Pope John Paul II

• 1. Introduction

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  Pope John Paul II was born Karol Józef Wojtyła on the 18th of May 1920, in the small Polish town of Wadowice. By the time he died on the 2nd of April 2005, an estimated four million people had gathered in and around Vatican City to mourn him. Four kings, five queens, at least 70 presidents and prime ministers, and more than 14 leaders of other religions attended the Requiem Mass, making it the largest gathering of heads of state the world had ever seen to that point. But the man who drew those crowds was not born a pontiff. He was born the youngest child of a schoolteacher mother who died when he was eight, and an Austro-Hungarian non-commissioned officer father who died when Karol was 20. By the time he was a young adult, he had already lost every person he loved. His ascent from a grieving orphan laboring in a wartime limestone quarry to the most traveled world leader in history is one of the 20th century's most extraordinary stories. What did a boy who played goalkeeper for Jewish football teams in a small Polish town become? How did a man who wanted to study Polish philology end up reshaping the geopolitics of Eastern Europe? And how did an actor, a poet, and a manual laborer become the 264th pope, the first non-Italian to hold that office in 455 years?

• 2. A Youth Forged by Loss

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  Emilia Kaczorowska, Karol Wojtyła's mother, died of a heart attack and kidney failure in 1929 when her youngest son was eight years old. His elder sister Olga had already died before his birth. His brother Edmund, nicknamed Mundek, was 13 years his senior and had become a physician. Edmund's work eventually killed him: he contracted scarlet fever from a patient and died, a loss that affected Wojtyła deeply. These bereavements shaped the boy who remained. At elementary school in Wadowice, at least a third of his classmates were Jewish, and he played goalkeeper in football matches organised between Catholic and Jewish teams, sometimes choosing to play on the Jewish side. He grew close to a girl named Ginka Beer, described by those who knew her as a Jewish beauty, slender, and a superb actress. His world in Wadowice was intimate, multilingual, and multiconfessional before it became brutal. In 1938, Wojtyła and his father left Wadowice for Kraków, where he enrolled at the Jagiellonian University to study philology. When Nazi Germany occupied Poland in 1939 and closed the university, Wojtyła's options narrowed sharply. From 1940 to 1944 he worked as a messenger for a restaurant, a manual labourer in a limestone quarry, and then a worker at the Solvay chemical factory, doing what was necessary to avoid deportation. That year, 1940, also brought two serious accidents: a fractured skull after being struck by a tram, and a permanent stoop and one shoulder higher than the other after being hit by a lorry in the quarry. His father died of a heart attack in 1941. Reflecting on those years nearly four decades later, Wojtyła said: "I was not at my mother's death, I was not at my brother's death, I was not at my father's death. At twenty, I had already lost all the people I loved."

• 3. War, Survival, and Vocation

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  In February 1940, Wojtyła met Jan Tyranowski, who introduced him to Carmelite spirituality and the "Living Rosary" youth groups. That encounter began to tilt him away from literature and toward theology. On the 6th of August 1944, a day remembered in Kraków as "Black Sunday", the Gestapo swept through the city rounding up young men to suppress a potential uprising similar to the one then erupting in Warsaw. More than 8,000 men and boys were taken. Wojtyła escaped by hiding in the basement of his uncle's house at 10 Tyniecka Street while German troops searched the floors above. He then made his way to the Archbishop's residence, where he remained in hiding until the Germans departed the city. The night of the 17th of January 1945, the Germans fled Kraków, and the students reclaimed the ruined seminary. Among the first tasks Wojtyła volunteered for was clearing frozen excrement from the toilets. On that same bitter return, he encountered a 14-year-old Jewish refugee named Edith Zierer, who had escaped a Nazi labour camp in Częstochowa and collapsed on a railway platform. Wojtyła carried her to a train and rode with her to Kraków. She later said he had saved her life that day. His response to another family's wartime plea reveals something equally striking about his character. When a Jewish family asked him to baptise their son, Stanley Berger, whose biological parents had been killed in the Holocaust and who had been sheltered by a Christian family, Wojtyła refused. He insisted the boy should be raised in the Jewish faith of his birth parents and did everything he could to arrange for Berger to leave Poland and be raised by Jewish relatives in the United States. In October 1942, while the war was still raging, Wojtyła had knocked on the door of the Bishop's Palace in Kraków and asked to study for the priesthood. He began courses in a clandestine underground seminary run by Archbishop Adam Stefan Sapieha. He was ordained a priest on All Saints' Day, the 1st of November 1946.

