I’m in Vienna right now, and stumbling down for a tourist breakfast I found a glorious story1 in Der Standard, bylined from Warsaw.
A Polish Catholic radio Station, Radio Marja, whose programme could be summarised as “back to the2 Thirties” has displeased the Vatican with the strain of anti-semitism in its broadcasts. At the risk of another torrent of green ink, I will point out that there is a long history of popular anti-semitism in Poland, as well as of its opposite, and that the last pogrom on Polish soil took place in 1946 when the rest of Europe had rather outgrown the practice. There is a sort of patriotic Pole who talks as if every single communist was actually a Jew, and not a Pole at all.
These are clearly the people running Radio Marja. There has been trouble there before, and at the end of March someone called Stanislaw Michailkiewicz broadcast a commentary attacking the Jewish societies which have for the last few years been reclaiming synagogues, graveyards, hospitals, and schools which had belonged to the community.
There was a storm of criticism. The Vatican wrote to the Polish Bishops’ Council demanding that they take steps against the radio station. Within Poland, the critics included the country’s official Council on Media Ethics, a voluntary body which seems to correspond to the British press council. Radio Marja retaliated by setting up a committee of its own supporters, “The Independent Ethical Council for the Media”, whose chairman, a professor emeritus of philosophy at Warsaw University, explained to the listeners of “the Catholic voice in your house” what lay behind the whole thing.
“The Third Reich took the moral backbone out of the Germans, and [Pope Benedict’s] hasn’t grown back yet”.
This is a remarkable thing for any Catholic radio station to say about a Pope, but Professor Wolniewicz is a remarkable philosopher, went on in a later broadcast: “”The terrible suspicion grows in me,” said Wolniewicz to Radio Marja’s audience of millions, “that the people who have organised the latest attacks against you are trying to exploit the fact that the Pope is a German, and that it must seem extraordinarily difficult for him openly to defend anyone who has been accused of antisemitism by the media, and possibly even by some of his closest advisers.”
In other words, the Pope is not just a German, tainted by Nazism: he is a crypto-Nazi who is being manipulated by the Jews.
After I had stopped laughing at this story, and after I had stopped marvelling at the inexhaustible creativity of the religious imagination, which can breed such monsters as a German Pope being manipulated by the Jews against honest Polish patriots, I felt (how can one, here, in Vienna, avoid it?) a chill of real horror at persistence and versatility of anti-semitism throughout history.
The Polish bishops, who help to fund Radio Marja have so far kept silent about the matter. They have to make a decision soon, though: Pope Benedict is due to make another foreign visit at the end of May, and this time he will be coming to Poland.
1 Some details of this translation may not be accurate. I don’t have a dictionary handy; my German has not had much practice for many years now; and when I saw on the German for “of the ethical council” I read it at first as a reference to the little-known pre-Socratic philosopher, Ethikrates.
2 I don’t know enough Polish politics to be sure whether these are the nineteen, seventeen, or the fifteen thirties
Whenever I tune in to Radio Maryja online I find myself exposed to dangerous concentrations of Catholic religiosity that I can’t take for more than a few minutes at a time, so I can’t speak from direct experience, but my understanding is that RM in recent years has generally been quite careful to avoid overtly anti-semitic comment. I wonder if Michalkiewicz’s remarks are the product of changes in RM’s political position: the church hierarchy’s increasing concern about RM’s political activities, and the warm relations the station now enjoys with the conservative government that was elected last autumn.
The church authorities, both in the Vatican and locally, are unhappy that a single priest, Father Rydzyk, is running his own nationalist political operation. That is not how things are supposed to be done in the Catholic Church. Nor does the Catholic-nationalist vision embraced by RM sit comfortably with that of what is supposed to be a universal church.
Michalkiewicz’s words should be understand within this nationalist context. It’s not just Jews but foreign interests in general that are the object of resentment, suspicion and paranoia. Under communism, opposition was nationalist above all; to today’s nationalists, the post-communist period has been one in which the country has been manipulated by foreign influences and its assets sold off to foreigners. Radio Maryja and the like-minded daily paper Nasz Dziennik are seen by nationalists as isolated media beacons that are Polish-owned and speak for Polish interests. In a similar spirit, a belief that strategic economic assets should remain under national control underlies the current government’s diffidence about privatisation.
Which Thirties would RM like to return to? Certainly not those of previous centuries, in which Poland was a notably multicultural nation. The identification of Polishness with Polish Catholicism, to the exclusion of all else, is a relatively recent phenomenon.
My own idea of a glorious Radio Maryja story is the one I did for the New Statesman a while back about the ‘mohair berets’, the pious female pensioners who make up the station’s core audience. Maybe I should get round to posting it.
That piece is online “here”:http://www.newstatesman.com/World/200512190006 .
R
A riot then broke out as to who was going to make Father Tadeusz ‘a lovely cup of tea’.
>After I had stopped laughing at this story, and after I had stopped marvelling at the inexhaustible creativity of the religious imagination, which can breed such monsters as a German Pope being manipulated by the Jews against honest Polish patriots
it gets worse. they crashed those planes into the WTC!
Jews did WTC .com
by the bye, i don’t believe this has anything to do with religion, but everything to do with culture-fights.
What an idiot wrote this article!… He/she obviously never has listened to Radio Maryja him(her)self. That radio is Catholic but (except from prayers and faith issues analysis) also full of information and analysis of the current situation of Poland and Europe. Having the numerous broadcasts on the contemporary politics, social, environmental, historical, health services problems, not forgetting cooking recipies or health advises of health specialists it’s rather something of an university on the radio.
Re antisemitism, Poland has always been a refuge for Jews running away from other European, less friendly countries… Why would they want to be in Poland if it was anti-semitic? ha, ha!
The author’s ridiculous conclusion that the Pope must be a Crypto-Nazi amazes me – in which world does he/she live!…
Instead of demonizing Poland and its citizens he/she should rather try to get some solid information from the source – not repeating some false views and slanders.