Jerzy Popieluszko

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Jerzy Popieluszko by Grazyna Sikorski

All booklets are published thanks to the generous support of the members of the Catholic Truth Society

CATHOLIC TRUTH SOCIETY PUBLISHERS TO THE HOLY SEE

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CONTENTS Contents ..........................................................................2 Early Life ........................................................................3 Poland under communism ...........................................4 Calling to the priesthood .............................................7 Seminary years ............................................................9 In the army ................................................................11 The Young Priest ..........................................................14 As a medical chaplain ...............................................16 Fr Jerzy and the pro-life Movement in Poland ..........17 Solidarity ......................................................................20 Martial law ................................................................23 A day in the life of Fr. Jerzy .....................................29 Masses for the Fatherland .........................................31 The patriotic sermons ................................................32 The mission of Solidarity ..........................................39 John Paul II on Solidarity .........................................41 Not Selling Out .........................................................42 Persecutions ..................................................................43 In prison ....................................................................49 Interrogations ............................................................50 Kidnapping and murder ............................................57 His last moments .......................................................60 A National outrage ....................................................61 Fr. Jerzy’s death is announced ..................................62 The Funeral ...............................................................65 An inspiration even after death .................................68 Towards beatification ................................................70

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EARLY LIFE It was in the spring of 1947 that a group of missionaries arrived in Suchowola - a village situated in Eastern Poland, to conduct a one-week mission in the local parish church of St. Peter and Paul. Among the packed congregation, Marianna Popieluszko, a local peasant woman, listened attentively to the sermons and recited her rosary. She was pregnant with her fourth child; but despite all her duties as a mother of three and the owner of a small farm she found the strength and the time to walk four kilometres every night to church to hear words of consolation and guidance. Like the vast majority of Poles, Marianna was a devout Catholic and together with her husband they were determined to pass their faith to their children.

However, Marianna knew that their intentions were contrary to the new official ‘Communist’ state ideology which had been imposed on Poland at the end of the second world war by its powerful neighbour - the Soviet Union. Along with the overwhelming majority of Poles, Marianna rejected this alien Marxist ideology but like the others she felt powerless. It was during the week of the mission, that Marianna’s prayers for guidance led her to promise to give to God the child she was carrying, and she would call him Jerzy.

  

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Poland under communism The 20th century witnessed the creation of a new ideology - Marxism - which rejected the spiritual dimension of man and which saw religion as the “opium of the people”.

Marxism said that religion was used by the oppressing classes to keep the rest from seeking social justice and equality in this world.

In 1917 the Marxist Revolution in the Russian Empire led to the formation of the first state ruled by the Communist Party in accordance with Marxist ideology. It soon became clear that, in practice, Marxist ideology results in the creation of a perfect totalitarian state which cannot but aim at total control over an individual’s life, including his spiritual life. This combination of politics and ideology was the essence of the communist system.

All that might escape total Party control was to be destroyed. Human rights and the dignity of man became subordinated to the state and to history. The Party’s monopoly over the media and the education system cut people off from the values of truth, history, tradition and above all those of Christian culture. Through the state’s control of the economy, people were forced to depend on the state for all the necessities of life; which in turn made them easier to manipulate. Most tragically, a reign of terror was established by the extensive security system. In

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this way a perfect model of enslavement came about, whose two supporting pillars were lies and fear.

The Party saw the Church, with its spiritual vision of man, as one of the main obstacles to building their heaven on earth and so a ruthless war was declared on the Church and religion. Churches were blown up or turned into atheist museums, clergy were killed or sent into exile to distant Siberia. Practising religion became an unlawful activity; a believer could be killed, imprisoned, have his children taken away or be sent to a psychiatric hospital.

It was this ideological system which was imposed on all the countries of Central Europe at the end of World War II in 1945 by a victorious Soviet Union. This led to the creation of two opposing political blocks - East and West with an “iron curtain” between them. Among the new Soviet ‘satellite countries’ was Poland - a country with a very strong and ancient Christian tradition.

Jerzy’s childhood When the baby boy was born a few months later, in September, Marianna wondered if he would live long enough to become anything. In fact, he was so weak that he was baptised just two days after the birth, and named Alfons after Marianna’s brother. The baby survived, but as he grew older it was clear at a glance that he was not a future farmer. He was frail, too small, too thin and had a wracking cough.

