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All over the country the people sang and waved and prayed and wept with him, and he sang and waved and wept with them, and they drew power from each other. In Czestochowa, a vast expanse of several hundred thousand worshipers, at a single hand gesture of the Pope, sank to the earth, like a field of instantly scythed wheat, to pray.
Charisma was not the word to describe what had happened. Returning to his homeland for the first time since he was chosen Pope last October, Karol Wojtyla, John Paul II, stirred an outpouring of trust and affection that no political leader in today's world could hope to inspire, let alone command.
If the journey to Poland was a kind of spontaneous show business of the spirit, there were plenty of political overtones. And when the visit was over, it seemed as if the spiritual geopolitics that involve European Communism and Christianity, East and West, church and state, might never again be quite the same. John Paul had a mission on his mind, just as he did in visiting Mexico. There the Pope laid out a clear but complex policy for social action in Latin America and, by extension, for his worldwide church of 700 million. In Poland, the contest between Christ and Marx is far more explicit than in Latin America. Every papal gesture, every deft historical reference had political connotations in this setting. The week saw the first great public outpouring of religious and nationalistic fervor permitted since the Communists took command of Eastern Europe. Even though he never once mentioned the Communist Party or the Soviet Union by name, the new Pope was surprisingly blunt in challenging the power of the Kremlin on the issue of human freedom.
In Poland, the visible contrast between the church and the ruling regime, even after it has been in power for more than 30 years, was devastating, and John Paul took full psychological advantage of it. His message to the 77-member Polish Bishops' Conference and to tightly smiling Party First Secretary Edward Gierek was the same: the church must be free to accomplish its mission in the world.
The papal vision went beyond Poland, and beyond Catholicism. John Paul reached out eloquently to "the Silent Church," the hosts of oppressed congregations in the Soviet orbit that fare worse than Christians in Poland. In one remarkable sermon, the Pope wondered aloud about God's purposes in the election of an East European as the first non-Italian Pope in 455 years. He called himself history's "first Slav Pope," whose succession to the Apostle Peter forms a bond of blood not only with Poles but with other Slavic peoples, including Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Serbs, Croats, Bulgarians, Ukrainians and, most dramatically, Russians —some 220 million Slavs in all. Rhetorically, at least, that included the great Orthodox churches of East Europe. The Pope seemed to envision an eventual pan-European Christian alliance against the secular materialism of both East and West.
It would be sad to believe," he said, "that each Pole and Slav in any part of the world is unable ^ to hear the words of the Pope, this Slav. I hope they hear me." Many did, but no thanks to the Communist state media. Soviet television carried a 30-second clip on the Pope's arrival, but refused to show its audience the hundreds of thousands