Iron Curtain (50 page)

Stalin himself laid out this policy very clearly in October 1949, at a
Cominform meeting in
Karlsbad, when he ordered the bloc’s communist parties to adopt harsher tactics, starting in Czechoslovakia:

In Hungary, the authorities followed precisely these tactics, and they did so in concert with the mass “peace campaign” launched nationwide in 1948. This peace movement, as noted, did not resemble its spontaneous, grassroots counterparts that eventually developed in some Western European countries; it was organized from above by the government, and carried out with the aid of communist party activists who organized peace parades, peace races, and peace conferences, and who collected money for peace bonds. Journalists were commissioned to write about the peace campaign, and designers were set the task of creating posters and brochures promoting peace.

In Hungary, as elsewhere, activists also launched a major peace petition drive. Petitions were passed around schools, offices, and factories, where party members vied with one another to see who could get the most signatures. In the spring of 1950, this campaign reached an almost hysterical intensity. By the beginning of May, 24,583 “peace activists” had collected 6,806,130 signatures on a petition calling for world peace, an enormous percentage in a country which at the time had some 9 million inhabitants.
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Priests were asked to sign the petitions too, and some did. Others evaded or dodged the campaign altogether, arguing that they didn’t know whether their vows permitted them to sign a political petition. Finally, Archbishop Grősz, who after Mindszenty’s arrest had replaced him as the Hungarian primate, resolved the issue. In public, he declared that the Catholic Church had always promoted peace. However, only the Vatican was entitled to decide whether any Catholic clergyman could join an international organization or sign any treaties. As a result, he would not sign this peace petition, or any other petition, and no other Hungarian priest should do so either.
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That statement gave the communist party and its sympathizers the ammunition they needed. Party journalists immediately attacked the church for warmongering. György Lukács, the Hungarian philosopher who sometimes collaborated with the communist party and sometimes did not, attacked the archbishop’s “hypocritical” decision. The communist party leadership was delighted: the secretariat decided that the peace movement should now be “used to make lower-level priests oppose their superiors.”
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Pressure on low-ranking clergy would intensify—and rewards would be offered to those who defied Archbishop Grősz and agreed to join the “peace movement.”

Quickly, the potential collaborators were identified and
József Révai orchestrated the “peace rally,” which would become the founding meeting of the organization of “peace priests.” Everything about the meeting was
planned in advance, including its concluding declarations, which would eventually be signed by 279 priests and monks, about 2 percent of the clergy in the country. Even the mood of the participants was determined in advance. At one Central Committee meeting, János Kádár—later to become Hungary’s post-1956 dictator—declared that “the atmosphere of the meeting should neither be too convivial, nor too reserved”:

A similar level of planning went into the organization of the Polish “progressive” priests, as the Polish communist party called them. (Colloquially—and ironically—this group of clerics was widely known as the “patriotic priests.”) These Polish clergymen were not attached to the peace movement, as in Hungary, but rather to the “official” organization of war veterans, the Union of Fighters for Freedom and Democracy (Związek Bojowników o Wolność i Demokrację, or ZBoWiD), which had been created by the communist party because the authentic veterans’ groups, linked by informal relationships and close emotional bonds to the Home Army, were too dangerous for the regime to tolerate.

Priests who joined immediately received privileges such as access to doctors and sanatoriums, as well as building materials for church construction. Following the dissolution of
Caritas in January 1950, the possible rewards for collaboration grew even larger. Priests who cooperated with the state could take control of Caritas assets, offices, and projects. By that point the Polish secret police had begun to encourage the creation of “official” Catholic publications and organizations as well. An “official” Catholic newspaper,
Dziś i Jutro
(
Today and Tomorrow
), was already in existence, as was Pax, an “official” Catholic pseudo-political party, of which more later. In the wake of these changes, the progressive priests orchestrated a membership drive
and planned a national conference, which was indeed attended by some 350 priests in 1952.
⁷⁶

But the church fought back. In Hungary, the bishops’ council dismissed peace priests from their posts. In Kraków, Cardinal Sapieha demanded a personal meeting with the local progressive priests and ordered them to resign from the movement. In both countries, pro-regime priests were also, at times, harassed by members of the public. In one Hungarian village, the faithful “stopped confessing and taking holy communion with the peace priest” and interrupted his sermons with shouts.
⁷⁷

As a result of such hostility, the movements never did become mass organizations for the distribution of pro-communist literature and the support of the regime. They did grow, but not as much as the regime had hoped: at the movement’s zenith, there were some 1,000 progressive Polish priests, plus another 1,000 sympathizers. The Hungarian group never published an official count of its members: at one point the leadership claimed more than 3,000, though
Radio Free Europe, the American-backed broadcasters based in Munich, later put the number of true activists at 150. Both groups published newspapers—
The Chaplain’s Voice
in Poland and
Cross
in Hungary—and held periodic meetings.

