Leaving the political capital, John Paul flew by helicopter to Gniezno, the repository of the relics of St. Adalbert, the first missionary to Poland. Here his Polish pilgrimage along “the route of the history of the nation”—the road from Gniezno through Częstochowa to Kraków and the relics of St. Stanisław—really began.
Gniezno’s population was about 60,000. A million Poles filled the plains outside the city, on which Poland had been baptized a thousand years before, as far as the eye could see. At the heliport in Gebarzewo near Gniezno, the Pope addressed representatives of rural Poland and stressed the importance of religious education for children, whom he prayed would “have easy access to Christ.” Those who denied them that access stood under the “severe” judgment of which Christ had spoken when he said that those who gave scandal to children would have been better off if millstones had been hung about their necks and they had been thrown into the sea (see Luke 17.2). “Let us meditate every once in a while on those words,” he suggested, before leaving the podium to work the front lines of the immense crowd, shaking hands, blessing the people, kissing children held up to him by their parents.35
At an open-air Mass that afternoon outside the tenth-century cathedral of Gniezno, with every inch of space along the way from Gniezno Common to the cathedral taken by an unbroken mass of people, John Paul once again greeted the Poland that had been “inserted into the mysteries of the divine life through the sacraments of baptism and confirmation.” “In this upper room of our Polish millennium” they were gathered, he said, like the apostles—in this instance, to recall again “the mystery-filled date…from which we start to count the years of the history of our motherland and of the Church that has been made part of it—the history of Poland ‘ever faithful.’”36 The New Testament day of Pentecost had been a day of linguistic miracles. The Scripture read at Mass had spoken of the apostles preaching in Jerusalem and being heard in their own tongues by men from all over the Mediterranean world. On June 3, 1979, John Paul said, Poland was living a similar pentecostal experience, which touched the entire world of the Slavic peoples and their recent history—and which rendered the Yalta division of Europe moot.
That the Spirit of God continued to speak through all the world’s languages was confirmed by the millennium-long experience of the Slavic peoples, with their distinctive tongues. Perhaps, he said, that was why the Holy Spirit had brought him to the papacy, to “introduce into the communion of the Church the understandings of the words and of the languages that still sound strange to the ear accustomed to the Romance, Germanic, English, and Celtic tongues.” Was it not Christ’s will “that this Polish Pope, this Slav Pope, should at this precise moment manifest the unity of Christian Europe,” the result of the “rich architecture of the Holy Spirit?
“Yes,” he concluded: “It is Christ’s will, it is what the Holy Spirit disposes…We shall not return to the past! We shall go towards the future! ‘Receive the Holy Spirit!’ (John 20.22). Amen!”37
During this stirring homily, John Paul noticed a banner in the crowd: “Father, remember your Czech Church.” He interrupted his prepared text to reassure these long-suffering people, and all those who were being prevented from hearing his voice, that he would never forget them.38
That afternoon, speaking from the balcony of the archbishop’s residence, John Paul defended the spiritual independence of Polish culture. “Christian inspiration,” he said, “continues to be the chief source of the creativity of Polish artists,” which was where “the soul of the nation is reflected.”39 The Pope also bantered with the enormous crowd. It had been an extremely hot day and the weather became the subject of a papal wisecrack: “In June, ninety degrees heat is as common one hundred fifty miles west of Warsaw as a Polish pontiff.”40
June 4–6: Częstochowa
Jasna Góra, the “Bright Mountain” shrine of the Black Madonna at Częstochowa, is built atop a limestone promontory rising above the flat plains of the Silesian Basin. More than a million Poles had gathered on the grounds surrounding the shrine on June 4 when John Paul—speaking from the ramparts of the Pauline monastery where the Swedish invasion had been broken in 1655—began his sermon at an outdoor Mass by quoting an epic he had once performed in the Rhapsodic Theater, Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz: “Holy Virgin guarding bright Częstochowa…” That invocation “expressed what then beat and still beats in the hearts of all Poles.” For it was to Jasna Góra that every Pole came, physically or in spirit, to bring the “decisive moments” of life, “the occasions of responsibility,” to be laid before the Virgin.
His voice breaking with emotion, John Paul said that it was inconceivable that the first Polish Pope in history should not have come to Jasna Góra. How could he not come to “this shrine of great hope,” where “so many times I had whispered totus tuus in prayer” before Mary’s image? How could he not come “to listen to the beating of the heart of the Church and of the motherland in the heart of the Mother”?
Jasna Góra was “the nation’s shrine.” Here was where one learned what Poland really was and who the Poles really were. Anyone who wanted to “know how…history is interpreted by the heart of the Poles…must come here” where one heard “the echo of the life of the whole nation in the heart of its Mother and Queen.”
Thirteen years before, at the culmination of the celebrations of the national millennium and at the beginning of the new era opened by Vatican II, the Polish nation had reconsecrated itself to Mary, petitioning “for the freedom of the Church in the world and in Poland.” He now asked his country-men’s consent “that I, as St. Peter’s successor present with you here today, should entrust the whole of the Church to the Mother of Christ with the same lively faith, the same heroic hope” as had been done thirteen years before. “Consent that I should entrust all this to Mary. Consent that I should entrust it to her in a new and solemn way.
