Lubach writes that the believers in the multiculturalism of the First Polish Republic, including my father who raised me in the spirit of respect for others, rightly underlined the religious tolerance written into state law in the Warsaw Confederation Act of January 28th, 1573.
Owing to this, the Poland of old was a country without stakes, and many non-Catholic believers living in the Catholic kingdom, such as Orthodox and Protestant nobility, Armenians, Tatars and Karaims, who enjoyed full rights as citizens. Jews weren’t persecuted and were allowed to govern themselves according to their own laws.
Today’s screamers, who accuse Poland of eternal radical non-tolerance, should be reminded that the Warsaw Confederation’s text was written into the UNESCO Memory of the World. Rightly so, as during the time of establishing the act of tolerance in Poland, Western Europe, which was ruled by absolutist monarchs, the rule of “cuius regio, eius religio” reigned, which meant that the subjects had to worship the same religion as the king, which led to terrible wars.
Today, uneducated fools put forward as an example of tolerance, the inheritors of those bloody nations – the French, Germans and Dutch. Two hundred years ago, the enemy of all despotism and great Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov said, “this would be amusing, if it weren’t so terrifying!”
Macron and Timmermans are to be our moral authorities! Why shouldn’t Robespierre and his admirer Pol Pot also play that role?
I learned to appreciate true Polish tolerance in the spirit of the First Polish Republic on my own skin. And it wasn’t thanks to the “enlightened” high lords, but ordinary people, often not really educated, but following basic Christian rules, which have been ingrained in their genes or souls. This manifested itself during the martial law period in Poland.
