In the stately metropolitan Cathedral of Wawel we are today concelebrating Mass after the close of the Second Vatican Council. On the feast of Christmas, we are concelebrating at the altar of Saint Stanislaus, bishop and martyr, patron saint of Krakow, of our archdiocese, and of the whole of Poland [Saint Stanislaus (1030-1079) was bishop of Krakow and was killed by King Boleslaus 11 while celebrating the Eucharist; he was canonized in 1253 and is the patron saint of Poland]; we bishops from this archdiocese who took part in the Second Vatican Council are celebrating this Holy Mass together.

When we celebrate the Eucharist together we are trying to express the deep truth of the priesthood of Jesus Christ. As we know, when a priest celebrates Mass alone, he represents Jesus Christ, as his living, intelligent, and conscious instrument, so that in the priest we see Christ himself. When many of us celebrate - or concelebrate - Mass together, the number of celebrants makes it easier for us to understand that there is in fact only one priest who celebrates the eternal sacrifice and that this priest is Jesus Christ. Every priest and bishop who has received the sacrament of orders bows down before the deepest and only fullness of the priesthood that belongs to Jesus Christ himself.

Today we are celebrating the Eucharist in thanksgiving to God, one in the Holy Trinity, for the Council, and we want to bow down before the fullness of the one priesthood of Christ. We gaze on him with faith and love in the Bethlehem crib, and with the same faith and love we recognize that he is present sacramentally, but just as effectively and just as full of grace, here in the Holy Mass.

Kneeling before the crib, we see the infant Jesus, the Son of God, the incarnate Word, lying on the straw, and we see his first moment on earth at the very beginning of his mission. He came and lived among us, and he wants to stay with us. And this is how the Second Vatican Council, reflecting on Jesus in the crib in Bethlehem, rediscovered more deeply and fully its true task. The Church has rediscovered itself and stated that its meaning comes from the mystery of the Incarnation, the mystery of the Father who sends his Son, and the mystery of the Holy Spirit, who is sent by the Father and the Son.

The Church is a true, homogeneous extension of the divine missions - or "sendings" - of the Son and the Holy Spirit, and herein lies its deepest essence. The mission of the Son and the Holy Spirit, which took place within time, is still continuing through people who receive the Son and who, through the interior action of grace, themselves become the mystical body of Christ and the people of God.

These truths may seem very simple, but they had to wait to be rediscovered, formulated, and expressed. In the Second Vatican Council, the Church has thus formulated and described its own supernatural, holy essence.

However, the work of the Church does not end with these definitions. The Son of God, whom we see in the manger today, was sent into the world, for the world. He entered into the world and is a living part of the human race; he belongs to humanity and remains with it. Similarly, the Church entered into the world, belongs to humanity, and remains closely bound to it. This is why it was not enough for the Second Vatican Council to produce definitions regarding the interior nature of the Church; it also had to express the attitude of the Church toward the world.

At this point I should like to tell you that I was fortunate enough to play a special role in the work of the part of the Council that dealt with what was known as Schema 13, which later became known as the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et spes, issued just weeks before Cardinal Wojtyla gave this homily). Everything I am telling you now therefore comes from my own personal experience. I remember all the meetings of the commission held last winter and spring and then the meeting of the whole Council this fall.

When we considered the contemporary world, we noted two particularly pressing problems. The first concerns progress and development in the scientific and other fields. This progress must go hand in hand with the development of the interiority, humanity, and personality of the person, who was created in the image and likeness of God. This is the basic problem. However, in complete contrast to this we see signs of things that threaten man and that spring from this progress and development. The first and greatest threat is that of war with all the weapons of destruction that technical progress and our civilization have brought into being.

On this point the attitudes of the Council and of all humanity are in agreement. In a way the ideas expressed by the Council developed out of the attitudes of John XXIII. I remember the moment in 1962 when he announced the Council and how at the very beginning of its work there was a strong risk of war. Thanks to the pope (and everybody recognizes this) the threat was averted. John XXIII then devoted the rest of his days to writing the encyclical Pacem in terris.

