The Highlanders had their own Christmas wafer meeting with John Paul II; as the Archbishop says, usually in the Clementine Hall. It was on a folk note – he recalls – always with a hunch; always touching. They brought the Holy Father spruce trees and hay for the Christmas Eve table as well as their homemade delicacies. Four days before the Christmas Eve in 1997, they thanked him for his pilgrimage to Poland, for the holy Mass celebrated under the Great Krokiew (Wielka Krokiew). They thanked him, and he thanked them. “I return to my pilgrimage to Poland with my thoughts and heart” – he said. “Today, when I look at you, all this is very much alive in my memory. After all, you are part of the Homeland. And today’s meeting is, in a way, an extension of my visit in my homeland, in my home country.” The Highlanders played and sang; John Paul II enjoyed it and blessed each one individually. They understood each other without words – laughs the Archbishop. “The Holy Father had the soul of the Highlander. He missed them, longed to the mountains. I think that he missed it a lot at the Vatican.
Marcin Zubek remembers well when he was to sing for John Paul II for the first time. We all waited for the Holy Father, dressed and ready – he recalls. The Holy Father entered the hall, the band began to play and Father Mirosław Drozdek said to me “Marcin, now your turn”; nothing; no words. The heart would sing, but I had tears in my eyes and squeezed throat. I ran out of voice. The band played, I stopped dead, and the Holy Father, as if he knew that I was supposed to sing, looked at me, smiled and everything was fine. We were performing and singing, so beautiful as, probably, never before. When he talks about it, he immediately gets emotional. It’s not like that – he explains – that it happened in the past and now I am just recalling it. That still is alive in a man; that I was there a few days before Christmas Eve; that I could bow to the Holy Father; break the Christmas wafer with him; that I could dance and sing for him.
With the permission of Archbishop Mieczysław Mokrzycki, “A place for everybody”
‘Znak’ Publishing House, Krakow 2013
