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The motto could also be seen on banners held up by members of
the congregation alongside the priest’s likeness, Solidarity banners and Polish flags. There were worshippers in colorful Polish folk costumes and miners in black parade uniforms and plumed-topped hats.
Attending the beatification were priests and nuns, nurses, soldiers, Boy Scouts, Girl Guides and thousands or ordinary Poles.
Father Popiełuszko was
abducted, tortured and murdered by three communist secret-police agents who hurled his bound and battered body over a dam into the River Vistula. Father Jerzy, as he was affectionately known to his numerous
admirers, was considered a martyr for the faith already at the time of his death, and his countryman, the late Pope John Paul II,
had made frequent references to that effect.
The 37-year-old priest was murdered by the communist secret police in 1984 in reprisal for his patriotic
monthly Homeland Mass (Msza za Ojczyznę) at Warsaw’s Saint Stanislaus Kostka Church. The mass lifted the spirits of his
downtrodden compatriots during the grim years of martial law (1981-1983) and afterwards but infuriated Poland’s communist rulers.
A man of slight build and frail health with a somewhat boyish face, Popiełuszko was no fiery orator but spoke in calm, rather monotonous, droning voice. He never mentioned the word communism nor directly criticized Poland’s communist rulers by name, but Homeland Mass goers knew that Jaruzelski’s Zomo riot police were being referred to when he called for prayers for “those who persecute their own countrymen for Judas silver.”
He spoke of fidelity to God and country, of freedom, human dignity, truth, honesty and justice – all things most Poles felt were sorely lacking in communist Poland.
Soviet-trained communist strongman General Wojciech Jaruzelski clamped Poland under martial law to crush the
16-month-old Solidarity movement, the Soviet bloc’s first independent trade union. The country was cut off from the world, as all flights were grounded, phone lines were cut, public gatherings were banned, a
curfew was imposed, industrial plants were militarized and some 10,000 Solidarity activists were jailed.
The murder might have never been discovered, because the victim’s weighted-down body would have soon
decomposed in the depths of the Włocławek dam basin, were it not for one fact. Father Jerzy was abducted while travelling along a
dark country road together with his friend and driver Waldemar Chrostowski who managed to escape and tell the story.
Under public pressure and extensive international media scrutiny the regime had no choice but to hold a trial
in which the three killers and their mid-level direct superior were convicted of the crime. They have long since been released following a series of amnesties, but the higher-ups who ordered the killing have never
been brought to justice nor even identified.
Jerzy was one of five children born to the devoutly Catholic Popiełuszko family in the village of Okopy in northeastern Poland’s poor Podlasie region. His older brother Józef recalls how the entire family would
pray on their knees together every morning and evening. Jerzy served as an altarboy and, on days when he wasn’t serving at the altar, would rise earlier and walk an extra three miles to attend mass before going to school. He was drafted into a special army unit for seminarians which subjected recruits to atheist propaganda and various forms of humiliation and harassment to turn them against the Church. He was punished for refusing to remove his religious medallion and surrender his rosary. “How easy it is to suffer, when one suffers for Christ,” he wrote to the director of his seminary.
When the peaceful Solidarność
revolution erupted in 1980, the late Primate Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński assigned the soft-spoken priest to be the chaplain to Warsaw steelworkers and nurses. At St. Stanislaus Church he pioneered his trademark
Homeland Mass, celebrated on an outdoor balcony, which regularly attracted up to 20,000 faithful who filled the entire street in
front of the church and spilled over into an adjoining park.
In addition to his compatriots Lech Wałęsa and Pope John Paul II, Father Jerzy made a significant contribution to the collapse of the Evil Empire, as U.S. President Reagan called the USSR. By 1984, the Jaruzelski junta had used threats, intimidation
and blackmail to force the Polish nation into submission and offered incentives to those ready to play ball with the authorities. Ordinary people had to think about feeding their families and many began succumbing
to what the country’s communist rulers called “normalization.” It was Popiełuszko’s brutal murder that
convinced a majority of Poles that the totalitarian regime had no future and re-ignited their quest for freedom.
The beatification ceremony was followed by a massive four-hour procession bearing the
martyr’s relics which winded its way across the sun-drenched city to the Church of Divine Providence in the south Warsaw suburb of Wilanów, a distance of 7.5 miles. There, they were enshrined in a basilica
still under construction which is due to become a National Religious Sanctuary.
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