Pope Urges Poles to Help Revive Europe’s Churches

c. 2006 Religion News Service WARSAW _ Pope Benedict XVI celebrated Mass before a technicolor sea of umbrellas on Friday (May 26), urging Poles to uphold church teaching and resist a perceived wave of moral indifference and secularism washing across Europe. An estimated 270,000 Poles joined Benedict under steady rainfall in Pilsudski Square _ the […]

c. 2006 Religion News Service

WARSAW _ Pope Benedict XVI celebrated Mass before a technicolor sea of umbrellas on Friday (May 26), urging Poles to uphold church teaching and resist a perceived wave of moral indifference and secularism washing across Europe.

An estimated 270,000 Poles joined Benedict under steady rainfall in Pilsudski Square _ the same spot where the late John Paul II launched his historic challenge to Soviet communism in 1979. On that occasion more than 1 million Poles packed the square and its adjoining streets to hear the Polish-born pontiff.


Standing at the foot of a towering metallic cross, Benedict challenged Poles to bear the torch of John Paul’s legacy of conservative values and absolute truths with the same intensity that allowed them to turn the tide of the Cold War.

“We must not yield to the temptation of relativism or of a subjectivist and selective interpretation of sacred Scripture,” the pope said, speaking in Italian.

Quoting John Paul’s address to Poles in 1979, Benedict added, “Poland has become nowadays the land of a particularly responsible witness.”

The comments came during the first public Mass of Benedict’s four-day trip, which retraces the life of John Paul. Later in the day Benedict was to travel to a Catholic shrine at Czestochowa and to Krakow, the city where John Paul served as archbishop until his 1978 election as pope. On Saturday, Benedict will also visit John Paul’s birthplace in Wadowice.

Despite the sentimental overtones of his tour, Benedict is pushing Poland’s devoutly Roman Catholic population to enlist in his fight to re-Christianize Europe. Poland joined the European Union in 2004, making it one of the nation bloc’s most populous countries and largest economies.

Geographically, Poland stands between Eastern Europe, where Christian identity remains strong, and Western Europe, where the church’s influence has weakened in recent decades.

In early July Benedict will travel to Spain, where an erosion in church influence is well under way despite the country’s predominantly Catholic population and heritage. In Italy, another Catholic stronghold, members of the newly elected center-left government are challenging laws that ban civil unions and the RU-486 abortion pill _ two issues that the Vatican fiercely opposes.


“As in past centuries, so also today there are people or groups who obscure this centuries-old tradition,” Benedict said in his Friday homily. “They try to give the impression that everything is relative” to historical and political context, the pope said.

Benedict invoked his trip’s official motto, “Stand firm in your faith,” and urged Poles to “cultivate this rich heritage of faith” and “hand it down to your children.”

Greg Stramka, a 63-year-old engineer from Warsaw who attended the Mass and later followed Benedict to Krakow, said he had faith in his fellow Poles to take up the pope’s call.

“The Polish people do not go anywhere the wind blows,” Stramka said. “We can’t live without religion, especially Catholic religion.”

The pope will close out his tour of Poland on Sunday with a visit to the Auschwitz death camp _ a particularly sensitive site for a man forced to enroll in the Hitler Youth movement as a teenager.

KRE/JL END MEICHTRY

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