Pope John Paul II - Reuters article -- Polish American Club of Greater Sacramento Forum

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Date Posted: 13:46:00 04/02/05 Sat
Author: No name
Subject: Pope John Paul II - Reuters article

Poles Battle to Come to Terms That Pope Is Dying
Sat Apr 2, 1:08 PM ET
Reuters
By Sabina Zawadzki
WADOWICE, Poland (Reuters) - Poles struggled on Saturday to come to terms with the fact that Pope John Paul -- a national hero, spiritual mentor and father figure -- was dying.
There has never been such a Pole as him and there never will be. I am counting on a miracle," Stanislaw Witek, a 56-year-old electrician in the Pope's home town of Wadowice, said before bursting into tears.

"It's not the time for us, for Poland, for him to pass away," Witek said outside the church where Karol Wojtyla was an altar boy before going on to head the Roman Catholic Church and its 1.1 billion faithful round the world.

A solemn crowd packed the town's basilica to pray for the Pontiff, who is slipping in and out of consciousness at the Vatican after a sharp deterioration in his health this week.

The 84-year-old Pope is revered in Poland as the person who inspired a peaceful revolution which ended communism and gave the central European state of 38 million, dominated by Moscow for half a century, unprecedented international status.

The mayors of Warsaw, Krakow and several other major cities asked for all cultural and entertainment events to be canceled out of respect for the Pope's grave condition.

For most Poles, the Pope has also been the ultimate moral authority during the past 16 years of tough reforms and often painful transformation from communism into a Western democracy, even though many do not agree with his stance on birth control.

In recent years he urged skeptical Poles not to shun Europe. His voice helped silence the radical Catholic right's opposition to Poland's European Union entry just days before the 2003 referendum on whether to join the bloc. In central Warsaw, several thousand watched a Vatican news briefing beamed live on a screen outside St. Anne's church, lighting candles on nearby sidewalks.

"Such situations make us realize what is important in life," said Urszula Zawrodzka, 35, who came with her seven-year-old son to a special mass dedicated to the Pontiff.

"Usually we are so involved in our daily rat race that we loose sight of what really matters: feelings, closeness and the sense of our mortality," she said.

In Krakow, where Wojtyla was ordained and still has many friends, people were clinging to slim hopes.

"There is hope, but it is fading away in us and in the Holy Father," said Jozefa Hennelowa, a prominent Catholic writer and friend of the Pope.

(With reporting by Rob Strybel and Natalia Reiter in Warsaw and Wojciech Zurawski in Krakow)

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