A Witness to the Faith

...One hundred and twenty devoted priests, literally "on mission," are trying to shoulder the burden of ministering to a Catholic population that, despite banishment and emigration, still numbers two millions of souls...

...And with the Polish people, as with the Irish, to whose character and national destiny the resemblance is so often noted, religion and nationhood are one...

...In speaking of future prospects of the Catholic Church in Russia, even the sane optimism which one feels is part of Archbishop Cieplak's temperament is not able to paint the present picture in anything but murky colors...

...The head is round, the hands and feet remarkably small for so strongly built a man...

...All Poles in Russia know the Russian language, and know the sentiments and character of its people...

...One left the gentle presence of this hero of the Church with a feeling that the providence which put off the crown of martyrdom from his grey head is hardly less unmistakable...

...It is typical of Monsignor Cieplak that, in speaking of the sufferings of Catholics in Bolshevist Russia and the prospects of the Church in the future, he likes to hark back to the days when he covered perhaps the very largest diocese in Christendom, and was received at distant townships even as far away as Siberia, not only by the Polish colonists and residents, but by the authorities of the Orthodox and Jewish faiths, as an honored guest...

...His final imprisonment for fourteen months, from March 1923 till May 1924, in the Butyrki prison at Moscow, even without the shadow of death that lay at its end, recalls the worst days of the Paris terror...

...And when he breaks from the French in which his phrases are measured out, almost too meticulously for an eager and imaginative reviewer, the language of his own land flows from his lips with a cadenced harmony which it is a pleasure to listen to, even though not a word is understood...

...In 1921, he was again in prison for a week, on the absurd charge that he had accompanied Polish refugees to the railroad station...

...It is this serenity which first reaches one in Monsignor Cieplak's presence...

...While many in the Orthodox body, hopelessly split into divisions by the "Living Church" movement, and stripped of the possessions that once gave them power and influence, are looking wistfully towards union with Rome, the immediate needs must be met, and the last Catholic archbishop of Russia is convinced that the task of evangelization can be best done by devoted Polish priests and laity...

...It is the Slav, but the Slav refined and humanized, with the great frame molded to elegance, the rough features chiseled, and the fugue disciplined by culture—the Slav as he turns his face to the West on the marches of Poland—the martyr nation of Europe...

...When it came to a standstill and a short, sturdily built figure, dressed in black broadcloth with a touch of Roman purple at the collar, appeared for a moment at the head of one of the parlor cars, a hoarse shout of welcome that rang in the roof of glass and iron burst from the throats of the expectant throng...

...In these good relations that reigned despite the fact that a hampered and official-driven life was all Catholics of the western allegiance were permitted, he seems to see the best warrant for a better day when the storm-clouds of the present persecution have blown away...

...His guards were rough and illiterate, but hardly more so than the commissars who sat in judgment upon him at the parody of a trial permitted him at the end...

...It is in this very unadir" of the Faith that the patriotic prelate sees a challenge to the Polish people and priesthood...

...The career of Archbishop Cieplak, until his dramatic trial and the iniquitous sentence actually carried out upon his vicar-general, Monsignor Budkiewicz, awoke protest all over the civilized world, was one of labor and evangelization...

...It is not generally known, I think, that the arrest of Archbishop Cieplak in March 1923, was the third indignity of the sort that he endured at the hands of the Soviets...

...In the common prison where he was herded for fourteen months with political prisoners and felons, one can imagine that his presence was a positive ray of hope and resignation...

...Letters from the outside world were subjected to rigorous censorship...

...even when some memory of the injustice and hardships he has endured is recalled for him by one of his attendant clergy...

...The long period of persecution has had this peculiar and unlooked-for effect...

...In Russia, since Monsignor Cieplak was conveyed across the Polish frontier and left to make his way to Warsaw with neither money nor food, there is no Catholic bishop...

...The intentions of the Soviet to root out faith of any sort in Russia is obvious and sinister in its devilish cleverness...

...His figure is strongly built and straight despite sixty-eight years of life and forty-five of labor for God...

...By strenuous efforts Father Edmund Walsh, of the University of Georgetown, obtained leave to visit the imprisoned archbishop on four occasions, but saw him only surrounded by guards and was not allowed to penetrate the prison...

...Food was brought him twice a week by his parishioners and cut into morsels before it was permitted to reach his cell...