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Like other Polish children little Jerzy received his first communion at the age of seven and became a regular altar boy at the 6.30 am Mass at St. Peter and Paul’s church in Suchowola. Every day he got up at 5 o’clock and walked the four kilometres to the church regardless of the weather.

At fourteen he entered the local secondary school in Suchowola, which had been established just after the war and which gave the local peasant boys an opportunity for academic development. Significantly, the school was founded early in 1945, just before the communist authorities took absolute control over education. Its founder was a young and dedicated priest called Fr. Kazimierz Wilczewski. Fr. Wilczewski managed to find a unique group of teachers to run the school. They were not only excellent educators but were also patriotic and religious.

In effect, this rural school had an academic standard equal to the best schools in the country which accounted for the unusually high proportion of its pupils who went on to university. At a time when Polish schools were being run along the lines of communist internationalism, Jerzy and his friends were being brought up in a Polish and Catholic tradition. It was there that Jerzy’s religious beliefs matured. There was not a single teacher on the staff who was not a Catholic and this made an enormous impression on the pupils. This is probably why, over forty boys have been ordained priests from this little town of Suchowola.

  

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Calling to the priesthood Marianna never forgot her promise made to God during the mission of 1947 and gladly gave her permission to Jerzy to be an altar boy. She watched him with pride as he accompanied Fr. Stefan Porczyk in the Corpus Christi procession walking through the streets of Suchowola dressed in his red cassock and white surplice. On several occasions Marianna saw Jerzy, still a primary school pupil, engrossed in deep conversation with a local youth studying at the seminary in Warsaw. She could never understand what her little son could find in common with a wise cleric. But she never asked. In fact, although the signs were there, Jerzy’s possible vocation to the priesthood was never discussed openly. It was as if Marianna put all her trust in God to guide her son into His service.

Jerzy’s decision to become a priest matured silently and in solitude. Throughout his childhood Jerzy was a loner who liked to leave for school an hour before other children so that he could think matters over. His habit of analysing all problems from a moral and ethical perspective in the end won him the nick-name “philosopher”. He would often carry a religious book with him and read it whenever he had a free moment. He studied the lives of the saints, the history of the Church in Poland, and the collections of sermons by the Primate of Poland, Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski. His favourite books of all were about

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Maximilian Kolbe, the Franciscan priest who had been interned in Auschwitz during the war and who had offered to die in the place of a fellow prisoner.

Maximilian Kolbe was his hero. To Fr. Jerzy, Maximilian was a symbol of the victory of man, who despite being enslaved by force, remained spiritually free.

All his life Fr. Jerzy tried to follow Saint Maximilian’s credo: “In order to remain a spiritually free person we must live in the truth.” Kolbe was canonized by John Paul II in 1982.

In the spring of 1964, a few months before his eighteenth birthday, Jerzy Popieluszko told his mother that he was going to visit Niepokalanow (“The Place of Mary the Immaculate One.”) This was the Franciscan friary, situated near Warsaw which had been founded by Maximilian Kolbe. Marianna understood her son’s trip as a rite of passage to manhood and a declaration of his vocation; she knew that her prayers had been answered.

The decision After visiting the friary at Niepokalanow and before even taking the bus home to Okopy, Jerzy went to the Seminary of St. John the Baptist in Warsaw and applied for admission for the following year. In the spring of 1965 he received news of his acceptance for that summer. Fr. Porczyk, the parish priest at Suchowola, did his best to persuade his most loyal altar server to enter the local

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seminary at Bialystok and after ordination to return to Suchowola. But Jerzy was determined to go to Warsaw.

His parents accepted his decision more readily; they knew that by studying in Warsaw Jerzy would be close to Niepokalanow his “best loved place in the whole world.”

On 23 June 1965 Marianna walked with Jerzy the four kilometres to Suchowola. Jerzy was going to catch a bus to Warsaw. He carried two black cardboard suitcases.

Marianna carried the lunch she prepared for the journey.

After waiting for only a few minutes in the shadow of the church a bus pulled up. A quick kiss and Jerzy got on the bus without looking back. The first thing she noticed when she returned home was the framed picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in her kitchen. She knelt before it and said two prayers for her son; first, that he would fulfil the vow she had made while he was in her womb. The second was that God would let no harm come to him.

