HOLY FATHER CLOSES SECOND NATIONAL PLENARY SYNOD

VATICAN CITY, JUN 11, 1999 (VIS) - At 5:10 p.m. the Pope visited the monument to victims of the Holocaust, dedicated to the memory of the more than 300,000 Jews deported from the Warsaw Ghetto. Thereafter, he visited the monument to the 'Siberians', built in remembrance of those who were deported to Siberia during the Soviet regime, many of them Poles. In both places he stopped to pray for a few minutes.

At 6 p.m. the Holy Father went to Warsaw Cathedral, the city's oldest church and dedicated to St. John the Baptist, where he presided at the celebration of the closing of the Second National Plenary Synod.

In his homily, John Paul II indicated that "in our own century, synod activity increased after Poland regained independence. Thus in 1936 there was the Plenary Synod for all five Polish Metropolitan Sees, and many diocesan synods took place as well. These synods sought to give new life to the religious life of the faithful after the long years of lost independence, and to unify Church law."

"I know that the most important themes of the Council have been part of the Synod's work, in which more than 6,000 study groups have taken part. The approved documents express a common concern for the renewal of Christian life in the Polish Church in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council and also point the way for future work."

The Pope underlined that "the formation of a new society based upon respect for human rights, truth and freedom, requires from all the daughters and sons of the Church an awareness that can be the starting-point for wider responsibility in the Church. It is good that in a situation such as this the Plenary Synod recognized that its fundamental task was to work for the rebuilding and deepening of this awareness in the Church, among both laity and clergy."

"The Second Plenary Synod and its implementation attempt to meet the great challenge which the Church in Poland faces today. This challenge is the need for a new evangelization, that is, accomplishing the saving work of God which requires new ways of spreading the Gospel of Christ."

At the end of his speech, after recalling that today is the hundredth anniversary of the consecration of the human race to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, he said: "'God is love' and Christianity is the religion of love. While other systems of thought and action seek to construct the human world on the basis of wealth, power, force, science or pleasure, the Church proclaims love. ... The goal of the new evangelization is to lead people to encounter this love."

After the ceremony, the Pope prayed in the chapel that houses the tomb of Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski (1901-1981) who was a key figure in the Polish church during the post-war period.

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