Father Jerzy, though he died while his murderers still live, has triumphed.

Overcoming Evil With Goodness

by Peter Strzelecki Rieth

“Do not use violence in your struggle. Violence is not a sign of strength, only of weakness. He who cannot win the heart or the mind seeks his victory through violence. Each act of violence is vivid proof of moral incompetence. The most excellent, enduring battle known to Man, known to history, is the battle of ideas. The most pitiful and insignificant battles are the violent ones. An idea which requires weapons to defend it will die on its own account. An idea which can only live by violent means is a perversion. An idea which is capable of life conquers on its own account. Such an idea will find millions of spontaneous followers.”

 

Thus spoke the Blessed Martyr Father Jerzy Popieluszko on December 26th, 1982. Father Jerzy loved his enemy. During martial law, in 1981, he told Poles to take hot drinks and food to the soldiers who stood ready to shoot them. The tens of thousands who came together to celebrate the Eucharist with him did not carry weapons, they did not shout partisan political slogans full of hate for one group and blind worship of another group. They never once took up arms against their oppressors. They listened to Father Jerzy’s famous ‘Homilies for the Fatherland’ in which they were told that the only proper action a man could take in the face of physical and spiritual oppression was prayer and constant acts of love—especially towards their enemies.

No matter how many bullets were fired at them, no matter how many police batons loomed over their heads, sometimes striking their bodies, no matter how empty their stomachs due to food shortages, the tens of thousands of people who came to receive the Body of Christ from Father Jerzy’s hands, the nine million members of the Solidarity Union for whom Father Jerzy was a moral patron and the tens of millions of Poles who heard his words and learned of his works never once engaged in armed revolution, insurrection or any form of mass coordinated popular violence.

Their enemy, the Communist Polish State and the nuclear armed Soviet Union that stood behind it, charged three officers of the Ministry of the Interior to murder Father Jerzy; they beat him, tied him, put him into the trunk of a car, tied his arms, neck and legs together, tied a heavy rock to him and threw him into a river, after torturing him and apparently bludgeoning his skull. The men who committed this murder are free today.

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