John Paul II and "taking down" the Soviet Union

[Amos]

I keep reading everywhere that John Paul took down the Soviet Union and saved the west from communism – but I don't really understand why or where this came from.

I used to be knee-deep in Post-conciliar Catholicism before JPII died. Everyone telling me Vatican II was the greatest thing in the history of infinity and thinking John Paul II was some kind of near-divine being who could do no wrong. But during those years, I never heard about JPII destroying communism. Even after he died, I never heard of anything about him "taking down" or even helping to take down the Soviet Union. Only years and years later did I ever hear about this. 

Is this just a bunch of hype someone made up for his canonization or something? I searched around and the only thing I could find is people talking about how he gave some speeches in Poland and years later that made the Soviet Union fall - seems like a very far stretch.

[mikemac]

http://www.disappearingman.com/berlin-wall/poland-1979-want-god-want-god/

Poland, 1979: We Want God! We Want God!

In 1979, schoolteachers in Poland were told to inform their students that the man about to visit their country "is our enemy." Teachers were urged to explain to their classes that this man's sense of humor and great communication skills made him "dangerous, because he charms everyone."

Who was this dangerous enemy?

It was Pope John Paul II, and the warnings were sent out to schools in Poland because in 1979 the communists were still in control. John Paul II was going to visit his home country for the first time since becoming Pope, and the communists allowed it because they thought he would "behave himself." They gambled that he would not say anything too controversial in this officially atheist country.

Poland might have been officially atheist at that time, but it was unofficially a very religious country with a large Catholic population.

Suffice it to say, Pope John Paul II, one of the most popular Popes in history, did not behave himself. The moment he arrived in Poland and kissed the ground of the land where he grew up, the bells of churches throughout the country began to ring. The communists must have taken this as the first sign that the Pope's visit was not going to be what they planned.

Authorities thought they could discourage people from coming out to see him, but they were still afraid that tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands might try to hear him.

Again, they were wrong. More than a million Polish people came out.

Pope John Paul II said to the throngs, "Christ cannot be kept out of the history of man in any part of the globe, at any longitude or latitude of geography. The exclusion of Christ from the history of man is an act against man... the history of each person unfolds in Jesus Christ."

In response to the Pope, the massive crowd began to chant: "We want God! We want God! We want God!"

By this time, the communist leaders must have fully realized that they had made a strategic mistake in allowing Pope John Paul II to visit Poland, wrote columnist Peggy Noonan in a 2005 retrospective in The Wall Street Journal. "Perhaps as John Paul spoke they heard the sound careen off the hard buildings that ringed the square," she said. "Perhaps the echo sounded like a wall falling."

Many people pinpoint the fall of the Soviet Union's communist empire to November 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. But Noonan said, "I know the moment Soviet communism began its fall." She said it was in June of 1979 in Poland and "it happened in public. Anyone could see it. It was one of the great spiritual moments of the 20th century, maybe the greatest."

Even more remarkable than the Pope's speech, Noonan said, was the Mass he said in Blonie Field a week later. The Polish communist officials would not allow the service to be advertised, but word spread, person to person. Two to three million people came to that Mass.

Over the next 10 years, beginning in Poland with the Solidarity movement, the cracks began to form in the communist empire, until that crack became an earthquake, bringing down the Berlin Wall in 1989.

When President Trump went to Poland last year, he referred to this historic moment when a million voices shouted, "We want God" in the face of a totalitarian government. "Totalitarian" means total control, but don't be fooled. This moment in history showed that the Polish communists did not have total control.

As John Paul II said during his visit, "Let your Spirit descend. Let your Spirit descend. And renew the face of the earth, the face of this land."

[Amos]

Yes, that's exactly the kind of stuff I read. There's no substance to it and proves nothing, it's very bizarre.

[Vincentus Ioannes]

Communism doesn't work, so the edifice was going to come down eventually.  And it's not as if the Soviet Union in the late '70s was a flowering utopia.  They were already in decline before John Paul II came on the scene in '78.  Look up the Brezhnev era.  It's literally called the time of stagnation.

The Soviets were also spending a ton of money on the military in the arms race with America, which further sapped their limited resources.

[Innocent Smith]

Communism doesn't work, so the edifice was going to come down eventually.  And it's not as if the Soviet Union in the late '70s was a flowering utopia.  They were already in decline before John Paul II came on the scene in '78.  Look up the Brezhnev era.  It's literally called the time of stagnation.

The Soviets were also spending a ton of money on the military in the arms race with America, which further sapped their limited resources.

True.  But we in the U.S. also had something called 'Stagflation' at the exact same time.  As a matter of fact, during this time the G-7 started making their moves that sent textile mills from New England and West Germany to places like India and Pakistan.  Capitalism was also in decline simultaneously.  And that should not surprise anyone as the two systems always did work hand in glove.  The auto industry in the U.S. was also sacrificed to Japan during the era of Stagflation.  It used to be a real head scratcher to me when they handed over our auto industry to the people we had defeated just 30 years before.

The above developments are nothing short of desperate moves to keep the Ponzi scheme going.  And of course the objectives were typically American.  Just make sure that next quarter's earnings don't drop below the earnings the CEO's predecessor had during the same time in the prior year.

Enough said.   

[Vincentus Ioannes]

Communism doesn't work, so the edifice was going to come down eventually.  And it's not as if the Soviet Union in the late '70s was a flowering utopia.  They were already in decline before John Paul II came on the scene in '78.  Look up the Brezhnev era.  It's literally called the time of stagnation.

The Soviets were also spending a ton of money on the military in the arms race with America, which further sapped their limited resources.

