Airing the Frictions in Poland

It is past midnight, and the woman calling the talk show on Radio Maryja, an enormously popular but highly controversial Roman Catholic station, is sobbing.

She asks permission to say a prayer for her hospitalized sister--and when she finishes, she asks if she may pray again. The priest hosting the show agrees, and she says two more prayers before going off the air.

Emotional, old-fashioned religion--the centerpiece of broadcasts on Radio Maryja--has helped the station strike a sympathetic chord among millions of Polish citizens.

But Radio Maryja (pronounced Maria) is not just about religion. Through talk shows on current events and support groups across the country, it is becoming an increasingly powerful movement with the ability to mobilize listeners around its right-wing stances.

Its supporters see themselves and the station as fighters against evil forces threatening their nation.

Its critics contend that Radio Maryja is spewing a dangerous brew of anti-German and anti-Semitic nationalism combined with working-class populism.

Owned by a Catholic missionary order and funded by listener donations, Radio Maryja is a key backer of a movement to place crosses near Auschwitz, against the protests of international Jewish organizations. It has also fiercely opposed what it claims are steps to turn the famous Gdansk shipyard, birthplace of the Solidarity trade union, over to German financial interests--even though all available evidence shows that the recent buyer, another Polish shipyard, has no German ties.

The station’s outlook and the views of most of its callers reflect a broad rejection of much that is happening to Poland as it is buffeted by democratization, the rigors of capitalism and expectations of eventual entry into the European Union.

More than 1.8 million people--nearly 10% of the work force--are now unemployed in a country where a decade ago the Communist government guaranteed everyone a job. Average incomes are higher, but pensioners cannot keep up, and miners, steelworkers and farmers have been hit hard by the pain of economic restructuring and foreign competition. The gap between rich and poor is growing.

Conservative Reaction Disturbs Many Liberals

Many Polish liberals find the nation’s growing conservative political-religious reaction deeply disturbing.

“The movement which has emerged around Radio Maryja has all the traits of a sect,” said Sergiusz Kowalski, a sociologist at the Polish Academy of Sciences. “One of the psychological and social traits of a sect is the feeling of an external threat . . . the feeling that an enemy is lurking everywhere, it is hidden but powerful, omnipotent.

“In my opinion, those who say this is something marginal, something on the fringe of Polish political life, are not right.”

Surveys put Radio Maryja’s listeners at up to 4 million in a country of 38 million. A July poll by SMG/KRC Poland Media ranked Radio Maryja as the country’s fourth-most-popular station, drawing 7.4% of Poland’s population during the survey period. Of those listeners, 60% were retired, 69% were women, 46% had no more than junior high educations and only 5.2% had university training. Just 3.1% of Warsaw’s residents listened, while in smaller cities of 200,000 to 500,000 population, 9.7% of the residents were listeners. Nearly half of the audience lived in towns or villages of less than 10,000.

Another poll showed that the average listener spent 219 minutes per day tuned in to Radio Maryja.

The station’s broadest appeal is to lonely, elderly women who are angry about negative trends in Polish society, such as an explosion in crime and pornography. But the station also draws younger people with its political agenda.

Such an audience is enough to give the station major political punch. A key bloc of 35 members of Parliament was elected last year with Radio Maryja backing, and the station is already weighing in on local elections scheduled for October.

The station derives much of its power from the personality of Father Tadeusz Rydzyk, its outspoken founder.

“Never surrender!” Rydzyk urged on a recent broadcast. “Politicians must . . . feel the breath of their voters. . . .”

Kowalski described Rydzyk as “a great charismatic figure, a man who has all the traits of a people’s leader, of a great talented preacher.”

“America knows such people,” he added. “There are famous TV evangelists listened to by millions of people. This is a similar phenomenon.”

Rydzyk’s impact is all the greater, Kowalski said, because under half a century of Communist rule, most Catholic clergy here learned to speak indirectly, with enigmatic language full of allusions, as they criticized the dictatorial government.

“He presents his ideas ostentatiously, openly, sharply, in a tough, clear way” so that listeners often feel “someone finally said something straight,” Kowalski said.

Radio Maryja also stands out as a strong conservative voice in a Polish media world dominated by liberals.

Rydzyk specializes in motivational speech laced with innuendo. In a radio talk opposing the sale of the Gdansk shipyard, where the Solidarity movement that toppled communism was born, he declared:

“I remember being in the shipyard. I saw the workers there, the abandoned workers. I thought: These people really care that their shipyard remains in Polish hands.

“For so many years, Poles had built it, only to give it away now for pennies to those whom we fought against many years ago. . . . Everything is being sold out as though at somebody’s command. Before, it was Moscow commanding us. . . . And now it looks as though under some pressure--I ask, where is it from?--Poland is being sold out mercilessly.”

Such views make sense to many Poles, given this country’s history of suffering under occupation by Nazi Germany and then under Communist rule, all followed by myriad uncertainties--such as the threat of unemployment--engendered by the current transition to capitalism and democracy.

Sen. Jozef Fraczek, a legislator associated with Radio Maryja, strongly defends the station’s nationalistic stance.

