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Day: June 7, 2010

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Poland - Polish - Polonia,

Condé Nast Traveler visits Poland

A few excerpts from Polish Renaissance

This was the country that set to rebuilding its churches and palaces and ancient cities. I ask Marek Kwiatkowski how this was possible. “We had to rebuild because we were poor!” he insists with great animation, as if annoyed that I had missed such an obvious point. “England didn’t have to rebuild Coventry Cathedral because it was a rich country.” Warsaw was the first city in Europe to decide to rebuild, because, he says once more, “we had to.”

Gdańsk may be the most successful reconstruction in the country. With its high-gabled houses, its golden fountains, and its face toward the sea, the Baltic port feels closer to Amsterdam or Stockholm than to Warsaw or Kraków—”or it did, until I decided to walk over to the National Museum to see the famous Memling brought here in 1473, after pirates snatched it off the English coast.

It is easy to imagine what such a beautiful museum might have meant to the people living toilet-paper-less in those dingy apartments: a hope of dignity, for themselves and their nation. “My generation had only one goal: the independence of our country,” Kwiatkowski tells me. But with the Red Army occupying Poland, there could be no question of political or economic independence. A degree of cultural independence was the best the Poles could hope for, and as it happened the very existence of Polish culture was controversial enough to make its manifestations far more powerful than they would have been elsewhere.

This was because something about Poland so irritated its neighbors that they went to great lengths to wipe it out. In the nineteenth century, Russians seeking justification of their conquest settled on the excuse that the Catholic Poles threatened the unity of the Orthodox Slavs. In the human taxonomy devised by the Nazis, only Jews ranked lower than the Poles: Hitler did not want to exterminate them entirely, but, unlike other occupied peoples, they were to be reduced to slavery, their culture eradicated.

The occupiers devoted a startling amount of effort to destroying all symbols of Polish culture, from statues of Chopin and Copernicus to professors at Kraków’s Jagiellonian University. Thirty percent of Poland’s university teachers were killed, along with twenty-one percent of its judges, forty percent of its physicians, and fifty-seven percent of its lawyers. All told, a third of Poland’s population was displaced or murdered in the war.

But preserving the culture their enemies tried to annihilate was the one way the Poles could show the world that they were not a race of slaves.

…

Not much had changed since the days of King Stanisław, who could transmit a barbed political message by having a god petulantly stare at a nymph across a Baroque ceiling. Under communism, art and culture were the most powerful weapons the Poles had; and in his final book, Travels with Herodotus, the great Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński recalled why even that ancient Greek historian couldn’t be published in Stalinist Poland.

“All our thinking,” he wrote, “our looking and reading, was governed during those years by an obsession with allusion. Each word brought another one to mind; each had a double meaning, a false bottom, a hidden significance; each contained something secretly encoded, cunningly concealed.”Architecture was all the more eloquent in such an environment, and after Stalin died, in 1953, its expressive potential was unleashed.

A people under foreign occupation, whose intellectuals had been massacred and whose economy had trouble keeping up with the demand for toilet paper, had to piece together the accumulated artistic legacy of centuries—”in a country nearly as large as France.

…

The Polish language, spread across a giant area, has almost no dialects—”a situation unique in Europe, where even different neighborhoods in the same city can have starkly different dialects. And Poland’s ethnic and religious homogeneity is also unique: The population is almost entirely Polish and Catholic, although historically Poland was one of Europe’s most diverse and tolerant nations. Untroubled by the Reformation, which tore apart societies across Europe, Poland became known as a Paradisus Hereticorum, and those heretics included the Jews, so welcomed in Poland that the community soon became the world’s largest.

Christian Witness, Perspective, , ,

From Communist to Priest

A Greek Catholic priest, Fr. Yurko Kolasa, reflects on his journey from communism to a vocation as a married man and a priest. He speaks of the martyrs of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, his personal journey, his marriage, vocation, pastoral work, and a program he developed to support married life.

From ZENIT: From Communism To Catholicism To Priest: An Interview With Father Yurko Kolasa of the Ukraine

Raised in the communist Soviet Union, Yurko Kolasa knew nothing of the Catholic faith until he was well into his teens. Once the Greek-Catholic Church went from an underground following to being an openly practiced and respected religion in Ukraine, this future priest’s whole world opened up.

Today, Father Kolasa is the prefect of the training program for priests, seminarians and religious, at the International Theological Institute in Vienna. He is also a married priest of the Eastern Rite Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, and a father of four.

He also tells of the marriage preparation program he developed, how it has positively impacted the marriage success rate in Ukraine and is quickly becoming the proto-type for marriage preparation programs throughout various dioceses in Eastern Europe.

ZENIT: You have said that you accepted the ideas of Communism until you were 15. What happened that made you turn away from that ideology and turn toward the truths of the Catholic faith?

Father Kolasa: Most of my relatives were very active in communist party. As a boy I did not know anything about the persecution of the Greek-Catholic Church in the Soviet Union. It was only in 1989, when the Greek Church was legalized that I began to learn about thousands and thousands of martyrs of this Church — Greek Catholic bishops, clergy, monastics, and laity.

It was the authenticity of their faith that radically changed my life. I was crushed by the fact that there were so many people who have resisted compromise with the oppressive regime of that time and overcame the greatest moral challenges of the 20th century: the suppression of God-given freedom and human dignity by ideological totalitarianism. They gave the strongest testimony of their faith — their blood.

ZENIT: Despite the government’s effort to stamp out Christianity, the people’s faith prevailed. Can you describe how people continued to practice, or at least hold on to, their faith in such conditions?

