"We Stand on Calvary"

Warsaw taxicab drivers were suddenly ordered to report en masse for vehicle examination. Trains to Czestochowa did not arrive at stations, and prospective passengers were brusquely told, "There are no more tickets left." Buses and cars were stopped for endless roadside identity checks, detours and delays. Yet, despite the obstacles thrown up by Wladyslaw Gomulka's Communist regime, some 300,000 devout Poles last week came by bus, car, train, horseback, buggy, bicycle or foot to the Jasna Gora monastery, the nation's most sacred shrine, which stands on a high hill overlooking Czestochowa. On May 3, the traditional Polish national holiday, the pilgrims prayed and sang before a giant outdoor altar through some twelve hours of Masses, sermons and processions that began in steamy, 90DEG midday heat and lasted until a full, honey-colored moon hung in the sky.

It was the climax of ten years of celebrations that the Roman Catholic Church has held to mark Poland's conversion to Christianity in 966. In some ways, it was an oddly anticlimactic one, for the crowds at Czestochowa were not nearly as large as had been hoped--or feared. Church officials had predicted 700,000 pilgrims, while Communist authorities, concerned that the demonstrations might fan the coals of antigovernment resentment, had made elaborate plans to tamp down a turnout that they believed could top a million. Two major football games were scheduled to siphon off Poles who might otherwise make the pilgrimage. And more than 300,000 workers in the nearby city of Katowice turned out--on government orders--to attend a patriotic rally, while for most of the rest of Poland, May 3 was officially a regular school and working day.

Nonetheless, the celebration was a festive occasion. Throngs of peasant women and men, peddling sausages and souvenirs, clustered in the newly washed streets of the normally drab industrial city. When Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski arrived two days before the ceremonies, he was nearly mobbed by frantic tens of thousands, chanting wildly "Long live the Pope"* and singing the ancient Polish hymn We Want God.

The celebrations had an additional significance because Wyszynski chose to emphasize a theme for which he and his bishops have been attacked by Gomulka's regime: the need for Poles to forgive neighboring Germany for its World War II crimes and forget the historic enmities that divide the two peoples. "We stand on Calvary," preached Wyszynski in the moonlight, "and hear Christ's words of forgiveness for those who crucified him. From Jasna Gora, we the Polish bishops, and God's representatives, we also forgive." "We forgive," the crowd thundered back, and the fields echoed with applause.

*Who was forbidden to come to Czestochowa by Gomulka but nevertheless celebrated his own private millennial Mass in a small chapel among the grottoes of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, before a replica of Czestochowa's renowned Black Madonna.

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