In 2003, toward the end of the Holy Father’s pontificate, I received one of the greatest honors in my life. When we still struggled behind the Iron Curtain drawn over Poland by Soviet Russia, he was our best advocate in the free world, an advocate also for our liberty - a very successful one, as history proved later. Peter, and so a spiritual mentor, the highest moral authority, but also a great father figure, beloved by the young and the old alike, and a national hero, respected even by those with little regard for the Catholic Church. To us, he was not only a messenger of God in his capacity of the successor of St. So on the one hand, we sort of took him for granted and on the other, we all felt his constant presence in our daily lives. When we became conscious of the reality around us, he was already pope, and he continued in his papal service until we moved well into adulthood. John Paul II has always been a part of my life, just like many other Poles born in the 1970s. But it never crossed my mind that I would yet “meet” him in a way that I could never have imagined. John Paul II personally, although during his visits to my native Poland and at European Youth Day in Italy in 1995 I saw him several times at a close distance.
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