Cross and Commissar

The name of the factory suburb on the outskirts of Cracow is as drab and anonymous as the upright slabs of apartments that crowd its barren hills: Nowa Huta--New Foundry. Conceived by the Polish Communist state as a counterweight to "reactionary" central Cracow, Nowa Huta is home to the giant, 35,000-employee Lenin Steelworks, one of the largest in Europe. As originally planned, the town was to have schools, shops, theaters, recreation halls and a hospital--but no church. The workers wanted one. After the anti-regime riots of 1956, they won grudging permission from the state to build a church, and then had to struggle with bureaucratic obstructions for eleven years before the first spadeful of earth was even turned. Not until 1977 was the massive, modernistic church, standing at the junction of Karl Marx and Great Proletarian avenues, finally ready to be consecrated. Cracow's Karol Cardinal Wojtyia triumphantly blessed its opening.

Loyal to Marx and Lenin, Communist Poland officially promotes atheism. In his most famous observation on religion, Karl Marx argued: "It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness." Lenin and Stalin systematically sought to suppress and eventually eliminate religion from their Communist society.

In some Communist countries the effort has been brutally successful. Not in Poland. Of the country's 35 million people, 33 million are Roman Catholics, most of them still churchgoers--including, on the sly, a number of party officials. A popular joke tells of a district Communist chief reporting to higher-ups that his drive to instill Communism is a big success. "After all," he boasts, "only 85% of the people in the district attend church regularly."

Poland has been earnestly Catholic for more than 1,000 years, Rome's eastern bulwark against Mongols, Turks and Orthodox Russia. When Prussia, Russia and Austria carved Poland out of existence in three 18th century partitions, the nation's language and culture were kept alive within the spiritual fortress of the Roman Catholic Church until an independent Poland was re-created after World War I.

Ironically, Poland became more homogeneously Catholic at the end of the second World War, when Moscow annexed the eastern portions and, with those lands, most of the country's remaining Orthodox Christians. The Catholic Church, shorn of extensive landholdings, was now persecuted and poor, but respected all the more for its resistance to both Nazi and Soviet occupations. As Communist cadres consolidated their power, the church became in a new way the font of national pride and cherished freedoms.

Today, after 31 years of Communist government, Poland has more than 20,000 Catholic priests--6,000 more than it had on the eve of war in 1938--and some 32,000 nuns, fully twice the 1938 figure. The faith penetrates nearly every level of society. A vigorous Catholic intelligentsia has grown up in the Communist years and developed a link with human rights activists. The regime fears to damp down lest it trigger more protest. Concedes one Communist official ruefully: "The church is an unofficial opposition."

Poland's shrewd, 77-year-old Primate, Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, has pressed this opposition role ever since he became Archbishop of Gniezno and Warsaw in 1948. When Cardinal Wojtyla joined the battle, he used his intellectual powers to persuade both disaffected liberal Catholics and Marxists to take the church seriously. The new Pope, says a Czech Jesuit in exile, has been "more dangerous for Communist countries than Cardinal Wyszynski, because he combats Marxism also on theoretical grounds, and with such success that they have been hard put to refute his arguments."

Wojtyla's election poses embarrassing difficulties for the party. The government discouraged a visit from Pope Paul VI for the church's millennial celebration in 1966, but it can hardly discourage a trip home by a native son. Next spring Poland celebrates the 900th anniversary of the martyrdom of a national spiritual hero, St. Stanislaw of Cracow. Polish bishops last week formally asked the new Pope to attend. If the regime tries to keep him away, the volatile Poles could take to the streets in protest. If the new Pope visits, they will surely take to the streets in jubilation.

Western observers were puzzled about what Wojtyla's election might mean elsewhere in the Communist world, especially in regard to the Vatican's strategy of Ostpolitik. Diplomatic dealings with Communist regimes to ease persecution of Catholics were pressed assiduously by Pope Paul VI. The imponderable factor is not so much Wojtyla, who knows when to roar and when to purr, but rather the Communist governments and the Christians who have to live with them, especially in the other nations in Eastern Europe.

In Hungary, every diocese now .has a bishop for the first time since 1948. But while an estimated 65% of the population are Catholic, far fewer attend religious services. That is partly the result of a long vacuum in Catholic leadership during Jozsef Cardinal Mindszenty's 15 years of asylum in the U.S. embassy in Budapest. The appeal of the spiritual is by no means dead, though. When Protestants invited Billy Graham to Hungary last year, his first rally drew 10,000.