The ideas and attitudes of the pope who convened the Council found their echo in his successor Paul VI. Their personalities may be different, but their orientation is the same. I came to understand this personally, since I was fortunate enough to observe both pontiffs closely during the Council. Pope Paul VI, and with him the Council, developed the ideas of his predecessor, paying special attention to the threats hanging over humanity today (particularly the risk of war, which has potential flashpoints in a wide variety of problems and areas of conflict) and also studying theories of human development. In this way they produced a just formula and valid principle for working towards the restoration of harmony in the problems afflicting humanity today. This formula is known as dialogue.

You may ask about the precise meaning of the word dialogue, which is a word we know and frequently use and which may appear to be more or less equivalent to the word conversation. When two people talk together, we say that a dialogue is taking place; whereas when only one person speaks, we say that it is a monologue. However, this explanation is too superficial, since dialogue is much more than a simple conversation or an exchange of words or ideas. Dialogue is a human attitude deriving from the fact that man is a person called to live with others in society. Dialogue entails not only the capacity to speak but also the capacity to listen, the capacity to speak in such a way that the other can understand, and the capacity to listen in such a way as to understand the other. Dialogue is a human attitude and is an attribute of the person endowed with a social sense. Such an attitude is also deeply Christian because it can be used as an effective means of eliminating hatred and human conflict. Dialogue and conflict are contradictory terms.

Thus the Church today, through its pontiffs and through the Council, is telling people in every part of the world never to base human relations on conflict, but on dialogue instead.

Dialogue is a fundamental expression in today's Church, and we see its value in daily life. We know that between two people, for example husband and wife, dialogue can be used to resolve problems happily. If each of us insisted on his own monologue, we would be running the risk of conflict because monologue often does lead to conflict. If I think in my own way and say what I want, without the slightest thought as to whether the other hears and understands me because I do not hear and understand him either, we shall inevitably clash. This happens on every level of human life.

While I might even dare say that in the past humanity could permit itself the indulgence of war, this is no longer true today, since we have such immense means of destruction at our disposal.

Our reflections on the world and on the mission of the Church make it ever clearer what dialogue fundamentally is. The Church and the Council draw this conclusion not only from the contemporary situation of mankind and society but first and foremost from the crib and the cross - as Paul VI wrote in his first encyclical, which dates from 1964, and which begins with the words Ecclesiam Suam. Revelation, redemption, and then faith, prayer, and the whole Christian life, are the substance of God's dialogue with man and man's with God. Through this dialogue, which the eternal Father carries on with humanity through his Son and the Holy Spirit, he teaches us how to find the means of resolving difficult human problems. This is what the Council tried to discern and find in the manger, in revelation, and on Calvary, in order to be able to proclaim it to men and women today.

I now want to pass on to you one of the basic concepts and principles of the Church which has been given fresh emphasis in the course of the Council. The Church has not simply formulated ideas and proclaimed principles but actively seeks to open dialogue and set an example in resolving difficult or controversial problems. Thus the Church is entering into dialogue - or is at least trying to do so - with followers of other religions and also with non-believers and atheists.

Although these are of course the first steps, they have been deeply considered and are dictated by concern for the good of mankind and humanity as a whole and not only for the good of the Church. When the Church bows before the manger and kneels before the cross, it is aware that all humanity has been redeemed and that the mission of the Son and the Holy Spirit is directed to all humanity and hence that the same applies to its own mission. Today I am trying to pass on to you this enriched concept of the Church.

We are concelebrating our Christmas Mass at the tomb of Saint Stanislaus, bishop and martyr. You may find this linking of cradle and tomb rather strange, but we are here because this tomb saw the birth of a life. The birth of the Church in our country has its place within the framework of God's unceasing activity; and this tomb is the cradle of its birth. I am not saying that it marks the absolute beginning, although to a significant extent this is in fact so. So here we are at the cradle of Poland's faith, around the crib that is the symbol of the Nativity.

