President Kaczynski, who perished in the plane crash along with his wife and a big group of state officials, was the one who stood strong behind the Polish Catholic Church while at the same time he represented the state in official and semi official ceremonies.
In the eyes of the Church, the President was their man exactly where he was supposed to be. No state ceremony was to be held without the Church officials who openly demonstrated their active involvement in life of state institutions, including secular ones. President Kaczynski, on the other hand, was too far lenient and reluctantly demonstrated and implemented the idea of separation of state and religion in public life. He never opposed active involvement, interference and intentions of the Catholic Church to dictate their ideas of how life should be like in a modern state in the middle of Europe. It all looked very much like “I’ll scratch your back and you scratch mine” and it was working very fine.
Now, after the tragedy, the Catholic Church in Poland uses the President’s image, people’s fragility in the time of mourning to create their new hero whom the Church really needed at the time when the Roman Catholic Church as the whole have recently been shattered by a wave of sexual scandals originating directly from Vatican. That’s the way the Polish Catholic Church pays back for what they got from the President.
Somebody in the group of high rank officials, no matter whether state or religious ones, agreed to bury the Presidential couple in the castle of Wawel in Krakow that’s the burial place for Polish people of extraordinary merits. President Kaczynski, unfortunately, didn’t belong to this group of Polish people. No matter what happened in the catastrophe and how tragic its outcome was, the President was just not the person to be buried along with the Polish kings who made huge difference in the course of more than 2,000 years of Polish history.
All the links now go to the Metropolitan Archbishop of Krakow, Stanislaw Dziwisz, who was a personal secretary to the Pope John Paul the 2nd and whose influences in the life of Krakow’s Wawel are widely known because of the rank he holds in Polish religious life. But it’s not this factor only, he – as an active religious figure in the life of the state – has his own way to say how the state ceremony of burial of the Presidential couple should look like.
When asked who decided to help select a burial place to the President and the Polish First Lady, he said, “I don’t know. I just accepted the will of the [President’s] family and the state officials to do so”. Well, don’t put tons of foam on people’s eyes, Mr. Dziwisz, once you accepted the decision of others than family, you must know who you were exchanging your information with. Whom decision did you accept, Mr. Dziwisz? It seems that Polish version of Catholicism from the top reminds the one from Vatican – make people stupid by spreading disinformation (yes, “I don’t know” statement at the time of knowing is defined like “disinformation”).
The decision, no matter who its author was, divided the whole nation and its repercussion will soon resurface once the hurt nation will come out from time of mourning.
Moreover, the national mourning is now led by the Catholic Church as if people didn’t know how to mourn. Maybe people need to go to the church to give a hug one to another and pray, maybe…, but maybe not in everyone’s case. So how come the Church claims their leading role in the whole process of Presidential burial ceremony? They need it, they need a new hero after 5 years after the Pope John Paul the 2nd died. This time there’s a new hero from the political life who let them live with their uninterrupted life and closed his blind eye to interfering the state institutions’ life, help them claiming huge real estate properties for nothing and continuously let them avoiding the tax policy in Poland. They need an icon who gave them a fresh breath of life and self confidence at the time of Europe without borders. They need the whole state ceremonies under their supervision and leadership. They will again demonstrate their importance and necessity to be in everyday life of every Pole and lead their role in spiritual shape of the nation. In the life of new generation they create the image of their presence in the state as if it was business as usual. At the end of the day they like the ceremonies like burials – the latter ones strengthen their might and power, slowly changing from spiritual to political. They will also sum up the money people bring for them today. Tomorrow it will be another business day, business as usual.
