Chicago Tribune

The pope and the end of European communism

By Tom Hundley
Tribune staff reporter
Published April 2, 2005

WARSAW — Poland in the late 1970s was a grim and isolated place. The
economy was a shambles. The shelves of shops were empty, and consumers
waited in long lines. The Communist regime went almost unchallenged.

But spirits rose in October 1979, when Karol Wojtyla, archbishop of Krakow,
was elected pope. Poles suddenly had a link to the outside world – Wojtyla
would be their voice. And Wojtyla was determined to help his homeland.

When the Vatican first proposed a visit in early 1979, Leonid Brezhnev, the
Soviet leader, recommended that the pope’s trip should be postponed “due to
illness.” A homecoming for a Polish pope would only bring trouble, he
warned.

The Polish government believed it could stage-manage a harmless religious
event. But the Communists had little inkling of the power wielded by Pope
John Paul II.

Some 300,000 Poles filled Warsaw’s vast Victory Square for the first papal
mass on June 2, 1979. Nearly a million more jammed the surrounding streets.

“There can be no just Europe without the independence of Poland marked on
its map,” the pope told them.

The response swelled like a vast tidal wave: “We want God, we want God.”

Over the course of the nine-day pilgrimage, the pope altered the
psychological landscape of his homeland, instilling a sense of dignity and
courage. His theme, repeated over and over at every stop, was
solidarnosz – the solidarity of the Polish people.

Fourteen months after the papal visit, those ideas bore fruit.

Government-imposed price increases triggered a wave of strikes culminating
in the takeover of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk by 17,000 workers. They were
led by a feisty electrician with a drooping mustache named Lech Walesa, who
knelt at the barricades armed only with images of the Black Madonna,
Poland’s most cherished religious symbol.

Timid church leaders in Poland were slow to grasp the meaning of what was
taking place and urged the strikers to show restraint. But in Rome, Pope
John Paul II understood immediately the importance of the strikers’ demands
and sent a message of support.

The strikers refused to buckle, and in August 1980 a revolution was born. It
called itself Solidarity.

Within three weeks of its founding, more than 3 million workers from 3,500
factories had declared their allegiance to Solidarity. Within months the
number would balloon to 10 million – more than one-quarter of the population.

In 1981, under mounting pressure from Moscow, Poland’s leaders imposed
martial law. A few minutes before midnight on Dec. 12, telephones across
Poland went dead, and tanks rumbled through the capital. Four thousand
Solidarity leaders, including Walesa, were rounded up and arrested.

The pope, still recovering from the gunshot wound inflicted by a would-be
assassin seven months earlier, prayed for his compatriots. That Christmas
Eve, he lit a single candle in the window of his Vatican apartment – a symbol
of “solidarity with suffering nations.”

But he was determined to do more than that. In 1983, after months of
negotiations with the Communist leaders of Poland, the pope returned. That
second pilgrimage would turn out to be one of the crowning achievements of
his papacy and an unmitigated disaster for the regime.

Despite warnings from the government to stay home, 3 million people turned
out for three open-air masses in Czestochowa. They heard the pope preach a
gospel of dignity, human rights and solidarity.

Despite tanks in the streets and the menacing presence of security police
everywhere, 300,000 gathered for a mass at a Warsaw stadium meant to hold
100,000.

Bronislaw Geremek, a professor of medieval history and key adviser to
Walesa, would later serve as democratic Poland’s foreign minister. But on
June 17, the day of the pope’s open air mass at the football stadium,
Geremek was in Warsaw’s Rakowiecka Prison. He recalls the extraordinary
silence that descended upon the city as the pope began to speak.

By the time the pope left Poland, the regime was more afraid of its own
people and the Polish pope than it was of Moscow’s hollow threats of
invasion. A month after the papal visit, martial law was lifted.

The road to freedom and democracy would not be easy for the Poles. As their
economy continued its slow motion free-fall, the country’s rulers stubbornly
clung to power, harassed Solidarity activists and curtailed human rights.

But the Solidarity movement – officially non-existent – had regained the
initiative, and, with constant reinforcement from the Vatican, it would hold
fast until the regime finally gave way.

At the beginning of 1987, a full two years before the beginning of the talks
that would mark the formal dismantling of communism in Poland, Gen. Wojciech
Jaruzelski traveled to Rome for a meeting with the pope.

At this point, writes papal historian George Weigel, “Both men knew who had
won.”

And with the ascent to Soviet leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev, who signaled
that he would not continue to use military might to suppress Eastern Europe,
the only real issue was to secure a peaceful transition.

