Stefan Wyszyński
Cardinal, archbishop of Gniezno and Warsaw and primate of Poland from 1948 until his death. The communist government held him under arrest from 1953 to 1956. John Paul II said that without his faith there would have been no Polish pope.
Stefan Wyszyński was born at Zuzela in Poland on 3 August 1901 and ordained priest on 3 August 1924. Pius XII named him bishop of Lublin in 1946 and transferred him in November 1948 to Gniezno and Warsaw, the primatial see of Poland. In May 1953 he addressed to the state authorities, in the name of the bishops, the message known by its words “Non possumus”. He was arrested on 24 September 1953 and kept in isolation until 28 October 1956. He died in Warsaw on 28 May 1981 and was beatified on 12 September 2021 (Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, profile of Stefan Wyszyński).
He was at the head of the Polish bishops who came to Rome for the inauguration of John Paul II in October 1978 (John Paul II, Inaugural Homily (22 October 1978) 7). The new pope wrote, in a letter dated the next day, that he would not be 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). See John Paul II and the Churches under Communism.
In the timeline
- 1978 to 1979, firm dateJohn Paul II and the Churches under Communism
In October 1978 the cardinals elect the archbishop of Kraków as pope. He tells the world not to be afraid and to open the frontiers of states to Christ, and in June 1979 he preaches in Warsaw that Christ cannot be kept out of human history.