Word: vatican
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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
...Pope was quoting the Apostle Paul, who in Ephesians 4:5-6 called on first-generation church congregations to overcome their internal divisions. In doing so, he enunciated an ecumenical policy of broad social import. Vatican analysts had already expected that this Pope from the East might seek to heal the 11th century break with the Eastern Orthodox churches more ardently than to mend the 16th century split-off of Protestantism. The Pope's sermon surveyed the centuries of missionary activity in present-day Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and, finally, Soviet Lithuania...
...Soviet invasion of Poland that state classrooms never mention. There are some two dozen illegal samizdat periodicals and dissident organizations for intellectuals, workers and peasants. In its present need to ensure a measure of political order, the Gierek government devoutly desires good relations with the Polish church and the Vatican. That need is a source of the Pope's bargaining power...
Even Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko has been concerned. He made an early visit to the Vatican after John Paul was elected to size up the new Polish Pope. John Paul may prove a hard bargainer, much more likely than Paul VI to demand quid pro quo for Vatican good will and to hold the Communist world to its word thereafter. Gromyko was recently quoted in the Italian press as fearing that the Pope's visit would have "the same effect on the masses as the Ayatullah Khomeini had in Iran...
Says Religious Minister Kakol of the current visit: "The Vatican assured us that there will be no controversial state ments made." But with millions of Poles, along with other East bloc Catholics, turning out to see John Paul, a certain political nervousness is understandable. The deep feeling that the accession of Wojtyla to the papacy stirred in East European Catholics can hardly be overestimated. "In future," as the underground Chronicle of the beleaguered Lithuanian Catholic Church put it, "we shall not feel abandoned to the will of the atheists in the Kremlin...