Positivity: Former Leader in Polish Solidarity Ordained in Canada
Loving God and Justice
Newly ordained priest once a leader in Poland’s Solidarity movement
May 20, 2006Bronislaw (Bruno) Schema grew up hearing about profound struggle and suffering.
His parents and neighbours talked of the unimaginable cruelty that had taken place during the Second World War at nearby Auschwitz, the concentration camp set up by the occupying Nazis in his native Poland.
They recalled emaciated camp survivors being marched past their town, Pszczyna, as the war neared its end in 1945. They remembered Nazi soldiers shooting people on the spot if they couldn’t keep up with their tormentors’ commands.
Years later, in a communist-run prison in Poland, Schema experienced a different kind of deprivation and fear first-hand. He remembers interrogators pointing guns at his head and seeing his fellow inmates being beaten or thrown into isolation cells.
But his exposure to cruelty and injustice, he says, instilled a lasting sense of compassion and social responsibility that he hopes to carry into his new role as a Roman Catholic priest in Halifax.
“My faith was always . . . strong, and I felt very close to God,” says the former altar boy and seminary student who eventually became a lawyer and later, a leader of the Solidarity trade union movement in Poland.
Like others involved with Solidarity, he was imprisoned when the Soviet Union crushed the movement in 1981 and imposed martial law.
“But this time, for me, it was . . . like a retreat, new experience through suffering,” he says of his six months in a cold, cramped jail, where he and three others shared a roughly three-metre by three-metre cell.
“We had a time to re-evaluate our path, our thinking and our way of doing, and it was a time of reflection. . . . And at this time, I thought probably my way is not this way,” he says with a Polish accent. “I was thinking again to join seminary and I was thinking about my vocation again very close. There was very deep re-evaluation.”
“I felt I didn’t go the way God wanted,” adds the 56-year-old, ordained by the Archdiocese of Halifax earlier this month. “Now I feel I’m on the right way.”
His path to the right way, though, has had many twists and turns.
After leaving a seminary in Krakow, he became a lawyer. He says he was doing well in his chosen profession. But despite the risks, he saw joining Solidarity as an opportunity from God.
….. Schema eventually left Poland, working in Europe for years before finishing his theological studies, all the while inspired by Pope John Paul II. He first met the Pope as a young seminary student in Krakow when the man who would go on to head the Roman Catholic Church was archbishop of that city. He also listened to the Pope preach during pilgrimages in Poland and later met him on a trip to Italy in 1980.
But even from afar, says Schema, the late Pope was a spiritual beacon for a nation under totalitarian rule. And when the then-newly elected Pope John Paul II visited Poland in 1979, millions gathered in the open to celebrate their faith.
Schema remembers shivering as he watched the Pope’s Warsaw address on television.
“It was time of miracle,” says the burly man of faith.
“From outside Poland, people don’t understand, but we saw the miracle in our eyes. . . . In companies, at work, talk about the church was taboo . . . but suddenly, we saw it is not only me thinking about God, about the church, but . . . millions of people who think the same way. Suddenly, we lost the fear from the secret police . . . and we suddenly saw that we have power.
“At the end, he said, ‘Let your spirit come upon the earth, upon this earth.’ It was so powerful. . . . The people saw we are not alone, we are together, we think the same way, and . . . God is with us.”
Schema was asked to come to Halifax in 2004 by Halifax Archbishop Terrence Prendergast, who’d heard about him through friends. These days, as he trains to minister to local prisoners, he keeps other words close to his heart; words that have kept him on the right path even in times of persecution.
“The spirit of the Lord is upon me, he has anointed me, he has sent me to bring the good news to the oppressed, to the poor, to release from prison,” he says, recalling a verse from the Bible. “It was my motto and it was, all the time . . . accompanying me in my life.”
