FRIENDS and followers of the Polish priest Fr Jerzy Popiełuszko will gather tomorrow to the mark the 40th anniversary of his murder by agents of the communist Służba Bezpieczeństwa, or secret police.
Besides recalling the dramatic, biblical dimensions of his testimony, the commemoration may also shed light on current attitudes to Christian martyrdom, and how these have changed as a result of events. The bound and gagged body of 37-year-old Fr Popiełuszko, who was linked to Poland’s Solidarity movement and known for his homilies defending human rights, was dredged from a Vistula River reservoir on 30 October 1984, 11 days after he was abducted while returning overnight from a mass in Bydgoszcz.
The killing was broadcast worldwide, making a cover-up difficult: four SB agents were convicted, but released early under controversial amnesties, while two former secret-police generals were charged with involvement in 1994, but cleared for lack of evidence.
Fr Popiełuszko was beatified as a martyr in June 2010in Warsaw, at an open-air mass attended by his mother, Marianna; a process to have him proclaimed a saint was launched in 2014.
Moves to charge the Polish communist rulers Generals Wojciech Jaruzelski (1923-2014) and Czesław Kiszczak (1925-2015) with responsibility for his death also failed, however, and, in 2019, Warsaw’s District Court dropped charges under Poland’s statute of limitations against ex-agents accused of planting weapons and explosives in the priest’s apartment.
MOST of those implicated are now dead or in their dotage; so most Poles accept, reluctantly, that justice will never be complete. But the challenge continues of explaining Fr Popiełuszko’s story to a new generation who have been raised in very different circumstances.
Mechanisms of state control used against him remain in place in many parts of the world, while Christians still face persecution on a large scale. In Western countries, too, the struggle for fundamental values which motivated Fr Popiełuszko still goes on, along with subtler forms of intolerance and discrimination.
Yet, even in his own Church, in which most clergy now live comfortably and feel compromised by his heroic testimony, a full acknowledgement of past sufferings has been slow in coming.
Although the eight decades of communist rule across Eastern Europe led to the greatest wave of persecution since the first Christian centuries, barely 100 Roman Catholic martyrs have so far been beatified, compared with more than 2000 from the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War, and hundreds more from the French and Mexican Revolutions, Paris Commune, and other modern anti-Church campaigns.
While most Christians, witnessing to the faith but hardly expecting to die for it, would readily pay tribute to these countless martyr testimonies, enacted in living memory on their doorstep, the question “What can I really learn from this?” is a reasonable one to ask. The best answer is also the simplest.
Martyrs such as Fr Popiełuszko died for the faith; but they also died for personal integrity, reminding us that, in a era of fake news, moral relativism, indifference, and competing narratives, truth and humanity still exist and still need defending — as much in a pluralist democracy as under totalitarian rule.
One of the saddest paradoxes today is that the legacy of communism’s martyrs has been sullied by the taint of abuse in the Roman Catholic Church, and undermined more comprehensively still by the Russian Orthodox Church’s identification with President Putin’s authoritarian regime and its brutal invasion of Ukraine.
Did Lenin and Stalin have a point, after all, in identifying the Church as an instrument of state repression and declaring war on it? Given the Russian Church’s current stance, can we still feel sympathy for its historic victimisation? That such questions can even be asked is a measure of the current tragedy.
NONE of this should detract from the personal sacrifice of Fr Popiełuszko, whose funeral, the largest in Polish history, was attended, defiantly, in November 1984, by 600,000 mourners, and whose grave, designed from a rosary sent to him by St John Paul II, has since been visited by 23 million people, including many world leaders.
Despite the passage of 40 years, pilgrims still come here from all over the world, seeking help in moments of personal crisis, counselling in how to survive curbs on religious freedom, and inspiration from his universal message of solidarity, justice, mutual respect, and living in truth.
In a pastoral letter to mark the 40th anniversary, read in Polish churches on 29 September, the country’s bishops pay tribute to the priest’s devout family upbringing, recalling how he was moved to begin seminary studies by the Auschwitz martyr St Maximilian Kolbe (1894-1941), at a time when “anyone not recognizing the socialist order had to reckon with persecution”.
His “words and decisions”, they write, reflected a “holiness that transcends his era”; they hoped that his future canonisation would enable his testimony to “reach the whole world”.
The letter continues: “The modest figure of this priest has crossed geographical, cultural, and generational boundaries, making him the patron not only of Solidarity, but of all persecuted Christians. But he remains, above all, a patron for people seeking a worthwhile life — a guide to the young in this complicated world of half-truths, conflicts, fears, and hatreds.”
Jonathan Luxmoore’s two-volume study of martyrdom, The God of the Gulag, is published by Gracewing.