Dear Brothers and Sisters, beloved Compatriots!
Today, I am fulfilling what we started yesterday. Yesterday you offered me this House as a special gift of Poles, of Polonia from all over the world. Today, in consecrating this House in the name of the Most Holy Trinity, in the name of Jesus Christ, in the intercession of Him and our Mother, I offer your gift to God Himself, so that, devoted to God it could serve men and women. This is what the liturgy of consecration means: we consecrate the Polish Home in Rome, we give to God what people have brought, what they have brought from different parts of the world as an expression of their pilgrimage.
It is a home for pilgrims. It expresses the many pilgrimages of Poles, a pilgrimage that has lasted for generations, which in our generation has spread even more to different sides of the world and matured even more. I think the current generation of Poles, the generation of Polonia from all over the world, is a particularly experienced generation and thus also particularly mature. We want this Home to serve our pilgrimage, every person, and especially every Pole, whether from Poland or from any part of the world, so that it can be the place where this pilgrim stops, to which they come and from which they leave: strengthened, uplifted, filled with a new hope. This is the general destiny of this Home. It is a gift of pilgrims for pilgrims, a gift of today’s generation of pilgrims for today’s generation, but also for the next, ever more distant generations of pilgrims, just as in the past such a gift was the Polish hospice, which today, in Rome, was established by the Servant of God Cardinal Stanisław Hozjusz.
(Speech during the dedication of the Polish Home. Rome, November 8, 1981)
Do not stop in this good work. Papal Speeches to the John Paul II Foundation
John Paul II Foundation &Centre for Documentation and Study of the Pontificate of John Paul II, Rome 2012
