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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, JUNE 27, 1983
PAGE 8
full of love: Find yourself again. Be yourself. Discover your
origins, revive your roots.
Those roots are as alive as ever in the Poland of today. In the rest of
Europe, to varying degrees, they have withered away--especially in the
Western part under the post-war impact of American-influenced mass
commercialism that the pope decries as much as communist atheism.
It appears now that it was absolutely essential, in order for the
prophesied end-time Roman system to re-emerge, that a nation like Poland
r reserve Catholic traditions so wholeheartedly, and- that� pope spring
orth on the world stage from within such� climate, attempting to spread
Catholic ideals continent-wide.
Of course, the big question that arises now is what will--or what can--the
Soviets do now, challenged as never before by this new reality on their left
flank? Moscow, which tried as hard as possible to ignore the visit of the
pope (I never heard a peep about it on Radio Moscow on my shortwave
receiver} is totally perplexed about what to expect next.
President
Andropov and the other top Politburo members must have cringed when, on the
last day of the pope's trip, Premier Jaruzelski � to the� in Krakow,
at the pope's request. That was undoubtedly viewed in the Kremlin as a
humiliating gesture.
Another of the pope's acts on the final day, hardly applauded in the
Kremlin, was his raising to a rung just below Catholic sainthood, two Poles
who fought against the Russians in a nationalistic uprising in 1863. The
two heroes, said the Pope, started "on the path to holiness" by joining tbe
revolt.
Perhaps expecting the worst, Soviet leader Yuri Andropov, two days before
the pope left for Warsaw, delivered a clear warning to the Polish
leadership--especially its more moderate leaders who pushed for the papal
visit. In a speech in Moscow, Andropov exclaimed: "When the guiding hand
of a communist party weakens, there exists the danger of slipping down to
a... reformist way of development." He added that leaders of the East Bloc
must never weaken the party's grip on power. Not long afterward, and during
the pope's trip to Poland, the first spontaneous anti-government
demonstration broke out 1n Prague, Czechoslovakia.
"Freedom for all
nations" shouted 300 youths.
Pope Fills Moral Vacuum
Soviet threats notwithstanding, Poland, it would seem now, is the nurturing
ground and the advancing wedge in Europe of� new (but old} third-force
"universa! nationalism."
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, as we have recently
reported in this section, has continued to rail against godless atheism in
the East and an "eroded humanism" in the Western world, which he says leads
to the "total emancipation from the moral heritage of Christian centuries."
The Russian philosopher adds that. "our spiritual life...is trampled by the
party mob in the East, by the commercial one in the West."
The pope, who says virtually the same thing, is now stepping boldly into
this moral vacuum. A political vacuum does not yet exist in Europe, which
is still divided between the Soviet and U.S. spheres of interest. But it
will come, and will be filled by the political authority of the prophesied
church-state power.