Return of the Native

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confessor and the pastor of Warsaw's Saviour Church: "Because the government is absolutely isolated from society, it feels that the church is less dangerous than a legitimate political opposition." But if the church is strong in moral authority, it is hamstrung by the fact that it has no legal standing in Polish society and must constantly engage in a cat-and-mouse game with the state to protect its interests.

Difficult months of bargaining preceded the Pope's visit to Poland. John Paul was originally supposed to return home in August 1982 for the celebration at Czestochowa but the military crackdown intervened and Jaruzelski postponed the trip. When the government finally invited the Pope, he asked Jaruzelski to grant a general amnesty. The authorities adamantly refused. Warsaw also balked at including the cities of Gdansk and Lublin in the papal itinerary, fearing that supporters of the banned union, which was particularly strong in those two cities, might use the Pope's visit to stage demonstrations. The Vatican, for its part, would not give the government advance copies of the Pope's speeches except when an official reply was expected, and it refused to discuss barring Walesa from meeting the Pope.

In the weeks leading up to the visit, Polish clerics and government officials have been smiling through clenched teeth, but the struggle has continued in the official press. Challenging an unwritten understanding that granted the episcopate more permits to build churches, the hard-line weekly Rzeczywistosc bluntly questioned whether there were not too many churches going up at a time when the nation could ill afford them. The Warsaw daily Zycie Warszawy attacked the Roman Catholic community on a different front, claiming that it was "morally ambiguous" for the church to call for a general amnesty while giving aid to Solidarity's underground. Even Jaruzelski entered the fray, assailing "certain clergymen who espouse antisocialist activities and attitudes."

Especially controversial are the parish relief committees that have sprung up to channel food and funds to the families of the imprisoned (see box). A Jesuit priest from the city of Kalisz was sentenced to two months' imprisonment for collecting aid for the relatives of political prisoners. When the teen-age son of a relief worker died after he was mauled by the police, Cardinal Glemp lashed back, calling on the government to stop "infringing human and civic rights." Although the authorities have promised to investigate the event, Poles expect no results. When the Pope spotted the dead boy's mother in a crowded Warsaw church, he spoke to her softly for several moments, then embraced her and kissed her on the cheek.

Given the atmosphere of mistrust, church leaders were worried that the state might prove overzealous in protecting the Pope. Clerics in the industrial city of Katowice reportedly scotched a proposal by local security officers to build watchtowers around the site of an open-air Mass, fearing that it would make the faithful feel as if they were in a concentration camp. Residents of Cracow also wondered why a park that had been used for a papal Mass in 1979 had been subdivided with wooden railings that gave it the appearance of a cattle pen. The likely explanation: it was a clever way to keep the Pope from mingling with the people. A