Father Jacek Salij is turning 80, and this is definitely a reason to remember his figure and his fantastic activity not only in the Warsaw monastery on Freta Street, but also in many other places and areas. For several decades he ran a column in a Dominican monthly magazine, 'Seeking the Way', in which he answered countless questions from readers about faith, religion, the Church, relationships with the Lord God and with other people. But how did he answer! He wrote in a fascinatingly 'unprofessional' language, explained the most difficult matters without a trace of scientific pomp or excess of erudite display, and referred to examples from his life. Readers later bought books of these columns on the spot, published two or three times over, and lent them to each other.

"He is a rock", says journalist and writer Alina Petrowa-Wasilewicz, who met Father Salij long ago through the poet Anna Kamieńskaya, a friend of her parents. "This is a man who will answer doubts, give intellectual 'soil', because faith feeds on reason, he will not leave without an answer".

"Father Jacek was an important participant in the dialogue between Catholic circles and the participants in the March '68 protests, centred around Jacek Kuroń and Adam Michnik," adds Professor Jacek Czaputowicz, former Minister of Foreign Affairs. "For the circles of the early oppositionists, to which I belonged at the time, the cloisters and catechetical rooms in the Dominican monastery in Freta Street were always open, just to recall the meeting of the Cultural Section of the Warsaw Catholic Intelligentsia Club (KIK) with Antoni Macierewicz, a member of the Workers' Defence Committee (KOR), organised at a time when the lectures of the Society of Academic Courses were paralysed by the militia of the Socialist Union of Polish Students.

SIGN UP TO OUR PAGE And yet this jubilarian is a professor of theology, an eminent scholar, the promoter of numerous doctoral theses, the author of dozens of books and thousands of articles. He was a member of various important scientific and social bodies, sometimes - in times justly gone - somewhat secret, in the last 30 years quite official. Above all, he was a shepherd of souls, and we should divide this word into two parts if anyone doubts his understanding: "shepherd - of souls" and look at Father Jacek's activities in this way. That he was - and is - a shepherd of souls who seek help.

"And everything is built on the foundation of his very deep spirituality, his deepest understanding of Christianity, his incredibly strong faith and based on a fantastic intellectual background," explains Alina Petrowa-Wasilewicz, author (with Jacek Borkowicz) of an long interview with Father Jacek entitled "Celebrating God".

Firstly: life

No one remembers it today, but in the late 1970s - that is, in the years of rampant 'free' abortion - for even the slightest public statement in defence of unborn life, any editorial board or other entity of social life faced instant trouble from the censors or other repressive authority. And it is under such circumstances that three priests with several lay people undertake just such an activity: a modest and quiet offer of help to girls and pregnant women hesitating to give birth. At the head is Father Jacek Salij, still young, but already scientifically established, with a habilitation degree and therefore a professorial career in prospect - although also with a solid portfolio of surveillance, since in 1975 he signed Letter 59 - an objection to the planned changes to the Constitution of the People's Republic of Poland, consisting of the introduction of the "leading role of the Communist Party" and a "perpetual alliance with the Soviet Union". Father Jacek, as I was told by the co-founders of the "Gaudium vitae" movement, the then very young Wanda and Andrzej Urmanski and Maria Wolframowa, a generation older, was always a support, you could always count on him, he never referred to other agents or "for later".

He himself comes from a large, wonderful family, but as a four-year-old he survived the death of his sister Maniya, who was three years older. Not to mention that when his mother was seven months pregnant with him, she was miraculously not shot in a group of Jewish women with small children, to which she was herded in the Volhynian forest. In the aforementioned interview 'Celebrating God', Father Salij reported that it took almost half a century for his mother to be able to tell the story. A year after that event, the Germans expelled the Salij family from their village, which may have saved the family's life, as the Volhynian slaughter was already approaching. They ended up in a German labour camp near Świdnica and, after much post-war turmoil, settled near Dzierżoniów. Mr and Mrs Salij had three more daughters and five sons - three of whom went into the clerical state - and each birth was received with enthusiasm, as their eldest son has told in more than one interview, also with joy. And he always rejoiced with each new child in the families of his brothers and sisters, friends and acquaintances. "I prayed very fervently for this Extraordinary Miracle you call Stas," he wrote to me when I shared the news of our first grandchild with him.

