ABSTRACT
In December 1970, the Polish workers in the Baltic seaports organized a strike which soon precipitated riots. The immediate cause of the unrest was the government's tactless raising of food prices on the eve of the Christmas holidays. Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, a man whose influence with the Polish people is second to none, and the Polish bishops immediately called for calm and peace throughout the country, making clear, however, their sympathy with the workers and their reprobation of the brutality of the police in suppressing the strike. The policy of rapprochement, although already set in motion by the exchanges between Khrushchev and Pope John XXIII in 1963, was not paralleled, in any meaningful way, in Poland until the 1970s. Starting in 1958, the government launched an attack upon religious instruction and soon banned it in most schools. Relations in 1965 continued to show the animosity that had become their characteristic feature.
