I'm at an international press gathering in Helsinki, where I was asked to bloviate about the Nordic model; but there are a lot of genuinely interesting and inspiring journalists here as well and I was talking to one of them at lunchtime. Piotr Stasinski is a former Solidarity activist who had been jailed in the 80s for his activities as an underground journalist and now works, overground, for Gazeta Wyborcza.
In 1979, as a 26-year-old atheist, he had been among the enormous crowd who gathered in Warsaw for the first visit home of Pope John Paul II. This was one of the most significant events in the 20th century. Without it, there would have been no Solidarity; without Solidarity, who knows how long Russian communism and its empire would have lasted?
The story I had often read about this mass demonstration was that the pope told his audience "Don't be afraid". But when Piotr told the story he added something you can't see in the history books: he imitated the voice; and what the pope said sounded entirely different then. The words were no longer an encouragement, or an uplifting sentiment. They were an order. The harsh bass voice with which he imitated the pope sounded about as cuddly as a sergeant major. It was a summons to discipline and purpose in the ranks.
I said as much, and he said that perhaps he had exaggerated, "But that's how it sounded to us. I heard that, and I was no longer alone." And all through the 80s, this atheist went on going to church, because the moment at the peace, where the congregation shook hands with one another, meant so much to him.
Of course, the Polish church now is a rather different and much more conservative body. But the wider question this story raises is whether anything other than the absolute, pre-rational (rather than irrational) certainty of the Polish church, and Pope John Paul II in particular, could possibly have first resisted and finally overthrown the communist state.
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