Homily at Victory Square, Warsaw
The homily John Paul II preached at Mass in Victory Square in Warsaw on 2 June 1979, the first stop of his first journey to Poland as pope. It argues that Christ cannot be kept out of human history and ends with a prayer for the renewal of the land.
The Mass was celebrated on the eve of Pentecost. In section 1 the pope says that Paul VI had wished to come to Poland for the millennium of its baptism and had been unable to, and that his own pilgrimage marks the ninth centenary of the death of St Stanislaus. Section 3 argues that man cannot be fully understood without Christ, that Christ cannot be kept out of the history of man in any part of the globe, and that the history of Poland cannot be understood without him. It recalls the Warsaw rising of 1944. Section 4, spoken before the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, remembers the dead of Poland’s wars and of the Warsaw ghetto and ends with the prayer that the Spirit descend and renew the face of the earth and of that land.
The homily does not mention communism, Marxism, the government or the party. See John Paul II and the Churches under Communism.
Cited in
- 1978 to 1979, firm date