Iron Curtain (49 page)

One way or another, the clergy had to function within a political system that described them as its most important enemies. Some thought a degree of cooperation and even collaboration with the communist parties was the only way to survive, and the only way to protect the faithful. Others disagreed vehemently. Nobody had the benefit of hindsight, and it was not always clear at the time what the “right” or “moral” choice ought to be. This ambiguity becomes very clear when examining closely the stories of Cardinals Mindszenty and Wyszyński, two extraordinary men who made very different choices at this time.

Sociologically, the two men had much in common. Both were the sons of devout, provincial farmers of modest means, and both owed their education and their careers to the church. In his memoir, Mindszenty writes
with gratitude of his parents’ decision to send him to secondary school, which wasn’t common among his peers.
⁵³
Wyszyński’s earliest childhood memory was of gazing up at two holy pictures in his bedroom: the Black Madonna of Częstochowa, a figure his father adored, and the Blessed Virgin of Ostra Brama, the icon most revered by his mother.
⁵⁴

Both men were patriots, and both had established records of resistance to tyranny. The short-lived Hungarian communist government of 1919 had arrested Mindszenty briefly, and the Hungarian fascist
Arrow Cross government had arrested him again in 1944, when he refused to take an oath to their leader, Ferenc Szálasi.
⁵⁵
Wyszyński too had worked as an “underground” teacher in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation, after the university was closed. He remained closely linked to the Home Army throughout the war. During the Warsaw Uprising he served as chaplain to the Żoliborz district and the hospital in Laski, to the north of the city.

Both men were politically savvy and alert to the dangers of their own positions. Following his appointment in 1948, Wyszyński noted wryly that he was frequently offered books on the subject of martyrdom, as well as holy pictures of martyrs. Everyone around him expected the police to come at any moment: “My impending arrest seemed so certain that even the chauffeur was on the lookout for a new job.”
⁵⁶
In the same year, also fearing arrest, Mindszenty issued a statement forgiving in advance any Catholics who might be forced to sign letters or petitions against him: “I do not wish that any Catholic should lose his livelihood because of me. If Catholic faithful sign letters of protest against me, they can do it in the knowledge that it is not done of their own free will. Let us pray for our beloved Church and our precious Hungary.”
⁵⁷

During their initial years in office, both men thought deeply about the role of the church under a communist regime, discussing the possible options with their colleagues, praying for guidance. Both also acted in good faith, according to what they thought best for religious institutions and for believers. Yet as their respective memoirs illustrate, they eventually came to very different conclusions about the best path to follow. For deeply religious people, the choices were neither easy nor obvious.

Of the two, Mindszenty was the more political, the more outspoken, and the more openly antagonistic to communism. His conflict with the Hungarian government began very early. During a 1945 visit to the
Vatican, his first
as primate, Mindszenty obtained a promise of charitable aid for Hungary from American Catholics. This infuriated the communists, who tried to prevent the aid from reaching Hungary. Mindszenty denounced this maneuver in public: “These American donations were a sign of the all-embracing solidarity of the world Church. World Bolshevism did not like them at all.” He was equally blunt about the communist party’s disregard for the rule of law. Before the elections in October 1945, he issued a letter that did not mention any party by name but that denounced police violence and arbitrary arrests, declaring that “it seems that a totalitarian dictatorship is starting to replace the previous one.” Rákosi called an emergency meeting after Mindszenty’s letter was released, and in some places police tried to prevent priests from reading it aloud in church.
⁵⁸

As pressure on Catholic and Protestant youth groups grew, Mindszenty took on the responsibility of loudly and publicly defending them. In May 1946, he marched alongside the Catholic Parents’ Association in demonstrations against the proposed closure of church schools. In March 1947, he publicly condemned the abolition of religion in all schools, warning that, “promising freedom of religion while creating institutions of irreligiousness is the height of hypocrisy.” After Hungary’s bishops declared 1947 a holy year—a Marian year—Mindszenty threw himself into the celebrations. Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims turned out to meet him at mass gatherings around the country, despite artificially constructed obstacles such as “broken” trains and “closed” roads. He rallied them with powerful and provocative speeches: “The Catholic parishes must be on the alert in such times of struggle … We harm no one, and will not do so in the future. But if there be an attempt made to destroy justice and love, the foundations that sustain us, we then have the right of legitimate self-defense.”
⁵⁹

