John Paul II and the Churches under Communism

On 16 October 1978 the cardinals elected Karol Wojtyła, archbishop of Kraków, as pope, and on 22 October he began his ministry as John Paul II (Holy See, biographical profile of John Paul II). In his homily that day in St Peter’s Square in Rome he called himself a bishop who was not a Roman, a son of Poland (John Paul II, Inaugural Homily (22 October 1978) 3). He told his hearers not to be afraid and to open wide the doors for Christ: to open to his saving power the boundaries of states and economic and political systems (John Paul II, Inaugural Homily (22 October 1978) 5).

His letter to the people of Poland is dated the next day. The church there, he wrote, had acquired a special significance for the whole church because of the system of relations in which it lived (John Paul II, Letter to the People of Poland (23 October 1978), paragraph 3). He told the cardinal primate that there would be no Polish pope on Peter’s chair but for the primate’s faith, which had not retreated before prison and suffering (John Paul II, Letter to the People of Poland (23 October 1978), paragraph 5). The primate was Stefan Wyszyński, archbishop of Gniezno and Warsaw, who under the communist government had been arrested on 24 September 1953 and held in isolation until 28 October 1956 (Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, profile of Stefan Wyszyński).

His encyclical Redemptor Hominis, dated 4 March 1979, in the first year of his pontificate (John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis 22, dating clause), spoke of an atheism organised as a political system (John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis 11). Appealing to the declaration on religious freedom of the Second Vatican Council, it called the curtailment of religious freedom an attack on human dignity. It was hard to accept, he wrote, a position that gave only atheism the right of citizenship in public life while believers were barely tolerated or treated as second-class citizens (John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis 17).

On 2 June 1979 he celebrated Mass in Victory Square in Warsaw, the first stop of a pilgrimage for the ninth centenary of the death of St Stanislaus of Kraków. Paul VI, he said, had wished to come to Poland for the millennium of its baptism and had not been able to (John Paul II, Homily at Victory Square (2 June 1979) 1–2). The homily argues that man cannot be fully understood without Christ, that Christ cannot be kept out of human history anywhere on the globe, and that the history of Poland cannot be understood without him (John Paul II, Homily at Victory Square (2 June 1979) 3a–3b). Before the tomb of the Unknown Soldier he remembered Poland’s dead and those who died in the Warsaw ghetto, and ended with a prayer that the Spirit descend and renew the face of the earth and of that land (John Paul II, Homily at Victory Square (2 June 1979) 4).

The homily names neither communism nor the government (John Paul II, Homily at Victory Square (2 June 1979) whole text); its claim is that a nation’s history cannot be told with Christ left out (John Paul II, Homily at Victory Square (2 June 1979) 3a–3b). For the churches of eastern Europe in 1989 see Churches and the Fall of Communism.