Keys of This Blood (97 page)

As to Wyszynski himself, meanwhile, several possible ways to dispose of him were considered. For a brief time, serious thought was given to direct assassination—an “accident” on the road could be arranged. But it was decided instead to milk his arrest to the fullest. His confinement would be such that if it did not kill him, it would enfeeble him physically and unbalance his personality. He would be putty in the hands of his captors.

While the brainwashing was going on, government propaganda would prepare the public mind in Poland and abroad for a huge show trial to convict “Mr. Wyszynski” of “sins against the people”—gross currency violations, for instance, plus collaboration with the CIA, plotting with the Vatican to overthrow the People's Republic of Poland, and moral turpitude among his entourage and in his own private life.

That, it was hoped, would write an end to the troublesome presence of Stefan Wyszynski as Primate and
Interrex
; thus the frustrating opposition among his clergy and laity would fall to pieces. Of course, none of this was going to happen. Wyszynski, far from being reduced to putty and brainwashed into admitting horrible crimes, only seemed to wax mentally stronger and more active than ever. Then there was the ecclesiastical
mechanism he had created, and the intricate ramification of Catholic organizations he had created and prepared precisely for such a government tactic. There also was Father Wojtyla. Junior in years to all of the bishops, he rapidly came to the fore as the leader during Wyszynski's imprisonment. He was confident and tranquil, thus evoking confidence and tranquillity in those around him. The reports to Rome were clear-minded and balanced. He obviously understood all the factors, national and international, that were at play in this crisis.

Wyszynski's first place of imprisonment was in the cold northern reaches of Poland, at a Capuchin monastery in Rywald. Then, in October, he was taken to another dilapidated monastery, at Stoczek. Location in the north, with inadequate protection against the frigid temperatures and dampness of the Polish winter, was intended to ensure at least the Cardinal's physical breakdown; the more so since, as the government was aware, Wyszynski had suffered from a weak chest in his younger days. If the government was lucky, he might even die.

The government should have known better. But even after all their years of dealing with “Mr. Wyszynski,” it is fair to say that, except for the faith they refused, there was probably nothing that could have prepared them for what was to come. For it would belong to a terrain made accessible to the human mind only by the special grace of the God Wyszynski adored, by the Christ he worshiped as Savior, and by the special privileges granted by God to the mother of Christ as the Queen of Heaven.

In the face of a hopelessness as bleak as the winter landscape of Stoczek, Wyszynski searched for strength and perseverance in his pain. Cut off from his Church, from Rome, from his people, from his country, he searched for the confidence to maintain optimism in the darkness that enveloped his life as a prisoner.

In the deepening misery of this “final and irrevocable” banishment from his work, this Pole of the Poles entered into the only dimension left to him; into the largest dimension of all: Poland as the sacred possession of God; Poland as the nation that had confided itself, in the intimacy of faith, to the protection of the woman who had been chosen by God to protect his Son; Poland as the Kingdom of Mary.

On December 8, 1953—the day on which the Church commemorates and celebrates the special sinlessness of Mary, which had been granted her by a “unique grace and privilege of Almighty God,” as Pope Pius IX had written nearly a century before—the imprisoned Cardinal, as
Primate and
Interrex
of Poland, made an act of devotion and consecration to Mary.

In that act of “voluntary servitude,” Wyszynski affirmed for himself, and for Poland in the mid-twentieth century, the same Pact of Polishness that had been declared by King Jan Kazimierz in 1655, after he defended the Bright Mountain of Jasna Góra against the Swedes. Wyszynski linked himself and Poland with Jan Sobieski's victories over the Turks at Chocim in 1673, and in Vienna in 1683. In the intimacy of faith, and in tangible history, he followed the same path that had led to the Polish rout of the vastly superior Soviet army at the “Miracle of the Vistula” in 1920.

In sum, as each of those predecessors had done, Wyszynski was asking Mary, within God's will, to use him still for the task of saving souls and saving Poland. He was drawing down upon himself and upon his nation the supernatural protection of Poland's great Queen.