Father Kolasa: By the end of 1947, male and female religious, lay faithful and hundreds of priests who refused to “convert” to orthodoxy, often with their wives and children, were arrested and sent to labor camps, where they endured horrific hardships. Parishes where the pastor had been arrested were to become the backbone of the underground. The faithful sang outside closed churches or worshiped at churches not registered with the regime. Priests who had avoided arrest tried to make pastoral visits to these underground communities. Nuns maintained contact between the priests and the laity, arranging secret religious services and catechizing children.

With Stalin’s death in March 1953, many priests who survived the camps were allowed to return home where they often resumed their pastoral activities. Priests celebrated the sacraments in forests or in private apartments, late at night or early in the morning, in addition to their legal jobs. Sometimes they were caught and again sentenced.

Until it emerged from the underground in 1989, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was the world’s largest illegal church. It was also the most extensive network of civil opposition in the Soviet Union. Despite relentless persecution, church life continued through an elaborate system of clandestine seminaries, monasteries, ministries, parishes and youth groups until the church was legalized on Dec. 1, 1989.

ZENIT: You are a Greek-Catholic priest, you are married, and you have four children. For those not familiar with the tradition of married clergy in the Eastern Catholic rites, could you explain how this difference in tradition came about?

Father Kolasa: The tradition of married clergy comes from the apostolic times. In the early years of the Church some married men were even consecrated bishops. The Eastern Church has always allowed the possibility of married men being ordained to the priesthood.

Please note that not a single practicing priest in the Church has ever married; there have only been instances of married men who later became ordained. The Western Church has cherished the discipline of only unmarried men being ordained, except for some Protestants who have entered the Church in recent years.

I always have a great respect and high esteem for unmarried priests and always try to encourage them to treasure and to protect the gift they have received. St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 7:7 said; “I wish that all were as I myself am. But each has his own gift from God, one of one kind and one of another.”

ZENIT: You were ordained in 2001. As you approach your 10th anniversary as a priest, could you share with us some reflections on your vocation, and how your life has changed since your ordination?

Father Kolasa: One of the most powerful experiences of being a priest is to be an eyewitness of the tremendous power of the holy sacraments, and to know that as unworthy as I am, God is using me to be a channel of his infinite divine love.

I will never forget this one moment in my life when, after a long, exhausting day of fulfilling different tasks at the parish, I was called to give the anointing of the sick to a very sick man. When I came, the poor man was in terrible pain. His whole body was caught in convulsion. I tried to communicate with him, but he would not respond. I do not know if he even heard or saw me. I began to pray the prayers of the rite of anointing of the sick. All this time the convulsions would only increase. The moment I finished with the word Amen, his body suddenly rested. His eyes were closed. He was still breathing.

I said to his sister that stood next to me, let us pray together and thank God for his mercy. As we began to recite the Our Father, the man gently opened his eyes; he looked at his sister then at me and then he smiled at me with the most blissful and peaceful smile, then he closed his eyes and breathed his last. At this moment I could not stop thanking God for saving his soul and for the gift of the priesthood…

He gets it and lives it.

Art, Perspective, Poland - Polish - Polonia,

Historic Moments

The Cosmopolitan Review discusses the Year of Chopin in Poland, marking the 200th anniversary of Frederyk Chopin’s birth, and what he might think of life in today’s free Poland:

There’s much to celebrate, starting with the 200th birthday of Poland’s most famous exile, Frederic Chopin, born in Żelazowa Wola, just outside of Warsaw. We join the festivities bearing gifts of poetry, prose and a guide to Chopin events worldwide. In CR’s first fiction, Eva Stachniak transforms her readers into aristocratic guests at a salon in Paris in the company of Polish exiles, among them, Chopin himself.

Were the composer alive today, would he accept an invitation to give a concert at Warsaw’s Soviet-built Palace of Culture and Science? Would he dance in the Palace’s hip club Kafe Kulturalna? Or would he side with Minister of Foreign Affairs Radek Sikorski, who is suggesting Poland “demolish its own symbol of communist misrule”?

This year also marks the rehabilitation and reburial of Copernicus, labeled a heretic long before Galileo was ever hit with that charge. From the AP via Yahoo! News: Astronomer Copernicus reburied as hero in Poland

Nicolaus Copernicus, the 16th-century astronomer whose findings were condemned by the Roman Catholic Church as heretical, was reburied by Polish priests as a hero on Saturday, nearly 500 years after he was laid to rest in an unmarked grave.

His burial in a tomb in the cathedral where he once served as a church canon and doctor indicates how far the church has come in making peace with the scientist whose revolutionary theory that the Earth revolves around the Sun helped usher in the modern scientific age.

Copernicus, who lived from 1473 to 1543, died as a little-known astronomer working in a remote part of northern Poland, far from Europe’s centers of learning. He had spent years laboring in his free time developing his theory, which was later condemned as heretical by the church because it removed Earth and humanity from their central position in the universe.

His revolutionary model was based on complex mathematical calculations and his naked-eye observations of the heavens because the telescope had not yet been invented.

After his death, his remains rested in an unmarked grave beneath the floor of the cathedral in Frombork, on Poland’s Baltic coast, the exact location unknown.

On Saturday, his remains were blessed with holy water by some of Poland’s highest-ranking clerics before an honor guard ceremoniously carried his coffin through the imposing red brick cathedral and lowered it back into the same spot where part of his skull and other bones were found in 2005.

A black granite tombstone now identifies him as the founder of the heliocentric theory, but also a church canon, a cleric ranking below a priest. The tombstone is decorated with a model of the solar system, a golden sun encircled by six of the planets…

I had visited his home in Toruń, Poland, and the church in which he was baptized. I found the juxtaposition with the on-going closings and desecration of historic churches throughout the United States to be amazing. The R.C. Church was wiping out churches 100 to 150 years old, and here I stood in a church that predated 1473. I will never be able to show my children the churches their grandparents were baptized in. They have all closed.

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