Polen: Gesegnet oder verflucht?

Was kommt nach Johannes Paul II? Die katholische Kirche in Polen steht vor einem entscheidenden Test, so Krzysztof Burnetko und Jaroslaw Kamowski in Transitions Online.

Though John Paul II was the pope of a catholic church, one embracing up to a billion people, in Poland he was usually called “our pope.” He was a national symbol, a man who had become almost an icon. He made Poland recognizable not just to professors in the Sorbonne, but also to farmers in Montana and even to some Africans and Asians without television or the Catholic faith. We cannot be surprised, then, that Poland is a nation plunged in sorrow, united in prayers for and remembrance of the dead pope.

Yet when the mourning period is over, this pope may become not just a source of pride for the Church, but also a cause of arguments and divisions. In this sense, the death of John Paul II will inevitably change the local church. But other changes, changes that are today difficult to foresee, may prove truly dramatic.

Indeed, without Pope John Paul II, Poland’s Catholic Church resembles an unpinned grenade, ready to explode unless the Polish Church’s hierarchy and its clergy treat it with due caution. For Catholicism as it is practiced along the River Vistula, this test could prove an ordeal.

The unfortunate gift of freedom?

The Polish Church has obviously proven in the past that – in recent decades, thanks largely to the Pope – it is able to overcome historic problems, and emerge largely unscathed.

So it was when the Church had to oppose the communist dictatorship. The election of Karol Wojtyla in 1978 strengthened this resistance. His election gave new meaning to the fight with the “evil empire.” As we can now read from archives of the communist party and the secret services, communist dignitaries shook with fear because of their compatriot in Vatican. They considered him to be the major risk to their comfortable status quo. And they were not mistaken. Every speech made by John Paul II, above all those he made in his “pilgrimages” to Poland, proved to be a new driving force behind the movement for liberation.

This opposition to the communist system created a feeling of unity. A Catholic nation had a common, clearly defined enemy. And so the Catholic Church in Poland became a wall, a wall without cracks. 

When communism was consigned to the dustbin of history in 1989, it immediately became obvious that the cracks had merely been papered over and that the unity of the Church was superficial. The Church considered itself a moral victor and, being so, it began to claim privileges. Some Catholics saw an opportunity to create a religious state; others believed that would be a huge mistake. The first group insisted that the Church should have a major impact on the state’s institutions; the latter spoke up for autonomy and civil rights for everybody, non-Catholics included.

One of the most important analysts of Poland’s post-communist transformation, Jozef Tischner, a priest and professor, wrote that the Polish Church proved able to defeat communism, but could not deal successfully with the “gift of freedom.”

The divisions were not new, but had merely been moderated by the notion of a common struggle against the communists. Now, the faultlines – described sometimes as a division between “closed church,” a clergy and the faithful with the same mentality, and the “open church” – were revealed and made plain to see.

The voice of John Paul II was invaluable in these disputes. He reminded the Polish Church that, as it set about building a democratic state, it must respect the teachings of the Second Vatican Council, a three-year gathering between 1963 and 1965 at which the Church’s leading figures re-evaluated Catholic doctrine. First and foremost John Paul II reminded everybody of the importance of the Gaudium et Spes, a work that resulted from the council and defined the Church’s role in the modern world. It states clearly and strongly the need for a separation of Church and State. The Pope was convinced that to advocate the Gospels nothing more is needed than freedom. And freedom is guaranteed in democratic systems. 

He himself was sometimes critical about contemporary democracy, above all in Polish disputes about abortion and the place of the Church in public life. For him, “a democracy without values changes into open or camouflaged totalitarianism.” But he domesticated Polish Catholicism to the notion of democracy. Without his involvement, the process would undoubtedly have taken longer. 

The Pope’s influence was also crucial in ending the Polish Church’s indecisiveness about whether to support Poland’s integration into the European Union. Many of the faithful made a final decision only after the Vatican had made its approval heard. For Poles, then, John Paul was a point of reference in religious and political matters. 

To read the article in full, visit the Transitions Online website.