On
June 2, 1979, the Pope arrived in Poland. What followed will never be forgotten
by those who witnessed it.
He
knelt and kissed the ground, the dull gray tarmac of the airport outside
Warsaw. At the same moment, the silent churches of Poland began to ring their
bells. The Pope traveled by motorcade from the airport to the Old City of
Warsaw.
The
government had feared thousands or even tens of thousands would line the
streets.
They
were wrong.
By
the end of the day, counting the people lining the streets and highways plus
those massed outside Warsaw and then inside it—all of them cheering and
throwing flowers and applauding and holding signs and singing—more than a
million people had come.
In
Victory Square in the Old City the Pope said a Mass. Communist officials
watched from the windows of nearby hotels. The Pope gave what George Weigel
called the greatest sermon of his life.
Why,
he asked, had God lifted a Pole to the papacy? Perhaps it was because of how
Poland had suffered for centuries, and through the twentieth century it had
become “the land of particularly responsible witness” to God. The people of
Poland, he suggested, had been chosen for a great role, to humbly but surely
understand that they were the repository of a special “witness of His cross and
resurrection.” He asked then if the people of Poland accepted the obligations
of such a role in history. He asked if they were capable of accepting it.
The
crowd responded with thunder.
