CHURCH AND DEMOCRACY IN POLAND: TWO VIEWS

...they wanted to destroy not "reactionaries" but all tradition, in order to render men rootless and atomized...

...the Church was actively involved in the process of change that affected Catholic life all over the world, both before and after the Second Vatican Council...

...True...

...Once Communism had been reduced to a matter of sheer power, and its doctrinal aspirations were no longer being taken seriously even by its own ruling parvenu class, attempts to wear it out from within became pointless...

...It must be stressed that many of the young and old who are attracted to the Christian tradition were brought up in an intellectual milieu that was either irreligious or indifferent to the Church...

...it was also being corroded by the "secularist" spirit, usually—but not always—associated with the process of urbanization, the rapid increase of social and spatial mobility, and the expansion of general schooling...

...In other words, an independent Church, no matter how rigid or intransigent, would still have preserved, by the simple fact of being there, a priceless element of pluralism in an otherwise totalitarian situation...

...In fact, the Church in Poland has sustained these elements of pluralism not only by the mere fact of its existence and by winning recognition and tolerance from the state, however grudgingly this was yielded...

...It was the Church that used to be accused of hampering independent thought, of stifling learning, of upholding indefensible social privilege, of employing massive untruths in order to promote its worldly interests, of persecuting heretics and Jews, of combating democracy...

...In critical moments, when violence was likely or indeed had erupted, the Church used its influence to promote calm...

...This common interest is strong enough to allow room for a limited agreement between church and state, although it is insufficient to bring about the removal of various restrictions imposed on religious life, let alone to loosen the intolerable fetters of censorship...

...Without the cloak of the Church wrapped gently around it, the opposition would face greater dangers...

...Recently, during the Pope's visit, priests and church-delegated representatives, together with militiamen and security personnel, supervised for eight memorable days law and order in the People's Republic of Poland...

...Transformation THE EVOLUTION of Catholicism in Poland has also been aided by various factors in the international, as well as the internal, situation...

...And it succeeded as nowhere else, almost miraculously...

...Once it was no longer able to rely on its highly privileged (though not institutionally established) cultural position of the prewar period, Christianity made a great effort to survive under duress by using only its moral and intellectual resources...

...What is happening is too important for politically and socially minded intellectuals to stay away from...

...In the ethnically homogeneous country that Poland has become after the Second World War, the Church has embraced the great majority of the people...

...These changes have come about as a result of a number of cultural factors...

...For the new rulers of "the People's Poland" were not against "religious superstition," but against moral values tout court...

...With the destruction of the propertied classes, all the threads and commitments that in former years tied the Catholic culture to the traditional social hierarchies were broken, and the Church found itself in a position of poverty among the poor...

...systematic discrimination against avowed Catholics in all areas of social life...

...In Poland, both as a matter of principle and for obvious circumstantial reasons, the Church has never endorsed, let alone incited, violent opposition to the regime...

...Religious organization is merely one, and a rather marginal one at that, among institutional vehicles through which the collective life of a modern community must be mediated to allow for peaceful expression of preferences and ambitions...

...In philosophy it continued to maintain the tenets of a closed, traditional Thomism, as did the overwhelming majority of Catholic philosophers and theologians everywhere...

...After a period of inevitable disruption, the altered situation released new forms of democratic opposition, and the secular/ Christian distinction finally, and deservedly, lost meaning...

...Today the cadres of these regimes are formed by power-hungry and subservient, cynical yet obedient, faceless and at the same time faithless careerists...

...The forms they took were of a different order: chicaneries to prevent children from receiving religious instruction in proper centers outside the schools (religion is forbidden in the state education system, of course...

...if the Polish Catholic spirit had been torn by doubts, more open to selfquestioning, more responsive to novelty, it would probably not have produced the strength that eventually helped Poland survive its ordeal...

...Although the Church, due to its independent position, acts as an outlet for a variety of feelings and needs within the opposition, it only does so because the source of its strength lies ultimately in its faith and not in any political doctrine...

...Suppose permission to build some 50 new churches was granted—it would syphon off antigovernment tensions from communities that for years have been trying to secure such permission...

...In assessing the function of the Church and of Catholic values in the antitotalitarian opposition and in the struggle for human rights, two sides of the question have to be taken into account: the sheer presence of the Church as a non-nationalized crystallization of spiritual life, and the actual content of its teaching and preaching...

