Basilica Being Built In Poland A Work Of God - Or Gaud?

LICHEN, Poland - From a great distance, across the flat fields and modest farmhouses of an unremarkable swath of Polish countryside, it looks like the Roman Colosseum simply fell out of the sky.

Continue along the narrow, bumpy country road until finally, like Dorothy before the city of Oz, you say, wow, it's big. It's huge. It's . . .

It's a church under construction, actually.

And, to be frank, it's difficult to know if God or gaud hath wrought this particular creation.

When the Lichen basilica is finished - some unhurried time in the next century - it will be the largest place of worship in Poland.

The domed building with its vast naves, grand porticoes, sweeping staircases and gold-and-marble finish will be, as its patron envisions, lavish to the last pebble.

"I want people who look at it to have no doubt it is a Roman Catholic church," said the Rev. Eugeniusz Makulski, 71, the driving force behind the basilica and the parish priest for this historic site.

"This is a church that is being built at the end of the second millennium, but I want it to have links to the great basilicas of the first millennium."

A grand vision

A man possessed by a vision, Makulski commissioned a building that can hold 52,000 people, 7,000 seated.

The basilica will have 10 floors, including three main open levels, and be 420 feet tall at its highest point. An estimated 110,000 tons of material will go into the basilica's making.

But although Makulski delightedly tosses off the awesome statistics, there is one figure about which he is mighty reticent: cost.

"I don't reveal what I spend on God's work," Makulski said.

He said the effort is being funded by donations from Polish Catholics who visit the site or send money.

Nor does he have any idea when, exactly, the church will be completed.

"I have to hurry up," he said cheerily, with a shrug.

In a country where families routinely live in tiny apartments, the sheer scale of the undertaking has arched more than one eyebrow.

"I'm shocked," said Krystyn Rozanowicz, 42, of Rybnik, making her first visit to Lichen.

"Look at the columns, you could build a house from the material in any one of them. It's so exaggerated."

Popular pilgrimage

This central Poland village, 125 miles west of Warsaw, is home to a revered religious site devoted to the Virgin Mary. Lichen is the country's second-most-popular pilgrimage - after the Black Madonna of Czestochowa.

In 1813, a wounded Polish soldier in the Napoleonic wars, Tomasz Klossowski, besought the Virgin Mary to allow him to return "to the womb of his fatherland" from where he lay in a German state.

The Virgin Mary, he said, wearing a golden coat, appeared to him clutching a white eagle, a symbol of Poland, to her breast and told him he would return to his family. She told him to find a picture of her just as she appeared to him and cultivate a following for it.

Klossowski finally found a suitable picture in 1836, and placed it in the Grablin forest near Lichen - as Mary asked.

People flocked to it, and by 1852 it was moved to a nearby church. In 1967, a cardinal held a coronation of the picture in Lichen's splendid sanctuary.

Today as many as 1 million visit Lichen each year.

Pope blessed cornerstone

Because of the pilgrims, Makulski said he began to imagine a great church 33 years ago when he moved here as parish priest.

"I saw the need," he said, "but times were different. Communist times."

After the fall of communism in 1989, Makulski said, he quietly bought land near the older sanctuary.

In June 1994, after an architectural competition, the cornerstone, taken from St. Peter's in Rome and blessed by Pope John Paul II, was laid by the Polish primate, Cardinal Jozef Glemp.

The church basement, including five chapels, and much of the imposing facade, is complete, but the rest of the building is a maze of scaffolding and construction workers.

"It's miraculous," said Aniela Bryl, 85, who comes regularly from her nearby home.

"It will be an extraordinary building. You can already see how beautiful it is. I'm an old lady, so I just want to live to see it finished."