| |
John Paul II born 18 May 1920 2 April 2005) reigned as the 263rd Pope of the Roman Catholic Church 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 after Pius IX's 32-year reign. He has been the only Polish pope, and was the first non-Italian pope since the Dutch Adrian VI in the 1520s.
John Paul II was Pope during a period in which the Catholic Church's influence declined in developed countries but expanded in the Third World. During his reign, the pope traveled extensively, visiting over 100 countries, more than any of his predecessors. He remains one of the most-traveled world leaders in history. He was fluent in numerous languages: his native Polish and also Italian, French, German, English, Spanish, Croatian, Portuguese, Russian and Latin.
Discussion
Ask a question about 'Pope John Paul II' Start a new discussion about 'Pope John Paul II' Answer questions from other users |
Timeline
|
|
1920 Born
1967 Pope Paul VI ordains 276 new cardinals (one of them Karol Wojtyla).
1978 Cardinal Karol Wojtyla becomes Pope John Paul II.
1979 Pope John Paul II visits his native Poland, becoming the first Pope to visit a Communist country.
1980 Yugoslav president Tito dies. The funeral ceremony later becomes the world's biggest diplomatic meeting and media event ever, with more than 140 state delegations in Belgrade from all over the world (only the funeral of Pope John Paul II in 2005 will have more news coverage and a higher number of delegations).
1981 Pope John Paul II is shot at and nearly killed by Mehmet Ali Agca, a Turkish gunman, as he entered St. Peter's Square in Rome to address a general audience (Two days after Christmas in 1983, Pope John Paul goes to the prison to meet and forgive his would-be assassin).
1982 Spanish priest Juan Hernandes tries to stab Pope John Paul II with a bayonet during the latter's pilgrimage to the Fatima shrine.
1983 Pope John Paul II visits his would-be assassin Mehmet Ali Agca in prison to forgive him.
1992 Pope John Paul II issues an apology, and lifts the edict of the Inquisition against Galileo Galilei.
2000 Pope John Paul II begins the first official visit by a Roman Catholic pontiff to Israel.
|
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
John Paul II born 18 May 1920 2 April 2005) reigned as the 263rd Pope of the Roman Catholic Church 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 after Pius IX's 32-year reign. He has been the only Polish pope, and was the first non-Italian pope since the Dutch Adrian VI in the 1520s.
John Paul II was Pope during a period in which the Catholic Church's influence declined in developed countries but expanded in the Third World. During his reign, the pope traveled extensively, visiting over 100 countries, more than any of his predecessors. He remains one of the most-traveled world leaders in history. He was fluent in numerous languages: his native Polish and also Italian, French, German, English, Spanish, Croatian, Portuguese, Russian and Latin. As part of his special emphasis on the universal call to holiness, he canonized a great number of people.
He beatified 1,340 people (some listed here), more people than any previous pope. The Vatican asserts he canonized more people than the combined tally of his predecessors during the last five centuries, and from a far greater variety of cultures. Whether he had canonized more saints than all previous popes put together, as is sometimes also claimed, is difficult to prove, as the records of many early canonizations are incomplete, missing, or inaccurate. However, it is known that his abolition of the office of Promotor Fidei ("Promoter of the Faith") streamlined the process.
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 and Emilia Kaczorowska. His mother died on April 13, 1929, when he was just nine years old, and his father supported him so that he could study. His brother, who worked as a doctor, died when Wojtyla was twelve. He lost everyone in his family - a sister, brother, mother, and father - before he became a priest. His youth was marked by extensive contacts with the then thriving Jewish community of Wadowice. He played sports during his youth, and was particularly interested in football (soccer) as a goalkeeper.
After completing his studies at the Marcin Wadowita high school in Wadowice, in 1938 Wojtyla enrolled at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, and in a school for drama. He worked as a volunteer librarian and did compulsory military training in the Academic Legion, but refused to hold or fire a weapon. In his youth he was an athlete, actor and playwright and he learned as many as ten languages during his lifetime, including Latin, Ukrainian, Croatian, Greek, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, German, English as well as his native Polish. He also had some facility with Russian.