Mindszenty did not mince his words, and he did not compromise or negotiate. He responded to every attack on the church with a counterattack. He would not sign any agreement with the state until the regime agreed to restore the church’s confiscated buildings and funds, revive the disbanded associations, and establish diplomatic relations with the Vatican. Clearly, these were not conditions that the communist party was going to meet, and in the autumn of 1948 the party press launched a campaign under a new slogan: “We will annihilate Mindszentyism!”

After Christmas, he was arrested. He was immediately stripped of his
robes and his possessions, repeatedly interrogated, and tortured for many weeks. He writes of being beaten on the soles of his feet and of being kicked on the floor of his cell. Eventually he was forced to undergo a humiliating show trial, during which he publicly “confessed” to a series of ludicrous crimes, including plotting the theft of Hungary’s crown jewels and conspiring to return Archduke Otto von Habsburg to the Hungarian throne. Afterward he remained in prison until October 1956.
⁶⁰

Wyszyński’s fate was different, not only because Poland was different but also because the Polish primate chose different tactics. By nature, he was inclined to seek compromise. Although he too was openly harassed from the very beginning of his term in office—he became primate after Hlond’s death in 1948, just as the propaganda campaign against the church gathered pace—he nevertheless sought to avoid open conflict. He eschewed fiery sermons and public criticism of the regime, preferring to protest behind the scenes. In his memoirs, he regretted that people were not always aware of these hidden tactics: “The public knew nothing about the many letters, memoranda, protests submitted … in defense of the Church’s rights.” He even sought to identify some points of potential agreement with communist ideology, pointing to the church’s traditional advocacy of “social justice” and declaring himself in favor of economic restructuring and land reform, which he considered to be long overdue. He admitted that their “narrow atheism” made cooperation with communists difficult, but he sought to find common ground anyway.
⁶¹

From the moment he took office, Wyszyński also began to negotiate what would later be known as the “agreement of mutual understanding” between the state authorities and the church. Three senior bishops were sent to meet regularly with communist officials. They continued the meetings even as heavier restrictions were placed on church activity and even as the communists created obstacles and delays. Famously—or infamously, depending on one’s point of view—Wyszyński finally signed the document in April 1950. Among other things, it compelled Polish church leaders to “tell the clergy that their pastoral work, in accordance with church teachings, should foster respect for the laws and prerogatives of the state among the faithful.”
⁶²
In effect, the church undertook not to support the underground resistance or indeed anticommunist resistance of any kind. The agreement was controversial and remained so for many years. To many, it seemed a step too far, a shameful compromise that contributed to the regime’s legitimacy and weakened the church. One priest who was under police interrogation in 1950
was told about the agreement while still in prison. He wrote later that he had assumed it must be a lie, designed to rob him of the will to resist. It was impossible, unthinkable that a Polish Catholic primate had signed something so profoundly collaborationist.

Wyszyński himself agonized over the decision to sign this agreement, and at times he appeared to regret it. In 1953, he told a conference of the episcopate that all of their attempts to cooperate with and accommodate the regime had been perceived simply as “weakness”: “The government has never stopped looking at the church through a political lens. The church is the Vatican, the bishops are agents and spies.” He seemed almost relieved when he was finally arrested in September 1953 because that gave his position some clarity, as he told a fellow priest: “Workers, peasants, intellectuals, all kinds of people from all over the nation are in prison, it’s good that the primate and priests are in prison too, since our task is to be with the nation.”
⁶³

Wyszyński understood why so many disliked the church–state agreement, and he also knew that Mindszenty had refused to sign a similar document. His decision to negotiate did not mean he had any illusions about the nature of the regime: he knew he gained nothing by signing an agreement except some extra time. But time was precisely what he wanted. The Polish church had suffered terribly during the war, he later wrote: thousands of Polish priests had been arrested, thousands had died in both German and Soviet concentration camps, and the clergy needed time to recover. The church must avoid at all costs the destruction that had been inflicted on the Russian Orthodox Church after the Russian Revolution: “We had to gain time and strength to defend God’s positions.”
⁶⁴
He saw the agreement as a necessary compromise, one that would give the church some breathing space and would at least make it difficult for the regime to claim that the church was obstinate or recalcitrant.

