Still Running Off at the Keyboard

WHAT WAS JP II DOING ?

Bear with me...the quotes are somewhat long, but I think deserve a hearing. In looking at these passages, also consider my blog on the Sillon, the Polish communist organization PAX and its involvement with Pax Christi.

Now look at another passage from the same index of De Poncin's book FREEMASONRY AND THE VATICAN by Vicomte Leon De Poncins:

Under these conditions, which favour the proliferation of erroneous opinions to the great detriment of the Church in Poland, a word of warning is timely.

1. Outside Poland Pax represents itself as a "movement" of progressive Polish Catholics. As a result it tends to be compared to Western progressive movements, which, living under democratic forms of government, are completely free to proclaim their opinions and sympathies for the programmes and leanings of the political Left of their respective countries.

In reality, Pax is not a "movement" but a closely-connected organ of the police machine, directly responsible to the Minister of the Interior, and blindly obedient to the directives of the secret police, the U.B.

This fact is well known in Poland, but people realise that it is dangerous to talk about it. Once only, under cover of the "thaw" in October 1956, Communists and Catholics joined in denouncing and stigmatising publicly the character and activities of this secret, Stalinist agency of the U.B. ...

2. In order to understand fully the activities of Pax, it is as well to go back to its beginnings. Its founder, Piasecki, condemned to death by the Soviet authorities for resistance activities, saved his life at the price of an explicit undertaking to penetrate and enslave the Church for the benefit of the Communist revolution.

From the beginning, therefore, Pax has borne the character of a strictly controlled secret agency. All its members are salaried officials (the forms of payment vary) appointed to carry out and report on definite projects.

Their orders emanate from the central office of the Communist party. Mr. Piasecki is directly subject to the "Security Office" (U.B.), and to the Office for Religious Affairs, which has absolute and in fact total power over everything concerning the Catholic Church in Poland. ...

The intellectuals, especially the writers, are clearly more vulnerable due to the fact that Pax owns a prosperous publishing business, which pays well. In a country in which even the government admits that salaries seldom reach the minimum subsistence level, the temptation to collaborate with Pax is obviously great and a refusal to collaborate in any way presupposes an unusual strength of character. (pp. 206-207)

De Poncins goes on to describe the methods of infiltration of the Church, the intention to divide the bishops into integralists and progressives and pit them against each other. The house organ of Pax was "Slowo Powszechne":

This statement of Jankowski's, editor of Slowo Powszechne, the Pax daily paper... (ibid, p. 212)

Now go with me to WITNESS TO HOPE, George Weigel's biography of JPII:

Tygodnik Powszechny, Znak, and the circle of writers, poets, and intellectuals built around those two publications remained crucial conversation partners for Cardinal Wojtyla. The benefit, Jerzy Turowicz suggests, was mutual: "I have a right to say as his friend that Tygodnik Powszechny had an influence on him." Wojtyla used the editors of the paper and the journal as sounding boards for reflecting out loud on Church affairs throughout Poland, the Church-state situation, and modern culture. His oversight of Tygodnik Powszechny and Znak was exemplary by their editors' own sandards. The archbishop met with the editors every other month to talk over mutual concerns....He listened, but preferred that you'd speak, and he'd take the floor at the end. Not once in his sixteen years as vicar capitular and then archbishop did he ask that something not be printed in Tygodnik Powszechny. "There was no censorship," according to editor Turowicz. ...

There were arguments, but Wojtyla had the ability, not universal among senior prelates, to work happily with people with shom he did not always agree. During her years at Tygodnik Powszechny, the peppery Halina Bortnowska often criticized the more traditional "Wyzinski Church," as she sometimes called it. Wojtyla was far more sympathetic to popular piety, but maintained his friendship with the outspoken young philosopher and writer, whom he asked to edit the revised edition of LOVE AND RESPONSIBILITY....

On several occasions Wojtyla had to mediate between Tygodnik Powszechny and Cardinal Wyszynski. (WITNESS pp. 211-212)

Now turn with me to a www.chiesa article by Giga Riva, posted today, titled "Exclusive from Poland: Who Was Spying on Karol Wojtyla":

Krakow, November 17, 1949. The mole, using the code name “Zagielowski” (but who also used the name “Torano” and in the future would give his real signature), sent the police a “top secret” report on a meeting in the curia during which this “Wojdyla” was pointed out as someone to keep an eye on.

“Zagielowski” was recruited in 1948 and would be active until his death in 1967. His age would remember him by his real name, Wladyslaw Kulczycki. Father Kulczycki. He had been interned in a Nazi concentration camp, and it was for this reason that he was viewed as more approachable: he had seen of what evil man was capable. Besides, he had a sin that compromised his priestly character – a sexual weakness. In 1953 a note from Department IV of the interior ministry, the one charged with watching over the Church, gave this assessment of him: “His evaluation is good. He is the only one working in Krakow who can be approached.” He was the pastor at Saint Nicholas, and was the friend – and perhaps even the confessor - of the legendary cardinal Stefan Wyszynski (in the photo, with Wojtyla). He showed bitter enmity against young Karol from Wadowice. Kulczycki couldn’t explain how he climbed the ecclesiastical ranks so easily. A document written in 1960 contains this outburst: “I don’t understand why Wojtyla is chosen for all the important tasks. The man is well educated, he knows the communists, he has ties among the workers, and he frequently organizes pastoral visits to Nowa Huta.”

The infiltrators didn’t know each other. That’s how things worked, whatever the location. And who knows how many times Fr. Kulczycki met at the chancery with another key pawn for the regime: Tadeusz Nowak, the treasurer for the curia, who was also the administrator of “Tygodnik Powszechny,” the Catholic weekly dear to the future John Paul II. (emphasis mine)

Were De Poncin's Slowo Powszechne, the publication of the communist organization Pax which officially represented Catholicism in Poland, and the publication Tygodnik Powszechny, the publication "dear to the heart of the future John Paul II, one and the same publication? Or conversely were there two publications of the Catholic Church in Poland, one official and one underground?

According to Weigel:

Yet in the midst of the Occupation, Adam Stefan Sapieha planned for the future. A member of the reformist wing of the Polish hierarchy, Sapieha had broken up huge old parishes before the war and created new ones, bringing his priests closer to his people. He had also reformed the seminary, insisting on serious theological instruction. As the war wound down, he began to make plans for a new Catholic newspaper, Tygodnik Powszechny [Universal Weekly], to be edited by a young lay journalist, Jerzy Turowicz. (WITNESS, p. 74)

Weigel provides what might be an additional clue:

During the summer of 1947, Starowieyski and Wojtyla traveled around Europe with funds provided by Cardinal Sapieha. They met Parisian worker'priests in the French capital and discussed their efforts to evangelize the post-Christian French proletariat--an experience that Wojtyla later remembered as "enormously important," and the occasion for his first article in Tygodnik Powszechny... (WITNESS P. 83)

Was Wojtyla promoting the Sillon/Pax/Pax Christi when he traveled around France? Wasn't France a Catholic country in 1947? What is to be made of this claim that it was "post-Christian"?

Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us!