The Sheila Variations

The pope and the Ark of Nowa Huta

The Pope has died.

I will not defend the Pope's stance on gay marriage, on women in the priesthood, on (fill in the blank). I'm a Catholic, but I won't sit around defending what I see to be backwards and foolish stances. On the flipside, I also don't expect the Catholic Church to modernize itself and its attitudes in any way that even resembles speed! People who are waiting for that kind of change from that kind of institution have no idea how institutions like that operate. So. That being said. I also will not tolerate generalized Catholic-bashing. I just won't have it. [Especially from people who go on and on about how we have to tolerate this or that other religion - wiccans, fire-worshipers, Muslims ... and yet somehow that tolerance is not inclusive towards Christians or Catholics. Nope. Hypocrites.] I'm no idiot, and I'm no blind follower. I'm against dogma, anyway, which ... makes it surprising that I am able to call myself a Catholic at all. But oh well. It's my faith. Love it or leave it, Tommy. The Pope has pissed me off recently more than he has enlightened and inspired, this is true, but he - being a human being - like all of us - was a mixed bag, part good, part evil, part wrong-headed, part visionary.

I like this quote from Secular Blasphemy:

I am no fan of Karol Joseph Wojtyla, a deeply conservative man, but one positive thing he leaves the world was his tremendous part in bringing down communism in Eastern Europe. That is something nobody can take away from his record.

Exactly. And so: what I will remember him for (and this probably isn't a surprise) is his courageous and active stance against Communism, and how instrumental he was in the crackup of the Soviet Union. His actions in the late 1970s and early 80s stand as an example of one human being, one small human being, holding up a light, shining it not only so that his followers know which way to go - but also shining it onto the evil itself, illuminating it for all to see. That is what he did. His presence gave people hope. He said to the people of Poland (and, by proxy, to all people suffering under the communist yoke): "You are already free. They cannot enslave you. You are free already."

I think the Catholic Church has a lot to answer for, in terms of its handling of social problems and its own problems and necessary change in general, but in a strange way, I am glad it has been embroiled in scandal recently. Because maybe now the truth will come out, and true reform can occur. The truth shall set you free and all that.

But today, of all days, I do not want to dwell on that. It is not appropriate, and it's not my thing. I never talk about religion on this blog, because frankly, it's such a private thing for me that even putting any of it into words feels weird. I find evangelism frightening and off-putting. If evengelism floats your boat, then do it - but you'll find no conversion from me. My faith is a private thing. It exists, it's my own, and the thought of getting into doctrinal arguments with people is ... it's just not right for me. My spirit says to that: NO. I will not do that. I have no need to convert others, I have no need to even TALK about my beliefs to people. I think righteousness has no place in religion (which is why so much of organized religion and its followers, in particular, disgust me.) Humility is what seems most holy to me. Humility, and a sense that whatever it is we are doing here in church, whatever it is ... is basically a mystery. The Holy Ghost part of the equation. St. Augustine said, "If you think you understand, it isn't God." I am with you Augie!!!

Anyway. I'm getting off track here. What I really want to do is post a long excerpt from a book I really love: Down with Big Brother: The Fall of the Soviet Empire, by journalist Michael Dobbs. Poland and the Solidarity movement (inspired, in part, by the Pope), were at the forefront of the "fall of the Soviet Union" - The stirrings began in Poland, and then spread like wildfire until nothing could stop the crack-up.

And that's all I want to say about the Pope. My feelings about the other policies of the Church and the way it is going right now have no place in this conversation. At least not today. Today, I think it is important to remember the magnitude of his contribution to the fall of the Soviet Empire.

Here is the story of the Polish Pope, and the extraordinary thing that happened at Nowa Huta, Poland, on June 22, 1983:

An excerpt from Down with Big Brother: The Fall of the Soviet Empire, by journalist Michael Dobbs.