And so it was that the avowedly atheist government in Poland—by violating the Cardinal's persona as Primate and by rendering him impotent to deal with them on the tangible plane of their contention—had led him to a renewal of Poland's immemorial Third Pact of its national identity. They had forced him onto the high ground of Heaven's terrain.

Over the next two years, the Council of Polish Bishops under the acting head, Bishop Michal Klepacz, and following Wyszynski's directions from his prison, reactivated the Mixed Commission, organized pilgrimages and prayer meetings—the theme of which was the unjust imprisonment of the Primate—and kept up a barrage of requests that he be released on legal and constitutional grounds. The ground swell of protest about the imprisonment, over the two years, was one contributing factor in Wyszynski's final release. But just as important was the hard lesson learned by the government: The religious machinery created by Wyszynski only doubled its energy and performance because of the harsh treatment the Primate had received. It was a no-win situation for the government.

In the fall of 1954, Wyszynski was transferred from Stoczek in the north of Poland to Prudnik Slaski in the extreme south. Then, in October of 1955, he was taken to his final place of imprisonment, at Komancza, in Sanok Province, near the Czechoslovak border.

With the onset of spring in 1956, the national and political landscape of Poland began to change. Communist mismanagement in general had now produced breadlines, hunger, a shabby and broken-down condition in cities and towns, inflation, unprofitable enterprises and a crumbling industrial infrastructure.

In March, the First Secretary of the Communist Party, President Boleslaw Bierut, went on a visit to Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow to account for his dismal record. Aside from Bierut's failure, and Khrushchev's personal dislike of Bierut, the Soviet dictator did not take kindly to his visitor's oily and ill-timed hints that he knew much that was damning about everybody in Moscow's leadership, including Khrushchev himself. Bierut was given a bullet in the back of the head.

At Komancza, Cardinal Wyszynski prayed for the eternal soul of Boleslaw Bierut, the man directly responsible for his imprisonment. The top spot in Poland's government, meanwhile, was given to the lugubrious, ruthless, skirt-chasing Soviet security agent Edward Ochab, who had earned the sobriquet “Gloom-and-Doom-and-Boom” Ochab among the Polish populace.

Ochab had his hands full. Poland's economic misery was finally beginning to erupt in the sort of discontent that would lead to the defeat of political Communism in the 1980s. In June of 1956, “bread and freedom” riots of workers broke out in Poznan. Communist Party offices were destroyed, secret police files were burned; and, in the city's unrest, fifty-three people were killed.

Sparked by the Polish example, Hungarian workers exploded in riots, and finally rose up in full revolt against their Soviet masters. Red Army tanks rumbled across Hungary and crushed the revolt. But the lesson was not lost on Moscow.

In the midst of the Eighth Plenum of his Central Committee, Nikita Khrushchev took some of his top men and flew to Warsaw. Simultaneously, Soviet tank corps moved westward toward that city. In talks held in the Polish capital on October 19 to 21, the Soviet and Polish comrades agreed to cool things down. More exactly, Khrushchev made it clear that he would have no further riots. The country was to be pacified. After the bloody quelling of the Hungarian uprising, they could not take a second international black eye in Poland.

Wyszynski's isolation at Komancza was not so complete that he was unable to follow the unfolding situation. And he clearly saw something new in these events; something more than the troublesome sociopolitical unrest in Poland was now motivating Moscow's policy and behavior. Gradually, news filtered through the underground pipelines undergirding all political and social life in the Soviet empire. The Party-State in its inner councils was going through a deep upheaval. The Kremlin geopoliticians were in a profound reassessment of their world situation.

On March 15, 1956, as he contemplated the changing panorama, the
Cardinal came to a simple-seeming but grave decision that was unique, and at the same time totally in keeping with the permanent worldview inherent to his Polishness. This decision was, as he told two visitors to his prison on that day, not simply the only remaining solution to Catholicism's peril in Poland, but the only proviso against the unsure future of the USSR. He would dedicate Poland as a nation, as a people and as a territory in voluntary servitude to Mary for the sake of Europe and the world—and he would do so together with all of Poland's bishops, and with all Polish Catholics. It would be a truly national act of voluntary servitude for the sake of the world.

