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Pope John Paul II (Latin: Ioannes Paulus PP. II, , born ; (18 May 1920 – 2 April 2005) reigned as Pope and Sovereign of the State of the Vatican City from 16 October 1978 until his death almost 27 years later. His was the second-longest pontificate. He has been the only Polish pope, and was the first non-Italian since the Dutch pontiff Adrian VI in the 1520s.
John Paul II is widely acclaimed as one of the most influential leaders of the twentieth century.
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Timeline
Quotations
Never again war. Never again hatred and intolerance.
Amen.
Where: In his Papal apartment, Vatican City ( 2005-04-02), This word is the final word before his death
You applaud, even though you don't understand me.
Quipped by the pope during a mass in Central Park, New York City after he recited a prayer in Polish to the applauding English-speaking crowd (October, 1995)
The exploration of both the micro and the macro cosmos, is a song to Gods glory, which is reflected in everything in the universe.
Jubilee Address to Men and Women from the World of Learning Rome ( 2000-05-25)
The twentieth century was the great century of Christian martyrs, and this is true both in the Catholic Church and in other Churches and ecclesial communities.
From his book 'Memory & Identity' -Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005, p.44.
I have looked for you. Now you have come to me. And I thank you.
Where: In his Papal apartment, Vatican City ( 2005-04-02), Among the Holy Father's last words in Polish
Encyclopedia
Pope John Paul II (Latin: Ioannes Paulus PP. II, , born ; (18 May 1920 – 2 April 2005) reigned as Pope and Sovereign of the State of the Vatican City from 16 October 1978 until his death almost 27 years later. His was the second-longest pontificate. He has been the only Polish pope, and was the first non-Italian since the Dutch pontiff Adrian VI in the 1520s.
John Paul II is widely acclaimed as one of the most influential leaders of the twentieth century. He has been credited with being instrumental in bringing down communism in Eastern Europe, as well as significantly improving the Roman Catholic Church's relations with Judaism, the Eastern Orthodox Church, and Anglican Churches. While many criticised him for his views in such areas as ordination of women and contraception, his support for Vatican II and its effect on the Liturgy, and his stance on the sanctity of marriage, many others praised him for his orthodox Catholic stances in these areas.
He was one of the most-travelled world leaders in history, visiting 129 countries during his pontificate. He was fluent in many languages: his native Polish as well as Italian, French, German, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Ancient Greek and Latin. 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 last five centuries. In any case, he would have been expected to beatify and canonize more people than his predecessors because of the increase in the number of living humans.
Biography
Early life
Karol Józef Wojtyla was born on 18 May 1920 in the Polish town of Wadowice and was the youngest of three children of Karol Wojtyla, an ethnic Pole, and Emilia Kaczorowska, who was of Lithuanian ancestry. His mother died on 13 April 1929, when he was just eight years old. Karol's elder sister, Olga, had died in infancy before his birth, thus, Karol grew close to his brother Edmund, who was 14 years his senior, and whom he nicknamed ‘Mundek’. However, Edmund's work as a physician led to his contraction and death of scarlet fever, profoundly affecting Karol.
As a youth, Wojtyla was an athlete and often played football (soccer) as a goalkeeper; he was also a supporter of Polish club Cracovia Kraków. His formative years were influenced by numerous contacts with the vibrant and prospering Jewish community of Wadowice. School football games were often organised between teams of Jews and Catholics, and Wojtyla would voluntarily offer himself as a substitute goalkeeper on the Jewish side if they were short of players.
In the summer of 1938, Karol Wojtyla and his father left Wadowice and moved to Kraków, where he enrolled at the Jagiellonian University. While studying such topics as philology and various languages at the University, he worked as a volunteer librarian and did compulsory military training in the Academic Legion, but refused to hold or fire a weapon. He also performed with various theatrical groups and worked as a playwright. During this time, his talent for language blossomed and he learned as many as 12 foreign languages, nine of which he later used extensively as Pope.
In 1939, Nazi German occupation forces closed the Jagiellonian University. All able-bodied males were required to work, and, from 1940 to 1944, Wojtyla variously worked as a messenger for a restaurant, a manual labourer in a limestone quarry, and as a salesman for the Solvay chemical factory to avoid being deported to Germany. His father, a non-commissioned army officer, died of a heart attack in 1941, leaving Karol the sole surviving member of his immediate family. “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.”
