Word: bishops
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...warriors, who even found Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, the venerable Primate of Poland, too soft on Communism. Their theory was that concessions for the Polish church could best be won by high-level negotiations between the Vatican and Warsaw. Now, just as he had done when he was a Polish bishop himself, John Paul was announcing that the Polish church leaders ought to do the bargaining directly...
...Mass in honor of St. Stanislaw, their mutual predecessor 900 years ago in the see of Cracow. Stanislaw, according to legend, was felled by King Boleslaw the Bold because he dared to excommunicate the cruel and licentious Polish monarch for mistreating his subjects. Canonized in 1253, the martyred bishop is interpreted by the church as a defender of human rights against tyranny...
Even anticlerical observers in Rome admit, rather glumly, that John Paul has galvanized Italian Catholics, especially the young. Says Cesare Pagani, Bishop of Città di Castello: "The arrival of Pope Wojtyla has turned our youth upside down. They are taking over the leadership of the young again to advance not only the ecclesiastical but the civil life of our country...
During the building battle, Bishop Ignacy Tokarczuk of Przemysl called on the people to "break the line of fear." No Catholic in his diocese, he decided, should have to walk more than 2½ miles to church. Starting in the mid-1960s, his parishioners would secretly assemble small, prefab churches, then put them together overnight without permission. In the morning the authorities would be presented with an act of faith accompli. A day came when the bishop was led off to be fined at the prosecutor's office for his actions, but such a noisy phalanx of Catholic housewives...
...Communists were so nervous about the politics of an impending visit that they ham-handedly censored John Paul's first message to his former diocese in Cracow because he praised St. Stanislaw, an 11th century bishop of that city, by describing him as a martyr who "did not hesitate to confront the ruler when defense of the moral order called for it." The Polish government also balked at the Pope's expressed interest in returning home during last month's 900th anniversary celebration of the martyrdom...