Appeal for national unity

An appeal for national unity has been made by the Archbishop of Warsaw, Cardinal Kazimierz Nycz, in view of three important events for Poland in the days ahead: the sixth anniversary of the death of John Paul (2 April); the first anniversary of the disaster of Smolensk (10 April) in which Polish President Lech Kaczynski, his wife and 94 high representatives of the Polish State lost their lives, and the eagerly awaited beatification of Karol Wojtyla. Cardinal Kazimierz Nycz made his appeal during a press conference in which he expressed serious concerns about the social climate in the country.Stop to internal conflicts. In consideration of the importance of these events, the Archbishop of Warsaw underlined the need for an atmosphere of national unity, and stigmatized the inadequate level of the political debate, which conflicts with the legacy of the Polish Pope and his appeals for concord. The President of the Polish Bishops’ Conference (KEP), Archbishop Jozef Michalik, in a recent reflection on the service of John Paul II as gift for all his compatriots, recalling the words spoken by the pontiff in the Polish Parliament (1999), made a bitter observation: “The political scene in our time is sad. Poland in the mass media is increasingly one of party politics; not only the battles between the political parties, but even those within the individual political groups, are increasingly dominating the scene. These conflicts obfuscate minds and distract attention from the country’s real problems”. The archbishop then vehemently inveighed against “the lowering of the culture of language accompanied by a growing brutality of the public debate”. The words of Mgr. Jozef Zycinski, spoken shortly before his sudden death, seem like a pressing appeal against such practices: “No political group, faction or formation can appropriate for itself the legacy of John Paul II! He cannot be privatized, nor can attempts be made to make his life and work coincide with any one political formation, group or outlook”.Poland and the Church. Poland and her relation with the Church are being subjected at the present time to close analysis and study by observers and sociologists. A distinguished Polish historian, Jerzy Kloczowski, has stressed that in the 1950s the Church in Poland enjoyed an incontestable prestige which lasted down to the 1980s, because she gave a strong support to the yearning for independence of the Polish people, and the pilgrimages of John Paul II did even more to reinforce these aspirations. But once that period had ended, after 1989, a radical opposition to Catholicism began, and a political line imbued with the fear of the possible emergence of a confessional State began to appear. Kloczowski points out that the Church during these years was obliged to adopt the model indicated by Vatican Council II, namely, forming statesmen capable of drawing their inspiration from their faith, though without herself getting directly involved in politics. In spite of that, many politicians during this period tried to exploit religion for their own electoral needs. Important, in this regard, is the adoption in 1997 of the new democratic constitution that introduced the principle of the impartiality of the State in relations with the various Churches and religious communities.Poland and John Paul II. Though the death of John Paul II constituted a particularly momentous moment in the history of the religious convictions of the Polish people, three years later, in 2008, people began to speak of the “void” left by the Pope. Writing in one of the major Polish weeklies (Polityka) Adam Szostkiewicz maintained that day after day the Pope was increasingly being forgotten, that the Poles (in spite of their traditional religiosity) felt disillusioned by a Church no longer at Wojtyla’s level and that a potential social capital represented by the “JPII generation” marked by the days of the agony of the pontiff had by now been squandered. Today, however, sociologists underline, on the basis of recent analyses, that in spite of the fact that a growing secularization has been feared, Poland remains convinced of the exceptional nature of her Catholicism and is sensible of the importance of questions of faith, which she considers an inalienable part of her own individuality and an essential component of her own role in Europe. For several years now opinion polls have confirmed the confidence of the population in the Church (support levels around 70%), while fluctuations are only observed on particular occasions such as the conflict over the commemoration of President Kaczynski, shared by a large part of public opinion.