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Paulina Napiera艂a, formerly a visiting scholar at the Boisi Center, shared an insightful presentation drawing connections between the roles and responses of Black Churches during the American Civil Rights Movement and the Catholic Church during communist Poland. Napiera艂a began by outlining the contexts of both relationships, particularly the historical church influences in Poland鈥搃nformed by her own Polish heritage. The key aspects Napiera艂a highlighted from Polish Catholic history were its geographic location and the resulting occupations that compromised Poland's government鈥揳nd, therefore, its independence鈥揳nd required that the Church take up the role as keeper of Polish culture. She used this context to describe the Polish people's, the Catholic Church's, and Communism's relationship, particularly involving the Solidarity movement. As she illustrated, Catholic and the Catholic Church鈥檚 responses were far from uniform toward their oppression, but rather were a plurality of responses鈥搒ome more aggressively liberationist while others were more conciliatory or even complicit in the Communist regime.

Due to the similar social contexts鈥搘ithout ignoring important distinctions鈥揘apiera艂a presented the response to the Civil Rights Movement by the Black Churches as similar to those of the Catholic Church and the Catholics of Poland. One distinction she noted was that the Catholic Church and Catholic Poles were a majority, while, in comparison, the Civil Rights Movement focused on a movement for the nation鈥檚 minority. Rather than focus on this contextual difference, Napiera艂a highlighted the similar response by Black Churches; that is, some were militantly against the 鈥渞abble-rousing鈥� they perceived Martin Luther King, Jr. and other movement leaders to be instigating, while others were sympathetic to the cause and took extreme measures to risk their lives to accompany those activists in their efforts.听

Napiera艂a spent much time describing Poland and America's social, political, and historical contexts that informed their respective movements and the participation in and/or responses to them. One interesting conclusion she drew was that, despite this plurality of response and involvement by some churches to either the Solidarity Movement or the Civil Rights Movement, many of those communities now claim that they had a significant hand in the particular movements. Those Black Churches that once disparaged King and his followers now claim to have played an outsized role in the Civil Rights Movement, and Catholic Poles now also claim to have been a unified anti-Communist voice during their own struggles. History, Napiera艂a concludes, provides a significantly different view.听

Audience questions followed Napiera艂a's presentation, exploring King's studies and the impact of the concept of social/structural sin, Niebuhr's influence on King and the role of coercion for good, and Pope John Paul II's influence on Catholic Poland and its self-image.听