I have seen only the trailer for Messenger of the Truth, the documentary biography of Fr. Jerzy Popieluzsko, the priest who was murdered by agents of the Polish regime in 1984. His martyrdom is a pivotal moment in the history of the Solidarity movement and seemingly occurred in odium fidei—that is, at the hands of persons who had a hatred for the faith. And, we might add, a hatred for the the way the faithful chose to live out their faith.

In the trailer, Cardinal Dolan’s on-screen endorsement of the documentary states it is a “must-see for all who believe in the rights of religious liberty, the dignity of the human person, and those who are lovers of freedom and defenders of the truth.” The whiff of Diocletianesque persecution looming here might be only in my imagination, but recently professor Robert George also has referred publicly and darkly to the end of “comfortable Catholicism,” a condition that we believers might have hoped to avoid in the first place, surely.

This eagerness to cast believing Americans as imminent candidates for the gulag seems both overwrought and strangely ahistorical. We need not look far for other examples.

For us John Paul II Catholics, his recent dual canonization with Pope John XXIII naturally stirred reflection about the histories of these two individuals. Nevertheless, nearly a decade since the death of John Paul II—a period that encompassed the financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath—it is surprising to realize that one aspect of the his life is still little remarked upon. I am referring here, of course, to his significant involvement in the Solidarity movement in Poland, starting from its very origins.

The attempt of some American commentators in recent years to remake John Paul in our own image has led them to skimp many details about this remarkable and formative part of John Paul’s life. These commentators' lack of curiosity may be attributable to a wary sense that Polish labor struggles from the 1980s surely have little or nothing to teach us Americans, snugly wrapped as we are in our advanced economy. That view was easier to defend before the financial crisis of 2008—and, for that matter, before the elevation of Pope Francis.

Another odd thing about this missing dimension in our understanding of John Paul II: Amid the frequent debates about what the economic and political implications of his teachings might mean, his plain commitment to and influence within the Solidarity movement over many years provide a series of concrete examples—in both action and thought—of just how he thought an authentic faith should be lived out.

Thus we need to recall just what John Paul and his friends, the leaders of the Polish Solidarity movement, made of their epic experiences if we seek to understand what a new revolution of conscience might mean in the 21st century. Putting it more pointedly: Amid a culture of fear such as pervades our country today, how do we in 2014 create “a huge forest planted by awakened consciences,” as the Solidarity chaplain Fr. Jozef Tischner described the movement? (And it was a forest—i.e., a national movement of the people—not simply a few very tall trees.)

What erupted on August 14, 1980—the date of the first Solidarity strike at the Gdansk shipyard—was perhaps “the most hopeful movement in the history of contemporary Europe,” according to historian Tim Garton Ash. And the great moment (the “psychological earthquake,” as it was later called) that set Solidarity in motion was the earlier pilgrimage of John Paul II to his homeland in June 1979, an extraordinary public outpouring (some 13 million people saw the Pope in person) that many historians believe demonstrated to the country just how united it was and what this unity might do.

Behind the movement we can find some key texts and remarkable individuals. One such text was Romans 12:20-21, on overcoming evil with good, and thus a source of the movement’s successful emphasis on non-violence. (Unlike the regime, Solidarity was not responsible for a single death during even the tensest moments of its history.)

As to the individual actors, in addition to better-known leaders like Lech Walesa, Fr. Jozef Tischner notably played a remarkable role both as chaplain to Solidarity and as its public theologian. Trained in philosophy, Tischner kept the focus on ethics in his public activities, influenced by then-Cardinal Wojtyla’s The Acting Person (1969) and the latter’s papal encyclical Laborem Exercens (1981), along with Catholic social teachings and the writings of diverse figures like Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, and Rosenzweig.

After all, the crucible of the events in Poland of the 1980s might have had a very different outcome—perhaps even a decline into a Hobbesian state of homo homini lupus or 'all against all' (as some observers believe finally occurred in the post-Communist 1990s). Or they might have simply deepened the numb, mistrustful condition of much of the Polish population in their own form of homo sovieticus, a kind of learned helplessness.

Instead, Tischner and his colleagues forged an extraordinary alliance between workers and intellectuals, and between shipyard workers and farmers, which some observers termed almost a movement of mass conversion. “Solidarity, the one that is born of the pages of the Gospel,” Tischner preached, “does not need an enemy or opponent to strengthen itself and grow. It turns towards all and not against anyone.” The goal was thus not to destroy the other but to hold up a mirror, to convert.

