Pope John Paul II: Cold Warrior with a cross

By John Christensen
CNN Interactive

On June 2, 1979, just eight months after his consecration as pope, John Paul II returned to his native Poland for a nine-day visit that heralded the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire.

The pope said Mass that day in Victory Square in Warsaw, a place more often the scene of army parades and rallies orchestrated by the ruling communist government.

Officially, Poland was atheist, and the government had confined and thwarted the church at every turn, stopping just short of outright confrontation. But Poland had been a stronghold of Catholicism for more than a 1,000 years. It would take more than 35 years of communism to snuff out that faith.

So it was that 250,000 Poles crowded into the square to behold this robust and charismatic fellow Pole, charged with emotion and special purpose, standing beneath an enormous wooden cross.

To understand himself, the pope told his listeners, man must understand Jesus Christ. He can understand neither who he is nor what his truth may be, neither his vocation nor his final end, without the help of the Lord.

After a pause, the pope then uttered words that could only be regarded as at once an affirmation to the faithful and a challenge to the secular authorities:

"Therefore, Christ cannot be kept out of the history of man in any part of the globe, at any longitude or latitude of geography. ... Christ cannot be kept out of this part of the world. To try to do this is an act against man."

The applause began slowly, then rose in a crescendo, thundering across the square again and again like storm waves battering a seashore.

For eight long minutes the applause continued. And when it began to subside, and the pope, hand on his chest, was unable to continue, the singing began.

"Christ conquers, Christ rules," they sang, hundreds of thousands of triumphant voices. And from among the yellow and white papal flags in the crowd a banner was unfurled that read: "Freedom, independence, protection of human rights."

'The pope was the real power'

It was, says a bishop who was there that day, "an awakening."

"Everyone suddenly perceived that the pope was the real power," the Rev. Jan Sikorski, a priest, told the Boston Globe. "The police meant nothing. The politicians meant nothing. They trembled before the pope. The people did not sing the Internationale, they sang church hymns."

Media reports estimate that despite a virtual news blackout in Eastern Europe, news of the pope's visit to Poland reached 40 million Catholics behind the Iron Curtain.

A year later, the Solidarity trade union was born in Poland. In time, the movement would enlist 10 million Poles as members, and priests visiting the imprisoned Solidarity leaders often concealed messages of encouragement from the pope in their robes.

In the autumn of 1989, Solidarity played the pivotal role in bringing down the government and replacing it with a democracy.

Attempts have been made to credit the pope with the subsequent fall of the Soviet empire over the next few years, but without much credibility.

No other country was as strongly Catholic as Poland, and policy experts say there are too many other variables to make such a generalization. Mikhail Gorbachev's decision not to use the Soviet army in Poland and elsewhere, experts say, probably was more the result of Russia's economic decline and the realization that in the future he might need Western help.

Pushing over the first domino

Nevertheless, John Paul is credited with helping to push over the first communist domino. Others in the Eastern bloc were not only encouraged but emboldened by his support for freedom and rights.

"There was never any doubt in the way the pope talked that he wanted to bring their system down," a Vatican official told the Chicago Tribune in 1992. "He always believed the division of Europe was a bad thing, and he was concerned that the peoples of Eastern Europe should take their rightful place in Europe."

Joaquin Navarro Valls, the pope's spokesman and one of his closest advisers, told the Tribune that the pope was certain communism would fall.

"He was convinced that it was so corrupt it could not last forever," Navarro said. "He was basing himself in philosophical and moral ground, and that was the thing the communists feared most. They knew how to deal with political pressure, but they didn't know what to do with moral pressure."