Ioannes Paulus PP. II (1978-2005)

THE HISTORY OF JOHN PAUL II

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John Paul II (Latin: Ioannes Paulus PP. II, Italian: Giovanni Paolo II), sometimes called Blessed John Paul or John Paul the Great, born Karol Józef Wojtyla (Polish: 18 May 1920 – 2 April 2005), reigned as Pope of the Catholic Church from 1978 until his death in 2005. He was the second-longest serving Pope in history and the first non-Italian since 1523.

A very charismatic figure, John Paul II was acclaimed as one of the most influential leaders of the 20th century. He is credited with helping to end Communist rule in his native Poland and eventually all of Europe.[1] John Paul II significantly improved the Catholic Church's relations with Judaism, Islam, the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the Anglican Communion. Though criticised by progressives for upholding the Church's teachings against artificial contraception and the ordination of women, and by traditionalists for his support of the Church's Second Vatican Council and its reform, he was also widely praised for his firm, orthodox Catholic stances.

He was one of the most-travelled world leaders in history, visiting 129 countries during his pontificate. As part of his special emphasis on the universal call to holiness, he beatified 1,340 people and canonised 483 saints, more than the combined tally of his predecessors during the preceding five centuries. He named most of the present College of Cardinals, consecrated or co-consecrated a large number of the world's past and current bishops, and ordained many priests.[2] A key goal of his papacy was to transform and reposition the Catholic Church. His wish was "to place his Church at the heart of a new religious alliance that would bring together Jews, Muslims and Christians in a great [religious] armada".[3][4] On 19 December 2009, John Paul II was proclaimed venerable by his successor Pope Benedict XVI and was beatified on 1 May 2011.

Karol Józef Wojtyla was born in the Polish town of Wadowice[5][6] and was the youngest of three children of Karol Wojtyla (1879-1941), an ethnic Pole,[7] and Emilia Kaczorowska (1884-1929), who is described as being of Lithuanian[7] ancestry. His maternal grandmother's maiden surname was Scholz therefore Wojtyla could have had distant German ancestry.[8] Emilia died in 1929,[9] when Wojtyla was eight years old.[10] His elder sister Olga had died before his birth, but he was close to his brother Edmund, nicknamed Mundek, who was 13 years his senior. Edmund's work as a physician eventually led to his death from scarlet fever, which affected Wojtyla.[7][10]

As a boy, Wojtyla was athletic, often playing football as goalkeeper.[11] During his childhood, Wojtyla had contact with Wadowice's large Jewish community. School football games were often organised between teams of Jews and Catholics, and Wojtyla often played on the Jewish side.[7][11] "I remember that at least a third of my classmates at elementary school in Wadowice were Jews. At elementary school there were fewer. With some I was on very friendly terms. And what struck me about some of them was their Polish patriotism." [12] Wojtyla's first, and possibly only, love affair was with a Jewish girl, Ginka Beer, who was described as "slender", "a superb actress" and "having stupendous dark eyes and jet black hair".[4] On 13 April 1929, Wojtyla's mother died in childbirth.[8]

In mid-1938, Wojtyla and his father left Wadowice and moved to Kraków, where he enrolled at Jagiellonian University. While studying such topics as philology and various languages, he worked as a volunteer librarian and was required to participate in compulsory military training in the Academic Legion, but he refused to fire a weapon. He performed with various theatrical groups and worked as a playwright.[13] During this time, his talent for language blossomed, and he learned as many as 12 foreign languages, nine of which he used extensively as Pope.[5]

In 1939, Nazi German occupation forces closed the university after invading Poland.[5] Able-bodied males were required to work, so from 1940 to 1944 Wojtyla variously worked as a messenger for a restaurant, a manual labourer in a limestone quarry and for the Solvay chemical factory, to avoid deportation to Germany.[6][13] His father, a non-commissioned officer in the Polish Army, died of a heart attack in 1941,[8] leaving Wojtyla as the immediate family's only surviving member.[7][9][14] "I was not at my mother's death, I was not at my brother's death, I was not at my father's death", he said, reflecting on these times of his life, nearly forty years later, "At twenty, I had already lost all the people I loved."[14]