These two different positions produced different results. Mindszenty’s open confrontation had the merit of clarity. At the time, he was widely admired for his insistence upon the truth, and he is still admired for that today. Church schools and institutions had been destroyed, innocent people had been arrested and killed, and he had the courage to say so. His openness later made him an important symbol for anticommunists in Hungary and around the world. When he was finally freed by Hungarian rebels in 1956, ecstatic crowds awaited him outside the prison.
⁶⁵
Yet his courage did
not prevent the Hungarian church from suffering severe repression. After his arrest, torture, and humiliating public show trial, the Hungarian bishops were forced to sign an “agreement of mutual understanding” of the sort Wyszyński had reluctantly signed, but under far worse terms.
⁶⁶
The Hungarian version not only acknowledged the constitution of the Hungarian People’s Republic but also called upon believers to help fulfill the Five-Year Plan. It explicitly warned priests not to oppose the collectivization of agriculture. A week after it was signed, the state issued the order dissolving Hungary’s monastic orders.
⁶⁷

Wyszyński’s more pliable tactics had the merit of flexibility. He sought to avoid confrontation, to keep priests out of prison, and to keep as many church institutions open as possible. His approach didn’t have the same moral clarity as that of Mindszenty, nor the same inspirational quality, and his soft-spoken sermons left ordinary people feeling confused about the church’s real attitude to communism. But his nonconfrontational style may help explain why Wyszyński was arrested relatively late, in 1953 instead of 1949; why he was never put on trial; and why the Polish church emerged from the Stalinist period relatively intact, at least as compared to its Hungarian, Czechoslovak, and German equivalents. Wyszyński himself believed that his conciliatory tone had made it more difficult for the communists to attack the Polish Catholic Church. They could hardly accuse him of reactionary intransigence when he agreed to so many of their demands. At least until the 1980s, Wyszyński’s attitude set the tone for other Polish clerics, most of whom publicly accepted the party’s legal authority. Throughout the communist period, the vast majority of Polish priests sought to avoid open political conflict while continuing to carry out their traditional duties. By contrast, the Hungarian churches, both Catholic and Protestant, were more thoroughly demoralized in the Stalinist period and more deeply penetrated by the secret police in the 1970s and 1980s. Unlike the Catholic Church in Poland and the Protestant churches in Germany, the Hungarian churches did not play a large institutional role in the political opposition to communism that developed in the 1980s.

Both of their approaches had advantages and drawbacks, and indeed the different choices made by the region’s two outstanding Catholic leaders had their echo among ordinary clergy as well as lay believers. Some chose defiance and prison. Others chose the less satisfying path of negotiation, compromise, and protest behind the scenes, believing that it was better for their
parishoners.
Hans-Jochen Tschiche, a Lutheran clergyman in East Germany, told himself that “We are the church not only for the strong ones but for the majority. The church is for the weak and the fearful, and if I enter into a large conflict with the state that might be too threatening to them.”
⁶⁸

But those were not the only choices open to the faithful under the new regime. Very quickly, other kinds of opportunities opened up as well.

From the first days of Soviet occupation, the new secret police services sought to recruit priests and religious people secretly into their ranks, just as they sought to recruit members of many other professions. But in the case of the clergy, secret collaboration was not enough; they also wanted the clergy to function openly in the service of the regime, as an arm of the communist party. This was an explicitly Soviet idea.
⁶⁹
According to Józef Światło, a senior Polish secret police officer who defected in 1953, General Serov himself had proposed “not the liquidation of the church but slowly making it into a tool of Soviet politics.” The idea was to “penetrate it on the inside, divide it into squabbling factions as much as possible—as happened in Russia before 1929—and weaken its authority on the outside.”
⁷⁰
This had been the fate of the Orthodox Church in Russia, which by the 1930s was in effect a state institution.