Pope John Paul II visited Poland in 1979.
His arrival was met by hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens who had suffered under socialism since the 1945 Yalta Conference, when Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill surrendered Poland to Stalin at the end of World War II.
The Popeâs visit sparked an unprecedented spiritual revival in Poland.
The next year, labor leader Lech Walesa, rallied Polish citizens to reject socialism and establish a free representative government.
This sparked uprisings in other communist countries, and by 1989, the Berlin Wall came down.
Pope John Paul II stated:
âThe fundamental error of socialism is ⦠(it) considers the individual person simply as an element, a molecule within the social organism, so that the good of the individual is completely subordinated to the functioning of the socio-economic mechanism.â