Lift Up Your Hearts

What Pope John Paul II taught the world.

By Newt Gingrich and Callista Gingrich
http://www.nationalreview.com/
April 6, 2010 4:00 A.M.

Following Pope John Paul II’s death five years ago, the world prayerfully reflected on a life that had transformed the lives of millions of people worldwide.

Today, the world continues to reflect on the life of Pope John Paul II because his teaching and his actions point the way forward to building a future worthy of man.

How best to serve our fellow man? This is the timeless challenge of both political and religious leaders, but it was Pope John Paul II who most resolutely taught the world, religious and non-religious alike, that a future worthy of man must be rooted in recognition of the incomparable dignity of the human person and a commitment on behalf of the human person.

From his election in October 1978, Pope John Paul II constantly preached that it was only through an understanding of Jesus Christ that man could fully understand his great dignity — the dignity of the human person — and therefore no country anywhere in the world had a right to separate man from the pursuit of knowing and loving God.

This demand for freedom of faith had powerful social and political implications.

When the Pope preached this message in June 1979 in Warsaw’s Victory Square, on an altar with the backdrop of a 50-foot cross, 1 million of his fellow Poles responded in affirmation with 14 minutes of applause, interrupted by singing in one voice: “Christus Vincit, Christus Regnat, Christus Imperat” (“Christ Conquers, Christ Reigns, Christ Governs”). In an officially atheistic country, the Polish people dramatically bore witness that God, not the state, was sovereign.

Later in the same homily, when the Pope recalled the great sacrifices made by the Poles during the Warsaw Uprising, the people responded by singing an old Polish song, “We Want God.”

It became evident to us in working on our new documentary film about the Pope’s 1979 pilgrimage to Poland — Nine Days that Changed the World — that the Pope’s bedrock insistence on the freedom to pursue God, the freedom to “want God,” proved too much for the Communist system to bear.

Ten years later, the system slowly collapsed. It started on June 4, 1989, with the Polish elections that resulted in a Solidarity-led government. Then, on Nov. 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. Finally, on Dec. 25, 1991, the Communist hammer-and-sickle flag was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time, signaling the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

But the history of the 1980s shows that the political freedom won by the Polish people was not due merely to the Poles’ expanded freedom to pursue God. No, it was also due to the Poles’ actual pursuit of God.

Freedom for faith was a necessary precondition, but the Polish people ultimately achieved freedom through faith, inspired by the courageous witness of Pope John Paul II and a countless number of his fellow Poles.

Speaking before the United Nations General Assembly on Oct. 5, 1995, Pope John Paul II reflected on what contributed to the revolutions of 1989:

A decisive factor in the success of those non-violent revolutions was the experience of social solidarity: In the face of regimes backed by the power of propaganda and terror, that solidarity was the moral core of the “power of the powerless,” a beacon of hope and an enduring reminder that it is possible for man’s historical journey to follow a path which is true to the finest aspirations of the human spirit.

This message of solidarity was given powerful voice by Pope John Paul II during his first pilgrimage to Poland in June 1979. In Victory Square, he said the Polish nation could not understand itself if it rejected its 1,000-year community rooted in Christ. He prayed that Christ would not cease to be an open book for the future life of Poland.

This prayer did not go unanswered, as Poland indeed became, in the words of the Pope, “the land of a particularly responsible witness” — with global repercussions.

Millions of Poles turned out to see the Pope in person during the 1979 pilgrimage and subsequent visits. Young people joined burgeoning Christian renewal movements like Oasis, which offered a needed island of resistance — a foundation of Christian community — against the desert of the Communist state. One by one, hearts were transformed. Millions of Poles made individual decisions that they would no longer make compromises with the daily lies of life under Communism. Oasis founder Father Franciszek Blachnicki urged Poles to overcome their fears and challenge the Communist regime by “living in the truth.”

A critical experience of solidarity occurred during the August 1980 strikes in Gdansk. At a very intense moment in the early days of the strike, workers arranged for a Mass to be said within the shipyard for the very first time. Zenon Kwoka recalled that day: “Permission for Mass in shipyard was breakthrough in my opinion. Something incredible happened, because all of the city arrived for that Mass and stood at the closed gate. The front of altar was directed to the shipyard and at its back was the shipyard’s main gate. Delegates and shipyard workers stood at one side, at the other side were people of Gdansk. All of the people sang religious songs and there was a kind of duet. There was an incredible feeling. I never experienced anything like that before. During Mass, that stress disappeared and many workers around me cried. During Mass, people got rid of fear.”

For some, the call to live a particularly responsible witness led to martyrdom. Father Jerzy Popieluszko was a Solidarity chaplain murdered by Polish Communist secret-service officers in October 1984 because he dared to remind his fellow Poles that their first duty is to God and not to the state. His challenge to Communist authority was too much for a totalitarian system that could not tolerate dissent.

In June 2009, 30 years after Pope John Paul II’s first pilgrimage to Poland, the mayor of Warsaw, Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz — in the presence of the president of Poland, a company of soldiers, the archbishop of Warsaw, and thousands assembled — dedicated a 30-foot cross in the same square in commemoration of the Pope’s Mass there in 1979. The mayor described the impact of Pope John Paul II’s prayer for the renewal of Poland in this way:

The message of John Paul II met with our highest national and social aspirations. It poured hope into our hearts. Then, for the first time in decades, we saw how many of us are here. We felt what it meant to be together, free, and in community. Soon, August 1980 arrived and Solidarity was established. Then the tragedy [martial law] of December 1981, and thanks to those who went through that and did not reject hope, June 1989 arrived. . . . From this day forth in Warsaw, in the heart of Poland, opposite of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, a symbol of bravery of Poles, there will be a Cross standing which is a symbol of faith, perseverance, and hope. . . . And living here and now we are taking responsibility not only for a free Poland, but also for the solidarity of all of Europe. This cross is a symbol that what is impossible becomes possible.

Just after the mayor unveiled the memorial cross, a recorded message of Pope John Paul II played: “Today, I look at the whole of Poland, from the Tatra Mountains to the Baltic Sea, and this cross says to whole of Poland, sursum corda, lift up your hearts.”

The cross, as carried by Pope John Paul II, not only lifted the hearts of the Poles, it also lifted the hearts of millions around the world. Italian senator and philosopher Marcello Pera says that it is important to remember not only John Paul’s II contributions to the political struggle against Communism, but also the way he went about it: “Against Communism he proposed the cross. And it was the cross as displayed by John Paul II that, according to me, was the decisive factor in the collapse of Communism in Poland and then elsewhere.”

In the 1980s, the world learned from John Paul II and the Polish people that tyrants and dictators are no match when millions of hearts are lifted high. This Polish experience of freedom through faith serves as a timeless warning to governments anywhere that threaten religious freedom, including those in democratic societies.

— Former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Newt Gingrich and his wife, Callista, are hosts and executive producers of the documentary film Nine Days that Changed the World, which will premiere in the United States on April 9 and will be screened in Poland and Italy in June. This article first appeared in Wprost, a Polish weekly magazine.