True.  But we in the U.S. also had something called 'Stagflation' at the exact same time.  As a matter of fact, during this time the G-7 started making their moves that sent textile mills from New England and West Germany to places like India and Pakistan.  Capitalism was also in decline simultaneously.  And that should not surprise anyone as the two systems always did work hand in glove.  The auto industry in the U.S. was also sacrificed to Japan during the era of Stagflation.  It used to be a real head scratcher to me when they handed over our auto industry to the people we had defeated just 30 years before.

The above developments are nothing short of desperate moves to keep the Ponzi scheme going.  And of course the objectives were typically American.  Just make sure that next quarter's earnings don't drop below the earnings the CEO's predecessor had during the same time in the prior year.

Enough said.   

This is one of the obvious downsides (from the perspective of the American working class) of free trade policies.  Without protective measures, you're asking American workers to compete against men in the third world being payed a minuscule fraction of the American wage.

Good luck keeping industry in the West with that policy!

[james03]

Enough said.

Note I'm pro-union and pro-tariff, however you leave out some things.  First is the creation of the Great Society, Social Security, and Medicare, which bankrupted this country, along with the foreign wars.  None of that is capitalism, and in fact is closer to the Soviet system, which is why we got off the gold system (which is when we literally went bankrupt) and started printing money.  This caused inflation, so you ship production to slave labor countries to try to keep prices down.  It works until it doesn't, which is today.  And the unions had turned into mafia run criminal enterprises which also hurt things.

So while I'm a big fan of tariffs, you can't really use them when you have a big bankrupt welfare State.  If you have a small custodial State and let the Church take care of relief, tariffs make a lot of sense.

[james03]

Is this just a bunch of hype someone made up for his canonization or something?

Note I am a big critic of Pope St. John Paul II, The Great, Witch Doctor of the Church, Patron of Islam^(TM), but give the guy his due.  Yes he participated in pagan rituals, wrote heresy, and protected pedophiles.  All true.  But he did work with Reagan, Thatcher, West Germany, and Solidarity to bring down the Soviet Union.  Though he didn't do it on his own.

I suspect part of it was that he was a Pole, and they really hate Russians.  He also wasn't a commie, though he seemed to lean left.  So give him his due.  For example, he ordered his plane to land in Poland when the commie government denied him landing rights.  So they had to shoot down the Pope's plane, or let him land.  Give him some credit on that.

[Greg]

Takes down the Soviet Empire.

Cannot spot the infiltration of homosexuals and perverts in his own church and do anything about them.

Who is this superhero?

[Frank]

Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin took down Hitler - but I wouldn't want any of them to be canonised.

[Xavier]

Yes, His Holiness Pope John Paul II was responsible, after God and Our Lady of Fatima, and together with President Raegan and President Walesa, for the downfall of the Soviet Union. This was admitted by Premier Gorbachev himself: "Gorbachev, who once said the collapse of the Iron Curtain would have been impossible without John Paul II, said the pope condemned communism the first time the two met in 1989, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The pontiff, who began his papacy in 1978 when the Soviets dominated his Polish homeland and Eastern Europe, was a harsh critic of communism and offered support to those fighting for change from within.

"We had a really interesting, albeit perhaps too emotional conversation," Gorbachev said. "He told me he ... was very, very critical of communism." https://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/04/03/pope.gorbachev/

In the same way, Pope John XXIII was responsible, after God and Our Lady, and together with Catholic President John F Kennedy, for World Peace and avoidance of a Nuclear Holocaust during the Cuban Missile Crisis around the time of Vatican II. Mistakes that the Popes have done don't change the good that they - or the Church through them - has done.

As Catholic Christians, we should have a kind of patriotic pride that the Holy Church we belong to was instrumental in all these things.

[Vincentus Ioannes]

So John Paul II was able to bring down Communism in a country hundreds of miles away but couldn't bring down the heresy right under his nose?

M'kay.

[Innocent Smith]

Enough said.

Note I'm pro-union and pro-tariff, however you leave out some things.  First is the creation of the Great Society, Social Security, and Medicare, which bankrupted this country, along with the foreign wars.  None of that is capitalism, and in fact is closer to the Soviet system, which is why we got off the gold system (which is when we literally went bankrupt) and started printing money.  This caused inflation, so you ship production to slave labor countries to try to keep prices down.  It works until it doesn't, which is today.  And the unions had turned into mafia run criminal enterprises which also hurt things.

So while I'm a big fan of tariffs, you can't really use them when you have a big bankrupt welfare State.  If you have a small custodial State and let the Church take care of relief, tariffs make a lot of sense.

That would fall under programs enacted to prop up the poor in order to go onward and upward with Capitalism.  A tax levied on the middle class to allow the rich and powerful to pretend to take risks with their money.

And when the oligarchs bust the economy after decades of looting they get the Socialism Benefits in the form of bailouts.  Again, on the tab of the middle class.

The bailouts to bankers and other crooks in 2008 and 2020 alone dwarfs the funds paid out to ghetto blacks during the run of the Great Society.

Besides, that's a benefit to the rich as well as these welfare recipients are mere conduits who transfer all that cash into local businesses and right back to the state in the form of lottery tickets, booze, cigarettes, groceries, etc.

[Michael Wilson]

Since he took down the Catholic Church, the taking down of the Soviet Union pales by comparison. Let's give this man his due:

[james03]

Cannot spot the infiltration of homosexuals and perverts in his own church and do anything about them.

Dry Brit sarcasm.  For the benefit of others, he knew.  The son of the head of Legion went to Rome with a report on all the pedophilia sodomy going on.  Pope Benedict clearly knew and one of the first things he did when he became Pope was bust the pervert.