The Enthronement of Jesus Christ as King of Poland

Poland to Vote on EU Membership, Christian Heritage in Proposed Constitution Referendum

If Scotland and northern England could be converted from tiny Iona, perhaps the great Polish people, in the heart of Europe, will one day restore the light of faith to that continent.

Questions on EU membership, support for the traditional family, and Europe’s “more than 1,000-year-old Christian heritage” have been included in referendum plans put forward by Poland’s conservative president.

President Andrzej Duda on Tuesday put forward 15 questions that citizens should be .in a referendum planned for later this year, which will be the first vote of its kind for Poland since it joined the bloc.

Both domestic and international matters are covered in the issues Duda proposed Poles be consulted on in the wide-ranging referendum, which is set to give people a voice on whether to update the nation’s post-Communism 1997 constitution.

Read more at Breitbart >>

Poland’s Incoming Prime Minister: ‘My Dream Is to Re-Christianize the EU’

Hope they will start with the Vatican.

Supreme Court building in Warsaw, Poland. Photographer: NurPhoto/NurP

Poland’s incoming prime minister threw down the gauntlet with the European Union, offering to "help the West with proper values" after his allies advanced a judicial overhaul that the bloc has criticized as democratic backsliding.

Premier-designate Mateusz Morawiecki, tapped to replace Beata Szydlo halfway through the government’s term, rejected threats by EU leaders who have warned that Poland may lose out on the aid that drives its economic growth if it didn’t uphold the rule of law. His comments followed a heated parliamentary debate in which the ruling Law & Justice party approved draft laws to revamp the Supreme Court and overhaul a panel that appoints judges despite warnings from EU officials that the measures may trigger sanctions.

While Morawiecki a western-educated finance minister, has impressed foreign investors as the steward of the EU’s largest eastern economy, he made clear his allegiance is with his conservative party and its vision of returning Poland -- and the rest of Europe -- to its traditional Christian roots. In his first interview since being named prime minister on Friday, he lauded his "great, proud nation" and said it would not submit to "blackmail" from other European leaders.

Read more at Bloomberg >>

Polish PM Offers to Save John Paul II Statue after French Court Orders Removal of Cross

The bronze statue of Pope John Paul II in Ploërmel, France (Getty Images)

She offered to move it to Poland to save it from 'political correctness'

Poland’s prime minister has stepped into a row over a statue of Pope St John Paul II in Ploërmel, a town in Brittany.

France’s top administrative court, the Conseil d’Etat, has ruled that a large cross over the nearly-25-foot high statue of John Paul in prayer must be removed, because it contravenes a 1905 law banning any “religious sign or emblem” in a public space, upholding France’s strict separation of Church and State.

Beata Szydło, prime minister of Poland, has offered to have the statue moved to Poland, to rescue it from “the dictates of political correctness”. She said that religious censorship is undermining the values of Europe.

Read more at Catholic Herald >> 

 

Father Rutler: The "Christ of Nations"

Fr. George Rutler

In the nineteenth century, the poet Adam Mickiewicz dramatized the theme of his suffering Poland as the “Christ of Nations” and, in an image used by many others, Poland was crucified in the twentieth century between the two thieves of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. It was not the West’s proudest moment when President Roosevelt complained to Stalin at the Yalta Conference that “Poland has been a source of trouble for over five hundred years.” Pope John Paul II lamented Yalta in the encyclical Centesimus Annus. That will resonate in the annals of papal teaching more than recent magisterial concerns about the responsible use of air conditioning and the like.

On July 6 in Warsaw, the President spoke of a culture with which a generation of “millennials” have been unfamiliar: “Americans, Poles, and the nations of Europe value individual freedom and sovereignty. We must work together to confront forces, whether they come from inside or out, from the South or the East, that threaten over time to undermine these values and to erase the bonds of culture, faith and tradition that make us who we are.”

Comfortable journalists, for whom the “Christ of Nations” is an enigma, resented “a tiny speech, a perfunctory racist speech,” “xenophobic” and “a catalogue of effrontery,” and a comparison was made with Mussolini. Solzhenitsyn once was pilloried for similar themes, and Reagan was advised by his Chief of Staff and National Security advisor not to tell Mr. Gorbachev to take down the Berlin Wall.

The Warsaw speech mentioned three priests: Copernicus, John Paul II and Michael Kozal. The latter was the bishop of Wloclawek who was martyred by the Nazis in Dachau along with 220 of his priests in 1943.

Among the irritations in the Warsaw speech were these words: “We put faith and family, not government and bureaucracy, at the center of our lives.” As that was being said, the parents of a gravely ill child, Charlie Gard, in London were tussling with government officials who did not want to release their infant to them.

A Polish philosopher, Zbigniew Stawrowski has written: “The fundamental cleavage is not the West v. Islam or the West v. the rest, but within the West itself: between those who recognize the values of Judaeo-Christian, Graeco-Roman culture and those who use terms like "democracy," "values," "rights" but pervert the latter. So it means democracy of the elites, values of secularism, rights to kill Charlie Gard, marriage that has nothing to do with sex, sex that … is a “private” matter to be funded by the confiscatory state and your duty to support this incoherence…”

The Polish king Jan III Sobieski rescued Christian civilization at the gates of Vienna in 1683. That was one of the “troubles” that Poland has caused in the past five hundred years. We survive because of such behavior.

