Pax: Poland's Proteus

WHENEVER a little girl makes her First Communion in Poland and her parents present her with an image of the Madonna or some other religious souvenir, they have to buy it from PAX, a pseudoCatholic organization run by a former fascist leader and supported by the Communists. Likewise, when a Polish housewife wants to buy a kettle or a brush, she is more likely to find one made by PAX than by the state-run factories.

The history of this peculiar outfit is closely connected with the complex personality and the baffling career of its founder, Boleslaw Piasecki. Before the war Piasecki was a young and vociferous leader of Falanga, a fascist and anti-Jewish Polish movement. He was tall, fair-haired, blue-eyed, athletic, and looked like a perfect specimen of the mythical Aryan race. He and his associates of Falanga wore a greenish-brown shirt and a uniform similar to that of the German storm troopers.

But when the Nazis invaded Poland his patriotism prevailed over his political convictions, and he fought bravely against them. When Stalin attacked Poland from the East, the last Polish resistance collapsed, and Piasecki, like so many of his countrymen, was taken prisoner by the Germans. He was released shortly afterward, thanks to an intervention on his behalf by an Italian diplomatic envoy who acted for the fascist Foreign Minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano.

Then Hitler launched his attack on Russia, and the whole of Poland was occupied by the Nazis. Many Polish patriots went underground. Piasecki, too, formed an underground movement, which he called the Confederation of the Nation. Being by nature a lone wolf, he never joined the so-called Home Army, which grouped all the Polish underground movements in a kind of national front; and within a short time the Confederation of the Nation was fighting against the Russian partisans who had been left behind by Stalin’s retreating armies in the eastern provinces of Poland — underground against underground. The Germans, of course, knew, but as it suited their books, they closed their eyes.

The fortunes of war changed, and the Red Army swept over Poland. Piasecki was caught again and charged with his antipartisan activities. A death sentence was expected. Instead, he was sent to jail, and his stay there was very short. Exploiting to the full his gift of gab, his power of persuasion, and his natural charm, he prevailed upon the Russians not only to let him go free but to allow him to form an organization of “progressive” (that is, pro-Communist) Catholics, which he called PAX. This happened in 1945, with the blessing of two top Soviet security officers, General Ivanov and General Sierov.

To complete this brief biographical sketch of Boleslaw Piasecki, and before we go into the activities of PAX, it should be mentioned that three years ago he was made to pay dearly for his former antiJewish attitude. His sixteen-year-old son was kidnapped by two men in a taxi, and a few days later his body was found in a cellar in the center of Warsaw. The body bore ritual marks which made it quite clear that the boy was the victim of a Jewish vendetta. The police carried out a halfhearted investigation which came to nothing. Through his newspaper, Piasecki offered a big reward to anybody who could supply information, and he mobilized the whole PAX organization. Some clues were found and forwarded to the police, but they dropped the case.

From the very beginning PAX was a puppet in the hands of the Communists, whose main aim was to disrupt the Catholic front from within. Piasecki was the leader, and the key posts in the organization were occupied by former Falanga members, whom the Communists could easily blackmail into submission because of their Nazi record. A few priests and a few Catholic intellectuals adhered to the movement from the start, some because of convenience, others because they genuinely and naïvely thought that Catholicism and Communism could be reconciled.

Gradually PAX became a fairly important factor in Polish politics. Although its leader was viewed with suspicion and was considered a bit of an adventurer, and although it was clear that he was being manipulated from behind the scenes by the Communists, PAX nevertheless became a kind of bridge between the Communist world and the Catholic world and a channel through which men of the right could hope to make their voices heard, even if only in a limited and controlled way.

As for the Communists, they found it advantageous to let the PAX movement have some freedom of expression and of action, or a semblance of it, since this allowed them to keep a check on the mood and the strength of the opposition.

DURING its heyday, around 1954, PAX numbered among its followers about six hundred priests, 10 percent of the Polish diocesan clergy. Many more were in sympathy with the movement. At a rally held in Warsaw no less than one thousand priests were present.

The spreading of the movement alarmed the Vatican, and in 1955 it issued a condemnation of Piasecki’s book Essential Matters and of the PAX weekly paper, Today and Tomorrow. Piasecki’s conduct on this occasion was very shrewd. He bowed to the authority of the Vatican, he withdrew his book from circulation, and he stopped printing Today and Tomorrow. The fact that shortly afterward he came out with another weekly called Orientations is just another proof of his insincerity. The title of the paper had changed; practically all the rest had remained the same. Thanks to his apparent submission to the Holy See, Piasecki managed to limit the damage the Vatican condemnation had done to PAX. A number of priests left him, but at least half of them remained linked to the movement in one way or another.

In the meantime, the economic activies of PAX had kept growing. Piasecki had started with a publishing house which was financed by the Communist Party but had a Catholic facade, and he was later given a monopoly over the distribution of religious objects and souvenirs. Crucifixes, missals, chalices, rosaries, reproductions of saints and the Madonna were and still are produced by PAX on an industrial scale. PAX even makes Orthodox crosses which are exported to Russia.

