John Paul II

Roman Catholic pope (1978-2005)

• Born: May 18, 1920
• Birthplace: Wadowice, Poland
• Died: April 2, 2005
• Place of death: Vatican City

John Paul II was the 264th pope of the Roman Catholic Church and the first non-Italian pope since 1522. The first Slav to be named pope, the first pope from a communist country, and the youngest pope in modern times, John Paul II had a history of political involvement that predated even his religious vocation, having fought attempts first by Nazi Germany and later by the Soviet Union to weaken the power of the Church in Poland. During his reign as pope, he sought to return the Church to some of the traditional values that he believed were lost after the Second Vatican Council.

Early Life

Karol Józef Wojtyła, the future Pope John Paul II, was born on May 18, 1920, to Karol and Emilia (Kaczorowska) Wojtyła in Wadowice, a small town near Kraków, Poland. “Lolek,” as he was affectionately known, was delivered by a midwife in the Wojtyła family apartment, a three-room residence on the second floor of a house across from the village church. The Wojtyła family originally came from Czaniec, a village near Andrychow. Wojtyła’s paternal grandfather, Maciej, was a tailor who had settled in Biala Krakowska. Wojtyła’s father, Karol, married in Wadowice and decided to settle there. The elder Karol Wojtyła had been a staff officer with the Twelfth Infantry Regiment of the Polish Army. While Wojtyła was growing up in Wadowice, his father was retired, and the family subsisted on a meager army pension.

Wojtyła learned to speak German from his mother, Emilia, whose family had come from Silesia. Emilia died from a heart ailment when Wojtyła was nine years old. Four years later, Edmund, Wojtyła’s only surviving sibling, a doctor, died after contracting scarlet fever from a patient. This left Wojtyła and his father, a stern but warmhearted man, alone. While Wojtyła went to high school, his father took care of the apartment. As time went on, Wojtyła’s father became all but a recluse, with only his son to keep him company. As a result, the two became very close.

The younger Wojtyła was devout even as a boy, stopping each morning at the church to pray. His gifts for the humanities were evident early; he excelled in religion, Latin, Greek, German, and philosophy. Even in grammar school, he demonstrated a fierce enthusiasm for the theater and frequented the cinema. He also wrote poetry and took second prize reciting poems at a local speech festival. He loved the outdoors, especially enjoying skiing, hiking, and kayaking. Accounts of his youth reveal an irrepressible personality, a young man with a prankish disregard for authority, and a skilled raconteur. Naturally, he was likable, and he was popular even with the young girls. Like most of his teenage friends, he had a steady girlfriend. Wojtyła was graduated from high school with distinction in 1938, and he and his father moved to Debniki Krakowskie, a district of Kraków. There they lived in a cramped, dark, cold basement apartment, which was nicknamed the Catacombs.

Life’s Work

Wojtyła was enrolled at Kraków’s Jagellonian University to study for a degree in Polish literature. Always enthusiastic and energetic, the young student joined the Polish Language Society, a group of students who wrote poetry, held literary meetings, and went to the theater. He also joined the newly established Theatrical Fraternity. After completing his first year of college, Wojtyła spent the summer of 1939 in military training, which was compulsory for all Polish young men. Before the fall term began, the Blitzkrieg offensive against Poland was launched. On September 1, 1939, Kraków, along with other Polish cities, was bombed by Adolf Hitler’s army. While most of the citizens of Kraków sought cover from the bombing, Wojtyła spent that morning assisting the vicar in saying Mass. When the city fell to German forces a few days later, one of the first things that the occupying army did was to close the university and to make it illegal for Poles to seek a university education. The handful of teachers who had managed to avoid arrest were to establish an underground university by the end of the year. Wojtyła was immediately enrolled as a second-year literature student in one of the secret cells.

To support himself and his father, and to acquire the Arbeitskarte needed to avoid arrest by the Nazis, Wojtyła was able to secure a job at a quarry, breaking and hauling rocks. Later he worked at a water purification factory. During this time, he continued writing poetry, kept up his secret university studies, and even began studying French with a family friend. Because the Polish theater was outlawed, Wojtyła and his friends started an underground theater. Later, Wojtyła joined the clandestine Rhapsody Theater as an actor and coproducer. This small group was able during the war to give more than twenty performances of plays by Polish writers. Most of these plays were presented in the apartments of friends. One play was performed immediately after a Gestapo search. Wojtyła’s daring extended beyond the theater, and he was eventually blacklisted by the Gestapo for providing many Jews with new identities and hiding places.

Wojtyła’s father died of a stroke in the spring of 1941. Several months later, Wojtyła was enrolled at the clandestine theological seminary in Kraków. He distinguished himself academically at the seminary, where he finally moved in 1944, for safety, along with the other seminarians, under the orders of the archbishop. The end of World War II brought little in the way of political reprieve for the Poles, for Poland was immediately occupied by Joseph Stalin’s Soviet army. The schools, however, were no longer outlawed, and Wojtyła was permitted to complete his education.

