Detroit — Lech Walesa told students at St. Mary’s Preparatory they must take personal responsibility for their country’s future.
Just as he rose from being a simple electrician to leading a labor movement that eventually toppled Poland’s communist government, and became modern Poland’s first freely elected president, the students must understand that they can shape what kind of country America will be, Walesa told them Oct. 27.
“His story was just a great example of how big an effect one man who puts his faith in God can have on the world,” said Albert Karschnia, a St. Mary’s senior from Our Lady Star of the Sea Parish in Grosse Pointe Woods.
The 1983 Nobel Peace Prize-winner spoke to the high school students through an interpreter after Mass in the Our Lady of Orchard Lake Chapel.
He later had lunch with members of the Orchard Lake Schools’ Board of Trustees and met with school representatives and former Detroit archbishop Cardinal Edmund Szoka.
The previous day, Walesa, 67, opened an exhibit marking the 30th anniversary of the Solidarity trade union movement he once led at the Walter Reuther Library on the campus of Wayne State University. The exhibit runs until July 2011.
Fellow St. Mary’s senior Connor Neme said Walesa told them the United States has the potential to be a great force for peace and freedom in the world, but that they needed to correct America’s slide toward socialism.
Neme, from St. Joseph Parish in Lake Orion, called Walesa “a really humble speaker” and “great guy, who really related to me on a personal level and understands what it means to be a teen-ager like me.”
Michael Christen, from St. Mary Parish in Milford, also a senior, said Walesa spoke about the importance of his faith to him when he was in prison during the communist regime, and how Pope John Paul II “was a key figure and really helped the Solidarity movement.”
St. Mary’s Headmaster James Glowacki said Walesa “was fantastic with the boys.”
“He was dynamic and vigorous, and challenged them that, if communism comes back, it will be their fault,” Glowacki said.
Walesa was invited to the Orchard Lake campus, which is home to St. Mary’s Preparatory, SS. Cyril & Methodius Seminary and an extension program of Madonna University, by Marcin Chumiecki, director of the Orchard Lake Schools’ Polish Mission.
It wasn’t his first visit to the campus, either. He had visited the school in 2002.
Chumiecki applauded how Walesa told the students they were the leaders of the future and how important it is to have values and to turn to God.
“He is my personal hero,” Chumiecki said. “I’m here, as a 35-year-old Pole, because of his fight for freedom.”