...were at stake and thus the entire stability of Europe might be upset...

...In social doctrine the Polish Church moved in a rut similar to the rest of the Catholic world, apart from very few exceptions...

...We all know that the Catholic press is muzzled but when we read it, we get the feeling of a breath of fresh air...

...Confrontation DESPITE ALL THE LOSSES it suffered, along with the entire population, in the persecution and massacres of the occupation, the Church emerged as spiritually influential as it had been before the war...

...Thus far, experience has not been encouraging, but nothing is absolutely precluded...

...But the Church could help to insulate the movement in subtle ways: by ordering parish priests to be silent about it...

...The split between loyal Catholics and the others grew sharper once Poland—after well over a century— regained its dreamed of, and fought for, independence in 1918...

...The historical record does not inspire great confidence—in the past, when Catholicism was Poland's dominant state religion, it was usually intolerant and politically obscurantist...

...The separation of church and state was a dearly paid-for victory without which the idea of sovereignty of the people could never be translated into the political institutions of a representative democracy...

...It is common knowledge that the government has lost the battle for what Poles refer to as "the government of the souls," and that the Church has remained the greatest, unquestioned authority in the country...

...persistent violation of the Church's autonomy to appoint bishops...

...It ought to be noted, in spite of what has already been said, that the stubborn rigidity of Polish Catholicism in the 20th century was not really exceptional by the standards then prevailing...

...In brief, there was no unequivocal distribution of rights and wrongs in this dramatic history...

...No matter what concessions the government made, the Church could always demand more...

...However, radical movements, socialist and agrarian, although often strongly anticlerical, could hardly be called anti-Christian, and the mordant militant atheism that did exist was but a marginal phenomenon in cultural life...

...To be sure, some of the outstanding writers who in the 19th century contributed decisively to shaping the "Polish spirit" could not—by any standards—be counted among ultramontanist bigots: some were philosophically highly unorthodox, and anti-Roman or anticlerical views were by no means exceptional in their writings...

...But the division into Catholics and non-Catholics, believers and sceptics, is nonexistent in political terms...

...There is no theoretically unambiguous answer to this question...

...None of them can justifiably be raised against the contemporary Church in Poland today, all of them are true when applied to the ruling party...

...the Lutheran and Calvinist communities have been reduced to tiny minorities (in the 16th century, Calvinism was well-established among the nobility...

...By the '60s, it became clear that there was nothing to "revise" any longer...

...Cooperation THIS PROCESS reached its culmination in 1968, the year of a major cultural pogrom in Poland...

...This lack of perception was to impair the effectiveness of the democratic resistance until the mid-'60s...

...It is Communism that has become the incarnation of obscurantism, fear of enlightenment and truth, the persecutor of free cultural expression, the seedbed of falsehood and anti-Semitism...

...Say that the circulation of Tvgodnik Powszechny was doubled, from its present 40,000 to 80,000 copies—it would, most of all, undercut the black market, and fewer people would have to borrow their copy...

...In fact, the latter is not an issue in Poland where the Declaration and Covenants of Human Rights are in principle legally binding (much as they may be made void by a number of specific laws or by the deliberate vagueness of other legislation...

...Whatever happens, it is clear that the vicissitudes of Christian life in Poland have led to a situation whose significance goes far beyond the confines of its own borders...

...Yet until the second half of the 19th century Polish culture was emphatically Catholic...

...Many ex-Marxists, who are only rarely allowed to appear in print, find refuge there...

...Out of all this, it became a powerful agent in the struggle for human rights, carrying the fight well beyond its own particular cause...

...An erosion of faith was slowly taking place, however, among the Polish intelligentsia in the last decades of the 19th century, supported and stimulated by the social and intellectual forces that were operating all over Europe in the wake of growing urbanization and industrialization...

...An important book on this subject was written three years ago by Adam Michnik, a social democratic leader of Poland's opposition...

...were at stake on that occasion...

...Well, when the agreement between the Church and the Polish government was signed on April 14, 1950, the bishops promised that the clergy would preach respect for state authority, would not oppose the collectivization of the countryside, and canonic sanctions would be applied against all priests involved in antigovernment activities...

...For years this entire process was hardly noticed by the antitotalitarian movement that developed within Communism in the mid-'50s and used to be known under the somewhat misleading label of "revisionism...

...Such a confrontation is very likely, I believe, if the movement's calling—the revival of the sovereignty of Poland's society as body politic—is ever to be fulfilled...

