A PASTORAL STRATEGY OF ACCOMPANIMENT

Srodowisko

Karol Wojtyla’s pastoral practice of working with lay people, as priest, bishop and cardinal (and to some extent even as pope), has been described by George Weigel as a "pastoral strategy of accompaniment." Wojtyla’s play, The Jeweler’s Shop, was a partial payment of his debt to what he himself referred to as “my srodowisko,” a Polish word that can be translated as environment or milieu.

Those involved in the srodowisko (many of them married couples with grandchildren, and numbering about 200 Polish lay people by the time Wojtyla, whom they called “Wujek,” meaning “uncle,” became Pope) spent much time together, including holidays skiing, kayaking and hiking. Srodowisko discussions were characterised by friendliness and openness with no subject and no problem being off limits.

Coincidental with the development of the srodowisko was Wojtyla’s continuinually progressing academic career studying and teaching philosophy:“Srodowisko was, in a sense, the empirical tether for Wojtyla’s emerging skill at philosophical reflection.” Crucial in shaping Wojtyla’s ideas and ministry, his srodowisko facilitated a detailed understanding of how ordinary people, trying to be mature Christians, lived their everyday life. One of those people, Stanilslaw Rybicki, recalling the experience of the srodowisko, said of Wojtyla, “He lived our problem. He knew life from this side – the side of people who really have to work for their living.”

Five themes from a student retreat in 1954 suggest ideas that Wojtyla tested with his srodowisko:

1. There is no dividing life up into the serious and the frivolous, the true and the unimportant.

2. Christianity is not for the sacristy and the sanctuary alone nor was it an abstraction.

3. Jesus Christ was not God pretending to be man but the incarnation of God entered fully into the drama of the human condition.

4. Love is not fulfilling oneself through the use of another. Love is giving oneself to another, for the good of the other and receiving the other as a gift.

5. The lethal paradox of the age is that, for all its alleged humanism, it had ended up devaluing the human person into an economic unit, an ideological category, an expression of a class or race or ethnicity.

Wojtyla told his people,

“You are great because you are God’s creation.”