The World Youth Days in Rome were held on the great fields of the Tor Vergata University. A million young people from all over the world. I remember it like it was yesterday. Already five years earlier, in 1995, when I saw John Paul II somewhere far on the horizon in Loreto during the Youth Days in Europe, I knew that in the year of the turn of the millennium I would like to be with him in the Eternal City. It worked. I came with a group of friends from my parish. We walked in sweat in the forty-degree heat for hours throughout Rome, and finally reached the vast square. It was an incomprehensible space. The sea, the ocean of young people to the horizon on one side and the Papal scene flickering somewhere in the distance on the other. We took a place on trodden grass, spread out our sleeping bags, ate the provisions we received from the organizers on the way, and waited for him to appear. Could I have expected that three years later I would be united with John Paul II not only by nationality and love for my beloved Beskidy forests, but also by a quite close neighborhood? That I would be able to look at the windows of his apartment, going from kitchen to room? And, with people from his immediate surroundings, who were circling somewhere in distance, far away on a high stage, I would have to share my everyday life behind the Portone di Bronzo?
Magdalena Wolińska-Riedi “It happened in the Vatican”
Znak Publishing House. Kraków 2020
Pages: 197 – 198