Karol Wojtyła was ordained on November 1, 1946, by the metropolitan archbishop of Kraków, Prince Adam Sapieha. Wojtyła was sent to Rome to study at the Pontifical College Angelicum under the Dominican Fathers. There he resided at the Belgian College, where he was able to further refine his knowledge of the French language. His studies first focused on the Spanish mystic Saint John of the Cross; later, he would concentrate on Saint Thomas Aquinas. He became a doctor of divinity, magna cum laude, on April 30, 1948.

After his return from Rome, Wojtyła was made pastor of a poverty-stricken parish in the small country village of Niegowic. He soon became very popular with the young people there. He organized a theater group and took many of the youth with him on hiking and kayaking trips. In less than a year, much to the disappointment of Niegowic’s inhabitants, Wojtyła was transferred to the important parish of St. Florian, in Kraków. Again, he gave much of his time to the youth of the parish, risking arrest by the Soviet-backed government, which had its own ideas about the groups to which Polish young people should belong. At this time, Wojtyła was also lecturing on Thomistic philosophy and Max Scheler at the Catholic University of Lublin.

In 1958, he was consecrated bishop of Ombi and auxiliary bishop of Kraków. He officially became archbishop in 1964 and was elevated to the cardinalate by Pope Paul VI on May 29, 1967. Throughout his career, Wojtyła was a chief advocate of greater concessions by the communistic state toward the people. His main concerns were human rights, better education, improved access to the mass media, the abolition of censorship and atheistic propaganda, and religious freedom, including freedom of religious instruction.

On October 16, 1978, Wojtyła was chosen pope of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the state of the Vatican City by the Conclave of Cardinals. He chose the name John Paul after his immediate predecessor and began his reign by declining coronation, preferring to be installed simply during a pontifical Mass in St. Peter’s Square on October 22, 1978.

In June, 1979, Pope John Paul II landed at Warsaw airport for a historic visit to his homeland of Poland. His trip stimulated processes of reform that almost certainly contributed to the fall of the communist regime in Poland ten years later. Relations with the communist leaders of Poland were quite tense during the visit. Two years later, in May of 1981, John Paul survived an assassination attempt by a Turkish terrorist in Vatican City’s St. Peter’s Square.

One of the many ways in which John Paul II distinguished himself as pope was through his travels, becoming known as the Pilgrim Pope. He went to Latin America, Ireland (becoming the first pope ever to go there), the United States, the Philippines, Brazil, and some one hundred other countries, including his beloved homeland. During his first American tour, he addressed the United Nations on world problems, especially peace and disarmament. He confronted Church leaders and dissidents in the United States, listening patiently to their complaints. He admonished the Catholics in the United States to beware of excesses and wished for a more equitable share of wealth in the world. Throughout his American tours, he stressed the sanctity of unborn life, the Church’s opposition to artificial means of birth control, and the sacredness of the marriage bond. (His appeal for an end to the death penalty is credited with saving the life of a convicted murderer whose sentence was commuted following John Paul’s visit to the United States in January, 1999.) The pope called for Christian unity but did not want to dilute the Church’s essential doctrine or compromise essential practices. When Anglican leaders expressed an interest in intercommunion, John Paul refused, saying that fundamental differences needed to be resolved first. His last “apostolic voyage” was a pilgrimage to Lourdes, France, on August 14, 2004, to celebrate the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception, promulgated 150 years earlier.

With the fall of communism in the early 1990’s, John Paul II focused on different threats to the dignity of humankind in the form of Western commercialism, liberalism, materialism, secularism, despotism, hedonism, and what he called “the culture of death.” He increased his efforts to confront those who called for relaxation of Catholic norms regarding the use of birth control, the practices of abortion and euthanasia, priestly celibacy, and the ordination of women. To impose greater order in the Church, John Paul II issued a new Catechism of the Catholic Church in 1993. He also issued many encyclicals, including Veritatis Splendor (1993) and Evangelium Vitae (1995). Evangelium Vitae (gospel of life) seeks to clarify Catholic Church teachings concerning abortion, euthanasia, and the death penalty. In the encyclical John Paul stresses that respecting the dignity of the person calls for the respect of life as a gift from God. At the same time, he improved relations with other religions, particularly Judaism and Islam. He won the admiration of many Jews, in fact, by visiting the Israeli national Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, in 2000, and the Western Wall in Jerusalem. He became the first pope to go into an Islamic mosque and pray there, which he did in the Umayyad Mosque of Damascus, Syria, on May 6, 2001. By kissing the Qur՚ān during the visit he won the admiration of many Muslims as well. On June 29, 2004, he met with his counterpart in the Eastern Orthodox Church, Bartholomew I, patriarch of Constantinople, in the hope of healing the schism between the two branches of Christianity.

At the same time, he considered international politics part of his concern, sometimes issuing statements that were at odds with the policies of powerful states and blocs. For instance, he criticized such dictators as Chile’s Augusto Pinochet Ugarte and the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos, endorsed the Jubilee 2000 campaign to provide debt relief to African countries, and in 2003 denounced the United States-led invasion of Iraq.