He later stated that he began thinking seriously about the priesthood after his father's death, and that his vocation gradually became ‘an inner fact of unquestionable and absolute clarity.’ In October 1942, increasingly aware of his calling to the priesthood, he knocked on the door of the Archbishops Palace in Kraków, and declared that he wanted to study for the priesthood. 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 knocked down by a German truck. Unexpectedly, the German Wehrmacht officers tended to him and sent him to hospital. He spent two weeks there recovering from a severe concussion and a shoulder injury. This accident and his survival seemed to Wojtyla a confirmation of his priestly vocation. On 6 August 1944, ‘Black Sunday’, the Gestapo rounded up young men in Kraków to avoid an uprising similar to the previous uprising in Warsaw. Wojtyla escaped by hiding in the basement of his uncle's home at 10 Tyniets Street, while German troops searched upstairs. More than eight thousand men and boys were taken into custody that day, but Karol escaped to the Archbishop's Palace, where he remained in hiding until after the Germans left.
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 unenviable task of clearing away piles of frozen excrement from the lavatories. That month, Wojtyla personally aided a 14-year-old Jewish refugee girl named Edith Zierer who had run away from a Nazi labour camp in Czestochowa. After her collapse on a railway platform, Wojtyla personally carried her to a train and accompanied her safely to Kraków. Zierer credits Wojtyla with saving her life that day. B'nai B'rith and other authorities have said that Wojtyla helped protect many other Polish Jews from the Nazis.
Priesthood
On completion of his studies at the seminary in Kraków, Karol Wojtyla was ordained as a priest on All Saints' Day, 1 November 1946, by the Archbishop of Kraków, Cardinal Sapieha. He was then sent to study theology in Rome, at the Pontifical International Athenaeum Angelicum, where he earned a licentiate and later a doctorate in sacred theology. 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 1948 with his first pastoral assignment in the village of Niegowic, fifteen miles from Kraków. Arriving at Niegowic during harvest time, his first action was to kneel down and kiss the ground. This gesture would become one of his ‘trademarks’ during his Papacy, but it was not his own, since he acknowledged that he had adopted it from a 19th-century French saint, Jean Marie Baptiste Vianney the ‘Curé d'Ars’.
In March 1949, he was transferred to Saint Florian parish in Kraków. He taught ethics at the Jagiellonian University there and subsequently at the Catholic University of Lublin. While teaching, Wojtyla gathered a group of about 20 young people, who began to call themselves Rodzinka, the "little family". They met for prayer, philosophical discussion, and helping the blind and sick. The group eventually grew to approximately 200 participants, and their activities expanded to include annual skiing and kayaking trips.
In 1954 he earned a second doctorate, in philosophy, evaluating the feasibility of a Catholic ethic based on the ethical system of phenomenologist Max Scheler. However, the Communist authorities' intervention prevented his receiving the degree until 1957.
During this period, Wojtyla wrote a series of articles in Kraków's Catholic newspaper Tygodnik Powszechny ("Universal Weekly") dealing with contemporary church issues. He also 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. However, he published his work under two pseudonyms – Andrzej Jawien and Stanislaw Andrzej Gruda – to distinguish his literary from his religious writings (which were published under his own name) and also so that his literary works would be considered on their own merits. In 1960, Wojtyla published the influential theological book Love and Responsibility, a defence of the traditional Church teachings on marriage from a new philosophical standpoint.
Bishop and cardinal
On 4 July 1958, while Wojtyla was on a kayaking vacation in the lakes region of northern Poland, he was nominated for the position of auxiliary bishop of Kraków. He then travelled to Warsaw to meet the Primate of Poland, Stefan, Cardinal Wyszynski. He agreed to serve as auxiliary to Archbishop Eugeniusz Baziak, and he was ordained to the Episcopate on 28 September 1958. At the age of 38, he was the youngest bishop in Poland. Baziak died in June 1962 and on 16 July Karol Wojtyla was elected as Vicar Capitular, or temporary administrator, of the Archdiocese until an Archbishop could be appointed.
Beginning in October 1962, Bishop Wojtyla took part in the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), where he made contributions to two of the most historic and influential products of the council, the Decree on Religious Freedom (in Latin, Dignitatis Humanae) and the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes).
Bishop Wojtyla also participated in all of the assemblies of the Synod of Bishops. In December 1963 Pope Paul VI appointed him Archbishop of Kraków. On 26 June 1967, Paul VI announced Archbishop Wojtyla's promotion to the Sacred College of Cardinals.
In 1967, he was instrumental in formulating the encyclical Humanae Vitae, which deals with those same issues and forbids abortion and artificial birth control.
Papacy
Election
In August 1978 following the death of Pope Paul VI , Cardinal Wojtyla voted in the Papal conclave that elected Pope John Paul I, who at 65 was considered young by papal standards. However, John Paul I died after only 33 days as Pope, thereby precipitating another conclave.
