(7 of 10)
While union activists ponder their strategy, the regime has been picking off key members of the underground. Days before the papal visit, security police rounded up ten Solidarity workers in Cracow; most had been involved in running illegal presses. Some church leaders have even begun to question whether it would not be better to close the Solidarity chapter in Poland's history and move on. Says Father Piasecki: "The underground? Who are they? What is their program? How do they plan to carry it out? You cannot talk to a partner who is not visible."
But if Solidarity leaders were nowhere to be seen, then supporters were legion. More than one million people, the largest crowd that had assembled anywhere in Poland since the Pope's 1979 visit, jammed Warsaw's Tenth Anniversary soccer stadium for an open-air Mass on the second day of the Pope's visit. Some of them had arrived more than 24 hours early in order to greet the Pontiff. The crowd included delegations from Gdansk, Poznan, Radom, Lublin and other Polish cities. There were uniformed boy scouts, nurses in white tunics, peasant women in brightly colored scarves, and Silesian miners in black uniforms and tall hats topped with black feathers. Farmers from Lowicz, 50 miles southwest of Warsaw, were dressed in their native costume: straw hats with blue ribbons, elaborately embroidered red jackets and black felt pants.
As the crowd caught sight of the Pope arriving in his bulletproof car, hundreds of thousands of hands shot into the air in a V-for-victory sign. Red-and-white banners bearing the words SOLIDARITY and GDANSK sprouted from the stands and above the crowd outside the stadium amid hundreds of national flags and papal banners. A delegation from the Ursus Tractor Factory, once a hotbed of union activity, made its presence known with a sign reading URSUS WORKERS GREET THE POPE WITH SOLIDARITY. Another poster proclaimed: GOD, HONOR, HOMELAND, WE PRAY FOR THE PRISONERS. Security guards spread throughout the stadium made no attempt to pull down the offending slogans. But officers in blue berets were armed with movie cameras, which they trained on the crowd in an attempt to record the faces of those who were holding illegal banners.
Clad in a golden chasuble and wearing his gold mitre, John Paul held a crucifix in his left hand as he spread his arms wide to offer his blessing to the multitude. The Pope stood beneath a 40-ft. white crucifix with the image of Christ in reverse relief, as if the body had been scooped out of the cross, and delivered a homily in which he called for national reconciliation through "mutual dialogue and agreement." The crowd broke into applause when he declared that "I, too, have lived deeply the whole experience of these years since August 1980." But the Pope urged his compatriots to seek a moral victory in which there would be only winners and no losers. Said John Paul: "A victory through effort and the cross, a victory achieved through defeats, is part of the Christian program of life and of the life of the nation