Kościół katolicki w PRL – wybrane zagadnienia, hipotezy, prowokacje

Church-state relations in the post-war period are still an open subject, despite the large subject literature available. The reason for this is not only its broadness but also the slow process of giving access to record series which are of fundamental significance, mainly documents created by the Security Service and church institutions. These new sources, sometimes fundamentally, change the historian’s outlook on the described events and occurrences. This study is an attempt to verify some of the theses, which argued without the knowledge of these records, have already become all too firmly entrenched. The communist authorities’ policy concerning religious matters practically did not change. This can be seen from the vantage point of the statutory law, the ruling atheistic ideology as well as the missions carried out by the Security Service and the Office of Religious Beliefs for the communist party during the whole post-war period. Additionally, the heavy repressions instituted against the Church, its members and property, in the first decade of communism, aimed at pushing Catholicism onto the margins of political life, gave the changing ruling party groupings that followed the possibility to use far more refined methods to sideline the people of the Church.