Word: pauls
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Underlying the rhetoric lay an important shift in Vatican policy that the new Pope has introduced. Popes John XXIII and Paul VI inaugurated Vatican Ostpolitik in contrast to the policies of Pius XII, the coldest of cold warriors, who even found Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, the venerable Primate of Poland, too soft on Communism. Their theory was that concessions for the Polish church could best be won by high-level negotiations between the Vatican and Warsaw. Now, just as he had done when he was a Polish bishop himself, John Paul was announcing that the Polish church leaders ought...
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...
...John Paul spoke with obvious emotion, sometimes seeming short of breath, often lowering his voice for emphasis. Six hundred thousand people listened in rapt attention, surrounded by the grim watchtowers and barbed wire. "It is impossible merely to visit [Auschwitz]," said the Pope, who served in the anti-Nazi underground and hid Jewish refugees. "It is necessary to think with fear of how far hatred can go, how far man's destruction of man can go, how far cruelty...
...John Paul was tiring. That Thursday evening, after he had retired in the house of the Archbishop of Cracow, the Pope was called out onto the balcony by a crowd of serenaders. When he appeared in his shirtsleeves, the crowd shouted the usual, "May you live 100 years." Asked the Pope: "Do you really want your Pope to live 100 years?" Shout ed the crowd: "Yes!" Replied the Pope with a smile: "Then let me get some sleep...
...What will we do with this Slav Pope?' they will say," John Paul joked to fellow Poles, describing the nervousness of his Italian aides. But the question will more likely be asked by Communist Party leaders all over Eastern Europe, most crucially perhaps by the Soviets. It is in the Kremlin, more than anywhere else, that the conditions under which the East bloc churches live could be quickly changed, for better or worse. Just as the real area of agreement between the Polish party and the Polish church was a fear of domestic disorder that might activate the Red Army...