Father Rutler’s book, He Spoke to Us – Discerning God's Will in People and Events, is now available in paperback through Ignatius Press.

Father Rutler’s book, The Stories of Hymns – The History Behind 100 of Christianity’s Greatest Hymns, is available through Sophia Institute Press (Paperback or eBook) and Amazon (Paperback or Kindle).

Melanie Phillips: Trump in Poland

In his magnificent speech in Poland, President Trump asked whether the west “still has the will to survive”.

If he’d listened to BBC Radio’s Today programme this morning (approx 0840), he might have lost his own.

The issue that seemed to have startled the BBC was the suggestion that there were now threats to western bonds of culture, faith and tradition. (The fact that some of us have been writing about this for years has of course totally passed the BBC by). Two guests were invited to discuss this question: Margaret MacMillan, professor of international history at Oxford university where she is also Warden of St Anthony’s college, and Lord Dannatt, former Chief of the General Staff.

The interviewer’s loaded question about Trump’s speech, “Is he in any sense right?” invited them to agree that no, there could be no sense in which he was. Both duly agreed. Three against Trump, then. But if anything illustrated precisely what he was talking about, this conversation could scarcely have been bettered.

Opined Professor MacMillan: “There are bonds that hold us together and there are often bonds of history, but the idea there is something called ‘the west’ seems to me very dubious indeed. There are many wests, there are many different ways of looking at who we are, and I’m worried by the whole tenor of his speech. The talk of the ‘will’, the family, traditional values, what does that all mean?”

Lord Dannatt was equally perplexed. “What threat does he have in mind? From Russia? Islamic State? From climate change? Well he ruled that one out by pulling out of the Paris agreement. Or is it the nuclear threat from North Korea?”

Helpfully, the interviewer observed that what Trump had meant was a waning of cultural self confidence; he further ventured to suggest, with appropriate BBC diffidence, that “the project that we’ve all been involved in for centuries is a decent one”.

Professor MacMillan agreed there was a “decent side to what the west has done”. But just in case anyone might have thought she believed it to be better than other societies, she added there were many sides that weren’t decent at all “when you think of some of the things we’ve unleashed on the world” (presumably as opposed to the unlimited decencies that countries which don’t subscribe to respect for human life, freedom and democracy have bequeathed to humanity).

She conceded that the west had built a “liberal intentional order since the first and second world wars”. She agreed that respect for the rule of law and democratic institutions were very important and that these should be defended. “But if you talk about defending the power of the west and the dominance of the west that’s very different and I’m not sure that does make the world more stable… What worries me is that part of the enemy is seen as those who live among us… Islam, or Islamic fundamentalism, is [as presented by Trump] in some way a threat, and that means not just from outside but inside and that to me is really troubling”,

This professor of history, who teaches the young and thus transmits the culture down through the generations, didn’t even seem to know what that culture was. She implied that the will to survive was something out of Nietzsche or fascist ideology rather than the impulse to defend a society and a civilisation. She seemed to find incomprehensible the very idea that certain values defined western civilisation at all, or that it had a coherent identity.

She found something frightening or sinister about traditional values or the emphasis on the family: the very things that keep any society together. The one good thing she conceded was associated with the west – the “liberal international order” – had developed only after the two world wars. So much for the 18th century western Enlightenment, the development of political liberty and the rise of science.

The idea of the west having power filled her with horror; but without power the west can’t defend itself. And she thought the idea the west was threatened from within as well as from without was “troubling”. In other words, she doesn’t believe home-grown radicalised Islamists pose a threat to western countries. Now that really is troubling.

As for Lord Dannatt complaining Trump wasn’t specific about the threats he had in mind – well, talk about missing the point! Russia, Isis and North Korea are all threats to the west. The question was whether the west actually wanted to defeat any or all of these and more.

And Lord Dannatt’s reference to climate change was unintentionally revealing – about himself. Climate change supposedly threatens the survival of the planet. No-one suggests it poses a threat to the west alone! So it was irrelevant to the issue under discussion. Its inclusion implies that Lord Dannatt knows one thing: that Trump is wrong about EVERYTHING. So he just threw in climate change for good measure to show how wrong about everything Trump is.

So what exactly did Trump say to produce such finger-wagging disdain? Well, he produced an astonishing, passionate and moving declaration of belief in the west, its values of freedom and sovereignty and his determination to defend them.

He summoned up Poland’s resistance against two terrible tyrannies, Nazism and the Soviet Union, to make a broader point about western civilisation. Most strikingly, he identified Christianity as the core of that civilisation, that it was Christianity that was crucial in Poland’s stand against Soviet oppression – and that, in an echo of Pope Benedict’s warning years ago, the west has to reaffirm its Christian values in order to survive.

