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Who Deserves Credit for the Berlin Wall's Fall? by Tim Drake Tuesday, November 10, 2009 Taking a look at the vast majority of stories commemorating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, there’s one pivotal person missing from the majority of the mainstream coverage: Pope John Paul II. Is this lack of inclusion an accidental oversight or an intentional act? If the previous Pontiff played no key role worth remembering, then why did the KGB want him dead? There’s no question about the role that Pope John Paul II played in the collapse of the wall and communism in general. President Ronald Reagan talked about it. George Weigel wrote about it. Professor Nick Hayes has written about it. And Lech Walesa said something on it. “The truth is that 50% of the fall of the wall belongs to John Paul II, 30% to Solidarity and Lech Walesa and only 20% to the rest of the world. That was the truth then and is the truth now,” said Walesa. Polish-born Pope John Paul II called on the peoples of Europe “to change the face of the world, and his message liberated the people who then forced politicians to sanction changes,” added Walesa. Not only did Pope John Paul II appoint anti-communist bishops in the Eastern Bloc, but he also publicly visited Krakow, Warsaw and Auschwitz, giving the Polish people the support they needed to oppose communism. Let’s demand that the mainstream media give credit where credit is due. Acknowledgement to: National Catholic Register. Please also see below. Don't Forget Church Role in Fall of Wall By Gerard Knowles A GERMAN cardinal said various commemorations of the collapse of the Berlin Wall
ignore contributions by the Catholic Church. Reprinted with permission from The Catholic Times, November 8th, 2009.
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Some Cold War Truths GEORGE WEIGEL On Christmas Day, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev transferred the Soviet nuclear codes to Boris Yeltsin, called President George H.W. Bush to wish him a happy Christmas, and picked up a pen, intending to sign the document that would dissolve the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, created by Lenin seventy-four years before.
The pen wouldn't work. Gorbachev had to borrow a replacement from a CNN crew covering the story. The Cold War was officially over, which was a very good thing. Yet as we prepare to mark the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall -- the symbolic centerpiece of the Revolution of 1989, which made the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 virtually inevitable -- there seems to be a remarkable lack of interest in a struggle that dominated world politics for forty-three years, threatening nuclear ruin to North America, Europe, and the USSR, devastating Korea and Southeast Asia, and embroiling the Third World in proxy wars from which many developing countries have never really recovered. Something that large and consequential, you would think, would merit considerable and ongoing attention. Yet, to take but one example, modern history classes in Polish schools today stop at 1939 (or, in some cases 1945). Things are not much better in the United States, I fear. Americans are traditionally good winners who don't hold grudges. There was no gloating over the collapse of the USSR. There were no equivalents of the Nuremberg Trials, or the Allied military tribunals in post-war Japan, to bring the murderers of the KGB to book. There wasn't even a VC Day -- Victory Over Communism Day -- to parallel VE Day and VJ Day in 1945. Perhaps many Americans thought it would have been unsporting to declare victory. We quickly put the Cold War behind us. Worse than today's lack of interest, however, are those interpretations of the Cold War that suggest it was all a terrible misunderstanding, or that Stalin was "provoked" into hostility toward the West, or that the West could have comes to terms with the Soviet Union long before 1989. With an eye toward the twentieth anniversary of the wall coming down, let me propose a few truths about the Cold War and its ending, with special reference to the Catholic Church and its roles under, and against, communism: Moral equivalence is moral idiocy. The United States and its western allies during the Cold War were imperfect democracies that sometimes did wicked things. Throughout the Cold War (and long before), the Soviet Union was a pluperfect tyranny that did terrible things as a matter of course, murdering millions of innocent people in cold blood. Any suggestion that the U.S. and the USSR were "two scorpions in a bottle" (as one Carter administration nominee famously put it) reflects a fundamental moral obtuseness about the situation.
The Ostpolitik of Pope Paul VI did not ease the situation of the Catholic Church behind the iron curtain. Pope Paul's openness to dialogue with communist regimes can claim one genuine (if unintended) accomplishment: it created openings that a Polish pope (who viewed his predecessor's Ostpolitik with considerable skepticism) could exploit (often against the counsel of Vatican diplomats). On the ground, the Ostpolitik of Paul VI was a disaster in Hungary (where most bishops from the mid-1960s on collaborated with the regime), in Czechoslovakia (where the underground Church felt betrayed), and even in Rome, where Soviet bloc intelligence agencies used the new diplomatic contacts necessitated by the Ostpolitik to penetrate the Vatican in a quite striking way. Moral power was the key to success. Communism might have collapsed of its own economic incompetence, but why did it collapse in 1989 rather than 1999 or 2009 or 2019? And why did it collapse without violence (Romania excepted)? Our premier Cold War historian, John Lewis Gaddis of Yale, has the answer: the moral revolution launched by John Paul II during his first pilgrimage to Poland in June 1979 was the key to all the rest. There were winners and losers in this epic contest. Be grateful that we won. Be grateful for all those who sacrificed blood and treasure for the victory.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT George Weigel. "Some Cold War Truths ." The Catholic Difference (September 30, 2009). Reprinted with permission of George Weigel. George Weigel's column is distributed by the Denver Catholic Register, the official newspaper of the Archdiocese of Denver. Phone: 303-715-3123. THE AUTHOR
George Weigel, a Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is a Roman Catholic theologian and one of America's leading commentators on issues of religion and public life. Weigel is the author or editor of Against the Grain: Christianity and Democracy, War and Peace, Faith, Reason, and the War Against Jihadism: A Call to Action, God's Choice: Pope Benedict XVI and the Future of the Catholic Church, The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God, Letters to a Young Catholic: The Art of Mentoring, The Courage to Be Catholic: Crisis, Reform, and the Future of the Church, and The Truth of Catholicism: Ten Controversies Explored. George Weigel's major study of the life, thought, and action of Pope John Paul II, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II (Harper Collins, 1999) was published to international acclaim in 1999, and translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Portuguese, Slovak, Czech, Slovenian, Russian, and German. The 2001 documentary film based on the book won numerous prizes. George Weigel is a consultant on Vatican affairs for NBC News, and his weekly column, "The Catholic Difference," is syndicated to more than fifty newspapers around the United States. Copyright © 2009 George Weigel
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