A new old world:

...My role is to be below, to help develop the spiritual, to help the people remember personal responsibility for the common good...

...What will happen as the people and clergy face life in a more democratic and open society1.' Bishop Henryk Muslynski of Wroclawek and chairman of the Polish bishops' Commission for Dialogue with Judaism, acknowledged that the church faces new challenges...

...Would their quick dismissal serve the public interest...

...Lay formation: "Of course, it has happened already with Solidarity...

...it is not enough to have a good president...

...But it is macroeconomics that the World Bank, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and the Economist are talking about-the economic resources and performances of the whole society in relation to the world economy...

...Or people wait, in the opinion of some, because they are unprepared for the pace of change and do not want to work hard...

...The boards are filled with cards...

...Who knows better than Communist party bureaucrats and managers the real ins and outs of offices and businesses...

...its disappearance is fraught with both opportunities and dangers...

...The quiet, the patient, the attentive waiting seemed a national act of meditation on the past certainly, but also on the future and the most fundamental kinds of questions: How shall we live...

...Yes, Poland is beautiful...

...Fields of wheat and barley and vegetables are dotted with brilliant red and yellow flowers...

...Still, a sticker on an East German car echoing Havel, "We are all Stasi" (the East German security police) seemed to invite a brick through the window...

...The church in an open society In Communist Poland, the Catholic church was Solidarity's powerful and unstinting ally, Catholic magazines and newspapers were major alternatives to siate-supported media, and parish churches provided social and cultural alternatives to parly-sponsored activities...

...Lech Walesa made no secret of its religious motivation...

...Perhaps the peaceful course of events in Poland, Czechoslavkia, and East Germany has engendered a level of empathy conducive to a mentality of forgive-and-forget...

...There are deep, cool woods enclosing the roads...

...The tasks of reframing foundational public institutions are enormous...

...Youthful insouciance, genuine slothfulness, or greener grass...

...Perhaps Vaclav Havel's observation, "We are all responsible," has stayed the hand of revenge...

...And those small plots of land in the country are assiduously tended...

...But Berberyusz sums up a story she has written for the new Warsaw daily edited by Adam Michnik, Gazeta Wyborcza: "Unemployment, there is none...

...M.O.S...

...This means education of all human beings in mutual respect and in true brotherhood...

...there are no beggars or people sleeping on the streets...

...Though "waiting," and its implied passivity is a consistent theme of conversation, "hesitation" or "reluctance" better captures the slightly anxious state of uncertainty...

...In June she visited Prague, Bratislava, Cracow, Warsaw, Berlin, and the countryside in between...

...They do it with alacrity and good cheer...

...for seeing the sights or searching out unpronounceable street names, letter by letter...

...The second problem with a June visit is related: warmth, sunshine, and the endless stretch of Northern evenings...

...Warsaw and Berlin are at 52 degrees latitude, the same as northern Newfoundland...

...Restitution to the Jewish community: the return of sacred objects and books left for safekeeping with the church when Miller invaded Poland...

...When talking about the economy, people mostly talk about-people...

...There are only people unwilling to take the jobs available...

...gas is available and cheaper than in Western Europe...

...And the day lasts and lasts and lasts with light enough until 10 p.m...

...The roads though single-lane get us from here to there with adrenalin surging as we pass large trucks...

...Poles speak about their own martyrs...

...In a recent visit to New York, the bishop outlined Poland's need for a moral and religious renewal-even though it is seen by many as the most Catholic of countries...

...Gabriela's in Prague where Maly is pastor bears proof of his intent...

...But who knows better than they how to siphon off "public" assets into a privatized economy...

...Poland and Czechoslovakia must write new constitutions, state enterprises and "collective" properties have an ambiguous status, members of the old regime continue to hold important bureaucratic and managerial positions as many Czechs and Poles will mention, democracy and pluralism though stoutly defended are barely living memories from prewar days...

...On Saturday, June 9, the second day of the Czechoslovak elections, a great crowd gathered in the Old Town Square of Prague before the twin steeples of the Tyn church to attend a concert of Bedrich Smetana's "Ma Vlast"-"My Country...

...In such a country as Poland, almost entirely Catholic, this is now the first and most important task of ourchurch...

...But that does not mean that things are good...

...Because it is legal, he believes many Catholics do not understand the moral issues involved...

...At a portable table in Wenceslaus Square, young people sell the International Herald Tribune and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung along with posters, buttons, books on the environmental crisis...

...We have always been good tradesmen," she says...

...Table turnover has not come to Eastern European restaurants...

...For the majority of the Jews the only adequate answer to such an evil is silence...

...So in the midst of a beautiful (and apparently bountiful) summer, Eastern Europeans hesitate...

...I walk in to look and people grab me to ask if I am interested in this or that job...

...But people have been trained to work within church institutions: now their real work is in the world...

...The crowd stands first through a rehearsal, then through a rain shower, then through the ninety-minute concert...

...Mus/ynski believes it has been lost in a work environment that degraded people's sense of responsibility fortheirown labor...

