POLAND: Darkness on the Mountain

Throughout their country’s heartbreaking history of being partitioned, conquered, occupied and finally reduced to a satellite, the Poles have clung tenaciously to the Roman Catholic Church, not only as their faith, but also as the most enduring symbol of their fervent nationalism. Almost the first thing that Communist Boss Wladyslaw Gomulka did when he came to power after the anti-Soviet uprisings of 1956 was to release Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski from detention and give to Poland, which is 95% Catholic, a degree of religious freedom unknown in any other Communist nation. That was a concession won, not a benefit conferred, and ever since, uneasy has been the truce between church and Communist state.

In March Gomulka abruptly halted the distribution of millions of dollars’ worth of welfare packages from Catholics abroad until the church would agree to let the government supervise the distribution. Finally last month, perhaps because of pressure from Moscow and his Communist colleagues, Gomulka decided to crack down in earnest. For its first show of force, the government chose the 600-year-old fortress-monastery of Jasna Gora, the most sacred of Poland’s holy shrines.

Masks & Truncheons. A many-turreted complex of buildings perched upon the “Mountain of Light” overlooking the grimy industrial city of Czestochowa, the monastery not only houses the gem-studded image of the Madonna (“The Holy Mother—Queen of Poland”) that legend says was painted by St. Luke; it was also the great fortress famed for holding out against the conquering Swedes in 1655. No sooner had the church-state agreement of 1956 been made than pilgrims began flocking by the thousands once again to the shrine that had come to mean national independence. But even more disturbing to the government was the fact that the monastery has been distributing vast numbers of religious tracts, many of them strongly antiCommunist.

At 2 one afternoon a cluster of Communist officials turned up at the monastery and started ransacking it. When a female clerk tried to phone her superiors, a buxom Anna Pauker type snatched the phone out of her hands and tore it from the wall. The Communists did not stop to examine their loot: papers and mimeograph machines were dumped helter-skelter into sacks. Soon an angry crowd of pilgrims formed outside the building, and one official nervously summoned the police. Police arrived armed with gas masks and swinging truncheons.

“An Insult.” Though the government kept the attack out of the press, the story soon spread. Last week in a letter that was read from every pulpit in his city, the Bishop of Czestochowa denounced the government’s action as “an insult to our national sanctuary.” That evening 20,000 Catholics gathered for a special Mass, heard Cardinal Wyszynski himself deliver the apostolic blessing. Later the cardinal issued a pastoral letter charging that the police had arrested at least one monk and several priests and pilgrims.

As the tide of indignation rose, the government hurried into a huddle with church officials to see if it could patch things up. They reached a compromise on distribution of the present stockpile of welfare packages to flood victims in southern Poland, and the church agreed to keep printing presses and mimeograph machines out of its holy places.