In 1939, Nazi occupation forces closed the Jagiellonian University. All able-bodied males had to have a job. From 1940 to 1944 Wojtyla variously worked as a messenger for a restaurant and a manual labourer in a limestone quarry, and then as a salesman for the Solvay chemical factory to avoid being deported to Germany. His father died of a heart attack in 1941. B'nai B'rith and other authorities have said he helped Jews find refuge from the Nazis.
On 29 February 1944, Wojtyla was knocked down by a German truck. In sharp contrast to the harshness normally expected from the occupiers, German officers tended him and commandeered a passing truck to get him to a hospital. He spent two weeks there with 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", just after the Warsaw uprising began, the Gestapo rounded up young men in Kraków to avoid a similar uprising. Wojtyla escaped by hiding in the basement of his home as it was searched, then escaped to the Archbishop's residence, where he stayed until after the war.
On the night of 17 January 1945, the Germans quit the city, and the seminarians reclaimed the ruined seminary. Wojtyla and another seminarian volunteered for the odious task of chopping up and carting away piles of frozen excrement from the lavatories. That month, Wojtyla personally helped a 14-year-old Jewish refugee girl named Edith Zierer who had run away from a Nazi labor camp in Czestochowa. Zierer was attempting to reach her family in Kraków but had collapsed from cold and exhaustion on a train platform in Jedrzejów. No one helped but Wojtyla, who gave her some hot tea and food, personally carried her to a train and accompanied her to Kraków. Zierer credits Wojtyla for saving her life that day. She would not hear of her benefactor again until she read that he was elected as the Pope in 1978.
Priest
In 1942 he entered the underground seminary run by the Archbishop of Kraków, Cardinal Adam Stefan Sapieha. Karol Wojtyla was ordained a priest on 1 November 1946, by Cardinal Sapieha. Not long after, he was sent to study theology at the Pontifical Athenaeum of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome, Italy, commonly known as the 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 Doctrina de fide apud S. Ioannem a Cruce (The Doctrine of Faith According to Saint John of the Cross). Even though his doctoral work was unanimously approved in June 1948, he was denied the degree because he could not afford to print the text of his dissertation (an Angelicum rule). In December of that year, a revised text of his dissertation was approved by the theological faculty of Jagiellonian University in Kraków, and Wojtyla was finally awarded the degree.
Returning to Poland in the summer of 1948, with his first pastoral assignment in the village of Niegowic, fifteen miles from Kraków. In March 1949, he was transferred to Saint Florian's parish in Kraków. He taught ethics at the Jagiellonian University in there and subsequently at the Catholic University of Lublin. Wojtyla gathered a group of fewer than 20 young people, who began to call themselves Rodzinka, the "little family", who met for prayer, philosophical discussion, and helping the blind and sick. Eventually there were some 200 people in his circle, which came to be called Srodowisko, meaning roughly "milieu". The group went on both skiing and kayaking trips annually.
Fr Wojtyla wrote a series of articles in Kraków's Catholic newspaper Tygodnik Powszechny ("Universal Weekly") dealing with contemporary church issues, and his literary work blossomed in his first dozen years as a priest. The war, life under communism, and his pastoral responsibilities all fed his poems and plays. These were published under two pseudonyms-Andrzej Jawien, and Stanislaw Andrzej Gruda. He used these pseudonyms firstly to distinguish his literary from his religious writings, which were published under his own name, and also so that his literary work would be considered on their own merits rather than as clerical curiosities.
He earned a second doctorate, based on an evaluation of the possibility of founding a Catholic ethic on the ethical system of phenomenologist Max Scheler (An Evaluation of the Possibility of Constructing a Christian Ethics on the Basis of the System of Max Scheler), in 1954. As was the case with the first degree, he was not granted the degree upon earning it. This time, the faculty at Jagiellonian University was forbidden by communist authorities from granting the degree. In conjunction with his habilitation at Catholic University of Lublin, Poland, he finally obtained the doctorate of philosophy in 1957 from that institution, where he had assumed the Chair of Ethics in 1956.
Bishop and cardinal
On 4 July 1958 Pope Pius XII named him titular bishop of Ombi and auxiliary to Archbishop Baziak, apostolic administrator of the Archdiocese of Kraków. He was consecrated to the Episcopate by Arcbishop Baziak on September 28, 1958. At 38 Karol Wojtyla was the youngest bishop in Poland. Pope John Paul II recounts in his book Rise, Let us be on our Way how he entered a room a full of priests, after news had been received of his appointment as auxiliary Bishop, when Archbishop Baziak called out "Habemus papam" ("We have a Pope"). Baziak died in June 1962 and on July 16 Karol Wojtyla was elected as Vicar Capitular, or temporary administrator, of the Archdiocese until an Archbishop could be appointed.
