Word: wyszynski
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Almost immediately, the government began to violate its side of the agreement, firing 500 priests from their posts as religious teachers, demanding that the Polish clergy sign the Stockholm peace declaration (Wyszynski refused at first, later capitulated), rounding up members of religious orders in mass arrests. Wyszynski's stock in the free world was low when in January 1953 he was made cardinal...
...Wyszynski's resistance to the Communists stiffened. When a Polish bishop was tried on phony espionage charges, Wyszynski delivered an angry sermon in which he said: "Today they speak of criminals, perhaps tomorrow one will speak of holy criminals." On Sept. 25, 1953, the secret police came to take him away. Cardinal Wyszynski had still one more touch of consideration for the enemy: when one of the arresting officers was bitten by a watchdog, the cardinal insisted on personally bandaging his hand...
...Conditions. In the hands of the Communists, Cardinal Wyszynski suffered no physical hardship, only isolation. He was never brought to trial as he had feared. He was confined successively to four convents; in the third he was even allowed to see visitors...
Some of his visitors were deputations from the Communists offering his release. If he agreed to give up his post of primate, said one delegation in 1955, he could preach, hear confessions and say Mass. "I prefer to pray for you gentlemen here," replied Cardinal Wyszynski coolly...
When Poland's Stalinist government fell in October 1956 and Wladyslaw Gomulka took power, he lost no time in sending representatives to the cardinal to discuss the conditions of his return. Now Wyszynski was in a position to dictate the terms on which he would accept his freedom, for Gomulka needed Wyszynski's tremendous personal authority to keep Poland's anti-Red fever under control. The cardinal's bargaining power was nothing less than the Soviet army that might roll over Poland if things went out of control...