Ahead of today’s 20th anniversary of St John Paul II’s death, world leaders and thinkers gathered in Poznan, Poland, to discuss his legacy. Source: Catholic Review.
A common thread of their memories and interventions was that the pope from Poland was a sensation of the times whose steadfast faith brought humanity more freedom and true spiritual leadership — and continues the drive for freedom in today’s world.
Hanna Suchocka, Poland’s prime minister in the early 1990s and the country’s ambassador to the Holy See in the final years of John Paul’s pontificate, said speakers at the conference she and her team organised are “the last generation that can point out that papal teaching is not only history” but is rooted in reality.
She said John Paul “became a sign of hope for all of us — those that lived under the communist rule, but also those that lived on ‘a better side’ of the wall.”
She pointed out that “we didn’t fight for a free world” under the Iron Curtain of Cold War divisions to become closed “yet again” today, polarised against each other and that all the more now we need to reject “trivialising” John Paul’s teaching and remind the world of “its true meaning.”
If there are two people that immediately come to mind as iconic Poles to anyone in the world, they are likely to be Karol Wojtyla, elected Pope John Paul II in October 1978, and Lech Walesa.
The leader of the first free trade union in a communist country — Solidarity — a movement that led to first free elections in Poland in June 1989 and eventually the fall of communism throughout Eastern Europe, said that the pope was a believer in the cause of freedom from communism.
It was the pope’s faith in the peaceful revolution that kept Solidarity leaders going in times of persecution, Mr Walesa told a packed auditorium at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan on March 26 during the conference titled “John Paul II — to Read History, to Form History.”
Remarks on John Paul’s legacy by leaders and thinkers “really made a mark in our conscience,” said Michal Senk, director of the Centre for the Thought of John Paul II, a Warsaw-based think tank.
“It left us with conviction that freedom is intertwined with truth and aligned with goodness and that we need to carry that legacy of John Paul II ahead,” he said.
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St. John Paul II drives cause of freedom for humankind 20 years after death, say world leaders (By Paulina Guzik, OSV News via Catholic Review)
