The Poles knew they were in for tough talk. Now that the commissars are gone, the church has ceased to be the shield for the Solidarity movement or the sole embodiment of Polish nationalism. Going to mass, though still popular, is no longer politics by other means. According to one report, vocations to the priesthood have dropped by 20 percent since freedom was restored, and Poland’s priests are experiencing a backlash of anticlericalism, fed in no small part by the bishops’ recent effort to win for Roman Catholicism the privileges of a state church.
Most controversial of all is the Polish church’s campaign to bring down the nation’s high abortion rate. Polish women undergo more abortions every year–about 600,000–than give birth. Just three weeks before the papal visit, Polish legislators, most of them Catholics, blocked a church-backed bill which would have banned abortions for any reason, and punished both the woman and her doctor with imprisonment.
In his sermon on the Sixth Commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” the pope appealed passionately to the Polish people to reject abortion, which was legalized under communism and which many politicians would like to see left alone. “What Parliament,” he asked, “has the right to legalize the killing of an innocent and defenseless human being?” Raising his voice to a shout, he departed from his text to personalize the issue: “Understand, all you who are careless in this matter, understand that they cannot fail to concern me and to hurt me. And it should hurt you as well.”
In fact, Polish Catholics have grown accustomed to abortion as a form of birth control, especially since reliable contraceptives are hard to come by, and the church has been criticized for its efforts to criminalize the procedure. The latest polls show that the Army has replaced the church as the people’s most trusted institution. In part this also reflects a rising tide of annoyance with a clergy that is not content to remain on the altar. In some parishes, for example, priests do not hesitate to check up personally on members who have been lax in going to confession. “The church today is triumphant, expansive and intolerant,” says Barbara Labuda, a former Solidarity activist who is now a member of Parliament. “Supporting such a church means playing the toady. It is not the same as supporting the church at the time it was subject to persecution.”
The pope’s greatest accolades came during his visits to Poland’s border towns, where, for the first time, tens of thousands of Catholics from the Soviet Union’s western republics were permitted to come and cheer their spiritual leader. At Lomza, in the northeast, John Paul left little doubt that he supports Lithuanian nationalists. “With longing in my heart,” the pope said in halting Lithuanian, “I am with you and have for a long time wanted to be among you.” To Vitas Radzavicius, a construction engineer from Kaunas, this hint of a future papal visit was good news for the Lithuanian independence movement. “The closer he is to Lithuania,” he said, “the closer we are to our goal.”
Enthusiasm was equally high in Przemysl, where 10,000 Catholics from the neighboring Ukraine cheered and wept at the sight of the pontiff few believed they’d ever live to see. Again, John Paul promised to visit the pilgrims in their homeland, where the church had been outlawed for 44 years. But an embarrassing incident in Przemysl demonstrated just how little even a pope can do to mollify deep-rooted ethnic and national hatreds.
In preparation for his visit, the pope tried to persuade Polish Catholics to give back a Polish church to Ukrainian Catholics living in Przemysl. The Ukrainians belong to the church’s Eastern Rite but did not have a place of their own for worship. The pope’s plan was to return a Carmelite church which had been a Ukrainian cathedral until 1946. But with the support of Carmelite monks, local Catholics occupied the building, forcing John Paul to cancel a visit to the church. Although he was able to announce that another MA church nearby would be turned over to the Ukrainians, the pope was clearly anguished by the continuing ethnic hostility. “Oh, how fervently I wish that Catholics of both rites would love each other,” he declared.
Obviously John Paul would like to see his homeland become a model for the kind of Christian social order he hopes will emerge in all of Eastern Europe. But such a society cannot be achieved unless it is arrived at voluntarily. If the pope’s evangelism was hard for many Poles to swallow, it was at least true to the spirit of democracy. Having inspired Poland to an admirably nonviolent revolution, the pope must now persuade–not coerce–the people to embrace its teachings. That is one lesson in freedom Polish Catholics can still learn from churches in the hedonistic West.
