Page 4, 23rd December 1983

23rd December 1983

Page 4

Page 4, 23rd December 1983 — A nation waiting to make a break
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Organisations: Marxist government
Locations: Wellington, Warsaw

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A nation waiting to make a break

POLAND IS the test, Belloc said. If before the War it was sandwiched between the barbarisms of Stalinism and Nazism; now it is hedged round by the pragmatic socialism of the Soviet Empire on one side and the new barbarism of Western Materialism on the other.
The Church in Poland has survived to the extent that churches are full. young and old frequent the sacraments including Penance, priestly vocations boom so that priests are being sent abroad. It would be foolish to ascribe all this, and much more, to the presence of Communist 'opposition.
A typical case of the way things are developing is the new parish of Millenium, a,suburb of neo-Stalinist blocks of flats outside Czestochowa, named not after the thousandth anniversary of Christianity in Poland, but after the State anniversary held (pointedly) a couple of years later. Of course, the suburb, like Nowa Huta, was built without a church.
For fifteen years the parish pricq said Mass in the open air, or in a tent during the bitter winter. It took eight years for permission to build a church, now nearly completed. The team of seven priests give instruction to 7.000 children a week, prohibited from learning about religion at school. Of the 30,000 in the parish, each visited by their priests, only 500 refuse to come to Mass. And a team of 24 lady volunteers still distribute powdered milk and potato to 1.000 parishioners below the bread line.
None of the credit for the heroism of these people can genuinely be awarded to the Jaruzelski regime, except in the most convoluted way. It is true that he has managed to stop the Russians from marching in. Perhaps he has stopped a world war — for if the Soviets used East German troops to occupy Poland, a war within its borders would very likely ensue and would be hard to contain.
Jaruzelski let the Pope come back to Poland in June, and the street demonstrations which accompanied it, with thousands showing Solidarity signs, did not develop into riots. Government apologists could even claim until recently that the State was letting the Church get on with its own affairs.
But it really makes no sense to suppose that Jaruzelski is at ease, or even in equilibrium, with the%Church. It is not just that the Church supports Solidarity; indeed it does not in any official way. It is rather that the vast body of Polish churchgoers — more than 90 per
cent — are the very same people who would welcome a system of government informed by the principles of Solidarity. And so they hate the present regime.
So the State has started taking action against priests who encourage underground Solidarity from the pulpit. Fr Jerzy Popieluszko in Warsaw and the Walesas' priest in Gdansk, Fr Henryk Jankowski, are the first candidates for treatment.
Nothing could have demonstrated better the remarkable conformity between the supporters of Solidarity and the inspiring presence of the Church than Mr Lech Walesa's gift of his Nobel Prize medal to the treasury of Jasna Gora monastery, where generations of Polish heroes have left gifts in gratitude to Our Lady bf Czestochowa, who has saved the country from so many oppressors. And then the Walesa car was stopped by police 13 times on the way back to Gdansk.
The editor of a party newspaper in Krakow, Dr Slawomir Tabkowski, was asked last month if he did not think the Church would continue as a force int Poland long after the failure of Communism had been admitted. Not an easy question to answer for a man in his position. He had to start explaining about the possibility of the co-existence of private belief with a Marxist ideology, and how the State only wanted to cooperate with the Church. But then he had to say that this was only a tactic of necessity while the Church had so much sway — the ultimate goal was to do away with the Church, such an engine of reaction and obstacle to progress.
worried that the Marxist government has failed in the last 40 years to come up with the material fruits proper to a truly progressive economy. When peasants following horse-drawn ploughs (still the normal method of tilling the land) cannot even get Wellington boots, it should be no surprise that the people are more willing to give backing to the Church fund to aid private farmers (the most productive by far) than to embrace the disastrous consequences of official policy.
The State has been calling for dialogue. but has not shown any willingness to enter into serious discussion. It will not make real attempts to work out how the Church can implement its
farmers' aid scheme (to which Walesa donated his Nobel Prize money). But the Church, including its laity, as represented by the Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszechny, is calling for dialogue too. It has plenty to talk about.
"There will never be peace in Europe without a free and independent Poland," said Pope John Paul during the first visit to his homeland after his election. This year he said: "I do not stop hoping that social reform, announced on many occasions, according to the principles so painstakingly worked out in the critical days of August 1980, and contained in the agreements, will gradually be put into effect." The agreements the Pope referred to, in his speech to the authorities, were the outcome of the Solidarity strikes. But after that martial law came and when it was lifted the government persisted in regarding Solidarity as non-existent and its agreements with the Slate as void.
The Pope's optimism is admirable, but it is difficult to see how it can be fulfilled. Poland's "geographical situation" — in other words the presence of its great neighbour to the East — ensures that it ,cannot in any real sense be free until the Soviet Union changes its system. In the meantime the Church watches over a nation surviving in expectation.




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