The Polish Church: key facts | IMGpapers 1980

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and 19,683 priests.

for 186 new churches to be built.

There are nuns.

There are 78 bishops in Poland, two cardinals, and two archbishops. There are 9,856 churches Between 1945 and 1970, 352 new churches were built. 871 old churches were restored.

Between 1971 and 1978 permits were issued 42 monastic orders, over 7,000 monks, 100 women's religious orders and 25.765 church.

church was lUll lll to newspapers behaviour at this time was wor'An unequivocal proby the bishops about anti-semitism was badly Gierek, coming to power in 1970 after another upsurge by Poland's militant working class straight Wyszynski for help. The Cardinal urged the workers to pray for 'peace and calm' and to put an end to their strike was obviously grateful to Wyszynski. When day. Poland could be transformed into a lever for strengthening the position of the church. This explains the : backing that it passively gave to the opposition movement.' But the church, like the fears nothing more than the mass movement of the striking Polish workers. As the workers' combativity increases their trust in the church grows less and less. Even the 'clever' Cardinal Wyszynski is finding the going tough in Poland toSocialist Challenge 3 September 1980 Page 5

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- Forty years after the assass THE MAN WH THEY COULDN day. but for genuine socialist democracy.

imperialists and Stalinists.

by Tariq Ali and Phil Evans. LEON TROTSKY, leader of the Russian Revolution and later founder of the Fourth International, murdered forty years ago by an agent of Stalin.

It is from Trotsky's fight against the bureaucratisation of the Soviet workers' state, for the maintenance of a policy of revolutionary internationalism based on the independent struggle of the working class, that the International Marxist Group draws its inspiration toWhen Trotsky and his small band of supporters around the world fought to create a new Fourth International in the face of the betrayals of the Comintern (whose policies had let Hitler into power in Germany), their struggle was very much against the stream. It was above all a declaration of confidence in the revolutionary potential of the working class in the future.

Today that confidence has been totally vindicated — not merely by the general rise in world revolution, but above all by the events in Poland. As Trotsky predicted, the working class is in revolt against the bureaucracy — not for the restoration of capitalism, The Polish workers' strikes are dramatic confirmation of the relevance of Trotsky's analyses - and of his struggle for a new world party which would fight to mobilise the working class internationally against the Below we print a recollection by veteran revolutionary Harry Wicks of Trotsky's famous speech in Copenhagen in 1932, extracts from Trotsky's writings on the tasks of the political revolution, and a couple of pages from the newly published Trotsky for Beginners