“And when the day came on June 2nd, 1979, and one million Poles gathered around Victory Square for their very first mass with their Polish Pope, that day, every communist in Warsaw must have known that their oppressive system would soon come crashing down.  They must have known it at the exact moment during Pope John Paul II’s sermon when a million Polish men, women, and children suddenly raised their voices in a single prayer.  A million Polish people did not ask for wealth.  They did not ask for privilege.  Instead, one million Poles sang three simple words:  ‘We Want God.’

“In those words, the Polish people recalled the promise of a better future.  They found new courage to face down their oppressors, and they found the words to declare that Poland would be Poland once again.

“As I stand here today before this incredible crowd, this faithful nation, we can still hear those voices that echo through history.  Their message is as true today as ever.  The people of Poland, the people of America, and the people of Europe still cry out “We want God.”

“Together, with Pope John Paul II, the Poles reasserted their identity as a nation devoted to God.  And with that powerful declaration of who you are, you came to understand what to do and how to live.  You stood in solidarity against oppression, against a lawless secret police, against a cruel and wicked system that impoverished your cities and your souls.  And you won.”

“Our adversaries, however, are doomed because we will never forget who we are.  And if we don’t forget who are, we just can’t be beaten.  Americans will never forget.  The nations of Europe will never forget.  We are the fastest and the greatest community.  There is nothing like our community of nations.  The world has never known anything like our community of nations.”

“We write symphonies.  We pursue innovation.  We celebrate our ancient heroes, embrace our timeless traditions and customs, and always seek to explore and discover brand-new frontiers.

“We reward brilliance.  We strive for excellence, and cherish inspiring works of art that honor God.  We treasure the rule of law and protect the right to free speech and free expression.

“We empower women as pillars of our society and of our success.  We put faith and family, not government and bureaucracy, at the center of our lives.  And we debate everything.  We challenge everything.  We seek to know everything so that we can better know ourselves.

“And above all, we value the dignity of every human life, protect the rights of every person, and share the hope of every soul to live in freedom.  That is who we are.  Those are the priceless ties that bind us together as nations, as allies, and as a civilization.

“What we have, what we inherited from our — and you know this better than anybody, and you see it today with this incredible group of people — what we’ve inherited from our ancestors has never existed to this extent before.  And if we fail to preserve it, it will never, ever exist again.  So we cannot fail.”

But the danger is that we might do just that.

“We have to remember that our defense is not just a commitment of money, it is a commitment of will.  Because as the Polish experience reminds us, the defense of the West ultimately rests not only on means but also on the will of its people to prevail and be successful and get what you have to have.  The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.  Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost?  Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders?  Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?

“We can have the largest economies and the most lethal weapons anywhere on Earth, but if we do not have strong families and strong values, then we will be weak and we will not survive”.

The millions who voted for Trump did so because of the promise he made them that he would defend America and the western values of life and liberty that it embodies. They understand very well that America and the west are not just being threatened from outside but are being undermined from within by the kind of people who are engaged in a fight to the death to destroy him – and by the kind of people who took part in that discussion on Today.

President Trump's Awesome Address to the People of Poland

Polish Bishops End Year of Mercy by Enthroning Christ as King in Presence of President

On November 19, at the end of the Jubilee of Mercy, Poland celebrated a historical Act of Acceptance of Christ as King and Lord with a Mass at the Shrine of Divine Mercy, with the Polish bishops, government authorities, and many faithful in attendance. President Andrzej Duda from the Law and Justice Party took part in the event, thus attracting international media attention.

More than 100,000 Poles in Krakow recited the solemn pledge: “O Immortal King of Ages, Lord Jesus Christ, our God and Savior! In the Jubilee Year of the 1,050th anniversary of Poland’s baptism, in the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy, we Poles stand here before you to acknowledge your reign, to submit ourselves to your law, to entrust and consecrate to you our Fatherland and our whole people.”

Read more at Life Site News >> 

Poland: Europe's Forgotten Democratic Ancestor

From The National Interest
By Adriel Kasonta

inShare

It may not be apparent to everyone today, but written constitutions are a relatively modern phenomenon. The two earliest examples date only from the late eighteenth century, and come from two countries, decidedly different at first glance: America and Poland.

The first one was a federation of newly independent colonies that would become the most powerful country in the modern world; the other one was then a major European power and the largest state on the continent, stretching from the shores of the Baltic in the north to the Black Sea in the south.

The constitutions of these two countries not only shared many notable similarities in their development and their final form, but they were also ratified almost at the same time: the first on September 17, 1787, the other on May 3, 1791.

It Takes Heroic Poland – And the Truth About Katyn – To Show Us How Evil Communism Is

From The Telegraph
By Ed West

I'm an unashamed Polonophile. If you grew up in a certain kind of Irish-British Catholic household in the 1980s, Poland was a heroic and tragic fairytale kingdom that, having endured the neo-pagan Nazis, was now held captive by the godless Soviets – and yet maintained its faith, chivarly and honour. 

