Word: communistic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Loyal to Marx and Lenin, Communist Poland officially promotes atheism. In his most famous observation on religion, Karl Marx argued: "It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness." Lenin and Stalin systematically sought to suppress and eventually eliminate religion from their Communist society...
...some Communist countries the effort has been brutally successful. Not in Poland. Of the country's 35 million people, 33 million are Roman Catholics, most of them still churchgoers-including, on the sly, a number of party officials. A popular joke tells of a district Communist chief reporting to higher-ups that his drive to instill Communism is a big success. "After all," he boasts, "only 85% of the people in the district attend church regularly...
...second World War, when Moscow annexed the eastern portions and, with those lands, most of the country's remaining Orthodox Christians. The Catholic Church, shorn of extensive landholdings, was now persecuted and poor, but respected all the more for its resistance to both Nazi and Soviet occupations. As Communist cadres consolidated their power, the church became in a new way the font of national pride and cherished freedoms...
Today, after 31 years of Communist government, Poland has more than 20,000 Catholic priests-6,000 more than it had on the eve of war in 1938-and some 32,000 nuns, fully twice the 1938 figure. The faith penetrates nearly every level of society. A vigorous Catholic intelligentsia has grown up in the Communist years and developed a link with human rights activists. The regime fears to damp down lest it trigger more protest. Concedes one Communist official ruefully: "The church is an unofficial opposition...
...ever since he became Archbishop of Gniezno and Warsaw in 1948. When Cardinal Wojtyla joined the battle, he used his intellectual powers to persuade both disaffected liberal Catholics and Marxists to take the church seriously. The new Pope, says a Czech Jesuit in exile, has been "more dangerous for Communist countries than Cardinal Wyszynski, because he combats Marxism also on theoretical grounds, and with such success that they have been hard put to refute his arguments...