A True Shepherd
First Things, 9 September 2021
Wyszyński took the initiative, even at the cost of painful attacks from those who normally cheered him on.
When Stefan Cardinal Wyszyński is beatified on Sunday in Warsaw, this colossus of the postwar Polish Church will be principally remembered for his stalwart defense of Polish liberty under communist oppression. He paid a personal price for that, suffering three years of arbitrary imprisonment.
The primate of Poland from 1948 to 1981 will be beatified along with his personal friend and spiritual companion, Mother Elżbieta Czacka. Mother Czacka, the foundress of a religious order, labored to support the blind; she had lost her sight as a young woman. The joint beatification will highlight Wyszyński’s commitment to the corporal works of mercy and his staunch advocacy of Catholic social teaching.
What some will likely overlook is Wyszyński’s role as a figure of Christian reconciliation. Due to a false caricature of conservative Polish Catholicism, and the false identification of mercy with liberal Catholicism, Wyszyński the reconciler does not fit the established storyline of an indomitable prelate rallying the piety of the people against the regime. Yet Wyszyński led reconciliation efforts with Germany, though this was not popular with the Polish people; he provided an admirable example of leadership in difficult circumstances.
Upon his release from prison in 1956, Cardinal Wyszyński launched the “Great Novena,” a nine-year program of prayer and pilgrimage in preparation for the millennium of Poland’s “baptism” in 1966. Wyszyński emerged as the undisputed father of the nation during these nine years; he is known to this day in Poland as the “Primate of the Millennium.”
In November 1965, the Polish bishops sent letters to the episcopates of 56 countries, inviting them to send delegations to the millennial celebrations in Poland the next year. The letter to the German bishops was no mere formality. It reviewed at length the history of the two nations, including the recent atrocities of World War II. Wyszyński knew that history all too well; all of his seminary classmates—he was ordained in 1924—were either imprisoned or killed by the Nazis. Some 2,000 Polish clergy were interned at Dachau; 868 of them were killed there. But in the letter to their German brethren, the Polish bishops declared that they sought forgiveness and reconciliation. They concluded: “We forgive and we ask forgiveness.”
The Polish communists used this letter as a rare opportunity to divide the people from their pastors. They declared it an outrage that Polish leaders should be willing to offer forgiveness to Germans, much less ask for it. What did Poland have to be sorry for? The Polish communist regime proposed another message: “We don’t forgive. We will never forget.”
The regime stirred up great indignation against Wyszyński and the other Polish bishops, including the new archbishop of Kraków, Karol Wojtyła. Nothing happened of consequence in the Polish episcopate without the primate’s approval. The millennium was his primary pastoral project. Why would he risk his moment of greatest triumph on an unnecessary controversy?
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