Starting in October 1962 Bishop Wojtyla took part in the Second Vatican Council, and 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 with the title of Cardinal Priest of San Cesareo in Palatio.
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).
In 1960, Wojtyla had published the influential book Love and Responsibility, a defense of the traditional Church teachings on sex and marriage from a new philosophical standpoint. In 1967, he was instrumental in formulating the encyclical Humanae Vitae which deals with those same issues and forbids abortion and artificial birth control.
A Pope from Poland
In August 1978 following Paul's death, he voted in the Papal conclave that elected Pope John Paul I, who at 65 was considered young by papal standards. However, John Paul I was in poor health and he died after only 33 days as pope, thereby precipitating another conclave.
Voting in the second conclave was divided between two particularly strong candidates: Giuseppe Siri, the Archbishop of Genoa; and Giovanni Benelli, the Archbishop of Florence and a close associate of Pope John Paul I. In early ballots, Benelli came within nine votes of victory. However, Wojtyla secured election as a compromise candidate, in part through the support of Franz Cardinal König and others who had previously supported Cardinal Siri.
He 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. 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 (SABC2 "The Greatest souls" documentary 2005). As Bishop of Rome he took possession of his Cathedral Church, the Basilica of St. John Lateran, on 12 November, 1978.
Assassination attempts
On 13 May 1981 John Paul II was shot and critically wounded by Mehmet Ali Agca, a Turkish gunman, as he entered St. Peter's Square to address an audience. He was rushed into the Vatican complex, then to the Gemelli Hospital, where Dr. Francesco Crucitti, a noted surgeon, had just arrived by police escort after hearing of the incident. The Pope had lost almost three-quarters of his blood, a near-exsanguination, despite the fact that the bullets missed his mesenteric artery and abdominal aorta. He underwent five hours of surgery to treat his massive blood loss and abdominal wounds. En route to the hospital, he lost consciousness. Agca was caught and restrained by a nun and other bystanders until police arrived. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. Two days after Christmas 1983, John Paul II visited the prison where his would-be assassin was being held. The two spoke privately for 20 minutes. John Paul II said, "What we talked about will have to remain a secret between him and me. I spoke to him as a brother whom I have pardoned and who has my complete trust." The pope also stated that Our Lady of Fatima helped keep him alive throughout his ordeal.
On 2 March 2006, an Italian parliamentary commission concluded that the Soviet Union was behind the attempt, in retaliation for John Paul II's support of Solidarity, the Catholic, pro-democratic Polish workers' movement, a theory which had already been supported by Michael Ledeen and the United States Central Intelligence Agency at the time. The report stated that certain Communist Bulgarian security departments were utilized to prevent the Soviet Union's role from being uncovered. Although the Pope declared during a May 2002 visit to Bulgaria that this country had nothing to do with the assassination attempt, his secretary, Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, alleges in his book A Life with Karol that the pope was convinced privately that the KGB was behind the assassination attempt. Bulgaria and Russia disputed the Italian commission's conclusions, pointing out that the Pope denied the Bulgarian connection. This theory was also central to Tom Clancy's novel Red Rabbit, published in 2002.
Another assassination attempt took place on 12 May 1982, just a day before the anniversary of the last attempt on his life, in Fatima, Portugal when a man tried to stab John Paul II with a bayonet, but was stopped by security guards. The assailant, a right wing Spanish ex-priest named Juan Marķa Fernįndez y Krohn, a former priest of the Diocese of Madrid, reportedly opposed the reforms of the Second Vatican Council and called the pope an agent of Communist Moscow. Fernįndez y Krohn subsequently left the Roman Catholic priesthood and served a six-year sentence. He was treated for mental illness and was expelled from Portugal afterwards, only to become a lawyer in Belgium, where he would try to assassinate King Juan Carlos I of Spain.
