The priest who defied an Orwellian nightmare in 1984

What really happened on the night of October 19-20, 1984? The circumstances surrounding the death of Polish priest, Blessed Fr. Jerzy Popiełuszko, whose body was found in the Vistula a few days later, remain an enigma.

The arrest and conviction of three officers at the time has never made it possible to trace the entire chain of responsibility back to its source. All the more so as some Ministry of the Interior documents were destroyed by agents of the regime when it fell in 1989. A recent conference at Rome's Gregorian University, attended by several experts on the period, sheds new light on the persecution of the Catholic Church in Poland at the time—in particular, the fate of Fr. Jerzy Popiełuszko.

Inspired by the courage of St. John Paul II and Bl. Cardinal Wyszynski, between 1982 and 1984 Fr. Popiełuszko delivered powerful homilies at his 26 “Masses for our homeland,” celebrated in Warsaw at the parish of St. Stanislaus Kostka, where he was vicar. According to historian Ewa Czaczkowska, these celebrations provided participants with “two hours of freedom,” and “many testimonies show that these prayers enabled a real spiritual healing of fear, hatred against the authorities, or the desire for revenge.”

By breaking the chains of hatred, the martyred priest — who never attacked anyone, but drew his reflections from the truth of the Gospel — revealed to Poland and the world the fragility of this regime. He thus encouraged a resistance that would lead to the fall of communism five years later.

Beatified in 2010, Jerzy Popiełuszko was not in fact the only priest murdered in Poland during the last years of the Communist regime. A total of 10 priests were killed between 1976 and 1989.

Historian Jakub Gołębiowski, of the Institute for National Memory, recounts that over the years, “the Communists devised new and increasingly sophisticated tactics to fight the Church. [...] Every priest, from the moment he entered the seminary until his death, was treated as an enemy of the Communist system and an agent of a foreign state, the Vatican.” Within the Ministry of the Interior, “Department 4” was dedicated to monitoring the Catholic Church.

Political scientist Andrzej Grajewski sees a coincidence between the year of Fr. Popiełuszko's death, 1984, and the year chosen by George Orwell for the title of his eponymous dystopian novel denouncing a totalitarian surveillance society. Andrzej Grajewski notes many similarities between the totalitarian world described by the British writer and the reality of Communist Poland.

In the 1980s, following General Jaruzelski's proclamation of a “state of war,” the country saw the departure of a million of its nationals, many of whom were among its most dynamic members. The security services reinforced a surveillance system worthy of Orwell's “Big Brother.” There were thousands of officers in charge of monitoring the population, linked to thousands of informers scattered across all sectors of economic and social life, and even in parishes.

But contrary to Orwell's dystopian account, the Catholic Church offered “a space of freedom that the authorities could never control.” This infuriated the regime. Fr. Popiełuszko's “Masses for our homeland” were referred to at the time as “hate sessions” by the government spokesman. This is a surprising parallel to the “two minutes of hate” described in Orwell's novel to arouse negative emotions and make the population manipulable by propaganda.

In December 1983, Fr. Popiełuszko was arrested. In a crude set-up, weapons and explosives — planted by agents of the regime, naturally — were discovered in his personal apartment. The intervention of the General Secretary of the Episcopate initially led to his release. But various forms of harassment and provocation soon followed. This culminated in an attempt to provoke a “car accident” on October 13, 1984, followed by his abduction and execution six days later.

The wave of emotion and protests anticipated by the architects of this plot was supposed to justify a new authoritarian tightening of the screws, as part of the regime's internal settling of scores. Andrzej Grajewski sees in this sequence “a veritable Orwellian scenario of social engineering, using emotions to conduct a cold-blooded political game.”

In reality, however, the priest's funeral took place in conditions of great dignity and calm, reviving massive non-violent resistance to the regime. “Big Brother lost and the totalitarian system began to disintegrate,” concludes Andrzej Grajewski 40 years later.

Today, pilgrims from all over the world pay their respects at Blessed Fr. Popiełuszko's grave in Warsaw. There, they find energy to resist abuses of all kinds, whether they come from authoritarian regimes or democracies in which religious freedom and freedom of conscience are undermined by various forms of “Orwellian” conditioning.

Resisting the grip of ideologies and distorted language, and living our faith as an act of perpetual search for truth and freedom, remain essential challenges for Christians today.