Thirty years ago, on October 16, 1978, a Polish cardinal was elected to the highest office in the Catholic Church. How do Poles remember the historic day? How did the Polish pontificate change the face of Poland?

Michal Kubicki reports

Thirty years ago today thousands of Polish people poured  into the streets. Many of them wept and kissed one another.

‘I was playing football outside my house here in Warsaw and I remember people started to shout that we have a Polish Pope from the open windows. It was a hot day and all the windows were open so I remember the day very well.’

Several months after his election, Pope John Paul II made his first pilgrimage to Poland. Under a huge wooden cross in the centre of Warsaw, he was speaking to half a million people – about their motherland and the blood spilled for liberty in every generation. It was in that homily that he called on the Holy Spirit to renew the face of Poland.  Free-lance journalist Mariusz Ziomecki.

‘At first it was pride. Then there was the first pilgrimage to Poland we saw another country, it so profoundly changed our entire outlook. This is when the freedom in Poland really started. It’s very rare that you can pinpoint the very beginning of a historical breakthrough and it was then.’

Łukasz Warzecha of the daily Fakt was three years old in 1978.

 ‘I can hardly remember the Pope’s first  trip to Poland. When he was elected I was only three years old but I can remember the atmosphere of the next trip and around all his important speeches. I think when people say that John Paul II  was a kind of Polish king, they are right, not in legal  terms of course but in spiritual terms.’

Over a year after the Pope’s first visit to Poland, the Solidarity movement was born. In 1989, after many setbacks which included martial law, the Soviet domination ended and Poland entered the path of democracy. The Pope’s role in the collapse of communism cannot be overestimated. According to journalist Bartosz Weglarczyk, the Poles were lucky to have a man in the Vatican at that particular time in history.

‘If the Polish Pope came back in the 1950s or 1960s, even if it was Karol Wojtyla, he would not have made this kind of impact on Poland and Europe. Because he came in 1978 and stayed during the whole 1980, the glasnost in the Soviet Union, he had enough time and chance to influence events in Poland, Europe and the world. Therefore we are extremely lucky to have the Polish Pope exactly at the time we had him.’

Thirty years on, an inevitable question is about the legacy of the pontificate of John Paul II.

For most Poles, he seems to be a symbolic figure, but not necessarily a man whose teaching is taken very seriously. But at the same time there is a strong conviction that the legacy of John Paul II is a very important part of the nation’s heritage.

‘The Pope is the standard to which things are compared. I’m sure that when history produces the next challenge or difficult situation for Poland we will reach to this legacy and it will be incredibly helpful. So in normal times it may seem superficial and just decorative, like the Pope’s pictures on the walls, but as historical and emotional resource the Pope is incredibly strong,’ said Mariusz Ziomecki.

All analysts of the pontificate of John Paul II agree that he was able to establish a special rapport with young people. He brought millions of them together for the World Youth Day celebrations. After his death three years ago, some sociologists began to speak of the J P II Generation.

Is there such a generation in present-day Poland? Polish Member of the European Parliament Konrad Szymanski. 

‘You can seen the JP II Generation is some places like the Warsaw masses for the Pope, like Lednica near Poznań, where you can find many professionally trained persons who are very devoted to the Catholic heritage and are looking for new clothes for this message. So I think this is the spirit of the generation, they would like to influence the reality, this is something new.’

But there are also those who claim that the notion – the J P II generation – can be applied rather to those who were in their early twenties or thirties when the Polish Pope was elected and whose entire lives therefore were shaped by his 27 year-long pontificate.