|
Edited on Thu Apr-07-05 10:39 PM by Stephanie
I am ignorant of this history of John Paul II and I found this short article quite informative. I don't recall the Pope's visit to Poland, nor the impact it had. But what is this reference to Vatican neo-conservatives in the last paragraph of the excerpt? Surely it doesn't mean Perle/Cheney/Wolfowitz style neo-cons, does it? Please tell me no. ===============================
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/050411ta_talk_remnick
JOHN PAUL II
— David Remnick
<snip> John Paul’s reign has been so long, and last week’s vigil so filled with the imagery of raw human suffering—his last, mute appearance at his window, the increasingly dire bulletins—that it was difficult to bring into focus the extraordinary and vital images of the first days of his papacy, days that helped to re-order the world. Not long after his ascension to the Chair of St. Peter, the Pope declared that he would make a “pilgrimage” to Poland—an event that the Communist Party in Warsaw anticipated with dread. To counteract what it knew would be the destabilizing impact of the visit, the Party sent out a desperate, secret memorandum to the nation’s schoolteachers:
The Pope is our enemy. . . . Due to his uncommon skills and great sense of humor he is dangerous, because he charms everyone, especially journalists. Besides, he goes for cheap gestures in his relations with the crowd, for instance, puts on a highlander’s hat, shakes all hands, kisses children, etc. . . . It is modeled on American presidential campaigns. . . . Because of the activities of the Church in Poland our activities designed to atheize the youth not only cannot diminish but must intensely develop. . . . In this respect all means are allowed and we cannot afford sentiments.
John Paul, who, in 1941, as a young man had seen his parish priests arrested by the Gestapo, and the Polish Church subjugated to Moscow after the Second World War, had come into his papacy telling all who would listen, “Be not afraid!” As Andropov understood, in his own paranoid way, this was a message as potentially subversive as Solzhenitsyn’s “Live not by the lie!” When John Paul’s Alitalia 727, named Città di Bergamo, landed in Warsaw on the morning of June 2, 1979, his reception from the Polish people was as fearless as his own unmistakable message, couched in theological language, that the Polish nation’s “voluntary collaboration” with the Soviet empire could not continue. Over nine days, John Paul spoke to and performed Mass in front of millions in Warsaw, Kraków, Gniezno, Czestochowa, and the village of Oswiecim, the site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. The reception, as Weigel writes in his book “Witness to Hope,” was so profoundly emotional, and so obviously political, that during his homily at Jasna Góra, at the shrine of the Black Madonna in the Silesian Basin, the Pope interrupted himself and jokingly wondered what the Italian priests in his entourage must be thinking: “What are we going to do with this Polish Pope, this Slavic Pope? What can we do?” The crowd of more than a million burst into ten minutes of sustained applause. “How many divisions has the Pope?” Stalin once asked, and now there was an answer. “I beg you,” the Pope said later in Kraków, “never lose your trust, do not be defeated, do not be discouraged.”
Adam Michnik, one of the leading dissidents in Poland, said that the Pope’s visit had brought hope, a challenge to “dishonourable living,” and the revival of the “ethos of sacrifice, in whose name our grandfathers and fathers never stopped fighting for national and human dignity.” On August 31, 1980, four hundred and forty-eight days after the Pope left Poland for Rome, at the Lenin Shipyard, in Gdan´sk, an electrician named Lech Walesa signed the agreement (his enormous souvenir pen bore the image of John Paul II) that created Solidarity, the first legal and independent union in the Soviet empire. In March, 1985, a provincial reformer, Mikhail Gorbachev, became General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. In 1990, another playwright-turned-politician, Václav Havel, welcomed John Paul to Prague after the fall of Communism, saying, “I am not sure that I know what a miracle is. In spite of this, I dare say that I am participating in a miracle: in a country devastated by the ideology of hatred, the messenger of love has arrived.” And by Christmas night, 1991, Gorbachev, who had found an ally in the Pope, agreed to his empire’s dissolution.
* * * *
.... In recent years, the Pope has tried to make historical amends—asking forgiveness, for example, for the Church’s failure to speak out against the persecution of the Jews. And yet some critics, such as the biographer John Cornwell, have written that the Pope, by not stepping down when he became ill, left power in the hands of Vatican neo-conservatives, who failed to act persuasively on crises ranging from aids to sexual abuse by priests.
=============================== |
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
