"Be not afraid! Open wide the doors for Christ!" — Pope John Paul II, inaugural homily, October 22, 1978
By the time he was twenty-one, Karol Wojtyła had buried every member of his immediate family.
His mother was gone when he was eight. His older brother, a young doctor he adored, was gone when he was twelve. His father, the last person he had, died in the winter of 1941, in a country under military occupation, while the boy was working a shift of manual labor to avoid being deported to a German factory. He knelt beside his father's body for most of that night. He was an orphan, a student whose university had been shut down at gunpoint, a poet with nobody left to read his poems to, in a nation that the world's great powers had agreed to erase.
This is the man who would later be seen by hundreds of millions of people, on every continent, pronouncing the same sentence over and over: Do not be afraid.
It is easy to forget, because he became so large, that he did not begin as a world figure. He began as a lonely young man in a cold apartment, walking to work in the dark. If you are in a season of loss, if people you counted on are gone, if your work is not what you hoped, if the future looks closed, then the history of this pontificate begins with someone just like you. He did not get out of grief by being strong. He got through it by being faithful, one day at a time, until the Church put him on the balcony of Saint Peter's.
A Goalkeeper's Childhood in a Town Where Two Faiths Shared the Street
Karol Józef Wojtyła was born on May 18, 1920, in Wadowice, a small market town in southern Poland, about thirty miles from Kraków. Poland itself was barely two years old as a modern state. For more than a century, its territory had been divided among three empires, and in 1918 it had reappeared on the map. Two years later, Poland's army stopped a Soviet advance at the gates of Warsaw. The country he was born into was proud, fragile and surrounded.
His father, also named Karol, was a former army officer who worked as an administrator in the military and lived on a modest pension. His mother, Emilia, was devoted to her family, in poor health and deeply prayerful. They lived in a small apartment across the street from the parish church, so close that the church bells were the family's clock. The older brother, Edmund, whom everyone called Mundek, was fourteen years Karol's senior. A sister had died in infancy before Karol was born.
Wadowice was a mixed town. Roughly a fifth of its residents were Jewish, and the two communities lived side by side, sharing schools, shops and streets. Karol's closest childhood friends included Jewish boys, among them Jerzy Kluger, with whom he played football on the town's pitch. Karol was usually the goalkeeper. The friendship with Jerzy would last the rest of their lives, and decades later, a Pope would receive an old school friend in the Vatican as an equal.
From his earliest years, he was drawn to two things: the church and the stage. He served at the altar. He recited poetry. A teacher named Mieczysław Kotlarczyk, who led a drama circle, saw something in the boy and trained him. Karol could hold a room. He did not know yet that it was practice for something larger.
Three Funerals Before His Twenty-First Birthday
On April 13, 1929, Emilia died. She was in her forties, and the cause was heart and kidney failure. Karol was eight. Her death changed the house permanently. His father, shaken, did not withdraw from his sons but poured himself into them, cooking, mending, and praying with them. The elder Karol also took the boy on pilgrimages to the Marian shrine at Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, where Karol learned to love Our Lady in the countryside, among peasants and processions. He would return to that shrine all his life.
In December 1932, Mundek, by then a young physician, caught scarlet fever from a patient and died, at the age of twenty-six. Karol was twelve. Those who knew the family said that his father never fully recovered.
Karol finished school at the top of his class, and in 1938, he and his father moved to Kraków, where he enrolled at the Jagiellonian University to study Polish language and literature. He joined student theater groups, wrote poems, and expected to become an actor or a writer. A year later the war began.
In September 1939, Poland was invaded from two directions. In November, the German occupiers summoned the professors of the Jagiellonian University to a supposed lecture, arrested them and shipped many of them to concentration camps. The university was closed. Any Pole who was not working could be deported for forced labor, so Karol found a job in a limestone quarry, and later at a chemical plant. It was heavy, dirty work, done in all weather, between shifts of reading, memorizing poetry and rehearsing in secret.
The theater went underground. In 1941, with Kotlarczyk, he helped found the Rhapsodic Theatre, which performed Polish poetry and drama in private apartments, because the occupiers had banned Polish cultural life. For Karol it was resistance of the mind: the Polish language, which the Nazis wanted dead, spoken out loud.
During these years, something else was growing. A layman in his parish, a tailor named Jan Tyranowski, ran small prayer groups for young men. Tyranowski was not a priest or a scholar, but he knew the Spanish mystics, and he introduced Karol to Saint John of the Cross and Saint Teresa of Ávila. Karol began to pray in ways he had not before. In his own later words, Tyranowski was one of those people God uses without credentials.
