Leadership draws respect

Press, 15 June 1979, Page 12

Leadership draws respect

By

SUE MASTERMAN and ANTON KOENE

in Czestochowa, Poland

When Poland gained a Pope, it lost a great actor. Pope John Paul knows precisely how to manipulate a crowd. With a simple gesture he can rouse them to near hysterical enthusiasm or reduce them to obedient silence. The mere demonstration of the power of his presence, before he has said a word, must be enough to make the Iron Curtain regimes tremble. In the negotiations leading to the visit to Poland, one of the fears of the Polish authorities was that the Pope would not stick to the Vatican’s tacit agreement to

avoid the delicate issue of human rights while in the country. Their fears were justified. The Pope’s campaign began in Warsaw with a general appeal for human rights. It continued in Gniezno with a direct reference to the suppression of the Church in Czechoslovakia. It went even further in Czestochowa, first with an appeal for support for Christians in Hungary, then with a reference to Berlin. Yet the Pope is not out to drive a wedge between State and Church. On the contrary, what he wants to achieve is

the fullest possible cooperation between the two. He believes that the authoritarian systems of Catholicism and Communism can not only tolerate one another, but can work along parallel lines. The Pope’s charisma has moved millions in Eastern Europe. Pilgrims have tramped hundreds of miles, many in broken shoes or barefoot, to catch a glimpse of him or just to hear his voice.

Millions more would have come, had not the authorities

refused to grant days off to three out of the four who requested them, and turned down three out of four requests for extra trains and buses.

Not only Poles have come. Pilgrims have travelled to the open-air services from Czechoslovakia, Hungary and even from the Soviet Union. A group of Lithuanian Jews came to try to get the Pope to plead their cause for the right to emigrate to Israel. The power the Pope wields is extraordinary. The East Europeans see in him a leadership which they can respect and which. they lack in their own countries. —O.F.N.S., Copyright.