Word: czestochowa
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Each year 5 million or 6 million pilgrims visit the Jasna Gora monastery in Poland to see the revered painting of the Black Madonna. But dozens of visitors are injured while crossing the busy road that separates the grounds from the town of Czestochowa. In addition, the government has long wanted to widen the road into an expressway. The solution: a pedestrian tunnel. But the project became another test of wills between Polish church and state. Bishop Stefan Barela complained that the underpass was a plot to cut off the monastery from the town and to "strike a blow...
...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...