The Catholic Church in Poland was at a high point during the Communist regime, and many intellectuals, abandoning Marxism, joined it. Ten years later, Poland is free and democratic, but the Church has lost ground. It blames the intellectuals, but they blame the Church. Our correspondent in Warsaw reports. WHEN Poland?s foremost historian of philosophy, Stefan Swiezawski, made a rare appearance in Warsaw on his ninety-second birthday last month, there was an air of pathos about the occasion.

Swiezawski, a lay auditor at the Second Vatican Council, was speaking on The Church in the Twentieth Century. His large audience knew he represented a vanishing breed of Catholic intellectuals who still had the stature to speak independently of the Church?s hierarchy.

In the years before the Second World War, when Swiezawski befriended the likes of Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson, Polish Catholics like him helped rebuild the national identity after a century of foreign occupation. In the post-war years, they kept it alive by presenting an authentic Christian culture to counter an artificial Communist one.

Today, with younger Catholic figures more dependent on the approval of the church hierarchy, the readiness to speak and write freely has dwindled. So has the attractiveness of the Church to creative non-Catholics.

In the 1970s and 1980s, people like this flocked to the Polish Church, in a mass rediscovery of Christianity fuelled by the repressive conditions of Communist rule. What was dubbed the return to faith has long since petered out. But arguments about its role and meaning remain as bitter as ever.

The term intellectual, with its overtones of the Enlightenment, is still widely used in Eastern Europe to denote people with the capacity to speak and act outside the constraints of class and custom.

The full story still has to be told of how so many prominent intellectuals abandoned Marxism and turned to Christianity. What follows is only a brief outline.

The na?ve intoxication with Communist ideals had largely worn off by 1956, when the Hungarian Uprising and Polish October reform movement plunged the Soviet bloc into its first crisis. Attempts were now made to turn the clock back and rediscover the original Communist vision, purged of its Stalinist corruptions. Revisionism, personified by such figures as the Pole Leszek Kolakowski, the Czech Karel Kosik and the Hungarian Gyorgy Lukacs, was an internal Marxist affair. Most wavering intellectuals still had their backs turned against the Catholic Church.

Things began to change after 1968, when the invasion of Czechoslovakia dealt revisionist hopes a death-blow. That year?s events in Eastern Europe were a mirror image of the student rebellions in the West. While bourgeois students raged about revolution in Paris and London, their downtrodden counterparts demanded democracy in Prague and Warsaw. Yet there were similarities, too. Both episodes symbolised the erosion of post-war dreams of a perfect society. Both resulted in the parallel triumphs of capitalist and Communist establishments.

Fresh attempts were made in the 1970s to break out of the straitjacket imposed on intellectual life. In Poland, a Committee to Defend the Workers (KOR), formed in 1976, became Eastern Europe?s first open opposition group. In Czechoslovakia, Charter 77 emerged a year later. It was now that disillusioned intellectuals began to look to the Church.

When the only free trade union in the Eastern bloc, Solidarity, emerged in August 1980, it quickly upstaged the work done by scattered intellectual dissidents. Solidarity was a Christian movement, the kind of mass industrial force, responsive to church directives, which Popes from Pius XI onward had dreamed about. It was driven underground by martial law, but official Marxism was now discredited. The Communist regimes had become unable to recoup intellectual support, and the accompanying repressions released a surge of spirituality.

As early as the 1970s, Polish sociologists had identified a de-secularising curve, as the cultural and psychological impact of two decades of industrialisation slackened, producing signs of a religious revival. By the mid-1980s, to the bemusement of Western observers, it had become an intellectual fashion to be religious ? even in Poland?s officially atheist Communist Party. In an internal Party survey conducted in 1981, 70 per cent of members claimed to believe in God, while half described themselves as practising Catholics. By 1985, the figures had marginally fallen, as members with principles and values quit the Party. But even then, 92 per cent of Party members favoured the teaching of religion in schools and believed that only the Church could guarantee the nation?s moral education. This curious religious-political hybrid was something of a Polish speciality. But it had parallels elsewhere. Why did so many intellectuals defy historical inevitability and return to religion?

One reason was largely practical. With worldly ambitions blocked, there was time and leisure for spiritual reflection. Another was cultural. In Poland especially, the mass fervour unleashed by the Pope?s 1979 pilgrimage highlighted the isolation of the intellectuals. Many now yearned to be reintegrated into the religious-patriotic mainstream of national life.

Another reason was psychological. The dashing of hopes and expectations focused on Communism generated a search for new creeds and beliefs. Some former Marxists, with a tendency to surrender their will to great causes, found the switch to religion quite easy.

For most intellectuals, the Church had become attractive. Communist persecution had purged it of its negative past associations. As the long march through Eastern Europe?s institutions gathered momentum, the Church became a beacon of freedom and dignity. For the first time, it was leading the struggle for self-determination and human rights.

Today, all this belongs to history, and new norms and standards apply. If the harsh 1980s stimulated an ethos of religiousness, the freer 1990s have brought a reborn ethos of secularism. Was the rapprochement between Church and intellectuals no more than a brief hiatus, a quirk of circumstance?

