ABSTRACT
On June 2, 1979, only eight months after his elevation to the papacy, John Paul II delivered a carefully worded sermon before a vast audience of nearly one million Catholic faithful who jammed into Warsaw’s Victory Square and the surrounding streets. In advance of this open-air Mass and his first visit to his native land as the Roman Catholic pontiff, John Paul pored carefully over the wording of his message in a conscious effort to inspire a peaceful, religiously centred toppling of the communist government in Poland.