...Above all, it was helped by the inexorable corruption and degradation, both moral and intellectual, of Communism...

...The Church became active in all areas of cultural life...

...The intelligentsia had to shed its illusions in order to understand that its customary distinctions between secular and religious, progressive and reactionary were meaningless in the face of totalitarianism...

...At various periods in history some of these charges were well-founded, some might have been exaggerated, but still they contained a sufficient basis of truth...

...It has been defined by the regime for over 30 years as an ideological enemy...

...Not surprisingly, it provided an outlet for all sorts of social and political discontent, and though it never encouraged any violent expression of opposition, it naturally absorbed— by the sheer fact of not being state-owned—both the feelings of national humiliation that resulted from the forcible incorporation of Poland into the Soviet empire, and the people's passive resistance toward so oppressive and mendacious a power system...

...restrictions imposed on the Catholic press, including a particularly devastating and vicious censorship...

...It is certainly possible for a worker or peasant to be a party member and a Catholic at the same time, but he will still remain one of the "proles" like the rest of the believers, for it is not the party members but the salaried apparatchiks who wield power...

...The point has been admirably 318 argued* that those critics who attacked the Communist despotism from their leftist or socialist tradition failed to perceive both the antitotalitarian potential of Christianity and the profound transformation of Catholicism itself...

...Gierek's regime could not blackmail the Church now into such a sweeping statement of submission, but it could certainly lure it into some concessions—for instance, a promise that the Church suspend the tacit support it provides for the movement for democratization...

...and has managed to preserve its independence from the state...

...Of course, my point is not that the Church is immune to criticism or that its policy is infallible, but that the leftist cliches and categories—including in particular the left /right, progressive/ reactionary, humanist/religious distinctions— were becoming increasingly and glaringly inadequate to deal with our crucial problems, and that all analyses that employed these distinctions as a basic system of reference were bound to lead to false conclusions...

...themselves...

...Since the definitive triumph of the Counter-Reformation in the 17th century, the Roman Church has enjoyed a virtually monopolistic position among ethnic Poles...

...There was a good deal of truth in the contentions of both sides...

...Those who openly profess a different belief are bound to remain second-class subjects even if they are not directly punished by law...

...Probably genocide in Europe is inconceivable today, certainly Catholic intolerance is less militant than Islam's, and Polish nationalism less xenophobic than black nationalism in Africa...

...Freedom in modern times, whether we like it or not, means secularization...

...Revisionism, effective though it might have been in wreaking havoc on Communist ideology, was a transient phenomenon, and its role naturally decreased with the collapse of Communism as a viable ideological force...

...This could not have been seen at the time of the struggle between them, but only ex post facto, once the old cultural patterns had practically disappeared...

...At times, they feud among * Adam Michnik, The Church, the Left, the Dialogue...

...By thus increasing the chances of antitotalitarian resistance, dangers as well as hopes may breed, especially when the economic failures of the government provoke more and more fury...

...What remains is to forge a compromise—difficult but not impossible...

...The government knows both the demands of the Church and the sanctions it is likely to bring if a modus vivendi is not agreed upon...

...On the other hand, throughout the postwar years, Christianity was not only subjected to harassment and repression (which often acted as a double-edged weapon, both enfeebling and strengthening...

...Having taken up the cause of human rights as its own, and having given it universal meaning—by no means confining it to Communist countries—the Church does not need to desist from its condemnation of violence even for just ends...

...Throughout the postwar years the Church has been subjected to various forms of pressure, but it has remained the only powerful form of organized cultural activity that has escaped nationalization...

...But in a free Poland, where it would have the virtual monopoly for organizing religious worship, would the Church continue to be a pillar of democracy...

...Though the Church, in cultural terms, kept its sway over the overwhelming mass of the population, its domination over the intelligentsia was not only challenged but suffered serious harm...

...Notice that while the ideological decor is still maintained faithfully in Poland, no importance is attributed any longer to Marxist doctrine...

...The ruling party supported and organized—often using police methods—various pseudo-Catholic "progressive" groups intended to break down the unity of the Church, but despite the enormous effort invested by the state, the outcome was meager indeed...

...Christianity, as embodied in the Catholic Church, thus emerged not only as Poland's main bulwark of pluralism but also served as a haven for the truth...