In earlier times freedom in Poland had always been understood as national sovereignty, especially with regard to Russia, with overtones of the country’s traditional republican ethos of “noble democracy.” Tischner began by challenging this conventional and limited understanding of the word. Solidarity, this “open conspiracy,” was not merely another national insurrection, he argued. It was a revolution of the conscience. Regardless of the regime, if your conscience is free, you are free. He proposed the life and martyrdom of St. Maximilian Kolbe as one dramatic example.

The leaders of Solidarity saw that it was necessary to push the boundaries of freedom wider to include the fulfillment of one’s own freedom, especially as realized in sharing in the governing of one’s community. Freedom, as they proposed it, can only be achieved interpersonally or else it is merely solipsistic. We cannot be free if others around us are not free. Thus we seek the participation of all.

This was not mere rhetoric. Witness Lech Walesa’s argument at one point that the Lenin Shipyard workers should refuse a wage hike in order to stay in solidarity with workers in other industries. Nor was he a lonely voice: During this struggle, workers traveled to strike with farmers; farm families sometimes fed workers. At another point a strike was called at Gdansk over the regime’s unfair firing of one female worker.

Solidarity, it should be noted, was partly a criticism of senseless work (i.e., wasting human labor, natural resources and time, a frequent occurrence in socialist economies) rather than of poverty per se, of which there was not a great deal in the Poland of the 1980s. Moreover, Tischner resisted “absolutizing the poor,” which tendency he saw as a residue of Marxism in the emerging theories of liberation theology.

Also in the air at this time were voices for Maritain’s personalist communitarianism, with which some Polish intellectuals were familiar. And, however oddly it may have struck some outside observers, the upwelling of popular Catholic piety during these years was surely a major force, symbolized by the Ark Church in Nowa Huta, with its icon of the Black Madonna. (For another example of popular piety turned to populist purposes, see Christopher Shannon’s essay on how Ivan Illich created Puerto Rican Day—the Fiesta de San Juan—in New York City.)

Yet Solidarity’s call to “life in truth” did not require the profession of Christian faith, despite the fact that the language the Polish Church spoke was effectively the only tolerated living alternative to the official lies of the regime. The truth about the human person—our inviolable dignity, capacity for freedom, and the call to participation—could also be understood as grounded in a different understanding of human fulfillment, one achieved by renouncing when necessary one’s own claims in favor of the common good. Thus secular, leftish intellectuals like historian Adam Michnik grasped the revolutionary power of religious belief in the struggle.

Freedom in this context was thus much more than the negative "freedom from" enshrined in much contemporary liberal and neoliberal thought. It was "freedom for," and a true “revolution of the soul” for millions of ordinary citizens. For many, it was a time of the “as if” philosophy: “We will live as if we are in a free country, as if we are not afraid.”

As Walesa wrote about the regime at one point:



Our souls contain exactly the opposite of what They wanted. They wanted us not to believe in God, and our churches are full. They wanted us to be materialistic and incapable of sacrifices: we are anti-materialistic and capable of sacrifice. They wanted us to be afraid of the tanks, of the guns, and instead we don’t fear Them at all.

For millions of Poles, overcoming the fear in their souls with a sense of hope made them strong enough to unite and participate on a vast scale. As Garton Ash reported, a directive to strike during these times was followed even in the remotest parts of the country: in the tiny station buffet and village pub as well as in Warsaw.

By 1989, however, the ethos of solidarity began to wane, signalled by a “war at the top”, a struggle between Walesa and Tadeusz Mazowiecki, both of whom wanted to be president of the new Poland. As we might recall, this was the time of the rise of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, coincident with the fall of Soviet communism. Related to these events was a kind of rush to embrace Western economic approaches, symbolized by the visits to Poland by American advisors such as Milton Friedman and Jeffrey Sachs, as well as the influence of Friedrich von Hayek’s work. The covert injection of tens of millions of U.S. dollars into Poland during the 1980s undoubtedly also played a certain role.

The 1989 debate between the two presidential candidates had to do with the pace of what was considered the requisite “shock therapy,” in the form of capitalistic restructuring. Walesa wanted a fast-track approach and won the election, thus ensuring an open door for the three major tenets of what came to be known as neoliberalism: the unconditional supremacy of the economic system; unfettered capitalism with no “mixed” economic elements; and permissiveness toward all points of view on other issues (civil liberties, social issues, capital punishment) so long as they did not interfere with economic freedom.

