Lech Walesa, founder of the Solidarity movement that toppled communism in Poland in 1989-1990, recalled the power of Pope John Paul's visit to
"We know what the pope has achieved. Fifty percent of the collapse of communism is his doing," Walesa said yesterday. "More than one year after he spoke these words, we were able to organize 10 million people for strikes, protests and negotiations.
"Earlier we tried, I tried, and we couldn't do it. These are facts. Of course, communism would have fallen, but much later and in a bloody way. He was a gift from the heavens to us."
The pope's role in the fight against communism was largely symbolic and moral.
Soviet dictator Josef Stalin had once disparaged the influence of an earlier pope, as reported by British Prime Minister
Originally, the Polish secret police were not worried at Wojtyla's promotion to archbishop of Krakow in 1963, considering him a poet and apolitical dreamer.
His coronation as pope was different. The fact that a Pole, from an eastern Europe penned behind barbed wire, could become the most prominent religious figure in the West was immensely powerful, said Alexander Rahr, an expert on
"For many Poles, it was the fact that one of their own made it in the West, which was closed at the time for Poland, made it to the top of the Catholic Church and played a political and moral role as one of the leaders in the world," said Rahr. "That mattered. It mattered politically; it mattered as a moral matter."
Pictures of Pope John Paul giving his blessing or Holy Communion to a kneeling Walesa, himself a churchgoing Catholic, did much to undermine Poland's atheist regime. And the strong Catholic element in Solidarity helped make it a nonviolent movement, though its miners and factory workers could have purloined all the explosives they needed if terrorism had been their choice.
Pope John Paul did not call for an open uprising against communism, and seemed to have a kind of rapport with Gen.
A few years later, a reform-minded Soviet leadership under
Poles say the pope's charismatic visits and Masses let people feel their collective power in defying the authorities.
Anna Bohdziewicz, who helped distribute underground books around the time of the pope's first visit to Poland, recalled the electrifying feeling in the huge crowd that formed even the day before the pope arrived, among people walking to Victory Square in Warsaw where he was to speak, and later during his Masses.
The pope gave people confidence a peaceful struggle was not a pipe dream, said Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a Solidarity activist and Poland's first democratically elected prime minister after the fall of communism.
During that 1979 visit, "society felt its strength and saw that it was able to organize itself against the existing system - and especially toward a peaceful fight," Mazowiecki said.
"This is what the pope always taught us. When martial law was implemented, the pope never gave up. He constantly spoke about Solidarity - about holding it up and keeping it alive."