...Apart from certain posts reserved for a few loyal Catholics in certain public bodies intended as window dressing, for the overwhelming majority in the population all avenues leading to participation in power are definitively closed...

...It cannot be a lay state in the true sense, nor can it give up the goal, hopeless as it may be, of converting its citizens to its creed...

...by letting it be known, by word of mouth, that the opposition, though perhaps well intentioned, is irresponsible since it puts in jeopardy the Polish raison d'Otat (the proverbial specter of Soviet tanks) and the new gains of the Catholic faith...

...both opposing forces contributed to our survival...

...Its defenders argued that it was the strength of the religious continuity and unity that had preserved Polish cultural identity through the trial of partition, and had enabled the nation, under the worst of conditions, to successfully resist its powerful enemies...

...The independent Catholic press (leaving aside the spurious, governmentsponsored variety), though incessantly in the grip of censorship and police restrictions, has been free of falsehood and has enjoyed general trust for this reason...

...If there is "gulash communism" in Hungary, can't there be an "altar communism" in Poland...

...The Church in Poland has strenuously maintained its right to perform its evangelical mission...

...This mutual recognition and the practice of confrontations, negotiations, and occasional cooperation are of tremendous importance to the Polish government—there are no damaging symbolic thresholds it has to cross in order to sit at the negotiating table with the Church...

...sectarian movements have not achieved any significant size...

...In a strange way, the Church is both the strongest and weakest link in the coalition of liberalizing forces...

...It cannot print what it would wish to, but it does not lie...

...For freedom in modern society encompasses religious freedom as merely one of many domains in which people strive to practice the dictates of their conscience...

...K homeini's inspiring liberation of his people, mainly by sermons and chanting crowds against a welltrained army, turned into a brutal restoration of intolerance...

...In the atmosphere of all-pervading mendacity, which poisons and distorts the public language of the entire Communist world, the language of Christianity has remained honest...

...In fact, somewhat similar currents did appear in Poland just before the war and were also confined to small groups of Catholic intellectuals...

...It is inconceivable that all Catholic intellectuals would withdraw from the movement—too many hopes were aroused during the last three years, too many friendships formed...

...The Church has also changed--not in its doctrine, or fundamental moral teaching...

...the times were different then, and in those darkest years of Stalinism the pressures brought against the Episcopate were enormous...

...This kind of coalescence of Christianity, in its worldly aspects, with the human rights movement and democratic values has never before been achieved...

...Thus, Poland's citizens are not prevented from attending Mass, baptizing 317 their children, and marrying in church (acts that might invoke the death penalty in Albania), yet, if they do so, their chances of participating in public affairs or reaching positions of importance are drastically curtailed...

...It is indeed arguable that it was the very rigidity of Polish Catholic culture, from the 17th century onward, that gave the country its power of resistance...

...Furthermore, even when the Church was rightly blamed for its intolerance and backwardness, it never had guns at its disposal (as Stalin aptly observed...

...Perhaps the government could no longer repress it, but it would certainly try...

...The distinction is of importance: the totalitarian state (even when clumsily and inefficiently totalitarian, as in Poland) is propelled along by an unrelenting drive to nationalize everything, including culture and memory, feeling and thought, as well as by the need to destroy all forms of communal life other than those it sets up itself...

...On the other hand, if Polish culture had not been able to resist the Church's claim to domination, if it had 316 failed to produce a science, literature, and an art independent of a self-confident bigotry, it would have doomed itself to sterility and stagnation...

...It might herald dramatic changes throughout the entire Christian world...

...This well-known fact was mentioned in a Vatican broadcast to Yugoslavia, and this was described in an editorial in the London Observer as the "Vatican's criminal folly" since the "vital interests" of the U.S.S.R...

...And it could acquire what it most conspicuously lacks at the present time—a degree of legitimacy through respecting the national heritage...

...These attacks were part of the well-known patterns of conflict that were then tearing at the traditions in the Christian parts of the world...

...But the fact that we were unable to make prudent use of the freedom won in the 19th century does not justify remedies that would eliminate it now in principle from political life...

...His argument was truly refreshing in advancing the principles on which this new political coalition could be established...

...But the key point is that Michnik's analysis was strictly historical in that it applied to a persecuted Church...

...The task of democratic oppositions in totalitarian countries is not to destroy the regimes presently in power but to restore, or install, political freedom...

...Both in the legal Catholic press and in the numerous illegal (albeit not clandestine) journals, priests and former party members appear side by side...

