In Wojtyla’s footsteps

The elections for the European Parliament, due to be held in Poland on Sunday 7 June, will determine the country’s 50 MEPs who will sit in the EP in Strasbourg for the next five years. And although sceptics predict a low voter turnout (from 20% to 35% of those on the electoral roll), the importance of the collateral events being held to coincide with the vote should not be underestimated, also in terms of their possible effects on its results. For on Sunday 7 June the Polish Church will celebrate for the second time the Day of Thanksgiving called by the episcopate as recognition of the fundamental role played by Karol Wojtyla as Pope in the process of the democratization of the Central and Eastern Europe. In addition, the thirtieth anniversary of John Paul II’s first pilgrimage to Poland ( 2-10 June 1979) and the twentieth anniversary of the first free elections held in Poland and indeed in the whole of Eastern Europe (4 June 1989) are being celebrated this year.Architect of European spiritual unification. “John Paul II is one of the fathers of united Europe”, says Archbishop Henryk Muszynski of Gniezno. While “Schuman and Adenauer wanted a fresh start based on Christian ideas for Europe after the war, and their initiative was especially of an economic character, John Paul II may be defined instead as the architect of the spiritual unification of a Europe that was doubly divided, historically torn between East and West, and politically split by the Iron Curtain into democratic countries and those under the Communist yoke”. Archbishop Muszynski, pointing out that “those who don’t vote are always wrong”, said that “Poles ought to choose as their representatives those who are able to bring the best of their national culture into Europe”. “Poles – said the bishop – are different from many other peoples because their faith is still alive: Christianity in Poland is not a relic of the past and can inspire other nations”.Men and women open to the Holy Spirit. For his part, Archbishop Kazimierz Nycz of Warsaw dismisses as inappropriate “the attempts to reduce the transformations in Central Europe to the events of November 1989 as if everything only began after the fall of the Berlin Wall”. “The first pilgrimage of John Paul II to Poland took place when no one could have predicted that, in spite of the repressions, and even the subsequent introduction of martial law, we would in the end re-conquer the freedom first of our country and then that of the whole of Europe”. Speaking of the significance of the Day of Thanksgiving whose promoter he is, Mgr. Nycz explains: “for all this we need to thank the Lord and our fellowmen, the Pope, the men of the Church and the members of Solidarnosc. For all these changes did not come from nothing. I firmly believe that it was the Holy Spirit that guided men, but for this to happen men open to His work were needed”. Mgr. Alojzy Orszulik, bishop emeritus of Lowicz, who in the spring of 1989 was one of the episcopal observers during the talks between Solidarnosc and the Communist authorities, in a Poland in which 300,000 troops of the Red Army were still stationed, recalls that the result of the first free elections in Central and Eastern Europe, held on 4 June twenty years ago, caused many rifts within the Communist Party itself, so much so that it even proved impossible to agree on a candidate for the future head of the government. The Church then, strengthened by a clear victory of Solidarnosc (a movement of 10 million people) at the ballot box, proposed a Catholic and well-known opponent of the regime as premier: Tadeusz Mazowiecki. European citizens with satisfaction. Today, almost 78% of Poles are conscious that the first visit of Karol Wojtyla as Pope to Poland contributed to the birth of Solidarnosc, the subsequent defeat of Communism in 1989, the regaining of freedom in Poland and, later, the fall of the Berlin Wall. And while three-quarters of the population express satisfaction in being European citizens, and almost half of all Poles are favourable to a European Constitution, 63% are convinced of the need to mention the Christian roots of our continent in the Treaty. Bishop Wiktor Skworc of Tarnow, in a recent pastoral letter recalls that “participation in the elections and the choice of candidates able to share the teaching of the Gospel on ethical and social questions such as the defence of life, marriage and the family gives Polish Catholics a real chance of transmitting the Gospel values among the European peoples, and hence of helping to create a moral order”. The family as the founding value of European civilization was also underlined by Mgr. Tadeusz Rakoczy, bishop of the diocese of Bielsko and Zywiec, in addressing over 100,000 participants in the annual pilgrimage to the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Piekary Slaskie. He also recalled the words of John Paul II’s Apostolic Exhortation Christifideles Laici: “whole civilizations and the cohesiveness of peoples depend above all on the human quality of their families” (no. 40).