The Assistant Pastor

Baptizing an infant (Adam Bujak)

On this day in 1948, Father Wojtyła arrived at his first parish in Niegowić, Poland. Here the future Pope found himself fifteen miles east of Krakow, at the Church of the Assumption of Our Lady.

Upon reaching the parish boundaries, Saint John Paul II knelt and kissed the ground, which is something that he learned from the story of St. John Vianney. Wojtyła continued to perform this gesture as he encountered new places throughout his life.

The parishioners he served were poor farmers, and Fr. Wojtyła himself had no electricity or running water. He lived with few and well-worn belongings, which garnered respect from the community he served. Parishioners provided some material things for him, but he was known to give even those things away to others in need. 

As assistant pastor, the great saint was asked to provide religious education to young children. He often celebrated Mass, and like John Vianney, he saw himself as a "prisoner of the confessional." According to papal historian George Weigel, St. John Paul II understood the confessional to be the place "where priests encountered their people in the depths of their humanity, helping the person on the other side of the confessional screen to enter more deeply into the Christian drama of his or her own unique life. If priests stopped doing this, they’d become office managers or bureaucrats" (Witness to Hope, 92).

Remembering A Legacy

Earlier this spring, Our Sunday Visitor posted an article about the legacy of Saint John Paul II.  While the author admits that she only covers a fraction of his legacy, she does a wonderful job of capturing the impact the late Holy Father made on the Church and the world.

This is something we set out to do in our permanent exhibit, A Gift of Love: The Life of Saint John Paul II, and today we decided to lay out how we preserve the pieces of our beloved John Paul’s legacy that the author mentions.

Theology of the Body

John Paul II’s anthropology gave the Church a new language with which to address the fallout of the sexual revolution and help Christians recover a sacramental understanding of the world.

World Youth Days

With each successive World Youth Day, Pope John Paul II helped the Church see that it didn’t need to change in order to inspire young people; rather, it needed to challenge young people to change — to be bolder, more faithful and more heroic.

Light In Darkness

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

-1 John:5

The first part of our new exhibit, A Gift of Love: The Life of Saint John Paul II, can be surprising for some of our visitors. Saint John Paul II was a great lover of humanity, even though, as our exhibit shows, he experienced humanity at some of its darkest hours.

As a child, John Paul II was known as Karol Wojtyła. Born in Wadowice, Poland in 1920, young Karol lost both of his parents and his two siblings by the time he was 21. Amidst the losses he suffered, Karol grew up in a world in which his faith, his culture, and his freedom were all under attack. The Nazis occupied his country until he reached adulthood. Once they were defeated, the Soviet Union took over.

Throughout this time, Wojtyła flourished. Studious, athletic, and artistic, he did not allow outside forces to quell the love inside of him.  Sustained by his family, friends, and faith, he instead lived as a light to others. The shadows of the 20^th century did not keep him from his vocation to the priesthood, they did not keep him from nourishing his flock in Poland, nor did they keep him from bringing his love for the human person to the Second Vatican Council.

The Peaceful Audacity of St. John Paul II

In an interview with Vatican Radio this past weekend, Cardinal Roberto Tucci gave a first hand account of the events in communist Poland during Saint John Paul II’s first visit there as Pope. Listen here.

This 1979 pilgrimage to Victory Square is featured in our exhibit, for it was an important moment in the late Holy Father’s stand against the Soviet Union. With his peaceful audacity, St. John Paul II played a key role in the fall of communism. He brought hope to those living behind the “Iron Curtain,” and that hope was eventually fulfilled.

St. John Paul II, Pray for Us!

In Defense Of The Cross

In an article published by Columbia Magazine this past spring, Krzysztof Mazur wrote about the town of Nowa Huta, or “The New Steel Mill,” built by the communists in Poland after World War II. This was a town for workers, intended to make communism more attractive. Polish religiosity and culture were left out.

Catholic residents of Nowa Huta desperately wanted to build a church, but the authorities wouldn’t allow it. Town leaders eventually permitted believers to build a cross in the city square. This cross became the place of worship for the people there. Christians gathered at the cross for prayers, and Mass was said there on occasion. 

In 1960, four years after the cross was built, the authorities in Nowa Huta decided that it was time to take it down and build a school in its place. On April 27, workers and guards arrived in the city square to tear down the cross. As Mazur recounts, the people put up a fight:

A group of women saw what was happening and equipped themselves with shopping carts, brooms, bricks and bottles. A short time later, when a shift at the steel mill was let out, more than a thousand men started making their way toward the cross carrying shovels, pickaxes and other tools. In a spontaneous act of civil disobedience, 5,000 workers and citizens suddenly gathered in the square.

The protests came to a violent end, but the cross was allowed to remain in its place. Saint John Paul II, who was serving as an auxiliary bishop at the time, provided much religious support for people struggling in Nowa Huta. One way was by organizing midnight Masses under the cross each Christmas eve. 

For The Good Of Man

Our times have great need of an act of witness openly expressing the desire to bring nations and regimes closer together, as an indispensable condition for peace in the world. Our times demand that we should not lock ourselves into the rigid boundaries of systems, but seek all that is necessary for the good of man, who must find everywhere the awareness and certainty of his authentic citizenship. 

-Blessed John Paul II, 1979

Check out this Catholic News Agency article for the story of Blessed John Paul II’s role in the fall of the Soviet Union.

Blessed John Paul II, as we countdown to your canonization, please pray for peace and unity in our world! 

We Want God

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.

Poland honors the Pope and the President

Polish officials unveiled a statue of Blessed John Paul II and former U.S. President Ronald Reagan on Saturday, honoring the two men who are widely credited for the fall of communism 23 years ago. The statue, inspired by a photograph taken during the late pontiff’s 1987 visit to the United States, was unveiled in Gdansk, the birthplace of Poland’s anti-communist struggle—the Solidarity movement.

Both Blessed John Paul II and President Reagan agreed that communism is rooted in evil and that it leads to major violations of human dignity. The statue will forever stand as a reminder of their united fight against this evil, and of their love and support for Poland.

The Third Glorious Mystery: The Descent of the Holy Spirit

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly a sound came from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared to them tongues as of fire, distributed and resting on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance (Acts 2:1-4).

On this day the Church celebrates Pentecost. This is the day when the Holy Spirit came down upon the Apostles, giving them the gifts of wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord. They were given everything necessary in order to fulfill Jesus’ commands.

Blessed John Paul II reflected upon the descent of the Holy Spirit during his 1979 Mass at Victory Square in Poland:

The liturgy of the evening of Saturday the Vigil of Pentecost takes us to the Upper Room in Jerusalem, where the Apostles, gathered around Mary the Mother of Christ, were on the following day to receive the Holy Spirit. They were to receive the Spirit obtained for them by Christ through the Cross, in order that through the power of this Spirit they might fulfil his command: "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you" (Mt 28:19-20). Before Christ the Lord left the world, he transmitted to the Apostles with these words his last recommendation, his "missionary mandate".

In the face of a Communist regime which worked tirelessly to take God out of the Poland’s past, present, and future, Blessed John Paul II then fearlessly called for a “second baptism”—a baptism that would change the history of the twentieth century and eventually lead to the fall of Communism: