The Polish communists had tried and failed to have the death of Father Jerzy Popiełuszko look like the result of pure bad luck. According to court documents, they had planned to cause a “beautiful traffic accident” to get him out of the way. 

There had been other plans to discredit Popiełuszko, with tape recordings of a woman he would have been wrongfully accused of being romantically involved with. This idea failed, claimed one police officer, because “the woman had married and we have great respect for the institution of marriage”. Such piety. What happened to their respect for the truth is unclear.

When all of these plans fell through, the thugs did what came most naturally to them. On 19 October 1984 — forty years ago today — they kidnapped Father Popiełuszko, beat him black and blue, tied a rope from his neck to his feet and tossed him into a reservoir. 

Water in his lungs suggested that he was alive when he fell.

What had made the slim, sickly 37-year-old priest such an imposing enemy of the state? He had preached. He had preached to striking steelworkers in Warsaw. He had preached to the trade unionists of Solidarity. His sermons had been broadcast on “Radio Free Europe”.

He had led the funeral of Grzegorz Przemyk — an 18-year-old aspiring poet who had been beaten to death by police officers. A gigantic funeral procession had marched peacefully in protest.

Censorship was tight in Poland. Its tentacles, Norman Davies wrote in God’s Playground, “regulated the activities of all the media, all news and translation agencies, all publishing houses” et cetera, with themes to be suppressed including “criticism … of the party line, all comparisons between the Soviet Union and Tsarist Russia, all civil disasters, all shortcomings in industrial safety, all defects in Polish export goods, all references to the superior economic and social standards of non-communist countries and … all information regarding the existence of the censorship.”

One exception was church services. The communists tolerated some amount of independence for the Church — believing that suppression was unsustainable — and Popiełuszko had used that to his advantage.

He had preached about the value of the truth. He had preached against violence and indignities. He had even preached about the virtue of patriotism. His sermons referenced historical events where Polish courage and determination had been illuminated, like the 19th century uprisings and the Miracle on the Vistula. Popiełuszko “did not include the historical references just to present facts,” writes Grzegorz Szczecina: 

… although this would have made sense in the context of the Communist propaganda. The main purpose was to show to … fellow Poles the meaning of self-sacrifice and suffering as a price which had to be paid in the struggle for national liberty over centuries. 

Polish communism had not been quite as brutal as communism in parts of the Soviet Union, at least since the horrific Stalinist period of the late 1940s and early 1950s. (I once had the chance to speak to the Archbishop of Riga, who said that Poland had seemed comparatively nice next to communist Latvia.) 

Still, lies were pervasive and the threat of violence was never far away. In 1981, following the strikes and protests of Solidarity, alleged plans by the Soviets to invade became the pretext for the imposition of martial law. Activists were detained, a curfew was implemented and protestors were attacked — by soldiers, by the police, and by the hired goons of the Citizens’ Militia. (ZOMO, the elite formations of the militia, earned the sarcastic name “the beating heart of the party”.)

Communist true believers were rare in Poland. There was, instead, a sense of understandable cynicism. Anything, it seemed, could be a lie. Anybody could betray you. Bronisław Wildstein, co-founder of the Student Committee of Solidarity, told me in a 2021 interview that for many Poles it felt like “if something is happening it means that the authorities agree”.

A man like Popiełuszko was dangerous to the communists because he gave people hope. The rigidity of a monopolistic system, wrote the Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski, “depends in part on the degree to which men who live within that system can be convinced of its rigidity”. Authorities, he suggested, “remain powerful for as long as people believe in the power”.

It isn’t always true, perhaps, but it can be true. Communist Poland was a paper hammer and sickle, commanding respect only inasmuch as it commanded fear, and Popiełuszko was inspiring people to believe that it could be crumpled. The authorities could not allow him to continue.

Nor, however, could the authorities cover up his death. Popiełuszko’s murder caused outcry. His funeral was attended by hundreds of thousands of people. His death became a focal point for international criticism of the regime, with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher visiting his grave. 

General Jaruzelski, the head of Government, had to take the unusual step of promising “vigorous prosecution”. Three police officers and their commanding colonel were convicted. The entitlement of the officials was on full display, with the suspects griping about their working hours, and the inconvenience of dealing with the meddlesome priest.

Poles have understandably suspected that the chain of responsibility did not end there. Still, the goons of the state had been taught that they were not invulnerable. You couldn’t crack a head and know that it would not come back to bite you. Meanwhile, Jaruzelski and his comrades were shaken. Popiełuszko’s death, meant to crush popular hopes, had done the opposite. Polish communism was being demystified and had entered its last stages.

The life and death of Father Jerzy Popiełuszko helps to explain the strength of Polish identification with Catholicism. In tandem with the papacy of John Paul II, Catholic anti-communism represented a beacon of proud resistance to a corrupt establishment. Now, the Church is facing harder times while it is seen as being the establishment. There might be some aspect of inevitability here — inasmuch as it easier to have illusions about worldly power until it is used — but the struggle for the clergy is to have the soul of a Father Popiełuszko without the direct challenges that harden one’s resolve.

A question we should all face when remembering the saintly is whether to celebrate them in a passive sense or whether to use them as sources of inspiration. Most of us cannot be saintly, of course. (Most of us cannot be anything close.) But we can all be braver, and more thoughtful, and more honest.

“If we must die,” Popiełuszko is reported to have said, “It is surely better to meet death defending a worthwhile cause than sitting back and letting injustice win.” None of us face death for our opinions, which makes weakness even less defensible.