Originally published at The Catholic Thing
The auto-liberation of east-central Europe had begun in earnest in June 1989, when semi-free Polish elections returned anti-communist Solidarity candidates to all the contested seats in the Polish parliament—which, three months later, elected Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a longtime Catholic intellectual activist become Solidarity leader, prime minister. Other dominos in the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact system began to fall, and then came the night of November 9–10, 1989, when the breaching of the Wall by celebrating Germans made what came to be known as the Revolution of 1989 irreversible.