“I am,” he concluded, “a man of great trust. I learned to be so here.”41
The Pope interrupted himself during his homily to imagine out loud what the Italian prelates in his party were saying to themselves: “What are we going to do with this Polish Pope, this Slavic Pope? What can we do?” The crowd burst into ten minutes of “thunderous applause and cheers.”42
That evening, after praying privately before the icon of the Black Madonna, John Paul met with parish delegations from the Diocese of Częstochowa and with the sick, who had been gathered outside the monastery. Whenever he had met the sick as a priest and bishop, he said, he had felt that his words of compassion were inadequate. But there was “the one reality in which human suffering is essentially transformed”: the cross of Christ. On the cross, the Son of God had accomplished the redemption of the world. And it was “through this mystery that every cross placed on someone’s shoulders acquires a dignity that is humanly inconceivable.” In entering more deeply into the mystery of the cross, suffering was ennobled. And so he asked the sick for a favor: “You who are weak and humanly incapable, be a source of strength for your brother and father who is at your side in prayer and heart.”43
After celebrating Mass for 6,000 Polish nuns—whom he called a “living sign…in the midst of humanity [that] is beyond price”—John Paul participated in a plenary assembly of the Polish episcopate in the Jasna Góra monastery. The meeting presented the Pope with a major challenge. In four days, he had established himself as the authentic spokesman of the Polish nation, as the vast crowd response had made unmistakably clear. He was leaving Poland in less than a week, though, and the seventy-eight bishops he left behind, especially Cardinal Wyszyński, would have to bear the daily burden of defending the free space he had created. How could he continue to speak for Poland without undercutting his brother bishops and the Primate? How could he do so in what was, for him and his former colleagues, a tremendously emotional moment?
The answer was to reaffirm the strategy on which Wyszyński had insisted for more than thirty years: unity. John Paul began his formal address by noting that �
��the quality that particularly characterizes the Polish Bishops’ Conference is that unity which is the source of spiritual strength.” That unity had given society a “justified and deserved” confidence in the Church and the Polish episcopate. The embodiment of both that unity and that confidence was the Primate. As Pope, he wanted to say before his brother Polish bishops what he had said to Polish pilgrims in Rome and to the Polish authorities in Warsaw: Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński was “a providential man for the Church and for the motherland.”
His own work as a Polish bishop, John Paul continued, had “enabled me to study at close quarters the problems of the modern Church in their universal dimension.” Others might think of the Polish case as unique; John Paul saw it as a particular window into the universal crisis of modernity. There was something singular about Poland at the end of the twentieth century, though. Faced with that crisis of humanism in an acute form, Poland had responded by intensifying its Christian faith. This was a lesson with resonance far beyond Poland’s borders.
The Polish hierarchy had supported, and sometimes saved, the Polish nation in times of crisis. This, he knew, was something difficult for instinctively anti-hierarchical moderns to appreciate. For Poles, “it is simply a part of the truth of the history of our own motherland,” the truth that he had come to restore to his people. And as he had written in his last poem, the warrant of that truth was to be found not in argument, but in blood: in “the heritage of the holy martyr bishops Wojciech [Adalbert] and Stanisław.”
John Paul then reviewed the teaching of Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, which had described the hierarchy as servants of the Church’s mission to the world. Church-state relations in Poland had to be dealt with in this evangelical context. “Normality,” as John Paul II and the Council understood it, meant the public situation prescribed by Vatican II’s Declaration on Religious Freedom (which, the Pope noted in an almost acerbic aside, “directly tallies with the principles promulgated in fundamental state and international documents, including the Constitution of the Polish People’s Republic”): the freedom of the individual to pursue the truth according to the dictates and demands of conscience, the freedom of the Church to make its evangelical proposal to society, and the freedom of individual believers and of the corporate Church to be servants of society’s needs. That was what the Church asked—no more, but also no less. In so asking, it reminded the state that it existed to serve society, not the other way around.
St. Stanisław’s life, witness, and death at the hands of arbitrary state power had built a great truth into the foundations of Polish history and culture, John Paul said—the laws promulgated by the state must be accountable to the moral law inscribed by God in nature and on the human heart. The moral law “places an obligation on everyone, both subjects and rulers.” Only when this moral law was recognized could the crisis of modernity be resolved. For it was only in recognizing the moral law that “the dignity of the human person [can] be respected and universally recognized.”
