Poland’s archbishop helped lead nation toward democracy
Mediator between Communist regime and Solidarity union
Although he faced criticism, Glemp
insisted that his mission was the preservation of the Church, not the overthrow of Communist rule.
Cardinal Jozef Glemp, the spiritual leader of Poland’s Roman Catholics for 25 years, who helped steer his nation through a historic and relatively peaceful transition from communism to democracy in 1989, but who was dogged by allegations of antiSemitism, died Wednesday in Warsaw. He was 83.
Jozef Kloch, a church spokesman, announced the death. The Polish news agency PAP said Glemp had lung cancer.
For a thousand years, the church has been a repository of nationhood in overwhelmingly Catholic Poland, and for decades Glemp, as the archbishop of Warsaw and Gniezno and the primate of Poland, was both mediator and power broker in the struggle between the Communist government and the resistance led by the Solidarity labour union.
His approach was nonconfrontational, urging calm when the government declared martial law in 1981 and even when state security officers killed a popular dissident priest, Rev. Jerzy Popieluszko, in 1984.
Through repeated crises, Glemp was an ally, though a fitful one, of Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, and a hostile but pragmatic and useful intermediary for Warsaw’s Communist leader, Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski.
Glemp was named primate by his countryman Pope John Paul II in 1981, becoming the representative of 34 million Catholics, about 95 per cent of the population. (He became a cardinal in 1983.) But he disappointed Poles who wanted a national saviour to fight communism with the dynamism of his predecessor, Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski.
Unlike Wyszynski, a thundering autocrat, Glemp was a quiet, unprepossessing man with a homespun modesty strangely becoming in the ornate splendour of great cathedrals and his palatial Warsaw residence. He listened to subordinates, strived for consensus and sometimes appeared indecisive.
Though criticized by priests and laity who supported the outlawed Solidarity, Glemp insisted that his mission was the preservation of the Church, not the overthrow of Communist rule. He opposed violence and general strikes, urged restraint by the government, and conferred with both sides to ease tensions as Soviet communism and the walls dividing Eastern and Western Europe crumbled.
In 1988, when labour unrest shook Poland, Glemp named Tadeusz Mazowiecki, his close associate and a Solidar- ity adviser, to mediate the peace and pave the way for talks on political reforms and national elections. In 1989, the cardinal was a voice in Mazowiecki’s selection as Poland’s first non-Communist prime minister since the 1940s.
He burnished his standing by accompanying John Paul during his pilgrimages to Poland. After the democratic transition, he backed Walesa’s successful presidential campaign in 1990, but his support was less helpful in 1995, when Walesa lost to a former Communist, Aleksander Kwasniewski, whom the cardinal called a “neo pagan.”
Despite an increasingly secularized population, Glemp advanced his agenda. Compulsory religious education resumed in public schools, a law requiring the media to conform to “Christian values” was adopted and abortions were sharply restricted. His appeals to abolish a constitutional separation of church and state went unheeded, but he gave his blessing to Poland’s market economy.
Glemp was repeatedly accused of anti-Semitism, notably for his 1989 remarks resisting an agreement to move a Carmelite convent from Auschwitz, where millions of Jews were killed by the Nazis. After Jews complained, the Vatican had agreed in 1987 to put the convent in a nearby interfaith centre. But as a dead- line passed and Jews staged protests, the cardinal went on the offensive, saying: “Do you, esteemed Jews, not see that your pronouncements against the nuns offend the feelings of all Poles, and our sovereignty, which has been achieved with such difficulty? Your power lies in the mass media that are easily at your disposal in many countries. Let them not serve to spread anti-Polish feeling.”
He added: “Dear Jews, do not talk with us from the position of a people raised above all others, and do not dictate conditions that are impossible to fulfil.”
The ensuing firestorm reignited old controversies in a largely rural land where the prewar Jewish population of 3.5 million had dwindled to a few thousand. But the cardinal did not back down until the Vatican reaffirmed the pope’s determination to move the convent.
The issue resurfaced in 1991, when Glemp, touring the United States, encountered more protests and told Jewish leaders that he regretted the pain his statements had caused.
In 1997, Glemp belatedly rebuked a rabidly anti-Semitic radio station, Radio Maryja, and the Rev. Tadeusz Rydzyk, who mingled daily outpourings of hate with prayer. The cardinal acted only after Vatican hints and a prosecutor’s slander charges.
In 2001, Glemp was again accused of anti-Semitism when he refused to accompany Kwasniewski to the village of Jedwabne to apologize for the 1941 massacre of 1,600 Jews, most of them burned alive in a barn by Polish neighbours. The cardinal disavowed “ostentatious penance” in advance and said: “I prefer not to have politicians impose on the church the way it is to fulfil its act of contrition for the crimes committed by certain groups of people.”
Glemp retired as archbishop of Warsaw in 2006, having surrendered the Archdiocese of Gniezno in a reorganization in 1992. He was primate of Poland until he turned 80 in 2009.
Jozef Glemp was born Dec. 18, 1929, in Inowroclaw, Poland. He decided early to be a priest, but his schooling was interrupted when the Nazis invaded in 1939. His father, a salt miner, joined the resistance, but Jozef, his mother, sister and two brothers became slave farm labourers.
Ordained in 1956, Glemp was a parish priest and teacher before earning doctorates in civil and canon law in Rome. He returned to Poland in 1964 and was Wyszynski’s legal adviser for 12 years. He was bishop of Warmia, a diocese of 1.3 million, from 1979 to 1981, when he succeeded Wyszynski on his death.
As he settled into his role as protector of the church in a national crisis, he asked Poles to pray instead of taking to the streets when martial law was imposed and Walesa was jailed. And before 350,000 spread out over a hillside at the Jasna Gora shrine to the Virgin Mary, he assured them that the voice of the church was on their side.