
CV NEWS FEED // In the latest edition of his widely popular syndicated column, Pope Saint John Paul II’s official biographer George Weigel recalls the legacy of the late Pontiff’s visit to Poland in June 1979, in which a powerful “revolution of conscience” turned the tides of history.
In the column, Weigel cites Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis, who wrote in 2005 that “when Pope John Paul II kissed the ground at Warsaw Airport on June 2, 1979, he began the process by which communism in Poland—and ultimately everywhere else in Europe—would come to an end.”
However, as Weigel wryly observed, “the conventional wisdom of the day,” promulgated by The New York Times, grossly underestimated the Pope’s influence. In its response the the visit, the Times remarked in a June 9, 1979 editorial:
As much as the visit of Pope John Paul II must reinvigorate and reinspire the Roman Catholic Church in Poland, it does not threaten the political order of the nation or of Eastern Europe.
“Oops,” Weigel wrote, explaining that the Catholic Church was not only the “strongest local Church behind the Iron Curtain,” but also “the repository of Poland’s authentic national identity, and a constant thorn in the side of the communist authorities.”
Weigel further referenced Stalin’s famous remark that “trying to make Poland communist was like fitting a saddle on a cow.”
The visit did not merely “reinvigorate and reinspire the Roman Catholic Church in Poland,” as the Times put it, Weigel asserted in the column.
Rather, it was the “thought and witness” of the Pontiff that shaped the social movement that defeated Communism and prompted modern history “for once, in a more humane and noble direction.”
Weigel shared that a friend of John Paul II, a philosopher-priest named Joseph Tishner, had once described the anti-communist movement inspired by the Pope as “a great forest planted by aroused consciences.”
“Father Tischner’s brilliant image is one that bears reflection today,” Weigel wrote, concluding: “For the West needs ‘reforestation:’ a planting of new seeds of conscience, reflecting the built-in truths about human dignity to which John Paul II appealed during those nine days of June 1979.”
