On April 2, 2005, Pope John Paul II died. He went down in history for many reasons, including: because he also contributed to the fall of communism without bloodshed.
Metropolitan Archbishop of Krakow, Cardinal Karol Wojtyła was elected pope on October 16, 1978. He took the name John Paul II. He was the first non-Italian bishop of Rome in over 450 years and the youngest pope in a century and a half. He was 58 years old then. During the inauguration of his pontificate, he said the famous phrase: “Do not be afraid! Open, open wide the doors to Christ! (…) open state borders, economic and political systems, wide areas of culture, civilization and development.”
He told Western European politicians back in 1978 that “the Yalta agreement is of a transitional nature.” He chose evangelism and diplomacy as a means.
John Paul II went down in history as the greatest traveler among the popes. During the 26 years of his pontificate, he made 104 foreign pilgrimages to 132 countries. He visited 900 cities and towns. It traveled 1.7 million kilometers, which is equivalent to circling the Earth around the equator 30 times and three times the distance between the Earth and the Moon.
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He made his first trip in January 1979 to the Dominican Republic, Mexico and the Bahamas, and his last one – to France in August 2004. He visited Poland nine times. The USA and France seven times, and Mexico and Spain five times each.
Pilgrimages to the most distant geographically, religiously and ideologically distant countries determined the entire rhythm and program of the pontificate, as well as its most important events, and were especially an impulse for the Pope’s historic gestures, expressing the will to dialogue, reconciliation and reaching out.
According to the chairman of the Muslim Religious Union in Poland, Mufti Tomasz Miśkiewicz, “the pontificate of John Paul II was groundbreaking for the Christian-Islamic dialogue, and the Pope was a great friend of Muslims, a person worth trusting and imitating.” During his first and last pilgrimage to Turkey in 1979, the Pope crossed the threshold of a Muslim temple – a mosque in Istanbul – incognito.
John Paul II was the first pope in history to visit the Lutheran church in 1983, and on April 13, 1986, the synagogue. The visit of the head of the Catholic Church to a Jewish temple was the first since apostolic times.
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Representatives of the Roman Jewish community and people who accompanied John Paul II, a witness to the Holocaust, recalled the tears of Jews when they saw the Pope in their homes and the applause in response to the speech he delivered. John Paul II called Jews “brothers” several times. He also stressed that “there are no grounds for any supposedly theologically justified discrimination or – even worse – persecution of Jews.”
During his pontificate, he also made an important opening towards Orthodoxy. Already in 1979, together with Patriarch Dimitrios I of Constantinople, he announced the commencement of doctrinal dialogue between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches. In 1999, for the first time at the invitation of the Romanian Patriarch, Teoctist visited the mostly Orthodox country to meet “Brothers in Faith”. He then appealed for dialogue to become “a way of healing open wounds and overcoming still existing difficulties!”
The attempt on the life of John Paul II was widely reported around the world. On May 13, 1981, in St. Peter’s Square, the Pope was seriously injured and was taken to the Gemelli Clinic in critical condition. He was saved, even though the doctors themselves doubted whether he would survive. The attacker was Mehmet Ali Agca from Turkey. The Pope forgave him and visited him in prison in December 1983.
Some materials examined by historians indicate that the secret services of Bulgaria and other communist countries during the “Cold War” were behind the attack on the pope. Due to the nuclear threat, in October 1986, the Pope invited the world’s religious leaders to Assisi to pray together for peace. He organized a similar meeting during the war in the Balkans and Rwanda and after the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 in the USA.
He has repeatedly said that violence is not the solution to conflicts. In the context of the 1992–1995 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, he appealed for forgiveness. “In the name of this mystery, Christ teaches us that we must always forgive and love one another as He loved us,” he said in April 1993 in the Vatican.
In the Catholic Church, forgiveness is one of the acts of mercy towards the soul. The message about God’s mercy, which during the difficult years of World War II was support and a source of hope not only for the inhabitants of Krakow, but also for the entire Polish nation, “in a way shapes” the image of my pontificate – confessed John Paul II during his pilgrimage to Poland on June 7, 1997 in Krakow’s Łagiewniki. Then he canonized Sister Faustyna Kowalska, author of the now world-famous “Diary”. At the same time, the Pope announced the second Sunday of Easter – Divine Mercy Sunday. In turn, during his last pilgrimage to Poland – on August 17, 2002 in Łagiewniki, he entrusted the fate of the world and every person to God’s mercy. As he noted, “in God’s mercy the world will find peace and man will find happiness.”
As the head of the Vatican City State and head of the Catholic Church, the pope has met with state leaders many times. The following turned out to be significant, among others: conversations with Ronald Reagan. After consultations with the Vatican, he accelerated the arms race, putting the Soviet Union on the brink of financial collapse. From the perspective of historians, the first visit of the Pope to his homeland turned out to be no less important, as it launched the process of social changes in Poland.
“However, the most important achievement of the Pope was not contributing to the fall of communism, but bringing about changes without bloodshed,” said the political scientist, Fr. prof. Piotr Mazurkiewicz from the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw.