A Night Beside His Father's Body
On the evening of February 18, 1941, Karol came home from work and found his father dead. Karol Sr. had died alone, of a heart attack, in their rooms. His son was twenty. He knelt beside the body and prayed through the night.
Years later, he said that on that night, he felt he was entirely alone in the world. He had lost his mother, his brother and now his father. What he had left was God, a handful of friends and a country under occupation.
He did not decide right away to become a priest. The decision came slowly, over the next year and a half, tested by the war. But looking back, he treated the night beside his father's body as one of the hinge moments of his life, when his understanding of loneliness changed. If he had nothing else, he would not be without Christ. The grief did not push him out of faith. It pushed him further into it.
The Underground Seminary, Black Sunday and a First Mass in a Crypt
In the autumn of 1942, Karol Wojtyła took a step that could have gotten him killed. He approached the Archbishop of Kraków, Adam Stefan Sapieha, a tall, imposing aristocrat who had remained in the city throughout the occupation, and asked to be admitted to the priesthood.
Sapieha ran a secret seminary. The German authorities had closed the official ones and forbidden the ordination of new priests, and the Archbishop quietly gathered a few dozen young men in his residence to study theology in disguise. Karol joined them. By day he went on working at the plant. At night he studied. He told almost no one.
On February 29, 1944, on his way home from work, a German military truck struck him and left him unconscious on the road. He was taken to a hospital and spent about two weeks recovering. Then, on August 6, 1944, a day Poles call Black Sunday, the Gestapo swept through Kraków, rounding up young men from streets and homes. Karol escaped the sweep, and Sapieha took him into the archbishop's residence, where he and the other seminarians lived in hiding until the Soviet army pushed the Germans out in January 1945.
He was ordained a priest on November 1, 1946, the feast of All Saints, in the Archbishop's private chapel. The next day, All Souls, he said his first Masses in the crypt of Saint Leonard, beneath Wawel Cathedral, among the tombs of Polish kings and bishops, a fitting place for a man who had spent the last years among the dead.
Sapieha then sent him to Rome, to study at the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas, known as the Angelicum. There, he wrote a doctoral dissertation on faith in the writings of Saint John of the Cross. It was the Spanish mystic he had met through a tailor in Kraków, who had now become the subject of his scholarship.
From Student Chaplain to the Chair of Peter
He returned to Poland in 1948, now under a communist government. He served first as an assistant in a village parish, then in Kraków, where he became chaplain to university students. He did what he had always done: he went where young people were. He organized groups for prayer, discussion, hiking and kayaking. They called him Wujek, "Uncle," a nickname that disguised his priesthood in the presence of informers. He heard confessions, celebrated Mass in the open air, and walked with them in the mountains.
He also wrote. He taught ethics at the Catholic University of Lublin, the only independent Catholic university in the whole communist bloc. He wrote poems and plays, and in 1960 published Love and Responsibility, a book on marriage, chastity and the dignity of the person, drawn from his work with young couples. Many of the ideas he would later develop as Pope were already in that book.
In 1958, at age thirty-eight, he was named an auxiliary bishop of Kraków, the youngest in Poland. According to the story, the summons reached him while he was on a kayaking trip. He took part in the Second Vatican Council, contributing to the documents on the Church in the modern world and on religious freedom. In 1964 he became Archbishop of Kraków. In 1967, Pope Paul VI made him a cardinal.
As archbishop, his best-known fight was over a church. The communist government had built Nowa Huta, a vast steel-working district on the edge of Kraków, as a model workers' city, and had refused to allow a single church. Wojtyła said Midnight Mass outdoors every Christmas Eve in an open field, in the snow, for years. The government eventually yielded, and the church, known as the Ark, was consecrated in 1977, built largely by the workers themselves.
On October 16, 1978, the cardinals elected him Pope. The previous Pope, John Paul I, had died after thirty-three days. Wojtyła was fifty-eight, the youngest Pope in over a century, and the first non-Italian in 455 years. When he stepped out to greet the crowd in Saint Peter's Square, he joked in Italian that if he made mistakes in the language, they would correct him. Six days later, at his inaugural Mass, he said the sentence that would define the pontificate: Be not afraid. He added a second line: open wide the doors to Christ.
The Pilgrim Who Put the Whole World on His Schedule
His pontificate lasted more than twenty-six years and changed the shape of the papacy. He took the Pope out of the Vatican. He made more than a hundred trips abroad and visited well over a hundred countries, carrying the Mass, the sacraments and the Gospel to places no Pope had ever been.
