The Activities of the So-Called Patriot Priests and Catholics Collaborating with Communists in the Lublin Voivodeship during the Stalinist Period (1950–1956)
The Activities of the So-Called Patriot Priests and Catholics Collaborating with Communists in the Lublin Voivodeship during the Stalinist Period (1950–1956)

Summary/Abstract: After the Second World War, since 1949, the organisations were established in Poland with the aim to gather priests and Catholics and support the communist authorities. Members were recruited by the political police using terror and various discrediting materials. The organisations were created, financed and supervised by the communist party and the political police. Their task was to break up the Church from inside and subordinate it to the totalitarian state. The Catholic Church punished canonically the clergy who acted within the structures of these organisations as they were committing treason. These organisations gathered nearly 10 percent of all Catholic priests in the Lublin voivodeship. They ended their activity when de-Stalinization started in Poland in 1956. The clergy who supported the communist regime in Poland were popularly called patriot priests. It was an ironic term used by Poles. The article shows the organisational structures and analyses the motives and conditions that led the priests to collaborate with the communist authorities.

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