Love is Never Defeated: Pope John Paul II in Ireland

Love is Never Defeated: Pope John Paul II in Ireland

On September 30, 1979, during his historic pastoral visit to Ireland, Pope John Paul II delivered one of the most memorable speeches of his pontificate at Ballybrit Racecourse in Galway. Speaking directly to an immense gathering of young people, he offered a message that was affectionate, challenging, and profoundly hopeful. More than any other moment of his visit, the Galway address captured the pope’s gift for connecting with youth and his conviction that they were the decisive force for the future of both Church and society.

The speech opened with words that immediately entered Irish memory: “Young people of Ireland, I love you.” These simple yet powerful words established a deep sense of closeness. The pope did not present himself as a distant authority but as a pastor and a friend who trusted and cherished the younger generation. His declaration of love was not sentimental, but a way of affirming their dignity and reminding them that they were seen, valued, and essential to the life of the Church.

John Paul II’s empathy for young people stemmed in part from his own early years. As a university student in Kraków when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, the young Karol Wojtyła experienced firsthand the brutality of war, the suppression of national identity, and the fragility of human freedom. The occupation closed his university, forced him into manual labor, and surrounded him with violence and death. Rather than joining armed resistance, Wojtyła engaged in a courageous cultural and spiritual resistance, participating in the clandestine Rhapsodic Theatre, which staged secret performances of Polish plays, poetry, and literature. These underground gatherings were acts of defiance, preserving Poland’s language, faith, and identity under an oppressive regime. It was through these experiences that he learned that love, culture, and faith could be stronger forms of resistance than violence—a lesson that would profoundly shape his papacy and his message to youth around the world.

That lesson came alive in Galway. The pope urged young people not only to defend their faith but also to express it creatively and courageously. Drawing on his own experience, he reminded them that art, poetry, music, and culture could serve as powerful ways to witness to Christ and to shape society. He encouraged them to be bold in cultivating their talents, to lift their voices in song and story, and to use their creativity as a means of building community, strengthening identity, and inspiring hope.

That same conviction was evident only months earlier, when Pope John Paul II returned to Poland in June 1979, his first papal visit to his homeland under communist rule. In Warsaw, before millions of his countrymen, he invoked the deep Christian roots of Polish identity. As he prayed, the crowd spontaneously broke into the chant: “We want God! We want God!” It was a cry of spiritual resistance that defied the Soviet system and revealed the irrepressible hunger for faith and freedom. Many historians view that moment as the beginning of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. The pope, who had once preserved his nation’s identity through clandestine theatre during Nazi occupation, was now inspiring his people to reclaim their dignity under Soviet domination.

In Galway, he spoke to Irish youth with the same urgency. Acknowledging the struggles of a generation growing up amid violence in Northern Ireland and the pull of secularism, he warned: “Do not use your freedom unwisely. Do not turn it against yourselves and against others. Do not lose your respect for life and for the dignity of every person.” His words carried the weight of his Polish experience, where the denial of human dignity had devastating consequences. Just as the Polish crowds had declared that they wanted God, he urged the young people of Ireland to make a conscious choice for Christ, who alone could satisfy their deepest longings: “It is Jesus you seek when you dream of happiness; he is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you.”

The heart of his message centered on love—not as mere sentiment, but as a force capable of transforming nations and healing wounds. In one unforgettable line, he declared: “Love is never defeated, and the history of Ireland proves it.” For John Paul II, this was no abstract phrase: love had carried the Polish people through Nazi terror and Soviet oppression; love had sustained the Irish through famine, persecution, and division. Love, he insisted, was the enduring strength that could lead the young away from violence and despair toward peace and reconciliation.

That theme of undefeated love was also embodied in his visit to Knock, the shrine in County Mayo where in 1879 villagers witnessed an apparition of the Virgin Mary. Knock itself had become a place of hope for the poor and suffering, a sanctuary for those carrying Ireland’s trials before God. There, John Paul II celebrated Mass and prayed for peace. By linking Galway and Knock in his pilgrimage, he showed how Ireland’s youth and Ireland’s faith tradition stood together as proof that love endures: whether in the fidelity of past generations at Knock or in the choices of young people facing a turbulent future. The shrine was, in a sense, the living witness to the very words he spoke: that Ireland’s story was the story of love that refuses defeat.

Above all, the pope entrusted the future to the youth he met in Galway: “The future is in your hearts and in your hands. God is entrusting to you the task, at once difficult and uplifting, of working with him in the building of the civilization of love.” Just as his own generation in Poland had been called to preserve faith and identity under oppression, he now called the young people of Ireland to be builders of peace, witnesses of hope, and creators of culture in their own troubled land.

Seen together—his wartime youth in Poland, his clandestine efforts to defend culture through the Rhapsodic Theatre, his triumphant return to Warsaw in 1979, his pilgrimage to Knock, and his address in Galway—John Paul II was weaving a single story. It was the story of nations that endured suffering yet refused to let their faith be silenced. It was the story of peoples, whether Polish or Irish, who discovered that love is never defeated. In Galway, he invited Ireland’s youth to take up their place in this greater drama: to carry forward a witness that proclaimed to the world, in word, deed, and creative expression, that love is the power that conquers despair, and the victory that endures forever.

Read the full text of Pope John Paul II's address to Ireland here.

Read the full text of Pope John Paull II's address to Poland here.