Mary, Queen of Poland

POLONIAE TOIUS EUROPAE ADVERSUS BARBARORUM NATIONUM...

FIRMISSIMO PROPUGNACULO

(To Poland, Most Steadfast Fortress for the Whole of Europe Against the Barbarian Peoples)¹

This title, ascribed to Poland in 1573, is found on a triumphal Parisian arch erected in honor of Henry Valois's election to the Polish throne. It describes appropriately and prophetically Poland's commitment to the defense of faith in Christ and His Church in the period before, during, and following the Reformation. This defense of the Catholic faith continued bravely throughout the political turmoil of the 20th century. In his comprehensive work on the history of Poland, "God's Playground," Davies explains that "antemurale," or its Polish equivalent "przedmurze" (bulwark), is a term accepted after the fall of Constantinople in 1467 to describe Poland's "Place in Europe" from the time of its conversion to Catholicism forward. The term "Antemurale" is in favor with many Catholic writers, and has even been adopted by the Vatican's Institute of Polish History as the title of its journal. The opening paragraph of Davies' chapter that shares this title describes it succinctly:

At any point between AD 1000 and 1939, quotations can be found to illustrate the conviction that Poland was, is, and always will be, the last outpost of western civilization. In the earliest centuries it was seen to be holding the line against the Prussian and Lithuanian pagans; in the modern period against Islam and the Muscovite scismatics; in the twentieth century, against militant communism. At all times, Poland's 'place in Europe'... was quite clear; it was the antemurale, 'the bulwark.'² 

The following quote is attributed to Jerzy Mirewicz S.J. in an attempt to describe the suffering, yet steadfast Catholic nature of the collective Polish soul in the struggle for political freedom in her seemingly impossible circumstances:

By all reasoning the Polish people should not even exist. I can never forget a French specialist on Polish history who once told me that "even if you reconcile yourself to the fact that the Poles emerged on this vast plain of territory, unprotected by natural boundaries, surrounded by stronger and larger nations, by all historical logic they should have disappeared a long time ago."³

G.K. Chesterton revealed his admiration for this same abstract quality in his remarks after the Battle of Warsaw in 1920, the "Miracle on the Vistula," which providentially coincided with the feast of the Assumption. The post WWI peace saw the reemergence of Poland from the partitioning of its land at the end of the 18th century. During this partitioning period, despite political division, the heart of Poland remained united within the overarching unity of the Church and Catholic culture, this romantic idea is beyond the rationalization common to many authors of the era but was explained by Chesterton as follows, an explanation which made his reception akin to that of royalty upon his visit to Poland in 1927:

When the Poles defeated the Bolsheviks in the field of battle, it was the old chivalric tradition defeating everything that is modern, everything necessitarian, everything that is mechanical in method and materialistic in philosophy. It was the Marxist notion that everything is inevitable defeated by the Christian notion that nothing is inevitable-no, not even what has already happened.⁴

The earliest known composition in the Polish language⁵ is the hymn of the Bogurodzica (Mother of God). It reveals the Marian Catholicism of a nation who's faith in divine providence lies within the mantle of Mary's mediational heart. It was sung before the battle of Grunwald by her knights: 

Bogu rodzica dzewica              Virgin, Mother of God,

Bogem slawena maria!             Maria, honored by God,

Utwego syna gospodzina,         Your Son's patroness,

Matko swolena maria,              Maria, chosen Mother!

Sziszci nam, Kyrieleyson!         Assist us. Kyrie Elesion!

Just as salvation history depended on Mary's fiat, Polish and European Christian history also has depended on the collective soul of an emerging Catholic Poland to give her fiat. This  "yes" was articulated through her obedience to God's will through her obedience to Rome, an obedience that Mary requests from all Catholics. The people's pious personal practices and devotion to the Sacraments, especially the Eucharist,  form the circulatory system through which Mary's heart distributes Christ's mercy and graces. The protective mantle of Mary unites the Polish Church  within her boundaries and in the universality of the Catholic Church. John Paul II, as Archbishop Karol Cardinal Wojtyla, offered us this description of the Polish  resolve  in a sermon given in Cracow in celebration of the Third of May, 1978, the  same year he would be elected  Pontiff:

...everything that we have lived through in the course of our history, especially in the most painful periods of partition, occupation, insurrection, struggle, and suffering, has had the effect of pumping both the historical and contemporary life of the entire nation through the heart of every Pole. Nothing which is Polish can be alien or indifferent to Him. It was the great poet Stanislaw Wyspianski who asked his listeners to gather round a little girl, to whom he said, "What can you hear beating there inside you? It's your heart. And that heart is what Poland really is"... After all, each one of us possesses a heritage within us- a heritage to which generations and centuries of achievement and calamity, of triumph and failure, have contributed: a heritage which somehow takes deeper root and grows new tissues from every one of us. We cannot live without it. It is our soul. It is this heritage, variously labeled the Fatherland or the Nation, by which we live. As Christians, we live by this Polish heritage, this Polish millennium, this Polish Christianity of ours. Such is the law of reality...⁶

