Four kilometres from the centre of Zakopane there is a wooden church under Giewont that most mountain visitors never hear about until someone points. It looks like another highland sanctuary. It is that — and it is also a sentence spoken between eight and nine o’clock on the evening of 13 May 1981.
That afternoon John Paul II was shot in Saint Peter’s Square, on the anniversary of the first apparition at Fatima. In a small Pallottine chapel at Krzeptówki, which could not hold the people who had come to pray, Father Mirosław Drozdek promised that if God saved the Pope’s life they would build a church of thanksgiving on that ground. The Pope lived. Sixteen years later he walked through the door and consecrated what their gratitude had raised.
The place is older than the vow. Pallottines came in 1950 looking only for a cheap house of rest. In 1961 a statue of Our Lady of Fatima, given so that she could travel countries behind the Iron Curtain, was blessed here by Bishop Karol Wojtyła and then spent twenty-five years on Polish roads. Two stones now lie in the foundation: one from the tomb of Saint Peter, one from Cova da Iria.
This little book tells that path in ordinary words. It is not a guidebook and not an argument about every question Fatima raises. It is the story of a poor chapel that kept watch, a promise that took years to become walls, and a Pope who knew he had been prayed for under this mountain.
A Silent Homilies booklet. Written to be read in one or two sittings.