Word: gniezno
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Shedding Vatican rhetoric, he spoke to the people in folksy Polish, just as he sang folk songs and ballads and made bad jokes. One night in Gniezno, after an open-air Mass for 100,000 young people, he began to lead them in a songfest of popular tunes, starting the huge crowd into favorite after favorite. The youngsters pressed him into encore after encore, and would not let him go until finally he picked up the microphone and half sang to them: "Your buses
...continuing heat, the Pope went by helicopter to Gniezno and told the welcoming crowd there with a grin, "It was so hot in Rome that I decided I must come to Poland." It was at Gniezno, where Polish Christendom's first see was established in A.D. 1000, that John Paul made his sweeping opening to the East. The day was Pentecost, the feast marking the birth of the New Testament church, when the Apostles began to speak in a profusion of languages. This miracle of tongues was held as proof of the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the church...
Poland's shrewd, 77-year-old Primate, Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, has pressed this opposition role ever since he became Archbishop of Gniezno and Warsaw in 1948. When Cardinal Wojtyla joined the battle, he used his intellectual powers to persuade both disaffected liberal Catholics and Marxists to take the church seriously. The new Pope, says a Czech Jesuit in exile, has been "more dangerous for Communist countries than Cardinal Wyszynski, because he combats Marxism also on theoretical grounds, and with such success that they have been hard put to refute his arguments...