Corpus Christi: Krakow Today

Cardinal Dziwisz Venerates the Altar at the beginning of Mass
Participants and Onlookers

One of the Stational Altars

Cardinal Macharski

Cardinal Dziwisz Gives the Final Blessing

The tradition of the Corpus Christi procession in Krakow continues in this day, pretty much as it has for centuries. The celebration begins with a Mass celebrated by the Archibishop of Krakow outside of the Cathedral Basilica of Sts. Wenceslaus and Stanislaus, on Wawel Hill, and then processes down the hill to four stational altars. The altars are located at the corners fo the main market square, and at each altar, one of the many auxiliary bishops of Krakow preaches and gives a reflection.

This year, the theme was the 30th anniversary of the visit of John Paul II to Poland in 1979, which as Cardinal Dziwisz recently pointed out, was the beginning of the Fall of the Berlin Wall. The texts used at the altars were taken from the words of John Paul II to the Poles of thirty years ago, and are certainly as applicable today, as they were then. John Paul II emphasized the relationship between Christ and the history of Poland. Indeed, the very first words of his first encyclical were "Jesus Christ, the Redeemer of Man, is the center of the universe and of history."

With this message, John Paul II arrived in Poland, to the trembling of the communist authorities, and encouraged the people by preaching the truth about the course of human events and of the history of Poland: from its inception, Poland began as a Christian nation with the baptism of Mieszko I, a pagan tribal chief, in 966. From that day, Christianity has survived, flowered, and blossomed in Poland, and has played a role in the very heart and soul of Poland for a longer time than the ancient Orthodoxy of Kievan Rus or Muscovy. With that momentous decision in the backwoods of north central Europe in 966, a Christian nation was born and the blood of the martyrs began to flow through the lifeblood of Poland. This is the truth that the Marxists sought to deny. They sought to understand man through materialistic and economic worldviews, and Poland through the eyes of an anti-religious dialectic. What they failed to account for is the instrinsic connection between the Christian faith of the Poles and the transcendence and dignity of the human person, the capability of the human spirit, and in this case, the Polish spirit, to only understand itself fully through reference to the truth about the good.

This is the message that John Paul II came to preach, and only his words can express it most perfectly:

" It is right to understand the history of the nation through man, each human being of this nation. At the same time man cannot be understood apart from this community that is constituted by the nation. Of course it is not the only community, but it is a special community, perhaps that most intimately linked with the family, the most important for the spiritual history of man. It is therefore impossible without Christ to understand the history of the Polish nation—this great thousand-year-old community—that is so profoundly decisive for me and each one of us. If we reject this key to understanding our nation, we lay ourselves open to a substantial misunderstanding. We no longer understand ourselves. It is impossible without Christ to understand this nation with its past so full of splendour and also of terrible difficulties. It is impossible to understand this city, Warsaw, the capital of Poland, that undertook in 1944 an unequal battle against the aggressor, a battle in which it was abandoned by the allied powers, a battle in which it was buried under its own ruins—if it is not remembered that under those same ruins there was also the statue of Christ the Saviour with his cross that is in front of the church at Krakowskie Przedmiescie. It is impossible to understand the history of Poland from Stanislaus in Skalka to Maximilian Kolbe at Oswiecim unless we apply to them that same single fundamental criterion that is called Jesus Christ.
The Millennium of the Baptism of Poland, of which Saint Stanislaus is the first mature fruit—the millennium of Christ in our yesterday, and today—is the chief reason for my pilgrimage, for my prayer of thanksgiving together with all of you, dear fellow-countrymen, to whom Christ does not cease to teach the great cause of man; together with you, for whom Jesus Christ does not cease to be an ever open book on man, his dignity and his rights and also a book of knowledge on the dignity and rights of the nation.
Today, here in Victory Square, in the capital of Poland, I am asking with all of you, through the great Eucharistic prayer, that Christ will not cease to be for us an open book of life for the future, for our Polish future.

We are before the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. In the ancient and contemporary history of Poland this tomb has a special basis, a special reason for its existence. In how many places in our native land has that soldier fallen! In how many places in Europe and the world has he cried with his death that there can be no just Europe without the independence of Poland marked on its map! On how many battlefields has that solider given witness to the rights of man, indelibly inscribed in the inviolable rights of the people, by falling for "our free­dom and yours"!
"Where are their tombs, O Po-land? Where are they not! You know better than anyone—and God knows it in heaven" (A. Oppman, Pacierz za zmarlych).
The history of the motherland written through the tomb of an Unknown Soldier!
I wish to kneel before this tomb to venerate every seed that falls into the earth and dies and thus bears fruit. It may be the seed of the blood of a soldier shed on the battlefield, or the sacrifice of martyrdom in concentration camps or in prisons. It may be the seed of hard daily toil, with the sweat of one's brow, in the fields, the workshop, the mine, the foundries and the factories. It may be the seed of the love of parents who do not refuse to give life to a new human being and undertake the whole of the task of bringing him up. It may be the seed of creative work in the universities, the higher institutes, the libraries and the places where the national culture is built. It may be the seed of prayer, of service of the sick, the suffering, the abandoned—"all that of which Poland is made".
All that in the hands of the Mother of God—at the foot of the cross on Calvary and in the Upper Room of Pentecost!
All that—the history of the motherland shaped for a thousand years by the succession of the generations (among them the present generation and the coming generation) and by each son and daughter of the motherland, even if they are anonymous and unknown like the Soldier before whose tomb we are now.
All that—including the history of the peoples that have lived with us and among us, such as those who died in their hundreds of thousands within the walls of the Warsaw ghetto.
All that I embrace in thought and in my heart during this Eucharist and I include it in this unique most holy Sacrifice of Christ, on Victory Square.
And I cry—I who am a Son of the land of Poland and who am also Pope John Paul II—I cry from all the depths of this Millennium, I cry on the vigil of Pentecost:
Let your Spirit descend.

Let your Spirit descend.

and renew the face of the earth, the face of this land.
Amen.

With the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on that fateful day on Victory Square in Warsaw, the victory of truth over falsehood, of freedom over slavery, of transcendence over conformism began, and the history of the world changed forever.