You don’t have to be Roman Catholic to appreciate the legacy of Karol Wojtyla, better known to the world as Pope John Paul II:

Lech Walesa, founder of the Solidarity movement that toppled communism in Poland in 1989-90, recalled the power of John Paul’s visit to Warsaw in 1979. It was the first to his homeland after becoming pope a year earlier, and he ended Mass with a prayer for the Holy Spirit to “renew the face of the Earth,” words that became a rallying cry.

“We know what the pope has achieved. Fifty percent of the collapse of communism is his doing,” Walesa told The Associated Press on Friday. “More than one year after he spoke these words, we were able to organize 10 million people for strikes, protests and negotiations.

“Earlier we tried, I tried, and we couldn’t do it. These are facts. Of course, communism would have fallen, but much later and in a bloody way. He was a gift from the heavens to us.”

[...]

Anna Bohdziewicz, who helped distribute underground books around the time of the pope’s first visit to Poland, recalled the electrifying feeling in the huge crowd that formed even the day before the pope arrived, among people walking to Victory Square in Warsaw where he was to speak, and later during his Masses.

“This feeling was something absolutely new because people were together, happy and somehow free, because they came because they felt like it, putting flowers on the square where the Mass was supposed to be,” said Bohdziewicz, 54.

“And the next year you had Solidarity, and it was the same feeling. I think it broke some kind of fear — I’m sure because suddenly people saw that there were a lot of people who feel the same, who think the same, and this was a kind of power.”

As a catalyst for Solidarity, Pope John Paul II stirred one of the first movements that began to rot the Soviet Empire from within the iron curtain. Perhaps that’s why the Soviets tried to assassinate the Pope in 1981; he was remarkably effective.

Karol Wojtyla, the people of the world thank you.