...No waiting...

...The seventy-six-year-old Rafael Kubelik, exiled from his native land in 1948, has returned to lead the symphony orchestras of Czechoslovakia's constituent republics, Bohemia, Moravia, Slovakia...

...Recent changes are still very superficial, they must have deeper roots...

...There is no credit system and young people have no hope of buying their own flat...

...M.O.S.nce to cross the desert...

...For example, nature...

...Henryk Wozniakowski, former editor of the Catholic monthly, Znak, and now deputy government spokesman, smiles at the glowing report of his visitor...

...what we learned from the experience...

...It seems tragic that the victims of the same racial ideology, even if they have not suffered in quite the same way, should now contend w ith each other, accusing and slandering each other...

...I pass the employment office in my neighborhood frequently...

...The 10 o'clock Mass at St...

...drunks, of whom many are to be seen in Warsaw, stagger upright and purposefully to some destination other than a doorway or the side of a building...

...Indeed the light is sufficient to show that at least on the surface nothing seems quite as bad as the Western press has reported...

...For forty years, changes were always made by others...

...Indeed, on the West side of Berlin's Brandenburg Gate the singular economic activity to be found on a Sunday in this staid city is the "Polish Market," where Poles, Turks, Gypsies have established a "free" market-open on Sunday and no doubt skirting other laws as well...

...MARGARET O'Brien STEINFELS is the editor of Commonweal...

...In the new ones, there is friendliness and a willingness to explain the menu, even to make suggestions...

...But for the moment that consensus and the popular trust placed in leaders like Havel and Mazowiecki are seen as surer guarantees of emergent democratic and pluralistic institutions than a rapid and full-blown development of partisan politics likely to be linked to single-issue politics in Poland or separatist tendencies in Czecho-Slovakia...

...A Polish friend mentions some handsome cotton shirts we have seen people wearing...

...But he did not wait...

...Jews, in a like manner, accuse Poles of a conscious effort to minimize or even to appropriate Jewish suffering...

...One legacy of the gray market, the quasi-legal and illegal methods by which affairs were conducted under the Communists, is that people are not used to paying taxes...

...The economic shambles of the Eastern economies is doubtless real: what were once world-class Czech motorcycles, Polish freighters, East German assembly line systems cannot compete on the world market by the assessment of their own managers...

...Others will not have this problem solved so dramatically or so efficiently...

...In Poland small plots form a patchwork quilt-the legacy of generations of division and subdivision that withstood the mania for collectivized agriculture and may also withstand the cajoling of agronomists who now say that so many small parcels are inefficient and unproductive...

...He sums up with a little joke about the shadow economy, "All Poles spend twice what they have and give the extra to the church...

...in fact, it is yours before you ever arrive...

...Political maneuvering prior to Czechoslovakia's June election and the continuing conflict between Lech Walesa and Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki in Poland signal the inevitable break-up of this consensus...

...Kven more than the economy, personal values, Christian values have been destroyed by the Communists...

...How shall we care for one another...

...The congregation is attentive, even absorbed in the intense preaching of their pastor on the Trinity, in his few words to the children, in a baptism, in prayer and song, and in Communion which he personally gives, dipping Host in chalice, to each communicant...

...While Jews stress the unique nature of the Shoah...

...They are brought by freighter from China on order from a Polish designer and sell briskly on the market...

...But amidst such green profusion it is hard to imagine anyone will starve...

...Our theological views of Auschwitz are also quite different....Jews see in Auschwitz the Shoah-absolute evil and we see the martyrdom of millions of innocent victims...

...Housing remains a disaster in the cities...

...It is standing-room only amidst a crowd that spills out the door...

...He has turned from politics to parish life...

...Still, unemployment is expected to grow...

...Vaclav Maly, the young Czech priest who last November acted as spokesman for the Civic Forum, offers a moral and spiritual explanation: "People see responsibility outside of themselves...

...These, of course, are the cliches of Soviet rule, and perhaps capitalism with its packaging and individualism will change that, but perhaps these have all along been and will continue to be the cliches of Mittel Europa...

...People understand that a common enemy kept them united...

...In East Germany, banks from the West moved in wholesale to provide financial and consumer services...

...In mid-June half the population of Poland seemed to be out haying-cutting, stacking, turning, carting...

...We need democratic structures to protect personal freedom...

...In the old ones a remarkably skilled aversion to eye contact keeps them, seemingly engaged in other pressing tasks, at an ever steady distance from diners signaling for a menu or another beer or the check...

...Though city traffic is thick with taxis, buses, motorcycles, horse-drawn hay wagons, and more private cars than expected, it moves...

...international in the middle of the night...

...In keeping with his training as a Scripture scholar, in our interview the bishop summed up the current situation in Poland Ihis way: "We have crossed the Red Sea without great losses, bul now we need the engagement and patience to cross the desert...

...The debates and divisions oflhe church in Western Hurope and the U.S...

...this is exceedingly civilized and exceedingly cost ineffective since there are always more people wanting to dine than tables available...