How The Poles Saved Civilization, Pt. II

From Crisis Magazine

By M. D. Aeschliman

Among the most momentous events of twentieth-century history is the defeat of the Communist Red Army in the Battle of Warsaw in the summer of 1920, “the miracle on the Vistula,” the subject of Adam Zamoyski’s excellent recent book Warsaw 1920: Lenin’s Failed Conquest of Europe. In the aftermath of the catastrophic First World War, with its 13 million deaths, the old order in much of Europe collapsed, and though the armistice was concluded in the West on 11 November 1918, eastern Europe, Italy, and the Middle East remained on fire for another five years. This is the background to T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” finished in Lausanne in 1922, and gives it an apocalyptic quality: “Falling towers/ Jerusalem, Athens Alexandria/ Vienna London/ Unreal” (Part V). Four vast empires collapsed—Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire, propelling several hundred million people into conditions of intermittent chaos, starvation, and war. Given the discrediting of nearly all continental European political regimes (and the Ottomans)  and the demobilizing of vast numbers of soldiers and their subsequent unemployment and bitterness, Europe was a powder-keg, with fiery instruments everywhere. There were Communist and Fascist strikes, riots, and coups d’etat throughout the continent, including Berlin, Budapest, Munich, and Milan. The Bolsheviks had taken power in Russia in 1917 and defeated their “White” Russian opponents in a bloody civil war over the next three years. Meanwhile, with the advent of the Americans in the West, the Germans, who had driven the Russians to their knees in the east, precipitating the Bolshevik revolution and Russian withdrawal from the war, were themselves forced into an armistice that became a surrender and led to the fall of the Kaiser. 

How the Poles Saved Civilization, Part I

From Crisis Magazine

By M. D. Aeschliman

On a June evening in 1979 I was having a drink on a small balcony outside a sixth-floor apartment in downtown Warsaw with a very civilized, elderly Polish intellectual, a retired mathematics professor who had taken a degree at Cambridge between the two world wars and spoke a refined, witty, patrician English. Inside the apartment about a dozen much younger Poles, twenty-five to forty-five years old, were having a secret meeting, their voices inaudible due to the classical music being played so as to hide or muffle their discourse in case the apartment was bugged. They had each arrived separately, by pre-arrangement, from different parts of the city. The elderly professor, whom I will call Professor X, had discreetly let them into the apartment, then offered me a drink and retired with me to the balcony, apparently either uninterested in their conversation or prudent enough not to want to know its content. (As a non-Polish speaker, I could not follow it anyway.) Among the young men in the apartment were several figures who would later become known for their prominent participation in the underground Polish anti-Communist movement and some who already were, including my friend Pawel B., a meteorologist who had brought me along by a circuitous route that required our rapid and sudden exit from a tram-car, the immediate flight to two hidden bicycles, and a fast ride across a large urban park, measures designed, successfully, to elude the two Polish secret service agents who had clearly been following us both, and one of whom was apparently assigned to watch his apartment full time. (It was an apartment that Pawel and his family shared with another family, where in the single bathroom the only toilet paper consisted of successive pages torn out of a stack of the Polish-language edition of Stalin’s collected works.)

Poland is Rising Against Suppression of Media Freedom by the Polish Government Agency

On April 21, 2012, an unprecedented number of 120,000 Poles protested on the streets of Warsaw against Polish government agency decision to restrict access to independent media for millions of Poles. Similar protests were held on the streets of many cities all over in Poland.

Elected by the ruling party, the Civic Platform (PO), the post-communists (SLD), and President Komorowski, the Polish media regulatory agency, broke the law and refused to grant license to independent TV Trwam despite its multi-million viewer base, long-term presence and excellent financial standing.

Protesters see this decision as a reversal to the dark years of communism when only government-controlled media were allowed to exist in Poland between 1944-1989.

The agency's refusal to allow broadcast rights to TV Trwam triggered massive street protests in Poland, unheard of since 1989 when Poland regained its independence from Soviet-imposed communism.

In Warsaw, the protest, lasting over five hours, began with the Holy Mass, followed by a peaceful march to Prime Minister Tusk's headquarters, then continued to President Komorowski's residence.

                                                      Protesters chanted:

“Prime Minister Tusk, rule Poland Polish style, not Russian style."
"God, Honor and Motherland"
"We will not surrender TV Trwam"
"TV Trwam today, other independent media tomorrow…"
"Let's show solidarity in our struggle for truth and remembrance"

Over 2.2 million people sent letters in defense of plurality of media in Poland and requested decision reversal and granting broadcasting license to TV Trwam.

The decision by the media agency was condemned by a significant majority of editors of major Polish newspapers, magazines, and independent media; by hundreds of non-governmental organizations and civic organizations (including the Polish Helsinki Foundation);

The magnitude of protests were not shown in mainstream media.

Video link to the manifestation independent coverage. Scroll time slide bar to advance.

Full 5 hour coverage; Scroll time slide bar to advance.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UATU6M4eDNo&list=UUNY81VIp_eKAmyKymiAyr3A&index=18&feature=plcp

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJ7f7FmgUl0&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qO26zTAin3o

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTMEGDnlTM4&feature=related

The April 21 protest was a huge manifestation of Poles' deep love of liberty, democracy, and traditional values.

