Grazyna Sikorska’s Jerzy Popieluszko: A Martyr for the Truth (Wm.. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 255 Jefferson, S.E., Grand Rapids, Mich. 49503; $6.95) is a simple, moving, and powerful book, a politicized nonfiction version of Georges Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest. Its subject, of course, is the Solidarity priest abducted, beaten, and murdered last October by Polish government thugs, members of the secret police, who have been tried and sentenced to long (but don’t hold your breath) prison terms imposed by a kind of inverse kangaroo court in which the killers, prosecuted by the “appalled” government that had pulled their firing-pins, were permitted to indulge in tirades against their victim to the extent that the auxiliary prosecutors, arguing on behalf of Father Jerzy’s family, were forced to assume the role of defense counsel for their murdered client. (Polish joke: “Question: Why did Piotrowski get 25 years’ imprisonment? Answer: One year for killing Father Jerzy and 24 for messing it up.”)
Like Bernanos’s “little priest,” who subsisted on bread and sour wine, pushing his frail strength to the limit on behalf of his parishioners while dying slowly of stomach cancer, Father Jerzy was a sick man who spent a protracted period at the Institute of Hematology in Warsaw and was at first assigned by his Church to a position ordinarily accorded retired priests: that of spiritual advisor at the academic church of St. Anna’s, Warsaw, where he had responsibility for the city’s medical students. Despite ill health, his ministry was so effective that he was transferred in 1980, at the age of 32, to St. Stanislaw Kostka, which, within four years, he was to make the most influential church in Poland.
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