John Paul II was an vigorous sportsman until the 1981 assassination attempt left him gravely wounded. He also was an author, writing eleven books of theology and philosophy, seven plays, and three books of poetry. His official writings as pope fill more than 150 volumes. Furthermore, he remained open-minded about many intellectual matters, for instance reaffirming the Church’s openness to the theory of evolution (although he rejected a materialistic explanation for the human soul).

Diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1992, his health slowly deteriorated to the point that in the twenty-first century he became extremely frail, his speech slurred, and his hearing impaired. Some observers worried that he might become completely incapacitated or even comatose, and there was speculation that he might abdicate. However, he did not, dying on April 2, 2005, in Vatican City as St. Peter’s Square was thronged with people holding a vigil in his honor. Millions more came to file past as his body lay in state and for his funeral, attended by heads of states and religions from the world over. John Paul II was interred in the Tomb of the Popes beneath St. Peter’s Basilica.

He was succeeded on May 9, 2005, by Pope Benedict XVI. As a tribute to John Paul II and to satisfy popular sentiment, his successor made an exception to the normal five-year waiting period before a person can be considered for beatification. Almost immediately upon his death Catholics began to refer to him as John Paul the Great.

Significance

John Paul II’s enrollment at the secret university, his assistance to Kraków’s Jewish population, and his affirmation of faith in the face of an atheistic government were the direct result of the environment in which he was reared, as were his traditionalist views concerning morality. As pope, John Paul asked for less permissiveness in faith and issued a “universal call to holiness.” His reign reflected a return to conservatism after the liberalism of the Second Vatican Council. In contrast to Paul VI, who laicized two thousand priests each year, John Paul II reaffirmed the permanence of priestly vows and refused to dispense a single priest. Despite the growing demand in the United States and elsewhere for the admittance of women, the pope stood firm on the side of an all-male priesthood.

John Paul II had his share of critics, mostly for his conservatism, especially in relation to women and homosexuality, and for his recentralization of power in the Vatican. He also failed to respond quickly to the sexual abuse crisis of the early twenty-first century, to the consternation of many American Catholics.

John Paul II was, paradoxically, a sociopolitical liberal. He believed strongly in the inalienable rights of the individual and the peaceful coexistence of church and state. He was steadfastly opposed to communism indeed, he is credited with precipitating the fall of communism in Eastern Europe but he was as forceful in his objection to the morally corrupting consumerism of unrestrained capitalism. A savvy diplomat and sophisticated intellectual, he could hold his own in debate with Marxists and laissez-faire capitalists alike. For these reasons, he was respected by both friends and enemies. He was in constant contact, often physical, with his congregation and traveled to more countries than any pope before him, thus expanding his visibility and modernizing his position. He also canonized far more saints, 1,340, than any other pope. His intellect and charisma made the Catholic Church much stronger and more respected than it has ever been in modern times.

Bibliography

Allegri, Renzo. John Paul II: A Life of Grace. Cincinnati, Ohio: Servant Books, 2004. A brief biography focusing on the forces that shaped John Paul II’s route to the papacy.

Blazynski, George. Pope John Paul II. New York: Dell, 1979. Although its prose suggests that the author’s first language is not English, this biography is packed with accurate information on the pope’s early life. Blazynski provides the reader with the social and political backdrop of John Paul’s Poland. Suitable for a general audience.

Cornwell, John. The Pontiff in Winter: Triumph and Conflict in the Reign of John Paul II. New York: Doubleday, 2004. Cornwell discusses John Paul II’s attempts to reach out to other faiths and to apologize for the Church’s past injustices as well as criticisms of him for his views on such controversial issues as the role of women and homosexuals. A portrait emerges of a complex man, whose intellect was guided by a mystical view of history. With photographs.

Gronowicz, Antoni. God’s Broker: The Life of Pope John Paul II. New York: Richardson and Snyder, 1984. Gronowicz skillfully weaves a portrait of John Paul from interviews with the pope and those who knew him well. This book makes excellent reading, offering humorous and dramatic insight into the life and mind of the pope. Illustrated and indexed.

John Paul II. Rise, Let Us Be on Our Way. New York: Warner Books, 2004. Part memoir, part spiritual brief, John Paul reflects on the source of his vocation and his life as a bishop, especially his intellectual and pastoral responsibilities. The book is meant to be a sequel to Gift and Mystery (1996), which is about the early years of his priesthood.

Korn, Frank. From Peter to John Paul II: An Informal Study of the Papacy. Canfield, Ohio: Alba Books, 1980. Written by a Fulbright scholar, this volume, as its title suggests, covers more than two thousand years of papal history, up to John Paul II. It is illustrated and contains a useful chronological listing of all the popes.

O’Connor, Garry. Universal Father: A Life of John Paul II. New York: Bloomsbury, 2005. O’Connor considers John Paul II among the most politically influential popes of all time, and this biography traces his lifelong quest to understand good and evil, a quest that guided his political decisions. It includes samples of his poetry, plays, and theological works, as well as a generous bibliography and photographs.