• 4. The Polymath Priest

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  Cardinal Adam Stefan Sapieha sent the newly ordained Wojtyła directly to Rome's Pontifical International Athenaeum Angelicum to study under the French Dominican friar Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, beginning on the 26th of November 1946. Wojtyła passed his doctoral exam on the 14th of June 1948 and successfully defended his thesis on the doctrine of faith in St. John of the Cross on the 19th of June 1948. The Angelicum still preserves his original typewritten copy. A fellow student at the Angelicum, the future Austrian cardinal Alfons Stickler, recalled that in 1947 Wojtyła visited Padre Pio, who heard his confession and told him that one day he would ascend to "the highest post in the Church". Stickler added that Wojtyła believed the prophecy was fulfilled when he became a cardinal. Back in Poland, Wojtyła built a world around him that was unusually alive. He gathered a group of about 20 young people who began calling themselves Rodzinka, Polish for "little family". They met for prayer, philosophical discussion, and service to the blind and the sick. The group eventually grew to around 200 participants, and their activities expanded to annual skiing and kayaking trips. In Stalinist-era Poland, priests were forbidden to travel with groups of students, so Wojtyła asked his companions to call him "Wujek", Polish for "Uncle", to keep outsiders from identifying him as a priest. The nickname stayed with him for the rest of his life. His intellectual output during this period was prodigious. He published a theological book in 1960 titled Love and Responsibility, defending traditional church teachings on marriage from a new philosophical standpoint. He wrote poetry and plays under two pseudonyms, Andrzej Jawień and Stanisław Andrzej Gruda, to separate his literary work from his religious writings and to ensure that the literary works were judged on their own merits. He also developed a theological approach he called phenomenological Thomism, combining traditional Thomism with personalism derived from phenomenology, and in 1961 he coined the term "Thomistic Personalism". He had learned as many as 15 languages by this point in his life, nine of which he would use extensively as pope.

• 5. The Conclave of 1978

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  Pope John Paul I, elected in August 1978, served only 33 days before dying. The conclave that followed, beginning on the 14th of October 1978, was split between two strong candidates: Cardinal Giuseppe Siri, the conservative Archbishop of Genoa, and Cardinal Giovanni Benelli, the liberal Archbishop of Florence and a close friend of the late pope. Benelli came within nine votes of success in the early ballots. The Archbishop of Milan, Giovanni Colombo, was floated as a compromise among Italian electors, but he publicly announced he would decline if elected. Cardinal Franz König, Archbishop of Vienna, put forward Wojtyła's name as another compromise candidate. Wojtyła won on the eighth ballot on the third day, the 16th of October. He accepted his election with the words: "With obedience in faith to Christ, my Lord, and with trust in the Mother of Christ and the Church, in spite of great difficulties, I accept." When the new pontiff appeared on the balcony of St. Peter's Basilica, he broke with tradition and addressed the crowd directly: "I am speaking to you in your , no, our Italian language. If I make a mistake, please me." He was the 264th pope, the first non-Italian in 455 years, and at only 58 years of age, the youngest pope since Pius IX in 1846. He adopted the name John Paul II in tribute to his predecessor, also honouring the late popes Paul VI and John XXIII. There had been talk that he might choose the name Stanislaus after the Polish saint, but the cardinals persuaded him it was not a Roman name.

• 6. Soft Power and the Iron Curtain

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  When John Paul II travelled to Poland in June 1979, his first trip as pope to his homeland, the Communist Polish United Workers' Party faced a dilemma they could not resolve. They intended the visit to demonstrate that the Pope's Polishness did not diminish their authority. But if his presence sparked unrest, they risked a crackdown that would be blamed on the Pope. The crowds that came to see him removed both options. The account of what happened has been characterised in terms of what the political scientist Joseph Nye called soft power: the pope headed the one institution that stood for the polar opposite of the Communist way of life. His message was to be good, not to compromise, to stick together, and to be fearless. Millions shouted in response: "We want God! We want God! We want God!" This first papal trip to Poland contributed directly to the formation of the Solidarity movement in 1980, which later played a major role in the end of socialist rule. Lech Wałęsa, the founder of Solidarity and Poland's first post-Communist president, credited John Paul II with giving Poles the courage to demand change. Wałęsa said: "Before his pontificate, the world was divided into blocs. Nobody knew how to get rid of Communism. In Warsaw, in 1979, he simply said: 'Do not be afraid'." In December 1989, John Paul II met the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev at the Vatican, and each expressed respect and admiration for the other. Gorbachev later said: "The collapse of the Iron Curtain would have been impossible without John Paul II." In 1984, the Ronald Reagan administration opened diplomatic relations with the Vatican for the first time since 1870. Reagan and John Paul II had earlier shared, during a meeting at the Vatican in 1982, what their correspondence described as a mutual conviction that God had spared their lives from assassination for the purpose of defeating the communist empire. On the 4th of June 2004, U.S. President George W. Bush presented John Paul II with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian honour, at the Apostolic Palace.