At the beginning of October 1962 when I left to take part in the Council as vicar of the Archdiocesan Chapter of Krakow, this is the spot from which I took my leave and on which you bade me farewell. When I said then that I was leaving the tomb of Saint Stanislaus in order to go to the tomb of Saint Peter, I emphasized this because these two places are closely linked. For us the tomb of Saint Stanislaus at Wawel and the tomb of Saint Peter in Rome are closely connected.

When I left from here, I took with me, as it were, the whole of the Krakow church and indeed the whole of the Polish church, inasmuch as throughout the centuries Saint Stanislaus, bishop and martyr, has been seen as patron and protector of the Polish church. I took our Polish church to the universal Church of Christ, as it revealed and expressed itself in the Council. Our church of Saint Stanislaus was present there in the universality, unity, and great communion of all the churches of the world. Through myself and the other Polish bishops, our church took part in the renewal of the Church. Thus the ancient, thousand-year-old church of Krakow, the Polish church, was reaffirmed in the universality of the Church of Christ. It was strengthened in its meeting with all the churches and dioceses of the whole world - those of Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. Our church was reaffirmed and strengthened every day for many months in its constant contact and daily communion with bishops from every part of the world. Communion means a bond or unity, and communio episcoporum, communio ecclesiarum (communion of bishops, communion of churches) has been a great grace for our Polish church.

At the Council there were bishops of dioceses which are centuries older (and even a thousand years older) than ours, and there were others from churches which are much younger than ours, so that we lie between one extreme and the other because in Poland Christianity began more or less in the middle of the history of the Church to date, at the end of the first millennium and the beginning of the second.

In the course of the Council the dialogue opened among more than two thousand bishops formed the basis for the renewal of the Church, and in our experience and in our dialogue within the Church we looked for bases for a renewal of all humanity.
This is the situation now that we are approaching the beginning of the second millennium since the baptism of Poland. The Christmas we are now celebrating is the last one of the first millennium.

While experiencing the unbroken unity of bishops during the Council, we felt the wish to speak to them about our thousand years and our great Christian jubilee in the spirit of community that united us to them and all humanity. If only you knew how great the community of the Church is that unites us to the whole Christian world - not only to those in European countries but also to those much farther afield!

We also thought of our closest neighbors from a geographical viewpoint who have been separated from us by history (but also united with us, inasmuch as divisions also unify). We gave a great deal of hard thought to how to speak of our thousand years with the bishops and other Catholics of Germany, who is our westerly neighbor. Some people would maybe have wanted to express our hatred to them. But, my dear ones, would this have been possible after a thousand years of Christianity in Poland and after a thousand Christmases celebrated in this land? There may of course be people who would like to have told them that they have been and continue to be our enemies. But I ask you how we Polish bishops could have said this on the threshold of the celebration of a thousand years since our baptism.

Instead, we started by saying: "Our brothers in Christ, bishops of Germany, for centuries and especially more recently your country has done terrible things to us." We could say that in a certain way we have in fact confessed for them the terrible things that the German people have done to us. We have confessed it in its unvarnished truth, including Auschwitz and the six million victims of the last war, without hiding or glossing anything over. We have anticipated their confession. When we take a look at the two letters (ours to the German bishops and theirs to us) and read them carefully without omitting anything, we can see how, through our confession, they have confessed.

Briefly we told them that we forgave them and asked them to forgive us. We said that we forgave them inasmuch as they too, under the stimulus of our confession, had also made an open confession. We asked them to forgive us above all because in the solemn letter marking our millennial year we had said many unpleasant things, and when one says unpleasant things, one must then ask forgiveness, and then in the second place because we were aware that in any relationship between persons (especially one lasting for many years) there is always something to be forgiven on both sides.

And now, my dear ones, we have come back from the tomb of Saint Peter on the Vatican hill to the tomb of Saint Stanislaus on the Wawel hill, bringing with us the whole Council, the renewal of the Church, and the fundamental principle of dialogue.
Many years ago, the first conciliar father in Polish history, Bishop Vincent Kadlubek, left from this city to attend the Lateran Council and later returned to renew the church in this country. Similarly, we bishops are also returning in order to renew the Polish church in the context of the universal Church. You must help us in the task with which we are faced and for which we pray to God during today's Mass. Help us to renew our holy church of Saint Stanislaus. Let us all work together in this church to renew our people and, through our own renewal, contribute to the renewal of the whole of humanity. May my words as bishop kindle your hearts for this renewal, which we place on the tomb of Saint Stanislaus.

