Religion: Ax for PAX

The Communists’ chief weapon against the Catholic Church in Poland seemed broken last week. The weapon: PAX, an organization of fellow-traveling Catholic laymen. Faced with Premier Wladyslaw Gomulka’s anti-Stalinist regime, and with a new agreement for cooperation between church and state (TIME, Dec. 17), PAX was frantically holding meetings, breaking itself up into splinter groups with new names, trying to get its members into other organizations. Explained Radio Warsaw: “PAX, disguising itself, would like to regain the confidence of the community.” That confidence had never really existed.

When Soviet Secret Police Boss Ivan Serov, lately notorious in Hungary (see FOREIGN NEWS), set up headquarters in Warsaw in 1944, he realized that the NKVD was for the first time operating in a country with a Catholic majority. He favored a gradual undermining of the Church’s position rather than a direct frontal attack, picked a Polish political adventurer named Boleslaw Piasecki to lead a group of “progressive,” i.e., proCommunist, Catholics. Piasecki had learned the tricks of his trade as an agent for Mussolini and later for the Gestapo, had organized shock troops to liquidate Red partisans in Poland. Picked up by the NKVD, he saved his neck by betraying his former pals.

Under Piasecki’s direction, and with the aid of lavish government subsidies, PAX blossomed into a sprawling industrial and propaganda complex. It published magazines and books, controlled factories producing everything from shoes to metal goods, ran its own motor pool, its own high school and hospitals. It also had a lucrative monopoly of the sale of devotional items and religious literature in Poland.

But for all its vast resources, PAX never budged the vast majority of Polish Catholics. Audiences listened skeptically when high-living Director Piasecki tried to explain why it was “necessary” for Poland’s Red regime to jail Catholic bishops or liquidate Catholic charities. Many unsuspecting priests were arrested after their frank conversations were recorded by PAX men wearing concealed microphones; then Piasecki would offer to help free them in return for “cooperation.” Only a handful accepted, and not a single renegade bishop could be found.

In 1950 Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, Primate of Poland, boldly attacked PAX. Later, the Vatican proscribed PAX’s newspaper and a book by Piasecki which called Communism the true Christianity. When Gomulka returned to power last October, many PAX leaders hastily and publicly repudiated it. The total failure of PAX to split Poland’s Catholic leadership was a measure of how grossly the Soviets had underestimated the vitality of the Polish church.

Not all satellite clergy lived up to the example set in Poland. High on the dishonor role of turncoat churchmen who rendered unto the Communist Caesar that which is God’s stands Bishop John Peter, 55, of the Reformed Church of Hungary. Though he kept relatively quiet when he came to the U.S. two years ago for the Second Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Evanston, 111., he has a longtime record of pro-Communist hatchet-maneuvering. Item: in 1949 he was responsible for the execution of Hungarian Diplomat Victor Csornovi on trumped-up charges of espionage. Now word has come that on the high tide of the Hungarian patriots’ revolution, a special assembly of the Reformed Church expelled Bishop Peter. Even the arrival of Soviet tanks could not fully restore Bishop Peter, though a special committee has now been appointed by the nervous assembly to re-examine the case.