desires good relations with the Polish church and the Vatican. That need is a source of the Pope's bargaining power.

As Pope and party confront each other, both worry about what Poles refer to as "the Soviet tank factor," the fear that liberalization may go too far, as in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and activate those slumbering Russian divisions. That fear has loaded the plans for the Pope's tour with much heat, paradox and political potential.

Even Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko has been concerned. He made an early visit to the Vatican after John Paul was elected to size up the new Polish Pope. John Paul may prove a hard bargainer, much more likely than Paul VI to demand quid pro quo for Vatican good will and to hold the Communist world to its word thereafter. Gromyko was recently quoted in the Italian press as fearing that the Pope's visit would have "the same effect on the masses as the Ayatullah Khomeini had in Iran."

The Communists were so nervous about the politics of an impending visit that they ham-handedly censored John Paul's first message to his former diocese in Cracow because he praised St. Stanislaw, an 11th century bishop of that city, by describing him as a martyr who "did not hesitate to confront the ruler when defense of the moral order called for it." The Polish government also balked at the Pope's expressed interest in returning home during last month's 900th anniversary celebration of the martyrdom.

Says Religious Minister Kakol of the current visit: "The Vatican assured us that there will be no controversial state ments made." But with millions of Poles, along with other East bloc Catholics, turning out to see John Paul, a certain political nervousness is understandable. The deep feeling that the accession of Wojtyla to the papacy stirred in East European Catholics can hardly be overestimated. "In future," as the underground Chronicle of the beleaguered Lithuanian Catholic Church put it, "we shall not feel abandoned to the will of the atheists in the Kremlin."

No one can control spontaneous combustion. Both church and state, though, have been working together somewhat touchily to avoid unruly demonstrations. In Warsaw, liquor sales were banned. The Pope will travel into recently created security sectors. Both church and state agreed that spectator tickets to papal events would be issued only to people living in that sector. Meanwhile, the Communist regime may end up paying the bulk of $65,000 to put up the new altar in Victory Square in Warsaw, $116,000 worth of portable toilets in Cracow, and $25,000 to pay for special hats worn by 40,000 volunteer Catholic "civil guards" who, along with 85,000 state police, will help handle crowd control on the route. Priests will also assist.

All this is from a party officially bent on repressing Christianity and from the political heirs of a revolutionary, Lenin, who once wrote: "Every religious idea, every idea of any divinity, even any flirtation with a divinity is the most inexpressible vileness."

No one knows what will eventually come of John Paul's homecoming. Says Tadeusz Mazowiecki, editor of the Catholic monthly Wiez (The Link) and a founder of the flying university movement: "The Pope's visit will inject new energy into society. The masses will feel stronger; they will understand that they should demand more. These nine days will be a religious event, of course, but they will also shape the consciousness of the people." In other words, though the trip's intent is spiritual, its effects may be temporal as well.

*The portrait was credited with miraculously raising a siege of the Czestochowa monastery by Swedes in 1655 after priests prayed to the Virgin.

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