Audio of Newt's interview with Archbishop Timothy Dolan

Link to audio and transcript.

A section of the interview that took place on April 28:

FATHER DWYER: The whole world is now waiting, for Sunday, May 1st—Divine Mercy Sunday, the beatification of Pope John Paul II. I was fascinated, when we were planning for the show, Speaker Gingrich, I said, “let’s call the Speaker and see if he’d come on,” because I found the video that you and Callista did, “Nine Days that Changed the World,” to be one of the more moving, accurate, uplifting documentaries on John Paul that I’ve seen. You took his first visit back to Poland in June of 1979 and literally—it’s not just you—but everyone from Mikhail Gorbachev to Henry Kissinger, to now you and Callista, have pretty much documented the fact that this is eventually what brought down the Iron Curtain. Tell us about the genesis of the project.

SPEAKER NEWT GINGRICH: What started this was Callista and I were working with Dave Bossie and Citizens United and we were doing a film on Ronald Reagan called “Rendezvous with Destiny” and went to Gdansk, Poland to interview Lech Walesa, an electrician that became head of Solidarity and then president of a free Poland. Then we went down to Prague to interview Václav Havel who is a poet, playwright and spent three years in prison fighting for freedom and ended up as the first president of the free Czechoslovakia. We asked each of them, “What was the decisive moment in the defeat of the Soviet Empire?” To our surprise, because remember we’re making a movie on Reagan, we’re expecting a great Reagan anecdote, they both say, without question it’s June 2nd, 1979. It’s the arrival of Pope John Paul II back home in his native Poland for a nine-day pilgrimage. He spiritually re-catechized the entire country. The sense of evangelization went out, the nation talked to itself, looked at itself, and said, we’re Polish, we’re Catholic. We’re not communist. We’re not atheist.

From that point on for 10 years they struggled and 10 years and two days later, on June 4th, 1989, the first free election of the Soviet Empire is held in Poland. The Berlin Wall falls five months later.