There was thus something more to Wyszynski's decision than mere private devotion. His proposal contained a unique element that lifted the whole plan and vision from the outset onto the unmistakably georeligious and geopolitical plane that had always been implicit in Poland's outlook. His proposed dedication would not be for his personal freedom, or for Poland's national freedom. The intention now would be for the whole Roman Church, and for the world in which that Church now found itself. More, the intention would be that the slow torture of the Church and of the world by Leninist Marxism would cease; that the hate would be ended; that the cancer of Marxism would be removed from all of humanity.

In two thousand years of Church history, never had one nation offered itself, as Wyszynski now intended that Poland would, for the sake of the world. Nor is it likely in the purely natural course of things that any nation that had been treated by the world as Poland had would have had any such inclination.

Perhaps there was in Wyszynski's idea a trace of the nineteenth-century Polish Messianists; for it did presume a messianic role for Poland. But if so, it rested on none of the false Catholicism of those poet-dreamers. And it was eminently achievable.

Wyszynski's plan was laid out quickly and realistically. It would take time and concerted effort to arrange for the entire nation to come together as one in a solemn vow of dedication. Wyszynski looked, therefore, to the perfect timing of the millennium of Poland's conversion to Christianity as the date of full-blown national consecration. That one-thousand-year anniversary would fall in 1966. The Cardinal would have ten years in which to prepare for the celebration. Preparations would begin with a solemn vow of national dedication by the nation and its bishops on August 26, 1956. Each year, in August, Wyszynski's bishops would organize popular processions in which reproductions of the holy icon of Our Lady of Jasna Góra would be carried from city to town to village. Each year, the bishops would lead their people in the millennium
vow as composed by the Cardinal Primate. And during each of those yearly celebrations, the bishops would deliver sermons emphasizing the overall themes of that vow. Finally, in 1966, the bishops would lead all the people in one final, national repetition of that vow.

How Wyszynski would manage to coordinate all this from his isolation at Komancza was not a matter that troubled him. Heaven—and his bishops and people—would supply what was needed; for now he was acting as Primate and Intenex. Besides, the overall animator of the spirit of this national dedication was Karol Wojtyla. He grasped, apparently, the geopolitical and georeligious issues involved in the whole proposal. On that future date in 1966, Wojtyla would preach the keynote sermon and display a wide-sweeping grasp of the hugely vital world issues involved in Poland's conduct under pressure from Leninist Marxism.

On the very day he made his decision, therefore—March 15, 1956—with no glitter or fanfare to mark the occasion, Wyszynski wrote out the words to be used in the dedication. Those words were simple, mentioning only Poland, its families, its country, its work, its religion, its hopes. But it was the religious offering of all these—“in the spirit of the vows of our ancestors,” the Three Pacts of Polishness—that constituted the moral power of that national dedication.

Once he had composed that national vow, he started on practical plans. The supernatural intention of the Cardinal Primate seemed to develop among the Poles with a striking internal energy. On August 26 of that very year, just five months after Wyszynski's decision, the people assembled all over Poland for the first of the annual celebrations. At Jasna Góra alone, a million people assembled around the monastery where the quintessentially Polish icon of Mary is preserved. In every corner of the land, as each of the promises of the vow was announced by the bishops, Polish voices everywhere cried out in answer: “Queen of Poland, we promise!”

Alone in his prison at Komancza, Cardinal Primate Wyszynski stood before a reproduction of the Czestochowa icon and recited the vow he had composed. Later, it was determined that the first dedication had been carried out in all parts of the country within the same time span of about twenty minutes, and with remarkable spontaneity.

From that moment on, Stefan Wyszynski's release from his “final and irreversible” confinement and his restoration to his public duties as Primate would seem to have been no more than a matter of time, and of timing.

Pressures that had already been building on the new government of
Edward Ochab were becoming intolerable. The situation was becoming increasingly fraught with the danger of wide-scale riots and national revolt. Even Polish Communists were dissatisfied with Stalinist methods, and Ochab found he could not curb the national unrest. In mid-October, Ochab was replaced by Wladyslaw Gomulka as President and First Secretary of the Polish CP.