All Intensive Purposes

Tired of all the men bloviating about John Paul II? Anne Applebaum writes about the Pope's part in the downfall of Communism.

When I lived in Poland in the late 1980s, I was told that if I wanted to know what was going on, I'd have to go every week to a particular Warsaw church and pick up a copy of the city's weekly underground newspaper. Equally, if I wanted to see an exhibition of paintings that were not the work of the regime's artists, or a play that was not approved by the regime's censors, I could go to an exhibition or a performance in a church basement. The priests didn't write the newspapers, or paint the paintings, or act in the plays -- none of which were necessarily religious -- but they made their space and resources available for the people who did. And in helping to create what we now call "civil society," these priests were following the example of the pope who, as a young man in Nazi-occupied Poland, secretly studied for the priesthood and also founded an underground theater.

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[T]his pope also made an impact thanks to his unusual ability -- derived from charisma and celebrity as well as faith -- to get people out on the streets. As Natan Sharansky and others have written, communist regimes achieved their greatest successes when they were able to atomize people, to keep them apart and keep them afraid. But when the pope first visited Poland in 1979, he was greeted not by a handful of little old ladies, as the country's leaders predicted, but by millions of people of all ages. My husband, 16 years old at the time, remembers climbing a tree on the outskirts of an airfield near Gniezno where the pope was saying Mass and seeing an endless crowd, "three kilometers in every direction." The regime -- its leaders, its police -- were nowhere visible: "There were so many of us, and so few of them." That was also the trip in which the pope kept repeating, "Don't be afraid."