The pontificate of John Paul II was a breakthrough in the past of Poland in the 20th century. However, the way his legacy was treated is simply a large wasted opportunity. Today, the saint’s figure lost much of the authority she enjoyed 10 years ago.
The Pope for generations of Poles surviving in PRL was a unique figure. The first successor of Saint Peter, who had not been Italian since the Reformation period, a surviving symbol of the Catholic spirit in the nation and its representation abroad. Pilgrim, theologian and hope in the era of the commune. In practice, he was treated as a saint while inactive alive, and the Catholic public saw him as a large hope for spiritual revival in the country. And yet almost immediately after his death in 2005, the cult of Pope-Polak began to extinguish, until eventually, in the present times he barely choked, and mainly in people who inactive remember the period of his pontificate.
Young people already associate it practically only with ubiquitous memes. It is hard not to find a individual of school age who does not know the importance of the number 2137, or has not seen at least a fewer outstandingly fewer successful monuments of the Pope on the Internet. In a akin tone, many quotes of John Paul entered the language of common youth from the celebrated gathering with children in the programme Grains of the 1990s. That's it, actually.
But if you look deeper into the perception of the Pope by erstwhile generations, it is besides highly superficial. And likewise to younger Poles and their memes, the elders associate the saint with respective celebrated quotes, headed by “Do not be afraid” or quoted frequently in the satirical context of “this land”. Of course, without any comments or contexts. Also, of course, classical Wadowice creams, trips to the Tatras and canoeing. This was at last the most important, and much of it is limited by cognition of the saint figure.
However, it is not entirely the responsibility of these people. In a akin tone, the cult of St John Paul II lasted for years, driven by the hierarchs of the Polish church. They rightly saw the pope’s unique opportunity. The consolidation of Catholicism in Polish society after a hard period of communism needed a surviving symbol for which the pope-Poles was perfect.
This strategy was implemented in the worst possible way, by inflating the cult of John Paul II to giant, absurd sizes. It can be compared with an inflated to the limit with a balloon that was actually completely empty inside.
The balloon besides had 1 more task, or masking the slow beginning to wobble the Church. The exile of the faithful? Liberalization and widespread violation of liturgical regulations among hierarchs? expanding offensives of leftist environments and spreading anti-clericalism? The answer most frequently was an approach that could be characterized by these words: more pope!
And so among countless monuments, peans praised during long sermons and stories from the life of the Holy Father about how he fought with his colleagues in the yard, there was nowhere that most crucial essence. The pope's discipline and doctrine went somewhere in the shadows, stifled by uncriticalness and easy to assimilate anecdote.
This balloon must have cracked once. A young generation who did not experience the influence of the Pope in his life simply did not realize the phenomenon of this character. Flooded with a communicative that can be summed up according to “John Paul II was a large Pole due to the fact that he was a large Pole.”, while seeing the problems of the Church, exacerbating in the first and second decades, led to a slow misunderstanding of resentment, indifference, and yet open hostility. It yet led to an increase in attacks on the figure of the Pope as a symbol of slow, Polish Catholicism. Attacks in the form of both simple, humorous and unanswered charges.
First, the phenomenon spread among trolls from tiny websites, yet in order to origin righteous outrage among the public. From there, it spread always wider circles through leftist environments until it yet appeared in mainstream. TThere, it was a susceptible land in the form of youths, who last had more contact with religion during the First Communion period. Memes with the Pope and ironic singing “Barki” seemed to be the perfect forbidden fruit, an attack on the top holiness in the country that millions erstwhile loved. The attack of the first thing associated with the Catholic religion in Poland was an perfect expression of the youthful revolt against the old generation.
And so we reached April 2023. To the Papal Marches and loud attacks on monuments caused by the premiere of the loud book Ekke Overbeck. At that time, the main answer of the widely understood right with social activists was to pay attention to the pope's achievements in the fight against ungodly communism. However, it was hard to announcement the transgression beyond the already known strategy of "multi-co-production" of John Paul II.
Of course, it is impossible to consider this situation just in terms of the fall of the authority of the pope in our country. This must be done in the context of the ongoing dechristianization of Poland.
It should be noted, however, that it would not be so fast or so broad if the hierarchs truly tried to present the fact about St. John Paul II and respond to the current problems of the Church, alternatively of feeding the faithful with cremaries and subsequent letters of the Rector of KUL, who cites papal authority.