Pope John Paul II was also one of the targets of the Al-Qaeda-funded Operation Bojinka during a visit to the Philippines in 1995. The first plan was to kill Pope John Paul II when he visited the Philippines during the World Youth Day 1995 celebrations. On January 15, 1995, a suicide bomber would dress up as a priest, while John Paul II passed in his motorcade on his way to the San Carlos Seminary in Makati City. The assassin planned to get close to the Pope, and detonate the bomb. The planned assassination of the Pope was intended to divert attention from the next part of the phase. However, a chemical fire inadvertently started by the would-be assassins alerted police to their whereabouts, and they were arrested nearly a week before the Pope's visit.
Health
When he became pope in 1978, John Paul II was already an avid sportsman, and he traveled extensively during his papacy. At the time, the 58-year old was extremely healthy and active, jogging in the Vatican gardens, weightlifting, swimming and hiking in the mountains. He was also fond of football and played for Poland in his youth.
John Paul's obvious physical fitness and athletic good-looks earned much comment in the media following his election, which compared his health and trim figure to the poor health of John Paul I and Paul VI, the portliness of John XXIII and the constant claims of ailments of Pius XII. The only modern pope with a keep-fit regime had been Pope Pius XI (19221939) who was an avid mountain climber. An Irish Independent article in the 1980s labeled John Paul the "the keep-fit pope."
In 1981, John Paul II's health suffered a major blow after the first failed assassination attempt. He went on to a full recovery, and sported an impressive physical condition throughout the 1980s. Starting about 1992, however, his health slowly declined. He rarely walked in public and began to suffer from an increasingly slurred speech and difficulty in hearing. Most experts agreed that the frail pontiff suffered from Parkinson's disease, although it wasn't until 2003 that the Vatican finally confirmed it. From being strikingly fitter than his predecessors, he had declined physically to far more ill health than was the norm among more elderly popes.
In February 2005 John Paul II was taken to the Gemelli hospital with inflammation and spasm of the larynx, the result of influenza. He was released from the hospital, then taken back after a few days because of difficulty breathing. A tracheotomy was performed, which improved the Pope's breathing but limited his speaking abilities, to his visible frustration. In March 2005, speculation was high that the Pope was near death; this was confirmed by the Vatican a few days before John Paul II died.
Death
On 31 March 2005 the Pope developed septic shock, a widespread form of infection with a very high fever and profoundly low blood pressure, but was not rushed to the hospital. Instead, he was offered medical monitoring by a team of consultants at his private residence. This was taken as an indication that the pope and those close to him believed that he was nearing death; it would have been in accordance with his wishes to die in the Vatican. Later that day Vatican sources announced that John Paul II had been given the Anointing of the Sick by his friend and secretary Stanislaw Dziwisz. During the final days of the Pope's life, the lights were kept burning through the night where he lay in the Papal apartment on the top floor of the Apostolic Palace.
Tens of thousands of people rushed to the Vatican, filling St. Peter's Square and beyond with a vast multitude, and held vigil for two days. Upon hearing of this, the dying pope was said to have stated: "I have searched for you, and now you have come to me, and I thank you."
On Saturday 2 April, at about 15:30 CEST, John Paul II spoke his final words, "Let me go to the house of the Father," to his aides in his native Polish and fell into a coma about four hours later. He died in his private apartment, at 21:37 CEST (19:37 UTC), 46 days short of his 85th birthday. The mass of the vigil of the Second Sunday of Easter, that is, Divine Mercy Sunday which was put into the Church's calendar by him on the occasion of the canonization of St. Faustina on 30 April 2000, had just been celebrated at his bedside. Several aides were present, along with several Polish nuns of the Congregation of the Sisters Servants of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, who ran the papal household.
A crowd of over two million present in Vatican City mourned the death of John Paul II. The public viewing of his body in St. Peter's Basilica drew over four million people to Vatican City and was one of the largest pilgrimages in the history of Christianity. Many world leaders expressed their condolences and ordered flags in their countries lowered to half-staff. Numerous countries with a Catholic majority, and even some with only a small Catholic population, declared mourning for John Paul II.
On his death certificate, the primary cause of death was listed as (refractory) septic shock leading to profound hypotension and complete circulatory collapse.
