POZNAN, Poland (OSV News) ─ As the 20th anniversary of St. John Paul II's death approached April 2, top world leaders and thinkers gathered in Poznan, Poland, to discuss his legacy.
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, Polish prime minister in early 1990s and ambassador of Poland to the Holy See in the final years of John Paul's pontificate said in her remarks that speakers at the conference she and her team organized 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, polarized against each other and that all the more now we need to reject "trivializing" 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, it's most probably Karol Wojtyla, elected Pope John Paul II, 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, Walesa said.
"When a Pole became pope -- a year after his election he came to Poland and organized us to pray, not to start a revolution. He allowed us to notice how many of us there are. At the same time the pope said: 'change the face of the earth.' We stopped being afraid," Walesa told a packed auditorium at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan March 26 during the conference titled "John Paul II -- to Read History, to Form History."
Elected pope on Oct. 16, 1978, John Paul visited his country only seven months later, in June 1979. Eleven million people in a nation of 36 million at the time came to see the pope in person.
"Up to that point I was organizing the fight against communism. The pope accelerated those processes and made them bloodless," said Walesa, who was president of Poland from 1990 to 1995.
Norman Davis, professor of history at Oxford, Cambridge and London universities, said that Solidarity, a movement supported spiritually and organizationally by the pope, was a "sensation of the times."
John Paul "was a master of conveying information not through harsh words. He never condemned the communist system. He always spoke in a gentle language that was much stronger than harsh words. He didn't offend anyone, but got his point across," Davis said.
Hans-Gert Pöttering said that when he was about to meet the pope for the first time in 1981, John Paul was an hour late to that meeting.
"He was on the phone with Lech Walesa," the German lawyer, historian and conservative politician, said in Poznan, testifying to the ongoing commitment of the pope to support the freedom movement.
"If someone told me then, 'Poland will be free,' I wouldn't believe it," said Pöttering, who served as president of the European Parliament 2007-2009.
He pointed out that "we wouldn't be in Poznan today" if it were not for John Paul telling the Polish people, "Don't be afraid, change the world."
But this message, he said, has an all the more powerful dimension today when "we are challenged by the dictator in the Kremlin," he said. Pöttering made the comments as he stood next to the leader of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk of Kyiv-Halych, Ukraine, representing a country that has been fighting a full-scale Russian invasion since Feb. 24, 2022.
Following the teaching of John Paul, "it’s our duty to show solidarity to our friends in Ukraine so that they’re free people," Pöttering highlighted.
"We in the EU (European Union) -- Poland, Germany -- we are not just living in an organization, we are living in a EU based on values of the dignity of the human being, the core of the teaching of John Paul II. The person is responsible for himself and for the other," the European leader said, emphasizing that this task falls on today's youth, who need to be "engaged" in their societies.
Major Archbishop Shevchuk spoke next, addressing the hundreds of young people in the room, including large groups of Ukrainian students who later stood in the line to take a picture with him.
"For John Paul II," the prelate said, "young people were more important than meeting with senior political leaders. He knew that it's the youth that will decide the fate of their countries and of the world."
Major Archbishop Shevchuk said that John Paul "was not afraid of youth -- sometimes bishops are afraid of young people, but it was not a feature of John Paul."
He said that young people are destined to "build bridges, memory and communion among nations."
In 2001, he said the Polish pontiff told Ukrainians that "freedom is not only a gift but a challenge" and that young people defending Ukraine today put those words into practice "defending freedom at the price of their own blood," and that it was the words of John Paul that became for them a "signpost how to build freedom."
Major Archbishop Shevchuk thanked Walesa, who was on stage, for having a Ukrainian flag pinned to his shirt as a sign of solidarity since the war began.
Papal biographer George Weigel said that the truth about humankind that we meet in Christ is "the truth that we are creatures who long to form authentic community, to live in solidarity with others, creatures made for love, not merely for satisfaction," and therefore are thinking about freedom "in a distinctive way."
As a Christian formed by John Paul, "you will think of freedom as tethered to truth and ordered to goodness," Weigel, distinguished senior fellow of Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center, told the conference in a pre-recorded video.
The leading American theologian said that John Paul's teaching shows a visible difference between "freedom of indifference" and "freedom for excellence."
The first, he said, "can be summed up by thinking about Frank Sinatra and that famous song of his, 'I did it my way.' This is a freedom of self-absorption. It's a freedom untethered to any notion of truth and goodness. It's freedom as I want it. I want it now. I want it my way."
"Freedom for excellence" -- a term coined by the Belgian Dominican moral theologian Father Servais Pinckaers, who deeply influenced John Paul, Weigel said -- "means choosing the right thing, which we can know by reason, aided by supernatural faith ... and doing so as a matter of moral habit."
He added that John Paul taught about "freedom as choosing the right thing for the right reason, as a matter of moral habit, or what an older vocabulary would call virtue, 'habitus' being translated from Latin in some respects as 'virtue.'"
In the encyclical "Centesimus Annus," Weigel said, "John Paul II taught that freedom untethered to truth becomes self-destructive. Or, if you will, it cannibalizes itself. And I'm afraid that's the situation we find in much of the Western world today. If there is only your truth and my truth, and nothing that either one of us recognizes as the truth, then how do we settle the dispute?"
Weigel said "it is up to us to help heal the breach between that freedom of indifference and freedom for excellence, between the dictatorship of relativism and a genuine exercise of freedom in the public space."
Remarks on John Paul's legacy by top world leaders and thinkers "really made a mark in our conscience," said Michal Senk, director of the Center 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 told OSV News.
"In the context of a just peace for Ukraine, this vision of freedom becomes a powerful call to act with moral clarity, pursuing not only political peace but a peace grounded in virtue and truth," he added.
Ambassador Suchocka, who is a lawyer, concluded: "Maybe it's my professional twist, but John Paul II is like the constitution -- he needs to be interpreted. Interpretation is important. The interpretation for today is probably different than it was 30 years ago, but the text and its message remain constant: Don't close yourselves off, open yourselves up. And dialogue -- without dialogue, and the ability to understand each other, we will perish."
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Paulina Guzik is international editor for OSV News. Follow her on X @Guzik_Paulina.
