In his first visit, according to biographer George Weigel, a massive congregation in Warsaw had chanted in response to the pope's sermon: "We want God. We want God in the family, we want God in the schools, we want God in books." (They might as well have been addressing the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, as well as the Polish Communist Party.)
Before the pope's first visit to Poland, Solidarity founder Lech Walesa told Fox News this week, Walesa had been able to attract only about 10 supporters to his anti-communist movement. After the pope's visit, it swelled to 10 million.
The communists responded by outlawing Solidarity and quite likely recruiting the would-be assassin who shot the pope.
But, like Reagan, the pope never cowered before his enemies.
On June 12, 1987, as Reagan called for Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall and pointed to the undefeated cross on the tower at Alexander Platz, John Paul II invoked the forbidden name of "Solidarity" over and over again in his sermon at Gdansk. Lech Walesa sat in the very front row of a congregation numbering a million souls.
The hearts of captive peoples rose up. The wall came down.
In 1991, John Paul II wrote an encyclical letter reflecting on the collapse of communism and pointing to the error at its core that all nations must avoid.
"If one does not acknowledge transcendent truth, then the force of power takes over, and each person tends to make full use of the means at his disposal in order to impose his own interests or his own opinion, with no regard of the rights of others. People are then respected only to the extent they can be exploited for selfish ends," he said.
"Thus, the root of modern totalitarianism is to be found in the denial of the transcendent dignity of the human person who, as the visible image of the invisible God, is therefore by his very nature the subject of rights which no one may violate -- no individual, group, class, nation or state."
The signers of the Declaration of Independence would have said, "Amen." Yet, modern judges labor even now to erect a new wall between this truth and American law. If they succeed, freedom falls.