The details of his upbringing are a source of pride and a lasting connection with Poles. Preaching at a shrine outside Krakow on his last visit, John Paul II recalled his days as a chemical-plant laborer during World War ii. "I used to walk to work in my wooden clogs every day," he told the crowds gathered just a few miles away from the plant. "How could you imagine that man in clogs would be back today delivering a sermon on God's mercy?"
advertisement
Our photo gallery spans the pope's youth to his last days at the vatican.
A little more than 20 years ago, the thought of a Polish pope would indeed have been unimaginable: There hadn't been a non-Italian pope since 1523. But when Cardinal Wojtyla left Poland on Oct. 3, 1978, the church was in turmoil. John Paul I had died just a month after taking office, throwing the cardinals into a crisis. The conclave was primed for change. A Polish pope—experienced in dealing with communism, from a country with a deep and vigorous tradition of popular Catholicism—looked like the answer to the church's identity crisis.
The pope's election sent an electric thrill through the nation. Poland's communist government, on the other hand, regarded the pope with a mixture of respect and fear. "The pope is our enemy," Polish teachers were told shortly after his election. "Because he is unusually talented and has a great sense of humor, he is dangerous, since he can charm everybody."
And yet his power as a symbol was too strong to ignore. The Communist authorities decided a visit would shore up the legitimacy of their rule. "The regime was losing its grip on people's minds and hearts, and they thought a photo op with the pope would show they were one with the Polish people," Szostkiewicz says. "After 30 years of communism, of course the turnout wouldn't be dramatic. They thought they'd let everyone see it was only the older generation coming to greet the pope."
Instead, John Paul II's first pilgrimage home was the beginning of a cataclysmic shift across Europe. From the time he stepped off the plane on June 2, 1979, until he left nine days later, the pope's trip was a national event, despite the best efforts of the government to minimize the visit. State television cut all crowd shots from its coverage, showing only the pope and old nuns and omitting the crowds of millions that gathered in cities across Poland to greet their pope.
But the message got out. The powerful emotions of the visit turned every moment into a symbol, every spontaneous gesture into an anticommunist statement. When crowds began singing the traditional Polish folk song "My Chcemy Boga" ("We Want God")—panicked officials decided not to interrupt the broadcast. "The state authorities didn't expect anything like that," says Miroslawa Grabowska, a sociologist at the University of Warsaw. "After years of limiting religion, they were convinced secularization had gone much further than it had."
Indeed, the arrival of John Paul II brought a dormant national spirit to life. The next decade would see three more pilgrimages and a series of events that changed the world. Encouraged by the unity they experienced in 1979, dissidents and labor leaders organized a protest movement the following year that come to be known as Solidarity. Shielded to a degree by the moral authority of the pope, the successes of Solidarity called into question the very legitimacy of communist rule in Eastern Europe and were a major factor in the collapse of the communist system just a decade after the pope's first visit home.
At the time no one dared hope for such an outcome. The immediate import was much more prosaic: For the first time many could remember, the typical routines of state harassment and intimidation disappeared. Massive crowds gathered peacefully, organized not by state minders but by church deacons and volunteers. Surrounded by secret police agents, student activists raised forbidden banners with impunity. "People discovered togetherness, felt freer. Communism stopped meaning anything," says Andrzej Koprowski, who was a young Jesuit priest at the time. "Communism was like dirt on a window—the visit wiped it away."
Previous Page
