Leadership Quote by Rocco Buttiglione

Buttiglione’s line isn’t really about John Paul II so much as it’s about who gets credit for the most fragile of miracles: a regime change that doesn’t detonate. The verb choice is telling. “Contain” casts Eastern Europe’s late-communist pressure cooker as something volatile, almost chemical - frustration and hate as a “huge mass” that could have tipped into revenge, ethnic score-settling, or civil conflict. In that framing, the pope becomes less a theologian than a skilled crisis manager, channeling emotion away from bloodletting and toward procedure: negotiations, ballots, round tables.

The subtext flatters a particular reading of 1989, one that emphasizes moral authority over material causes. Economic stagnation, Soviet retrenchment, labor organizing, and dissident networks all matter, but Buttiglione spotlights a single figure who could speak across borders and class lines with credibility the party-state couldn’t manufacture. It’s also a Catholic political argument smuggled in through historical description: faith, properly deployed, acts as social technology, stabilizing crowds and legitimizing compromise.

Context matters. Buttiglione, an Italian Christian Democrat intellectual-politician, has long defended a public role for religion in European identity. Praising John Paul II as the one who “managed” the transition subtly rebukes both secular triumphalism (the West didn’t simply “win”) and revolutionary romanticism (the righteous anger wasn’t automatically virtuous). The closing claim - “changed European history” - is a bid to lock that interpretation into the official memory of post-Cold War Europe: not chaos averted by technocrats, but catastrophe averted by a pope who made restraint feel like victory.