Faith is very simple

Alina Petrowa-Wasilewicz quotes him in one of her reports: "I am becoming more and more aware that the Christian faith is very simple. To be a Christian, all you have to do is meet Jesus Christ, who is alive'. And simply follow Him.

"It has always amazed me that a theologian, but above all a professor of dogmatic theology, is such a good preacher and spiritual director of the younger generation," wrote in turn Cardinal Dominic Duka, the now retired Metropolitan of Prague and Primate of the Czech Republic, also a Dominican. "This could be seen in the endless series of phone calls asking for talk with Father Jacek."

Here I digress: five years ago, on the occasion of his 50th anniversary of priesthood, Fr Jacek Salij's students and friends prepared for him the Jubilee Book "Credo Domine" (W Drodze Publishing House and the Philosophical-Theological College of the Polish Dominican Province, Krakow 2017) and there Cardinal Duka thanked Fr Jacek for his help in rebuilding the Czech Dominican Province. "The young will say that I am writing down the history of the Polish Province [of the Dominicans - editor's note] and this is true. But it is also a history of great friendship, fraternal love, help and cooperation. Also in the first years after the fall of the communist dictatorship, Father [Salij - editor's note] was able to reach out with his literary and theological work to our university youth, especially in Prague," wrote Cardinal Duka.

This is probably what it is all about: that Father Jacek Salij is always consistent in what he writes, what he teaches and what he says - to his students, to his listeners and to all those who ask him for help.

"He will not betray the secular man, he will not go without a path, he will always be faithful," says Alina Petrowa-Wasilewicz.

Probably for this reason, "Teologia Polityczna" (Political Theology} not only publishes Fr Jacek Salija's Selected Works (three volumes have already come out and we present them each time in the TVP Weekly), but also publishes his commentary on the Gospels on its portal every day. This is not only because, full of the most profound content, it is written in as simple language as ever. But also - or rather above all - because the author is completely reliable for his readers. Verifiable and provable, which is not at all obvious in times of confusion, crises, the destruction and collapse of authorities, the undermining of truths, the breaking of principles.

Father Jacek Salij says and writes the same thing over and over again, because he himself works in this way: the Christian faith is very simple. It is enough to meet Jesus Christ, who lives.

He used to say this in the 1970s at meetings of the Cultural Section of the Warsaw Club of Catholic Intelligentsia (of which he was the assistant), where many very different people came looking for their identity, also Jewish - and in a way, in collaboration with Fr Jacek, they found it. And he used to say this at the Pastoral Tribunes, which the Dominicans also organised at the time, so that people could ask about everything - following on from the Civic Tribunes, which the party stopped organising, so that people wouldn't ask questions. He told me how it was: "The topics were various: 'the faith of the young', 'is it possible to live without lying? ', 'science vs. faith', 'Scripture - the word of God or a human story?', 'about artificial miscarriages', 'the meaning of our lives', 'work ethics', 'modern secularisation', 'conflict between generations', 'all about confession', and so on and so forth. The formula for the tribunals was simple: four or so representatives from different specialities would take up questions and allegations related to the announced topic, which had previously been presented on cards, and during the live stand. I have been invited many times to various cities for such stands and have seen first-hand how much good happens then."

But let's go back to Jesus: he said it in radio sermons broadcast from the Church of the Holy Cross and in retreats for the newly born Solidarity movement. And during martial law in countless churches where lectures on the Church's social teaching were organised, which included history, literature, political science, nuclear physics and ecology. And in retreats for the internees, but that deserves another thread.

– Miał dar przyciągania różnych środowisk i gotowość wsparcia słusznej sprawy, bez zważania na konsekwencje. Dlatego dziś tak różne środowiska i osoby przyznają się do związków z nim – podkreśla prof. Czaputowicz.

Poland and reconciliation

"Mrs Basia, I wasn't fighting for anything", he told me insistently when I asked for an account of his opposition activities.

No, no - Father Jacek Salij only took the side of the disadvantaged, those seeking the truth, those resisting injustice.

