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Poland's shrewd, 77-year-old Primate, Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, has pressed this opposition role ever since he became Archbishop of Gniezno and Warsaw in 1948. When Cardinal Wojtyla joined the battle, he used his intellectual powers to persuade both disaffected liberal Catholics and Marxists to take the church seriously. The new Pope, says a Czech Jesuit in exile, has been "more dangerous for Communist countries than Cardinal Wyszynski, because he combats Marxism also on theoretical grounds, and with such success that they have been hard put to refute his arguments."
Wojtyla's election poses embarrassing difficulties for the party. The government discouraged a visit from Pope Paul VI for the church's millennial celebration in 1966, but it can hardly discourage a trip home by a native son. Next spring Poland celebrates the 900th anniversary of the martyrdom of a national spiritual hero, St. Stanislaw of Cracow. Polish bishops last week formally asked the new Pope to attend. If the regime tries to keep him away, the volatile Poles could take to the streets in protest. If the new Pope visits, they will surely take to the streets in jubilation.
Western observers were puzzled about what Wojtyla's election might mean elsewhere in the Communist world, especially in regard to the Vatican's strategy of Ostpolitik. Diplomatic dealings with Communist regimes to ease persecution of Catholics were pressed assiduously by Pope Paul VI. The imponderable factor is not so much Wojtyla, who knows when to roar and when to purr, but rather the Communist governments and the Christians who have to live with them, especially in the other nations in Eastern Europe.
In Hungary, every diocese now .has a bishop for the first time since 1948. But while an estimated 65% of the population are Catholic, far fewer attend religious services. That is partly the result of a long vacuum in Catholic leadership during Jozsef Cardinal Mindszenty's 15 years of asylum in the U.S. embassy in Budapest. The appeal of the spiritual is by no means dead, though. When Protestants invited Billy Graham to Hungary last year, his first rally drew 10,000.
Alone among European Communist countries, Yugoslavia has an ambassador to the Holy See, and there is a papal nuncio in Belgrade—although Roman Catholics are outnumbered by members of the Orthodox churches. The Vatican is free to appoint bishops of its choice, including several who have been political prisoners. A Catholic press publishes missals, books and journals, with the proviso that they have no political content. (The government worries particularly about nationalist sentiments among the predominantly Catholic Croats.) Yugoslav Christians are relatively lucky. In 1967 neighboring Albania proclaimed itself the world's "first atheist state," and little has been heard from the remaining Christians in the country since.
In the German Democratic Republic, Party Chief Erich Honecker seemed to be moving last spring toward a thaw in relations with the principal Protestant denominations, which claim 9.5 million followers among 17 million people, but almost nothing has come of it. The minority Catholic Church has no voice of consequence.