Nickarama
Weasel Zippers
4/26/2014
If you weren’t of age during the 80s to understand the profound effect that John Paul II had on the world, this piece might give you a small taste of it. Walesa reminds us that change is not just about military might or political power, but about the power of the spirit.
…”The third millennium that is now underway actually doesn’t have a structure or foundations,” he said. “There’s a great debate over whether this millennium will be based on freedoms only, or on values.”
But John Paul II, he said, “is a kind of lantern showing to people that you have to build on values. From this point of view, he’s so needed today, so that those of a left-wing orientation don’t establish it their way.”…
…In an after-dinner speech, the former Polish shipyard worker who led the Solidarity movement in the 1970s and 1980s, said Poles felt powerless to effectively oppose Soviet communism. But after John Paul II visited the country in 1979, they realized that support for the communists was much less than they’d imagined.
“Had it not been the Holy Father, we would never have integrated, we would never have been able to realize we were so many,” he said. “And once we suddenly saw how many we were, that really gave us confidence.”…
…Asked if the same principles John Paul used against communism could be just as successfully applied in combatting the culture of death, Walesa said “very much so.”
“Nobody ever thought we could stop the communists and bring communism down, whereas thanks to values it was brought down,” he said.
“We didn’t believe victory was possible because what we were calculating were the troops, the tanks, the silos,” he said. “When calculating like this, we underestimated the value of God and the Spirit.
When the world learns how that battle was really won, he said, “we will begin establishing the third millennium basing ourselves on values.”
He called on the United States, as the world superpower, to take the lead in this task…
Read the entire article at Weasel Zippers.
Related: From 2011, Ronald Reagan statue unveiled in Warsaw
A statue to former US president Ronald Reagan, who is highly respected in Poland for having helped hasten the fall of the Iron Curtain, was unveiled by Communist-era opposition icon Lech Walesa in Warsaw yesterday.