However, Poland’s experience of war and communism prevented the pope from supporting “liberation theology.” In Latin America, the enemy was neither communism nor Nazism, but elites devoid of social sensitivity. As a consequence, the papal teaching was contested there.
Throughout his pontificate, the Pope remembered the young generation, repeatedly appealing to the elites of the world at that time for social and economic changes that would allow young people to live with dignity. In 1985, he established World Youth Day, which became the largest mass celebration of young people with the participation of successive popes. Many were skeptical about this. During WYD in Paris, France (August 19-24, 1997), contrary to predictions of 400,000. participants, for the final Holy Mass 1.1 million came. Despite the passage of time and civilization changes, WYD still attracts millions of young people from distant corners of the earth.
The Pope also became involved in the defense of women’s rights during the international conference for population and development in Cairo in 1994 and the UN conference in 1995 in Beijing. He emphasized that “women have made a contribution no less than men to the history of humanity, and in most cases in much more difficult conditions.” “In the name of respect for the human person, we must also expose the spread of a hedonistic and commercial culture that encourages sexual abuse, drawing even very young girls into circles of moral corruption and prostitution,” he wrote in a letter to the conference in Beijing.
The speech John Paul II gave in Agrigento, Sicily, when he called on mafiosi to convert, also went down in history.
On March 12, 2000, he was the first pope in history to make a “mea culpa” gesture, asking for forgiveness for the harm done by the sons and daughters of the Church to representatives of other religions.
He died on April 2, 2005 at 21.37 at the age of 84. Delegations from over 150 countries participated in the funeral ceremony on April 8, 2005. Six days of national mourning were announced in Poland. On the day of the funeral, the faithful in St. Peter’s Square shouted “Santo subito” (Saint immediately). The Polish Pope was beatified on May 1, 2011 by Pope Benedict XVI, and canonized by Pope Francis on April 27, 2014.
Doubts about the pope’s holiness emerged years later and were part of the discussion about pedophilia in the Church. The allegations were addressed in 2021 by Fr. Sławomir Oder, postulator of the beatification process. He noted that the process “was conducted in compliance with all procedures provided for by canon law.” He then explained that only a dispensation was granted from confirming the existence of the so-called opinion on holiness, which is the basis for every beatification process. “In this case, Pope Benedict XVI had no doubts about the existence of the opinion of holiness,” Oder, currently the bishop of Gliwice, told PAP.
Further accusations against John Paul II were made in 2023. On March 6, TVN24 broadcast Marcin Gutowski’s report “Franciszkańska 3”, which described the cases of three priests of the Archdiocese of Krakow: Bolesław Saduś, Eugeniusz Surgent and Józef Loranc, and the reaction to them of the then metropolitan Cardinal. Karol Wojtyła. It also included statements by the Dutch journalist Ekke Overbeek, author of the book “Maxima Culpa. What the church hides about John Paul II.”
This sparked a public debate. Ed. Tomasz Krzyżak emphasized that “based on the IPN documents, it is impossible to confirm the thesis that Cardinal Karol Wojtyła sent Father Saduś to Austria to cover up the fact that he molested children and that the priest was a pedophile.” He estimated that “if the prosecutor was dealing with this type of evidence, he would immediately discontinue the proceedings.”
Many contemporary commentators also accuse John Paul II of the fact that the code of canon law he issued in 1983 provided for too mild church penalties. However, priest Dr. Jan Dohnalik explained to PAP that “the climate of the era, including in the Church, assumed that punishment should be as little as possible.”
According to a lecturer and collaborator of the Child Protection Center, “John Paul II’s moral attitude towards the sexual abuse of minors was always clear, while systemic solutions were created along with the knowledge of the scale of the drama, taking full shape only at the end of his pontificate.”
Initially, the Pope thought that this was only an Anglo-Saxon problem, as evidenced by the guidelines given first in 1994 to bishops in the USA and in 1996 in Ireland. The document allowed for crimes against minors to be punished until they reached the age of majority, and not – as the norms of canon law at that time predicted – until they turned 16.
“The issuance of the motu proprio +Sacramentorum sanctitatis tutela+ for the entire Church on April 30, 2001 was a turning point. The document included the sexual abuse of minors among the most serious crimes in the Church and ordered all these matters to be referred to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,” Fr. told PAP. Dohnalik.
At that time, among others, the following issues were raised: the age of protection of minors throughout the Church from 16 to 18 years. The limitation period was also extended to ten years, starting from the victim’s eighteenth birthday. However, the Vatican’s actions still focused on the perpetrators, not on the victims, as is the case today.
During the 26 years of his pontificate, John Paul II left behind enormous scientific achievements that still remain undiscovered by many. He published 14 encyclicals, 14 exhortations, 11 apostolic constitutions and wrote 43 apostolic letters. The foundation of most of them is the teaching of the Second Vatican Council. (PAP)
Video material available on video.pap.pl: and on PAP.PL:
Author: Magdalena Gronek
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