A Revolution from Above

Chuck Donovan / November 09, 2009

The social and political drama that played out across Eastern Europe in the decade before the fall of the Berlin Wall had a profound spiritual dimension. From the time of John Paul II’s visit to his Polish homeland in 1979 to November 9, 1989, what historians have called a “revolution of conscience” occurred that led to the collapse of communism with little loss of life – the combined result of President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s policies of peace through strength and the Pope’s relentless messages of spiritual courage to the captive nations of Eastern Europe.

In the summer of 1979, John Paul II spoke in Warsaw’s Victory Square and reminded his countrymen that it was “not possible to understand the history of the Polish nation without Christ.” Soviet communism had held sway for most of the 20th century not merely by virtue of military prowess and the will to power of a totalitarian state, but because of its willingness to make demands on the inner life of human beings – it was, in essence, a church without God. As the American Catholic writer Archbishop Fulton Sheen had expressed it: (more…)