Maciej Golubiewski has received Faith and Freedom Award on behalf of Polish nation

The Award recognizes and sets apart outstanding personas and organizations that demonstrate their involvement and actively take part in actions committed to faith and freedom through their active missions’ involvement.

We would like to share the content of the acceptance speech that was given by awarded Consul General of Poland in New York:

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I am really moved to be here representing my homeland, Poland, and receiving this special award. 

In fact, I am even more honored as you asked me to accept it on behalf of the people of Poland, not just the government or the state.  

How apt, as it is the people who are at the center of defending God and country, faith and their freedom, not the bureaucracy however fine and noble goals it was designed to serve.  

It is truly moving that it is the free and faithful people of the United States, and no other country, that are giving this award.   

As the US and Poland truly have a special bond in this day and age. 

I can hardly think of any other modern Western country that has managed to preserve the living faith than the United States and Poland.  

Western Europe, unfortunately, has succumbed to radical secularization to the point that being deeply religious is considered a curiosity, sometimes a dangerous curiosity. 

Poland was supposed to go down that road.  Communism with its forced atheization programs did all it could. 

It imprisoned our best priests, even the cardinal himself!  

Some, like Blessed Fr. Jerzy Popieluszko were clobbered to death, put in a sack and dropped in a river to drown and die.  

What was his sin? Celebrating the Holy Mass for a free Poland every Sunday in Warsaw.

Dear friends,

Poland and the US have also understood something that many countries of our civilization have not. They understood that there is no contradiction between freedom and faith.  

In Europe of absolutist monarchies and state-established religions, Poland was the beacon of freedom.  A staunchly Catholic country, for sure, but not forcing anyone to convert. 

Our great king Sigismund once asked about how it is possible for him to tolerate Jews, Protestants and others who flocked to Poland to escape persecutions and religious wars in Western Europe famously quipped: I am not the king of anyone’s conscience.  

That is why at one point Poland harbored ¾ of worldwide Jewry and was called by the Jews Polin – from Hebrew – rest here.  

America and Poland are the countries of the free exercise of religion and no law should ever try to govern our conscience. 

The irony of Poland’s situation was that it paid for its exceptionalism dearly.  Its absolutists neighbors invaded it and deprived it of its sovereignty for all of the 19th century and the first 20 years of the XXth.  

It came back to life exactly hundred years ago, because the United States, and its president Woodrow Wilson, made a point of it at the Paris Peace Conference. Most Poles truly believe that PL would not resurrect if it was not for the US position.  

President Coolidge should then not have been then surprised when in 1926 he received 111 tomes of signatures from the highest level of Poland’s government to the 5 and a half million Polish students thanking the US for supporting Poland’s independence.  

That is friendship and alliance if those terms ever have come closer to their proper definition.  But it would not exist if the US and Poland were not bound by the same spirit that this award I am honored to receive on behalf of the Polish people encapsulates.

Today, Poland is a champion of what G. Washington called “ordered liberty”; a God fearing nation committed to building the common good through free enterprise, cherishing the family, valuing the dignity of every human being from the day of conception, constitutionally protecting marriage as the union of man and woman and reorienting the government to work for the people, not against them. 

Ladies and gentlemen,

The story says and President Trump mentioned it in his last year’s proclamation establishing a Casimir Pulaski day, that at the Battle of Brandywine, General Pulaski led a charge that averted a defeat of the American cavalry, saving the life of General George Washington and earning him the rank of Brigadier General in the United States Continental Army.  

And it so happens that the award I am holding is called the George Washington Award of Valor, and I would like to dedicate it to the memory of our common heroes like Gen. Pulaski, Gen. Kosciuszko, and many more: 

• the American pilot volunteers of the Kosciuszko Squadron that fought in the Polish Bolshevik War of 1920,
• the B-17 Flying Fortress pilots who dropped supplies on Warsaw during the Warsaw uprising in 1944 often with the cost of their lives
• and now the American troops that are stationing in Poland to once again through deeds not words show American commitment to Poland and to safeguarding the culture of the West. 

Let our joint traditions of faith and freedom guide us for as Pope John Paul II, a great friend of America once pointed out by quoting John Dickinson, Chairman of the Committee for the Declaration of Independence of 1776: 

"Our liberties do not come from charters; for these are only the declaration of pre-existing rights. They do not depend on parchments or seals; but come from the King of Kings and the Lord of all the earth". 

God bless you and God bless America and Poland faithful and free!

Consulate General of the Republic of Poland in New York
233 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016
Tel: 646-237-2100, Fax: 646-237-2116
Telefon alarmowy: 917-520-0032
e-mail: nowyjork.kg.sekretariat@msz.gov.pl