Alone among European Communist countries, Yugoslavia has an ambassador to the Holy See, and there is a papal nuncio in Belgrade--although Roman Catholics are outnumbered by members of the Orthodox churches. The Vatican is free to appoint bishops of its choice, including several who have been political prisoners. A Catholic press publishes missals, books and journals, with the proviso that they have no political content. (The government worries particularly about nationalist sentiments among the predominantly Catholic Croats.) Yugoslav Christians are relatively lucky. In 1967 neighboring Albania proclaimed itself the world's "first atheist state," and little has been heard from the remaining Christians in the country since.

In the German Democratic Republic, Party Chief Erich Honecker seemed to be moving last spring toward a thaw in relations with the principal Protestant denominations, which claim 9.5 million followers among 17 million people, but almost nothing has come of it. The minority Catholic Church has no voice of consequence.

Government concessions are almost as hard to negotiate in Czechoslovakia, where the Catholic churches--Latin and Eastern rite--still suffer from the repressive fallout of the Prague Spring of 1968. About two-thirds of the population are nominally Catholic but, observes an American diplomat, "there has been a notable erosion of belief due to apathy." A number of Catholics are so unimpressed by the caliber of official clerics that they are turning to underground churches manned by priests who have been outlawed by the state for political reasons.

Orthodox Christianity is the prevailing religion in Bulgaria and Rumania, with the usual cooperative church-state relationship that Orthodoxy has developed over the centuries. A tiny minority of Roman Catholics in Bulgaria is allowed very limited freedom. In Rumania, the regime tolerates Latin-rite Catholics in Transylvania, but has totally suppressed the Eastern-rite Catholics, who were forcibly incorporated into the Orthodox Church in 1948.

Last year's new Constitution of the Soviet Union, like the one that preceded it, guarantees freedom of religion, but Christians of any stripe are suspect. The dominant Orthodox Church has survived through an accommodation with the regime that limits its social mission. When Orthodox Priest Dmitri Dudko gave a series of controversial sermons in Moscow that led to his arrest in 1974, he was banished by embarrassed church authorities to a remote country parish.

Many Baptists in the Soviet Union became so disaffected by their official church's concessions to the state that they founded an underground church; it is now relentlessly persecuted. Roman Catholics--the great majority in Lithuania --have fared no better. Since the Soviet Union incorporated Lithuania into its territories, the most active part of the church has gone underground, and circulates a widely read anti-regime publication called Chronicle of the Lithuanian Catholic Church. Moscow forced the Eastern-rite Ukrainian Catholic Church to merge with the Orthodox Church in 1946, when the membership was estimated at 5.5 million. But loyal Ukrainian Catholics still meet in secret in private homes and apartments, served by some 300 to 350 underground priests and at least three bishops. The Ukrainians also maintain clandestine religious orders of both sexes.

Beyond the confines of Eastern Europe, the fate of Christians in Communist countries varies widely. In Cuba, where the median age is only 19, the education of children is a state monopoly from the time they are two. The Vatican has a nuncio in Havana, and the churches are open, but it is mainly the old who attend.

What remains of Christianity in Cambodia must be far underground, if anywhere. Catholics are fleeing the Communist regime in Laos. In Viet Nam, restrictions have been imposed on the once flourishing churches in the conquered South, as they have long been in the North. The major mystery in Asia is the fate of some 2 million Catholics presumably remaining in Communist China. No churches have been open since the Cultural Revolution except for one Catholic and one Protestant church in Peking, both reserved principally for foreigners.

Vatican negotiations with some of these Communist countries, if they could be started at all, could be interminable. Hungarian negotiations began under Pope John XXIII and are not yet concluded. The difficulty of winning back religious liberties once they are lost could prompt the new Pontiff to think long and carefully before reaching any modus vivendi with Eurocommunism in any of its national guises. At the same time, Wojtyla is living proof that a healthy church can survive under Communism.

Italy will of course be the main testing ground, and the Polish Pope brings to Italian politics a new uncertainty, since he has no connections with any political leaders. That fact may accelerate the recent and healthy trend among Christian Democrats to compete as a normal political party.

Italian Communists hope to convince the new Pope that there is a clear distinction between their Eurocommunism and the Communism in Eastern Europe. The effort, concedes one Party editor, "may push us to emphasize more and more sharply our difference from Soviet and East European Communists." In any case, the editor acknowledges, "when this Pope speaks about Communism he will do it with much more authority than past Pontiffs. People will believe his words more than they believed theirs." After three decades of jousting with Communism, John Paul II could hardly expect less.

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