Kraków, Poland: Poland's freedom icon Lech Walesa said Wednesday he would stay away from a meeting with Pope Francis, insisting that invitations from the Polish president and episcopate had arrived too late.
"I can't change my plans," devout Catholic Walesa announced on Facebook, saying he had an engagement 300 kilometres (miles) away from the Polish religious shrine of Czestochowa that Francis will visit Thursday.
Walesa also posted on his page both the presidential and episcopal invitations, which he appears to have received on Tuesday.
President Andrzej Duda is closely allied with the governing rightwing Law and Justice party (PiS), led by Jaroslaw Kaczynski, long known as a harsh Walesa critic.
Kaczynski has questioned Walesa's role in negotiating a bloodless end to communism in Poland in 1989.
Most historians accept that as leader of the freedom fighting Solidarity trade union, Walesa was a key figure in the country's peaceful transition from communism to capitalism.
But Kaczynski insists that he and his late twin brother, also Lech, were instrumental to Solidarity's victory against communism.
Walesa's relations with Kaczynski, the PiS party and President Duda have therefore been tense at best and deeply acrimonious at worst.
Shipyard electrician Walesa won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1983 for leading Solidarity, the Soviet bloc's only free trade union.
He became Poland's first democratically elected president after communism's peaceful demise in 1989.
At the heart of Pope Francis's first visit to Poland will be a meeting with Holocaust survivors at the former Nazi death camp Auschwitz on Friday, where he will pray for the camp's 1.1 million mostly Jewish victims, before the five-day trip winds up with the customary papal vigil and mass.
AFP
