St. John Paul II: The 20th Century’s Greatest Dissident

http://www.patheos.com ^ | April 24, 2014 | Tod Worner

[NKP_Vet]

Solzhenitsyn. Havel. Bonhoeffer. Kolakowski. These names are forever lionized in the pantheon of noble dissidents. And rightfully so. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn catalogued the heinous abuses of the Soviet labor camp experience in his greatest work, The Gulag Archipelago. Vaclav Havel endured isolation and harassment as an outspoken playwright who penned the razor-sharp analysis of life under oppressive Czech Communist stooges in his essay The Power of the Powerless. Dietrich Bonhoeffer helped found a Protestant Confessing Church objecting to the Nazification of his former denomination. He then went on to write his seminal work, The Cost of Discipleship, which objected to “cheap grace” in the face of times demanding suffering for Christian truth. And Leszek Kolakowski championed and brilliantly articulated why Marxism was philosophically robust and defensible, only to realize that this simply was not true. In writing his magisterial intellectual indictment of the Communist enterprise, The Main Currents of Marxism, he upheld his intellectual honesty and moral center which led his overseers to strip him of his titles, deprive him of his livelihood and threaten his safety. Consequently, he became the exiled intellectual godfather of the Solidarity movement which first fissured and cracked the edifice of Soviet Communism. How on earth could anyone expect to stand equally in the company of such courageous men? And where would you find them?

Let me say the last place I anticipated finding such a man was the theater. But there he was. In August, 1941, young Karol Wojtyla found himself nearly one year into the Nazi’s brutal occupation of Poland.

[NKP_Vet]

“I plead with you – never, ever give up on hope, never doubt, never tire, and never become discouraged. Be not afraid.”

- Pope John Paul II

[Jeff Chandler]

Be not afraid

[Gumdrop]

How blessed it is to have lived to witness the life of Pope John Paul II. An extraordinary man, indeed.

[Jeff Chandler]

Think of the leaders in our lifetime: John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher.

They were giants.