On November 18, 1965, twenty years after the end of World War II, Polish bishops directed to German bishops a letter containing the famous expression: “We forgive you and we ask to be forgiven”. Among the direct reasons why the letter was conveyed at that time, two major events are usually pointed to: the Second Vatican Council which then proceeded, attended by bishops from the two countries, and the approaching millennium of the christening of Poland. On September 29, 1963, in the Council hall, Pope Paul VI speaking to representatives of other Christian confessions uttered words to a similar effect: “If the guilt for this detachment is on our side, we humbly ask forgiveness of God and of those brothers who felt offended by us. On our part, we are prepared to forgive the offences levelled at the Catholic Church and forget the pain inflicted on her in the course of various disputes and divisions.” If the gesture of an outstretched hand was possible in relation to people of other confessions, can it prove to be too difficult in relation to brothers from the same Church, especially when you sit next to them during the Council’s debate? Sending the Message was thus a courageous practical implementation of what was happening in the Council’s hall and lobbies.

Another important event was the forthcoming millennium of the christening of Poland. Preceded with a nine-year prayer, novenna, this was the time of conscience clearing and making necessary revaluation. This was accompanied by the conviction that the jubilee would not be celebrated in a truly Christian spirit, if in relations between the Churches in Germany and Poland, the spirit of hatred would prevail. The idea itself was known before, especially to the Catholic milieu in Poland, to associations such as Znak and KIK (Club of Catholic Intelligentsia). Oskar Halecki, a Polish historian living abroad was also a powerful advocate of the idea: “And what could be said about our relations with the Germans and the Russians? It is true that the two nations were behind most of our misfortunes in recent centuries but we also lead our disputes with them. And it would not be compliant with Christ’s command to love also our enemies if we were unable to forgive old and new trespasses; if we spoke in relation to either of the two nations about a hereditary and thus incurable hatred, a hatred of one thousand years in relation to Germany. Indeed, it would not be a truly Christian millennium.” The jubilee context was also significant for a number of tactical reasons. At the moment of a fierce attack levelled by the communist regime against Polish bishops, it allowed Polish bishops to show the Message as one of many letters sent then by the Episcopate to the Churches in various parts of the world.

The Message was preceded by certain initiatives on the German side, indicative of an ongoing change in political mentality in some social groups. To mention just a few, the activities of “Aktion Sühnezeichen”, „Maximilian-Kolbe- Werk” or German „Pax Christi” can be named. A memorandum issued in October 1965 by the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) entitled: ”On the situation of the expelled and on relation of the German nation to their Eastern neighbours” was regarded as yet another important signal. The memorandum included, among others, the polemics with the notion of “the right to the home country” (Recht auf die Heimat), pointing out that any thoughts about the restoration of the old borders could have possibly been rational directly after the war but not twenty years later.

The absolute novelty of the Message was that an important peace initiative was undertaken by the Catholic Church in Poland, without involving state authorities who were back then not ready to take it. It was not the intention of the letter, however, to achieve any purely political goal, the intention was a religious and moral reconciliation between the Churches and the peoples. In the communist polemics, a charge was made that the bishops tried to step into the role of the nation’s political leaders. Also on the part of the German Episcopate certain doubts arose, prompted by such an interpretation of the issue. It was under different historical, cultural, religious and political circumstances that German bishops offered their response. The German people are divided into confessions and there are many divergent opinions on the Eastern politics among them. The Church, for their part, respects democratic state authorities without willing to compete with them in the arena of politics, especially the international one. Given these circumstances, the impact of the Catholic initiative was decidedly narrower than in Poland. The course of action adopted by the Polish bishops better suited Polish Catholicism and its traditions, where the Church, especially under Partitions, use to be the mouthpiece of the nation as a whole. Seeking to clarify their position, the bishops underscored, however, that “their right of representation stretches only as far, as far the spirit of the Polish nation interweaves with the sense of belonging to the Catholic Church. (...). Therefore, anybody who does not have any authentic affiliation with the Catholic community, should not feel that we spoke on his behalf”.

The very request to be forgiven directed to the Germans is the act of the greatest courage of Polish bishops. In the Letter, the bishops achieved a kind of turnaround in the way the history of Polish–German relations was perceived, also recalling positive developments, and especially the person of Saint Hedwig, by descent a German woman, and the greatest benefactress of the Polish people in the 12th century. But what made the strongest impression on the memory of the Poles are the events of the last war which was designed as an act of total destruction and annihilation. “More than 6 million Polish citizens, mostly of Jewish descent, had to pay the toll of life for the period of occupation. The leaders of the intelligentsia were simply uprooted, 2 thousand priests and 5 bishops ( a quarter of the Episcopate of that time) were murdered in various camps. Hundreds of priests and tens of thousands of civilians were executed soon after the outbreak of war. (...) The Wloclawek diocese lost during the war 48% of their priesthood, the Chelm diocese 47%. Many were displaced. All secondary and higher schools were closed, theological seminars were liquidated. Every German uniform, not only the SS one, inspired deadly fear among the Poles and fuelled hatred towards the Germans”. Despite the fact that the Poles were cruelly wronged in the wake of the criminal aggression perpetrated by the National Socialist Germany, they were also guilty of trespasses against the Germans, especially millions of refugees and displaced persons. It is in the nature of a war mechanism that there are no people who would be completely innocent. “In our conviction”, reads the Episcopate’s Letter to the Faithful, “should there be even one Pole who proved to be unworthy, this would give us a sufficient reason to say: ‘ We apologise’, if we want to be a nation of noble and magnanimous people, a nation of a better future”. This is why we, as the Poles, should not only forgive but also ask forgiveness. Such a conviction slowly paved its way through the awareness of the Poles who used to think about themselves only in terms of being victims.

