If you search for information about Garwolin on the internet, you will find that it is a simple but attractive little town in eastern Poland, about 50km east of Warsaw. Yet 25 years ago, when I lived in Poland, Garwolin was the scene of a nasty confrontation between the forces of communist secularism and Roman Catholicism that has echoes in a landmark judgement last week by the European Court of Human Rights.
The Strasbourg-based court ruled that the display of crucifixes in Italian state school classrooms unlawfully restricted the right of parents to educate their children in accordance with their beliefs. The seven judges contended that the presence of crucifixes could be “disturbing for pupils who practised other religions or were atheists”.
Predictably, the Vatican poured scorn on the judgement. The judges seemed to have forgotten about Christianity’s role in forming the identity of Europe, a Vatican spokesman argued. Italian politicians – even some on the unapologetically secular left – were also indignant. Pier Luigi Bersani, newly elected leader of the opposition centre-left Democratic party, suggested that common sense had fallen victim to the law.
If anyone in Garwolin bothered to read the court’s ruling, I can well imagine how they must have chuckled bitterly. For the 1984 troubles in Garwolin erupted over precisely the same dispute: whether the local school could display crucifixes in its classrooms. I saw how the communist authorities worked themselves into such a frenzy that they sent in the Zomo riot police to take care of the “troublemakers”.
Once that happened, the issue became thoroughly politicised. It was the communists against not just the Roman Catholic Church, but against the Polish nation as a whole. The Garwolin protesters did what many anti-communist Poles used to do back then. They made their way to the Jasna Gora monastery in the city of Czestochowa, where they mixed nationalism with piety by singing hymns and waving the red-and-white banners of the outlawed Solidarity movement.
From the perspective of a Catholic believer, there isn’t necessarily much difference between the repressive actions in Garwolin of Poland’s communist authorities in 1984 and the ruling of the European Court of Human Rights in 2009. Personally, I do not go anything like that far: the court is a legitimate court, and it is not exactly ordering the use of water cannon or tear gas against unarmed religious believers.
But what the two episodes do tell us is how deep the currents of secularism and humanism run in European public life, in a way that some Americans find disturbing. The Vatican is doubtless right to say that Christianity has shaped Europe’s identity. But so, too, have social and intellectual forces opposed to organised religion, starting with the 18th-century Enlightenment and the French Revolution and going all the way to Marxism-Leninism and the liberalism of the European Court of Human Rights.
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