Reagan Statue Unveiled in Warsaw

From The Telegraph

A statue to former US president Ronald Reagan, who is highly respected in Poland for having helped hasten the fall of the Iron Curtain, was unveiled by Communist-era opposition icon Lech Walesa in Warsaw yesterday. 

A statue of former US president Ronald Reagan has been unveiled in Poland

He did not mention ex-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, in power from 1985 to 1991, and far less well-regarded in Moscow's former stamping ground than in Western Europe.

Leaked Cables: Obama Admin Called Catholic Church Source of Spreading “Homophobia” in Poland

From LifeSiteNews

By Kathleen Gilbert

While surveying the landscape for inroads to push the homosexual agenda into Poland, American embassy officials under the Obama administration complained that the Catholic Church teaching is a major source of “homophobia” in the heavily Catholic country, according to private cables recently published by Wikileaks.

How the Holy See in Canada Helped Poland Protect its Secrets

Rafal Domisiewicz retrieved the last box of
documents from Rev. Tom Cassidy in May 2006.

From Embassy
By Anca Gurzu

Rev. Tom Cassidy made his way down the stairs to the basement of the centuries-old building in Rockliffe Park that had been home to the embassy of the Holy See in Canada for the past 25 years.

It was 1997, and staff at the Apostolic Nunciature had decided it was time to sort through the mission's archives and get rid of any papers that didn't need to be sent to the Vatican's permanent archival collection in Rome. Rev. Cassidy, English secretary and Canonical counsel at the Nunciature, was given the unenviable task of housekeeper.

Scattered around the basement were old event invitations, advertisements and other papers that one might expect to find in the basement of any diplomatic mission in Ottawa. However, in a chamber adjacent to the boiler room, Rev. Cassidy found four non-descript cardboard boxes on the floor.

"There was nothing from the outside that made them stand out," he recalls. "They weren't the fancy banker boxes, but rather boxes in which you might find canned goods in."

But if nothing stood out from the outside, the inside of the boxes painted a completely different picture. Going through the documents in the boxes, Rev. Cassidy found he could not decipher the foreign language, but his eyes quickly fell on the letterhead imprinted on the papers. It belonged to the Polish diplomatic mission.

It turned out that most of the documents covered the usual diplomatic business: consular affairs, visas, inheritances, Canadian newspaper clippings, cultural information and briefs about disapora communities. But about 10 per cent had a "top secret" stamp on them, he recalls, and another part was marked as confidential.

"I was sitting on the floor with the boxes all around me," says Rev. Cassidy. "I love history. I was excited. I knew there was something there."

The papers he stumbled upon were indeed historical and represented a lost part of pre- and post-Second World War and pre-Cold War diplomatic history in Ottawa. A fifth box was found in 2006 and now Poland is hoping to find a Canadian researcher interested in filling in the gaps of early 20^th-century Canadian-Polish relations.

Protecting secrets

Nazi Germany invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, prompting the start of the Second World War. For the next six years, Polish diplomats around the world worked for the government-in-exile in London. However, on June 28, 1945, the Soviet Union, whose Red Army had chased the Nazis from the Polish territories, installed a puppet government in Warsaw based on an agreement reached with the US and UK during the Yalta Conference. A week later, Canada and other Western countries officially recognized the legitimacy of the communist provisional government, spurning the London-based government-in-exile.

Intent on saving their country's archives before representatives from the new puppet communist government in Warsaw arrived, Polish diplomats, led by then-Polish diplomat Waclaw Babinski, smuggled all the documents they could out of the mission and turned to the Catholic church to safeguard the files. (The Canadian government eventually allowed Mr. Babinski and his staff to stay in Canada as immigrants.)

At that time, the Vatican's delegation was located on Queen Elizabeth Drive, close to the Bank Street bridge, in an old Victorian house. That house burned down years after the delegation moved its headquarters to the present location in Rockliffe Park in 1962.

"Everything was transferred, including the boxes," Rev. Cassidy explains. "I cannot verify, but I bet by that time nobody knew what they were. There were just boxes in our archives."

Although there are no records of the hand-over taking place, the decision on where to hide the archive was probably not very difficult—not only because Poland and the Catholic Church had had a strong religious and cultural connection dating back centuries. Rafal Domisiewicz, first counsellor in charge of cultural and scientific events at the Polish Embassy in Ottawa, points out that in 1945, the Vatican had not withdrawn recognition from the London-based Polish government-in-exile, and—in fact—was the last foreign government to do so in 1972.

However, Rev. Cassidy also feels that the fact the Vatican's representative in Ottawa at that time, Archbishop Ildebrando Antoniutti, was a staunch anti-communist may have been a key factor in the Poles' decision to hide the documents with the Holy See.

The boxes stuffed with documents from the embassy in Ottawa weren't the only things hidden by pre-communist Polish officials. National treasures that had been rescued from the country before the Nazis invaded and held safely in Britain throughout the course of the war were brought across the Atlantic by ship and hidden in different Catholic churches and monasteries in the region so they wouldn't be taken by the communists. The hiding of the national treasures started even before the Soviet Union installed the puppet government, Mr. Domisiewicz says.