...319 and has asserted man's universal right to spiritual liberty, but has been equally emphatic in its insistence that it does not issue prescriptions on political matters...

...q 322...

...This is precisely what the Church wants and it could offer, if it got satisfaction on this point, something in exchange...

...It is really the only partner able to enter into a separate peace with the regime and could not be blamed for doing so, for its mission is not of this world, and political transformations of a "People's democracy" are of secondary interest compared with its chief mission—to proselytize for the Catholic faith on earth...

...The persecuted Church now acted as a champion of human rights and of the freedom of conscience...

...Suppose a Mass was broadcast 321 once a week—the number of Radio Free Europe listeners would drop in those hours and perhaps church attendance as well...

...When denied freedom to preach its doctrine, the Church becomes a champion of democratization by demanding that freedom of conscience be restored...

...The point is that no Communist nor, for that matter, any ideological state can afford the separation of church from state because separation implies that the state is indifferent to citizens' religious views and that their social positions and careers are unaffected by allegiances to a particular denomination...

...of historical national identity, and the only reliable source of moral guidance...

...Neither the democratic opposition nor the Church are interested in violent clashes that could have disastrous consequences, including a Soviet invasion...

...it looked as though the Vatican had called the Poles to an armed uprising...

...Hence all opposition to these totalitarian aspirations introduced a measure of plurality, and therefore rescued some degree of freedom from the Communist state...

...But the government, having lost all credibility among the population (even the qualified and shaky legitimacy it achieved by the economic improvements of the early '70s), is compelled to canvas for the support of the Church to avoid an uncontrollable explosion of popular wrath that could bring Soviet tanks onto the streets of Warsaw...

...The concept of human rights suffices both for the democratic opposition to phrase all its claims, and for the Church to struggle for its place in public life and for freedom of expression...

...It cannot be denied that neither in the Stalinist period nor later, when a shaky modus vivendi between the Church and state had been reached (systematically infringed upon by the state though it was), the repressive measures intended to disable religion and the Church in Poland never reached the degree of brutality characteristic of the Soviet state...

...nowhere else has the convergence been so strong (with the possible exception of Ireland...

...May we hope that the ruling party, under its self-imposed duress and just to avoid the worst, will seek a minimal consensus by letting the population voice its grievances and by enlarging, even slightly, the extent to which people can influence the way they are ruled...

...The "revisionists" (here I might have used the first person plural, as I was actively involved in the disputes), for all their attacks on the Communist tyranny and the Leninist doctrine, remained the prisoners of various conceptual distinctions that had become utterly anachronistic...

...The Church and the government, though in opposition to each other, feel certain that an agreement, when reached, can be enforced by each side...

...Some find in it an irreplaceable vehicle of cultural continuity, the expression, par excellence...

...If the authorities view the Church as a kind of rival party that they failed to destroy, this is because they are unable to imagine human actions other than those motivated by greed for power and privilege...

...At the outset of the 20th century Catholic modernism was not absent, but its influence was very weak compared with a country like France...

...0 This article is reprinted, with permission, from Index on Censorship, 6/ 1979...

...Cardinal Wojtyla's election to the Holy See and his recent trip to his native land enormously fortified both the Church's moral authority and the steadfastness of Polish Catholicism...

...Even though they might occasionally laud the "progressive" trends in the Roman Church, they more frequently attacked it on grounds that might have been valid decades before but had since then lost all significance...

...But even though the government could not or would not want to completely satisfy the Church's ambitions, it could still offer many concessions without, it seems to me, jeopardizing its grip on political power...

...All forces that withstand this voracity, whether in the economic or in the cultural field, automatically acquire an antitotalitarian significance, irrespective of the degree to which their exponents have themselves adopted libertarian values...

...they did not want to promote the common good over egoistic self-interest but, instead, the interest of a ruthless organization lusting for the exclusive control over all aspects of life...

...numerous interdictions and limitations on the building of places of worship...

...No doubt it is difficult to clearly divorce the cause of human rights from constitutional questions...

...The importance of these groups was to become manifest only later, in the entirely different order that emerged after the war...

...To be more precise, their task is to do both—unless this point is firmly established in the consciousness of all concerned we will once again be bored (when looking from afar) or horrified (when thinking of friends and relatives) by the spectacle of a new zealous intolerance replacing an old decrepit autocracy...