After his father's death, he started thinking seriously about the priesthood.[15] In October 1942, while the war continued, he knocked on the door of the Bishop's Palace in Kraków and asked to study for the priesthood.[15] Soon after, he began courses in the clandestine underground seminary run by the Archbishop of Kraków, Adam Stefan Cardinal Sapieha. On 29 February 1944, Wojtyla was hit by a German truck. German Wehrmacht officers tended to him and sent him to a hospital. He spent two weeks there recovering from a severe concussion and a shoulder injury. It seemed to him that this accident and his survival was a confirmation of his vocation. On 6 August 1944 known as ‘Black Sunday’,[16] the Gestapo rounded up young men in Kraków to curtail the uprising, [16] similar to the recent uprising in Warsaw.[17][18] Wojtyla escaped by hiding in the basement of his uncle's house at 10 Tyniecka Street, while the German troops searched above.[15][17][18] More than eight thousand men and boys were taken that day, while Wojtyla escaped to the Archbishop's Palace,[15][16][17] where he remained until after the Germans had left.[7][15][17]

On the night of 17 January 1945, the Germans fled the city, and the students reclaimed the ruined seminary. Wojtyla and another seminarian volunteered for the task of clearing away piles of frozen excrement from the toilets.[19] Wojtyla also helped a 14-year-old Jewish refugee girl named Edith Zierer,[20] who had run away from a Nazi labour camp in Czestochowa.[20] Edith had collapsed on a railway platform, so Wojtyla carried her to a train and stayed with her throughout the journey to Kraków. Edith credits Wojtyla with saving her life that day.[21][22][23] B'nai B'rith and other authorities have said that Wojtyla helped protect many other Polish Jews from the Nazis. In Wojtyla's last book Memory and Identity he described the 12 years of the Nazi régime as 'bestiality',[24] quoting from Polish theologian and philosopher Konstanty Michalski.[25]

[edit]Priesthood

On finishing his studies at the seminary in Kraków, Wojtyla was ordained as a priest on All Saints' Day, 1 November 1946,[9] by the Archbishop of Kraków, Cardinal Sapieha.[6][26][27] He then studied theology in Rome, at the Pontifical International Athenaeum Angelicum, the future Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas Angelicum,[26][27] where he earned a licentiate and later a doctorate in sacred theology.[5] This doctorate, the first of two, was based on the Latin dissertation The Doctrine of Faith According to Saint John of the Cross.

He returned to Poland in the summer of 1945 with his first pastoral assignment in the village of Niegowic, fifteen miles from Kraków. He arrived at Niegowic at harvest time, where his first action was to kneel and kiss the ground.[28] This gesture, which he adapted from French saint Jean Marie Baptiste Vianney,[28] would become a ‘trademark’ action during his Papacy.

Pontifical International Athenaeum Angelicum in Rome

In March 1949, Wojtyla was transferred to the parish of Saint Florian in Kraków. He taught ethics at Jagiellonian University and subsequently at the Catholic University of Lublin. While teaching, he gathered a group of about 20 young people, who began to call themselves Rodzinka, the "little family". They met for prayer, philosophical discussion, and to help the blind and sick. The group eventually grew to approximately 200 participants, and their activities expanded to include annual skiing and kayaking trips.[29]

In 1954, he earned a second doctorate, in philosophy,[30] evaluating the feasibility of a Catholic ethic based on the ethical system of phenomenologist Max Scheler, a German philosopher who founded a broad philosophical movement which emphasised the study of conscious experience. However, the Communist authorities intervened to prevent him from receiving the degree until 1957.[27] Wojtyla developed a theological approach which combined traditional Catholic Thomism with the ideas of personalism, a philosophical approach deriving from phenomenology, which was popular among Catholic intellectuals in Kraków during Wojtyla's intellectual development. He translated Scheler's Formalism and the Ethics of Substantive Values.[31]

During this period, Wojtyla wrote a series of articles in Kraków's Catholic newspaper Tygodnik Powszechny ("Universal Weekly") dealing with contemporary church issues.[32] He focused on creating original literary work during his first dozen years as a priest. War, life under Communism, and his pastoral responsibilities all fed his poetry and plays. Wojtyla published his work under two pseudonyms – Andrzej Jawien and Stanislaw Andrzej Gruda[13][32] – to distinguish his literary from his religious writings, (under his own name) and also so that his literary works would be considered on their merits.[13][32] In 1960, Wojtyla published the influential theological book Love and Responsibility, a defence of traditional Church teachings on marriage from a new philosophical standpoint.[13][33]

Bishop and Cardinal

On 4 July 1958,[27] while Wojtyla was on a kayaking holiday in the lakes region of northern Poland, Pope Pius XII appointed him as the auxiliary bishop of Kraków. He was then summoned to Warsaw to meet the Primate of Poland, Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, who informed him of his appointment.[34][35] He agreed to serve as Auxiliary Bishop to Kraków's Archbishop Eugeniusz Baziak, and he was ordained to the Episcopate (as Titular Bishop of Ombi) on 28 September 1958. Baziak was the principal consecrator.

