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I'm 39 and remember the solidarity movement in poland, but no details. Isnt he credited in some part for the beginning of the breakup of the ussr? started with Poland and then snowballed?

"He is probably worshipped by some misguided folk, but most of us see him as a man who has led an exemplary life."

I agree with this statement, a lot of what I have seen in regard to the adulation of the pope seems to border on worship of a man as opposed to worship of God.

Unquestionably, Pope John Paul was the first, if not part of the first Anti Soviet salvo in Poland, followed closely by the ship yard worker's revolt. At the same time, the Gipper pressed America's advantage in technology and the Rooski's came tumbling down.

I'm 39 and remember the solidarity movement in poland, but no details. Isnt he credited in some part for the beginning of the breakup of the ussr? started with Poland and then snowballed?

??

I'm 40 and remember it like it was yesterday.

Found here:

John Paul's role in the collapse of European communism is now generally recognized, but it does not seem well understood. He was not, pace Tad Szulc, a wily diplomat skillfully negotiating a transition beyond one-party rule in Poland. He was not, pace Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi, a co-conspirator with Ronald Reagan in a "holy alliance" to effect communism's demise. He was not, pace the late Jonathan Kwitny, a Gandhi in a white cassock, running a non-violent resistance movement in Poland through a clandestine messenger service from the Vatican. Rather, John Paul shaped the politics of east central Europe in the 1980s as a pastor, evangelist, and witness to basic human rights
Primary-source evidence for this is found in the texts of the Pope's epic June 1979 pilgrimage to his homeland, nine days on which the history of the 20th century pivoted. In those forty-some sermons, addresses, lectures, and impromptu remarks, the Pope told his fellow-countrymen, in so many words: "You are not who they say you are. Let me remind you who you are." By restoring to the Polish people their authentic history and culture, John Paul created a revolution of conscience that, fourteen months later, produced the nonviolent Solidarity resistance movement, a unique hybrid of workers and intellectuals -- a "forest planed by aroused consciences," as the Pope's friend, the philosopher Jozef Tischner once put it. And by restoring to his people a form of freedom and a fearlessness that communism could not reach, John Paul II set in motion the human dynamics that eventually led, over a decade, to what we know as the Revolution of 1989.
June 1979 was not only a moment of catharsis for a people long frustrated by their inability to express the truth about themselves publicly. It was also a moment in which convictions were crystallized, to the point where the mute acquiescence that, as Vaclav Havel wrote, made continuing communist rule possible was shattered. Moreover, it was not simply that, as French historian Alain Besancon nicely put it, "people regained the private ownership of their tongues" during the Solidarity revolution. It was what those tongues said -- their new willingness to defy what Havel called the communist "culture of the lie" -- that made the crucial difference.
To be sure, there were other factors in creating the Revolution of 1989: the policies of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher; Mikhail Gorbachev; the Helsinki Final Act and its effects throughout Europe. But if we ask why communism collapsed when it did -- in 1989 rather than 1999 or 2009 or 2019 -- and how it did, then sufficient account has to be taken of June 1979. This is a point stressed by local witnesses: when I fist began to research this question in 1990, Poles, Czechs, and Slovaks, religious and secular alike, were unanimous in their testimony about the crucial impact of June 1979. That, they insisted, was when "1989" started.

(Parenthetically, it's worth noting that the West largely missed this. Thus the New York Times editorial of June 5, 1979: "As much as the visit of Pope John Paul II to Poland must reinvigorate and reinspire the Roman Catholic Church in Poland, it does not threaten the political order of the nation or of Eastern Europe." But two other Slavic readers of the signs of the times were not at all confused: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Yuri Andropov both knew that the rise of John Paul II and the deployment of his "culture- first" strategy of social change was a profound threat to the Soviet order.)