I shall never forget the impression left with my by a Russian soldier in 1945. The war was only just over. A conscript knocked at the door of the Cracow seminary. When I asked "What is it you want?" he replied that he wished to enter the seminary. Our conversation went on for a long time. Even though he never in fact entered (incidentally he was far from clear in his mind about what a seminary really is) our meeting taught me, personally, one great truth: how wonderfully God succeeds in penetrating the human mind even in the extremely unfavourable conditions of systematic denial of him. In the whole of his adult life that man had scarcely ever gone inside a church. At school, and then later at work, he had continually heard people asserting "There is no God!" And in spite of all that he said more than once: "But I always knew that God exists. . . and now I would like to learn something about him . . .".
--Cardinal Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II), Sign of Contradiction, 1977