"He did not hesitate to give his support to those who, in the second half of the 1980s, undertook, by refusing to take the military oath or military service, thehe fight against the armed arm of the Communist Party, the People's Army of Poland," recalls Professor Jacek Czaputowicz, one of the leaders of the opposition movement Freedom and Peace (WiP). "The military oath pledged an alliance with the Red Army and the defence of socialism. And that these were not just words, is evidenced by the participation of the Polish army in the intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968, or in the suppression of workers' strikes in 1970 and 1981. Jacek Salija's text 'The Problem of Refusal of Military Service at the Vaticanum Secundum' provided moral arguments for the protest, many of whose participants from the Freedom and Peace movement were sentenced to many years in prison", says Prof. Czaputowicz, also one of them.

In the course of my many years as a journalist, I too have gone to Freta more than once, not only to do a shorter or longer interview with Fr Salij, but to seek his help in situations of injustice and dishonesty faced by journalistic teams, to ask his advice. Unable to cope with violations of workers' rights and obvious injustices, I asked for guidance. And I was not alone with such problems, although our interviewee did not gather us into groups. But, after all, he had also experienced injustice himself, although he did not speak or write about it.

He once told me - for the first time, and then he kept coming back to it, because lack of justice is not uncommon - the story of his unique retreat he was to preach in 1982 for the internees first in Jaworze, in April, and then, in June, in Darłówek. He quickly realised that there were many non-believers among the listeners, so the theme could not be too religious, rather socio-moral. So for Darłówek he prepared the theme of love of enemies in Polish literature and in the Polish independence tradition. And after the first day, the authorities banned him from this retreat! The theme was too strong! The authorities did not want him to love them,' he recalled.

Father Salij had been studying this subject for a long time and had a firm view that such a tradition was simply present in Polish national and religious thought. He had plenty of examples of this, as he presented in a book published in 1983 by the Paris publishing house Editions du Dialogue, '"Love your enemies. Loving enemies in Poland' (and not allowed into Poland, of course, it circulated in reprints and illegally smuggled copies). There are texts from Fr Jan Długosz to Primate Stefan Wyszyński, with Walery Łukasiński, Rafał Kalinowski and Leszek Kołakowski included. It is thanks to this tradition, unfortunately forgotten today," he explained, "that we were able to survive as a society, that we were able to accept the words of the Polish bishops addressed to the German ones in 1965. Our ancestors, during the period of partitions and other occupations, repeatedly tried to shape their attitude towards their enemies in the spirit of the Gospel.

A5 "This is why", he told me in an interview in 2017." every year we break a wafer as a sign of peace and reconciliation, because if we did not want to reconcile with each other, it would be something indecent to rejoice in the birth of the Saviour, of God, who wants to reconcile us with each other" ("Idziemy" weekly) .

- It was not appropriate for opposition activists to be at a midnight mass elsewhere than at Father Salij's place on Freta Street. Jacek Kuroń's tuba-like voice singing 'God is born, power is broken' carried through the cloisters and the entire monastery," recalls Jacek Czaputowicz, who, with his whole family, is friends with the jubilarian to this day.

I asked then, on the occasion of the interview, if we were somehow particularly doomed to conflict as Poles. "No one is particularly doomed to conflict," replied Father Salij. "Did it follow from the fact that a pear tree grew on the land between two families described by Sienkiewicz in his 'Trilogy' that they were doomed to conflict?".

But I also asked him who could be offered such retreats today about love of enemies, about respect for the enemy. He replied: "To all those who wish to come. During that retreat, I did not tell anyone that they were full of hatred; I did not shout at anyone, I did not stroke anyone's conscience, I did not condemn anyone - neither those who came to the retreat, nor some 'others'. I simply reminded them how much the Lord Jesus Himself spoke to us about forgiveness and loving our enemies, and how much our ancestors heard from this teaching. I presented various, sometimes very poignant examples of the realisation of this teaching".

"He was and is a rock," stresses Alina Petrowa-Wasilewicz. "And this will be confirmed by the thousands of people he helped and who passed through his hands, through his support and teaching.

And to whom, like the one signed here, he has explained laboriously and many times over that it is not enough not to do evil, it is not enough not to condone evil, and it is even necessary to defend oneself against it. And it is not enough to do good, which is, after all, essential. But it is still necessary to accept without hatred the evil that falls upon us - especially the evil that is not culpable, unjust, unfair. And we must learn to do this. "And the Lord Jesus will certainly help," explains the jubilarian, because we still need to learn this.

Ad multos annos, Father Jacek!
– Barbara Sułek-Kowalska
–translated by Tomasz Krzyżanowski

TVP WEEKLY. Editorial team and jornalists