The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB

Wojtyła holds extreme anti-Communist views. Without openly opposing the Socialist system, he has criticized the way in which the state agencies of the Polish People’s Republic have functioned, making the following accusations:

• that the basic human rights of Polish citizens are restricted;

• that there is unacceptable exploitation of the workers, whom “the Catholic Church must protect against the workers’ government”;

• that the activities of the Catholic Church are restricted and Catholics treated as second-class citizens;

• that an extensive campaign is being conducted to convert society to atheism and impose an alien ideology on the people;

• that the Catholic Church is denied its proper cultural role, thereby depriving Polish culture of its national treasures.

In Wojtyła’s view, the concept of the one-party state “meant depriving the people of its sovereignty.” “Collectivization,” he believed, “led to the destruction of the individual and of his personality.” The fact that he dared to say what most Polish Catholics thought seemed to both the KGB and the SB evidence of his commitment to ideological subversion.

The SB report forwarded to the Centre reveals that as early as 1973-4 the Polish Procurator-general had considered prosecuting Wojtyła for his sermons. Three of his homilies—in Warsaw on May 5, 1973, in the Kraków steelmaking suburb of Nowa Huta on May 12, 1973 and in Kraków on November 24, 1974—were judged in breach of article 194 of the Criminal Code, which provided for terms of imprisonment of from one to ten years for seditious statements during religious services. According to an SB informant, Wojtyła had declared during one of his sermons, “The Church has the right to criticize all manifestations and aspects of the activity of the authorities if they are unacceptable to the people.”³ Wojtyła, however, was protected by his eminence. Though the UB (predecessor of the SB) had interned the Polish primate, Cardinal Stefan Wyszýnski, for three years in the 1950s, by the 1970s the Gierek regime no longer dared to arrest a cardinal.The SB thus lapsed into a tone of largely impotent outrage as it denounced Wojtyła’s “moral support to the initiatives of anti-socialist elements.”

In June 1976 Gierek repeated the mistake which had led to Gomułka’s downfall six years earlier and ordered a sudden increase in food prices. After a wave of protest strikes and riots, the price rises were withdrawn. On September 30 Wojtyła set up a fund to assist the families of those in the Kraków archdiocese who had been imprisoned for taking part in the protests or injured in clashes with the riot police.⁴ He also took an active interest in the formation after the strike wave of KOR, the Workers Defence Committee, which sought to create an alliance of workers and dissident intellectuals. According to SB surveillance reports, during the autumn of 1976 Wojtyła had a series of meetings with KOR’s founders in the apartment of the writer Bohdan Cywiński, later a prominent Solidarity activist.⁵ The SB also reported that he met individually KOR militants from a great variety of backgrounds: among them the dissident Communist Jacek Kurón, the wartime resistance fighter Jan Józef Lipski, the ex-Maoist Antoni Macierewicz and the writer Jerzy Andrzejewski.⁶