Several forms of protest are being planned against the Madonna concert in Poland on 15 August, including mass prayer sessions.
Religious groups are outraged that the concert is being held on a Catholic feast day celebrating the Assumption of Holy Mary.
The protestors have received the surprise support from former Solidarity leader and ex-president Lech Walesa. “It is true. I support this protest,” he told the Dziennik daily.
Head of the regional Mazowieckie council, Marian Brudzynski, is coordinating two weeks of the Chaplet of the Divine Mercy prayer on the rosary and an outdoor mass at Warsaw City Hall, all in the name of blocking the pop star’s concert in the capital.
Brudzynski heads the Pro-Polonia Committee on Faith Defense and National Traditions, which thinks the Madonna concert a scandal. The Committee has appealed to Allegro.pl, Poland’s leading internet auction site, to back out of their sponsorship of the event.
The Committee had appealed to parliament and regional governments to step in and ban the concert, but to little avail. So now the groups have decided to take up more direct forms of protest and are even appealing to a higher power.
The prayer campaign will take place directly in front of Warsaw City Mayor Hanna Gronkiewitcz-Waltz’s office under the slogan “Victory will come and it will come with Mary!”
“The Committee has the right to express their viewpoint through prayer,” stated Ewa Gawor, head of the city’s security office, adding that the protestors have filed paperwork to request permission to organize a public gathering.
Politicians from the Law and Justice party (PiS) were expected to fully support the anti-Madonna campaign, yet the politicians have not come out publically in support of the ‘Pro-Polonia’ campaign.
President Lech Kaczynski has announced that blocking the Madonna concert is not within his competencies.
“Lech Kaczynski, who calls himself a patriot, is a complete disappointment for me. The concert by a completely obscene vocalist is on the Polish Army holiday, the anniversary of the Miracle of the Vistula [when Polish forces stopped Trotsky’s Red Army in its tracks in 1920] which both hold a national significance,” stated Brudzynski. (mmj/pg)