The motives of those who stayed out of these movements are easy to understand: both their hierarchy and their system of values argued against it. Much harder to understand are the motives of those who joined. The historian
József Gyula Orbán reckons that a small proportion, about a tenth, collaborated out of an honest desire to cooperate with the new ruling powers. Some were themselves Marxists or left-wing socialists who had some faith in the party’s economic program. Others hoped that by working with the communists they could improve the lives of their parishioners. The Polish church historian
Father Tadeusz Isakowicz-Zaleski also speculates that some of the progressive priests, especially survivors of German
concentration camps, were psychologically weakened by their wartime experiences and therefore easily manipulated by the communists.
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Others were clearly blackmailed or beaten into submission. The eventual leader of the Hungarian group, Bishop Miklós
Beresztóczy, had been arrested in 1948 and tortured brutally. Another priest joined after he had been accused of arson (a haystack in his parish had burned) and he hoped to avoid prison. Światło, the secret police defector, claimed the Polish security services were disappointed by the movement: “The patriotic priests are creatures
of the [security services], in many cases broken physically and morally by Soviet or Nazi camps.”
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A few of those who attended the official gatherings were no more than secret police agents dressed in cassocks. Observers in Hungary at the first meeting of peace priests noted mysterious “Franciscans” whom no one had ever seen before and no one met later.

Still others joined in expectation of promotions and privileges, and indeed the secret police actively sought out priests who were disgruntled, thwarted in their ambitions, or in conflict with their superiors.
Father Henryk Weryński, a Polish priest who had once been a firm supporter of the prewar regime, fell very much into that category. Before the war, Weryński had worked for the Catholic press agency and had strong political and literary ambitions. He had even tried to run for parliament, but with no success. After the war he switched sides—and from then on his career progressed at a rapid pace.

Very early on, Weryński agreed to become a working agent of the secret police. They paid him a monthly stipend of 5,000 zlotys and ensured that his pro-government articles would be printed in all of the Catholic newspapers, which had hitherto rejected them. In return, he helped them to identify other potentially “progressive” priests. He informed on all of his Kraków colleagues, both clerical and lay people; reported regularly to the authorities; and expressed his gratitude in public. At a meeting of the local progressive priests’ committee in
Krynica in 1951, he declared that the prewar government, “though beloved by many priests, never took such good care of them” as the communists.
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According to Światło, Weryński had even supplied police agents with information he obtained from hearing confessions. Światło claimed that he personally gave Weryński a coupon to purchase a cassock.
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Fear, the stifling politics of Stalinism, and doubts about the future must have affected many priests as well. Cardinal Mindszenty’s arrest and disjointed “confession” terrified Catholic priests all across the Soviet bloc. The nationalization of
Caritas and other religious charities in Poland, the liquidation of the monasteries in Hungary, and the destruction of church schools everywhere may have seemed, to many, like the beginning of the end of the traditional church. So gloomy was the Polish cardinal Sapieha in this period that he issued a statement declaring that if he were arrested, no one should believe in the authenticity of any statements or “confessions” he made afterward.
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In this atmosphere, the decision to collaborate might not have seemed so morally dubious as it did later on.

Similarly mixed motives also explain not only public clerical collaboration
but secret clerical collaboration. Sándor Ladanyi, a historian of the Hungarian Lutheran church and the son of a Lutheran pastor, notes that although many priests who became informers had been tortured, and although many others were careerists like Weryński—priests, theology students, teachers who felt thwarted in their careers or wanted to study abroad—there were many more ambiguous reasons for collaboration as well. Priests and pastors were under constant pressure to speak to the secret police—more pressure than others—and some cooperated voluntarily, hoping to deflect the authorities’ interest while at the same time striving to assist them as little as possible. Some agreed to be informers, but said nothing. A number of Hungarian informer files end with the statement that a given priest’s name should be removed because “the information he provides is no good.” Still others were blackmailed, openly or more subtly. Protestant clergymen in particular were thought to be susceptible to blackmail because they had families. Their children’s education could be at stake, or their wife’s medication (Catholic priests, who did not have wives and children, were thought to be harder to “turn” and were often therefore treated more harshly).
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Certainly the peace priests and the patriotic priests were not in the end of much real value to the regime. Behind the scenes, Hungarian authorities criticized the peace priests for making “insufficient progress in the fight against clerical reaction.” In Poland, the movement was never truly embraced by either the party or the public: eventually the very phrase “patriotic priest” evolved into a term of abuse. As they became alienated from the mainstream of the church, and easier to ignore, they also became less useful to the regime as mouthpieces for propaganda. Nevertheless, their presence seems to have had a dispiriting, even debilitating effect on the rest of the clergy, and they occupied a good deal of church leaders’ time and energy. Cardinal Wyszyński met with the progressive priests frequently, including several times in the months preceding his arrest in 1953. For a short period, the prospect of a wholesale “conversion” of Catholic priests to the communist cause must have seemed perfectly plausible.

Above all, the existence of a vocal and pro-communist clergy contributed to the moral confusion of the period. Was the church supporting or opposing communism? Was the new Caritas charity in Poland authentic or ersatz? Were the peace priests really in favor of peace, and if so—shouldn’t everyone support them? Collaborationist priests also encouraged the collaboration of others: If “holy” men could accept gifts and favors from the regime in exchange for cooperation, why shouldn’t anyone else?