My dear brother priests and religious sisters, we want to arouse a great desire for renewal in you, and this concelebration should mark the beginning. With this same end in view, the Holy Father has asked that at the end of the Council, from the first of January to Pentecost, a special jubilee should be celebrated throughout the Church with the cathedral as its center in each diocese. We must therefore gather together more frequently in this Cathedral of Saint Stanislaus in Wawel and pray more intensely with special faith and sentiments of mutual forgiveness in our hearts. We shall gather together here, coming in pilgrimage to this holy place, which is the church of the living God in our land.

Reverend brothers of the cathedral chapter, I want to place this postconciliar jubilee under your special care and protection. It must mark the beginning of the renewal of our lives in Christ and in his Church.

As your bishop I should like to express my wish that all of you, my beloved fellow citizens of Krakow, who have gathered here to relive together the mystery of the birth of Our Lord Jesus, the mystery of the Incarnation, may live in the truth. The Son of God is the Word, and the Word is the Truth. I wish that you may live in Christ, in the Truth and in the Love which come from God.

25 December 1965

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On this great feast of Christmas, together with your most excellent bishop and the cathedral chapter as guardians and ministers of this holy shrine of our nation and church, I offer my wholehearted greetings and best wishes to you who have come to this majestic Wawel Cathedral. I would also link my greetings to those of the group from the seminary who are always of such assistance to us in the cathedral. Our greetings go out to all of you here present, especially the citizens of Krakow, and not only of the old city but also of the new one of Nowa Huta.

In a special way I should like to welcome the members of the parish of Saint Casimir who have been invited to share in today's celebrations. My dear ones, you have come here with your parish clergy in order to show the bond that unites your parish and church with the bishop and cathedral that is the mother of all the churches in the Archdiocese of Krakow. During Advent I made a pastoral visit to your parish and our meeting today in this cathedral, at the tombs of Saint Stanislaus and Blessed Queen Hedwig, sets the seal, so to speak, on that Advent meeting.

My dear brothers and sisters, today we are all filled with the Christmas joy which comes from the faith that God has been born into the world. However, our joy must expand and spread, so that each year it embraces new thoughts and events and brings them into the joy of Christmas, in order that the mystery of the Incarnation may grow fuller and fuller each year until the end of time. This is what today's liturgy teaches us.

While I am speaking to you, a great many of you will undoubtedly be thinking of that small group of men who are orbiting the moon - a remarkable event in the history of science and human technology. For the first time man has left the earth, in the literal sense of the term, moving beyond the barrier of the atmosphere and gravity of our earth, and is now orbiting another celestial body. Throughout the world people are thinking of this event and of their representatives who are the first to perform such a feat, and they are wondering with a certain amount of fear and apprehension whether they will come back safely to earth.

Events like these and the thoughts they engender make us realize that human reality is also expressed in this type of feat.
Man is an entity who is constantly seeking and moving beyond the limits of previous accomplishments, so that human history is the history of culture and civilization, in which emphasis is always placed on the desire to transcend previous limits. This tendency derives from human nature, thought, and creative capacity and also from the will to dominate creation, which the Creator planted in the human soul. Thus, God told our earliest ancestors: "Fill the earth and subdue it" (Genesis 1:28).

In line with this, man always looks to the future, discovering new things and finding out more and more about the visible reality of the created world. He gains ever greater knowledge of the laws that govern this world and comes more and more fully to dominate and make use of nature. In this way he becomes more and more the lord of creation, in accordance with the plan of his Creator.

The truth about man, which has been illustrated for us particularly clearly this Christmas when men are for the first time orbiting the moon, is also oriented in a special way towards the mystery of Christmas, which we are reliving today.

