He contributed decisively to the demise of the communism, not only as political system but more importantly as a set of beliefs. He demolished the lethal illusion of communism being the irreversible force of history.

Neo-revisionists, such as Guy Verhofstadt, Belgium Prime Minster, have been trying to rewrite the history of the fall of the Soviet Union by attributing some magic dissolving properties to the Helsinki process, started in 1975.

But for an objective and attentive observer, far enough from Poland not to be lost in details but close enough to be the beginning of the tidal wave that uprooted the "democratic socialism" and rolled back what was broadly acknowledged by the ruling elites of the west between 1950s and 1980s to be the unmovable status quo of Soviet domination, was the first Pope's visit to Poland in July 1979. A year later, in the summer 1980, and by no coincidence whatsoever, Solidarity movement launched the Gdansk strike. The liberation process was far from smooth, it was marked by the declaration of the State of War in 1982 but in the end, after less than ten years, for the first time in the history of communist regimes since 1917, a ruling Communist Party agreed to free transfer of power to a non-communist opposition.

This agreement,reached during the Roundtable negotiations by the appointed of a non-Communist Mazowiecki government in September, preceeded by few months the fall of the Berlin Wall. It triggered the collapse of the entire Soviet empire by conclusively demonstrating the feasibility of a peaceful transition.

The pope did more than inspire this process, he guided it and intervened at crucial junctures. His rallying cry "do not be afraid" inspired millions and exposed the moral bankruptcy of the communist rule.

Communist party and its security apparatus knew from the beginning what a mortal danger to them the Pope represented. The 1981 the move to him was in all probability masterminded by the KGB. Nor it is an accident that the best known victim of the Polish State of War was a priest, Jerzy Popieluszko.

The reconciliation of the Catholic Church and the Judaism may be a more discrete achievement of John Paul II but it is one that touched me most profoundly and directly. This Pope not only declared anti-Semitism alien to the Catholic spirit and the Church teaching, established diplomatic relations with Israel and engaged a sustained dialogue with Jewish clergy and intellectuals. He tirelessly worked to extirpate the anti-Semitic stance deeply engrained in Polish catholic clergy's views and attitudes.

His personal intervention in the dispute between Carmelite nuns and Jewish organizations about the location of their convent in Auschwitz is just one example of his close attention to this topic. Relationships between Poles and Jews are very rich, very old, very complex and very painful.

John Paul II reminded us of the vitality of the tradition of openness and support which goes back to Kazimir the Great in XVth century and continues with Kosciusko, Mickiewicz and, closer to us, with Pilsudski and Bartosiewicz (Zegota).

Anti-Semitism is far from dead in Poland but it lost any pretense of theological justification and therefore it is at present devoid of all legitimacy.

For those of us, who were brought up in Poland after the World War and then hounded out as the Fifth Column in the 1960s, Karol Wojtyla gave us something more precious than a right of return: he restored our roots and a sense of a distinct but proud tradition.

The third contribution of John Paul is certainly the most also the longest-lasting: he forces us to fundamentally reconsider the role of the religion in our society. The perception prevailing for the the twentieth century was that of all religion as backward and peripheral. Religion was the "opium of the masses," fodder for the poor and uneducated. As societies were getting richer and more less relevant. This pope made the relationship between science and religion of his philosophical inquiries (and he was a philosophy teacher long before he became Pope). He was also very attentive to the relationship between technology, mass media and religion.

But his papacy poses an even more daunting conceptual challenge.His action shows the power of religion as a force for social change, for democracy and freedom. In Poland, left-wing intellectuals like Kuron and Michnik,brought up in a strongly atheist even anti-clerical tradition, radically revised their views in the late 1970s and decided to closely co-operate with the Church and the grass-root worker movement, inspired by the Church, in their efforts to peacefully change the system. This alliance was at the core of the Solidarity movement.

To make the conceptual challenge even more taxing, John Paul II combined his message of social change and democracy with a conservative posture on personal life - anti-abortion, anti-contraception, anti-moral relativism. Many people see this combination as a paradoxical even contradictory. Yet, for Pope, it was necessary: to effect a wide-ranging social change, one needs a strong anchor of personal morality.

John Paul II put the religion back at the center of the social and political debate. If one looks at current political events in the Middle-East (Iraq,Iran or Israel) or in the United States, they cannot be understood without due consideration to the religious ideas and institutions. It is only in the "old Europe" that our rulers continue to pretend that the religion is peripheral: there is no reference to religious tradition in the project of the European "Constitution," This may be the reason why this project generates so much popular "enthusiasm."

Charles Goldfinger

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