The Portal December 2018 | Page 4

THE P RTAL December 2018 Joanna Bogle gives us an example R ecently I Christmas celebrations Page 4 read about nurses in a busy hospital being upset because they were told there must be no Christmas festivities of any kind. Christmas Eve and Christmas Day must be treated as ordinary working days. This hospital, they were told firmly, is funded through the state system and any outward show of religion is banned. Sounds familiar? This report came from Poland in the 1950s. The Communist system was seeking to reinvent the nation on the basis of an enforced ideology. The nurses had to attend lectures on political themes in tune with the government and with what they were firmly told was the normal modern view of things.  But there is something else to this story. One of the senior nurses, a tutor, decorated the tables in the refectory in their nurses’ hostel on Christmas Eve  and made the room festive. na wri tes I don’t need to press the point; there is no need to give in to anti-Christian campaigns and every reason not to. The people in Communist- dominated Poland kept the faith and God gave them a magnificent gift: the heroic Archbishop  Karol Wojtyla, elected as Pope John Paul in 1978, one of the great figures of modern times, under whom Communism crumbled. And we have something the Poles didn’t have; we have their example. So where does that leave us in Britain today? She had saved up various The lesson to be learned is sweets and treats, and when about courage, about holding the young women arrived for on to what is true, about their evening meal they found being faithful and loyal to the her in her best dress, urging Blessed Hanna Chrzanowska Church and to be cheerful them to hurry and change and and forward-looking. Even be ready for the Christmas Wigilia, the traditional when we are told we can’t celebrate Christmas in some Polish Christmas Eve. They all had a wonderful public facility. celebration. You are invited to join the The young nurses never forgot this, and the story Rosary Fellowship became something of a legend, inspiring hope wherever For full details and an application form it was told. It became part of the whole adventure of please contact Br Robert Augustine at: Poland’s defiance of enforced ideology and the final The Retreat of Our Lady and St Benedict, triumph of Christian culture.  And that nursing tutor – 63a Wells Road, Walsingham NR22 6DX who went on to do heroic work organising a system of [email protected] 01328 820130 voluntary home-nursing and care for the housebound and elderly across Krakow – was beatified in 2018: Please could clergy bring this initiative to the attention of any of Blessed Hanna Chrzanowska. your people who do not have access to this publication