My acquaintance, a tour guide for foreign trips, went on a pilgrimage to Italy with the Radio Maryja Family at the beginning of the 1990s. The story is authentic and tells of a phenomenon of Polish piety. One of its offshoots.
The pilgrimage was to Rome, but along the way the faithful intended to visit all the sites of Marian worship. The Radio Maryja Families have their own organization on trips. Each pilgrimage group is led by a leader. This is most often a woman with an uncommon name and a suitably fervent religious temperament.
The leader, let us call her Ostruda, boarded first the bus on which my acquaintance worked. She handed him a Radio Maryja Family pennant, a scarf and a small booklet called a diary, then took the microphone away from him. It is well known: whoever controls the media has power.
When they set off, the leader told the faithful to take their diaries in their hands. The pages rustled as if on command. Everyone had their own travel diary on their lap. Ostruda switched on the microphone and commanded:
– Open your diaries! Chapter one! Point one! MASTURBATION!
My colleague dropped the diary from his hands and his head almost turned 180 degrees. He wanted to see what his tourists were doing now. And they were absorbed in reading. The booklet being read aloud claimed that masturbation caused blindness and other illnesses difficult to cure. Nothing more sensational could happen that day…
After reading the warnings about masturbation, the entire group greeted my acquaintance with a rhyming song composed in his honor. As it turned out, such songs were also a specialty of the Family. It went more or less like this: “Our beloved guide is going with us, going with us”!
The pennants rustled, the lively song floated through the air, and nothing foretold the later anathema imposed on the guide. After just two days he was cursed and called a devil. His pennant, scarf and diary were also taken away, and he still feels the loss of the diary to this day. What had the poor fellow done? He had not attended a single Mass, especially those scheduled for 5:00 a.m.
Unfortunately, under the agreement with the devil’s agency, the group had paid for guiding services. And because they were unable to communicate with the locals in their language, the Family had to endure the presence of an atheist. Moreover, without his devilish map-reading tricks and his ungodly belief that the Earth is round, they would never have reached all the sites of worship they intended to visit.
The guide was not given the microphone again, lest he should pour some evil thoughts and intentions into their pure little souls. Ostruda took charge of the microphone. And once she had it in her hands, she decided to play tour guide as well.
As they traveled along the Italian coast, she told the pilgrims about the wonders of nature and a recently seen statue of the Virgin Mary, supposedly weeping bloody tears. All the road signs along this route encouraged drivers to turn toward bathing resorts. The same word appeared repeatedly on the signs, written in Italian: bagno (pronounced ban-yo).
The leader, who had taken over from the guide the job of commenting on the objects they passed, saw the words on the road signs and cried out in a voice full of Job-like foreboding:
– And here are the signs pointing to the bagno! The bagno of sin. That is why Mary, our Mother, wept bloody tears here.
Before the guide could recover from this and manage to correct the mistake, the bus entered a forest and a sign appeared bearing the word “bosco” (forest in Polish). Then the leader exclaimed in a tone of angelic rapture:
– And here it is heavenly!
– Here it is bagno, and here it is heavenly… – my colleague muttered to himself, unable even to crush the pennant in his hands or tie the scarf over his eyes so he would not have to look at all this. The journey ended in the arms of the Father Director in Rome.
Those were bygone times, when Radio Maryja was only beginning to become a political power. My colleague told us this story and warned us about these like-minded and extremely organized people. We did not believe that such people not only existed, let alone that they would have such a great influence in the approaching Fourth Polish Republic.
Bagno heavenly!
Grażyna Hanaf