Little was said about the fact that John Paul II had such a dream to inaugurate his pontificate in Bethlehem. Symbolically. Where the history of the Church began. He never told us about it, but we knew – recalls the Archbishop. – And, it did not surprise us very much. He had such a devotion to this place. And, many times he said that with our thoughts and prayers we should be where the Savior was born, and where today there is no peace. I am convinced that just as every day his thought and prayer was related to Poland, it was also related to the Holy Land.
He went there for the first time on pilgrimage in 1963, at the end of the second session of the Second Vatican Council. As Paweł Zuchniewicz writes, on the night December 8/9 he stood together with several other Polish bishops in the Basilica of the Nativity of Jesus. Apparently, until half past six in the morning, they celebrated Holy Masses, one after another. Paweł Zuchniewicz recalls a letter to Krakow’s priests, in which Karol Wojtyła later wrote: “It should be added that in the Grotto of Christmas, the Polish bishops did not fail to sing a few carols. They were obligated to do so by old man, Father Borkowski – a Polish Franciscan who has been working in the Holy Land for decades.” The Archbishop smiles. Probably no one had to oblige our Holy Father to sing carols. It must have been an extraordinary experience for him. Beloved Polish carols in a place where “among the silence of the night the voice spreads”, “God is born, the power is dead”, to which “the shepherds came”. In which everything he thought, prayed, sang, happened. What he was thinking at the time, we will not find out. Although there was only one significant trace left after this visit. The work “Journey to the Holy Places” published in 1965.
With the consent of Archbishop Mieczysław Mokrzycki – “Place for everyone”
