Word: czestochowa
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There were sobering moments, too, on this unprecedented journey. At Czestochowa, where the revered painting of the Black Madonna is enshrined, the Pope led half a million pilgrims in an elaborate consecration of Poland and the universal church to Mary, the "Queen of Poland" whose veneration runs deep in the Polish consciousness. On Thursday, caught in a whipsaw of emotions, he went immediately from a fond visit to his picturesque home town of Wadowice to the still standing symbol that epitomizes human evil: Auschwitz. The concentration-camp site, he told a huge, hushed throng, is "the Golgotha of the modern...
...over the country the people sang and waved and prayed and wept with him, and he sang and waved and wept with them, and they drew power from each other. In Czestochowa, a vast expanse of several hundred thousand worshipers, at a single hand gesture of the Pope, sank to the earth, like a field of instantly scythed wheat, to pray...
Poland's own television provided more extensive coverage, but played down the crowd size and response. Meanwhile, officials did their best to belittle the turnout, offering reporters a ridiculously low estimate of 120,000 for one of the Czestochowa Masses. The audiences were "disappointing," one official declared, and Czestochowa's mayor let it be known that he had laid in 400 tons of bread a day to feed 1.5 million visitors and had a lot of it left over...
...Czestochowa shrine there was one brief scuffle between police and pilgrims. A priest also took the microphone to announce: "Let us pray for those who cannot reach Czestochowa because they are stopped." The regime denied the persistent reports that it was hindering pilgrims in order to cut down the crowds. Supposedly, roadblocks were set up to prevent traffic jams in the cities, but a Western diplomat ran into one a full 19 miles away from Cracow before the Pope's arrival there. Church officials reported to friends that in various cases the buses for pilgrims that were promised in order...
...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...