John Paul II arrived in Warsaw on June 2, 1979; there and then, he ignited the revolution of conscience that would give birth to the Solidarity movement, the Revolution of 1989 and the end of European communism. Distinguished secular historians of the Cold War now argue that John Paul’s first pilgrimage to Poland, from June 2 to June 10, 1979, was one of the pivots of twentieth century history.
What seems obvious now, however, wasn’t quite-so-clear at the time. On the fourth day of the June 1979 papal pilgrimage, for example, the New York Times concluded its editorial, “The Polish Pope in Poland,” in these striking — and, as things turned out, strikingly myopic — terms: “As much as the visit of John Paul II must reinvigorate and inspire the Roman Catholic Church in Poland, it does not threaten the political order of the [Polish] nation or of Eastern Europe.”
Oops.
On the occasion of Pope Benedict XVI’s address to the United Nations and his first pastoral visit to the United States, let’s consider the possibility that his “June 1979″ has already happened and that, just as in the real June 1979, most observers missed it. And by Benedict XVI’s “June 1979 moment,” I mean the most controversial event of his pontificate, his September 12, 2006, Regensburg Lecture on faith and reason. Widely criticized as a papal “gaffe” because Benedict cited a robust exchange between a Byzantine emperor and a Persian Islamic scholar, the Regensburg Lecture now looks a lot like June 1979: a moment in which a pope, cutting to the heart of a complex set of issues with global impact, re-arranged the chessboard in a dramatic fashion, with historic consequences.
