Word: papally
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...papal entourage came to a halt in front of St. John's Cathedral, a red-brick gothic church in the Old Town that has served as a rallying point for antigovernment demonstrators since the declaration of martial law. John Paul entered the church and descended to the underground crypt to pray in front of the tomb of the late Polish Primate Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, who died...
...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 when an official reply...
...reportedly scotched a proposal by local security officers to build watchtowers around the site of an open-air Mass, fearing that it would make the faithful feel as if they were in a concentration camp. Residents of Cracow also wondered why a park that had been used for a papal Mass in 1979 had been subdivided with wooden railings that gave it the appearance of a cattle pen. The likely explanation: it was a clever way to keep the Pope from mingling with the people...
While union activists ponder their strategy, the regime has been picking off key members of the underground. Days before the papal visit, security police rounded up ten Solidarity workers in Cracow; most had been involved in running illegal presses. Some church leaders have even begun to question whether it would not be better to close the Solidarity chapter in Poland's history and move on. Says Father Piasecki: "The underground? Who are they? What is their program? How do they plan to carry it out? You cannot talk to a partner who is not visible...
...Pope arriving in his bulletproof car, hundreds of thousands of hands shot into the air in a V-for-victory sign. Red-and-white banners bearing the words SOLIDARITY and GDANSK sprouted from the stands and above the crowd outside the stadium amid hundreds of national flags and papal banners. A delegation from the Ursus Tractor Factory, once a hotbed of union activity, made its presence known with a sign reading URSUS WORKERS GREET THE POPE WITH SOLIDARITY. Another poster proclaimed: GOD, HONOR, HOMELAND, WE PRAY FOR THE PRISONERS. Security guards spread throughout the stadium made no attempt to pull...