The Pope Hits Home
HITTINGER, RUSSELL
The Pope Hits Home by Russell Hittinger In his fourth visit since leaving Krakow for Rome, John Paul II returned home last week at a crucial moment for his native Poland. Sometimes comically, but...
...For its part, the church is the more powerful force...
...Then, there is another kind of criticism that is a "coefficient of the Gospel message...
...But the pope was suggesting no such thing...
...On one hand, there is political criticism that must be expected in a free and democratic polity...
...Translated into concrete terms, if Beavis and Butt-head are kept off television in Krakow, it would be suicidal both to church authority and to democracy to have the cardinal archbishop's hand on the plug...
...But the pope made two further remarks that are crucial to the political situation in Poland...
...In a protracted political and cultural struggle for the soul of Poland, the secularists would have no reasonable hope of winning...
...The opposition seemed intent on making the constitutional order depend on Catholic orthodoxy...
...History has conspired to make Poland the most Catholic country in Europe, if not the world...
...He pointed out that "in the previous system the Church created as it were a space where the individual and the nation could defend their rights...
...In fact, he noted that they must accept "whatever is correct in this criticism...
...Yet nowhere did he quarrel with those high economic standards...
...In Poland, where some 70 percent of the population regularly takes communion, the people's piety should influence public policies on how to care for the poor...
...The historian Norman Davies aptly called Poland "God's Playground...
...Addressing the problem of economic dislocation and unemployment the next day in Legnica, he said that legislators have an obligation to "guide the national economy in such a way that these painful phenomena of social life find a proper solution...
...First, he counseled the bishops not to confuse two kinds of criticism of the church...
...The demographics over time are instructive: When Poland was partitioned among Prussia, Austria, and Russia in 1795, only 50 percent of the population was Catholic...
...Do Catholicism and liberal institutions stand to each other as a mutual blessing or a curse...
...If it moves into a position of reaction, the church could exercise a kind of veto power over the course of politics, but it would prove a Pyrrhic victory—not unlike the Republican Congress's shutting down the government...
...At the same time, ex-Communists like the Polish president, Aleksander Kwasniewski, are fiercely critical of the Constitutional Tribunal, which last month struck down major provisions of a liberalized abortion-rights law five months after its enactment...
...Sometimes comically, but more often tragically, the cycles of modern European history either begin or end in Poland...
...In comparing the tyranny of foreign oppression with slavery to immorality and secularism, the pope was saying that the question is not whether a Catholic nation can enjoy political and economic liberty and still be Catholic, but whether those very liberties can flourish without Gospel values...
...in the homily he delivered in Wroclaw, the pope remarked: "May solidarity prevail over the unrestrained desire for profit and ways of applying trade laws which do not take into account inalienable human rights...
...Take for example two widely reported comments about economics...
...In Kalisz two days later, he maintained that the "permanent measures" of a civilization are religious, moral, and political...
...The pope invited the episcopacy to engage in something like a highwire act, leaning in one direction toward a vigorous Catholic culture, while leaning in the other away from direct clerical intrusion into politics...
...His comment in Legnica about political management of the economy was carefully worded...
...now man must find a space in the Church in order to defend himself, in a certain sense, from himself: from the misuse of his freedom, from the squandering of a great historic opportunity for the nation...
...This should not be the cause of chronic political reaction on the part of the church...
...Predictably, the Western media imposed precisely this dichotomy on the pope's sermons and allocutions in Poland...
...Poland is the laboratory for an unprecedented experiment: Can a Catholic nation adopt liberal constitutional and economic institutions and still retain its Catholicism...
...But after the murder of some 3 million Polish Jews, and after the expulsion of Ukrainians and Germans by the Communists, Poland awoke to find itself 96 percent Catholic...
...Wherever the truth is preached, men and women will reject it...
...The pope knows perfectly well that free markets are an achievement and not a curse...
...Just three weeks before the pope's visit, the Polish hierarchy and Solidarity lobbied—unsuccessfully—to stop ratification of the new constitution, which mentions in its preamble the parity between Poles who believe in the Christian religion and those who draw "universal truths from other sources...
...Poland is soon to join NATO, and, with an impressive economic growth rate of 6 percent annually, it will be a major player in the new economic union...
...Neither Francisco Franco nor John Rawls—neither a clerical management of politics under the veil of civil authority nor a radically secularized and entirely procedural public order—will work for Poland...
...It's an open question how the Poles will reconcile their commitment to political liberty with their commitment to their church...
...They certainly must be helped," he said, "but no one should take their place...
...Although the judicial action was based on a civil right to life described in ordinary juridical, rather than theological, terms, the church and Solidarity were blamed for turning the clock back on liberties enjoyed under communism...
...Today, this is truer than ever...
...between the two world wars, when Poland was briefly reunified, Catholics comprised 66 percent...
...These are fighting words, and the Polish hierarchy liked what it heard...
...The Western press said the pope was inviting the Poles to choose between free markets and command economies and, on the basis of Catholic principles, to choose the latter...
...at the end of the day, the situation will be resolved according to the path it adopts...
...No matter how the Poles resolve this question, the pope insists that they reject the dichotomies afforded by elite opinion in the West...
...Whether the Polish hierarchy will be satisfied to have a Catholic-inspired democracy that is distinct from a clerically managed one is the key issue...
...Twice he went out of his way to praise the Poles for their "dynamic economy...
...In the very next sentence, he emphasized the importance of "volunteer associations and works of charity...
...The ex-Communist yuppies have transformed themselves into liberals who take the high road in debate about individual liberties...
...Yet their cultural authority is very weak...
...Second, and most important, the pope strongly advised the Polish bishops to let the laity assume responsibility for political and economic development...
...It goes with the territory, and this territory includes the religious mystery of human freedom...
...At several stops along the way of his visit, he claimed that the vocation of Poland is to teach Europe something more profound "than high economic standards...
...Only a "barbarian civilization," he warned, judges itself solely by rates of economic growth...
...He did not say that the state must be the only agent of justice with respect to the poor and unemployed...
...indeed, his remarks about solidarity were immediately aimed at the issue of European unity...
...The leitmotif of his sermon in Wroclaw was the rejection of a false dichotomy of liberty and moral virtue...
...With this in mind, the pope's address in Krakow to the Polish bishops was especially important...
...The pope was saying that the unity of Europe cannot be understood merely by economic criteria...
...Russell Hittinger is Warren professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Tulsa...
...It will take extraordinary prudence—even statesmanship—to pull it off...
...The Poles have had only 50 years to reckon with the implications of such a religiously homogeneous society...
...What he was rejecting is the idea that markets in themselves supply the moral and religious criteria for the common good...
Vol. 2 • June 1997 • No. 40