...I cannot remember similar strictures after the Pope in person had directly appealed to the poor Mexican peasants to organize themselves to fight for their rights...

...It was the confrontation with the Communist power that brought about formidable changes in all aspects of Catholic life...

...What could the Church offer in exchange for such government concessions...

...and this is an interest they share with the ruling party...

...Thus the moral foundation of both is essentially the same...

...Even the watered-down version of ideological infatuation—revisionism, which lasted roughly from the XXth Congress of the CPSU to the invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968—came to an end over a decade ago...

...The general spirit of the Enlightenment, positivism, and enthusiasm for science, combined with the idea of social progress and the secularization of morals inspired attacks on the Church for its obscurantism, parochialism, and enmity to human advancement...

...and indeed no "vital interests" of the U.S.S.R...

...Sadly, there is no need today to bring up the Bolshevik Revolution in order to illustrate the point—in the last 30 years, under the banners of decolonization, or war against foreign aggressors, or against domestic tyrants, the populations of Asian and African countries have been decimated by their own movements of liberation...

...Boorish party propaganda to the effect that the Church was a servant of the landlords and capitalists soon became meaningless...

...published in Polish in Paris by Kultura, 1977...

...By a cruel irony of destiny—or of Providence-the official, ruling ideology, once rooted in the ideas of the Enlightenment, has become host to all the vices formerly attributed to the Roman Church...

...The democratic movement may be headed for a confrontation with the Church...

...THE CHURCH IS THE ONLY component of the present democratic opposition recognized by the government as an independent institution...

...If the Polish process of totalitarianism on the Soviet model never reached the level of other socialist countries, this is largely due to the popular resistance that the Church itself symbolized...

...For one thing...

...The current antitotalitarian movement does not operate in perfect unison, and the various groups tend to stress different aspects of their struggle against the dictatorial order...

...320 It took three decades for the secular intelligentsia of Poland to discover the Catholic Church as its ally in the quest for political freedom and social justice...

...One must also remember that insofar as there were new trends in Catholic philosophy and social thought open and sensitive to the political and spiritual anxieties of the 20th century, these were limited before the Second World War to tiny groups that hardly shaped the general character of Catholic life...

...and Judaism has not become a spiritual rival to the Church as its influence was felt in a different social milieu...

...The Church in Poland gained a reputation of particular rigidity and conservatism, both in social and intellectual terms...

...What was creative and new in literature, philosophy, and the social sciences originated mostly (it would be unfair to say entirely) outside the Catholic sphere of influence, in those milieux that were either indifferent to religion or, in part, positively antireligious...

...True, it opened the way for demagoguery and populism and, in its extreme consequence, "totalitarian democracy" as well...

...Thus in Poland Christianity has become the most unyielding repository of traditional libertarian values...

...Since no one takes seriously the official ideology anyway, it is not clear why the regime could not agree to let the population have better access to the religious preachings of the Catholic Church...

...It produced a new generation of intellectuals—open-minded, intelligent, and tolerant, yet profoundly Christian in a real, not tactical or political, sense...

...The extent to which it was subject to harassment and repression varied, depending on many internal and external political factors: yet all attempts to split the Church from within failed...

...There were, of course, sceptics, atheists, anticlericals, freemasons and freethinkers, chiefly among the educated classes, and they grew in number...

...A state that is ruled by a single party professing a particular Weltanschauung with allembracing pretensions—even if no one takes its doctrine seriously any more—is unable, in principle, to treat its citizens as equals, irrespective of their faith...

...Why this clash between secular and religious cultural expression became anachronistic and irrelevant to Polish life is one of the most curious phenomena in the contemporary Christian world...

...Yet the profoundly Christian inspiration of their thought was undeniable and their work hardly affected the Catholic loyalty and fidelity of the faithful...

...Others return to Christianity in full response to its religious message...

...Milosz's and Koestler's diagnoses are only of historical interest to the students of the Soviet imperium...

...it has been fought with a variety of strategies, but also had to be placated— persecuted but also tolerated...

...but we must also remember that it takes less than a Pol Pot, a Khomeini, or an Idi Amin to bury democracy...

...but in becoming open, sensitive in its general attitude, tolerant, and intellectually fertile...

...During the last, the 170th, Conference of the Polish Episcopate, the bishops complained about the inadequate number of churches, low circulation of Catholic newspapers, lack of access to radio and television, and heavy censorship of Catholic publications...