As a child in Poland in the 1950s, my mother lived squeezed into a single room in the centre of Krakow, with her father, brother, aunt, uncle, cousins and grandparents, down the corridor from a communist party member who would inform on his neighbours.
At the other end of the corridor lived a young man who one afternoon was found by the children dead, hanging from his curtain pole.
Every so often my mother’s father would be put in prison – a barrister and member of the Polish Home Army (AK) who fought the Germans during WWII, he was considered a liability by the authorities. One day, my mother was expelled from her school for singing the national anthem.
My mother’s mother doesn’t feature in the family stories very much because, unable to cope in the political climate (her entire family, excluding herself and her sister, were murdered by the Ukrainians when she was still a child, and she was later put in a psychiatric hospital after it was discovered she too was in the AK), she had a nervous breakdown, leaving my mother when she was only three years old.
It was in such an environment that Karol Wojtyła, now St John Paul II, was operating, first as a priest and later as bishop of Krakow, a position he held from 1958 to 1978, before becoming pope. As such, I believe it is prudent to approach very cautiously the allegations made against him that he covered up and by implication condoned sexual abuse in the Church.
The latest such attempt was made last month by a journalist who on Polish television claimed to have discovered a new case of such negligence from research he had done into communist party files, the veracity of which are considered to be questionable.
No one sane thinks that condoning and covering up child abuse is acceptable, least of all John Paul II who in 1983 introduced a new code of canon law that explicitly obliged members of the clergy guilty of sexual abuse to be punished. Equally, no one sane would not approach what is written in communist government files with the utmost caution.
There were many ways in which Wojtyła’s job as bishop of Krakow was almost impossible, one of which was the presence of “patriot priests” – government moles who spread misinformation within the Church and informed on those inside it.
And it was not unusual for these moles to target their fellow priests and attempt to blackmail them using a tactic which came to be known as korek, worek i rosporek, meaning “cork, bag (of money) and (trouser) flies”. The premise of this tactic was to take a priest, give him a bottle of vodka and some money, and encourage him to talk in the hope that he would admit to any disordered sexual proclivities. If he admitted something, he was theirs, and remained very much in clerical ranks.
Knowing that the regime was not only intent on destroying the Church, but was actually enabling errant priests, one can only view any contemporary government files on the matter with some scepticism.
I am not trying to excuse the practice of covering up abuse in the Church – everyone now knows that this happened far too often – but I am trying to put the allegations against St John Paul II into their rightful context, which the maker of this latest documentary has failed to comprehend entirely.
It was, in this atmosphere of lies and obfuscation, impossible to know who was an informer and who wasn’t, who was an abuser and who wasn’t. And if you did know, it wasn’t as straightforward as reporting them to the police. You may have had the best intentions in the world, but if your under-secretary, for example, was a government mole, you were powerless.
To compound it all, although again not to excuse it, the last thing the good priests wanted was to give the malevolent government any more ammunition against the Church which they were intent on destroying.
The heroic acts of clergy such as the young priest Jerzy Popiełuszko, for example, who was murdered in 1984 by the secret services because of his anti-communist sermons broadcast on Radio Free Europe which encouraged people to rise up against the regime, played a huge part in saving Poland from total obliteration.
The effect that Wojtyła’s appointment as pope had on the Polish nation was astounding. He gave the Polish people something to be proud of, a new hope and confidence in themselves as a nation. When he would visit Poland as pope, his open-air Masses were attended by hundreds of thousands of people. These added fuel to the fire of the Solidarity trade union movement, which would in 1989 free Poland from communist rule.
Like all humans, John Paul II was not perfect, but he did a huge amount of good often in unimaginably trying circumstances. And let us not forget how much hatred there is out there still today against the Church among certain political factions who are intent, much like the communists were, on bringing it down and discrediting its heroes at all costs.
The only good thing about these “new allegations” is that they have united the Polish people who for the past week have put aside their political differences – which are heated, to say the least – to come to the defence of their beloved Karol Wojtyła.
(Pope John Paul II greets the crowds during an eight day visit to Poland, June 1979. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images))
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.