While the leaders of world communism were bidding farewell to Brezhnev, a little drama was being played out on the periphery of the Soviet empire that captured the scale of the ideological challenge confronting his successors. The workers of Nowa Huta, a city of 200,000 people in southern Poland, had taken a passionate dislike to a statue to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin adorning their central square. They had marched on it, scrawled anti-Communist graffiti on it, and attempted to pull it down with picks and ropes. On one occasion they had even set the father of the international proletariat on fire, drenching his billowing overcoat in gasoline and blowing off one of his hands.

Determined to protect Vladimir Ilyich from his ungrateful offspring, the Communist authorities erected a corrugated iron fence around the charred two-story-high monument. Thousands of ZOMO riot police moved into Nowa Huta. Armed policement patrolled the square day and night. At moments of tension a dozen police vehicles threw a defensive circle of steel around the statue. Water cannon were stationed nearby to repel a surprise attack.

For a nation still reeling from the psychological shock of martial law, there was a delicious irony to these events. Nowa Huta - Polish for "new steelworks" -- had been planned as a model socialist community. Poland's rulers had wanted a socioeconomic laboratory where they could turn God-fearing Polish peasants into the new proletarian man described by Marx and Lenin. They saw the town as a political counterweight to the nearby city of Krakow, Poland's ancient capital, which they regarded as a bastion of conservative reaction. The construction of Nowa Huta in the early 1950s was accompanied by a propaganda barrage about the incredible feats of "heroes of socialist labor", which served as inspiration for Andrzej Wajda's film Man of Marble. To celebrate its completion, the giant Nowa Huta steelworks received the hallowed name of Lenin ...

Nowa Huta differed from other model socialist towns in one very important respect. At the corner of Karl Marx Avenue and Great Proletarian Avenue stood a soaring concrete structure that had not been part of the original plan. Topped by a huge steel cross, the Church of Our Lady, Queen of Poland was known to everyone in town as the Ark. The struggle to prove the planners wrong had infused the entire community with a sense of defiance.

The first cross appeared on this site in 1957, in the wake of the popular upheavals that swept Gormulka to power. Over the next decade the cross was repeatedly torn down by police and stubbornly put up again by the local inhabitants. Finally, in 1967, seventeen years after the building of Nowa Huta, the archibishop of Krakow had dug a spade into the earth to break the ground for the town's first church. It took another decade of bureaucratic obstruction and arbitrary shortages of building materials to complete the Ark. Much of the work, including carrying two million stones from mountain streams, was done by local inhabitants with their bare hands. Consecrating the completed church in 1977, the archbishop had declared: "Nowa Huta was built as a city without God, but the will of God and the people who worked here prevailed. Let this be a lesson."

The archbishop had gone on to become Pope John Paul II, the first non-Italian pope in 455 years. On his first pilgrimage back to his homeland, in 1979, Karol Wojtyla had been refused permission to visit the Ark. So he had said mass across the cornfields in Krakow, against the backdrop of the dark, satanic steel mill. Now he was returning to Poland once again, and this time he would be visiting Nowa Huta. Frustrated in their attempts to put down the local Lenin monument, the inhabitants of the "city without God" were determined to show the world where their loyalties really lay.

The Pope's first visit had provided the spiritual boost that had paved the way for the rise of Solidarity. By turning out to greet their countrymean, and becoming part of the millions-strong crowd that followed his every move, Poles acquired a sense of solidarity with one another. Never again would they feel alone and isolated, as they had during the dark days of totalitarianism. If anyone was isolated, it was Poland's Communist rulers.

During the 1979 pilgrimage John Paul had spoken in a voice that was simple and direct, quite unlike the voice of the Communist regime. He talked of the 35-year Communist experience as a transitory phenomenon, insignificant in comparison with Poland's thousand-year devotion to the Roman Catholic Church. It was a message that came across clearly on the first day of the visit, in Warsaw's Victory Square, when the pope attacked the state for attempting to create an atheistic society. "Christ cannot be kept out of the history of man in any part of the globe," he had thundered. The crowd greeted his words with a ten-minute burst of applause, ending with rhythmic chants of "We want God, we want God!:

From that moment onward, Karol Wojtyla became the uncrowned king of Poland.