Mr. Babinski, at the request of the British government, submitted an inventory of all his belongings to the British High Commission in April 1946, says Mr. Domisiewicz. That inventory, however, did not satisfy the first Polish communist envoy, Alfred Fiderkiewicz, who arrived in Ottawa in May 1946. In his reports to Warsaw, he wrote about his efforts to recover what he thought to be the missing property of the state by looking for it even in private homes.

This discrepancy between Mr. Babinski's inventory and Mr. Fiderkiewicz's reports of missing state belongings leave both Rev. Cassidy and Mr. Domisiewicz puzzled to this day about when exactly the archive was hidden.

Maybe, they guess, the Ottawa-based Polish diplomats had already hidden the archive by the time the British had asked them for the inventory, explaining why the inventory would be succinct. Or maybe Mr. Babinski decided to submit an incomplete inventory at the request of Polish government-in-exile.

What is clear, however, is that the archives remained safe—and eventually forgotten until Rev. Cassidy's discovery.

Circuitous route home

When Rev. Cassidy realized what he had found in the four boxes in 1997, he was immediately driven by curiosity. Some of the documents were in English, and "I went straight to September 1939," he says.

The sensitive documents contained reporting on communist and fascist activities in Canada, information on the wartime military collaboration and security policy between Canada and Poland, and also files on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, in which hundreds of Polish Jews tried to fight their Nazi occupiers.

Rev. Cassidy remembers reading about a Polish diplomat's mission to Canada's West Coast in 1941, around the time of the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, which precipitated the United States's entry into the war. The purpose of the trip was to check on Canada's defences on that coast, he says.

"This was fascinating from a Canadian perspective. His report read 'Defences? What defences?'" Rev. Cassidy recalls. "By the 1990s we all knew that Canada and the US had nothing on the West Coast, we didn't have much of a navy out there."

He says he continued to go through the documents for a few weeks. Eventually, Polish-speaking Rev. Tadeusz Nowak came to the Nunciature from Toronto and spent over a month there cataloguing the documents. When that was done, Rev. Cassidy presented a brief to then-Apostolic nuncio Archbishop Carlo Curis.

"I saw no reason why [the documents] should not be returned," he says. "We were given them to look after until they could be returned [to Poland]."

But after Rev. Cassidy gave his report to his superior, the diplomatic game began.

Archbishop Curis contacted the secretary of state of the Vatican, who then contacted officials in the Polish department of foreign affairs in Warsaw, who said they would like the documents back. Eventually approval came back to the Holy See Embassy in Ottawa. The nuncio then called the Polish ambassador of the time, Bogdan Grzelonski, a historian by training, to tell him the boxes were ready to be picked up.

They were handed back to the original owners in 1998.

"We thought it was all over," Rev. Cassidy says smiling.

And it was—until 2006. That's when the Nunciature decided to go through its library collection and get rid of all the duplicates. And again, Rev. Cassidy went to work.

He remembers columns and columns of books being stacked in an unused mini-apartment in the basement. As they were emptying the bathroom, he noticed a cardboard box on the floor.

"I've seen this before," he remembers thinking. "When I opened it, there it was, more documents. I knew right away what they were."

It was the fifth box.

He then told the Apostolic nuncio of the time, Archbishop Luigi Ventura, of his discovery and that he didn't think it was necessary to go through the entire diplomatic process again.

Mr. Domisiewicz picked up the last box on May 9, 2006. It was 50 centimetres wide, 42 centimetres tall and 23 centimetres deep, according to Mr. Domisiewicz's measurements. The 13 folders in the box contained similar information as the previous ones.

Mr. Domisiewicz, who holds a Bachelor's in history and political science from the University of British Columbia, describes with excitement the day he opened the last box of documents with Rev. Cassidy at the Nunciature.

"We were sitting there and having coffee, and I was telling [Rev. Cassidy] what's in there. I was so excited," he says. "I brought the box back to the embassy and I told the ambassador, and all the staff came around."

Since some of the files were stamped "top secret," Mr. Domisiewicz says he was not sure what to do with them at first.

"Are they supposed to be kept in a secure location at the embassy? Or can we just keep them anywhere? Are they declassified after all these decades?" he asks. "These kinds of questions were running through my mind."

They eventually stored the documents in a safe at the embassy until they were shipped to Poland.

Still, when remembering that last box he took back to the embassy, Mr. Domisiewicz says he was struck by one thing.

"It seems the [hiding] operation might have been done in a rush because the files were just stacked up in dossiers," he says. What is sure, however, is that the Polish Embassy in late 1945 and early 1946 was a "beehive of activity."

"They knew it was coming," he says.

After so many years, the contents of all five boxes are now at the Archives of New Records in Warsaw, Mr. Domisiewicz says, still leaving the exact order of events unclear.

"All the people involved in this kept it to themselves, and then took it to their grave," says Rev. Cassidy.

Mr. Domisiewicz says the documents await a Canadian researcher interested to fill the gaps and further explore the Canada-Polish relations of that time.

