Karol Wojtyla is back.
The image of the Krakow seminary boy and amateur goalkeeper who went on to become Pope John Paul II is reappearing across Poland six years after his death.
As
he approaches beatification on 1 May, the penultimate step on the road
to sainthood, the country is taking the opportunity to bask in nostalgia
for its favourite son and for a less complicated time when church and
nation stood together in the face of adversity.
It was the
outpouring of emotion and mass mobilisation of the faithful for John
Paul II's visit to Poland in June 1979 that lit the fuse leading to the
creation of Solidarity, and ultimately to the downfall of east European
communism.
The legend lives on.
Likenesses of the pope are popping
up in almost every village in the land.
At the smallest end of the
scale, there are small plaster casts churned out by a garden gnome
factory in Nowa Sol, near the German border.
At the other end,
there is the work of artist and sculptor Czeslaw Dzwigaj, who has made
the production of papal monuments his life's work.
At his workshop in
Rzaska, on the outskirts of Krakow, John Paul II's instantly familiar
round face looks down from all sides from atop hunched, caped shoulders.
"He
is the greatest Pole in history. There is no doubt about it," says
Dzwigaj who, with his shoulder-length hair and moustache, resembles an
old-fashioned ideal of what an artist should look like.
Dzwigaj
reckons there are about 800 monuments of John Paul II around the world,
half of them in Poland.
He is personally responsible for more than 70 of
these, hundreds of smaller statues and countless medals.
Despite
the scale of the endeavour, the sculptor says he never gets bored.
"We
have a saying in Poland: the deeper you go in the wood, the thicker the
trees," Dzwigaj says. "The more you go into a subject, the more you see.
None of my sculptures of John Paul are the same. There is always more
to explore."
He has been working on a set of altar pieces in time
for John Paul II's beatification.
They are made of precious metal shaped
as a sunburst with a round hole in the centre to house reliquaries –
earthly remnants of a pope's life.
Dzwigaj's pieces are for
second-degree reliquaries – items that have been touched by the pontiff,
such as a bandage.
First-degree reliquaries include vials of the
pope's blood taken during medical tests and hair left over from visits
by the Vatican barber, kept by the Polish nuns who looked after John
Paul II throughout his papacy.
These will all be objects of adoration
after beatification, and will be even more so once he is elevated to
sainthood.
Dzwigaj is cheerfully sceptical over the miraculous
powers of such relics. He said he saw a disabled man rise to his feet on
entering a church two years ago.
Even so, he adds: "The rational side
of me resists such things."
He has no doubts, however, about the
transformational powers of John Paul II.
Priests call from around the
world with tales of long queues of pilgrims leaving lorry-loads of
flowers by his monuments.
That emotional attachment is naturally
strongest in the pope's birthplace.
Here there is a national pride, of
course.
"We saw him grow from a small boy to a man," Dzwigaj says.
He
doubts that the sense of national solidarity that John Paul embodied
can ever be recaptured.
"Respect for the church has fallen dramatically,
because we don't have a leader," he said.
"The church is all over the
place now, because it doesn't have a true leader like that. No one has
that charisma."