Ten days after the funeral of Pope John Paul I, on 14 October, the doors of the Sistine Chapel were sealed and the conclave commenced. It was divided between two particularly strong candidates for the papacy: Cardinal Giuseppe Siri, the conservative Archbishop of Genoa, and the liberal Cardinal Giovanni Benelli, the Archbishop of Florence and a close associate of John Paul I.
Supporters of Benelli were confident that he would be elected, and in early ballots, Benelli came within nine votes of election. However, the scale of opposition to both men meant that neither was likely to receive the votes needed for election, and Franz, Cardinal König, Archbishop of Vienna, individually suggested to his fellow electors a compromise candidate: the Polish Cardinal, Karol Józef Wojtyla. Wojtyla ultimately won the election 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 and the traditional white smoke informed the crowd gathered in St Peter's Square that a pope had been chosen. 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.’ When the new pontiff himself appeared on the balcony, he broke tradition by addressing the gathered crowd:
Cardinal Wojtyla became the 264th Pope according to the chronological List of popes. At only 58 years of age, he was the youngest pope elected since Pope Pius IX in 1846, who was 54. Like his immediate 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 hugged him.
Life's work
Teachings
As pope, one of John Paul II's most important roles was to teach people about Christianity. He wrote 14 papal encyclicals (List of Encyclicals of Pope John Paul II).
In his Apostolic Letter At the beginning of the third millennium (Novo Millennio Inuente), he emphasised the importance of "starting afresh from Christ": "No, we shall not be saved by a formula but by a Person."
In The Splendour of the Truth (Veritatis Splendor) he emphasised the dependence of man on God and His Law ("Without the Creator, the creature disappears") and the "dependence of freedom on the truth". He warned that man "giving himself over to relativism and skepticism, goes off in search of an illusory freedom apart from truth itself".
In Fides et Ratio (On the Relationship between Faith and Reason) John Paul promoted a renewed interest in philosophy and an autonomous pursuit for Truth in theological matters. Drawing on many different sources (such as Thomism), he described the mutually supporting relationship between faith and reason, and emphasized why it is important that theologians should focus on that relationship.
John Paul II also wrote extensively about workers and the social doctrine of the Church, which he discussed in three encyclicals. Through his encyclicals and many Apostolic Letters and Exhortations, John Paul also talked about the dignity of women and the importance of the family for the future of mankind, .
Other encyclicals include The Gospel of Life (Evangelium Vitae) and Orientale Lumen (Light of the East). In spite of critics who accused him of inflexibility, he explicitly re-asserted Catholic moral teachings against murder, euthanasia and abortion that have remained unchanging for two thousand years. Like all statements on faith and morals asserted in official papal capacity, these statements are infallible according to Roman Catholic doctrine, and are so defined by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Pastoral trips
During his pontificate, Pope John Paul II made trips to 129 countries, and logged more than 1.1 million km (725,000 miles). He consistently attracted large crowds on his travels, some amongst the largest ever assembled in human history. The cost of all these travels were paid by the countries that he visited and not by the Vatican.
One of John Paul II's earliest official visits was to Poland, in June 1979, where he was constantly surrounded by ecstatic crowds. This first trip to Poland uplifted the whole nations spirit and sparked the formation of the Solidarity movement in 1980, which brought freedom and human rights to his troubled country. On later trips to Poland, he gave tacit support to the organisation. Successive trips reinforced this message and Poland began the process that would finally defeat the domination of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe in 1989.
While some of his trips (such as to the United States and the Holy Land) were to places previously visited by Pope Paul VI, many others were to places that no pope had ever visited before. He was the first pope to visit Mexico in January 1979, before his initial trip to Poland as Pope, as well as to Ireland later that year. He was the first reigning pope to travel to the United Kingdom, in 1982, where he met Queen Elizabeth II, the Supreme Governor of the Church of England. In 2000, he was the first modern pope to visit Egypt, where he met with the Coptic pope, Pope Shenuda III and the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Alexandria. He was the first Catholic pope to visit and pray in an Islamic mosque, in Damascus, Syria in 2001. He visited the Umayyad Mosque, a former Christian church where John the Baptist is believed to be interred, where he made a speech calling for Muslims, Christians and Jews to work together.
On 15 January, 1995, during the X World Youth Day, he offered Mass to an estimated crowd of between five and seven million in Luneta Park, Manila, Philippines, which was considered to be the largest single gathering in Christian history. In March 2000, John Paul became the first pope in history to visit Jerusalem and pray at the Western Wall. In September 2001, amidst post-September 11 concerns, he travelled to Kazakhstan, with an audience largely consisting of Muslims, and to Armenia, to participate in the celebration of the 1,700 years of Christianity in that nation.
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