”I will confess that I don`t like Glemp very much personally,” a leading Catholic layman here said recently. ”But I will also say this: He is probably the most misunderstood, underestimated man in all of Poland.”
His reference was to Jozef Cardinal Glemp, primate of Poland`s Roman Catholic Church, who has come through five years of post-Solidarity political purgatory and remains at the center of a fierce debate among Polish Catholics over his ability to guide the course of their church.
The speaker, who asked not to be identified, has been on close personal terms for many years with the three men who have dominated Polish Catholicism in the latter half of the 20th Century.
The first is Pope John Paul II, formerly the cardinal-archbishop of Krakow, whose elevation to the papacy in 1978 electrified this overwhelmingly Catholic country and gave the church an unprecedented political legitimacy in the officially atheist Soviet bloc.
The second was the autocratic and much-revered Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski. His death in 1981, after 28 years as primate, including three years under arrest at the close of the Stalinist era, ended a career that set a standard for Catholics` determination to keep their faith alive.
Cardinal Glemp is the third. Now 56, he is very different from the other two–quiet, an indifferent public speaker, a veteran church administrator whose closest friends say that he wages a little-appreciated daily battle to keep the church flourishing in the face of the government`s attempts to undermine it.
By most accounts, his campaign is successful.
”I was in Rome a couple of weeks ago and Catholics there are saying the church`s situation is better here than it was under the Russian czars,” said Krzysztof Sliwinski, an often-censored Catholic intellectual and journalist.
”That`s hard to understand, but it`s true. Especially in Poland, the idea of killing the church has been eliminated. The best the authorities can hope for is something like the position of the Russian Orthodox Church, which could not imagine taking a position at odds with the government.”
Rev. Henryk Brumka, a spokesman for the Polish Catholic Episcopate, agreed: ”The attempt to liquidate the church has failed. They didn`t succeed in making a museum out of it.”
Cardinal Glemp, who declined to be interviewed for this story, was viewed as an also-ran before being named primate only five months before the Polish government declared martial law in December, 1981, to stop the spread of the Solidarity free trade union movement.
In those tempestuous times, other church officials were seen as more likely candidates for the top job in the Polish church, notably Franciscek Cardinal Macharski of Krakow (the Pope`s successor there) and Archbishop Bronislaw Dabrowski of the episcopate.
But according to sources in the Vatican, Cardinal Macharski was too much of a firebrand and Archbishop Dabrowski was too old.
After an intense assessment of the situation, they said, the church conceived a plan of action designed to keep Polish Catholicism as a going concern when authorities in Warsaw and Moscow wanted nothing more than to wipe it out.
Jozef Glemp, who grew up in the small western Polish town of Inowroclaw and showed enough intellectual promise to be sent to Rome for six years of study, was a key element in the plan.
”It`s difficult to avoid comparisons between Glemp and Wyszynski,” said Jerzy Turowicz, editor of a respected Catholic weekly newspaper published in Krakow.
”When Glemp came to the job of primate, he had no experience, no authority. He and the Pope are very different people, and the result is that people expect too much of Glemp.”
An official in the Vatican who is responsible for tracking the state of Polish Catholicism put the issue more sharply.
”The Pope felt that Glemp was an able politician and a good administrator,” the source said. ”His abilities aren`t always evident in public, because his style is to work behind the scenes. He tries to get along with everyone, rather than seeking open confrontation.”
With the possible exception of Hungary, which is 57 percent Catholic, the freedom of Poland`s Catholics to worship is unique in Eastern Europe.
Nonetheless, Cardinal Glemp`s failure to display aggressiveness against the authorities drives many Polish Catholics, especially young ones, to distraction.
Last October, the primate delivered a homily at an evening mass in Warsaw`s St. Stanislaw Kostka Church. The mass marked the first anniversary of the police murder of the popular ”Solidarity priest,” Rev. Jerzy Popieluszko, and many expected Cardinal Glemp to give a sermon breathing hellfire and brimstone.
His sermon was a calm and carefully worded argument against birth control, which had been one of Father Popieluszko`s pet themes.
”Damn it, damn it, damn it! When is that man going to start speaking to our souls?” one woman said later.
Equally livid was a skilled, blue-collar worker who had fallen away from Catholicism years ago and had come to the church to determine whether he could regain his faith.
”Here`s what I think of Glemp and Wyszynski,” he said, throwing his arms wide to show what he considered Cardinal Wyszynski`s stature–and to describe Cardinal Glemp he held his thumb and forefinger closely together.
By all accounts the Pope, who is to make his third return visit to his native country next June, keeps a close eye on events here. He receives Polish visitors at least once a week, including top church officials. Cardinal Glemp visited Italy for about two weeks this summer.
There are two incorrect assumptions about the way the two men go about their business, Vatican sources said. The first, they said, is that the pontiff sends specific orders to the Polish church about the way it should operate.
”He just doesn`t do that because he knows he would be putting his hand in the fire,” one official said.
The other notion is that the Pope simply doesn`t like Cardinal Glemp very much.
”They`re in communication all the time,” the source said. ”Glemp comes to Rome more often than most other cardinals do.”
That does not mean, however, that the Polish primate can depend on the pontiff`s influence to accomplish all that he would like to do.
Cardinal Glemp and the Polish leader, Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, have held nine face-to-face meetings. Government officials give the impression that when the two men get together, it`s a time for political hardball.
”Nobody else is permitted in the room,” said Adam Lopatka, minister of religious affairs. ”The situation is that the general knows he is the leader of the (Communist) party, and he knows that the cardinal is the leader of the church. These are very tough discussions, but they`re open, frank and civilized.
”The primate respects the general`s intellectual qualities. The general says more or less the same thing about the primate. They retain their own opinions and they don`t often issue a joint statement. The talks are useful.” It is, however, an uneasy church-state relationship, one that Cardinal Glemp cannot control entirely–even when it comes to his own pronouncements.
A book he prepared two years ago, ”Social Teachings,” was antagonistic to the Polish communist bureaucracy government, sources said, and fewer than 1,000 copies were permitted to be published.
Cardinal Glemp and his assistants are trying to negotiate several issues that preoccupy church-state concerns, with no clear indication that any of them can be resolved.
The most immediate and possibly explosive one is the question of whether the Pope will be allowed to visit Gdansk, the Baltic birthplace of the Solidarity movement. The government refuses to speculate on the outcome of formal negotiations this fall on the Pope`s formal schedule.
Another issue is the government`s continuing refusal to grant legal status to the church. This means, among other things, that degrees granted by major Catholic seminaries in Krakow and Lublin are not recognized as valid.
A third issue is the collapse early this month of a church-supported plan to organize a campaign to bring in millions of dollars of Western aid for poor private farmers. The episcopate said it was abandoning the plan because the government, for more than a year, had stalled talks about it.
The church has come out flatly against a government plan to establish Marxist-oriented ”religious” classes that, it thinks, are aimed at diluting the Catholic faith of young Poles.
Cardinal Glemp and the church`s organization of bishops also have assailed new state laws that allow abortion and the distribution of birth-control devices, but there is no indication that the government will drop the law.