...Things are not so bad as they appear in statistics...

...Most ordinary Poles and Czechs agree that their economies are in a critical state, but they do not talk about distribution systems and financing, savings rate, or investment opportunities...

...After all, everything is up for grabs, the economy and the political system, the legal and the social welfare system...

...In the midst of June and its abundance, the traveler remembers that in different forms, capitalism existed in eighteenth and nineteenth century England, France, and the United States apart from a full-blown theory that described and harnessed its powers...

...In the stores themselves, shelves seem well-stocked although purchasing power has fallen...

...for us the only meaningful answer is always prayer...

...And thus education appears as the only way to ward off and to make impossible a repetition oflhe Auschwitz monstrosity...

...Then there is the work ethic-the willingness to work hard and seriously at one's job...

...She is very good and very poor...

...The revolutions in Central Europe remain astonishingly free of recriminations and punitive measures against party members, informers, collaborators...

...One thing is certain: we Jews and Christians must learn to know each other...

...But in both, a table once reserved is yours for the evening...

...The bishop, who has been instrumental in negotiating the dispute Mirrounding the Carmelite convent at Auschwitz, told the American Jewish Committee's annual meeting on May 17: "I don't need to rehearse here the affair oflhe Auschwitz convent...

...Between the old state-run and the new free-market restaurants, the most striking difference is not food or ambiance, but waiters and waitresses...

...For Polish people the difference between the Shoali and the Polish martyrdom in Auschwitz is not so evident or as clear as it is elsewhere...

...We need a politics from below...

...There is a rundown air to beautiful Prague, historic Cracow, and bustling Warsaw, but there is no litter...

...This is both a problem of conscience and a problem for the economy...

...And it is this microeconomics-the little ways in which economies function-that meets the eye in Eastern Europe...

...Embedded in the resolution of these issues are potentially explosive questions of normalizing church-state relations, of doing justice without destroying the peaceful pace of change, of meeting the need for private property while protecting the common welfare...

...Eva Berberyusz, a Polish journalist (and Commonweal contributor) reports, "A university student cleans my house once a week...

...Sharp moves in one direction, for example, the wholesale return of confiscated property to the church, to businesses, to individuals will dislocate major institutions and may encourage resentful countermeasures...

...Phones work within a certain compass: local phone calls without difficulty...

...There are pristine passes through mountains that look like our own East Coast ranges...

...These are not, after all, third-world countries, but more like France in the early sixties...

...First of all, we have learned that the Jewish sensibility is quite different from our own and that we must respect it even when we don't understand it fully...

...intercity with delays...

...He headed his list with abortion, which is widely available in Poland...

...Also on the church's agenda: religious education, not just for Catholics, but for the Protestant and Orthodox minorities: "What we ask for ourselves, we must grant to others...

...And what they say is that "people are waiting-waiting to see what will happen...

...Some people will do well not simply because they have capital, but because "they are willing to work hard and take risks, while others are not...

...But world markets, financing, infrastructures are abstract concepts invented by economists to explain how capitalism-the theory-works...

...The sun lights and cheers streets that have so few shop windows or enticing signs and advertisements...

...The social consensus that forced the overthrow of the Communists, though frayed, remains intact, and for the moment, people resist talk of official political parties and opposing platforms, although nascent forms of parties, including Christian Democratic and Nationalist ones, have emerged...

...She could clean five houses during the summer vacation and help her family, but she prefers to go off to visit relatives in Germany...

...Berberyusz works very hard indeed and by her report so does the student's mother...

...Czech-language newspapers in contrast appear in the arms of a solemn, single vendor and people queue patiently before him to buy a copy...

...The coming gap between rich and poor in a society where the majority were equally poor is a moral issue the church must address...

...But "we never know how bad things are in Poland...

...Banking systems are rudimentary...

...Their hesitation may be prudent, even necessary...

...Standing in line for newspapers or for wire baskets, which are required to enter grocery stores and book stores (the baskets also serve as a crowd-control device), is one of those old behaviors that the students' enterprising outlook will steadily undermine...

...In Czechoslovakia the fields stretch endlessly, the landscape of collective farming-the only successful example among Eastern bloc nations and one which farm workers seem reluctant to dismantle...

...This is dangerous for civic morality," says the government spokesman...

...Capitalism existed in personal and interpersonal relations, in specific kinds of behaviors and forms of organization, in patterns of manufacture, trade, and distributions, even in denominational ties (as Max Weber observed), long before it existed in theory...

...I shall only ask...

...Along the gravel path that was once the Berlin Wall, Turks are busy selling Russian and East German military hats and medals along with the slightly unusual novelty: a tuna-sized can containing "The last breath of communism...

...In June, we observed its profuseness...

...The stage stands before a blue backdrop on which it is written: Pravda Vitezi-truth prevails...

...over the reforms of Vatican 11, the role of the laity, and the birth control question rarely troubled the Polish church...

...There is the green and intensely cultivated countryside...