Former Fringe Network Backs Leaders, Is Criticized by Pope
By Craig Whitlock
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, May 27, 2006
WARSAW, May 26 -- When Poland's fractious Parliament cobbled together a new government in February, lawmakers kept the pact a secret from most of the country's mass media. Then they permitted the initial ceremony to be broadcast exclusively by affiliates of Radio Maryja, a powerful Catholic broadcaster that is blurring the lines here between church and state.
Accused of hostility toward Jews, gays and the former communists who ruled the country until recently, the network reaches an estimated audience of some 4 million Poles. Most of them are rural, elderly Catholics who feel left behind by the free-market transformation of the country since the fall of the Iron Curtain.
For nearly a decade, Radio Maryja served primarily as a voice for opposition parties and others on the political margins. But it has become the preferred medium of Poland's president, Lech Kaczynski, and his twin brother, Jaroslaw, the de facto parliamentary leader.
Its aggressive support of the Kaczynski brothers and their Law and Justice party during last fall's election helped propel them into power. That has given the Catholic network an outsized influence on affairs of state, critics say. Secular parties and even the Vatican say that role could prove dangerous for Polish democracy.
On Thursday, during the start of a four-day visit to Poland, Pope Benedict XVI alluded to the debate over Radio Maryja by saying that the church should stay out of politics. "The priest is not asked to be an expert in economics, construction or politics," the pope declared in an address at St. John's Cathedral in Warsaw. "He is expected to be an expert in the spiritual life."
That came on top of a sharply worded statement from the Vatican last month expressing "grave concern" over the operations of the radio service and its close relationship with the government.
The statement was issued shortly after a Radio Maryja political commentator accused Jews of profiting from "the Holocaust business" and complained that Jewish groups were "humiliating Poland internationally by demanding money" as compensation for property confiscated during World War II.
Critics said the comments were just the latest example of the network fanning anti-Semitic sentiments in Poland and called on the church to shut it down. Marek Edelman, a prominent survivor of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising, wrote a letter to parliamentary leaders accusing Radio Maryja of a pattern of "xenophobia, chauvinism and anti-Semitism."
So far, Polish church officials have shown little inclination to tone down the broadcasts. Bishops in Warsaw note that the network is operated by Catholic priests from the Redemptorist order and is therefore not under their direct control. In response to the Vatican's criticism, the bishops formed a council to work with the Redemptorists to advise the network on programming, but also issued a statement praising Radio Maryja for its "great evangelizing work."
Radio Maryja's political allies have rallied to its side. Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the Law and Justice party leader and the country's top power broker, condemned critics of the network as "enemies of freedom" and accused them of trying to stifle an independent media voice.
Wojciech Wierzejski, a member of Parliament and deputy chairman of the League of Polish Families, a party in the new governing coalition, said Radio Maryja's enemies were trying to tame a popular network by asserting that it is a tool of the government.
"The question of Radio Maryja is raised mostly by free-market and leftist groups, the post-communists," he added. "These people are usually against the church and not Radio Maryja itself."
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.
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