Basic HTML Version
PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, JUNE 27, 1983
PAGE 9
As Solzhenitsyn adds:
"Only moral eriteria can help the West against
communism's well-planned world strategy. There are no other eriteria."
Only a resurgent Catholicism fills this bill; mainstream Protestantism long
ago made its own accommodation with the forces of the political left
{witness the actions of the National and World Councils of Churches).
Here now, in addition, are some press comments concerning this remarkable
development. The first is from an AP dispatch from Poland, datelined June
24:
...The Vatican newspaper L
I
OSSERVATORE ROMANO said [ the papal
visit] was teaching the pope's countrymen "patience and courage."
The visit, [the paper said in a front-page headline ] showed the
world the "Christian revolution" was under way in Poland.
Indeed, Solidarity has been transformed from a trade federation
into a popular Catholic lay movement.
As he journeyed through Poland, the pontiff was greeted by huge
crowds of people, many waving red-and-white Solidarity banners
and raising their hands in the victory sign as they sang [ the
unofficial, and officially frowned-upon national anthem] "The God
Who Watches Over Poland," a hymn asking for a free Poland. The
pope sang along, but raised his hands only in blessing. Many
priests alongside the�, however, did thrust their hands £E in
the
"Y"
which has been appropriated by Solidarity backers.
The lead article in the DAILY TELEGRAPH of London, June 21, was quite
optimistic over the prospects for Poland's "liberation."
There are two responses to the question of Poland to which the
former Karol Wojtyla, Pope John Paul II, has returned. Either
one agrees with Mr. Milovan Djilas, old communist, former Vice
President of Yugoslavia and dedicated democrat, "The Poles will
win, the Poles will win;" or with Mr. Neal Ascherson of the
OBSERVER who wa�t�"febrile" [feverish] Poles that their
stern masters in Russia had best be obeyed....
The Poles have marked and learned what the outside world has for
gotten. It is not wise to tell them to take a sophisticated view
of their colonial status.... Such liberty as they have derives
from a national disinclination to submit •...
Mr. Djilas is right. The Poles will win. They have no arms, no
people's militia. But they have themselves. Try coercing them.
Try the bluff of Soviet intervention. Try any of these things
and face the intangible will of a people which knows itself, is
true to itself, and is lit by its own hearth fire. This side of a
return to the Stalinism of 1932-38, such options are not on. The
Jaruzelski regime is roughly as popular with the Polish people as
the Norwegian supperters of Germany in the early 1940s. The
Poles will win.
Conservative (and Russophobic) American syndicated columnist Patrick J.
·Buchanan was excited too over the possibility, as he saw it, to "roll back"
Soviet forces from all of Eastern Europe. He wrote on June 21: