Large numbers turned out for the touring pontiff. In his base city of Cracow a reported million people thronged to a papal mass.

Partisans of the church rejoiced. See, they argued, that’s how necessary to humanity religion is. More than thirty years after the revolution in Poland, the masses pour out for a pope. Christianity has a stronger appeal to working people than Marxism.

But what happened in Poland was no test of Christianity versus Marxism. It was a massive expression of revulsion by the Polish people against a police regime that oppresses them in every sphere of life.

The revolution that ended capitalism in Poland, while it created the potential for great economic and social advances for the masses, came into the world cruelly deformed. Privilege-hungry bureaucrats, backed by Stalin’s troops, blocked the workers from exercising political power. Determined to prevent the working class from running the economy democratically, these bureaucrats have mismanaged and distorted the planned economy. They hold back wages and let prices skyrocket. They suppress democratic rights. And when the workers resist they unleash club-swinging, trigger-happy cops.

That’s why the Poles are so deeply alienated, so hungry for any broader social vision, that they will turn out for a pope.

But the Catholic Church is no progressive alternative to the Stalinist bureaucrats.

The Polish masses will increasingly demand working-class solutions to their economic and social problems.

There’s not a prayer of a chance they will settle for wafers, holy water, and hypocritical papal rhetoric.  
 
June 21, 1954
NEW YORK, June 15—An examiner’s decision has been issued denying the application of Carl Skoglund for discretionary relief from deportation to Sweden under the notorious McCarran Act. Although the 70-year old Minnesota labor leader has no political affiliation whatever, the examiner ruled that his admitted socialist views disqualify him from any consideration by the Attorney General; who has discretionary power to suspend the deportation proceedings.

Skoglund’s counsel, Stanley Lowell of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Alien Civil Rights Committee, immediately announced that the decision will be appealed. A vigorous effort will also be made to secure Skoglund’s release on bond from Ellis Island, where he has been detained since he was ordered there on May 20.

The government claims that Skoglund should be deported under the McCarren Act because he was a member of the Communist Party during the 1920’s, even though he was expelled from that party in 1928, and has been an outspoken opponent of Stalinism since that time. But Skoglund’s real “crime,” in the eyes of the government witch hunters, is his unblemished record of militant labor and socialist activity since he came to this country 43 years ago.  
 
 
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