In January 1989, Jaruzelski announced he would recognize Solidarity and meet
with Walesa for a series of talks on the future of Poland. The talks began
in February. Two months later the regime agreed to semi-free elections:
Jaruzelski would remain as president and the Communists would be guaranteed
65 percent of the seats in parliament. The remaining 35 percent could be
contested.

The election was held June 4, and Solidarity won all of the 192 contested
seats. There also was an election for the newly created Polish Senate.
Solidarity swept 99 out of 100 seats. Historians estimated that 80 percent
of the Communist Party’s membership must have voted for Solidarity.

A humiliated Jaruzelski took office as president, but he bowed to the
inevitable by naming Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a leading Catholic intellectual
with close ties to the pope, as prime minister. Mazowiecki was the first
non-Communist to head a government in Eastern Europe since World War II.

In short order, the communist regimes of neighboring countries began to
crumble. Hungary, East Germany and Czechoslovakia saw peaceful revolutions.
Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia and Albania followed, though not always
gently.

Although the CIA and the rest of Washington failed to see it coming, the
collapse of the Soviet Union was only a matter time.

Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms were too little, too late. The Baltic
republics – Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia – had been agitating for greater
freedoms since 1987. With the dramatic collapse of communism in the Soviet
satellite states, the Baltic peoples stepped up their demands. Nationalist
movements were on the rise in the Ukraine, Armenia and Georgia as well.

>From his earliest days in power, Gorbachev was deeply curious about the
Slavic pope.

A decade later, Gorbachev would write, “Everything that has happened in
Eastern Europe in recent years would have been impossible without the pope’s
efforts and the enormous role, including the political role, he has played
in the world arena.”

The pontiff takes a more modest view of his role.

“I didn’t cause this to happen,” he told an interviewer. “The tree was
already rotten. I just gave it a good shake, and the rotten apples fell.”

For a thousand years, the Catholic Church has been the guardian and
repository of the Polish national identity. Nowhere in Europe is a nation so
closely tied to its faith.

The Polish pope also saw his homeland as a living bridge between the two
Europes, East and West. And it was his hope – his expectation – that Poland
would not only regain its freedom, but would lead the rest of Europe back to
Christianity.

In the immediate aftermath of the regime’s collapse, the Polish church
claimedvictory for itself and demanded its say in the new nation. Poland’s
liberal abortion laws were abolished, and the Catholic catechism was taught
in state schools.

Many cities and towns renamed streets in honor of Pope John Paul II. From
the pulpit, bishops instructed the faithful for whom they should vote.

Most Poles saw things differently. The church, of course, had aided the
people, but that did not mean the church owned the victory. The last thing
Poles wanted was to replace the “red” tyranny of communism with the “black”
tyranny of clerical rule.

Instead, Poles embraced Western-style capitalism and consumerism with
astonishing speed. Almost overnight, it seemed, the drab gray of Warsaw was
transformed by colorful billboards of Western companies advertising their
wares.

Poles also began to adopt the social norms of Western Europe. Ignoring the
church’s teaching on birth control, they had fewer babies. While tough
anti-abortion laws remain on the books, an illegal abortion underground
advertises openly in newspapers. In recent years, the divorce rate has
soared; church attendance has declined.

On the occasion of Pope John Paul II’s first visit to his homeland after the
fall of communism, Poles were expecting a celebration. Instead, they got a
scolding.

The pope took in the all the changes, and, like an angry Moses, he lashed
out at the “whole civilization of desire and pleasure which is now lording
it over us, profiting from various means of seduction. Is this civilization
or is it anti-civilization?”

“And what should be the criteria for Europeanism? Freedom? What kind of
freedom? The freedom to take the life of an unborn child?” he demanded.

The visit stunned Poles and left the pope feeling betrayed by his
compatriots. For the first time, the international media began to paint a
picture of the pope as an angry old man, out of touch with the times.

The years took their toll on the pontiff, but he hadn’t changed his message.
He never did.

His most recent visits to Poland have been occasions for great outpourings
of national pride. Last year, an estimated 2.5 million turned out for an
open-air mass in Krakow.

Among them was a 46-year-old steelworker named Henryk Otlinger. With tears
streaming down his face, he hoisted his 10-year-old daughter, Natalia, onto
his shoulders so that she might catch a glimpse of the man her father said
“was the most important person in the world, in the country and privately
for us, in our family.”

In Krakow that day, there was little evidence of the “new evangelization”
the pope has yearned for. But the Poles came – young and old – to honor the man
that many of them consider to be the greatest Pole who ever lived, a man of
awesome spiritual power who gave his nation the strength to liberate itself.

Copyright © 2005, Chicago Tribune