...After holding the chair of theology at the Academy of Petrograd for thirty years, he was created auxiliary to the Archbishop of Mohilew (Petrograd) and so remained until the latter's banishment in 1919, when he assumed the full duties of the see...

...As mediators between the Universal Church and the soul, intensely religious still, of the Russian peasant and townsman, I am convinced that their destiny is no less clear, and that a day will dawn sooner than many believe, when the providence that once joined Russia and Poland in bonds that were so often fetters for the smaller and weaker nation, will show forth clearly as the manifest providence under God that it has really been...

...They never flash with anger...

...While it sent to Poland, as officials and administrators, men whose character was far beneath what the Czar's government would have endured in its own country, it also sent to Russia, where there was no hindrance placed in the way of their attaining the highest posts, men of whom Poland has reason to be proud...

...In 1920, at a time when the iron discipline of Lenin and Trotsky was not yet riveted on the people of Russia, he spent two weeks in prison, but was set free as the result of a public protest...

...He was born at Kielce in 1857—when men were still living who could recall, as children, the terrible massacres by Souvarov at Warsaw—six years before the last unsuccessful attempt by Poland to break her chains...

...Under bushy brows, steady grey eyes, also rather small, beam with a good temper and are ready, at some ludicrous memory of his trials, to twinkle with fun...

...For the guest in whose honor the station was filled was Jan Cieplak, Archbishop of Vilna, son of Russian Poland, former Catholic Primate of the vast empire that the czar once ruled, who had come from under the very shadow of the Bolshevik gallows to visit his own people in the far land where they have tasted liberty and prosperity...

...No visitors from the outside world were suffered to visit this shepherd of two million souls...

...There is no seminary nor any provision for a priesthood who shall replace them when they fall under the terrible task, or become victims to persecution...

...The emotions that strike one chord, reverberate along the other...

...Racial hatred, except perhaps on the border, simply does not exist," the venerable prelate declares, in no uncertain voice...

...Les Miserables, I suppose, is not what one calls a "good book...

...The conviction that childhood is the critical period in religious life, held by believers and unbelievers alike, is responsible for their war against religious training in schools, and for the absurd and insincere law that the child who has grown up without doctrinal teaching of any sort is free to choose his church affiliations at the age of eighteen...

...As interpreters to Europe of the Slav soul in music, art and literature, their reputation has never suffered any eclipse...

...Two weeks ago, when it was my own privilege, in a room on the sixth story of the Belmont Hotel in New York, to kneel and kiss the great ring which the Polish prelate wears upon one finger of a very small and shapely hand, the immediate comparison that leapt to my mind, was the figure of Monsignor Bienvenu, in Hugo's greatest novel...

...He was not suffered to say Mass, though happily he had the spiritual comfort that his vicar-apostolic, doomed to martyrdom, could afford him...

...208 THE COMMONWEAL December 30, 1925 A WITNESS TO THE FAITH By HENRY LONGAN STUART ON Saturday, December 4, as the train from Detroit steamed into the Park Row station at Chicago, a dense crowd of two thousand men and women were waiting its arrival...

...And what lingers in the memory when we have finished the vital chapters in which the anger and thirst for vengeance of the terrible convict dissolve before the sheer power that radiates from goodness, is not so much the mercy and insight of Monsignor Myriel, as the serenity of a good conscience before which a sort of paralysis overtakes fierceness and the desire to work ill...

...As a result, Polish prestige still stands high in Russia...

...But he will not leave the land where he has seen religion, under democracy, fulfilling its benign ministry unprivileged but unhampered, without taking home with him a large access of strength that, despite banishment and expatriation, will reach his hardpressed brethren across the Polish frontier...

...The two sees of Mohilew and Saratov are vacant...

...But all the hard things that have been said about its meretricious preachments and unsound reasonings will not alter the fact that in the holy "bishop of D-------------," Hugo has given us as vivid and heartfelt a portrait of a saint as the most devout could desire...

...Senator King, of Utah, was another visitor from the United States, to whose sympathy and practical help in securing his release by the moral pressure that power was able to exercise, Monsignor Cieplak's visit to these shores is largely due...

...His nomination by the Holy See to the Archbishopric of Vilna, the Polish diocese bordering on Soviet Russia, has cut short his stay in America...

...No hint of the tragedies in which he has been a protagonist, no shadow of the death sentence that once lay upon his venerable head while religious and civic bodies all over the world joined in a chorus of indigation, seems to linger upon his face or bearing...