The anniversary of St. Stanisław, the Pope concluded, also required Poles to think about themselves and their country “in the European context.” There was a way in which one could talk reasonably about “Western Europe” and “Eastern Europe,” but it was not the way of the iron curtain. “Despite the different traditions that exist in the territory of Europe between its Eastern part and its Western part, there lives in each of them the same Christianity, which takes its origins from the same Christ, which accepts the same Word of God, which is linked with the same twelve apostles.” This “spiritual genealogy” was what made Europe “Europe.” The unity of the Polish episcopate, so long at the service of the nation and its unity, must now be put at the service of a wider responsibility. For “Christianity must commit itself anew to the formation of the spiritual unity of Europe. Economic and political reasons alone cannot do it. We must go deeper: to ethical reasons.”44
Later that afternoon, John Paul preached on unity through reconciliation among nations at a Mass for another million pilgrims from Lower Silesia. But to the men in Warsaw and Moscow, the Pope’s address at Jasna Góra, by linking Poland’s religious freedom and national integrity to the cause of European unity, could mean only one thing. Without ever mentioning the word “Yalta,” John Paul II had set himself and the Church against the post-1945 division of Europe. This man was a threat to the entire communist position, precisely because he deployed weapons to which communism was acutely vulnerable.45
The ubiquitous Communist Party slogan “The Party Is for the People,” continued to decorate buildings throughout the country. A codicil had been surreptitiously added to at least one such banner: “…but the People are for the Pope.”46
June 6–10: Kraków
On June 6, his last day in Częstochowa, John Paul celebrated Mass for seminarians and the novices of religious orders, met with thousands of priests and religious brothers (whom he reminded of the Polish clergy martyred in the concentration camps of World War II), and celebrated a second Mass for hundreds of thousands of miners and other workers from Upper Silesia. Standing on the same ramparts where Prior Kordecki had defied the invading Swedes three centuries before, John Paul looked down into the city of Częstochowa and beyond, to the Bolesław Bierut steel mill and the surrounding colleries of the Silesian industrial basin. The workers hadn’t been given a holiday but they had come anyway, the miners dressed in the traditional gold-buttoned black frock coats of their trade and wearing white-plumed black hats. In his homily the Pope asked these manual laborers to remember the poet Norwid (“Work exists…for resurrection”) and not to let themselves “be seduced by the temptation to think that man can fully find himself by denying God, erasing prayer from his life, and becoming only a worker, deluding himself that what he produces can on its own fill the needs of the human heart. ‘Man shall not live by bread alone’ (Matthew 4.4).”47
On the evening of June 6, John Paul II flew into his “beloved Kraków.” “He left here with a bag, a toothbrush, and a couple of rolls to eat,” a hotel doorman remarked to foreign journalists. “Look at the way he came back.”48 It was a tumultuous homecoming. A vast crowd was waiting in the rain on the great greensward of the Błonia Krakowskie, the Kraków Commons, to greet the Pope at what seemed like an enormous family reunion. He felt, he said, “even closer to you” because of “the separation to which the Lord has called me.” During the days ahead, he concluded, he wanted to do “the same things I have always done: proclaim ‘the great works of God’ (Acts 2.11), give witness to the Gospel, and serve the dignity of man. As St. Stanisław did so many centuries ago.”49
John Paul II drove into his city in an open car, past the exultant faces of men, women, and children he had baptized, confirmed, and counseled, past couples whose marriages he had blessed and whose parents he had buried. When he recognized a face in the throng, he waved and called out a greeting. Arriving first at Wawel Cathedral, he wondered aloud at the “inscrutable designs” of Providence, which had brought him back home to celebrate the completion of the Synod of Kraków in a wholly unexpected way. Then he went to spend the night in his old room at Franciszkańska, 3. Except for a vase of fresh flowers, it had been left exactly as it was when he departed for Warsaw and Rome the previous October 2.
That night, and for the next three nights, the streets surrounding the archbishop’s residence and the roofs of nearby houses were thronged with young people—high school and university students and workers, celebrating a kind of papal street festival, clearly to the discomfort of the authorities. The first night, John Paul came out on a balcony and began a dialogue with the crowd, asking, “Who’s making all this noise? I haven’t heard so much noise since Mexico, where they cried ‘El Papa, El Papa.’…” The youngsters took the cue and began the rhythmic chant, ‘El Papa, Sto lat, El Papa, Sto lat! [May you live a hundred years!].” They called for a speech, but the Pope explained there wouldn’t be any; he had a sore throat. So they sang together, as they would for
the next three nights. To locals familiar with Karol Wojtyła’s encyclopedic knowledge of Polish songs, what was even more amazing than this unprecedented public dialogue was the fact that during one such impromptu songfest, their former archbishop had to confess publicly, “I don’t know this one; it must be new.”50
When the Pope had first come out in response to the incessant singing and cheers of the crowd, he had stepped onto the window sill so he could be seen better. Unidentified hands held on to the pleats of his cassock to hold him safely on the ledge. “When I was archbishop,” he cracked, “I didn’t have to hop onto the window sill, and even when I leaned out the window, nobody grabbed my cassock.”51 Later, he pretended to complain over the din: “It’s bad enough being the Pope in Rome. It would be far worse being the Pope in Kraków, spending all the time standing at this window with no time to sleep and no time to think.”52 Finally, at midnight, John Paul called off the songfest with the last word: “You are asking for a word or two, so here they are—Good night!”53
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