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By Frank Bruni
The New York Times
August 18, 2002
CRACOW, Poland, Aug. 17 - Just down the hillside from the
shrine in which Pope John Paul II celebrated Mass this
morning was the spot where he once worked in the quarry of
a chemical plant, back when this country was under Nazi
occupation.
A few hundred feet from the shrine's altar was the tiny
church where he often prayed, finding sanctuary and
strength as a life that had been filled with theater and
poetry gave way for a painful time to the tedium of manual
labor.
"Many of my personal memories are connected with this
place," the pope said at the end of the Mass, adding that
he remembered well the path he always took to that quarry
job. "Every day, I walked this road coming to work for
different shifts in wooden shoes that one used to wear
those days," he said.
It was a fleeting recollection, stinting on the hardship
and bereft of the drama of that chapter in his
extraordinary personal journey. But with those words, John
Paul made poignantly clear that his visit to Cracow - and
his official dedication of the shrine here to the memory of
a Polish nun who claimed mystical experiences of Jesus
Christ - was anything but a typical papal pilgrimage.
It was an opportunity to retrace the steps of his youth and
of his development during the four decades he spent in this
southern Polish city before becoming the first Slavic pope.
It was also a chance to reconnect with a country whose
history shaped him, and whose history he, in turn, helped
to shape.
Some of what he experienced as a young man in Cracow seemed
to inform the remarks he made during the Mass today, as he
dwelt on the persistence of violent conflict and
deprivation in the world.
"In every continent, from the depth of human suffering, a
cry for mercy seems to rise up," the pope said from the
altar of the Shrine of the Divine Mercy, a boat-shaped
basilica of marble, wood and glass with one tower that
measures precisely 77 meters, because the pope was 77 years
old when he last set foot on the shrine's location five
years ago.
"Where hatred and thirst for revenge dominate, where war
brings suffering and death to the innocent, there the grace
of mercy is needed in order to settle human minds and
hearts and to bring about peace," the ailing, 82-year-old
pope said.
His voice veered from firm to quavering; his words came out
alternately clear and fuzzy. That did not dilute Poles' joy
over his homecoming, his ninth since becoming pope in 1978.
One of the many Poles lining the route of his motorcade
lifted an enormous, red, heart-shaped sign. Outside the
basilica, thousands of people stood for hours to see his
arrival and then his departure, opening umbrellas for shade
from a punishing sun.
They knelt, too, dropping to the streets or the sidewalks
for those portions of the Mass, televised on an enormous
screen outside the basilica, that called for them to do so.
It was as if they inhabited row upon row of invisible pews.
They said they found John Paul's story and his example
profoundly inspiring. "The Holy Father gives me the impulse
to live," said Jozef Czyzowski, 74.
Boguslaw Matoga, 26, came within a few feet of the pope at
one point, and pronounced that moment "a great example of
the grace of God."
"I do not deserve it," Mr. Matoga added.
Their connection
to John Paul was more than spiritual, and more than
national pride. The pope helped change their lives by
exhorting Poland to throw off the chains of Communism.
But he did not venture far into secular matters today,
although his spokesman, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, was forced
to respond to a few scattered press reports that the
Vatican might reject a child sexual abuse policy drafted by
American bishops and cardinals. Dr. Navarro-Valls said the
Vatican had not yet made any decision.
The pope's movements today - like those scheduled for the
coming days - were more personal and emotional. The nun to
whom he dedicated the shrine today, Sister Faustina
Kowalska, has long been one of his religious inspirations.
After the Mass, he was driven by the two-story building
that had been his home when he was a teenager, in the
1930's. A 7-year-old boy who lives there now gave him
flowers.
On Sunday, he is to visit the cathedral where he was
serving as an altar boy when the Nazis invaded Poland and
where he later celebrated his first Mass. He will also go
to the cemetery where his parents are buried, and, on
Monday, will fly by helicopter over his birthplace of
Wadowice.
At night, he is sleeping in the same residence here that he
inhabited when he was the archbishop of Cracow - the post
he held when he was elected pope - and in the same bed.
When he returned to that residence early this evening and
spoke from a window to the Poles gathered in front of it,
he noted how much time had passed since his first visit
here as pope, in 1979.
"I am now 23 years older," he said.
"You're young!" they chanted. "May you live 100 years!"
The pope thanked them for coming and, referring to another
Mass he will celebrate on Sunday, joked, "Come by
tomorrow."
But he was looking backward, not forward, with his remarks
as he left the shrine this morning. "How could one
imagine," he asked, "that this man in wooden shoes will one
day be consecrating a basilica?"
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/18/international/europe/18POPE.html?ex=103067
3276&ei=1&en=12c3bbf94834fe55
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