Pope, Churches, and Civil Society

WaPo’s Anne Applebaum makes a useful observation about the role that Pope John Paul II and the Catholic Church in general had in bringing down communism:

The church, first in Poland and then elsewhere, broke these two monopolies, offering people a safe place to meet and intellectually offering them an alternative way of thinking about the world.

Here’s how it worked: When I lived in Poland in the late 1980s, I was told that if I wanted to know what was going on, I’d have to go every week to a particular Warsaw church and pick up a copy of the city’s weekly underground newspaper. Equally, if I wanted to see an exhibition of paintings that were not the work of the regime’s artists, or a play that was not approved by the regime’s censors, I could go to an exhibition or a performance in a church basement. The priests didn’t write the newspapers, or paint the paintings, or act in the plays — none of which were necessarily religious — but they made their space and resources available for the people who did. And in helping to create what we now call “civil society,” these priests were following the example of the pope who, as a young man in Nazi-occupied Poland, secretly studied for the priesthood and also founded an underground theater.

The church provided intellectual, emotion, and spiritual spaces that were separate from the asphyxiating grip that the totalitarian regime placed on its subjects. In the language of Burke, the church provided “little platoons” of alternative ways of life within the system.

We might want to remember this as we contemplate the destruction of religious freedoms in Canada, where the Knights of Columbus and Mennonite church camps are pressured to transform their spaces in ways that contradict their beliefs (and here).