To Murder a Priest: Remembering Blessed Jerzy Popiełuszko

Forty years have passed since October 19, 1984, when Polish priest and Solidarity chaplain Jerzy Popiełuszko was kidnapped and murdered by agents of the Communist secret police in Poland.

The then-37-year-old priest was abducted from his car, tortured, tied to rocks in such a way that any movement to free himself would further choke him, and then thrown into a Wisła River reservoir to drown. His beaten and decomposing body was recovered on October 30.

It’s hard to capture just how much has changed in those forty years. Even by the brutal “standards” of socialism, Poles in 1984 were shocked and outraged that the Soviet lackies running Poland would do what they did—as evidenced by the trauma to the recovered corpse–to a priest. It was one of the galvanizing moments ensuring that the fire of Solidarity John Paul II lit with his 1979 Warsaw visit would stay alive, despite the rulers’ attempts to pretend otherwise.

We should not forget that, 35 years ago this fall, the socialist satrapies behind the Iron Curtain: first Poland, then Hungary, Bulgaria, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Romania began falling like dominoes, gone by December. Or that, two years later, humanity progressed with the fall of the USSR. I have no doubt the sacrifice and intercession of Blessed Jerzy Popiełuszko—alongside millions of other Christian martyrs—contributed to the consignment of those abominations to the dustbin of history.

Popiełuszko’s engagement with Solidarity started in Warsaw, where he was a vicar at St. Stanislaus Kostka Church. Solidarność was legalized after the tense strikes in the shipyards of the Baltic Coast in August 1980, a year after John Paul’s visit. Westerners don’t realize how that visit taught Poles solidarity: as millions of Catholics filled the streets in Poland to see “their” Pope, they also saw each other. They realized, after 34 years of state propaganda, that they were not alone and that there were more of them than the Reds. They were realists: they knew they would not suddenly rearrange the geopolitical order, but they were both full of faith and convinced they had to better their own lives within the possible. (When I spent three months in Poland in 1989, as the system was in its death agonies, I watched the currency devalue from a black market rate of $1 = 3,000 Polish złoty in May to $1 = 15,000 in August. What would Americans do if their dollar in May was worth 20 cents in August?)

Popiełuszko was asked by Warsaw steel mill workers who were preparing to strike in 1980 to come and hear confessions and celebrate Mass for them. Poles remembered how, in 1970, the regime had used helicopter gunships against striking shipyard workers on the Baltic Coast. Anything was possible.

The young priest’s engagement with the workers perdured, and he continued as their “chaplain.” A year later Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, the traitor the Soviets had installed in Warsaw, declared martial law against his own country, declaring Solidarity illegal.

Popiełuszko’s response was twofold: organizing charitable help for many women and children whose husbands were in the socialists’ internment camps and—more irritating to the Reds—beginning a monthly “Mass for the Homeland” on a Sunday at St. Stanislaus in Warsaw. The “Masses for the Homeland” were intended to pray for those killed, imprisoned, or “missing” at the regime’s hands and for the restoration of some “normalcy” in Poland. Begun in January 1982, they would last—and attract ever-greater attendance—through September 1984, one month before Popiełuszko’s murder. Once the “Solidarity priest” was slaughtered, other priests continued the tradition.

New York priest Msgr. Michael Wrenn translated the homilies from those Masses, which appeared in book form in 1986 as The Way of My Cross: Masses at Warsaw. That Catholic social teaching is a “best kept secret” is a tired but somewhat true saying: Popiełuszko took Catholic social teaching and applied it to what was happening in Poland in the Eighties, combining it with Poland’s rich Catholic literary and hymnody traditions and the liturgy of the particular Sunday to enable the Church to speak to the “signs of the times” in people’s lives, families, and workplaces. Four decades later, those homilies are worth rereading.

But they irritated the Communists. Between planted “evidence” in Popiełuszko’s rectory apartment and unsuccessful pressures on Archbishop Glemp to silence him, the young priest was in the regime’s crosshairs. It should be noted that while Popiełuszko was the most prominent target, numerous priests of his generation who spoke in defense of their flocks died under “mysterious circumstances” at the regime’s hands.

We know now that the initial plan to kill Fr. Popiełuszko was to occur on October 13. On October 19, he went to pray with Catholics in Bydgoszcz, a town about 140 miles west of Warsaw. On the way back, his driver was forced to stop on the road, the young priest was seized and thrown into the secret police car’s trunk, and his bestial martyrdom began. The country waited ten days for his body to be found in the Wisła River.

Four decades have passed since those events. Two generations have grown up knowing freedom, some even to bite the ecclesiastical hand that protected them. But the martyrdom of Blessed Jerzy Popiełuszko remains a glorious moment in the Church’s witness to social justice and human rights in the 20^th century. We pray for his canonization.

• The Polish composer Andrzej Panufnik composed a “Bassoon Concerto” to commemorate Fr. Popiełuszko’s death. You can listen here.