There is already one monograph, which tracks those relations during that time period, but it is largely based on Canadian sources. Polish sources would paint a clearer picture, he says.

Father Jerzy Popieluszko Beatified in Warsaw

Blessed Jerzy Popieluszko

All of the Church joins with the great people of Poland in celebrating today's beatification of one of her greatest national heroes and freedom fighters, Father Jerzy Popieluszko. More than 100,000 people attended an open-air Mass of Beatification, along with Father Popieluszko's mother.

We have written previously about this great modern-day martyr. He is truly a model and a witness to be emulated throughout the Church and the world. We thank God for this alter Christus and pray for his speedy canonization.

Thousands of people gather and pray in front of altar during beatification mass on Plac Pilsudskiego in Warsaw June 6, 2010. Poland's communist-era martyr Father Jerzy Popieluszko moved a step closer to sainthood on Sunday after a beatification mass held in Warsaw by papal delegate Archbishop Angelo Amato. REUTERS/Peter Andrews

From Winnipeg Free Press
By Monika Scislowska

Thousands of Poles filled a vast sunbathed square in Warsaw on Sunday for the beatification of Jerzy Popieluszko, a charismatic priest tortured and killed in 1984 by communist Poland's secret police for supporting Lech Walesa's Solidarity freedom movement.

The head of the Vatican's saint-making office, Archbishop Angelo Amato, presided over the Mass at Pilsudski Square that was also celebrated by 120 bishops and 1,600 priests. Popieluszko's 90-year-old mother Marianna, his sister and brothers, were among some 140,000 attending that included Walesa.

Amato read out Pope Benedict XVI's declaration that made Popieluszko blessed for his martyrdom in giving his life to defend good. The crowd applauded when Popieluszko's portrait was unveiled.

The pope, on a visit to Cyprus, said Popieluszko's "zealous service and his martyrdom are a special sign of the victory of good over evil."

The two-and-half-hour Mass in Warsaw was followed by a three-hour procession of his remains — referred to as relics — encased in a small silver reliquary, to a new church of God's Providence in southern Warsaw, where they were deposited in a ceremony filled with praying and singing.

Popieluszko's grave remains in the yard of St. Stanislas Church, where he used to give riveting sermons. Since his burial in 1984, it has been visited by many world leaders.

Popieluszko, an outspoken priest, is remembered as one of the historic figures in this predominantly Catholic nation's struggle against communism. His "Masses for the Homeland" during a time of harsh repression under martial law in the 1980s drew crowds as he preached the value of freedom.

"We are very proud of him, he was a very good and brave person," said Wieslawa Nowak, 57, a bookkeeper.

"He preached the truth and was killed for preaching the truth," said Nowak, who travelled from Grajewo, near where Popieluszko was born, to attend the Mass.

On Oct. 19, 1984, three secret police officers kidnapped the 37-year-old priest and his driver.

The priest was beaten, bound, gagged and stuffed in the trunk of an unmarked police car. He escaped when they pulled in at a secluded parking lot, but was captured again, beaten and stuffed in a sack weighed down with stones and thrown into the Vistula River.

His driver, Waldemar Chrostowski, managed to escape and tell about the priest's abduction. Popieluszko's body was found two weeks later.

Popieluszko's murder sparked massive outrage and drew hundreds of thousands of people to his funeral, in a massive show of opposition to the communist regime. The authorities conducted a quick trial and convicted the three abductors and their immediate superior to prison terms of up to 25 years. All of have since been released.

Beatification procedures opened in 1997. Last December, Pope Benedict declared Popieluszko a martyr, opening the road to his beatification.

Beatification is a step toward possible sainthood, which, if sought in an official procedure, should be backed up by proven cases of miracles attributed to the candidate for sainthood.

'Nine Days That Changed The World' Premieres in Krakow, Warsaw, and Rome

Newt and Callista Gingrich, in partnership with Citizens United Productions and Peace River Company, will premiere their new documentary, Nine Days that Changed the World, next week in Krakow, Warsaw and Rome.

The film will premiere at the Lagiewniki Sanctuary of Divine Mercy in Krakow on June 8, at the Royal Castle in Warsaw on June 9, and finally at the Pontifical North American College in Rome on June 12.

Nine Days that Changed the World explores Pope John Paul II's historic nine-day pilgrimage to Poland in June of 1979, which created a revolution of conscience that transformed Poland and fundamentally reshaped the spiritual and political landscape of the 20th Century.

Newt and Callista Gingrich, along with a Polish, American, and Italian cast, explore what transpired during these nine days that moved the Polish people to renew their hearts, reclaim their courage, and free themselves from the shackles of Communism.

