Jerzy Turowicz, R.I.P.: 1912-99 - Polish journalist - Obituary

When Jerzy Turowicz died of a heart attack at age eighty-six on January 27, Poland lost a great and wise man. But to say only this fails to take his true measure, since for decades his salutary influence extended far beyond his native country.

Turowicz was deeply immersed in the politics, the religion, the culture of Poland, but it was as the editor of the Cracow-based Tygodnik Powsyzechny (Universal Weekly) that he met his most severe challenges and made his greatest contributions. His tenure at the Catholic weekly encompassed the great historical parenthesis that we know as the cold war. He joined the staff soon after the paper was founded by church leaders in 1945, but when he became editor six years later he made it independent of both church and state. From then until his death he frequently outraged politicians and sometimes church authorities as he established the paper as an arena of truth in a time of deceit and intimidation; a citadel of standards that were under constant assault; a point of stability amid political and moral turbulence.

Turowicz by personal example lived the message his weekly regularly conveyed. When Eastern Europe lay crushed under a militant and seemingly impregnable communism, he demonstrated that history is not a preordained, inexorable process to which one must simply yield; individual persons can make a difference; faith and reason are stronger than philosophical materialism; religion is the first freedom, the fount and spring from which others flow and which it constantly nourishes. He revealed not only the cynicism of Stalin's derisive question, "How many divisions has the pope?" but also its stupidity. He was able to translate such large issues into terms readily grasped by the flesh-and-blood people for whom they were intended, both the Polish citizens and those under whose rule they suffered and struggled. It was the rare combination of these abilities that enabled him to make Tygodnik Powsyzechny the freest and most trusted paper in Eastern Europe.

I first met Jerzy Turowicz in the offices of Commonweal when I was an editor. Not long before, state authorities had seized his paper and dismissed him because he had refused, on the death of the murderous Stalin, to publish a eulogy. The paper was given over to PAX, a group of Polish Catholics who judged it better to collaborate with rather than oppose their Communist rulers. (A representative of PAX later appeared in the Commonweal office to explain the superior wisdom and sophistication of their ways.)

Such was the moral authority of Turowicz, however, that three years after he was bounced out, the Communists, wishing to recoup credibility lost during the Polish and Hungarian uprisings, returned the paper to him.

Over the years, I met Turowicz a number of times, both during his infrequent trips to the United States and mine to Cracow. His low-keyed, unassuming manner and neat but well-worn clothes did nothing to reveal the stature he had attained. His colleagues and acquaintances, however, waxed warm in their appreciation of his work and their near-reverence for the man. He had become one of those editors around whom stories swirled, his canniness and insight the stuff of legend. Forced to submit each planned issue to government censors before publication, he would leave gaping spaces where prohibited material was to have appeared. Displeased with having their censorship so blatantly displayed, government authorities put a stop to that practice. Turowicz devised other ways to reveal their tactics. He also developed an Aesopean style that allowed him to communicate to the sensitively attuned reader messages that passed smoothly under the eyes of the literal-minded censors. During the government-directed, anti-Semitic purges of 1968, he published articles by writers whose Jewish origins were clearly evident. Dependent on the government for paper supplies, the press run of the weekly was limited to 50,000 - and it was sometimes less when an irritated government wanted to put the squeeze on Turowicz. This led friends and an active underground press to copy and distribute even more than their usual number of the paper.

Against the opposition of the formidable Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, he openly advocated church reform. A close and longtime friend of John Paul II, whose poems and essays he had published when the future pope was the Cracow-based Karol Wojtyla, he advised on a number of papal encyclicals. Nevertheless, after the liberation of Poland, he felt free to differ with John Paul on specific issues important enough to put a temporary crimp in their relations.

He was not always encouraged by events outside the Soviet-dominated orbit. Not only were there strong Communist parties in Western democracies, but the worst crimes of Soviet rulers, including gulags, anti-Semitic purges, and show trials, found apologists among noted Western intellectuals and artists. The United States implicitly urged subjugated peoples to revolt and then stood helplessly by when their uprisings were crushed. And even as the Polish people were suffering under the scourge of Soviet domination, they heard a president of the United States declare on TV that Poland was a free nation and witnessed another president welcome the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu as a lover of freedom and liberation. During all of these trials, Turowicz endured - and prevailed.

In Poland, his death was a time of deep mourning, an acknowledgment of an irretrievable loss, and a public thanksgiving for what Turowicz had contributed so abundantly during years of national humiliation, suffering, and lonely trial. We would do well to share, however tenuously, in these feelings.

May he rest in peace.

James Finn, a Commonweal editor from 1955 to 1961, is chairman of the Puebla Institute.

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