The Cross at Marx & Lenin

When it was designed by Poland's Communist rulers in 1949, Nowa Huta (literally New Foundry) was to be a model city of dedicated workers who took spiritual strength from their labors at the sprawling steelworks, and hence would need no church. But the devout peasants recruited from the countryside to man Nowa Huta's machines were not so easily weaned from their Catholic faith. Most simply got up an hour earlier on Sundays to make the long tram ride into Cracow for Mass. Finally, Party Boss Wladyslaw Gomulka bowed to pressure, announced that the 100,000 people of Nowa Huta could have a church after all. The site selected was an open, grassy site at the corner of Marx and Lenin streets, amid the scores of shabby new apartment buildings. A wooden cross was mounted in the center and consecrated by Cracow's Archbishop Eugeniusz Baziak himself.

That was in 1957. Three years later there was still no church, and the stalling Communist authorities began talking vaguely of building-material shortages and the need for schools. Last week housewives saw city workmen drive up to the site, obviously intending to remove the cross. Rushing into the street, the women chanted hymns and waved placards demanding "Freedom of Religion.'' Late in the afternoon they were joined by their husbands, coming off the day shift. By the time the police arrived, a threatening mob of some 3,000 had sealed off the block. The cops used tear gas. The throng replied with bricks and stones, and raced to the town hall, setting it afire.

At week's end 15 policemen were nursing bruises, and more than 50 members of the protesting crowd were in jail.

The Communist regime was so disturbed that it tried to censor all mention of the riot, and the secret police dogged the footsteps of foreign newsmen. But at the corner of Marx and Lenin streets the cross still stood, protected by groups of angry women--emphatic evidence that the faith of Poland's Christians is still a force that the Communist bosses challenge at their peril.

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