God came into the world! What does this mean? It means, my dear brothers and sisters, that he came to meet the aspirations imprinted within man to move beyond himself, to obtain more, and to be always something more. God takes these aspirations into account and, becoming man, shows man the true purpose of the possibilities that are found not in creation or in the visible world but in God himself. Man can transcend himself not only through his progress within the world: he can transcend himself through becoming a son of God, as today's gospel tells us.

Man was created in the image and likeness of God and becomes as completely as possible like his Creator and Father if, within creation, he becomes a son of God. Here we have another aspect of humanity's movement beyond itself. This is an interior transcendence with the help of the Spirit, in which man in his spiritual essence moves beyond his own spirituality and his humanity and comes to share in divinity itself. The Christmas mystery proclaims this to us, especially through the readings for today's Mass: "To all who received him . . . he gave power to become children of God" (John 1:12). "He gave power." He gave power to dominate the earth, the created world, the whole cosmos. He gave us this power, and we in turn develop it; and this is what leads to human progress in the world.

However, he also gave us the power to become children of God. He showed us this power when he was born in a stable in Bethlehem. Now in 1968, a very long time later, when we see how we have developed this first, natural power, we must also reflect on the extent to which we have developed our second, supernatural power. To what extent have we become children of God? This is an important question because if there were too great an imbalance between the first and second types of human development, this would constitute a danger for the human race.

Thus, my dear brothers and sisters, when we gather around the crib, we must feel that we are God's children, so that we regain that interior equilibrium and maturity that come from God, who is born today in Bethlehem. I have invited you to Wawel Cathedral in order to revive this awareness in you and also because this cathedral is, so to speak, the great cradle of the Polish spirit. The whole building (the altar, before which the Polish kings were crowned; the tomb of Saint Stanislaus, bishop and martyr and patron saint of Poland; and the tomb of Queen Hedwig, together with all the other monuments to our kings, military heroes, prophets, and bishops) is like a perennial crib for the unceasing birth of Christ in the history of the people of God in Poland. This is why each year at this Christmas daytime Mass we must gather in veneration around this Wawel crib, which is the cradle of our spiritual strength, which has come and always will come from God, just as the shepherds and the magi gathered around the manger in Bethlehem.

This year the divine Mother has revealed herself in a special way at the cradle of our archdiocese, and in a special way the Mother of God, Queen of Poland, Our Lady of Jasna Gora, has, through grace, given birth to Christ within our hearts.
Strengthened in the Spirit, we recall and give thanks for all these gifts. May our offering at this Bethlehem crib in Wawel be a new step towards the spiritual destiny of all of us gathered here and of the church of Krakow and the whole of our beloved country that we always remember as we sing: "Raise your little hand, O Holy Child, and bless our beloved homeland. In righteousness and soundness of life, may it base its strength on your strength, O fragile newborn Babe, on your strength!"

25 December 1968

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Christmas Eve is now over, midnight has struck, and dawn has broken, and we have all been caught up in the Christmas mystery, first through our vigil gathering around the family dining table and then by flocking in great numbers to midnight Mass or the dawn celebration; and now, as midday approaches, we have come here to the solemn eucharistic liturgy in Wawel Cathedral. The constant theme is that of gathering around the mystery of Bethlehem, the crib, the Word made flesh who has come to dwell among us.

The shepherds who were watching over their flocks came to find the child who had been born at midnight in a cave outside the city, and at the manger they were joined by the chorus, which sang hymns to God's glory. Later the wise men also arrived. And following the example of these different groups, we too come at different times - evening, night, dawn, and morning - in order to relive this divine mystery that is also the greatest human event.

Like those who came first, we come to contemplate and to bow down and acknowledge God in the mystery of his Incarnation; and when we come, we find ourselves. Contemporary people in this last quarter of the twentieth century, whose human dignity has been ignored and infringed in so many ways, come to Christ's stable in Bethlehem to ask who they are and why they are in the world, bringing with them their existential anxiety. And when they come to Bethlehem, like each of us they find the reply in the manger on the straw: "I have given them power to become children of God." This small, weak infant, who was born and forced to stay outside the town in a stable, has given this power - and he still gives it to us who live in the twentieth century and whose human dignity and essence have been so compromised that we no longer really understand that we were made in the image and likeness of God. However, this truth alone gives meaning to our human existence, and only in this truth do we find the answer to the questions of who we are and why we are alive.

