St John Paul II drives cause of freedom 20 years after death, say world leaders

In the lead-up to the 20th anniversary of St John Paul II’s death on 2 April, world leaders and thinkers gathered in Poznań, Poland, to discuss his legacy.

Their recollections focused on the Polish pope as a man of steadfast faith who brought humanity greater freedom and true spiritual leadership—and whose legacy continues to inspire the drive for freedom today.

Hanna Suchocka, Polish prime minister in the early 1990s and Polish ambassador to the Holy See in the final years of John Paul’s pontificate, was one of the organisers of the conference, titled ‘John Paul II—to Read History, to Form History’. Speaking to a packed auditorium at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań on 26 March, she observed that the speakers gathered there were ‘the last generation that can point out that papal teaching is not only history’ but is rooted in reality.

John Paul, she said, ‘became a sign of hope for all of us—those who lived under the communist rule, but also those who lived on “a better side’ of the wall”.’ She pointed out that ‘we didn’t fight for a free world’ under the Iron Curtain of Cold War divisions to become closed ‘yet again’ today, polarised against each other. Now, more than ever, she said, we need to resist ‘trivialising’ John Paul’s teaching and remind the world of ‘its true meaning’.

Perhaps two of the most instantly recognised Polish leaders in recent history would be Karol Wojtyła—elected as Pope John Paul II—and Lech Wałęsa, who was also a speaker at the conference.

He came to Poland and organised us to pray, not to start a revolution. He said, ‘Change the face of the earth.’ We stopped being afraid.

Wałęsa was the leader of the first free trade union in a communist country—Solidarity—a movement that led to the first free elections in Poland in June 1989 and eventually to the fall of communism throughout Eastern Europe. In his remarks at the conference, he recalled that John Paul II was a firm believer in the cause of freedom from communism. It was the Polish pope’s faith in the peaceful revolution that kept Solidarity leaders going in times of persecution, Wałęsa said.

‘When a Pole became pope—a year after his election he came to Poland and organised us to pray, not to start a revolution. He allowed us to notice how many of us there are. At the same time, the Pope said, ‘Change the face of the earth.’ We stopped being afraid,’ Wałęsa said.

Elected pope on 16 October 1978, John Paul visited his country only seven months later, in June 1979. Eleven million people in a nation of 36 million at the time came to see the Pope in person.

‘Up to that point, I was organising the fight against communism. The Pope accelerated those processes and made them bloodless,’ said Wałęsa, who was president of Poland from 1990 to 1995.

Norman Davis, Professor of History at Oxford, Cambridge and London universities, said that Solidarity, a movement supported spiritually and organisationally by the Pope, was a ‘sensation of the times’.

John Paul ‘was a master of conveying information not through harsh words. He never condemned the communist system. He always spoke in a gentle language that was much stronger than harsh words. He didn’t offend anyone but got his point across,’ Prof Davis said.

Hans-Gert Pöttering said that when he was about to meet the Pope for the first time in 1981, John Paul was an hour late to that meeting.

‘He was on the phone with Lech Wałęsa,’ the German lawyer, historian and conservative politician said in Poznań, testifying to the Pope’s ongoing commitment to supporting the freedom movement.

‘If someone told me then, “Poland will be free,” I wouldn’t believe it,’ said Pöttering, who served as president of the European Parliament from 2007 to 2009.

For John Paul II, young people were more important than meeting with senior political leaders. He knew that it’s the youth that will decide the fate of their countries and of the world

He said that ‘we wouldn’t be in Poznań today’ if it were not for John Paul telling the Polish people, “Don’t be afraid. Change the world.”’

But this message, he said, is all the more powerful today, when ‘we are challenged by the dictator in the Kremlin,’ he said. Pöttering made the comments as he stood next to the leader of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk of Kyiv-Halych, Ukraine, representing a country that has been fighting a full-scale Russian invasion since 24 February 2022.

Following the teaching of John Paul, ‘it’s our duty to show solidarity to our friends in Ukraine so that they’re free people,’ Pöttering said.