• 7. Bridges Across Faiths

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  On the 13th of May 1981, as John Paul II entered St. Peter's Square to address an audience, he was shot and critically wounded by Mehmet Ali Ağca, a Turkish gunman and member of the militant fascist group Grey Wolves. Ağca used a Browning 9 mm semi-automatic pistol, shooting the Pope in the abdomen and perforating his colon and small intestine multiple times. John Paul II lost nearly three-quarters of his blood and underwent five hours of surgery. He later said he believed the Virgin Mary had kept him alive, noting that the shooting occurred on the anniversary of the apparition at Fátima, Portugal. Two days after Christmas in 1983, John Paul II visited Ağca in prison. They spoke privately for about twenty minutes, and the Pope said afterward: "What we talked about will have to remain a secret between him and me. I spoke to him as a brother whom I have pardoned and who has my complete trust." This instinct for crossing divides ran through every aspect of his pontificate. On the 6th of May 2001, he became the first Catholic pope to enter and pray in a mosque, the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, Syria, removing his shoes respectfully before entering the former Byzantine-era Christian church dedicated to John the Baptist. He told those gathered: "For all the times that Muslims and Christians have offended one another, we need to seek forgiveness from the Almighty and to offer each other forgiveness." In March 2000, while visiting Jerusalem, he became the first pope in history to visit and pray at the Western Wall. Relations between Catholicism and Judaism improved dramatically across his pontificate, and in April 2005, shortly after his death, the Israeli government created a commission to honour his legacy. In 1985, he visited Togo, where 60 per cent of the population espouses animist beliefs, and spoke directly about the common ground between animism and Christianity. The 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, visited John Paul II eight times. As Archbishop of Kraków, long before the Dalai Lama was a world-famous figure, Wojtyła had held special Masses to pray for the Tibetan people's non-violent struggle for freedom from Maoist China.

• 8. Death, Mourning, and Sainthood

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  John Paul II was hospitalised with breathing problems on the 1st of February 2005, left the hospital on the 10th, then was hospitalised again and underwent a tracheotomy. On the 31st of March 2005, following a urinary tract infection, he developed septic shock but chose not to return to hospital, wishing instead to die in the Vatican. His closest personal friend, the philosopher Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, visited him at his bedside the day before he died. Tens of thousands held vigil in St. Peter's Square and the surrounding streets through the night, and upon hearing of this, the dying pope was said to have stated: "I have searched for you, and now you have come to me, and I thank you." On Saturday, the 2nd of April 2005, at approximately 15:30 CEST, he spoke his final words in Polish to his aides: "Pozwólcie mi odejść do domu Ojca" , "Allow me to depart to the house of the Father." He died that evening at 21:37 CEST of heart failure from septic shock. He had no close family by the time of his death. His secretary, Cardinal Stanisław Dziwisz, later disclosed that he had not burned the pontiff's personal notes, despite that being part of the will. John Paul II was beatified by Pope Benedict XVI on the 1st of May 2011, Divine Mercy Sunday, and canonised by Pope Francis on the 27th of April 2014, alongside Pope John XXIII. The remains of John Paul II were moved from the grottoes under St. Peter's Basilica to the Chapel of St. Sebastian within the main basilica upon his beatification. During his pontificate, he had beatified 1,344 people and canonised 483 saints, more than the combined total of his predecessors over the preceding five centuries. He had also recorded music albums, including one titled Abba Pater in 1999, and led nine World Youth Days whose total attendance ran into the tens of millions. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, which he ordered published on the 11th of October 1992, remains the first universal catechism issued since the Roman Catechism, a document that continues to define Catholic teaching worldwide.