The Son of God became man in weakness, to help us to be fully human, giving us the power to become children of God.
Although it is true that we come to Bethlehem to bring gifts, it is in fact we who receive them. And, indeed, when we consider the gifts brought by people, whether poor shepherds or rich kings (and this includes all of us), we are mainly talking of things they have found or received.

There is a great deal of discussion of human rights today, with people trying to define them and lay down their principles, and we are right to see this as a constructive contribution of our century. However, it must also be said that in this same century the very concept of humanity has been challenged and undermined. We must therefore defend the rights of the human person.
The first defender of human rights lies in the manger on the hay. He defined and ordained this dignity when he, the Son of God and coexistent with the Father, became one of us - a man.

Many people from different parts of the world come to Bethlehem to find him. And today the Polish people have come to this cathedral. Sad to say, however, if we read the official press, we shall find no mention at all of Christmas as such. It is spoken of as if it were just an ordinary holiday with designs of evergreen branches and little candles in an effort to hide the true light it brings. Nor do we find on the newsstands any mention of the close link between this birth and the birth of our nation.

The mystery of Jesus, who was born in Bethlehem to the Virgin Mary, has for a thousand years shaped the soul of our people in their history, culture, and traditions. Our identity is bound up with the mystery of Christmas, and in every period of our nation's history, from medieval times down to the nineteenth century and even to our own days, we find indications of what is completely ignored in today's press, even during the Christmas season.

However, despite the attitude of the official press in this period, hymns of joy rise up from every quarter, not only during midnight Mass but also in every home, and beautifully decorated Christmas trees twinkle and shine throughout our country. All this is not simply folklore but bears witness to our identity as Poles and testifies to how, with him, our nation is reborn on this night each year, generation after generation. "This is a sacred night for us," as (the Polish nationalist poet and playwright) Wyspianski wrote.

On this night the Polish people come to the Bethlehem crib, speaking of themselves and their history, their past and their mission, their victories and defeats and sufferings, and of their present condition. And as they speak they show who they are and who they want to be!

It is sometimes said that a new Poland must come into being. But Poland is a unique entity, and if this other, second one wants to remain Poland, it must be born from the first, since we can never deny or suppress our national and cultural heritage in any aspect.

Thus the people of Poland as they exist today in 1976 come to the Bethlehem crib, bringing their special heritage with their past, present, and future to the One who is born in a stable. We have no intention of denying our own identity.

The proposals sometimes made regarding education and the teaching of history and literature tend to increase our fear of a weakening of our identity. With this fear in our hearts, we, who are the people of God in Poland, come to the Bethlehem cave. With this fear but also with a thousand-year-old hope, we come to him who became man and made himself a weak infant whom we find lying in the hay. We entrust the rights of our people to him, the rights of man as individual and society, respect for which constitutes the first precondition for peace on earth.

In Bethlehem, the heavenly spirits used human voices to express this truth in song: "Glory to God in the highest and peace on earth to men of goodwill." We bring all our problems and anxieties to the Bethlehem stable, and there we come to realize that peace can be obtained only if the rights of the individual and of the population as a whole are respected. It is therefore not enough to repeat these words; we must put them into practice and mold circumstances. These thoughts have brought us twentieth-century Poles to the Bethlehem stable for the various Christmas celebrations both yesterday and today.

I want to express my greetings and best wishes to all of those present here, to the members of the cathedral chapter, my brother priests, and the representatives of the parishes of Mistrzejowice, Azory, and Krowodrze (whose patron saint is Blessed Queen Hedwig). These wishes are the same as those the heavenly Father sent through his angels, when with human voices they proclaimed: "Glory to God in the highest and peace on earth to men of goodwill."

25 December 1976