The Angry Strangler

In the fifth week of the Roman Catholic celebration marking Poland's conversion to Christianity 1,000 years ago, the long power struggle between the church's Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski and Wladyslaw Gomulka's Communist regime was speeding toward a climax. Day after day, the cardinal heightened his challenge to the government, rallying hordes of the faithful with millennial Masses and pilgrimages, defying steel-helmeted troops armed with tear gas and burp guns. And day after dav, Gomulka's men raised the level of their blasts at Poland's outspoken prelate.

To discourage attendance at church ceremonies, Gomulka tried every petty harassment he could think of--from switching train schedules to putting key roads "under repair." Dismissing such tactics as "childish tricks," Cardinal Wyszynski began using a few tricks of his own. When the government clamped down on a 15-mile pilgrimage from Katowice to Piekary by banning walking between the two cities, the pilgrims mobilized everything on wheels and carried passengers on fenders, hoods and rooftops. "If the government respects the rights of the Roman Catholic Church," Cardinal Wyszynski told a huge audience in Piekary, "then we will respect the government. But if the balance is upset, we do not take responsibility for the future."

"Death of Truth." After another sermon in the harbor city of Gdansk, shouting students marched on the main railway station, tore down an antichurch billboard and used it as kindling for a bonfire. Angrily the government fired off a note to the cardinal, ordering him to tone down the millennium and reminding him that a replica of Czestochowa's renowned "Black Madonna" painting--centerpiece for most of the celebrations--could only be transported around Poland in "a closed car." The warning went unheeded. Last week a group of students in Lublin grabbed the portrait after a cathedral ceremony and carried it down the main street to the cheers of tens of thousands of Poles. "The Virgin Mary," Cardinal Wyszynski explained later, "traveled to Bethlehem on foot, so our youth did not want her to travel by car." At Lublin's Catholic University, the only one of its kind in Eastern Europe, the cardinal was even more emphatic. "Youth is struggling for truth," he said. "If this right is strangled, it will be the death of truth, of science, of progress."

By last week Gomulka seemed almost ready to strangle the cardinal. Government newspapers angrily accused Wyszynski of rupturing church-state relations and exploiting the church celebrations for his own "political ambitions." Radio Warsaw accused him of "fanning the conflict that he himself created for the sake of the most re actionary objectives." Zycie Warszawy, the government's prominent morning paper, came out for the cardinal's ouster from the church's leadership and his replacement by Archbishop Boleslaw Kominek of Wroclaw, the cardinal's second in command and a man considered more "reasonable" and pliant. But even the archbishop must raise a few Red doubts. "On questions of the existence of the church," Archbishop Kominek vowed recently, "we [the hierarchy] are always together."

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