Keys of This Blood (96 page)

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.

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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, memoranda, 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?”

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 Poland.