O katolicki kształt Solidarności, część 1

After the suffocation of all significant opposition and resistance groups by the communists, beginning in the late 1940s the Catholic Church in People’s Poland became the only institution that expressed opinions and views that were expressed by the overwhelming majority of the nation. This situation would change in the mid1970s, when a democratic opposition began to appear. After the election of Pope John Paul II, his first pilgrimage to Poland in 1979, and the formation of Solidarity, the Polish Episcopate became the primary teacher of the new movement, whose members were predominantly Roman Catholics, seeing it as the fundament for the self-organization of the nation on the basis of healthy moral principles. At the same time, Poland’s bishops were critical towards or kept at a distance from such currents in the opposition as part of the Workers’ Defense Committee or, more broadly, the “secular left” which introduced into Solidarity a political factor that was risky from the perspective of political realism, thus making the nation prone to an inevitably failed confrontation with the Warsaw Pact bloc of independent states. Thus, the bishops intended to support the movement in its aspirations towards the creation of a self-governing public sphere based around healthy moral principles and the regaining of this sphere by the Poles, who had been devastated by communism for decades. The bishops said that by regaining freedom as a nation we would also restore morality in ourselves and in the public sphere.