SUMMA. Repositorio Institucional

REDC 47 (1990) 591-609 THE CATHOLIC CHURGH IN THE PRESENCE OF THE COMMUNIST REGIME IN POLAND At the beginning of the pontificate, john Paul 11 in his letter directed to the beloved Countrvmen of October 23, 1978 wrote: 'And here is remarkable thing, hard to explain in human wavs. It is just during the last decades that the Church in Poland has acquired a special significance in the dimensions of the Universal Church and Christiantitv. It has also become the center of great interest in view of specific situation which has a weighty importance for the search undertaken bv contemporary humanitv, different nations and states in social and economic domains in the sphere of ci vilization as a whole'l. - In these words the Pope points out that the experiences acguired by the Church in Poland in recent decades are of universal consequences. The source oh these experiences, generallv called 'a specific situation' by the Pope, is the confrontation of the Church with the Communist regime which occurs for the first time in history on such a wide scale. It is obvious that current disintegration of the Communist regime in all states of Eastern Europe demonstrated a proper meaning of these experiences. The present paper is intended to consider the basic elements of that specific situation. These are the following: -- a general characteristic of the Communist regime with special regard to its relation to the Church; the attitudes of the Catholic Church towards the policv of the Communist partv in Poland. 1 Cf. `Messaggio di Giovanni Paolo ai Polacchi', Un Papa dalla Polonia, ed. P. Scandaletti, B. Lewandowski, B. Kruszdowicz, Padova 1979, p. 159.

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