The 30th Warsaw Diocese Students’ Pilgrimage to the site of Jasna Gora in the southern city of Czestochowa leaves Poland’s capital this morning, although continuing protests have meant the Smolensk memorial cross will remain outside the Presidential Palace.

During preparations for the 250-kilometre journey, the Archbishop of Warsaw, Kazimierz Nycz said Mass for the pilgrims, saying in his homily that “the cross cannot be used to divide people.”

Plans to take the Smolensk memorial cross to Czestochowa were thwarted after dramatic scenes witnessed on Tuesday saw protestors defending the relocation of the cross to the academic church of St. Anne’s, from where the cross was to travel with pilgrims today.

“The pilgrims will take the [existing] cross [from St. Anne’s] that is [usually] taken by pilgrims to Jasna Gora,” Fr. Jacek Siekierski told local media in Warsaw.

Scouting organisations, which erected the cross shortly after the Smolensk catastrophe on 10 April, when President Lech Kaczynski and 95 others died, regret that the cross from outside the Presidential Palace will not make the journey to Poland’s most holy shrine.

“We think that it would be a good idea for the [Smolensk] cross to travel across the whole country,” Rafal Bednarczyk, a board member of the Polish Scouting Association has said.

While the pilgrimage leaves Warsaw, a crowd of a few dozen people are still surrounding the Smolensk cross, defiant in their stance of the cross’s removal.

Some people in favour of the cross’s relocation were also present, with one individual holding up a banner proclaiming: “The use of the cross for political war is the work of the Devil! Jaroslaw Kaczynski, remember that!”

The first pilgrimage from Warsaw to the holy site of Jasna Gora in Czestochowa took place in 1711 by the Piecoranski Brotherhood as thanksgiving for the abating of a typhus epidemic which had ravaged the city since 1707. (jb)

Sources: PAP/TVN24

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