He returned to Poland in June 1979, only eight months after his election. In Warsaw's Victory Square, before a vast crowd, he prayed for the Holy Spirit to renew the face of the earth, "this earth." It was a prayer, not a political speech, but the crowd understood. A year later, workers at the Gdańsk shipyard formed the Solidarity movement, and for the next decade, he supported their nonviolent resistance. Historians still argue about how much credit he deserves for the end of communism in Europe. What is not in dispute is that he gave millions of people the courage to believe that they did not have to accept it.
His teaching was vast. He wrote fourteen encyclicals, and among them were Redemptor Hominis on the dignity of man, Dives in Misericordia on God's mercy, Veritatis Splendor on moral truth, Evangelium Vitae on the Gospel of life, and Fides et Ratio on faith and reason. He gave his Wednesday audience talks on human love and the body, known as the Theology of the Body, from 1979 to 1984, a series of 129 addresses presenting the Church's teaching on marriage and sexuality in terms of the gift of self. He promulgated a revised Code of Canon Law in 1983, and in 1992, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the first universal catechism in centuries.
He loved Our Lady, and his papal motto, Totus Tuus, "entirely yours," was a consecration to her. In 2002, he added five new mysteries, the Mysteries of Light, to the Rosary.
He was devoted to the Divine Mercy. In 2000, he canonized Saint Faustina Kowalska, the Polish sister who had received the revelations of Divine Mercy in a convent in Kraków. As a young man, working at the plant, he had lived a short distance from her convent. He designated the Sunday after Easter as Divine Mercy Sunday for the whole Church.
And he loved the young. In 1985 he launched World Youth Day, a gathering of young Catholics from across the world, which drew millions at its largest events. He kept going back to them, in Rome, in Manila, in Paris, in Toronto, and in his final years, when he could barely walk, he still kept coming.
He also beatified and canonized more people than any Pope in history, more than 480 canonizations and more than 1,300 beatifications. He believed that the Church needed to show the world that holiness was not an antique idea, but something happening now, in every country and every walk of life.
At the Great Jubilee of the year 2000, he led the Church through a day of repentance for the sins of her members across the centuries, and then made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, going to the places where Jesus lived and died.
The Bullet, the Cell and the Slow Collapse of a Strong Body
On May 13, 1981, the feast of Our Lady of Fatima, Pope John Paul II was riding through Saint Peter's Square in an open vehicle, greeting the crowd, when a gunman named Mehmet Ali Ağca fired at him from close range. The Pope was hit in the abdomen, the arm and the hand. He lost an enormous amount of blood. Surgeons worked for about five hours at the Gemelli Hospital, and he survived.
He believed that Our Lady had saved him. "One hand fired the shot," he said, "and another guided the bullet." The next year, he went to Fátima to give thanks, and the bullet was placed in the crown of the statue there. On December 27, 1983, he visited Ağca in his prison cell and spoke with him privately for about twenty minutes. He had forgiven him.
The shooting was only one part of the trial. The communist governments of Eastern Europe saw him as an enemy and kept a close eye on him. And the second half of his pontificate was increasingly a witness of suffering. He had a benign tumor removed in 1992. In 1994, he fell and broke his hip. As the years passed, tremors and stiffness showed that he had Parkinson's disease. His speech slowed and his hands shook. He was often visibly in pain. His advisers urged him to rest, and some of his critics suggested he should resign. He refused. He believed that the Pope's suffering, offered to God, was part of his teaching, and he kept appearing in public, in front of the whole world, as the disease took away his voice and his strength.
His pontificate was also marked by serious difficulties he did not fully foresee. In 2002, the scandal of sexual abuse by priests broke open in the United States and elsewhere. He addressed it directly that April, telling the American cardinals that the abuse was a crime by every standard, an appalling sin in the eyes of God, and that there was no place in the priesthood for anyone who would harm the young. Questions remain about whether the Church moved quickly enough under his pontificate to protect the vulnerable. A Catholic reader can hold both truths: that he recognized the evil and spoke against it, and that the Church's response needed to be faster and fuller than it was.
Holy Saturday Night, the Eve of Mercy Sunday
In February 2005, he was taken to the Gemelli Hospital with breathing difficulties. A tube was inserted into his throat to help him breathe. He came back to the Vatican in March, and on Easter Sunday, March 27, he appeared at his window overlooking Saint Peter's Square. He tried to speak, but no sound came out. After a pause, he made the sign of the cross over the crowd and withdrew.