Then-Auxiliary Bishop Boleslaw Kominek (Titular Bishop of Sophene and Vaga; of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Wroclaw and future Cardinal Archbishop of Wroclaw) and then-Auxiliary Bishop Franciszek Jop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Sandomierz (Titular Bishop of Daulia; later Auxiliary Bishop of the Archdiocese of Wroclaw and then Bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Opole) were the principal co-consecrators.[27] At the age of 38, Wojtyla became the youngest bishop in Poland. Baziak died in June 1962 and on 16 July Wojtyla was selected as Vicar Capitular (temporary administrator) of the Archdiocese until an Archbishop could be appointed.[5][6]

In October 1962, Wojtyla took part in the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965),[5][27] where he made contributions to two of its most historic and influential products, the Decree on Religious Freedom (in Latin, Dignitatis Humanae) and the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes).[27] Wojtyla and the Polish bishops contributed a draft text to the Council for Gaudium et Spes. According to the historian John W. O'Malley, the draft text Gaudium et Spes which Wojtyla and the Polish delegation sent "had some influence on the version that was sent to the council fathers that summer but was not accepted as the base text".[36] According to John F. Crosby, as Pope, John Paul II used the words of Gaudium et Spes later to introduce his own views on the nature of the human person in relation to God: man is "the only creature on earth that God has wanted for its own sake", but man "can fully discover his true self only in a sincere giving of himself".[37]

He also participated in the assemblies of the Synod of Bishops.[5][6] On 13 January 1964, Pope Paul VI appointed him Archbishop of Kraków.[38] On 26 June 1967, Paul VI announced Archbishop Karol Wojtyla's promotion to the Sacred College of Cardinals.[27][38] Wojtyla was named Cardinal-Priest of the titulus of San Cesareo in Palatio.

In 1967, he was instrumental in formulating the encyclical Humanae Vitae, which dealt with the same issues that forbid abortion and artificial birth control.[27][39][40]

Election to the papacy

In August 1978, following the death of Pope Paul VI, Cardinal Wojtyla voted in the Papal conclave which elected Pope John Paul I, who at 65 was considered young by papal standards. John Paul I died after only 33 days as Pope, triggering another conclave.[6][27][41]

The second conclave of 1978 started on 14 October, ten days after the funeral. It was split between two strong candidates for the papacy: Giuseppe Cardinal Siri, the conservative Archbishop of Genoa, and the liberal Archbishop of Florence, Giovanni Cardinal Benelli, a close friend of John Paul I.[42]

Supporters of Benelli were confident that he would be elected, and in early ballots, Benelli came within nine votes of success.[42] However, both men faced sufficient opposition for neither to be likely to prevail. Franz Cardinal König, Archbishop of Vienna suggested to his fellow electors a compromise candidate: the Polish Cardinal, Karol Józef Wojtyla.[42] Wojtyla won on the eighth ballot on the second day with, according to the Italian press, 99 votes from the 111 participating electors. He subsequently chose the name John Paul II[27][42] in honour of his immediate predecessor, and the traditional white smoke informed the crowd gathered in St. Peter's Square that a pope had been chosen.[41] He accepted his election with these 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.’[43][44] When the new pontiff appeared on the balcony, he broke tradition by addressing the gathered crowd:[43]

Dear brothers and sisters, we are saddened at the death of our beloved Pope John Paul I, and so the cardinals have called for a new bishop of Rome. They called him from a faraway land – far and yet always close because of our communion in faith and Christian traditions. I was afraid to accept that responsibility, yet I do so in a spirit of obedience to the Lord and total faithfulness to Mary, our most Holy Mother. I am speaking to you in your – no, our Italian language. If I make a mistake, please ‘kirrect’ [sic] me...[43][45]

Wojtyla became the 264th Pope according to the chronological list of popes, the first non-Italian in 455 years.[46] At only 58 years of age, he was the youngest pope since Pope Pius IX in 1846, who was 54.[27] Like his predecessor, Pope John Paul II dispensed with the traditional Papal coronation and instead received ecclesiastical investiture with the simplified Papal inauguration on 22 October 1978. During his inauguration, when the cardinals were to kneel before him to take their vows and kiss his ring, he stood up as the Polish prelate Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski knelt down, stopped him from kissing the ring, and simply hugged him.[47]