The name of the factory suburb on the outskirts of Cracow is as drab and anonymous as the upright slabs of apartments that crowd its barren hills: Nowa Huta—New Foundry. Conceived by the Polish Communist state as a counterweight to "reactionary" central Cracow, Nowa Huta is home to the giant, 35,000-employee Lenin Steelworks, one of the largest in Europe. As originally planned, the town was to have schools, shops, theaters, recreation halls and a hospital—but no church. The workers wanted one. After the anti-regime riots of 1956, they won grudging permission from the state to build a church, and then had to struggle with bureaucratic obstructions for eleven years before the first spadeful of earth was even turned. Not until 1977 was the massive, modernistic church, standing at the junction of Karl Marx and Great Proletarian avenues, finally ready to be consecrated. Cracow's Karol Cardinal Wojtyia triumphantly blessed its opening.
Loyal to Marx and Lenin, Communist Poland officially promotes atheism. In his most famous observation on religion, Karl Marx argued: "It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness." Lenin and Stalin systematically sought to suppress and eventually eliminate religion from their Communist society.
In some Communist countries the effort has been brutally successful. Not in Poland. Of the country's 35 million people, 33 million are Roman Catholics, most of them still churchgoers—including, on the sly, a number of party officials. A popular joke tells of a district Communist chief reporting to higher-ups that his drive to instill Communism is a big success. "After all," he boasts, "only 85% of the people in the district attend church regularly."
Poland has been earnestly Catholic for more than 1,000 years, Rome's eastern bulwark against Mongols, Turks and Orthodox Russia. When Prussia, Russia and Austria carved Poland out of existence in three 18th century partitions, the nation's language and culture were kept alive within the spiritual fortress of the Roman Catholic Church until an independent Poland was re-created after World War I.
Ironically, Poland became more homogeneously Catholic at the end of the second World War, when Moscow annexed the eastern portions and, with those lands, most of the country's remaining Orthodox Christians. The Catholic Church, shorn of extensive landholdings, was now persecuted and poor, but respected all the more for its resistance to both Nazi and Soviet occupations. As Communist cadres consolidated their power, the church became in a new way the font of national pride and cherished freedoms.
Today, after 31 years of Communist government, Poland has more than 20,000 Catholic priests—6,000 more than it had on the eve of war in 1938—and some 32,000 nuns, fully twice the 1938 figure. The faith penetrates nearly every level of society. A vigorous Catholic intelligentsia has grown up in the Communist years and developed a link with human rights activists. The regime fears to damp down lest it trigger more protest. Concedes one Communist official ruefully: "The church is an unofficial opposition."