In Poland, the Catholic Church would contest claims that it no longer commands intellectual influence. Yet the falling away of creative talent has been a visible feature.

The Church?s cultural outreach and communication through the media, though far more technically advanced than under Communism, cannot compete with Poland?s more popular secular products. Church-owned educational institutions, including the Catholic University of Lublin (KUL), are no longer seen as centres for innovative thought. Once-prestigious milieux like the Catholic Intelligentsia Clubs are the haunt of the elderly, with no public impact. Once sought-after journals such as Wiez and Znak meekly avoid controversy and attract few top writers. The coming of mass global culture has sidelined the Church?s output.

Not surprisingly, the interpretations differ. The Church blames the intellectuals. The much talked-of conversions of the 1980s, its leaders argue, were mostly bogus anyway. Intellectuals never respected the Church or took its doctrines seriously. They merely used it for their own purposes when it offered a protective forum for independent activity.

Since 1989, the church argument continues, intellectuals have been corrupted by power and position. The erosion of the values of the Solidarity era is the fault of new ?lites, who have aped the liberal fashions trumpeted by their Western counterparts. The same cynical arrogance which led them to post-war Communism has now led them to post-Communist anti-clericalism.

The intellectuals, for their part, blame the Church. Some say it betrayed their sense of the sacred by reverting to its pre-war triumphalism. Others deplore its aloofness towards democracy, its disregard for lay responsibilities, its disdain for non-Catholic achievements.

In this bitter confrontation, both sides are partly in the right. Meanwhile, the whole situation in post-Communist Eastern Europe has evolved. For one thing, the need for free-thinking commentators who could speak and explain has given way to a need for experts co-opted into politics and business. Intellectuals have metamorphosed into a new middle class, acquiring a leading role. Most have lost the leisure and freedom needed for truly creative thinking, while the diminishing number who remain genuinely independent have reasserted their secular credentials. As in Western societies, coolness towards the Church is seen as a criterion of healthy originality.

Poland may still be one of few countries where the largest-circulation national daily, Gazeta Wyborcza, can devote four whole pages to a discussion of Nietzsche?s religiousness, and three more a week later to a Catholic academic?s exposition on why politicians should ignore their consciences. As in pre-war times, however, the most dynamic thought and culture are emerging outside the Church.

It can be argued that the collapse of Communism eroded the sense of a Catholic culture anyway. Creative intellectuals may still occasionally gain church approval for pursuing religious themes ? the late film director Krzysztof Kieslowski and the 1996 winner of the Nobel prize for literature, Wislawa Szymborska, provide examples. But most have again chosen to follow God in their own way ? in an echo of the intellectual mysticism which characterised the nineteenth century and was expressed by the Romantic poets Adam Mickiewicz and Juliusz Slowacki.

Even priests with an intellectual following, such as the Pole Jozef Tischner or the Czech Tomas Halik, are usually seen as outsiders, on the margins of official church toleration. Over 90 per cent of Poland?s Catholic bishops hold doctorates and professorships, compared to one in 20 among the lower clergy, suggesting that the Church too contains a clearly defined intellectual pecking order. But surveys persistently confirm that the Church?s support is strongest among the older, poorer and less educated.

Valid questions can certainly be posed about how far the conversions of intellectuals in the Communist era were genuine. It seems true that many owed their encounter with the Church to enlightened but unrepresentative priests, and were repelled when, behind this agreeable fa?ade, they discovered a world of rules and dogmas.

It also seems true that many, agnostics by nature, came to Christianity in search of absolute values, and had trouble penetrating to the deeper sphere of religious faith.

And it seems true that many were later tempted away by new preoccupations. Some at least continued to see the world in the ideological categories to which they were accustomed, and were lured into a new search for total theories and blueprints ? often, this time, liberal ones ? which would solve the dilemmas of their society. Having rebelled against an old conformism, they merely surrendered to a new one.

Yet legitimate questions can also be asked about the Church?s record since Communism. A decade on, the Church remains strong in the macro-values of collective identity and tradition. But it is abysmally weak on the micro-values of individual care and counselling. For intellectuals, these are the very values which count most today, as the newly emancipated societies of eastern Europe grow impatient with the declaratory formulations of the past and demand a Church which recognises personal needs and attributes.

At the heart of the new rift lies a dead weight of mutual insensitivity. It may still be lifted, as intellectuals grow tired of the newfangled enthusiasms of the 1990s and learn again to see the values of the Church and the faith as worth defending. But the Church must also learn to live with a new pluralistic order, recognising that intellectual activity needs a creative sphere of autonomy, and can find ways of staying loyal without being hidebound by demands and instructions.

All of which may help explain why the 92-year-old Stefan Swiezawski was given such an appreciative reception in Warsaw recently. When his long-time associate, Jerzy Turowicz, died at the end of January after editing Poland?s Catholic Tygodnik Powszechny for 54 years, another gap appeared in the Church?s once-flourishing intellectual armoury. The weekly?s new priest-editor, Fr Adam Boniecki, is the head of the Marian order, while a leading contributor, Jerzy Pilch, has opted to transfer his column to the Polish Hustler. For now, the crisis of confidence looks set to continue.

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