CHURCH SITE DISPUTE

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29192, 30 April 1960, Page 13

CHURCH SITE DISPUTE

Women Riot In Polish Town WARSAW, April 28. Rioting broke out in the Polish steel town of Nowa Huta yesterday. At least 15 police and an unknown number of demonstrators were injured. A pitched battle was sparked off by women Roman Catholics when workmen began to dig up a religious cross which had been c nsecrated on a church site. The authorities had decided that the site—on the corner of streets named after Marx and Lenin—was unsuitable for a church. The demonstrators flung up barricades across a street leading from the site to the Town Hall, and sacked and set fire to the hall itself.

Police hurled tear gas bombs at the crowds—estimated about 2000. For a time a full-scale battle raged. The church building project was started after the authorities had for years refused to build a church for the people of Nowa Huta, a completely new town built since the war for workers at the big Lenin steel foundry. Most of the Nowa Hutans go to churches in Cracow. The cross was erected three years ago and dedicated by Archbishop Eugeniusz Baziak, of Cracow, who appealed to the steelworkers of Nowa Huta to erect a church worthy of the famous Wawel Cathedral in CraC cow.