Walesa and his administration attempted to appease workers by promising that the shock therapy would be short-lived. Instead the resulting economic anger probably led to the rise of a radical right in Poland, according to one commentator. And it turned over many enterprises previously controlled by the state’s nomenklatura to a new “capitalistic” nomenklatura.

By 1999, Pope John Paul II returned again to Poland to observe in one talk that “growth and progress should not take place at all costs,” certainly not at the cost of postponing respect for human dignity until some future economic moment. Such a postponement would derive from a “false notion of human freedom,” as John Paul once referred to neoliberalism’s tenets. (Despite these statements and others, many observers would continue to insist on identifying his references to capitalism with the neoliberal model rather than the social market economy.)

Indeed, the years following the fall of the Communist regime were marked by a rise in both poverty and inequality in Poland, leading many to ask the question: For whose freedom did we struggle? Neoliberalism’s emphasis on negative freedom was leading to greater moral permissivism in society and to a return in private life to a mostly pietistic style of faith.

What historians like George Weigel termed the “resistance church” was finally unable to resist this narrowing in economic and social participation for many and took on a triumphalistic tone criticized by Czeslaw Milosz and Leszek Kolakowski, among others. As Andrzej Potocki pointed out, if the old solidarity was between different kinds of workers standing against the regime, the new solidarity should be between rich and poor, the employed and the unemployed. Or as Jozef Tischner often put it, solidarity is always “with someone and for someone,” especially the people lying in the road whom others “pass by.”

The rise and fall of this ethos thus led not to the final revolution (of Weigel’s 1992 book title) but to an unfinished revolution. While Solidarity’s revolution of the spirit was indeed the undoing of a colossal materialistic system, as Weigel well describes, the revolution was not one of disembodied spirits, as the author of a famous “theology of the body” well knew.

It was also the regeneration of civil society in Poland, one that for a time might have been capable of exploring a third way, one in which the dignity of work means avoiding what Tischner (in his Spirit of Solidarity) calls the disease of work—its exploitation through a form of human betrayal. We are obliged, in his view, to resist situations of such exploitation as a basic duty of conscience: Its damage, as we know, goes beyond the economic.

Economics and politics, he urged, are only derivative problems. Our basic problem is a problem of conscience and how to awaken consciences. (Quite simply, we cannot be in solidarity with people who lack a conscience.)

If our socio-economic system is viewed as an inhuman process that must continually trump ethical concerns, then a kind of blindness has set in. In the neoliberal settlement, that is, we often cannot “see” the exploitation, nor the exploiters—because a kind of shared superstition has duped us. Nothing less than a Copernican revolution in our economic worldview is needed.

Solidarity brings us a new feeling of responsibility, based in fidelity, leading us to recognize the signs of exploitation that, Tischner states, are those of needless suffering. Work should be a person-to-person relationship; it also is always with someone, for someone. Those who died in the shipyards, we recall, perished through their work.

Does the awakening of conscience require national strikes, demonstrations? Or should we, like the Polish citizens, simply come out in freedom? “The forest grows without noise,” as Solidarity’s leaders put it, often choosing the path of dialogue and even compromise in order to maintain a larger unity. As they also knew, solidarity does not need to be imposed: It is born spontaneously from the heart.

Today the legacy of Solidarity remains to be claimed in this country through the rebuilding of society at the person-to-person level of the neighborhood, the town, the region. This is surely how a healthy politics becomes imbued with solidarity.

The rising up of ordinary Polish workers was in contradiction with the conventional Marxist-Leninist dictum that the proletariat cannot see its own best interests. Similarly, our society’s 99 percent must cease to live “in thrall to an individualistic, indifferent and self-centered mentality” (as Pope Francis recently put it) in order to live “as if” we were part of an economy of the gift, as described in his predecessor’s encyclical Caritas in Veritate.

“The spirit rules through persuasion and not through fear,” Jozef Tischner wrote. “This is why a truly great revolution is, at the same time, a holiday of the liberation of a human being from the fear of other human beings.” As Saint John Paul II also knew, this hope is the goal of authentic solidarity, if we can only remember the lesson.

Author's note: Two key texts used here were The Spirit of Solidarity, by Fr. Jozef Tischner (HarperCollins, 1984) and Recovering Solidarity, by Gerald J. Beyer (Notre Dame, 2010). To the estimable Artur Rosman, a native Pole and philosopher who blogs here and at Cosmos the in Lost, I owe thanks for first tipping me off to the existence of what he calls Catholiclandia, a mythical “Orientalized” version of contemporary Poland dear to a certain kind of American intellectual.