What do you do when you’re facing an intractable problem? A real-life scenario over which you have little control? A situation that seems impossible to change? I don’t want to over-promise—not every problem has a solution—but rather offer a story that suggests a way to approach such a challenge.
Following World War II, the right to assemble, the right to speak freely, the right to express one’s faith were all severely curtailed in Poland. However, even as the country’s communist party worked methodically to eradicate all religious faith in the country, the Catholic Church, though embattled, was energetically fighting to preserve the faith of its citizens. Ground zero in this struggle for the soul of the nation was a place called Nowa Huta (“New Steel Mill”) just to the east of Kraków on the Vistula River.
In the 1950s, after receiving funding and specific direction from the Soviet Union, the satellite communist government in Poland constructed an enormous steel mill outside Kraków with a centrally-planned, socially-engineered community around it, a workers’ paradise they touted—and one of epic scale. It would be called Nowa Huta and would be populated with families residing in hulking apartments, huge buildings with up to 450 flats each. Notably though, if you wanted to visit someone beyond those on either side of your particular flat, your little module, you’d have to take the stairs to the ground, leave the building, re-enter through another door, then climb back up a set of stairs to reach the next module. There were no hallways or common areas for people to encounter one another or congregate. Those living in the apartments likened them to human file cabinets—and these cabinets were meant to stay separate. It goes without saying there would be no church anywhere in Nowa Huta.
In 1959, the auxiliary bishop of Kraków, a man named Karol Wojtyla, began a tradition of conducting a Midnight Mass each Christmas Day in an open field in Nowa Huta. Then, after being appointed archbishop of Kraków in 1964, Wojtyla began to press the government for a building permit for a church there. While refused again and again, his efforts built up an enormous backlog of construction permit requests in the government offices. In the meantime, Wojtyla insisted the priests under his direction go from door to door, neighborhood by neighborhood, to form a series of informal parishes throughout Nowa Huta despite the fact that there was no church. Once these “living parishes” were established, Wojtyla would go back to the government office to say, “Look, the people want a church,” with the only real obstacle being a delayed building permit. Worn down and fearing unrest among the now-organized parishioners, a permit was finally granted in 1967. However, while permission was granted, the government refused to make any construction equipment or materials available for the project, which in a state-run economy posed another seemingly insurmountable problem for Wojtyla.
Nevertheless, Wojtyla, a former quarry worker in his youth, pressed on, taking up a shovel himself, laboring with a crew who began to dig the trench that would form the new church’s foundation. The church, he announced, would be built by hand. On their days off, local parishioners poured from their flats to mix their own cement and make their own bricks. Having obtained a rock from St. Peter’s Tomb in Rome, Wojtyla placed it in the foundation. The church’s exterior was decorated with two million small stones pulled from rivers all over Poland as workers from the Lenin Steelworks forged a modernist steel figure of the crucified Christ for its interior.
The Lord’s Ark Church, as it would be known, took almost a decade to build and was dedicated by Wojtyla in May of 1977, a year before he was selected to be pope himself in 1978. As Pope John Paul II, he later discussed the struggle to build the Lord’s Ark Church with his biographer, George Weigel, who noted that rather than surrendering to the notion that things are simply the “way they are and you can’t do anything about it,” what Wojtyla would do in such a situation was to exercise the agency he did have to first change the situation on the ground. The Midnight Masses, the door to door visits, the permit requests, the digging, the steel, the stones. He called the strategy one of “creating facts.”
Again, there’s not a solution to every problem under the sun, but when things seem intractable, when faced with what seems like an insurmountable challenge, perhaps consider not just the daunting problem that lays right in front of you but how God, with your help, might change the ground itself. Create some facts. Some new ones.
God—Make all things new. Amen.
