POLAND
Sunday Catholic Weekly
Jerzy Robert Nowak
For the last several months the Polish mass media have been flooded with a shockingly high wave of anti-Church articles. In the post-communist Przeglad, 5 October 2004, it was even written about the possibility of ‘a new war’ between the Left and the Church. One could create a truly long ‘White Book’ about the fight with the Church only on the basis of the ‘literary output’ in mass media in the last half year. You could hardly see such a huge and concentrated amount of anti-Church articles in Poland in this relatively short period after the famous Gomulka’s smear campaign had been launched in 1966 on the occasion of the Millennium. (One should remember that in Gomulka times there were no periodicals, which would publish as many aggressive and lousy anti-Church articles as in today’s Fakty i Mity as well as Urban’s Nie.) What is the reason of this sudden and violent anti-Church explosion in mass media after so many years of pretending that the post-communists wanted a lasting agreement with the Church, and after their claims that they renounced all anti-Church and anti-religious phobias once for all? The answer is all too simple. The post-communists feel more and more isolated from the society when new political affairs and embarrassments have rapidly been revealed. And the polling squaring is at hand. Being more and more panic-stricken the post-communists decided to resort to the method they had tested long ago – to look for substitute subjects in order to divert people maximally from their pitiful affairs and deviousness.
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