Czechoslovaks, Pope Celebrate New Freedom

Hundreds of thousands of Czechoslovaks underscored their repudiation of communism here Saturday with a jubilant salute to Pope John Paul II, who had championed their rights when they could not.

“Today we stand before the ruins of one of the many towers of Babel in human history,” the Pope said as an epitaph for four decades of failed communism in Czechoslovakia.

For emotion, the reception given history’s first Slavic Pope in the Czechoslovak capital had few parallels in John Paul’s 46 journeys abroad. As rhetoric, the airport welcome for the Pope from playwright-President Vaclav Havel, a political prisoner of a dying Communist regime just six months ago, had no peer.

“I do not know whether I know what a miracle is,” Havel said. “Nonetheless, I dare say I am a party to a miracle now: A messenger of love comes into the country devastated by the ideology of hatred; a living symbol of civilization comes into the country devastated by the rule of the uncivilized. . . .”

This capital of 1.2 million, where 40 years of Communist rule collapsed in a popular, peaceful revolution last winter, turned out en masse for the Polish Pope, who has long been lionized throughout Eastern Europe as the paramount spokesman for human rights and a powerful force for democratic change.

Obviously moved by his reception, the Pope congratulated Czechoslovaks “on regaining your freedom” and scored the incapacity of Communist government “and its ideology to transmit to man the meaning of life and a firm hope for the future.”

“When I utter the splendid word freedom , I utter it with all the love and fervor in my heart,” John Paul said. “I utter it as a profession of my faith in man and in his dignity. I utter it with a sense of sincere solidarity with all those to whom freedom has been so long denied.”

A large, enthusiastic crowd lined John Paul’s route through a city dressed in spring-green and the institutional gray of bygone apparatchiks.

A crowd of up to 500,000 by some estimates sheltered under umbrellas in a rain-drenched esplanade for a papal Mass. Before he began, John Paul kissed on both cheeks Cardinal Frantisek Tomasek, the ailing, 90-year-old Czechoslovak patriarch who is a national hero today for his long resistance to Marxist rule.

John Paul preached to the multitude in Czech and in Slovak. Repeatedly he was interrupted by applause during a homily hailing “your rebirth . . . the great work of the spiritual renewal of your homeland.”

In an airport address launching his two-day visit, the 69-year-old pontiff called communism “a tragic utopia” that failed throughout Eastern Europe because it ignored certain essential dimensions of man: “his uniqueness and unrepeatable quality, his unquenchable yearning for freedom and truth, his inability to be happy if the transcendent relationship with God is excluded.”

The Pope returned to his theme “with a heart brimming over with affection” for Czechoslovakia in an address to intellectuals and leaders of other churches.

“Without a sense of the transcendent, any type of culture remains a formless fragment like the unfinished Tower of Babel,” John Paul said. “A person without culture is lacking in an activity which each person owes him or herself. Life without culture is life without spiritual depth, without openness to mystery, life exposed to the risks of superficiality regulated only by needs and consumption.

“Today we stand before the ruins of one of the many towers of Babel in human history,” he continued. “The building people tried to construct in former years was without a transcendent dimension, without spiritual depth. Every effort to build society, culture, unity between people and their brotherhood upon denial of the transcendent dimension creates, as at Babel, division of hearts and confusion of tongues.”

Cameras from the state television network tracked the papal passage unblinkingly from stop to stop Saturday in a country where Communist rule had savagely repressed all religion.

Catholics, who make up at least half of the 15 million people by Vatican count, lost priests to jail and churches to the state.

At the low point of church-state relations, formally restored on the eve of the papal visit, 10 of 13 bishoprics were vacant because Communist rule would not accept the Vatican nominees.

In Saturday’s new world, thousands of yellow-and-white papal flags waved among Czechoslovakia’s red, white and blue, and, at the Mass, a single Stars and Stripes. Posters at every turn welcomed “Jan Pavel,” as the Pope is known here.

“Pavel and Havel, two good men,” said one young Prague well-wisher.

In his appearances, John Paul repeatedly praised Tomasek, who, then a bishop, was jailed from 1951 to 1954.

“The Pope also comes to pay tribute to all your suffering,” John Paul told a meeting of clerics. “Your victory is the fruit of fidelity,” he said, urging his priests and nuns to help heal lingering wounds through church-state cooperation for national renewal.

Under democratic rule--parliamentary elections are scheduled in June--Czechoslovakia “is in a certain sense returning to Europe,” where, John Paul said, great promise awaits.

“A united Europe is no longer a dream; it is not a utopian memory for the Middle Ages. The events which we are witnessing show that this goal can be actually reached,” John Paul said, embroidering on his oft-expressed dream of a common European home from the Atlantic to the Urals based on common Christian principles.

Today, the Pope travels from Bohemia, where Prague is located, to the regions of Moravia and Slovakia for outdoor masses. He returns to Rome tonight.