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By Jonathan Martin
POLITICO
7/31/12 7:45 AM EDT
WARSAW — Mitt Romney, speaking in the homeland of the late Pope John Paul II, used a speech here Tuesday to pay homage to the iconic pontiff, a deeply popular figure among American Catholics.
Saying that John Paul “has a unique and a special place in our hearts,” Romney recalled the famous 1979 mass here while Poland was still under Soviet control.
“He reminded the world there would be no justice in Europe without an independent Poland, and he reminded the Polish people, long deprived of their independence, from where they drew their strength,” Romney told a few hundred Poles at a university library.
“While greeting a crowd huddled along a fence, he met a little girl. He paused and asked her, ‘Where is Poland?’ But the girl – caught off guard – couldn’t answer. She laughed nervously until the great pope put his hand over her heart and said: ‘Poland is here.’
The Cold War pope, Romney continued, “understood that a nation is not a flag or a plot of land. It is a people – a community of values. And the highest value Poland honors – to the world’s great fortune – is man’s innate desire to be free.”
Romney’s remarks received warm, it not overwhelming, applause from the crowd. But the remarks were not aimed so much for Polish consumption as they were for swing state voters Catholics of a certain age, some of whom still have pictures of John Paul framed in their home.
