Systemic struggles of the Security Service against the Catholic Church in Podhale in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Selected examples from the Nowy Targ area

The article illustrates the struggle of the communist authorities of the People’s Republic of Poland against the Catholic Church in the local dimension on the basis of factography contained in the files of the security apparatus files from the 1950s and 1960s. The Marxist-Leninist ideology was to oust the Catholic religion from the consciousness of Poles and to completely laicise society, replacing faith with an atheistic utopia. The text gives examples of how the communist apparatus of power restricted and prevented freedom of religious practice on the example of the Podhale region. The multifaceted nature of the issues of religiosity in the analysed areas made it necessary to present the most representative forms and methods used by the communist authorities, both central and local, whose link directly involved in surveillance and repression was the security apparatus, with the help of local agencies of the communist state administration, including the Religious Affairs, Internal Affairs, Finance, Architecture and Construction, Penal and Administrative Colleges of the Presidiums of Municipal and District National Councils. The ‘people’s’ authorities enacted laws that prohibited the construction of religious buildings, the free public profession of faith, pilgrimages, processions, and the teaching of religion in schools. The communist minority imposed on the vast majority measures aimed at eliminating religious symbols from public space, thus institutions (including educational institutions), forbidding pastoral ministry outside the walls of temples, reviewing statements, sermons, state teachings, taking a wide range of preventive measures (e.g. probing and frightening talks, called ‘preventive’, ‘warning’), as well as punitive ones (bringing criminal proceedings and trials, imposing fines and financial penalties, dismissal, etc.). The text gives the issues and matters dealt with on an ongoing basis by the security apparatus operating in the Podhale region, which described the highlanders as strongly religiously fanaticised and thus not susceptible to the influence of an ideology that was to completely secularise them.