John Paul II's 1979 Pilgrimage to Poland — Catalyst for Solidarity
John Paul II's visit to Poland in June 1979 is the event Poles date the following decade from. The government had spent months trying to prevent it and then to contain it. It could not refuse a Polish pope entry to Poland, so it negotiated the route, kept television cameras pointed at the altar rather than the crowds, and told citizens to stay at home. Some thirteen million people, a third of the country, attended the open-air masses over nine days. The largest was in Victory Square in Warsaw, on the site where the state held its own parades, where he preached on the descent of the Holy Spirit and asked that it renew the face of the earth — of this earth — and the crowd took up a chant that lasted a quarter of an hour. The political content was almost entirely implicit. What the visit demonstrated was organisation. Millions of people assembled, fed themselves, kept order without a single policeman visible, and cleaned up afterwards, and discovered that the state's account of who they were was not the only one available. The Polish phrase for it afterwards was that they stopped being afraid. Solidarity was founded at the Gdańsk shipyard fourteen months later, and its members hung his portrait on the gates. He supported it publicly through martial law, met Wałęsa, and was shot in St Peter's Square in May 1981 by a Turkish gunman whose connections have never been established. He also declined to say anything that could be used against the movement. The homilies are about dignity, work and the rights of the person, and contain no political programme at all, which is precisely why the government could not answer them.
- Year: 1979 CE
- Category: Political
