David QuinnIrish people are still not familiar enough with the reality of life under communism, writes David Quinn
This month marks the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The ‘fall of the wall’ was a truly momentous moment in European history. More than anything else, the Berlin Wall symbolised a divided continent.
The Berlin Wall was also an enormous, daily reminder of the failure of communism to fulfil its promises. It was built not to keep people out, but to keep people in. It was built to stop East Germans fleeing into West Berlin to live in the capitalist West.
But why would people want to flee the ‘workers’ paradise’? Surely it should have been the other way around? Surely people should have been flocking into the workers’ paradise if that is indeed what it was? It wasn’t of course. It was anything but.
People in the West are still not familiar enough with the reality of life under communism. For some reason, film-makers have almost never gone near the subject.
There was a time when Christians were aware of just how bad life could be for their fellow Christians behind the Iron Curtain, but that has also faded.
In the Soviet Union, Lenin and Stalin attempted to stamp out religion completely. The methods used in Eastern Europe following the communist takeover were slightly more subtle and varied, although the aim was the same; exterminate religion.
In Hungary, there was a massive confrontation between the Catholic Church and the new communist government. Cardinal József Mindszenty refused point blank to cooperate with the government and thereby to lend it any legitimacy.
Innocent people
As Anne Applebaum writes in her book Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, “Church schools and institutions had been destroyed, innocent people had been arrested and killed, and he had the courage to say so.”
For his troubles, he was imprisoned and tortured by the communists and then spent years in the American embassy in Budapest waiting for permission to leave the country after his position in Hungary became hopeless.
In Poland, Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski adopted a different approach. First of all, the Catholic Church in Poland was more powerful than it was in Hungary and the authorities were a bit more reluctant to try and crush it. Secondly, Dr Wyszynski was less confrontational by nature than Cardinal Mindszenty.
He signed a Church-State agreement and his sermons about the situation of the Church were soft-spoken. Applebaum writes that this “left ordinary people feeling confused about the Church’s real attitude to communism”.
However, this didn’t stop the communists eventually arresting Cardinal Wyszynski although he was never put on trial.
Poland’s communist government also went to great lengths to try and co-opt Polish priests. For example, it recruited so-called ‘progressive priests’ who admired communism. They became known as ‘patriotic priests’.
At one point, the number of such priests had grown to 1,000 but they met strong resistance from the hierarchy and from ordinary Catholics.
In any case, as admirable as Cardinal Mindszenty was, Dr Wyszynski’s approach might have been the wiser because the Catholic Church in Poland emerged from the hyper-aggressive Stalinist era in much better shape than its Hungarian counterpart and this, of course, helped to pave the way for the eventual downfall of European communism and the Berlin Wall.
A key event in the run-up to the fall of European communism was the election of St John Paul II as Pope in 1978. John Paul cast aside the foreign policy of the Holy See which in the previous decade or so had decided that the best approach to European communism was one of conciliation.
Approach
Cardinal Wyszynski’s approach seems to show that some level of conciliation with communism could work in the right circumstances. But by the same token, a more direct, confrontational approach is also called for in the right circumstances.
St John Paul made it abundantly clear that he believed communism was a failed and broken system and could never be anything except that.
St John Paul always believed – rightly – that unless you got your view of humanity right, you would get nothing right. He saw that communism saw the human person as essentially a material being and excluded God entirely from the picture. (He also saw, by the way, that capitalism did the same thing but, at the same time, that capitalism never built gulags, unlike communism.)
As a Pole, it was impossible for Poland’s communist government to refuse John Paul’s wish to visit his native country soon after his election as Pontiff.
When he did so, millions turned out for him in a massive expression, not just of faith, but of national identity. Poles wished to be free of communism.
When the Solidarity movement emerged in Poland, led by Lech Walesa, it received huge moral support from St John Paul.
Even though the Polish government imposed martial law in an attempt to retain control of the country, it could not resist the popular will, especially not now that the Soviet Union was unwilling to use its army to violently suppress Solidarity and its supporters.
John Paul cannot, of course, be credited alone with the fall of European communism and the Berlin Wall, but he played a major part, something acknowledged by the Soviet leader at the time the Wall fell, namely Mikhail Gorbachev.
Would communism have fallen so soon if the Church had been weaker? Probably not. Because the Church in Poland remained strong, it meant that the state could never become as powerful as it wanted to be and therefore could not seize complete control over the minds of the people which is what all totalitarian states want.
Had the Catholics of Poland decided to abandon the Church, or else to become ‘spiritual’ as distinct from religious (by ‘spiritual’ in this context, I mean a highly individualised faith that detaches itself from authority and has only a semi-detached relationship with the faith community), life would have been made much easier for the communist government.
But because the Church held open a space in the public square that the state could not control, that space become a focal point of resistance to the state’s totalitarian claims.
St John Paul II then took advantage of that. Any explanation of the fall of the Berlin Wall that leaves out the vital role the Church played in that, is simply wilfully ignorant.