Karol Wojtyła was born in 1920 in Wadowice, Poland. He lost his mother when he was nine. When he was twelve, his elder brother died. He enrolled at university in Krakow at the age of nineteen to study his passion, Polish literature, but a year later Germany invaded Poland, the university was closed and the professors deported to concentration camps.
Karol studied for the priesthood in Krakow’s clandestine seminary and was ordained in 1946. His bishop noted the young priest’s intellectual and spiritual gifts and sent him to complete a doctorate in Rome. After some time as pastor of a parish and a university chaplain, Fr. Wojtyła became a professor of moral theology and ethics at Krakow and Lublin. Communist officials allowed Wojtyla to be appointed auxiliary bishop of Kraków in 1958, considering him a relatively harmless intellectual. They could not have been more wrong!
Soon great events were taking place in the Church: a new ecumenical Council, convoked by Pope John XXIII to help the Church to carry out her mission in the modern world. From 1962-1965 Bishop Wojtyla participated extensively in Vatican Council II, contributing to the drafting of the Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et spes and to the document on religious freedom, Dignitatis humanae. In 1967 he became a Cardinal.
In 1978, Albino Luciani was elected Pope John Paul I, but died a month later. The shocked Cardinals entered a conclave to elect a pope for the second time in a year and Cardinal Wojtyla was elected pope in October 1978. He took the name of his short-lived, immediate predecessor. Pope John Paul II was the first non-Italian pope in 455 years.
In time, he made pastoral visits to 124 countries, including several with small Christian populations. John Paul II promoted ecumenical and interfaith initiatives, especially the 1986 Day of Prayer for World Peace in Assisi. He visited Rome’s main synagogue and the Western Wall in Jerusalem; he also established diplomatic relations between the Holy See and Israel. He improved Catholic-Muslim relations, and in 2001 visited a mosque in Damascus, Syria. The Great Jubilee of the Year 2000, a key event in John Paul’s ministry, was marked by special celebrations in Rome and elsewhere for Catholics and other Christians. Relations with the Orthodox Churches improved considerably during his papacy.
In the 1990s, John Paul II was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. So began the final chapter of his pontificate and mission, in which the energetic preacher who had traveled the world had one more “homily” to give, not with words but, as he gradually lost the capacity to speak, with silence. As his successor Pope Benedict XVI observed, this “master of words” still had, not to say, but to show that “the Lord redeemed us with his cross, with the passion, as an extreme act of love.” In the last years of John Paul II’s pontificate, he consoled the sick with his sickness; in the last months – including a mute blessing given to the crowds from his window – he showed what it meant to live the realities of suffering and death in Christ, as part of his Body.
On April 2, 2005, the vigil of the feast of Divine Mercy, John Paul II died. His last words were whispered, “Let me go to my Father’s house.” Some 3 million people came to Rome for his funeral, and millions more followed on television. They had heard when this Pope had told them not to be afraid, and they understood that in those last years and months, he had told them this in the most profound way possible. In 2011, Pope Benedict XVI beatified his predecessor, and in 2013, Pope Francis declared him a saint.