At this point, a problem surfaced of divergent interpretations of history and contemporary facts among Polish and German bishops, the problem closely linked to the issue of Western territories annexed to Poland. For Poland who in the wake of war lost 1/3 of its territories, to have the Western lands was “a matter of the very existence”. For that reason, the Polish side strongly accentuated historical belonging of these lands to the sphere of Slavic culture, seeing their annexation as their “return to the home country” and an act of historical justice. “Here, even stones speak Polish”, as Cardinal S.Wyszynski used to say. The resistance of the bishops against the historical truth lasted until the 1980s. Departing from the historical truth, on many occasions did they suggest that only together with the Polish settlers, the Church returned to these lands, as if from the christening to the end of war there was no presence of the Catholic or Protestant Church and their organisations on these lands. The Germans were treated as incidental inhabitants or occupants. German bishops, in turn, emphasised that every time their compatriots invoke their right to the home country, they were, with just a few exceptions excluded, not driven by any aggressive design but they simply wanted to express that they legally lived in these regions and they are still strongly attached to them. At this point, the interpretations of history made by the two parties were clearly driving apart. Even sending to the German Episcopate a translated copy of Oskar Halecki’s history of Poland was not enough to alleviate these differences. Thirty years later, Polish and German bishops wrote together: “We do remember all the wrong that was done during the war and in the wake of it. Only the truth may free us, the truth which does not beautify anything, does not omit anything; which does not silence anything but does not call for squaring of the accounts either, since this would be incompatible with the plea that we keep making: ‘And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us’”. We can say that the reconciliation process is already complete but if in some circles in Poland, voices of protest are raised against the sales of land to foreigners, i.e. Germans, it means that there are still people who are afraid that their neighbours would buy out land in a bad intention, in the hope to restore the old pre-war borders. To my mind, this raises the awareness of the Churches on both sides that their toil is not yet finished and that they must continue to lend Christian inspiration to the faithful and societies and always “keep vigil”, as the Gospel reads.

Initially, both sides had the impression that time would heel the wounds. Reconciliation would then be a fruit of forgetting. But the process of reconciliation is not about simple consignment into oblivion, since then tragic experience would not make us any wiser. It is about facing the truth which is a precondition to clear one’s memory of prejudices and hatred. Forgetting is an ordinary human thing whereas forgiveness is a religious act. Each human lawlessness is in the first place a trespass against God. It is His forgiveness that must be sought first and foremost. If man can himself experience the goodness of the Merciful Father, if he is thoroughly moved by His love, he cannot keep this sensation within. He tries to translate these feelings into his relations with other people. Conscious of what he was given himself, he takes a charitable look at another man and his shortcomings. “Forgiveness, as German bishops write, is an appeal, directed to the one who suffered wrongdoing, to look at it with a merciful eye of God and to agree to make a new beginning”.

Not only our neighbours need our forgiveness. We also need to clear our memory. Not only the others, but also we ourselves often fall prey to an old grudge, secretly nourished in our heart of hearts. Resentments keep us hostage. They do not allow us to believe in man, in love, in being loved.We look into people’s eyes with suspicion. Even God seems to be someone unreliable. Forgiving those who trespassed against us is a way to liberate ourselves from the burden of the past. “Forgiving our wrongdoers”, as Simone Weil wrote, “means a complete abandonment of the past. It must be assumed that the future is still clean and untouched, though linked with the past by bonds that we are not aware of, but still it is completely free of these bonds that our imagination would like to impose on it.” (...) “While firmly renouncing the past, we may prey to God that our old sins should not bring the fruits of evil and fallacious mistakes into our spirit. As long as we are bound by the past even God Himself cannot stop this horrible ripening. We cannot be attached to the past without being attached to our crimes because we are not aware of the core of the evil that is in us.”We cannot be perfectly purified as long as we stay hostages to our pride, relentlessness, ruthlessness or envy.We cannot change the past, we cannot turn back events which already happened but conscious of our limitations and our addiction to them, we can change the meaning of the past, change the impact history has on our contemporary life.

The process of reconciliation launched by the Polish Episcopate and taken up by the German Episcopate points to the Church as a source of spiritual force, capable of transforming people’s hearts and by doing so, of influencing the course of international politics. Debate on the role of religion in the contemporary world reminds us that religion when properly lived, does not antagonise people but brings about peace, forgiveness and reconciliation. Churches may fill this role only when politicians resist the temptation of instrumental treatment of the Church and religion, and Church representatives have the courage to take on all the consequences arising from the Gospels, also the ones which societies cannot yet embrace. As much as the contemporary lay society already sees the opportunity to include Churches in a reconciliation processes, it is often driven by the temptation to use them for their own purposes. A new role of religion would therefore entail its division into individual components, such as ethics, credibility and rites, which are used by the state depending on the demand of the time. In this option, religion is occasionally admitted to the public sphere but on terms and conditions strictly defined by the state and only to be a tool used to the state’s own ends. Then, religion is unable to meet these ends in a proper manner. The lay state should rather recognise that the message of reconciliation belongs to the core of the Christian message. If Churches are allowed to freely perform their mission, they will also serve the purpose of reconciliation. It was not always obvious but the request for forgiveness directed in the Jubilee Year by Pope John Paul II to various religious communities and social groups shows clearly that in the Catholic Church of today, this truth has been fully absorbed.