CRACOW — Adam Michnik was one of the great wordsmiths of the revolution of conscience that began to form in mid-1970s Poland, which was fully ignited by John Paul II in June 1979, and that triumphed in the Revolution of 1989.
It was Michnik, defending nonviolent methods of anti-communist resistance, who neatly observed that “those who start by storming bastilles will end up building their own.” It was Michnik who, in a 1977 book, defended Polish Catholicism to anticlerical dissident comrades by stating bluntly that “for many years now, the Catholic Church in Poland has … stood out in defense of the oppressed,” playing a role in the struggle against tyranny that “it is impossible to overestimate.” It was Michnik who described the Nine Days of John Paul II in June 1979 as having taught “a great lesson in dignity.”
Yet in 1991, when John Paul II returned to the post-communist Poland he had helped liberate and the theme of his pilgrimage was announced as the Ten Commandments, Adam Michnik said to his friend (and mine), Father Maciej Zięba, OP, “This is the end of Polish democracy.”
I was reminded of this sad, jarring juxtaposition when, in the wake of Poland’s June presidential election, a Polish political commentator with whom I had had previous e-mail exchanges sent me an article in which he claimed that the narrow victory of Karol Nawrocki, the more conservative candidate, had turned Poland into a “global laughingstock,” a country capable of resistance but “incapable of sustaining normal, serious government: whatever we [Poles] build, we immediately set out to destroy.”
That this reaction was more than a little overwrought — and what I hope was not what that Polish commentator meant by “normal, serious government” — was illustrated when the losing presidential candidate, Rafał Traszkowski, the mayor of Warsaw who had banned crucifixes in public offices, assuaged his frustrated supporters by leading the LGBT parade sponsored by the City of Warsaw, in which (as a Polish friend reported), “Satanists with pro-abortion slogans made their debut.”
What to make of all this?
There is something, I think, to the claim that Poles are great at resistance but not-so-great at governance. Almost thirty years ago, I asked a distinguished Polish theologian why that seemed to be the case, and that good Dominican gave the perfect Thomistic answer: because the idea of freedom that came to Poland in the High Middle Ages was William of Ockham’s notion of freedom as sheer willfulness, rather than Thomas Aquinas’ concept of freedom as tethered to truth, ordered to goodness, and guided by reason.
The post-communist Catholic leadership of Poland has also made its share of blunders, fueling the fears of the secular left that a publicly engaged Polish Catholicism would create something like Franco’s authoritarian Spain. And it was not just left-leaning secularists who were concerned: my friends among the former students of John Paul II were appalled some years ago when a Polish archbishop said in a Good Friday sermon that those who did not vote for the conservative party in the impending parliamentary elections were like Pontius Pilate.
Like every democratic country, Poland is a unique case. But yet another Polish political commentator — one of the most learned and insightful men I know — put his finger on something of more general concern when he responded to my query about the meaning of that recent, bitterly contested Polish presidential election in these terms:
…the declining phase of liberal democracy (in the form we know) is an exceptionally grim spectacle. The elections are perpetuating a division that increasingly calls into question the existence of a political community as a unity beyond divisions. There is something of the state’s self-aggression in this. For huge amounts of money, the state is organizing an exciting spectacle of mutual hatred that is leading to the disintegration of society into tribes that despise each other.
For the moment in Poland, those mutually antagonistic tribes are, in the main, subordinating their antipathies to their mutual (and quite legitimate) concerns about revanchist Russian imperialism.
But what of the United States? Shouldn’t my friend’s concerns about the viability of the “political community as a unity beyond divisions” ring a few bells here? And in both the Polish and American cases, where is the Church creating the space in which that unity might be recomposed, modeling rational discussion as the antidote to social media snark?
Hard questions, to be sure, but questions that cannot be avoided if the democratic ship is to steer its way between the rock of statist authoritarianism and the hard place of state-imposed wokery.
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Jesus said there will be divisions. Don’t trust in a “Democratic ship.”
Thanks George. It seems man is not made for moderation: much knowledge, little wisdom.
Trying to figure out why Poland is being criticized in this article. As I see it Poland is standing up to the ultra leftist secularist EU. If you pay attention to other EU governments, like Germany they are jailing conservatives who post anti government remarks on social media. Suggest that Mr. Weigel focus on the anti Catholic, leftist in the EU countries who are going all in on secularization and destroying their countries. Poland is the only EU country that remains Catholic, pushing back the satanic secularistic EU, hurray for Poland.
