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Mixed Reception for Polish Catholic Radio
The tower of Radio Maryja, a network accused of hostility toward Jews, gays and former ruling communists.
(By Czarek Sokolowski -- Associated Press)
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Tadeusz Rydzyk, the Redemptorist priest who founded Radio Maryja, apologized to listeners last month if they were offended by the broadcast accused of being anti-Semitic. Otherwise the network's management isn't backing down.
Stanislaw Michalkiewicz, the commentator who criticized the American Jewish Committee and World Jewish Congress for "humiliating" Poland, is still on the air. In an interview, he said he wasn't reprimanded or told to modify his remarks, which he denied were anti-Semitic. "I saw no grounds and no reason to apologize," he said. "Nobody tried to discredit any word that I actually said."
"Accusing me of anti-Semitism was just a way of changing the subject," he said. "My program became a pretext to attack Radio Maryja, because the existence of Radio Maryja is a problem to some groups in this country."
Andrzej Rychard, a sociologist at the Polish Academy of Sciences, said Radio Maryja has a dedicated listenership of deeply religious Catholics who feel marginalized and ignored by political parties.
"The radio makes them feel as if it is an instrument to take care of them," Rychard said. Populist organizations such as the Kaczynskis' Law and Justice party "quite rightly recognized that such groups existed in Poland and tried to capitalize on that."
During the fall campaign, Radio Maryja helped spread a report that a grandfather of presidential candidate Donald Tusk had served in the German army during World War II -- implying that he was a traitor. Tusk countered that his grandfather, like many Poles, was forced into German uniform. But the scandal eroded his lead in the polls, and he ultimately lost the election to Lech Kaczynski.
Although Poland is heavily Catholic -- 96 percent of its 38 million people identify themselves as members of the church -- the country's post-Cold War political model has long included a strict autonomy of church and state.
In 1993, Pope John Paul II warned his native country to avoid entangling the church in partisan politics, advice that was taken to heart by previous governments. The previous president, Aleksander Kwasniewski, was a former communist who continued to call himself an atheist.
Zbigniew Nosowski, editor in chief of Wiez, a Catholic monthly newspaper, said Polish bishops are divided over what to do about Radio Maryja and how to respond to the Vatican's intervention. But he said there's a general awareness that the church is always at risk of being co-opted by politicians if it isn't careful.
"If there is too close of a relationship between the altar and the throne, it is the altar which pays the price," Nosowski said.
