'Poland is here', Jarosław Kaczyński addressed Father Tadeusz Rydzyk at the Jasna Góra monastery. The Prime Minister's political alliance with the head of Radio Maryja was thus publicly decreed. The rationale of that alliance was recently explained to us by another priest, otherwise a columnist for Nasz Dziennik, who wrote, 'It is necessary today to support the only acceptable major party. I mean the Law and Justice. They have their shortcomings and weaknesses but they have done a whole lot of good for the economy and for Polish public life in general. Of course, not everything is possible. The party's leaders should apologise to Catholics for not taking a fully pro-life stand and undertake to redress this trespass in the future'.
Jarosław Kaczyński hasn't so far apologised to Catholics for his trespasses, and yet the Redemptorist media mogul has consistently canvassed for the PiS. This is worth considering in the context of the Episcopate's admonition that 'priests should not become involved in the election campaign on behalf of any of the parties. The same applies to the Catholic media'. I'm not trying to defend or criticise the Episcopate's position but one can hardly imagine a more peculiar interpretation of its instruction. Obviously, when it comes to fighting the opposition, which, as we read, 'fatally and aggressively encumbers the whole of socio-political life in Poland', Father Rydzyk prefers the principle of 'the end justifies the means' over that of 'overcome evil with goodness'. That's why we read in Nasz Dziennik about opposition politicians that they are 'people who don't care about Polishness', who want Poland 'in bondage to Germany or Brussels', that they are a 'not very Polish party', people 'enslaved with all their soul to the amoral and humanity-ruining Brussels ideology'.
The opposition, the Nasz Dziennik commentator argues, are 'liberals, post-communists, Catholefties, and masons'.
This is the kind of views that Jarosław Kaczyński's most precious ally enriches his readers with. One can only repeat after the aphorist Stanisław Jerzy Lec: 'Mindlessness kills. Others'.
Conformism Wins Jarosław Kaczyński likes to declare his devotion to Christian values. He understands them rather peculiarly, however, more in the spirit of Father Rydzyk's teachings than in that of the Sermon on the Mountain. Sometimes, I get the impression that the cross, the symbol of the Lord's suffering, serves this people for a club with which they can whack their opponents at will. If you oppose universal lustration - you're a communist collaborator; if you oppose harsher anti-abortion laws - let alone the penalisation of abortion - you're a child killer; if you're worried by the Central Anticorruption Bureau's omnipotence - you're a defender of corruption; if you're critical of Father Rydzyk's ideology - you're an enemy of the Church and of the Catholic religion.
These arguments are repeated over and over, with the kind of growing zeal and aggression characteristic for intolerant and hateful people. They are a moral blackmail to which we too often surrender. Who wants to be called a collaborator, a thief, or a child-killer? That's why we usually keep silent. We withdraw from the public sphere, choose not to vote, take shelter in privacy. Conformism wins in us, and the public debate becomes dominated by demagogy and claptrap, subservience to the powerful and contempt for the weak. 'The dim folk will buy it', as one of Jarosław Kaczyński's aides once cynically confessed.
Writing 130 years ago about the sources of Poland's loss of independence, Józef Szujski, a Cracow conservative historian, noted that Poles lacked moral courage. 'When there's no moral courage, official falseness starts to prevail in society, falseness belying the real situation, falseness symbolised by the lofty speeches of the deputies praising Poland to the skies when it had become but a roadside tavern for the Prussian and Russian armies, the falseness of printed panegyrics, false history, falseness that brings you to the edge of the abyss and pushes you into it by pouring roses onto you. ( ) The moral courage of individuals is the core of a healthy public opinion; when it is lacking, society staggers from extremity to extremity, does what it does not want to do, says what it does not think, this and that happens to it but it is not the master of its situation'.
Man = Radio It is worth reflecting on the Cracow conservative's words on the eve of the election. This is an important election, a lot depends on it. Many of the voters will heed in their decision the Church's voice, so eagerly referred to by Jarosław Kaczyński on Radio Maryja. So let's listen closely to this voice. In a Radio Maryja-broadcast sermon - I am quoting after Jarosław Makowski's report in Polityka - Father Stanisław Kuczek said, 'We are uncertain whom to vote for. I'll say one thing: vote for the PiS, they're the only ones who can do something for Poland'.
Bishop Tadeusz Pieronek called that statement 'disgusting campaign propaganda'.
