“FOR YOUR FREEDOM AND OURS”:

The afterlife of Father Jerzy Popiełuszko: Reflections on forty years since his death shook communist Poland (Ben Sixsmith, 10/19/24, The Critic)

What had made the slim, sickly 37-year-old priest such an imposing enemy of the state? He had preached. He had preached to striking steelworkers in Warsaw. He had preached to the trade unionists of Solidarity. His sermons had been broadcast on “Radio Free Europe”.

He had led the funeral of Grzegorz Przemyk — an 18-year-old aspiring poet who had been beaten to death by police officers. A gigantic funeral procession had marched peacefully in protest.

Censorship was tight in Poland. Its tentacles, Norman Davies wrote in God’s Playground, “regulated the activities of all the media, all news and translation agencies, all publishing houses” et cetera, with themes to be suppressed including “criticism … of the party line, all comparisons between the Soviet Union and Tsarist Russia, all civil disasters, all shortcomings in industrial safety, all defects in Polish export goods, all references to the superior economic and social standards of non-communist countries and … all information regarding the existence of the censorship.”

One exception was church services. The communists tolerated some amount of independence for the Church — believing that suppression was unsustainable — and Popiełuszko had used that to his advantage.

He had preached about the value of the truth. He had preached against violence and indignities. He had even preached about the virtue of patriotism. His sermons referenced historical events where Polish courage and determination had been illuminated, like the 19th century uprisings and the Miracle on the Vistula. Popiełuszko “did not include the historical references just to present facts,” writes Grzegorz Szczecina:

… although this would have made sense in the context of the Communist propaganda. The main purpose was to show to … fellow Poles the meaning of self-sacrifice and suffering as a price which had to be paid in the struggle for national liberty over centuries.