A Boy from Wadowice
Karol Józef Wojtyła was born on 18 May 1920 in Wadowice, a small town in southern Poland near Kraków. He was the third and youngest child of Karol Wojtyła senior, a non-commissioned officer in the Polish army, and Emilia Kaczorowska, a schoolteacher of Lithuanian descent.
Grief arrived early. His mother died of kidney failure and congenital heart disease in 1929, when Karol was eight years old. His elder brother Edmund, a doctor, died of scarlet fever in 1932. His father, the only family he had left, died in 1941. By the time Karol was twenty-one, he was alone.
Scholar, Worker, Priest
Wojtyła was an outstanding student. He studied Polish philology at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków from 1938. Then Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939. The university was shut down. Jewish neighbours were rounded up. The world Wojtyła had known disappeared.
To avoid forced deportation to Germany, he was required to work. He spent four years in a limestone quarry and then in a chemical factory, carrying stones and mixing solvents by hand. He also wrote poetry and acted in underground theatre during the occupation. He started clandestine study for the priesthood in 1942 at the underground seminary run by the Archbishop of Kraków, Cardinal Adam Stefan Sapieha.
He was ordained a priest on 1 November 1946 in Kraków. He was twenty-six.
Archbishop and Cardinal
Wojtyła rose quickly. He earned doctorates in Rome and Kraków, taught ethics at the Catholic University of Lublin, and became known as a rigorous philosophical thinker. He was appointed auxiliary bishop of Kraków in 1958, Archbishop of Kraków in 1964, and Cardinal in 1967 by Pope Paul VI.
At the Second Vatican Council, held in Rome between 1962 and 1965, he played an active and significant role. He contributed to Gaudium et Spes, the pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world, which addressed human dignity, conscience, and the relationship between the Church and contemporary society.
The Conclave of 1978
1978 was the year of three popes. Paul VI died in August. His successor, John Paul I, died after just thirty-three days in office. In October, 111 cardinals gathered in the Sistine Chapel to choose again.
On 16 October 1978, after eight ballots over two days, Cardinal Karol Wojtyła was elected Pope. He was fifty-eight years old, the first non-Italian pope since Adrian VI in 1522, and the first Polish pope in the history of the Catholic Church. He took the name John Paul II in honour of his two immediate predecessors.
When he appeared on the balcony of St. Peter's Basilica, he broke with tradition and spoke directly to the crowd in Italian, apologising for his accent and asking the people of Rome to correct him if he made mistakes. The crowd laughed. Something had changed.
Return to Poland
In June 1979, less than a year after his election, John Paul II returned to Poland for nine days. It was the first visit by a pope to a communist country. Crowds of a million or more gathered wherever he went. The Polish communist government had tried to prevent the visit and failed.
Lech Walesa, who would later found Solidarity and become president of Poland, said the visit gave the Polish people the courage to organise. Mikhail Gorbachev, who later oversaw the collapse of the Soviet Union, said that what happened in Poland could not have happened without John Paul II. The pope said nothing directly political. He said: Do not be afraid. It was enough.
The Assassination Attempt
On 13 May 1981, in St. Peter's Square during a Wednesday general audience, a Turkish gunman named Mehmet Ali Ağca shot John Paul II twice. The bullets struck his abdomen, right arm, and left hand. He lost nearly three quarters of his blood. He survived.
He recovered over several months and later visited Ağca in prison, where the two men spoke privately for twenty minutes. John Paul II publicly forgave him. He had the bullets removed and sent to the shrine of Our Lady of Fatima in Portugal, where they were incorporated into the crown of the statue of the Virgin. He believed his survival was a miracle. The shooting had happened on 13 May, the exact anniversary of the first Fatima apparition.
A Global Pontificate
John Paul II travelled more than any pope before him. He visited 129 countries and covered over 1.1 million kilometres. He launched the World Youth Days, gatherings of young Catholics that drew millions: Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Denver, Manila, Paris, Rome, Toronto, and beyond.
He canonised 1,338 saints during his pontificate, more than all previous popes combined. He beatified 1,340 people. He met with Fidel Castro, Yasser Arafat, and Mikhail Gorbachev. He prayed in a synagogue in Rome, visited a mosque in Damascus, and knelt at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. He addressed the United Nations twice, in 1979 and 1995.
His 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus addressed the fall of communism and the limits of both capitalism and totalitarianism. It is still cited by economists and political thinkers today.
The Long Decline
From the early 1990s, John Paul II showed signs of Parkinson's disease. He did not confirm the diagnosis publicly until 2003, but the tremor in his hand was visible from at least 1991. He continued working. He continued travelling. He was not a man who retreated.
His last public appearance was on Easter Sunday, 27 March 2005, when he appeared at the window of his study and tried to speak to the crowd below. He could not produce a sound. He made the sign of the cross and withdrew.
He died on 2 April 2005, at 9:37 in the evening, in his private apartments in the Vatican. He was eighty-four years old. His pontificate had lasted twenty-six years and five months, the third longest in history.
After Death
An estimated four to five million people came to Rome in the days that followed. The queue to view his body in St. Peter's Basilica stretched for up to twenty-four hours. Hundreds of heads of state attended his funeral. In St. Peter's Square, the crowd spontaneously chanted: Santo Subito. Make him a saint immediately.
He was beatified by Pope Benedict XVI on 1 May 2011. He was canonised on 27 April 2014 by Pope Francis, together with Pope John XXIII.
His feast day is 22 October, the anniversary of the beginning of his pontificate.
Sources
Wikipedia: Pope John Paul II,
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_John_Paul_II
The Holy See: john-paul-ii,
vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en.html
Wikimedia Commons: All images used under public domain and Creative Commons licences
