Pope John Paul II in the Park Stadium, Gelsenkirchen

On 2 May 1987, Pope John Paul II[1], who was later canonised, held mass in the Park Stadium (Parkstadion) in Gelsenkirchen in front of and with a crowd of around 90,000 people.[2] The mass was held during the second of his three visits to Germany.[3] Even though the overall level of interest had already noticeably declined since his first visit in 1980, the second guest appearance by the head of the Catholic church was still an extraordinary event. 

Even so, before his pontificate, Catholics had to wait nearly two hundred years before a Pope set foot on “German” territory again.[4] For the Ruhr region, where he also made appearances in Bottrop, Essen and Mülheim an der Ruhr on 2 and 3 May 1987, it is still the only time a Pope has ever visited. The papal tour from 30 April to 4 May 1987 also included visits to Cologne, Bonn, Münster, Kevelaer, Munich, Augsburg and Speyer. Originally designed primarily as the home ground of FC Schalke 04, the papal mass was not the last time that the Park Stadium was used for a different purpose. The following year, the first “Stadionrock” concert was held in the stadium in Berger Feld. But to date, neither Michael Jackson nor the Rolling Stones, or any other of the many stars at the time have been able to outdo the Pope’s visit, at least in terms of crowd size and the amount of attention it attracted. The city governors at the time even labelled the visit an “event of the century for Gelsenkirchen”.[5] 

An important symbol for the visit became clear at the end of the mass in the Park Stadium, when the Pope spontaneously expressed his thanks to the Ruhr bishop for the friendly treatment and reception of his fellow Poles in the diocese of Essen, a large number of whom were in the crowd in the stadium.[6] During his early years as a priest, Hengsbach had already provided pastoral care to the miners’ families who had migrated from Poland, and had learned to speak Polish for this reason. Over the course of time, this proximity to Polish immigrants led to the development of a close relationship between the diocese of Essen and the Polish archdiocese of Katowice, which after Hengsbach’s death was even formally sealed by a partnership treaty between the two dioceses.[7] This in turn led to friendly relations between the Ruhr bishop and the Pope from Poland,[8] who visited the bishop in Essen shortly before he was elected Pontifex, when he was still a cardinal and archbishop of Kraków.[9] A year after the Pope held mass in the Park Stadium, John Paul II raised Hengsbach, then already 77, to the rank of cardinal.