Pontiff Greets Fellow Pole With Brotherly Embrace : Walesa Calls Pope Symbol of Solidarity

Celebrating the rebirth of Poland’s free labor movement, a visiting Lech Walesa made an emotional pilgrimage to the Vatican on Thursday to thank a white-robed countryman who he said was the living symbol of Solidarity.

“I greet you with all my heart,” exclaimed Pope John Paul II, wrapping Walesa in a brotherly embrace.

The high-spirited Pope whisked Walesa into his private library for a half-hour chat. There followed a patriots’ lunch prepared by Polish nuns who learned their cooking while John Paul was still Karol Wojtyla, bishop of Krakow, and Walesa was an obscure shipyard electrician in Gdansk.

“My batteries are recharged. I can lift any weight,” Walesa said after his papal audience.

Spying a television crew from Gdansk, where Solidarity was born, the Pope joked: “Gdansk. Ah, I remember Gdansk. The light comes from Gdansk.”

Walesa’s three-day Italian visit is intended to woo international political and economic support for Polish reforms, and organizational and financial help for Solidarity from well-heeled Italian unions that are his hosts.

In their talk, Walesa thanked John Paul for his support for Solidarity, caught him up on details of events at home and noted that the once-again legal union is rooted in the church’s social doctrine, according to papal spokesman Joaquin Navarro.

John Paul told Walesa that reforms give Poland the chance for “social, political and economic transformation,” Navarro said.

When Walesa and the Pope last met in 1987 on a papal visit to Poland, Solidarity was illegal. On Monday, after months of delicate negotiations, in which the church served simultaneously as a referee and a cheerleader, a court registered Solidarity as a legal union. In the aftermath, Walesa left immediately for Rome to thank a pontiff whose public and private support for Solidarity never flagged in nearly eight years of official repression. “Save my country, save Solidarity,” the Pope prayed repeatedly during the dark days of martial law in Poland.

Speaking after a standing ovation of doctors and medical students at Rome’s Gemelli Hospital Thursday, Walesa left no doubt of the Polish Pope’s impact on events in his homeland. John Paul spent five hours in emergency surgery at the hospital in 1981 after being wounded by an assassin’s bullets.

“Here the life of Solidarity was saved, because here the life of a great Pole, the Holy Father, was saved,” Walesa said.

For Walesa’s first visit to Italy since 1981, there was constancy in the warmth of his reception at the Vatican, but a dramatic change in his more temporal welcome. When the longtime harassed underdog stepped from the Warsaw flight Wednesday, the Polish ambassador to Italy was on hand to welcome him with a spray of red and white roses.

Like the Vatican, the Italian government is treating Walesa almost as though he were a head of state. Walesa, who is accompanied by his wife, Danuta, five aides and the archbishop of Gdansk, meets today with President Francesco Cossiga and Prime Minister Ciriaco De Mita in search of aid for a nation he said is enduring “an economic disaster.”

The union leader, who has an avid Italian following, will also confer today with Italy’s three top industrialists. Italian newspapers speculate that economic initiatives for Poland from both the Italian state and the export-hungry private sector may be in hand in time for a scheduled state visit to Poland by Cossiga next month.

For his part, the Pope, who also met Thursday with Irish President Patrick J. Hillery and renewed his call for a cease-fire in fighting between Christian factions and Muslim and Syrian forces in Lebanon, begins intensive preparations today for the first of four scheduled trips abroad this year. He leaves next Friday for nine days in Africa, with stops in Madagascar, Malawi and Zambia, as well as the French Indian Ocean island of La Reunion.