Human dignity – the force more powerful

Pope John Paul II in Victory Square, Warsaw

Picking up on the post below on religious freedom and John Paul II….that homily has been on my mind. So I’d love share with you what papal biographer George Weigel writes in “Witness to Hope” about the Mass in Poland’s Victory Square on June 2, 1979, and the message that was the beginning of the end of communism.

No hero in Polish history–not King Jan III Sobieski, not Tadeusz Kosciuszko, not Jozef Pilsudski–had ever entered Warsaw as John Paul II did on June 2, 1979.

Why? Because for nearly three decades, the indomintable spirit of the Polish people had been suppressed by the communists. And because, as Weigel describes it:

Rebuilt Warsaw was a grim, gray place, its skyline dominated by the Palace of Culture and Sciences, a garish communist-baroque confection given to the city by Stalin. The city’s grayness too often matched the people’s mood. Now, for the Pope, Warsaw had come alive, visually and spiritually.

He defied communist authorities who warned him not to come, who threatened him with menacing messages about his safety in communist Poland. He responded that he will shepherd his people, come what may. So the people, who were prevented from even making the sign of the cross in public for nearly 30 years, prepared.

Victory Square, scene of many of Polish communist regime’s great public displays, had been transformed by government workers into an enormous liturgical stage for the papal Mass. From it, John Paul would address 1 million of his countrymen live, and tens of millions more on radio and television. The centerpiece of the altar platform was a fifty-foot-tall cross, draped with an enormous replica of a priests’s stole, reminding all present that they were witnessing a sacramental representation of Christ’s sacrifice on Calvary. Beneath the huge cross, where Mary had stood faithfully by, was a replica of the Black Madonna of Czestochowa.

That…She…is an icon of great importance to the faith of the Polish people.

The city had been transformed by homemade decorations. The windows and porches of the drab apartment blocks along the roads John paul would travel had been turned into shrines and altars bedecked with flowers, flags, and photogaphs of the Pope. As the papal motorcade moved slowly along the street, bouquets were thrown in the Pope’s path while the crowd broke out in songs, cheers, and, in some cases, uncontrollable tears…On June 2, 1979, 3 million Poles, twice the city’s normal population, had come to see their countryman, Karol Wojtyla of Wadowice, Krakow, and Rome.

It had been a long time coming, and it took place in Victory Square, near the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, where John Paul stopped and laid a bouquet, kneeling in silent prayer. Then the Mass began with a greeting from the beloved Polish Primate, Stefan Wyszynski.

Earlier in “Witness to Hope,” Weigel set the stage eloquently when he said that during World War II, Wyszynski believed…

the Polish Church had proven that it knew how to suffer and die. Its task, now, was to show that it knew how to live. The unprecedented shock the Church had suffered during the Occupation meant that it could not withstand a direct confrontation with the new communist regime. Conflict was inevitable, but it had to be managed subtly and in the firm conviction that the Church, not the Party, was the true guardian of Poland’s identity.

Wyzsnski’s task was the spiritual renewal of the country, and his young protegee/student/seminarian Karol Wojtyla was now Pope, and had returned to the homeland to reclaim its spiritual heritage. Now, at the Pope’s historical Mass in Victory Square, Wysynski opened:

“Holy Father, the capital is united today in prayer, led by the head of the Roman Catholic Church…Christ’s vicar on earth, apostle of Christ and His Gospel, messenger of truth and love, a son of Poland, chosen by God…”

After the proclamation of the Gospel, a deep silence fell over the tremendous crowd. Polish Communist Party leader Edward Gierek watched nervously from a window in a hotel adjacent to the square. He, and millions of others, wondered: What would he say? What could he say?

Karol Wojtyla looked out at a sea of expectant faces, paused–and then gave what may have been the greatest sermon of his life.

Theses and texts have been written about that homily, brief but tremendously powerful.

Today, he began, he wanted to “sing a hymn of praise to divine Providence” which had enabled him to come home “as a pilgrim”…

The Poles, he insisted, had a right to think…”with singular humility but also with conviction” that it was to Poland, today, that “one must come…to read again the witness of His cross and His resurrection.” This was no cause for boasting, however. “If we accept all that I have dared to affirm in this moment, how many great duties and obligations arise? Are we capable of them?”

The crowd began rhythmic chant, “We want God, we want God…”

Somewhere around that moment, communism lost its grip.

It was, Providentially, the Vigil of Pentecost….the arrival of the Holy Spirit. Pentecost, John Paul noted, marked “the proclamation of the mighty works of God in our Polish language.”

The mightiest of those works was the human person, redeemed by Christ: “Therefore Christ cannot be kept out of the history of man in any part of the globe, at any longitude or latitude of geography. The exclusion of Christ from the history of man is an act against man. Without Christ it is impossible to understand the history of Poland…” Even those who…lived within the Christian context of Polish history and culture. Anyone who tried to deny this or to uproot it damaged the Polish nation. For Poland and its history–“from Stanislaw in Skalka to Maximilian Kolbe at Oswiecim–could not be understood without reference to Jesus Christ. That was why he had come to Poland: to reaffirm that “Christ does not cease to teach the great cause of man,” for Christ was “an ever-open book on man, his dignity, and his rights…”

Throughout the Pope’s sermon, the crowd responded rhythmically, “We want God, we want God, we want God in the family, we want God in the schools, we want God in books, we want God, we want God…” Seven hours after he had arrived, a crucial truth had been clarified by a million Poles’ response to John Paul’s evangelism. Poland was not a communist country; Poland was a Catholic nation saddled with a communist state.

Poland’s “second baptism,” which would change the history of the twentieth century, had begun.

Read now, in light of the news out of China and every other country where religious persecution is rampant, in light of laws and cultural practices in the Western world that permit taking the life of other human persons, this homily is not a marker or a moment in history, but a testament to the truth of human dignity. And its power.

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  • This Vicar of Christ…Pope John Paul II …Energized his native land…and the Catholic Church which he led like no other in recent memory! Certainly, a worthy Saint….God Bless the People of Poland and All People of God, who once again showed his Love for Man through Pope John Paul II!

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