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This is the sermon that Pope John Paul II delivered at the open-air mass described in the previous section, and it is typical of both his rhetorical style and the substance of the sermons he delivered during his trips to Poland. The formal occasion for the mass was the conclusion of a national Eucharistic Congress that had been held over the preceding days in various sites around Poland. Such….

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This sermon was delivered in Podkowa Leśna, a small town in central Poland near Warsaw, on October 13, 1982. An émigré publishing house in the United States published a transcript in a collection of sermons that purported to present the views of the rank-and-file clergy during the period of martial law. Much more militant than the official pronouncements of the Bishops, texts such as these….

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This sermon was delivered by Cardinal Stefan Wsyzyński, the Primate of the Roman Catholic Church in Poland, on January 25, 1976, in Warsaw's Holy Cross Church. Here we see the conservative political convictions shared by most members of the Polish clergy at the time (and today), according to which the Church, the nation, and the state must be tightly intertwined. The Polish Church, barely….

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