On a break in Warsaw during coverage of the Polish elections, I escaped to visit the parish of St. Stanislaus Kostka, where the priest Jerzy Popieluszko, kidnapped and murdered in 1984 by the communist secret police, is buried. He was 37 years old and his tortured body appeared in the Vistula River, tied up and with a bag of stones tied to his feet so that he would not float. His grave is in the garden of this church where he exercised his ministry in the last four years of his life.
By then, he had become a public figure, hated and harassed by those in power, who saw a subversive element in the Church. Popieluszko was the unofficial chaplain of the independent union Solidarnosc – led by the electrician Lech Walesa, later president of the country and Nobel Peace Prize winner – and celebrated masses for the country from the balcony of the church before standing crowds on the esplanade that is now a green park. The day I went was Sunday morning, and I was chatting with Wojciech and Robert, two middle-aged Catholics, who before embarking on a bicycle excursion had stopped to pray at the tomb. “He always said that he conquers evil with good,” they stressed, excited.
Popieluszko spoke of freedom to believe in God, of workers’ rights and of the national soul. Between 1981 and 1983 he governed the martial law imposed by General Jaruzelski to crush the anti-communist opposition, a repression that cost the lives of ninety people. The dictatorial regime in its death throes gave violent blows.
The deep presence of Catholicism in Poland has never ceased to surprise me since almost twenty years ago, in April 2005, as a correspondent in Rome, I was literally walking around avoiding young Poles who were sleeping on the floors around the Vatican for the funeral of their compatriot. Pope John Paul II. There were so many arrivals that the Italian police wisely decided to turn a blind eye and let many camp in the flower beds.
Poland cannot be understood without the lights and shadows of the Catholic Church. The Church has long inspired devotion and respect as a bastion of Polish culture in periods of foreign domination since the 18th century, and in the communist era it was a beacon for democracy.
In fact, the process of secularization that other European countries with a long Catholic tradition have been experiencing for decades was slowed down in Poland by the memory of how the Church had suffered persecution under communism – with the murder of Popieluszko as a terrible example – and how it had helped to the dissidents. Older Poles do not forget John Paul II’s role in the fall of the regime.
But times change. The new generations focus more on the current behaviors of the Church, and the rocky conservatism of the hierarchy alienates youth. The bishops have become very close to the ultraconservative Law and Justice party (PiS), which in its eight years of government has guaranteed them strict legislation against abortion and a discourse of limits on the LGBTQ community. Meanwhile, cases of sexual abuse of clerics and cover-ups were revealed. And society is becoming secularized. In the 2021 census, around 70% of Poles declared themselves Catholic; Ten years earlier, that percentage was 87%.
As if entering another world, in the museum in the basement of the church of Saint Stanislaus Kostka, it is moving to explore the life of a humble and brave priest like Jerzy Popieluszko: his chasuble, his typewriter, union posters, … More 300,000 people attended his funeral in Warsaw. His martyrdom, recognized as such by Benedict XVI, raised him to the altars as blessed in 2010 and, for Catholics and non-Catholics, it is part of the history of Poland.