‘We in the EU [European Union]—Poland, Germany—we are not just living in an organisation; we are living in an EU based on values of the dignity of the human being, the core of the teaching of John Paul II. The person is responsible for himself and for the other,’ the European leader said, emphasising that this task falls on today’s youth, who need to be ‘engaged’ in their societies.

Major Archbishop Shevchuk spoke next, addressing the hundreds of young people in the room, including large groups of Ukrainian students, who later stood in line to take a picture with him.

‘For John Paul II,’ the prelate said, ‘young people were more important than meeting with senior political leaders. He knew that it’s the youth that will decide the fate of their countries and of the world.’

Pointing out that young people are destined to ‘build bridges, memory and communion among nations’, Major Archbishop Shevchuk said that John Paul ‘was not afraid of youth—sometimes bishops are afraid of young people, but it was not a feature of John Paul.’

Recalling that in 2001, the Polish pontiff told Ukrainians that ‘freedom is not only a gift but a challenge’, Major Archbishop Shevchuk said that young people defending Ukraine today are putting those words into practice ‘defending freedom at the price of their own blood,’ and that the words of John Paul had become for them a ‘signpost how to build freedom’.

Major Archbishop Shevchuk thanked Wałęsa, who was on stage, for having a Ukrainian flag pinned to his shirt as a sign of solidarity since the war began.

Speaking in a pre-recorded video on the Christian view of humanity, papal biographer George Weigel pointed out that ‘we are creatures who long to form authentic community, to live in solidarity with others, creatures made for love, not merely for satisfaction,’ and therefore are thinking about freedom ‘in a distinctive way’.

As a Christian formed by John Paul, ‘you will think of freedom as tethered to truth and ordered to goodness,’ Weigel, a distinguished senior fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, told the conference.

The prominent American theologian said that John Paul’s teaching makes a clear distinction between ‘freedom of indifference’ and ‘freedom for excellence’.

John Paul II taught that freedom untethered to truth becomes self-destructive ... it is up to us to help heal the breach ... between the dictatorship of relativism and a genuine exercise of freedom in the public space.

The first, he said, ‘can be summed up by thinking about Frank Sinatra and that famous song of his, “I did it my way”. This is a freedom of self-absorption. It’s a freedom untethered to any notion of truth and goodness. It’s freedom as I want it. I want it now. I want it my way.’

‘Freedom for excellence’—a term coined by the Belgian Dominican moral theologian Fr Servais Pinckaers, who deeply influenced John Paul, Weigel said—‘means choosing the right thing, which we can know by reason, aided by supernatural faith.’

He added that John Paul taught about ‘freedom as choosing the right thing for the right reason, as a matter of moral habit, or what an older vocabulary would call virtue, habitus being translated from Latin in some respects as “virtue”.’

In his encyclical Centesimus annus, Weigel said, ‘John Paul II taught that freedom untethered to truth becomes self-destructive. Or, if you will, it cannibalises itself. And I’m afraid that’s the situation we find in much of the Western world today. If there is only your truth and my truth, and nothing that either one of us recognises as the truth, then how do we settle the dispute?’

Weigel said ‘it is up to us to help heal the breach between that freedom of indifference and freedom for excellence, between the dictatorship of relativism and a genuine exercise of freedom in the public space.’

Don’t close yourselves off, open yourselves up. And dialogue—without dialogue, and the ability to understand each other, we will perish.

Michal Senk, director of the Centre for the Thought of John Paul II, a Warsaw-based think tank, told OSV News that the conference had ‘really made a mark in our conscience’ and ‘left us with conviction that freedom is intertwined with truth and aligned with goodness, and that we need to carry that legacy of John Paul II ahead.

‘In the context of a just peace for Ukraine, this vision of freedom becomes a powerful call to act with moral clarity, pursuing not only political peace but a peace grounded in virtue and truth,’ he added.

Ambassador Suchocka, a lawyer, concluded: ‘Maybe it’s my professional twist, but John Paul II is like the constitution: he needs to be interpreted. Interpretation is important. The interpretation for today is probably different than it was 30 years ago, but the text and its message remain constant: Don’t close yourselves off, open yourselves up. And dialogue—without dialogue, and the ability to understand each other, we will perish.’