Retired Polish Archbishop Ignacy Tokarczuk, who built churches in secret in defiance of the communist authorities, becoming a folk hero for many, has died at the age of 94, PAP news agency said on Saturday. One of the Soviet bloc's more colourful anti-communist clerics, Tokarczuk clandestinely built hundreds of churches under the noses of the officially atheist government in the 1960s and 1970s.
"While Ignacy Tokarczuk was bishop of Przemysl, more than 400 churches and chapels were built in the diocese despite the lack of building permits from the communist authorities," Episcopate Chairman Archbishop Jozef Michalik said on the website of the Przemysl Archdiocese. "He will be remembered for his uncompromising stance in defence of the institution of the Catholic Church despite frequent harassment by the security service of the Polish People's Republic."
The typical ruse was for a parishioner in the staunchly Catholic Przemysl region, in south-eastern Poland, to get a building permit from the authorities to build a farmhouse, whose interior was then secretly fitted out as a house of worship. When volunteer builders from the parish had everything in place, they would affix a small steeple to the roof under the cover of darkness, and a new church was created.
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