Word: vatican
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Archbishop Luigi Poggi, a Vatican diplomat-at-large whose primary function is to maintain contact between the Holy See and the Polish government, returned to Rome following a week-long visit to Poland. While there, he had met with Jaruzelski and delivered a papal message urging an end to martial law. Poggi professed to see "some rays of hope" and even "the possibility of a reconciliation." Mediation with the Jaruzelski regime is being conducted not by the church directly but through a "social council" made up of Catholic laymen. Among them is a close friend of the Pope, Jerzy Turowicz...
...illusions about restoring the "Polish Spring" of Solidarity, but it is seeking to make life under martial law as bearable as possible for the Polish people. The church is also trying to ease conditions for the detainees and to improve the arrangements for distributing relief supplies. According to Vatican sources, the Pope realizes that the church and the people are powerless against the regime's tanks and guns, and that violent resistance would only lead to a bloodbath and probably to a Soviet invasion...
...small but certain beacon of our solidarity with the Polish people." He asked Americans "to do the same, on Christmas Eve, as a personal statement of your commitment to the steps we are taking to support the brave people of Poland in their time of troubles." In Vatican City, Pope John Paul II lit a candle in the window of his study. Around the world, millions of candles flickered in the long night of Poland's anguish...
...Jaruzelski and had a long discussion with him. The Pope also received a personal report on the Polish situation from Polish Bishop Bronislaw Dabrowski, who had twice visited Solidarity Leader Lech Walesa in detention. What was most interesting about these diplomatic contacts between the Warsaw government and the Vatican was the implication that Poland's present rulers would welcome the support of the church in the event of future negotiations between the government and Solidarity...
...successive days, scientists sent by the Vatican met directly with President Reagan, France's Francois Mitterrand, Britain's Margaret Thatcher and, extraordinarily, the Soviet Union's Leonid Brezhnev. Carefully designed to reimpress the world's leaders with the horrific biological results of nuclear war, the mission was one more indication of the new urgency that Pope John Paul II attaches to battling the nuclear threat...