For Another Millennium

Communist Poland has a continuing cold war all its own, between the Roman Catholic faithful of Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski and the Red bureaucrats of Party Boss Wladyslaw Gomulka. Recently, the cold war has been getting hotter.

For months the cardinal has fumed be cause Gomulka failed to convene a long dormant committee on church-state relations intended to review political harassment of religious activities. Finally, in a series of Lenten sermons, Wyszynski sharply criticized the regime in two at tacks on state-sponsored atheism, a third on birth control and the Polish system of legal abortion. For good measure, he condemned the party-controlled press for "throwing mud at our priests'" by publishing the lurid "confessions" of unfrocked clerics.

The Red response was quick and virulent. Warsaw's Zycie Warszawy, in a rare personal attack on the cardinal, charged him with deliberately seeking to provoke an "atmosphere of persecution and martyrdom." Last week Cardinal Wyszynski hit back. He journeyed to the ancient western Polish city of Gniezno on a pilgrimage in honor of Poland's first patron saint. St. Adalbert.* Though city officials barred the procession from its traditional route through the center of town because of "traffic problems." 8.000 hymn-singing worshipers solemnly marched in a cold drizzle to an open-air Mass before the 980-year-old cathedral. Predicted the cardinal: despite continuing Communist threats, "the church in Poland will continue for another millennium."

*Bishop of Prague, who was massacred in 997 while on missionary expedition among the pagan Prussians. His body was ransomed by the Polish duke, Boleslaw the Brave, and buried in Gniezno. Adalbert was canonized about 999.

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