Funeral
The death of the pontiff set in motion rituals and traditions dating back to medieval times. The Rite of Visitation took place from 4 April to 7 April at St. Peter's Basilica. The Mass of Requiem on 8 April was said to have set world records both for attendance and number of heads of state present at a funeral. The Dean of the College of Cardinals, Joseph Ratzinger, who would become the next pope, conducted the ceremony. John Paul II was interred in the grottoes under the basilica, the Tomb of the Popes. He was lowered into a tomb created in the same alcove previously occupied by the remains of Blessed Pope John XXIII. The alcove had been empty since Pope John's remains had been moved into the main body of the basilica after his beatification.
Titles His title was: Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Jesus Christ, Successor of Saint Peter, Head of the College of Bishops, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, Patriarch of the West (this title was recently removed from the papal list of titles by the reigning pope, Benedict XVI), Primate of Italy, Archbishop and Metropolitan of the Roman Province, Sovereign of the State of the Vatican City, Servant of the Servants of God, Pope John Paul II.
Life's work
TeachingsAs pope, one of John Paul II's most important roles was to teach people about Christianity. He wrote 14 papal encyclicals that many observers believe will have long-lasting influence on the church.
In his Apostolic Letter At the beginning of the third millennium (Novo Millennio Ineunte), he emphasized the importance of "starting afresh from Christ": "No, we shall not be saved by a formula but by a Person." In what he calls a "program for all times," he placed "sanctity" as the single most important priority of all pastoral activities in the entire Catholic Church. He canonized many saints around the world as exemplars for his vision and he supported the prelature of Opus Dei, whose aim is to spread the message of the universal call to holiness and the sanctification of secular activities, which he said is a "great ideal" and a "characteristic mark" of the Second Vatican Council.
In The Splendour of the Truth (Veritatis Splendor) he emphasized 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 promotes a renewed interest in philosophy and an autonomous pursuit for Truth in theological matters. Drawing on many different sources (such as Thomism), he describes the mutually supporting relationship between faith and reason, and emphasizes why it is important that theologians should focus on the relationship. John Paul proposes that philosophy has lost its meaning (e.g., the pursuit for objective truth), and that restoring it will ultimately help cure the nihilistic condition of our current age; and, moreover, lead to the Truth of sacred scripture.
John Paul II also wrote extensively about workers and the social doctrine of the Church, which he discussed in three encyclicals. Through his encyclicals, John Paul also talked about the dignity of women and the importance of the family for the future of mankind, and many Apostolic Letters and Exhortations.
Other encyclicals include The Gospel of Life (Evangelium Vitae) and Orientale Lumen (Light of the East). Often accused of inflexibility through misunderstanding of the office of the papacy in asserting Church Teaching, he explicitly reiterated and asserted unchanged 2,000-year old Catholic teaching on moral matters like murder, euthanasia and abortion. These, like all statements on faith and morals, according to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, when asserted in the official papal capacity possess the quality referred to as infallibility.
John Paul II, who was present and very influential at the Vatican II (196265), affirmed the teachings of that Council and did much to implement them. Nevertheless, his critics often wished aloud that he would embrace the so-called "progressive" agenda that some hoped would evolve as a result of the Council. In fact, the Council did not advocate "progressive" changes in these areas, e.g., still condemning the taking of unborn human life through abortion as an "unspeakable crime". John Paul II continued to declare that contraception, abortion, and homosexual acts were gravely sinful, and, with Cardinal Ratzinger (future Pope Benedict XVI), opposed Liberation theology.
He believed in the Church's exaltation of the marital act of sexual intercourse between a baptized man and woman within sacramental marriage as proper and exclusive to the sacrament of marriage that was, in every instance, profaned by contraception, abortion, divorce followed by a 'second' marriage, and by homosexual acts. Often mistakenly assumed to be a rejection against women, he definitively explained and asserted in 1994 for all time the Church's lack of authority to ordain women to the priesthood, without such authority such ordination is not legitimately compatible with fidelity to Christ. This was also deemed a repudiation of calls to break with the constant tradition of the Church by ordaining women to the priesthood. In addition, John Paul II chose not to end the discipline of mandatory priestly celibacy, although in a small number of unusual circumstances, he did allow certain married clergymen of other Christian traditions who later became Catholic to be ordained as Catholic priests.
John Paul II, as a writer of philosophical and theological thought, was characterized by his explorations in phenomenology and personalism. He is also known for his development of the Theology of the Body.
Philosophers and theologians influenced by him include-among countless others: his successor, Pope Benedict XVI |
