A Triumphal Return

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would dearly love to return to Poland a second time in 1982 for the 600th anniversary of the installation of the Black Madonna at Czestochowa, and at the shrine he made a teasing reference to this hope. He said that the Prefect of the Pontifical Household and the Chief of Vatican Protocol were "novices" in Poland but "they must get used to it." These are officials who must accompany a Pope on trips. A return would be subject to another round of negotiations with the regime, and, as the Pope twice suggested during his tour, the Polish government had kept Pope Paul VI from coming to celebrate the millennium of Christianity in Poland in 1966.

In a lighter moment at Czestochowa, John Paul said at a Mass for priests: "In Rome they say the best things the Pope says are not in his prepared texts. You are enjoying yourselves now, but I will have a row later on for being late for my next appointment." The fact that the Pope's Italian staff objected to his ad-libbing and fretted about his getting behind schedule became a standing joke between the Pope and the Polish crowds.

On Monday evening the Pope sat before the shrine listening to the incongruous sound of a Catholic folk-rock band that blasted out We Want God and other religious songs. When the musicale ended, John Paul confessed, "I have a sweet tooth for song and music. This is my Polish sin. Now I must go; otherwise I will lose my image."

The Polish ecclesiastical hierarchy held a nationwide meeting to coincide with the Pope's visit. John Paul's speech to a closed-door session was the most significant statement of his trip. In the Christian-Marxist confrontation, the Pope said, "authentic dialogue must respect the convictions of believers, ensure all the rights of citizens and also the normal conditions for the activity of the church as a religious community to which the vast majority of Poles belong." The dialogue "cannot be easy," he added bluntly, "because it takes place between two concepts of the world that are diametrically opposed."

Underlying the rhetoric lay an important shift in Vatican policy that the new Pope has introduced. Popes John XXIII and Paul VI inaugurated Vatican Ostpolitik in contrast to the policies of Pius XII, the coldest of cold warriors, who even found Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, the venerable Primate of Poland, too soft on Communism. Their theory was that concessions for the Polish church could best be won by high-level negotiations between the Vatican and Warsaw. Now, just as he had done when he was a Polish bishop himself, John Paul was announcing that the Polish church leaders ought to do the bargaining directly.

Before leaving Czestochowa, the Pope demonstrated how completely Poles look to the church rather than to the party for leadership. The regime had balked at John Paul's plan to visit the miners in the industrial heartland of Silesia, presumably because it would have been too explicit an embarrassment to have even the workers eating out of his hand. But he held a Mass for workers at the shrine, which drew a special delegation of miners with czaka (plumed ceremonial hats), their wives in traditional peasant dress with brilliant red bandannas on their heads. The crowd of a quarter-million waved papal and Polish flags, applauded deliriously and several times broke into Sto Lot (May