Pax: ‘Progressive’ Catholics in Poland: II

Extract

The members of‘Pax’ begin by accepting the Communist revolution as an accomplished and permanent fact. Nothing is going to alter that fact. The people of Poland, of whom more than 90 per cent profess the Catholic religion, will remain indefinitely under a Communist government. Can all these people so arrange their thoughts and behaviour as to be able to live Christian lives in a Marxist regime? The members of ‘Pax’ believe that such an arrangement is not only possible but eminently desirable. Catholics should do more than give acquiescence to the new society; they should be the willing, joyful, joint-creators of it. They should joyfully co-operate for three excellent reasons: because in such co-operation lies the Church’s best chance of survival; because the Government’s social and economic work is praiseworthy in itself and historically necessary; because co-operation in the new social order could be a sublime manifestation of true Christianity. In the past, Polish Catholicism had been narrow, a matter of personal experience, based on pietistic sentiment and the fear of Hell, without thought for one’s neighbour, without social conscience, without indignation against the evil conditions that were tolerated by the clergy. Here is a glorious opportunity to change all that.

To all the obvious objections they have shrewd answers. ‘Without any doubt whatever’, says one of their official documents, ‘there is no room for the conception of God in the intellectual system of materialistic socialism.’ But they make a careful distinction. There is an atheistic humanism which has always been in conflict with Christian humanism, and the conflict will probably endure until the end of time; it is a civilized argument which can be maintained by men who are friendly in every other respect and can agree about one another’s sincerity.