During his weeklaong tour of Poland the pope had elaborated on one of his favorite themes, the spiritual unity of Europe. He saw his beloved Krakow as part of a European-wide civilization, in which political boundaries were more or less irrelevant. In Wojtyla's Europe, the Europe of 966, when Poland was first converted to Christianity, there was no Iron Curtain and no Berlin Wall. Priests, scholars, and ideas traveled freely from one town to another. The pope was convinced that his election was God's way of reminding Western Europe that Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, Serbs, Bulgars, and even Russians were also part of a much broader Christian civilization.

Born in 1920, the year Poland defeated Soviet Russia in the "Miracle on the Vistula," Karol Wojtyla had firsthand experience of family tragedy, backbreaking labor, and political oppression. He had scarcely known his mother, a schoolteacher, who died when he was only six, while giving birth to a stillborn girl. His father, who had served in the Austro-Hungarian army, was killed in the opening year of World War II. "At the age of twenty," Wojtyla later recalled, "I had already lost all the people I loved and even the ones I might have loved, such as my big sister who had died, I was told, six years before my birth." Psychologists have speculated that the future pope sought compensation for the maternal love he never received in the Marian cult of the Black Madonna.

As a theological student in Krakow, Wojtyla experienced the terror of German occupation. A particularly brutal Nazi gauleiter, Hans Frank, installed himself in the royal Warsaw Castle with orders from Hitler to treat the POles as a slave race. "The standard of living in POland must be kept low," Hitler instructed. "The priests will preach what we want them to preach. Their task is to keep the Poles quiet, stupid, and dull-witted." Wojtyla saw Krakow Jews being taken to the death camp at Auschwitz, just a few miles down the road. Polish intellectuals were disposed of in a similar fashion. The Germans put Wojtyla to work, first in a stone quarry and later carrying buckets of lime in a water purification plant. On the night of August 6, 1944, the Gestapo arrested all Polish males between the age of fifteen and fifty in retaliation for the Warsaw uprising. Had they found Wojtyla, they would probably have killed him. Fortunately for the young theologian, he was given shelter by the archibishop of Krakow, Prince Adam Sapieha.

Wojtyla lived in the residence on Franciscan Street, off and on, for nearly fifteen years, as both student and archbishop. When he returned in June, 1983, as pope, it was as if he were coming home. He greeted the nuns by name and sang and joked with the thousands of young people who waited to greet him in the street outside. "Holy Father, we trust you," they chanted. "Save Poland!"

On the last full day of his visit the pope said mass on the Blonie, the vast meadow in front of Wawel Castle. Banners reading "Solidarity Lives" and "There Is No Freedom Without Solidarity" fluttered above the crowd of two million people. Alluding to Jaruzelski's imposition of martial law, the pope urged his listeners never to give up. The nation had been "called to victory," he declared.

As he said these words, two million people raised their hands silently in the air in the V for victory sign. An underground Solidarity leader, Eugeniusz Szumiejko, who had managed to escape the police roundup, was standing at the back of the huge throng, on top of an embankment. All of a sudden he saw a sea of black heads submerged in a wave of white fists. It was an awe-inspiring sight, proof that Jaruzelski had been unable to crush the spirit that had given birth to Solidarity. At the end of the mass a large chunk of the crowd set off on foot for Nowa Huta, beneath their Solidarity banners, to see the pope consecrate a new church.

"Khodz z namy," they chanted, the battle cry of 1970 and 1980. "Come with us. There will be no beatings today."

When they reached the site of the new church, the joined a congregation of a quarter of a million people. The entire population of the "city without God" had turned out to greet the pope. Here was proof that history could not be reversed by tanks, internment camps, and corrugated iron fences, that martial law too would pass, and that Nowa Huta's two-story monument to the founder of world communism would one day come down.

Posted by sheila