Millions of Poles, almost one third of the nation, turned out to see the Holy Father in person, while the rest of the country followed his pilgrimage on television and radio. Within sixteen months, Solidarity became the first officially recognized free trade union in the Communist bloc, with over 10 million members. The momentum of this nine-day visit would eventually lead to the fall of the Berlin Wall in November of 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Featuring exclusive interviews with George Weigel, Michael Novak, John O'Sullivan, Jerzy Kluger, Father Adam Boniecki, Father Leon Knabit, Monsignor Jaroslaw Cielecki, Father Jan Andrzej Kloczowski, Father Thomas D. Williams, Father Wojciech Giertych, President Lech Walesa, President Vaclav Havel, Polish Free Trade Union Leaders Krzysztof Wyszkowski and Anna Walentynowicz, Former Director of Central Intelligence James Woolsey, and Secretary Jim Nicholson.

Nine Days that Changed the World is a story of human liberation, revealing the extraordinary power of Pope John Paul II's worldwide message of freedom through faith.

The Glory of Poland

From The New York Times
By Roger Cohen. Op-Ed Guest Columnist

My first thought, hearing of the Polish tragedy, was that history’s gyre can be of an unbearable cruelty, decapitating Poland’s elite twice in the same cursed place, Katyn.

My second was to call my old friend Adam Michnik in Warsaw. Michnik, an intellectual imprisoned six times by the former puppet-Soviet Communist rulers, once told me:

“Anyone who has suffered that humiliation, at some level, wants revenge. I know all the lies. I saw people being killed. But I also know that revanchism is never ending. And my obsession has been that we should have a revolution that does not resemble the French or Russian, but rather the American, in the sense that it be for something, not against something. A revolution for a constitution, not a paradise. An anti-utopian revolution. Because utopias lead to the guillotine and the gulag.”

Michnik’s obsession has yielded fruit. President Lech Kaczynski is dead. Slawomir Skrzypek, the president of the National Bank, is dead. An explosion in the fog of the forest took them and 94 others on the way to Katyn. But Poland’s democracy has scarcely skipped a beat. The leader of the lower house of Parliament has become acting president pending an election. The first deputy president of the National Bank has assumed the duties of the late president. Poland, oft dismembered, even wiped from the map, is calm and at peace.

“Katyn is the place of death of the Polish intelligentsia,” Michnik, now the soul of Poland’s successful Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper, said when I reached him by phone. “This is a terrible national tragedy. But in my sadness I am optimistic because Putin’s strong and wise declaration has opened a new phase in Polish-Russian relations, and because we Poles are showing we can be responsible and stable.”

Michnik was referring to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s words after he decided last week to join, for the first time, Polish officials commemorating the anniversary of the murder at Katyn of thousands of Polish officers by the Soviet Union at the start of World War II. Putin, while defending the Russian people, denounced the “cynical lies” that had hidden the truth of Katyn, said “there is no justification for these crimes” of a “totalitarian regime” and declared, “We should meet each other halfway, realizing that it is impossible to live only in the past.”

The declaration, dismissed by the paleolithic Russian Communist Party, mattered less than Putin’s presence, head bowed in that forest of shame. Watching him beside Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, I thought of François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl hand-in-hand at Verdun in 1984: of such solemn moments of reconciliation has the miracle of a Europe whole and free been built. Now that Europe extends eastward toward the Urals.

I thought even of Willy Brandt on his knees in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1970, a turning point on the road to a German-Polish reconciliation more miraculous in its way even than the dawning of the post-war German-French alliance. And now perhaps comes the most wondrous rapprochement, the Polish-Russian.

It is too early to say where Warsaw-Moscow relations are headed but not too early to say that 96 lost souls would be dishonored if Polish and Russian leaders do not make of this tragedy a solemn bond. As Tusk told Putin, “A word of truth can mobilize two peoples looking for the road to reconciliation. Are we capable of transforming a lie into reconciliation? We must believe we can.”

Poland should shame every nation that believes peace and reconciliation are impossible, every state that believes the sacrifice of new generations is needed to avenge the grievances of history. The thing about competitive victimhood, a favorite Middle Eastern pastime, is that it condemns the children of today to join the long list of the dead.

For scarcely any nation has suffered since 1939 as Poland, carved up by the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact, transformed by the Nazis into the epicenter of their program to annihilate European Jewry, land of Auschwitz and Majdanek, killing field for millions of Christian Poles and millions of Polish Jews, brave home to the Warsaw Uprising, Soviet pawn, lonely Solidarity-led leader of post-Yalta Europe’s fight for freedom, a place where, as one of its great poets, Wislawa Szymborska, wrote, “History counts its skeletons in round numbers” — 20,000 of them at Katyn.

It is this Poland that is now at peace with its neighbors and stable. It is this Poland that has joined Germany in the European Union. It is this Poland that has just seen the very symbols of its tumultuous history (including the Gdansk dock worker Anna Walentynowicz and former president-in-exile Ryszard Kaczorowski) go down in a Soviet-made jet and responded with dignity, according to the rule of law. So do not tell me that cruel history cannot be overcome. Do not tell me that Israelis and Palestinians can never make peace. Do not tell me that the people in the streets of Bangkok and Bishkek and Tehran dream in vain of freedom and democracy. Do not tell me that lies can stand forever.

Ask the Poles. They know.

Polish President Lech Kaczynski Dies in Plane Crash

Polish President Lech Kaczynski and scores of others have been killed in a plane crash in Russia.

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