1946: A new dawn for Polish Catholics

First Things, 05 August 2021

Anniversaries make clear the history that was hidden at the time: Nineteen forty-six was a new dawn for Polish Catholics and for the whole of Europe.

I spend a few weeks each summer in Poland, where anniversaries are observed with special devotion. Poles have a lot of history to keep.

Anno Domini 1946, for instance, was a very good year for the Catholic Church in Poland. That was hardly to be expected, given how unimaginably bloody the previous years had been. Poland was crucified during World War II—John Paul would call Auschwitz the “Golgotha of the modern world”—and the Catholic Church was not exempt from the lethal atheism of the occupying Nazis and Soviets.

Some two thousand of Poland’s ten thousand diocesan priests were killed during World War II. After the war, the Polish Church faced the task of rebuilding Catholic life, now under communism, with 20 percent of its priests dead. But first, there was the matter of honoring the valiant Archbishop Adam Sapieha of Kraków, the stalwart prelate who refused to leave his city, even under the occupation of Hans Frank, the brutal Nazi commander. 

A formidable spiritual and civic force, Sapieha operated a clandestine seminary in his residence, the most famous alumnus of which was Karol Wojtyła. In February 1946, Pope Pius XII honored the archbishop of the “long night of the occupation” with the red hat. Beleaguered and brutalized, Kraków had a moment of joy to reflect on its heroism. 

Seventy-five years later, it is now clear that the new Cracovian cardinal was not the most important ecclesial appointment in Poland that year. February’s elevation of Sapieha was followed in May by the consecration of Stefan Wyszyński as bishop of Lublin and in November by the ordination of Wojtyła as a priest. Sapieha’s cardinalate honored the past; Wyszyński and Wojtyła would shape the Polish and global future. 

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