It has never been proved, Poppagator, that the assassin who attempted to kill the pope, was aligned with any communist organizations whatsoever. The guy was Turkish, claimed to have done it for Palestine. When that was shown to be bogus, he then claimed to have been paid by some shadowy Bulgarians. No links were ever proved, though the most popular conspiracy theory/urban legend about the attempt was that it was "the Communists".

You seem to forget that Lech Walesa was the head of a secular trade union, who was thrown out of power by the Poles very quickly when it became clear his agenda had more to do with religious attacks on their secular state, than worker's rights. Poles don't want a Catholic state, they want a secular state. Did you forget that was a worker's revolution, which got it's start in food riots? In Poland, the workers used the church, and the church used the workers in the battle for post-Soviet political power.

While the pope's 1st trip to Poland in 1979 put Poland on the international map, internally it was the 1984 murder of dissident priest Jerzy Popieluszko by Polish security agents that triggered the final series of events that triggered the most intense and radical social unrest that led to the fall of the Jaruzelski government. The Polish Episcopate had acted as power broker, and pushed much harder for political recognition in the post-1989 era by co-opting the much more radical workers movement. That was done largely through Lech Walesa, who wasn't exactly the brightest bulb in the box on the worker's movement side. He is the one the church chose to back because he was devoutly Catholic and conservative in his social views. He wasn't very representative of the Polish population at all, hence his rather quick exit from the political scene. Once the church didn't need him as their pawn, well...

One result of the church acting as political power broker was that when the Sejm began deliberations on a new constitution in 1990, the Episcopate requested that the document virtually abolish the separation of church and state. Such a change of constitutional philosophy would put the authority of the state behind such religious guarantees as the right to religious education and the right to life beginning at conception (hence a ban on abortion).

As a political matter, however, the unleashing of stronger church influence in public life began to alienate parts of the population within two years of the passage of the bill that restored freedom of religion. In the period that followed, critical issues were the reintroduction of religious instruction in public schools--which happened nationwide at church insistence, without parliamentary discussion, in 1990--and legal prohibition of abortion. Almost immediately after the last communist regime fell, the church began to exert pressure for repeal of the liberal communist-era abortion law in effect since 1956. The draconian anti-abortion laws passed in 1993, and the church won the right to trump EU human rights law when it got an exemption for Poland's anti-abortion law, but still allowed the country into the EU. Ireland and Malta also have this human rights anti-abortion exemption.

All the major international human rights organizations, including the United Nations, have stridently opposed these human rights violations in Poland. The battle is still raging, as the current Polish government, which promised the liberalisation of the abortion laws when elected in 2001, is still dragging it's feet. However, it is looking as though a new law may be passed, allowing abortions up until the 12th week of pregnancy. An estimated 200,000 illegal abortions are occurring in the country each year as a result of the criminalisation of abortion in 1993.

When you look at the dynamics of the collapse of Soviet-style communism in Eastern Europe in Russia, it really had fuck all to do with the pope. Take Czechoslovakia for instance. Nothing religious about that anti-communist movement whatsoever. Same with Russia proper. There was doctrinal change in the wake of a hardliner's death--Brezhnev's--when the reformers led by Gorbachev took over, and refused to intervene in Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary as each country abandoned and ousted their communist dictators. It wasn't until the perestroika reformers allowed the collapse of the dictatorships, and allowed the nationalist Balkanizing of the republics occurred, that the Soviet economy collapsed. But it was pushed over the cliff by the Soviet reformers themselves, NOT the pope and NOT Ronald Reagan.