The Christ of Nations

__"The Catholic Church and Poland’s Return to Europe" by Timothy A. Byrnes, in East European Quarterly (Jan. 1997), Box 29 Regent Hall, Univ. of Colorado, Boulder, Colo. 80309.__

It is hard to imagine a more Catholic country than Poland. Not only does it owe its freedom in part to the boldness of Pope John Paul II but the church, through Primate Józef Cardinal Glemp and the other bishops, has remained actively involved in Polish politics. It now appears, however, that the church may have overplayed its hand. The ex-communist (and anticlerical) Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) now dominates the governing coalition in the Sejm (parliament), and the SLD’s Aleksander Kwasniewski overcame the church’s open opposition to defeat Lech Walesa in the 1995 presidential election. Last year, despite strong church protests, President Kwasniewski signed into law a liberalized abortion measure. Surveys show that a majority of Poles consistently dissent from the church’s stand against abortion, and 75 percent think that the church should stay out of politics.

"Why does the church continue to assert itself so aggressively in Polish politics?" asks Byrnes, a political scientist at Colgate University. The answer, he contends, is that it is looking far beyond Polish politics to "the future shape of European society."

During Poland’s agony of the last two centuries—its history of partition, occupation, and foreign domination—the Catholic Church there has been strongly linked with Polish nationalism. In popular folklore and nationalist literature, Poland is the "Christ of nations," its suffering and serial dismemberment to be followed by national rebirth and international Christian renewal.

"Pope John Paul II and many of the Polish bishops see their homeland as sitting once again astride the great religious and political divisions of the European continent," Byrnes writes. "They want an authentically Catholic Poland to serve as an instrument of the re-evangelization of the Orthodox East, and as a spiritual and moral exemplar to the secular West." Church leaders see their agenda in Poland—banning abortion, reintroducing Catholic instruction into public schools, and ensuring a legally protected role for the church—not only as morally right but as "essential prerequisites to Poland’s playing its proper role in the European community of nations."