Poles weep for Pope

WADOWICE - Poles wept and prayed in grim silence after their beloved countryman and spiritual guide, Pope John Paul II, died today.

Church bells tolled across the country and sirens wailed in the capital Warsaw as news of the Pope's death defied the hope of his compatriots that their prayers could save the man who helped them overthrow communism 16 years ago.

"This is a terrible shock, I don't know what to say. He meant everything to us," said Maria Drapa, one of several thousand who held a vigil in the Pope's home town of Wadowice.

In Krakow, where Karol Wojtyla began his steady rise to the Vatican when he was ordained as bishop and where many of his Polish friends live, thousands fell silent and many people fell to their knees and wept.

"I am overwhelmed by pain. I have prayed for two days and thought that a miracle will happen, but it didn't happen and now we can only weep," said Teresa Swidnicka.

The 84-year-old Pope is revered in Poland for inspiring a peaceful revolution which ended communism and gave the central European state of 38 million people, dominated by Russia for half a century, unprecedented international status.

John Paul's first visit as Pope to the then communist Poland in 1979 drew millions of people on to the streets.

Many believe his sermons inspired Poles to challenge their communist rulers and contributed to the birth a year later of the Solidarity movement led by shipyard electrician Lech Walesa, which won power in 1989 after a decade of struggle.

"I think we shall keep discovering how much the Holy Father worked for us and struggled for us. He spoke to us through his illness and through his suffering served to the very end," said Walesa, now a former Polish president.

"(Without him) there would be no end of communism or at least much later and the end would have been bloody."

For most Poles, the Pope has also been the ultimate moral authority during tough reforms and often painful transformation from communism into a Western democracy.

"The greatest and maybe the only authority is gone. An era is over forever but his wisdom will also last forever," Poland's first non-communist prime minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki said.

"The Pope's death is the hardest test for Polish people Poland and for the world."

- REUTERS