Hard questions nonetheless significant questions comprehensively addressing cultural political issues that most are not likely aware of that affect the welfare of the US and Poland – in context of the growing threat from religio-cultural driven Russian imperialism.
Polarization can come from:
A. Mistakenly prioritizing secondary issues; or..,
B. Correctly prioritizing primary issues…and not retreating from or submitting to demands to ignore or subordinate primary issues.
It seems that LGBTQ political ideology demands “submission, or else.”
That makes it a primary issue, and polarization on that issue is NOT a mistake, nor a matter that can be dismissed with the label “wokery,” as if it is just a silly notion easily dismissed.
This is a matter of life and death, and we are commanded and counseled to “choose life.”
And that, it seems, means dividing people and acknowledging that “polarization” is not the problem.
A man we hold in highest esteem has not promised us unity.
George Weigel’s reflections on Poland—and on the crisis of liberal democracies more broadly—invite a deeper look at the metaphysical roots of freedom itself.
The Christian Middle Ages assumed that rulers were bound by divine and natural law. But beginning with thinkers like Marsilius of Padua and culminating in early modern absolutism, a subtle shift occurred: the sovereign became solutus ab lege, freed from all higher constraints. Ulpian’s maxim—quod principi placuit legis habet vigorem—replaced the medieval view of law as participation in eternal reason.
The result, as Leo XIII warned, is not more liberty, but less. Once natural law is discarded, authority becomes arbitrary, and the personal rights of citizens lose their foundation. What begins as the autonomy of secular affairs from God ends in the tyranny of secularism.
As Benedict XVI wrote in Jesus of Nazareth, this should not be confused with clericalism. The Church does not demand submission of the state to the clergy, but to truth and to moral law. Without this, the world becomes undecipherable, and pragmatism fills the vacuum. Thus, the strong—whether political, economic, or cultural—become “the gods of this world.”
If modern democracy no longer has a shared moral foundation, it risks becoming not a community, but a contest of tribes. The “spectacle of mutual hatred” Weigel describes is a symptom of deeper fragmentation: the eclipse of a truth that binds.
The greatest war today is not ideological or geopolitical, but moral and spiritual. Abortion, by far the leading cause of death globally, reveals this silent devastation. And yet, the optimism of faith tells us: when man turns to the Father—as Pinocchio finally does—he frees himself from the puppeteers of ideology, materialism, and power.
This is the space the Church must reclaim—not for control, but for witness: not to dominate the state, but to remind it of the law that transcends all human calculation.
I am genuinely astonished by George’s admiration for Adam Michnik and his affection for St John Paul II. Michnik was, for many years, the editor-in-chief of Gazeta Wyborcza, a liberal-left daily which, since the early 1990s, has openly waged a campaign against the Catholic Church in Poland. This high-circulation newspaper has published tens of thousands of articles maligning priests—chiefly targeting the Director and Founder of Radio Maryja, Father Dr Tadeusz Rydzyk CSsR. It consistently promotes abortion, euthanasia, civil partnerships, and the like.
This suggests either a peculiar form of schizophrenia on the part of the editor-in-chief, or sheer hypocrisy—or perhaps George Weigel is simply unaware of these facts.
Please allow me to add a few thoughts to what I posted above. I’ve reviewed some reliable sources, and here’s what I found:
“Since June 1997, when we began collecting press clippings about Radio Maryja, up until February 2021, we gathered over 53,000 of them. Almost all could warrant legal action, as they are false or even defamatory,” wrote Fr. Dr. Tadeusz Rydzyk, CSsR, Director of TV Radio Maryja, in his recent monograph “A Miracle on the Air.”
The President-elect, Dr. Karol Nawrocki will be sworn in on August 6, 2025. Now that his political opponents have failed to block his inauguration in the Polish Sejm, I wonder, why was this article written? In life, there are no coincidences — those exist only in grammar.
A few years ago, the President of the Polish Bishop`s Conference, Archbishop Stanislaw Gądecki, urged the faithful to participate in large numbers and warned against voting contrary to the principles of the Catholic faith. The concerned shepherd reminded: Catholics must not support political agendas which promote abortion, moral corruption of children and youth; seek to redefine the institution of marriage, attempt to restrict the parents` rights of the responsibility for child-raising. The courage demonstrated by the Archbishop might well be compared to the forthright and often countercultural public stance once taken by Cardinal George Pell in Australia.
My short reflection lead me to this: each one of us will one day stand before God, called to give an account not of how we built or overthrew this or that political order, but of how we loved. For, as Ecclesiastes declares: ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity’ (Ecclesiastes 1:2).