“When I went to the U.S., all the time I heard ‘America, America, America,’ ” Fraczek said. “The American flag is everywhere. There are national holidays, America this, America that. Here if someone says ‘Poland, Poland,’ he is called a nationalist. If one says ‘America’ in the U.S., everyone says he is a good man, a patriot.”

Forthright Nationalism a Key Attraction

Radio Maryja’s wear-it-on-your-sleeve nationalism is one of the station’s key attractions.

Anna Wsol, an elderly woman who spent her childhood in the Soviet Union, sometimes on the edge of starvation, said she listens to Radio Maryja because the Virgin Mary saved her life many years ago. When she was a child, she explained, her mother was sent to a prison camp, and “Maryja took care of me, she helped me. . . . Otherwise, I would have died.”

But in addition to the station’s appeal to her faith, she also likes its strong patriotic stance. “They fight for Poland,” she explained. “They want Poland to be Poland.”

By becoming this country’s most popular religious radio station, but at the same time pushing a political agenda, Radio Maryja has created an uncomfortable dilemma for the Catholic hierarchy in Poland.

Archbishop Kazimierz Majdanski had unreserved praise for the station in a speech to an estimated 100,000 people who joined a Radio Maryja-sponsored pilgrimage to Polish Catholicism’s most holy place, the Shrine of the Black Madonna in Czestochowa.

“What are you, Radio Maryja, compared to other powers that use the media? You are like David, armed with a small pebble from a stream, facing a Goliath armed from head to toe,” Majdanski said.

“Radio Maryja fulfills a great mission,” Majdanski added. “The radio, by serving the truth, goes against the idols of today: the cult of money, moral relativity, falsely understood freedoms . . . and the selling out of Polish land.”

But Jozef Zycinski, a liberal bishop from Lublin, recently blasted Radio Maryja for its support of the movement to erect crosses near Auschwitz, site of the Nazi concentration camp where about 1.5 million prisoners, mainly Jews, were exterminated. Zycinski said that in the cross dispute, this “radio which calls itself Catholic” was in the same camp with “skinheads” and “former employees of the secret police.”

Radio Maryja’s success comes partly from a well-honed marketing touch.

One advertisement on the station urges listeners to buy signboards with Radio Maryja frequencies to display in their front yards. That is to help people find the station at different times or in different parts of the country because it broadcasts on various frequencies in different places or through the day.

More than anything else, it is the talk shows that attract listeners and give the station its special flavor.

Barbara Stefaniak, a middle-aged member of a support group called the Family of Radio Maryja, said the key virtue of the station is that “they keep contact with society: You can call them, you can ask advice, you can say what you think.”

In what most likely would be seen as a liberal position in the United States, the station was a vocal advocate for a group of homeless people who took over the center of the main hall of Warsaw’s railway station earlier this summer.

Its support for the homeless fits into a broader analysis, by the station and many of its listeners, of what is wrong with Poland today.

“The homeless today are a fragment of something bigger,” said Alicja, a talk show caller. “We can all become homeless. A careful observer who follows what our Parliament is doing, what laws are being passed, has to come to the conclusion that we are close to becoming Kurds in our own country. We will not have our state. We will not have our houses.”

Another woman caller complained: “I would like to say what I think. And I am sure this is how it is: Poland is not ruled by Poles. In every party there are people who have lived in Poland for a long time. They have changed their names. . . . They act in such a way as to destroy our country.”

Such conversations are classic Radio Maryja exchanges, Kowalski said. “It is very rare that one hears the word ‘Jew,’ ” he said. “Instead there are allusions, as, for example, ‘the fifth column, we all know of what nationality,’ or someone will say ‘people--their names are not Polish names,’ or ‘they changed their names.’ ”

The Family of Radio Maryja support groups largely serve as clubs for like-thinking listeners but also to push the station’s political and social agendas. These groups have played key roles in anti-abortion marches, which succeeded in tightening up Poland’s abortion laws, and in letter-writing campaigns on other political issues.

Priest Praises Station but Urges Tolerance

Father Adam Szkop, a local priest who spoke at the inaugural session of a Family of Radio Maryja support group in a Warsaw suburb, walked a narrow line between praising the station and urging its supporters to be more tolerant.

He told of a hospitalized patient subjected to incessant Radio Maryja broadcasts in a shared room, who said to him: “The radio was turned full volume. Whether I wanted to listen or not, Radio Maryja was on. The nurses were going crazy.”

Szkop cautioned: “We cannot be fanatics. We cannot say, ‘Only Radio Maryja, nothing else!’ Of course grandmother has the right to listen to Radio Maryja. But if you insist on only Radio Maryja, it’s like the grandchildren insisting on listening only to rock music.”

A spokesman for the Polish Episcopate, Father Adam Schulz, said that he feels that “about 80%” of the programs on Radio Maryja are positive but that “there are some programs . . . which give us concern.”

What is happening, Schulz said, is that people here are under enormous psychological stress as Poland rapidly undergoes great economic and social changes.

“The way I see it is that often those people who call are full of pain. They are pained by what is happening in Poland, and this pain is often expressed in a formula that can be perceived as an attack on someone. . . . You really have to listen to what sits inside those people. . . . Simple men and women, not just intellectuals, can get in touch with this radio--and nobody ridicules them.”

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Ela Kasprzycka of The Times’ Warsaw Bureau contributed to this report.