Andrzej Duda and Agata Kornhauser-Duda attended the grave of the Catholic Church’s third longest-serving pontiff in history on Monday evening, Polish state news agency PAP reported.
The Polish president paid his respects to the late pope as part of a one-day visit to Rome that focused on the 2023 European Games (EG 2023), one of the continent's biggest sporting events this year.
Poland is preparing to host the 2023 European Games in June and July. On Monday evening, Duda was due to attend a ceremony during which a symbolic Flame of Peace was to be handed over to Poland as the host country of the event.
Polish presidential couple pay tribute to late John Paul II
The president and first lady paid tribute to the late John Paul II a day after the 18th anniversary of his passing.
Thousands of Poles took to the streets throughout the country on Sunday to commemorate the late pontiff, who led the Roman Catholic Church from 1978 to 2005.
Earlier on Monday, the president’s top foreign-policy aide Marcin Przydacz told reporters that Duda “regards John Paul II, I believe together with the large majority of Polish people, as an outstanding figure in the historical sense, but also as a religious leader.”
“The president’s visit to the grave of John Paul II in the St. Peter’s Basilica today will be an expression of that,” Przydacz added, as quoted by the PAP news agency.
John Paul II, who visited 129 countries during his long pontificate, served as pope from October 16, 1978 until his death on April 2, 2005.
He was the third longest-serving pontiff in history and was declared a saint in 2014.
The pope was a strong supporter of Poland's anti-communist Solidarity movement and is recognised as a key influence in helping to end communist rule in Poland in 1989.
Documents unearthed several years ago show that Pope John Paul II was seen as the main enemy of Poland’s communist-era rulers, according to a report.
Heated debate
Polish lawmakers last month adopted a resolution to condemn a "disgraceful media smear campaign against St. John Paul II," and called the late pope “the greatest Pole in history.”
In early March, private broadcaster TVN24 aired a documentary detailing accusations of child sex abuse levelled against three Polish priests in the 1960s and 1970s, alleging that the then Archbishop of Kraków, Karol Wojtyła, who in 1978 became Pope John Paul II, knew about the wrongdoing.
The documentary, which included comments from Dutch journalist Ekke Overbeek, the author of a book entitled Maxima Culpa, stirred a heated debate in Poland.
'I am standing up to defend our pope': Polish PM
Poland's Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said last month that, contrary to claims, there was "no proof that the Polish pope ignored evildoing" in the Catholic Church.
Morawiecki added: “I’m standing up to defend our pope because I know that as a nation, we owe a lot to John Paul II. Maybe we owe him everything.”
The Polish Catholic Church has urged people to respect the late pope's memory, saying that a review of its archives did not confirm the accusations against high-ranking church officials, the Reuters news agency reported.
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Source: PAP, prezydent.pl