Little by little Piasecki started invading other fields. He took over small, privately run factories whose owners found themselves crippled by taxes and smothered by red tape. His strength — in the beginning, at least — lay in the fact that PAX was exempted from taxation, as it was considered a cultural organization, and also in the fact that, thanks to his high connections in the Party, he could obtain the raw materials, the machinery, and the permits he needed. The owners, who were living in constant fear of being expropriated anyhow, were only too glad to make a deal with PAX, and generally Piasecki hired them as managers of their own firms with a salary much higher than the meager profits they had been making.

Besides printing books and making religious objects, PAX produces records, chemicals, plastic materials, kitchen and household goods, detergents, floor polish, and many other things. It has no large factory, nor does it control any important branch of the economy. Rather it concentrates on sideline activities which are too small for the state to bother with and which the Communist economy planners are only too glad to forget about. Still, Piasecki has built a small industrial empire which employs nearly forty thousand people.

While PAX had weathered the Vatican condemnation with relative ease, it received a shattering blow from the 1956 upheaval. The Polish nearrevolution, which coincided with the Hungarian uprising, saw the return to power of Gomulka and the victory of the liberal faction of the Polish Communist Party over the Stalinist wing. Piasecki, who was tied hand and foot to the official Party machinery, made an almost fatal tactical error. He sided quite openly with the Stalinist faction, and even proclaimed his sympathies in an article entitled “The Instinct of the Nation.”

In view of the fact that Cardinal Wyszynski had openly supported Gomulka, this was, to say the least, a very strange thing for a self-styled Catholic to do. The Catholics who supported PAX, and particularly the priests, who already felt a certain embarrassment in collaborating with the Communists and did so only out of expediency, were certainly not disposed to back the Stalinist faction of the Party — and the losing faction, for that matter. They abandoned Piasecki en masse.

The 1956 upheaval was also a bad blow for Piasecki economically, since the Gomulka regime deprived the PAX enterprises of tax exemption. It looked as if the whole strange outfit were definitely going down the drain.

But Piasecki’s genius for weathering storms and his innate ability in political intrigue and maneuvering saved him. For a time he withdrew from the national scene, and PAX switched from big politics to local politics. The business concerns were kept going, and, despite taxation, they were even enlarged. Piasecki dropped the old pretense of PAX’s constituting a bridge between Communism and Catholicism and took up a new line. PAX, he said, had become “a factor which stimulated a constructive and patriotic participation of non-Party people in building socialism in Poland.”

The role of acting as an intermediary between the Church and the state was taken over by Znak (“the Sign”), a group of genuine Catholic intellectuals which had the support of the episcopate.

Subsequent events have been developing in Piasecki’s favor. The Stalinist faction came to terms with Gomulka and regained much of its political influence. PAX naturally benefited by this. Relations between the state and the Church deteriorated, and Znak turned out to be a failure.

Gradually, almost imperceptibly, PAX crept back into national politics. In the 1961 elections three candidates from PAX were elected, while Znak’s representation was reduced from nine to five members. A few priests started cautiously approaching Piasecki again, and there are a dozen or more who either work in the organization or write articles for his magazines. They are still forbidden by the cardinal to write for the PAX weekly paper.

Another sign of Piasecki’s comeback was the fact that a priest representing PAX, Mieczyslaw Suwala, was included in the Polisli delegation to the Moscow World Peace Congress for Disarmament.

During the first session of the Ecumenical Council Piasecki turned up in Rome on a mysterious mission. He stayed in a small hotel near the Piazza Navona, and he carefully avoided the press and the photographers. He went around armed with a pistol, a melodramatic gesture justified by the fact that he was supposed to be on the list of war criminals of the Israeli government, which could have asked the Italian government for his extradition. But Piasecki had taken precautions against this danger: his Communist friends in Warsaw had provided him with a diplomatic passport.

As for the motives of his trip to Rome, two suggestions have been made: that he tried to have the ban of his book revoked by the Vatican; and that he wanted in some way to insert himself in the negotiations between the Holy See and Poland, which had been set in motion by the visit to Pope John of the Polish state councillor, the Catholic writer Jerzy Zawieyski. Anyway, he failed to be received by any outstanding Vatican personality, and he left without having accomplished anything.

Lately PAX has been taking more steps forward, The so-called “partisan” faction, made up of former members of the Communist underground, has been gaining more influence inside the Central Committee of the Party since the spring of this year. The partisans favor a return to neo-Stalinism. They are strongly anti-Semitic and extreme nationalists. They would also like the state to exercise tighter control over the Church. Piasecki has been skillfully taking advantage of the fight for power going on inside the Central Committee. Besides, the business side of his organization is flourishing, and this, of course, also helps.

As far as his relations with the Vatican are concerned, Piasecki, after the death of John XXIII, sent to Rome his closest friend and the vice chairman of PAX, Jerzy Hagmajer, with the task of trying to establish contact with the entourage of the new Pope, Paul VI — so far, it appears, in vain. But we have not heard the last of this Polish Proteus.