Word: czestochowa
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Pope spent three days in the shrine city, Czestochowa, where he led the ceremony of consecration to the Virgin. Inside the fortress-like Jasna Gora (Bright Mountain) monastery is the Black Madonna painting, attributed by legend to St. Luke. "There are people and nations. Mother," the Pontiff prayed, "that I would like to say to you by name. I entrust them to you in silence. I entrust them to you in the way that you know best." Poles believe that prayer to her image by the Jasna Gora monks staved off invading Swedish armies in 1655. Since 1656 Mary...
...would dearly love to return to Poland a second time in 1982 for the 600th anniversary of the installation of the Black Madonna at Czestochowa, and at the shrine he made a teasing reference to this hope. He said that the Prefect of the Pontifical Household and the Chief of Vatican Protocol were "novices" in Poland but "they must get used to it." These are officials who must accompany a Pope on trips. A return would be subject to another round of negotiations with the regime, and, as the Pope twice suggested during his tour, the Polish government had kept...
...lighter moment at Czestochowa, John Paul said at a Mass for priests: "In Rome they say the best things the Pope says are not in his prepared texts. You are enjoying yourselves now, but I will have a row later on for being late for my next appointment." The fact that the Pope's Italian staff objected to his ad-libbing and fretted about his getting behind schedule became a standing joke between the Pope and the Polish crowds...
Before leaving Czestochowa, the Pope demonstrated how completely Poles look to the church rather than to the party for leadership. The regime had balked at John Paul's plan to visit the miners in the industrial heartland of Silesia, presumably because it would have been too explicit an embarrassment to have even the workers eating out of his hand. But he held a Mass for workers at the shrine, which drew a special delegation of miners with czaka (plumed ceremonial hats), their wives in traditional peasant dress with brilliant red bandannas on their heads. The crowd of a quarter-million...
...even those at Czestochowa. But it could have been larger. The Pope made an off-the-cuff, explicit reference to the reports that pilgrims from other Communist states had been turned away at the Polish border. "The borders should not stop our brothers from coming," he said...