…It was at that post-war time that the communists sought to strip the Church of the influence that it exercised over the nation, so they restricted the clergy as much as they could, prompting the Primate of Poland, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński,[6] to stand up to the authorities with the by now famous vociferous protest addressed to the government, ending with the words: “We [the Church] must not sacrifice the divine sacrum on the profane altar of Caesar [the state]. Non possumus [we cannot]”
Rather than being killed like his spiritual predecessor Bishop Stanislaus, Cardinal Wyszyński was imprisoned for a few years. It was at that time that the Polish Catholic Church, absent the Polish nobility and gentry who had disappeared as a class and whose members had either fled the country in fear of communists or who been deprived of their economic and political leverage, assumed the role of the Polish nobility, the Polish aristocracy, the Polish gentry. And what an irony of history it was! The priests were for the most part recruited from the peasantry, i.e., the social class that according to Marxist tenets was to be liberated from the influence of the “opium of the people” and at the same time the social class that for centuries had been thought of by the nobility of not being capable of sustaining nationhood!
At that post-war time, irrespective of whether you were a believer or not, so long as you were anti-communist (and most were), you naturally supported the Church, identified with the Church, and used the Church in your resistance against Marxism-Leninism, against atheists in the positions of power, against the party comrades imposed by Moscow, many of whom were Jewish. Religious instruction was banned from schools but was carried out by parishes. The voluntary attendance was nearly 100%; not because all parents were ardent believers: it was a form of protest, a form of expressing national identity, a sign of resistance — a pronounced, if silent, statement of non possumus. (By comparison, in today’s Poland, attendance at religious instruction, which meanwhile has been reintroduced in schools, has significantly dropped and continues to drop.)
…The northern territory between Poland and Rus’ was occupied by the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, a pagan political entity, that ruled over vast lands of otherwise Christian Rus’ after the latter had been partly destroyed, partly subjugated by many Tartar invasions. Lithuanian pagan dukes — mainly through dynastic marriages — managed to bring under their control what we know today as Belarus, almost all of Ukraine and huge chunks of today’s Russia. Lithuanian rulers were heathen almost till the end of the 14th century. As such, they were the target of religious-cum-ideological military raids carried out by the Teutonic Knights (a German military order), who had settled on a northern piece of Polish territory at the invitation of a Polish prince and had subjugated Old Baltic Prussians in the land that is today part of north-eastern Poland and makes up the whole of Russia’s Kaliningrad Region.
The Lithuanian rulers also got caught in the ideological-cum-religious cross-hairs of the Polish Kingdom. Since the Teutonic Knights threatened both Poland and Lithuania, it was a good idea to combine the forces of the two states (along with all those vast Rus’ territories under Lithuanian rule!) to fend off the German assaults. By mutual consent, the grand duke of Lithuania became king of Poland (1386) on condition, of course, that he and his heathen subjects let themselves be baptized. A new body politic emerged, powerful enough to defeat the Teutonic Knights in a series of wars, of which the Battle of Grunwald (1410) described by Henryk Sienkiewicz in the novel The Teutonic Knights/Krzyżacy and skilfully shown in the movie under the same title became part of the nation’s collective psyche as iconic.
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This is an excellent read. It brings Poland into a new focus while also illuminating the religious and ethnic complexity of Eastern Europe. Highly recommended. Above are a couple of excerpts that can stand alone. ABN
American Buddhist Net 