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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, JUNE 27, 1983
PAGE 10
Though controlled from the communist East, Poland remains
spiritually, culturally and politically part of the Christian
West. No wonder Khrushchev howled so about "captive-nations"
proclamations in the American Congress. They had the sting, the
resonance, of truth....
What the Poles and their pope--perhaps the most impressive leader
of the postwar era--are showing the world is how to stand up to
Moscow. In Poland, the Soviet Union is faced with an insoluble
problem. The regime has� legitimacy�no support: the economy,
the engine of the East bloc, is almost cold; the population is on
a prolonged sit-down strike; and the heroic example of the Polish
people is a magnet to the imprisoned Christian people of East
Germany, Romania, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, not to mention the
Baltic republics and the Ukraine.
They are all captive
nations••.•
Just as it is the undeclared policy of the Soviet Union to divide
and destroy NATO and expel the Americans from West Europe, why
not make it the ambition of American policy to divide and
dismantle the Warsaw Pact from within, to expel the Soviet armies
of occupation from East Europe? •..
The pope, who asserted on this trip that "Polish culture is, above all,
Western European,� nevertheless is aware of all the obstacles yet in his
patha Despite his blunt appeals for freedom and sovereignty, the pope, on
occasion, publicly appealed to both the government and society (the church
mainly but also Solidarity, obviously) to engage in a peaceful "dialogue"
with each other. This helped assuage governmental fears, of course. It
also reflected the pope's sense of reality and the possible--for now.
Reported the June 19 SUNDAY TELEGRAPH of London:
Pictures of Pope John Paul in solemn conclave with General
Jaruzelski, the military dictator of his native Poland, suggest a
confrontation between the irresistible and the immovable..•.
Catholicism flourishes in Poland today as never before. It has
achieved alongside its spiritual content a new nationalist
significance which even the Communists respect.
Where else
behind the Iron Curtain would one see members of the regime's
official welcoming party kissing the Holy Father's ring of office
when he landed at the airport?...
[And where else behind the
Iron Curtain does one find Catholic chaplains assigned to Army
u ? its, except in Poland?!]
The Vatican must concern itself with realities as well as with
faith, and one of these realities is that the Catholic Church,
throughout Eastern Europe, has to operate within the framework of
communist police states. This means deciding, in each country,
just how much can properly be rendered to the local Marxist
Caesars.
Hella Pick of Britain's GUARDIAN, June 20, also wrote of what the pope can
do now and what he would like to do motivated by "the power of the Virgin
Mary" (the pope is an especially-devout Marianist, as are most Poles).