Poles Hear Pope Hail ‘New Voice’ of Freedom

Pope John Paul II on Saturday hailed the “new voice” of freedom in post-Communist Poland but urged his increasingly skeptical countrymen to stick to their Roman Catholic traditions.

Smaller-than-expected crowds greeted John Paul as he opened his 12-city, nine-day pilgrimage here on the Baltic coast, in sharp contrast to the huge turnouts of his three previous trips to his homeland.

Organizers prepared for as many as half a million people at an afternoon open-air Mass that the Pope conducted from a wooden altar set in a field amid apartment blocks and construction cranes. But crowd estimates ranged between 100,000 and 200,000.

President Lech Walesa, the former Solidarity chief, and a crowd of several hundred stood at the airport in a chilly drizzle to welcome John Paul and pay tribute to his role in ending four decades of Communist rule.

“A free homeland is the fruit of the seed that you have sown. Without your work and prayer to ‘renew the face of this Earth,’ there would have been no Polish August and no victory of freedom,” Walesa said.

The Pope pledged that Poland will not “relinquish those values which constitute our national identity, our affection for the Christian faith, for the Catholic tradition.”

His white hair blowing in a stiff wind from the nearby Baltic Sea, the pontiff said the “new voice” he is now hearing “bears witness to the republic of a sovereign nation and society.”

“We waited so many years for the time when this voice could sound out in its full truth, so that it might become the historical fulfillment of what had cost so many lives and so much effort.”

But John Paul gently reminded his fellow Poles that the history of the Polish nation is linked to the 1,000-year-long presence of the church. He further stressed the country’s Catholic roots in his homily at the afternoon Mass in this industrial city of 100,000.

The welcome for the Pope appeared subdued, and not everybody headed to Mass. Some said they did not attend because of bad weather or other commitments.