Rafal Dutkiewicz: “Historically, the Polish province of Silesia has been a land of multiple cultures, inhabited mainly by Silesians, Poles, Czechs and Germans. A beautiful expression of this multiculturalism can be found in the ‘Book of Henryków’, added recently to UNESCO’s ‘Memory of the World’ register, which contains the first ever sentence written in the Polish language. The book is a chronicle written in the middle of the 13th century by a German monk, in Latin, and that first sentence in Polish, reported by the author, was uttered by a Czech peasant while talking to his Polish wife.” Read More …

Kitty Millet: “Returning to his native Warsaw in 1979, and for the first time in his tenure as pope, Pope John Paul II was met by thousands of Poles. As the crowds thronged Warsaw, hoping to to hear him say ‘mass’, the Pope ‘spoke openly on such sensitive themes as human rights, freedom of conscience and the church’s ancient role in the state.’ Such openness signaled to his listeners that the modern phenomenon of communism could not detach Poles from their ‘ancient’ Christian history. To the Pope’s assertion that ‘Christ cannot be kept out of the history of man in any part of the globe’, the crowd responded with chants of ‘We want God.’ Read More …