On October 13 of last year, the Metropolitan of Częstochowa, Archbishop Wacław Depo, handed over the relics of St. John Paul II to Fr Piotr Hernoga, the priest from the parish of St. Mary Magdalene in Radomsko. Our joy was manifested in the fact that now with so powerful intercessor we can constantly pray through his intercession. From that moment on, we very much wanted the Pope of the Family to be permanently present in his word, which we will keep in our hearts, meditate on and put into practice in personal, conjugal and family life.
So we decided that on every 22nd day of the month, starting from November, we will have in our parish community an Evening with St. John Paul II. The Evening with St. John Paul II program included an hour-long Adoration in front of the Blessed Sacrament, preceded by a prayer to the Holy Spirit, a prayer that St. John Paul II recited every day since his youth, and the Eucharist with the blessing of relics. We also prayed the litany and St. John Paul II’s prayer for the families. During the Evening, we were also listening to a homily of the Holy Father from various pilgrimages to the Homeland. We began with the fourth pilgrimage to the Poland in 1991 and the homily dedicated to the First Commandment of the Decalogue. On the following Evenings we listened to the homilies from Rzeszów, Lubaczów and Kielce.
On March 22, Divine Providence made this Evening special. We experienced it as part of the Lenten retreat with the prayer as the main theme. Fr Michał Zimny who led the retreat set St. John Paul II as a model of a man of prayer. He supported his reflections with many examples from the life of our Pope, the Pope, who during the Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament made the most important decisions of his pontificate and the Universal Church. He reminded that the Pope daily prayed for people with whom he was supposed to meet and for those who asked Him to pray in various intentions. He also recalled the Words of the Gospel that the Lord has given us for that day that we are to forgive not 7 times but 77 times. The Pope perfectly fulfilled those words in his life; he was a man of constant forgiveness. On Lenten evening we listened to the homily delivered in Radom, dedicated to the Fifth Commandment of the Decalogue – Thou shalt not kill. The Pope spoke there of the most terrible wars of the last century, of the millions of people who have lost their lives, of suffering, of pain, of weeping, of the blood shed by innocent people. He forcefully stated that: “The root of crime lies in man’s usurpation of God’s sovereignty over the life and death of man. There is a distant and yet persistent echo of those words, which man accepted from the “beginning” against his Creator and Father. These words were: “as God you will know good and evil”, that is: you will decide what is good and what is bad, you people, just like God, like God and against God.” This homily resounded particularly dramatically at a time when this terrible war is ongoing in Ukraine. We concluded this fifth Evening with the St. John Paul II prayer for peace in the world.
Irena and Tadeusz Olczyk
Guardians of the John Paul II Foundation Chapter in Radomsko