Jarosław Makowski notes: 'Sure, neither Mr Kaczyński nor Mr Rydzyk love each other. But it is not affection that binds them together for good and bad but the far more powerful feeling of hatred towards the so called post-communists or liberals. In their version of Catholic Poland, being friends is a matter of finding a common enemy. What's more, Kaczyński needs Father Rydzyk's support so much he will not hesitate to - entering the Church's own territory - admonish and reprimand the bishops.
And so Jarosław Kaczyński reprimanded Archbishop Józef Życiński for trying to transform Poland into a liberal hell like the Netherlands.
Makowski reminds us: 'Mr Kaczyński didn't hesitate to clash with Cardinal Stanisław Dziwisz, a close friend of John Paul II's, who accused Father Rydzyk of breaking the unity of the Polish Church, and suggested a management shake-up at the broadcaster so that it finally started to cooperate with the Episcopate. The Cardinal urged his fellow bishops to "assume responsibility for pastoral work which is slipping out of the bishops' control and being taken over by someone else"( )'.
As soon as on the following day the Prime Minister rejected Cardinal Dziwisz's allegations against Father Rydzyk. 'Radio Maryja', he said, 'has strengthened active Polish Catholicism and restored real civic rights to a sizeable part of the public'. And he added, 'The
radio is one man. Take this man away - there's no radio. It's absolutely obvious to me'.
For Makowski, something else is obvious: 'Jarosław Kaczyński not only has no intention of listening to the bishops, but actually makes it clear that it is them who should listen to him'.
Two Rhetorics Perhaps no case revealed the deep spiritual rift between Mr Kaczyński and Mr Rydzyk, on the one hand, and Cardinal Dziwisz, on the other, as powerfully as the dispute over lustration. Jarosław Kaczyński and Father Rydzyk (who wanted to lustrate everyone except Bishop Wielgus), attacked the unconstitutional bill's opponents in offensive words. Yet the Cracow metropolitan bishop admonished in April this year, 'Let's repeat the Holy Father's words: "we must not allow the everyday to destroy the great and mysterious". We all realise that what has recently been the particular kind of the everyday capable of destroying the great and mysterious in priesthood and in the Church is the so called lustration. It is a painful legacy of the communist regime. This legacy reveals the treason and weakness of some of that regime's victims, sometimes unaware ones. It also reveals the cunning of the enemies of the nation and the Church who acted clandestinely and created a vast body of material, recording, in a peculiar, secret police-like, manner, people's words and deeds. This archive is immoral in itself because its purpose was to enslave the individual and society in order to protect the power of those who had usurped it in the first place. Today, this material is being read out, publicised, often in a manner ignoring the fundamental principles of justice and historical accuracy. Unfortunately, lustration not only reveals a difficult truth, or rather, we should say, partial truth about the past, but also harms and does damage to people, disintegrating communities and society as a whole. For a dozen months now it has absorbed the attention of many people in the Church and outside it. Many people, including priests and bishops, have already been judged and pilloried. Now the time has come for other categories of people to be lustrated and only now have academicians, lawyers, and journalists started expressing doubts about whether lustration, in its present version, is moral and constitutional. These voices are worth listening to, because similar objections raised by the Episcopate were ignored'.
'There's no room in the Church for vengeance, retaliation, for trampling on human dignity, for rash accusations, slander, let alone for the sin of malicious backbiting and calumny. The point is to not throw ungrounded accusations against actual, or only alleged, collaborators of the communist secret police. We should realise that we must not do harm not only to the accused, who can't defend themselves, who may be dead now, but also to their relatives and friends.'
Here are two styles, two rhetorics, two ways of understanding Christianity's promise. Father Rydzyk, Jarosław Kaczyński's wunderwaffe, offers a certain vision of the Church and of Polishness, which Mr Kaczyński approves of and wants to administer to all Poles; Cardinal Stanisław Dziwisz suggests a different vision , close, I suppose, to the teachings of John Paul II. Father Rydzyk urges his audience to vote for the PiS; Cardinal Dziwisz repeats the Polish bishops' words: 'in making the right, and thus responsible, choice, we should consider criteria such as the candidate's moral posture, his or her competence in terms of political and civic life, proved by his public activity so far, the record of his or her life in the family and in the local community. What matters are qualities such as a clear-cut identity, respect for the individual, an attitude of conciliation and the ability to collaborate, to solve conflicts wisely, love for the country, and the perception of power as a service'.
