Word: polisher
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...that he would need to "contain my emotion" during the trip. As soon as the papal jet landed, black-robed Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, 77, the Primate of Poland, mounted the steps into the plane. John Paul's shrewd former mentor has maneuvered for three decades to guide the Polish church through the darkest days of Stalinist repression into an era of uneasy coexistence with the country's Communist rulers. The extent of the church-state detente was immediately apparent: figurehead President Henryk Jablonski came to the airport to welcome John Paul, and the Pope later conferred...
Though Stalinist-era oppression has ended, there is still tension. Said one Polish Catholic intellectual from Cracow: "You can't talk about persecution, but there is constant harassment." Religion classes remain outside the schools, and, more important, parents are pressured not to send their children. Religious broadcasts are forbidden, even of Masses that could comfort invalids. A notable exception was the four-hour telecast of Figure of crucified Christ in modernistic Nowa Huta church John Paul's installation at the Vatican. National coverage of three of this week's events has been scheduled...
Throughout the Communist period, the shortage of church buildings has been the most nettlesome problem. After the war's destruction, an increase in population and the move of peasants to industrial "new towns," Polish Catholics needed large numbers of new buildings. But the Communist government, which has total control of building permits and supplies, played a maddening cat-and-mouse game of rejection and delay. John Paul's most telling achievement in Cracow was the erection of a modernistic concrete-and-steel church at Nowa Huta (New Foundry), a steel town designed to provide no church...
...precisely the problem. Polish Catholicism exists in legal limbo, with no guaranteed rights. Four months before his election as Pope, Karol Wojtyla declared, "Being such a vast community, a community almost as large as the nation itself, we cannot be outside the law. Definition of the church's legal status is at the same time the definition of our place and of all of our rights." The church does not expect or even want the political powers that it wielded in former times. It seeks only elemental human freedoms, which John Paul has enunciated from his universal pulpit...
John Paul mulled over the choice for nearly two months following the death of Secretary of State Jean Villot. It was a foregone conclusion that a Polish Pope with no Vatican experience would have to choose an Italian to help him deal with the predominantly Italian Secretariat of State. John Paul reportedly considered giving the job to Giuseppe Cardinal Siri, 72, the hard-line conservative Archbishop of Genoa, but they could...