FRONT PAGE
In commenting on the sad news involving the Church in Poland, and particularly on the case created by the resignation of Monsignor Stanislaw Wielgus, the secular press has concentrated its fire exclusively on the attitude of the Church, particularly of its priests, to emphasise the collaboration of some (very few in this great Catholic country, in this often heroic Church, some say 10%) with the political police under the former Communist regime. But strangely the admonitors forget the essential point, namely the responsibility of the Communist system of implacable dictatorship, not only a form of authoritarian regime, but a form of totalitarianism that tried to subjugate the whole of public and private life. That system was based on an omnipresent police, and especially on a system of spying, of informing on others, in which children were encouraged to denounce their own parents. In this system each person was turned into a spy, and sometimes into a denouncer, of others. In this sense, Communism was truly a poison that envenomed a large part of society, as a poison may kill slowly, bit by bit, and that continues to produce its lethal effects even long after its ingestion. As long ago as 1878, Pope Leo XIII had with great perspicuity denounced Communism as “the deadly pestilence that spreads through the internal organs of society and reduces it to the extreme danger of ruin” (Encyclical Quod Apostolici numeris , 28 December 1878). This judgement could perfectly illustrate the current Polish situation. Later, Pius XI, in his Encyclical Divini Redemptoris of 19 March 1937, identified Communism as “intrinsically perverse”. He wrote: “Communism strips man of his freedom, spiritual principle of moral conduct; it strips the human person of everything that constitutes his dignity”. Pius opposed what he called the “conspiracy of silence”, namely, the refusal of a large part of the press to denounce it. Here too, the relevance of his observations to the contemporary situation is striking. These quotations ought to help us understand what is actually happening in Poland: the whole perversion of the Communist poison consists in making accusations against the institution that paradoxically best represents moral resistance and courage and that has produced so many martyrs; it consists in the division that it still succeeds in sowing among Catholics, 16 years after its fall. It survives in a society that is incapable of reacting, and that demands from the Church justifications that have never been requested of politicians. They also help us to understand what is happening elsewhere in the world, particularly in the Cuba of the dying Castro and in Venezuela where a new Communist dictatorship is emerging amid general indifference, profiting from yet another “conspiracy of silence”. Yes, Leo XIII had seen correctly: Communism is a lethal pestilence; it seems to feed on its crimes and continues to envenom.
