Word: communists
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Karol Wojtyla, a Cardinal-Archbishop warmly admired by his countrymen but little known elsewhere in the world. Last week he returned in triumph as John Paul II, a dynamic new Pope whose skill, originally tried and proved in day-by-day contest with Poland's Communist rulers, would be tested once again...
...Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, 77, the Primate of Poland, mounted the steps into the plane. John Paul's shrewd former mentor has maneuvered for three decades to guide the Polish church through the darkest days of Stalinist repression into an era of uneasy coexistence with the country's Communist rulers. The extent of the church-state detente was immediately apparent: figurehead President Henryk Jablonski came to the airport to welcome John Paul, and the Pope later conferred for 30 minutes with Communist Party Secretary Edward Gierek...
...other Communist countries, the state maintains a strict monopoly on publishing and paper supplies. Last November the bishops had to plead for paper for catechism texts, prayer books and church documents. The Pax Movement has its own daily newspaper, but the hierarchy is not able to publish periodicals. The independent Catholic press is led by the respected Tygodnik Powszechny (General Weekly), produced by John Paul's friend Lay Editor Jerzy Turowicz. The pa per is artificially limited to eight pages an issue and a circulation of 40,000. Editor Turowicz routinely prepares twice as much copy as he needs...
Throughout the Communist period, the shortage of church buildings has been the most nettlesome problem. After the war's destruction, an increase in population and the move of peasants to industrial "new towns," Polish Catholics needed large numbers of new buildings. But the Communist government, which has total control of building permits and supplies, played a maddening cat-and-mouse game of rejection and delay. John Paul's most telling achievement in Cracow was the erection of a modernistic concrete-and-steel church at Nowa Huta (New Foundry), a steel town designed to provide no church...
...granting of even a few simple freedoms, as the Communist world has occasionally discovered, can be politically explosive in countries where the people feel oppressed. That is one reason why there are still three Soviet divisions stationed in Poland. In bargaining for further concessions, the papacy today has no more divisions than it had when Stalin first sneered at its lack of them. Where Poland is concerned, however, John Paul II does have considerable secular as well as spiritual clout. It derives not merely from the strength and solidarity of Polish Catholics or from his own toughness and experience...