The 1979 image of John Paul II, walking humbly  through the infamous gates of Auschwitz accompanied by a group of Polish bishops and  priests, is a portrait of a faith enduring. The picture is both a portrait of a nation's faith enduring, in spite of the suffering and attempted extermination of its inhabitants and its culture, and a portrait of a personal faith enduring, through the difficult but blessed life of this man. This picture was taken on his walk to visit the cell of the Polish martyr St. Maximilian Kolbe, who through his actions showed the ultimate self sacrifice in imitation of Christ. Beneath John Paul II's peaceful, prayerful and forgiving countenance is the essence of a soul that has faced the challenges of faithfully following his religious vocation within the context of the political occupations of his homeland, first as a young clandestine seminarian during WWII, and later as Bishop and Pope under the Soviet occupation.

This figure, more than any other in contemporary history, eminently represents the Polish Catholic soul. Out of the turmoil which followed the brief political respite which allowed Poland to re-emerge after World War I was born this holy son of Poland. From its heartland he came to lead the world in a universal faith and hope for freedom and social justice. By now many details of his biography have become common knowledge to Catholics and non-Catholics alike. His intense Catholicism, loving demeanor, tolerance of, and active communication in authentic love with people of all faiths reflects the quality of the nation itself, for Poland has always had an authentic Christian faith with its accompanying true Catholic ecumenism. In his book, titled "The Thought of the Man Who Became Pope John Paul II," Rocco Buttiglione asserts that the words of John Paul II's 1979 homily in Victory Square in Warsaw, regarding the importance of Christianity to Polish history and of the importance of Catholic Poland to human history, express "the distinctive character of his thinking" which captures and reflects "the specific experience of the Polish nation and culture." ⁷

I must...ask myself why, precisely in 1978, after so many centuries of a well established tradition in this field, a son of the Polish nation, of the land of Poland, was called to the chair of St. Peter. Christ demanded...of the Apostles...that they should be his witnesses...to the end of the earth. Have we not the right to think that Poland has become nowadays the land of a particularly responsible witness?...To Poland the Church brought Christ, the key to understanding that great and fundamental reality that is man...Christ cannot be kept out of the history of man (this is) an act against man...the history of each person unfolds in Jesus Christ. In him it becomes the history of salvation...The history of the nation deserves proper appreciation according to the contribution which it has brought to the development of man and humanity, to the intelligence, to the heart and to the conscience....Without Christ, it is not possible to understand and to appreciate the contribution of the Polish nation to the development of man and of his humanity in the past, and his contribution also in our days....Without Christ it is impossible to understand this nation, with a past so splendid and at the same time so terribly difficult....to understand the history of Poland from Stanislaw in Skalka to Maximillian Kolbe in Oswiecim, if one does not apply, to them also, that unique and fundamental criterion which bears the name of Jesus Christ.⁸   

The history of the country of Poland is a story of the Church suffering, militant and triumphant. She has emerged from out of the twentieth century as one of the most influential and predominantly Catholic countries in Europe, if not the world. An examination of her history from the baptism of Prince Mieszko I in 965 and after reveals the piety, devotion and dependence on Jesus through Mary which has allowed her to endure as a light to the Church and the world seeking freedom and truth. Throughout this period her people's destiny has been intertwined inextricably with her faith, regardless of the outside forces which have blown her along like a ship lost at sea. Whenever all hope for her survival seems gone, the sky clears to reveal the shining star of Christ which guides her to safety carried in the loving arms of His Mother. In examining the history of the Catholic Church in Europe this country stands out as a unique and enduring witness to the kerygma and perseverance of the apostolic Church. While suffering from political domination in the temporal reality of its existence, an ideological warfare which was directed at its spiritual consciousness, the nation, while unable to successfully resist the long periods of suffering at their neighbor's hands, nevertheless has stood spiritually through the hearts of the people. This is evidenced throughout the many periods of oppression and survival. Through faith and justified resistance she has stood as a lighthouse amidst the sea of confusion and terror which has returned again and again in the form of atheistic ideologies which threaten to extinguish the light of Christ in western civilization. These threats have been met undauntedly by the heart of the people united under the banner of Mary, and this nation, with the Blessed Mother's Immaculate Heart adopted as its own, has come forth from her turbulent history carrying the light of true freedom.