My beloved Fellow-countrymen,

I am writing these words to you on the day on which it fell upon one of the sons of our country to assume the ministry of bishop on St Peter’s chair. I cannot fail to address you all, brothers and sisters, children of beloved Poland, precisely on this day on which, owing to the inscrutable plans of Providence, I, hitherto metropolitan archbishop of Krakow, find myself obliged to leave the ancient chair of St Stanislaus to assume the Roman one of St Peter, and with it concern for the whole universal Church. It is difficult to think and speak of that without a very deep emotion. It seems that the human heart—and in particular the Polish heart—is not sufficient to contain such an emotion. Words are lacking, too, to express all the thoughts which crowd into the mind on this occasion. Do not such thoughts and sentiments pervade our whole history? Do they not embrace the thousand years of its course during which we, sons of Poland, have preserved fidelity to Christ and to his Church, to the Apostolic See, to the heritage of St Peter and St Paul?

These thoughts and sentiments are addressed particularly, however, to the recent period in our history: the history of our country and the history of the Church. How difficult it has been! How hard! A symbol of this crucial period is certainly the figure of Blessed Maximilian Mary Kolbe who, a few years ago, was raised to the glory of the altars by the unforgettable Holy Father Paul VI.

And here we have a significant thing, difficult to understand on the human plane. Just in these last decades the Church in Poland has acquired a special significance in the context of the universal Church and of Christendom. The Church in Poland has become an object of great interest owing to the specific system of relations, a system which has so much importance in the efforts that modern man, the various peoples and states, are undertaking in the social, economic and cultural field. The Church in Poland has acquired a new voice, it has become the Church of a special testimony to which the whole world looks. In this Church our people, the generation of today, lives and expresses itself. . . . – from Letter of His Holiness John Paul II to the People of Poland, 23 October 1978