The Cardinal and the Commissar

...The suppression of the riots by Wladyslaw Gomulka's government rather vindicate the conviction of Milovan Djilas that even national Communists, like Gomulka and Tito, are ultimately tied to the system, and that their rebellion against Moscow means only that they want more elbow room for their national bureaucracy...

...Joseph Alsop recently gave a vivid account of the religious rite presided over by the Cardinal, in which the Virgin Mary was claimed as the protectress of the nation in good medieval fashion...

...One must assume that neither the Cardinal nor the people know what freedom means in the Western tradition...

...The more important aspect of the suppression of the Warsaw student rebellion was the advice which the Roman Catholic Primate, Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, gave the students...

...For centuries the Roman faith was a resource for the nation in its conflict with the Tsars, whose rule was sanctified by Russian orthodoxy...

...The church needs the state, for national Communism has undertaken to give the church the subsidies to which it has been historically accustomed and feels itself entitled...

...and they should discourage any precipitate judgments and prophecies about an inevitable future...

...But certainly one of the possibilities in Poland is that Poland will settle down to a condition of semi-freedom under the tutelage of a totalitarian political system and an authoritarian religion...

...Catholicism cannot be the ethos of the nation, for the nation is religiousl) and culturally pluralistic...

...The cynics will merely declare that the partnership of two forms of authoritarianism is natural enough, but I wouldn't agree, and prefer to make the more circumspect judgment that if politics is the art of the possible, the Polish Cardinal has proved himself, if not a statesman, at least a good politician...

...The Polish Cardinal and Commissar played the game closer to the vest...

...has Germany at its back and she is quite conscious of the fact that the slice of Germany which Stalin shrewdly allotted to her can be held only in partnership with Russia...

...But the student rebellion proves that there is a natural desire for freedom among all men, and it does not have to be nourished by our tradition...

...In Hungary, on the other hand, Catholicism is the religion of the feudal aristocracy, and Protestantism and secular liberalism are historically related to the national spirit...

...They are still ruling after a fashion...

...But part of the difference is explained by history rather than strategy...

...These comparisons are, in any case, irrelevant...

...Before we know it, church and state will be as dependent on each other as they are in Spain, though in the one case the cultural and social structure is thoroughly medieval, and in the other case diametrically opposed creeds and institutions lune been maneuvered into a position of mutual support...

...Poland, on the other hand...

...Hungary is...

...These curious emergences, these improbable concatenations of forces in history make the actual course of events so much more interesting than any or all of our philosophies of history...

...Djilas may have discounted too much the power of national passion of the people which may be loosed by these bureaucratic struggles...

...The other possibility is that the youth of Poland will refuse to heed Gomulka and/or the Cardinal, and that someone some time will start a fire with the cry: "Give me liberty or give me death...

...In Poland, Catholicism and nationalism are intimately interwoven...

...Some of the difference may be ascribed to strategic considerations...

...From a position of suppression, the church has emerged as a virtual partner of the state...

...with Yugoslavia, on the road to the Middle East, and the Russians are determined lo hold that road even at the price of losing all the fellow-travelers in the world...

...Thereto re, when the national Communist leader Imre Nagy had his brief hour of authority, he renounced the Warsaw Pact and appealed to the United Nations...

...It suggested the possibility of a complete break with Moscow and the Russians reacted with the ruthless-ness which is now a part of history...

...No doubt most of us would prefer the more dramatic heroism of a Djilas, who, having been a hero of the Communist movement, is now ready to pay the price of liberty or life to express his honest conviction that Communism is a new, and yet very old, form of class exploitation...

...Poland's Curious Alliance The Cardinal and the Commissar By Reinhold Niebuhr The recent riots in Poland remind us that it is not a simple thing for despotism to grant a little freedom, for it is bound to whet the appetite and the desire for more freedom...

...But Djilas was a Communist who entered the movement with idealistic illusions and knows more about the mechanics of justice than does the Polish Cardinal...

...If the Gomulka Government is to harness all the resources of the nation against the Russian master, it needs the church which guides and molds the sensibilities of the Polish peasant...

...On the other hand, the state needs the church as much as the church needs the state...

...Their freedom was snuffed out...

...He told them not to be too rebellious, lest they threaten the existence of their nation...

...That meant that he accepted the Gomulka Government's thesis that the freedom of Poland must be rationed lest Russian power do to Poland what it had done to Hungary...

...It was probably as unwise a step as it was heroic...

...To appreciate that fact it is necessary to study the long, tragic and glorious history of Poland and know how intimately Catholicism and Polish nationalism have been related through the ages...

...It must not be forgotten that orthodox Stalinists would still like to unhorse Gomulka, and that the Catholic support is very necessary as a bulwark of his power...

...Being in the Russian orbit is no new experience for Poland...

...This curious partnership gives us at least one clue to the difference in the fate of the two satellites, Poland and Hungary...

...Nagy and Cardinal Mindszenty were both more romantic than were Gomulka and Wyszynski...

...They must not distract us from appreciating one of the strange dramas of history in which nationalism, ostensibly abhorred by two antipodal forms of internationalism, has become the meeting ground for their curious partnership...

...Undoubtedly, some of the difference between the two countries must be attributed to the difference in the chief dramatis personae...

...Whether this partial freedom is worth having, whether it can be extended without running the risk of having it snuffed out, are questions which cannot be answered immediately...

...The Cardinal's advice underscored the significance of the curious alliance which had developed between the church and the Communist state, between the Cardinal and the Commissar in Poland...