Seminary years On 24th June, Jerzy entered the Warsaw Seminary of John the Baptist, where for the next seven years he prepared himself intellectually and spiritually for ordination into the priesthood. 1965 was the year in which the Polish Church was to celebrate its first millennium. It also marked the height of an anti-Church campaign and witnessed the worst Church-State relations since the early 1950s. By using blackmail and pressure on weaker priests,

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the authorities tried to split the Church and to create a schismatic National Catholic Church, as distinct from the Church faithful to Rome. At the same time, every “legal” means was used to restrict the Church’s freedom of action.

After banning religious instruction in schools, the authorities tried to extend their control over the teaching of religion in parish buildings and classes and even in private homes. People who accommodated such classes were harassed and discriminated against. No building permission was granted for new churches in expanding towns.

Attempts were made to split the Polish Bishops, and foreign travel was severely restricted for Polish clergy. Heavy taxes were imposed on church property; seminaries were taxed as if they were luxury hotels. As a result all seminarians were required to take outside jobs to contribute to the seminary’s upkeep. They became odd-job men with poorly paid jobs, doing hard manual work such as office cleaning, road sweeping or window cleaning. For many seminarians the combination of demanding academic study and physical work was hard to bear. However Jerzy, used to such double duties from childhood, blossomed in the atmosphere of the seminary. Though not top of the class academically, he displayed boundless enthusiasm for his work. He was also beginning to make contacts in Warsaw that he would draw on for the rest of his life.

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In the army Only a year into his training Jerzy’s vocation was put to the test. Still in his teens, and in violation of the Church State agreement, Jerzy was drafted into the army along with the rest of his class. The next two years he spent in a special army - indoctrination unit in Bartoszyce.

The special clerical units were used by the Polish authorities as a means of breaking the seminarians psychologically. Different types of harassment were employed, ranging from forbidding common prayer to attempts at forcing the weakest individuals to co-operate with the authorities. This harassment was the seminarians’ first experience of the difficulties they would shortly be facing as Catholic priests, and their first test of courage and of adhering to their faith. No wonder that Jerzy’s mother feared that her physically frail son would be intimidated into abandoning his vocation. But when she had a dream in which she was told that “God looks after those whom he has chosen” her despair evaporated.

It was, in fact, in Bartoszyce that Jerzy and his colleagues learned to overcome fear; so an experience which was supposed to break the seminarians backfired and instead strengthened them. During these two years Jerzy was exposed more than once to harassment and brutal violence. One day an officer found him with a rosary: “tread on it or I will tread on you”, he ordered. Jerzy refused. He

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was severely beaten and locked in the punishment cell for a month. In another incident he refused to take off his medallion of the Blessed Virgin Mary given to him for his First Holy Communion. As a punishment he was ordered to stand in the rain, barefoot for several hours. Jerzy wrote to his father of the ordeal: “I turned out to be very tough.

I can’t be broken by threats or torture”. In fact this physically frail young man was becoming the spiritual leader of the unit. He led prayer services, - and as a result was assigned extra hard labour. He recited the rosary to his instructors in Marxism and was forced to crawl around the camp like a dog. Jerzy’s attitude to all the tribulations were summed up in one sentence of a letter he wrote to his seminary instructor: “How sweet it is to suffer when you know that you suffer for Christ”. Little did he know that the sweetness of suffering was to be his life’s destiny.

While Jerzy’s spirit survived “communist re-education” his health was seriously damaged. Major surgery and almost a year in a hospital could not repair two years of brutal treatment that had weakened his heart and kidneys.

One of the seminary staff, worried about the effects of Jerzy’s ordeal said: “You were heroic. Now, you must take a rest”. But Jerzy did not want rest. His one goal seemed to be to become a priest as soon as possible. He attacked his study with such enthusiasm that despite his frail health he completed the two years of missed studies in half that time. Then, on 28th May 1972, Alfons Popieluszko was

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ordained a priest by Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski in St John’s Cathedral in Warsaw taking a new name : Jerzy Aleksander Popieluszko. His mother and father watched from the back of the Cathedral. Marianna’s prayers had been answered - her son was to serve God.