Must Rethink Communism, Pope Tells Poles

In an emotional day that included prayers at an old Nazi death camp only 40 miles from the Soviet border, Pope John Paul II boldly exhorted his fellow Poles on Tuesday to re-think their Communist system.

“I risk expressing the view that it is necessary to think over many questions of social life, structures, organization of labor, all the way to the very premises of the contemporary state organisms,” the pontiff told a scientific conference in Lublin, a city that the Polish authorities once declared off-limits to him because of its proximity to the Soviet Union.

Deplores Nazi Atrocities

In the course of the day, he deplored Nazi atrocities in World War II and recalled the activities of two Polish Catholic heroes. Police security was uncommonly heavy throughout.

Speaking at Lublin University, the only Roman Catholic institution of higher learning in the Communist world, where he taught ethics for 24 years, John Paul urged “relentless, unyielding questioning” so that the younger generation of Poles can “see a future for themselves in their own homeland.”

His largely philosophical discourse emphasized that “service to the quest for knowledge, namely service to the truth, becomes the foundation for shaping man.”

The speech, which could not have pleased the Pope’s Communist hosts, followed a moving visit to Majdanek, the World War II concentration camp in a southeastern suburb of Lublin. The government maintains it as a park-like monument to the people, estimated at 360,000 to 1 million and mostly Jewish, who died there at the hands of the Nazis.

Flowers From Survivor

Kneeling before a mound of ashes and bones at a massive gray concrete mausoleum erected after the war, the Pope prayed and fell into what his spokesman called “deep concentration” for 10 minutes. Then he received a gift of flowers from a tearful camp survivor, Dr. Wanda Osowska, who kissed his ring several times. The Pope in turn kissed the white-haired woman on the forehead and hugged her.

“Let us pray for the dead here,” he said to her, “in the consolation of faith which tells us that they live in God. You who have survived should remember everything and be witness for those now alive of everything that happened in this camp.”

‘We Must Remember’

Referring to the camp’s officers and guards, many of whom were tried and executed for war crimes, he said: “We must remember those who were the cause of this camp of death, a warning for the world today. We recommend them to the justice and mercy of God.”

The white-robed Pope then kissed the wall of the monument, which is inscribed with the words, “Let our faith be a warning to you.”

The papal spokesman, Joaquin Navarro Valls, who was close to the Pope as he left the woman’s side, said the experience was so profound that John Paul was unable to utter another word until his motorcade moved away from the mausoleum, down a line of about 700 former Majdanek inmates standing beneath the camp’s watchtowers. In the background, the gray chimneys of the crematories jutted into an overcast sky.

The Pope moved about Lublin behind a massive screen of policemen in many hundreds of security vans. Their presence appeared to have a subduing effect on the people, estimated to number 1 million, who had walked into the city for a three-hour open-air Mass at the end of the day. The pontiff saw only about a dozen banners bearing the name of the outlawed Solidarity trade union.

At least nine Solidarity members were arrested, and a tenth--Josef Pinior, a prominent Solidarity leader from Wroclaw--was warned to stay away from the Pope’s meeting with students at Lublin University.

A spokesman for Poland’s Roman Catholic Church, perhaps mindful of delicate negotiations in progress between the church and the government, declined to characterize the heavy police presence as discouraging Poles from wanting to see the Pope, but leading Catholic intellectuals said it was having a strong negative effect.

Krzystov Sliwinski, a Catholic editor, sought to explain this by comparing his feelings Tuesday to what they were when John Paul returned to Poland in 1979 and 1983.

Different Mood

“Before, we had the feeling it was our town wherever the Pope went,” he said. “Now, we don’t feel that way. We feel it is (the government’s) town. Now, with all the propaganda and police presence, there is a feeling this time that the Pope is theirs.”

The Pope ordained a number of priests at the evening Mass and piqued his Communist hosts by referring to Father Jerzy Popieluszko, a priest who was beaten to death by secret policemen in 1984.

He also quoted extensively from the diaries of the late Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, who headed the Catholic hierarchy in Poland until his death in 1981. Wyszynski often challenged Poland’s Communist leaders and was placed under house arrest from 1953 to 1956, but he strengthened the church’s position considerably.