He chose to remain in his own apartment. In his last days, he was surrounded by his closest associates, including his longtime secretary, Stanisław Dziwisz, and the sisters who cared for his household. He received the Anointing of the Sick and Viaticum. Thousands of people, many of them young, gathered in the Square, praying the Rosary and holding candles. It was reported that he said, in Polish, "Let me go to the house of the Father." His final word, according to those who were with him, was "Amen."
Pope John Paul II died on Saturday, April 2, 2005, at 9:37 p.m., in the Apostolic Palace. It was the eve of Divine Mercy Sunday, the feast he had established. He was eighty-four years old.
His funeral on April 8 drew more than three million pilgrims to Rome, along with heads of state and delegations from across the world. Banners in the crowd read Santo subito, "a saint, immediately." The book of the Gospels was placed on his plain cypress coffin, and as the funeral Mass went on, the wind turned its pages.
Mercy Sunday, Twice
The Church acted quickly, by her own standards. On May 13, 2005, the feast of Our Lady of Fatima, Pope Benedict XVI waived the usual five-year waiting period before the opening of the cause for sainthood. Pope Benedict beatified him on May 1, 2011, Divine Mercy Sunday. Pope Francis canonized him on April 27, 2014, also Divine Mercy Sunday, in the same ceremony as Saint John XXIII. His feast is October 22, the anniversary of the inaugural Mass of his pontificate.
Two miracles were recognized. The first was the healing of a French religious sister, Sister Marie Simon-Pierre Normand, who had Parkinson's disease, the illness that had afflicted him, and who was cured within months of his death. The second was the healing of Floribeth Mora Díaz, a Costa Rican woman with a brain aneurysm, on the day of his beatification.
His body now lies in the Chapel of Saint Sebastian inside Saint Peter's Basilica, where pilgrims pray at his tomb. It is not incorrupt, and no one claims it is. A relic of his blood is kept in Kraków.
His patronage should be explained plainly. He is closely associated with World Youth Day, which he founded and which carries his name in the minds of many young Catholics. He is invoked as a patron of families, because he spent his priesthood and his pontificate defending marriage and family life, from Love and Responsibility to the Theology of the Body. And he is turned to by those with Parkinson's disease, because he lived with it publicly, with dignity, and because a cure through his intercession was part of the cause for his canonization. The patronages of families and of those with Parkinson's come from devotion, not from a formal decree.
His deepest legacy may be a single idea. Throughout his writings, he returned to the claim that a person can only fully find himself through a sincere gift of himself to others. He lived it from a quarry in occupied Kraków to a balcony over Saint Peter's Square, and he asked the Church to live it too. Be not afraid. Not because the world is safe, but because Christ has already entered it.
| Born | May 18, 1920, Wadowice, Poland (Karol Józef Wojtyła) |
|---|---|
| Died | April 2, 2005, Apostolic Palace, Vatican City — after a long illness (Parkinson's disease and complications), at age 84 |
| Feast Day | October 22 |
| Order / Vocation | Secular priest; Archbishop of Kraków; Pope (October 16, 1978 – April 2, 2005) |
| Canonized | April 27, 2014 — Pope Francis |
| Beatified | May 1, 2011 — Pope Benedict XVI |
| Body | Chapel of Saint Sebastian, Saint Peter's Basilica, Rome (not incorrupt) |
| Patron of | World Youth Day · Families · Those who suffer from Parkinson's disease (the last two by devotion) |
| Known as | The Pilgrim Pope · John Paul the Great (popular title) · The Pope of Divine Mercy |
| Key Writings | Love and Responsibility · Redemptor Hominis · Dives in Misericordia · Familiaris Consortio · Salvifici Doloris · Redemptoris Mater · Veritatis Splendor · Evangelium Vitae · Fides et Ratio · Rosarium Virginis Mariae · Ecclesia de Eucharistia · The Theology of the Body (Wednesday audience addresses, 1979–84) |
| Foundations | World Youth Day (1985) · Pontifical Council for the Family (1981) · Pontifical Academy for Life (1994) · Catechism of the Catholic Church (promulgated 1992) |
| Their Words | "Be not afraid! Open wide the doors for Christ!" |
Prayer
O God, rich in mercy, you gave your Church Saint John Paul II as a shepherd who walked with the young, stood beside the suffering, and held the Cross before the whole world. Through his prayers, give us courage when we are afraid, faithfulness when we are alone, and trust in your mercy when our own strength gives out. Make us gifts to one another, and bring us at last to your house. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Saint John Paul II, pray for us.
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