THE POPE WHO HELPED BRING DOWN COMMUNISM
IN 1979, LESS than a year after ascending to the Catholic Church’s highest office, Pope John Paul II returned to his home country, then under communist rule. He disembarked at the airport, knelt, and kissed the Polish ground. That moment was arguably the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union.
In an officially atheist country, millions of people—more than a third of the population of Poland—showed up to see the first ever Slavic pope during his nine-day trip. “John Paul was walking among vast, enthusiastic crowds,” writes John O’Sullivan in his 2006 book The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister. “The pope proclaimed not only religious but also patriotic and political hope.”
While celebrating Mass at Warsaw’s Victory Square, John Paul drew the crowd’s attention to the nearby tomb of the unknown soldier. “In how many places has he cried with his death,” he said, “that there can be no just Europe without the independence of Poland marked on its map!” It was an astonishing political rebuke to the Soviets, who following World War II had installed communist governments across Eastern Europe that were “independent” in name only.
A few minutes earlier, in a rebuke of a different kind, John Paul had declared that “at any longitude or
