Cardinal Wyszynski

Cardinal Wyszynski: A Biography by Andrzej Micewski, translated by William and Katarzyna Brand, 463 pages

Stefan Wyszynski became Archbishop of Warsaw and Primate of Poland in 1948.  He remained in that position for 33 years, all of them spent under an aggressively atheist totalitarian dictatorship.  During that time, he lead the Church in Poland through his nine-year Great Novena of the Millennium (the first millennium of Polish Christianity, 966-1966) to the consecration of Poland to the Virgin Mary "to bring aid to the universal Church and the family of man."  Although he died in 1981, he survived long enough to see his junior colleague, the Archbishop of Cracow, elected Pope, and in many ways St John Paul II carried forward Wyszynski's program into the universal Church. 

The author describes his nearly 500 page book as merely a "sketch of his biography... intended only as initial research into his life."  A large portion of the text is taken up by paraphrases of the minutes of committee meetings - hardly the exciting, dramatic material one might hope for in a record of over three decades of resistance to tyranny.  Yet Micewski repeatedly makes the obvious comparison between Wyszynski and Cardinal Mindszenty of Hungary in order to contrast their approaches to Communist oppression, the former attempting to accommodate the authorities wherever possible without compromising core principles, while the latter refused to even speak of dialogue with his persecutors.  This starkly demonstrates Micewski's central theme, that Stefan Wyszynski not only had the courage to be a martyr, but also the wisdom to be a true pastor.