You have brought this Home as a gift to the Pope, who is your compatriot. Moreover, you have named this Home after him. I can’t help it, I have to accept the gift in the way it is offered, and although I personally would very much like it to bear the name of, for example, Blessed Maximilian Kolbe or the name of Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński, since you yourself have chosen the name you have chosen, I cannot do anything about it. I accept the gift as you offer it to me. I accept it in order to offer it, to offer it to Polish pilgrims and to Polish pilgrimages. Pilgrimage is the vocation of man, of the Christian. A Christian is a man of conscious pilgrimage: he knows that there is no eternal dwelling on this earth, that through it he makes a pilgrimage to the Father’s house.
In this universal, all-Christian sense of pilgrimage, or – to use Mickiewicz’s word – “pielgrzymstwa” (“pilgrimage”) there is a special our Polish pielgrzymstwo (pilgrimage), coming from our homeland to a place that is sacred to us, just as it is sacred to so many other people, to so many other Christians, to so many Catholics from all over the world. This Christian, religious meaning of pilgrimage linked to the See of Peter, to the legacy of the holy Apostles Peter and Paul in Rome, has a special place for us here, in this Home; it is a home of stopping in the sense of internal movement. We come here to focus, to renew ourselves, to deepen the values that the great Polish national family has been living for a thousand years. These contents and these values are closely linked to the Gospel and are linked to Rome, the See of Saint Peter. That is why I have longed and desire that this Foundation, this Home, will serve not only to make pilgrimages in the religious sense, but also in this particular sense, to serve – as I will say – the pilgrimage of our culture, to determine the point of its departure, to determine all the Points of its arrival, to designate all the Points of its encounter with cultures, with traditions, with histories, within the one great culture, tradition, history, which is Christian culture, Christian tradition, the history of the Church, as well as the history of humanity. This is what this Home is meant to serve in a special way. I think that by defining its purposefulness in this way, I am responding to the wishes of the donors. I think that our epoch, the twentieth century: a time of special pilgrimage of Poles, needs such an expression, such purposefulness.
(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
