c. 2007 Religion News Service
(UNDATED) The news of the collaboration of Polish bishops and priests with the communist-era regime is a layer cake of revelation about the long-idealized practice of Catholicism in that country. The reports in no way lessen the greatness of the late Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski of Warsaw, or of Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Krakow (later Pope John Paul II), who freed their country by wrestling the Russian bear to the ground.
But they do detail the “Who’s on First?” ineptitude of present-day church officials in Poland and Rome as they contradict each other about who vouched for Stanislaw Wielgus as new archbishop of Warsaw when his rap sheet of coziness snapped like the Polish flag in the Cold War breezes.
Giovanni Cardinal Re, head of the Vatican department that selects bishops, said he “did not know anything” about Wielgus’ collaboration. As Villanova law professor Robert Miller writes, “This … flatly contradicts Wielgus’ admission and apology, which expressly and repeatedly said that Wielgus had fully disclosed his past activities to the Holy Father and … the Congregation for Bishops.”
But perhaps there is no real news for Catholics in learning that church officials at worst bear false witness, and at best employ what Mark Twain called “stretchers” in explaining away or covering up harsh truths about the behavior of the clergy.
Although they haven’t yet blamed gays or George W. Bush for their woes, the Vatican press office did claim the accusations against Wielgus originated from a “vendetta by those who used to persecute the Church. …” In other words, the accusers were labeled communists until the press managed to put the truth before the public.
The lowest layer of revelation, however, concerns the romantic vision of Polish Catholicism _ that the church was able to outlive communism by practicing the faith in strict obedience to the pope and church teachings. Wyszynski and John Paul no doubt earned their heroic stature, but this long-simmering scandal compels a fresh examination of this idealized concept of Polish Catholicism before and after the fall of communism.
Pope John Paul II _ an actor, a playwright and poet _ may be described as a romantic in the sense of the definition: “having a bent or a tendency towards romance; readily influenced by the imagination.” He was rightfully proud of Polish Catholicism, but it’s possible that he also imagined it to be more like Christianity in the catacombs than it really was.
In 1978, when John Paul became pope, leading American churchmen returning from a visit to Poland told me abortion was more common in Poland than the U.S. John Paul condemned America’s “culture of death” but never applied it to his homeland.
Polish Catholics may now be forced into a new appraisal of their fidelity. The Pew Global Attitudes Project reports that just 36 percent of Poles see religion as a “very important” force in their lives, a figure higher than in much of Europe but much lower than in the United States (59 percent) and much of the developing world.
This layer of revelation, therefore, tells us that Polish Catholicism is much like Catholicism everywhere. We can apply psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan’s phrase to the Church there as well as to the Church here. Both are “much more simply human than anything else.”
(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)
KRE/LF END KENNEDY
To obtain a photo of this columnist, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.
