The midnight masses were very emotional for him. Apparently, he never said that he missed Christmas Eve at home. But, he recalled his early years as a priest, and then his bishop’s service in Kraków, where he went to the midnight mass in Nowa Huta. Under the open sky, because the church could not be built there – reminds the former secretary. – The authorities stopped the construction. I think he missed it a lot. Because, that’s what he recalled often in his stories. There was no midnight mass in the Vatican. In Krakow it was a tradition. For years. Because, it was celebrated for the first time by bishop Wojtyla in 1959. He celebrated it in the place where the first church in Nowa Huta was to be built, a residential area – a monument of socialism erected in the suburbs of Krakow. The permission to build the church was issued on the wave of the October thaw, but after a few years the authorities began to withdraw from it. The struggle for the church lasted twenty years. Bishop Wojtyla fought on the first front. Midnight Masses under the open sky gathered thousands of people. And, they gave strength for the fight. For this church that could not be built. And, for dignity. Paweł Zuchniewicz reminds in one of his publications that in 1963 Karol Wojtyla prayed there barely two weeks after his return from Bethlehem. “These two places seemed very similar to each other” – writes Zuchniewicz. “In Nowa Huta the parish has not had a church for so many years! And, the chapel serves as the place of celebrating the Holy Mass – he said the next day in the Wawel cathedral. – On the outer wall of this chapel there is an altar and people participate in the Holy Mass throughout God’s year, standing under the open sky. In solemn masses they must stand both during the blustery weather and during the rain. The midnight mass I celebrated took place in the great cold. There were several thousand people (…). What a closeness (…) between this shepherdess in Nowa Huta and what I saw in Bethlehem: a poor grotto open to the piercing’. Probably also for this reason, on Christmas Eve, Karol Wojtyla also visited other parishes fighting for the church. “In 1977 on the Krzesławickie Hills – we read in Zuchniewicz – during his last midnight mass before his election to the Holy See, he justified these visits as follows: I think (…) that on the night of Bethlehem, when the Son of God is born in a stable, the bishop of the Krakow church must leave the Wawel cathedral and go to the places wherever Christ is homeless”. When he visited Nowa Huta as Pope, he spoke about this fight for the church as “a new beginning of evangelization at the beginning of the new millennium of Christianity in Poland”. “We experienced this new beginning together” – he recalled. – And, I took it with me from Krakow to Rome as a relic. “That explains a lot. Also, the theme of the homeless God, which appeared many times in his words for Advent and Christmas.
With the consent of Archbishop Mieczysław Mokrzycki – “Place for everyone”
Znak Publishing House, Kraków 2013.
