Free Iron Curtain by Anne Applebaum Page B

heard inside all of the city’s churches. Inside one of them, the Church of the Capuchins, the congregation began to sing a hymn: “We Want God!” As mass came to an end and people poured out onto the streets, arrests began. The churchgoers tried to escape from the town center, butpolicemen blocked the side streets and herded them into armored trucks—a scene, one historian remarks, not so different from the street arrests the Nazis had carried out in Lublin a few years earlier. Some remained under arrest for a few hours, some for up to three weeks. 38
    By August, the authorities had found a way to fit the event into their overarching narrative. How had it happened that news of the “miracle” had traveled so quickly, even to places hundreds of miles away from Lublin? Who spread this fantastic rumor through the whole country?Polish radio had the answer: the organizers of the “miracle” in Lublin turned out to be reactionary cliques of clerics, acting in concert with enemies of the Polish nation and the People’s Republic, along withVoice of America. This, the reporter ominously concluded, was hardly surprising: “Voice of America was very pleased that in Poland people abandoned positive work in the fields, and ordered them to gather in front of the cathedral in indescribable conditions … This was not a manifestation of faith. It was an organized demonstration of medieval fanaticism … for purposes which had nothing to do with religion.” 39
    Eventually, the fuss over the Lublin miracle died down. But it was not the only such event in Stalinist Europe. In the Hungarian village ofFallóskút, two years earlier, a young woman named Klára ran away from a violent husband, spent the night in the fields, and had a dream in which the Virgin Mary told her to look for a spring. She found the spring, and then had a second dream, in which the Virgin Mary told her to build a chapel. Despite her poverty, “belief would be enough” to pay for the chapel, according to the Virgin, and so it proved. Klára convinced others to help, and the chapel was erected beside the spring at the end of 1948. A priest came to inaugurate the building.
    Even though the fearful episcopate refused to recognize the miracle, the Virgin nevertheless appeared to Klára several times again in 1949, after which she was sent to a psychiatric hospital and given electric shock treatment. She was released, but then sent back to the hospital once more in 1952 and diagnosed as schizophrenic. In the meantime, many others began to support the chapel, including Klára’s repentant husband. Later, in the 1970s, she made two trips to theVatican in an attempt to secure papal recognition for the miracle. Eventually recognition was granted, though only after her death in 1985. 40
    Fallóskút never attracted the crowds that briefly deluged Lublin cathedral. But the chapel eventually came to play a special role in HungarianGypsy culture. These most passive of all regime opponents demonstrated their belief by quietly making their way to Klára’s source, and by quietly observing the miracles the holy water wrought. Several patients with eye trouble were cured by the water. A mute boy was said to have begun to speak. No one who came to pray at the chapel had to say a word about politics, communism, democracy, or opposition. But everyone who came to Fallóskút understood why they were there and why others were not.
    Miracles, pilgrimages, and prayer were not the only form of passive opposition the church could offer. However curtailed, persecuted, and oppressed, religious institutions did continue to exist during High Stalinism. However pressured or threatened, not every priest was “patriotic” either, and not every Catholic intellectual was in search of a public career. Those church authorities who were willing to operate discreetly were even able to create unusual living and working arrangements for people who wanted nothing to do with communism at all.