I mention Václav Benda’s well-known idea that in a society of atomized individuals, as communist Czechoslovakia was, it was important for ordinary people to come together and to be reminded of one another’s existence. In a time when people have forgotten how to be neighbors, simply sharing a meal or a movie together is a political act. This, I say, is a way to fight back against the loneliness and isolation that allows totalitarianism to rule.
That’s true, says Patrik, but it is also the case that talking about movies is a way for older members of the community to contribute to the passing on of cultural memory to the young.
“I had the experience with some people who are twenty years younger than me consider a movie great and interesting, but they don’t know that it’s a remake of something older,” he says. “Also, we don’t just screen new movies but also older ones. Jumping between eras helps the young people to understand the cultural context in which the films are made. The fact that the younger ones can learn from the knowledge and experience of the older ones is really meaningful.”
For the Benda family of Prague, their purpose is first to serve God and then to serve others. They did this under communism, and they are doing it under post-Christian liberalism. It’s a family tradition.
The Social Importance of Family
The Bendas were not the only family resisting communism. In many conversations throughout the former Soviet Bloc, I heard stories of how the Christian family was naturally the bedrock of forming faithful resistance to communism.
In Russia, you expect to find Orthodox Christians, but Baptists are much rarer. They were unknown in this country until the latter half of the nineteenth century, and even today are only about seventy-six thousand in a vast nation of 145 million souls. A gentle, white-haired pastor named Yuri Sipko was once the leader of his country’s Baptists.
It was a difficult job, even after the collapse of Soviet power. Baptists are marginalized and at times persecuted in Russia, even by other believers. Under communism, though, they not only had to contend with ostracism from fellow Christians, but like all other religious believers, were also severely attacked by the Soviet state. Communist propaganda depicted Baptists as members of a dangerous, primitive cult. Sipko, born in 1952 into a family of twelve children, says his father and mother planted the seeds of courage in his heart.
“My father was the pastor of our congregation. All sorts of pressure was put on him,” Sipko recalls. “When I was a child, all I knew was that I wanted to be like my father. I saw that he was able to stand alone, with dignity and courage, against all his enemies.”
When Yuri was still a boy, the Soviets sent his father to prison for five years for preaching. His mother, along with several other women in the congregation, was left alone to raise the children. These mothers read the Bible to the kids, prayed with them, wept with them, and taught their little ones what to live for.
One day, Yuri’s teacher called his mother to the school for a conference. The teacher was angry because the child refused to accept the state-mandated lessons in atheism and materialism. Yuri’s teacher demanded to know what kind of cult Mrs. Sipko belonged to and why they taught children such nonsense. The boy watched his mother, whose husband was in prison for his faith, to see how she would react to this dressing-down by an authority figure.
“She got out her Bible and began to read,” he remembers, smiling. “It makes me so happy to think about it. The teacher called me to her and said, ‘This is our boy. He’s learning our lessons.’ But under the protection of my mother, I found the courage to say, ‘No, I believe in God.’ It was a fiasco for the teacher.”
In a vastly more consequential way, Polish authorities plunged headlong into a similar fiasco when they crushed Father Jerzy Popiełuszko, who was chaplain to Poland’s trade union, Solidarity. Despite numerous threats to his life, the Warsaw priest spoke out against the criminal regime. In 1984, the secret police murdered him and dumped his body in a river.
Father Jerzy was a mediocre seminary student and an undistinguished priest—until the rise of Solidarity in opposition to communist brutality called him to his destiny.
Paweł Kęska, who directs the Popiełuszko museum in the martyred priest’s Warsaw parish, told me a story about nearly one million mourners who came to Father Jerzy’s funeral. And then he told me a story about the modest childhood of the priest who would become a national hero, and who is on his way to official sainthood in the Catholic Church.
Kęska said that the impoverished rural village where Father Jerzy was born is nothing special. Kęska had recently returned from a pilgrimage there with a student group.
“The village is very ordinary—there’s nothing spiritual there,” Kęska told me. “In the home where Father Jerzy lived, there’s one room that has been set apart as a kind of museum, but all the items there are under a thick veil of dust. By the wall is a small table, covered with a kind of plastic sheet. There is a small piece of paper with handwriting on it, written by Father Jerzy’s brother. It said, ‘Every day near the table we were praying with our mother.’ There is a photo of that mother as an old, tired woman. On the other side of that piece of paper is a reliquary with Father Jerzy’s relics.”
Father Jerzy’s ended his short life as a national hero of Christian resistance to communism, beloved by millions for his fidelity to God and his willingness to risk his own life to speak out against injustice to others. But it began in a little house in a dull, poor village in the middle of nowhere, in the bosom of a family that prayed together.
“And that’s the
