Forty-five years ago, the New York Times cast its gimlet eye over the first three days of Pope John Paul II’s return to his Polish homeland. Reading the signs of those times through the conventional wisdom of the day, the Grey Lady then offered a typically ex cathedra judgment, in a June 5, 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.
To begin with, the Polish Church did not need reinvigorating or reinspiring in June 1979 – it was the strongest local Church behind the Iron Curtain, the repository of Poland’s authentic national identity, and a constant thorn in the side of the communist authorities. (Stalin had famously said that trying to make Poland communist was like fitting a saddle on a cow. Little did he know.)
As for the “political order of the nation,” well, Polish Communist party boss Edward Gierek surreptitiously watched John Paul’s homecoming Mass on June 2 from a hotel room high above what was then Warsaw’s “Victory Square.” When he heard the pope call on the Holy Spirit to “renew the face of the Earth – of this land!”, as hundreds of thousands of Poles chanted “We want God! We want God!”, he surely felt the winds of change blowing, even if the anemometers in New York failed to register what amounted to a Force 10 storm on the Beaufort Scale.
And as to the “political order…of Eastern Europe,” America’s premier historian of the Cold War, Yale’s John Lewis Gaddis, would write in 2005 that “when John Paul II kissed the ground at the 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.” I had made precisely that argument thirteen years before in my book The Final Revolution. There, I suggested that, while many causal factors shaped what we know as the Revolution of 1989, the indispensable factor determining when the revolution happened, and how it happened, was John Paul II.
What did he do, and how did he do it?
What he did was ignite a revolution of conscience, which preceded and made possible the nonviolent political revolution that brought down the Berlin Wall, emancipated the countries of east central Europe, and, through the auto-liberation of the Baltic States and Ukraine, imploded the Soviet Union. The tinder for such a revolution of conscience – the decisions of men and women determined to “live in the truth,” as Václav Havel put it – had been in place for some years in east central Europe.
Activists encouraged by the 1975 Helsinki Final Act and its “Basket Three” human rights provisions built organizations like Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77, Lithuania’s Committee for the Defense of Believers’ Rights, and Poland’s KOR [Workers’ Defense Committee] that were linked to “Helsinki Watch Groups” in North America and western Europe. John Paul supplied the flame that lit that tinder and helped keep the fire burning by his vocal support for those who were taking “the risk of freedom” (as he would describe it at the United Nations in 1995).
And how did that happen?
John Paul’s revolution of conscience began when he restored to the Polish people the truth about their history and culture, which Poland’s communist regime had both distorted and suppressed since 1945. Live in that truth, the Pope suggested from June 2 through June 10, 1979, and you will find tools of resistance that communism’s brute force cannot match. John Paul didn’t design those tools; the Polish people did that when, fourteen months later, they formed the Solidarity trade union, which later evolved into a vast social movement. But the movement’s heart and soul – like its name – was shaped by the thought and witness of John Paul II.
The Pope’s friend, philosopher-priest Joseph Tischner, once described Solidarity-the-movement as a great forest planted by aroused consciences. Father Tischner’s brilliant image is one that bears reflection today. 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. Those were days on which modern history pivoted – for once, in a more humane and noble direction.
In Professor Gaddis’s words, John Paul II was one of those “visionaries” who, as “saboteurs of the status quo,” were able to “widen the range of historical possibility.” Are there such visionaries among us today?
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Unfortunately, according to Statista, in 2022 60% of Poles surveyed favored keeping abortion legal.
The good news is that the number of recorded abortions has dropped dramatically.
In the introduction to his mentioned “The Final Revolution,” Weigel remarks on the fictional theological vision of Joachim of Fiore–that the eternal and Triune One manifests himself in a sequence three stages of history: The OT Father, the NT Christ, and after the 13h Century the Age of the Spirit with “love, joy, and freedom.” This mythology led finally to the sociological and supposedly scientific ideology of Marxism-Leninism.
In the book Weigel condenses how the “planting of new seeds of conscience” took down in 1989 the stifling “web of mendacity” in communist Poland and elsewhere: the final or ultimate revolution. What, then, about true Conscience taking down the very quotable Web of Mendacity (!) now insinuated by word-merchants and signalers within parts of the Church, itself?
Before being hijacked by the virtual “spirit of Vatican II,” the real Second Vatican Council–in its actual documents–affirmed the true future and the future of truth:
“Contemplating this melancholy state of humanity, the Council wishes to recall first of all the permanent binding force of universal natural law and its all-embracing principles. Man’s conscience itself gives ever more emphatic voice to these principles [the moral absolutes elucidated and explicitly incorporated into the Magisterium by Veritas Splendor]. Therefore, actions which deliberately conflict with these same principles, as well as orders commanding such actions, are criminal. Blind obedience cannot excuse those who yield to them” (Gaudium et Spes, n. 79).
To what extent does the new clericalism impose Joachim’s periodization of the Trinity? Setting the natural law against a fluid “spirit” dolled up as a new “sociological and scientific foundation”? (Hollerich, Fernandez, Paglia et al).
The NY Times statement here reminds me of another article statement made by them: “God is dead”.
John Paul indeed had a powerful presence one could ‘feel’, a phenomenon known to be possessed by some for good or for evil. John Paul’s spiritual presence was a deep projection of majestic goodness that this writer believes was a gift from on high. So powerful [in line with his words on justice, his transformation of Poland’s Solidarity movement into an irrepressible opposition to Marxism] that even made a powerful despot like Andropov fear and tremble. Perhaps it aroused the conscience of Mikhail Gorbachev and eventually that of Vladimir Putin.
Interesting information on Poland in 1979 and the 1980’s. What has happened since? Information that I just looked up said that 60% of Poland’s Catholic’s favor abortion and 58% practice their faith (probably overstated since it was self-reporting). Was it western influence that they did not have before?
JPII’s revival of conscience is something sorely needed in America and the world. So many people decry how our country is falling apart. They think to themselves, in effect, I’m doing my part to be good, but not the others. With that attitude, the U.S. and the rest of the world will never fix the evil that is dominating it. Sister Lucia tells us of Satan’s battle plan. To destroy marriage and the family. His first step to accomplish that goal was to get us to make sex consequence free through artificial/inherent sterility, i.e., birth control and LGBTQ sexual relations. How can this be, we ask. How do we stop it, we ask. But most Catholics are just fine with birth control, premarital sex, non-sacramental so-called marriage, etc. etc. Then we wonder why can’t we fix this?
This is where a revival of conscience is needed today. We are where we are because the Church has allowed our consciences to become distorted/dead. We need Truth, even though it will be painful to our pride.
In regard to the NYTimes: one of the most conclusive comments I recall came from an acquaintance in Brooklyn. Several of us would meet mid morning on Saturdays after Off-Leash hours in Prospect Park, and shoot the breeze. These were long time NYers, lived in Brooklyn, worked in Mid-Town. There is an endless number of newspapers in NYC to pick from but the NYTimes casts it’s shadow. One of these mornings one of us asked the group what everyone was reading these days. One seasoned member replied, and included that he’ll pick up a NYTimes once or twice a week, and always starts on page 20, where the corrections are. That comment sums up the general attitude, all were in agreement.