Word: gdansk
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...former union leader, who is now merely a "private citizen" in the government's eyes, was among the millions of Poles riveted to their television sets as the Pope arrived in Poland. Walesa spent most of the week in his home town of Gdansk, where he had returned to his job at the Lenin shipyards two months ago after spending nearly a year in detention. When Walesa asked permission from the shipyard management to take a day off to meet the Pope, the request was denied. Instead, a group of policemen turned up at his apartment; in an apparent...
Walesa had expected to meet the Pope on Sunday in Czestochowa, where John Paul celebrated the 600th anniversary of the Black Madonna, Poland's holiest religious painting. But Walesa stood by his telephone in Gdansk all day waiting for the summons that did not come...
...able to visit all the sick, the imprisoned, the suffering, but I ask them to be close to me in spirit," he said. Later, in what struck many listeners as a reference to the fact that he had been asked not to include in his itinerary the port of Gdansk, where the independent Solidarity union was founded in August 1980, the Pontiff called on Poles who could not see him "to welcome my presence in those places where my pilgrim path does...
Many residents of Gdansk and other cities the Pope would not visit came to Warsaw to see him. Jammed ten deep along the route of John Paul's motorcade, they raised homemade signs naming the cities from which they had come. Like the heroine of a Delacroix painting, one robust woman boldly thrust a banner reading GDANSK WELCOMES YOU toward a column of police as the procession filed past. The crowd roared its approval...
...supposed to return home in August 1982 for the celebration at Czestochowa but the military crackdown intervened and Jaruzelski postponed the trip. When the government finally invited the Pope, he asked Jaruzelski to grant a general amnesty. The authorities adamantly refused. Warsaw also balked at including the cities of Gdansk and Lublin in the papal itinerary, fearing that supporters of the banned union, which was particularly strong in those two cities, might use the Pope's visit to stage demonstrations. The Vatican, for its part, would not give the government advance copies of the Pope's speeches except...