Poland: Cross Words

Crucifixes in the classroom

A red-and-white banner adorned with four crucifixes loomed over the crowd at the Church of the Transfiguration in Garwolin, a rural community 40 miles southeast of Warsaw. THERE WAS NO PLACE FOR YOU, CHRIST, AT OUR SCHOOL, the banner said. In any other modern secular country, that message might simply have been a routine protest against the separation of church and state. But in Poland, where approximately 90% of the population is Roman Catholic, and the church is the only institution powerful enough to challenge the state, a battle over crucifixes in the classroom last week sparked one of the most fervid spontaneous demonstrations since martial law was lifted last July.

The dispute began when Ryszard Dominski, principal of an agricultural school at Mietno, two miles from Garwolin, took up a new government campaign to enforce a 1961 law banning the display of religious objects in public buildings. Dominski, a local Communist Party official, ordered crucifixes removed last December from seven lecture halls, where they had hung since the school's founding in the 1920s.

Last month a group of parents entered the school and hung more crosses. After those were removed last week, a number of students showed up in class with large crucifixes hanging from their necks. The following day, two-thirds of the school's 600 students staged a sit-in. After police threatened to use force to roust them, some of the young people sought refuge in the Church of the Transfiguration, where 2,500 students from nearby schools joined them for a morning of prayer in support of the Mietno protesters.

As police cruised outside, the crowd dispersed peacefully. The following day, however, the principal of a nearby school reportedly tried to resign rather than enforce the crucifix ban. Dominski met with parents at the Mietno school and tried to have them sign pledges that their children would obey school rules; the parents refused. Though local church officials were firmly on their side, Jozef Cardinal Glemp, Poland's Primate, offered only tepid comfort. Stopping over in Rome after a three-week trip to Argentina and Brazil last week, Glemp said, "Since the end of the war, we have always had problems with the crucifixes. All of that is normal."

Not many of the students around Garwolin would agree. At week's end a few hundred of them made a 130-mile pilgrimage to Czestochowa, home of the revered Black Madonna icon. Before the pilgrims left Garwolin, the Rev. Stanislaw Binko of the Church of the Transfiguration told them, "That which is happening before our eyes speaks to the whole world. Be brave."