Catholicism and Polish exile

“People, it’s time to tell the truth! This is a great crime! A conspiracy of Tusk, Obama and Putin!” Thus shouted one man through a loudspeaker in Warsaw when the coffin of Maria Kaczyńska, the Polish president’s wife, was being carried through the streets. In itself, this was unusual—if not necessarily the theory expounded, at least the public voicing of it in such a time of national mourning—but what followed was perhaps even more so. A white-shirted member of the public pleaded with the man to calm down, put away the loudspeaker, kneel on the ground and pray to God for forgiveness. The bewitched conspiracy theorist did so, after which he silently left the scene of the crime, loudspeaker in hand.

One wonders at the level of conviction necessary to leave one’s home, loudspeaker in hand, and brave the grieving crowd, surely aware all along that they none of them would agree with you, and finally to shout at the top of one’s voice. But such a thing is a relative commonplace in history. It is curiouser still to speculate on the lone protester’s thoughts when the man asked that he pray, and then during the prayer itself. Could he have been embarrassed? It seems that such a feeling must not register in the mind of one with such conviction. Most of us would be terribly embarrassed at spouting absurdities through a loudspeaker in the first place. But something must have engendered in him this apparently drastic a change of heart.

Poland’s identity is defined perhaps more than that of any other nation by its historical state of exile. The national anthem goes, “Poland is not yet lost, while we still live”. This was composed in 1806, while Poland had no official statehood, divided as it was among the hungry imperial powers of Russia, Austria, and Prussia. The words have not lost their relevance since then: after gaining independence, there was only a very brief window before the Nazi invasion, followed by half a century of Soviet rule, during which time a “government in exile” resided in London more as a symbol of continuity than a wielder of any real power. For most of modernity, the Polish people have been in exile from statehood, but kept a strong identity in other ways. Roman Catholicism was one of them. The Solidarity movement, arguably, may not have happened if it wasn’t for the leadership of Pope John Paul II, who spoke soon after his accession to rapturous crowds. Many of those who came to hear him speak or watched on television imagined that the pope spoke directly to them, and recall that moment as a turning point in their political awareness. The social glue of Catholicism, so often a conservative and unbending force, now became a crucial catalyst for change.

As in so many Catholic nations, many of its citizens hold their religious identity even while disbelieving. Perhaps it is hypothesising too far to suggest that the man with the loudspeaker was, in a cultural sense, deeply Catholic, and that it was his Catholicism that caused him, more efficiently than common sense would have, to see the fruitlessness of his tirade. Perhaps it is overanalysing to suggest that his Catholicism made him see that there is more that unifies the Polish people than residential coincidence. Perhaps so. But if such a theory is true of any nation, it must be of Poland.

Source: here.