Saint John Paul II, Pope (October 22nd)
Oct. 22nd -- St John Paul II, Pope
Oct. 23rd -- St John of Capistrano, Priest
Oct. 24th -- St Anthony Mary Claret, Bishop
Oct. 25th – Bl. John Angelo Porro, OSM, Priest
Oct. 26th – THIRTIETH SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME (Year C)
I’ve decided to write about St John Paul II.
The future St John Paul II, was born as Karol Józef Wojtyła on May 18, 1920 in Wadowice, about 30 miles south west of Kraków, Poland. A characteristic of his life was that he lost pretty much his entire family by the time he was 21 years of age. His older sister Olga died before he was born, his mother Emilia died when he was nine, his older brother Edmund died when he was 12, his father Karol, Sr died when he was 21.
This gave the young Karol Wojtyła, Jr a great deal of personal freedom even as he became an adult just as the Nazis invaded Poland to begin World War II. The Nazis quickly won the battle and all able bodied Polish young men were conscripted to work often hard labor, and Karol Wojtyła, Jr was not an exception. During this time, he suffered two significant accidents, the first, being hit by a tram resulting in a fractured skull, the second leaving him with one shoulder permanently higher than the other and with a permanent stoop after being hit by a truck at a rock quarry in which he had been forced to work. Karol Wojtyła, Jr escaped death on August 6th, 1944 (The Feast of the Transfiguration) as Germans passed house to house in Kraków in search of young men, to shoot them, in an attempt to quell a rebellion similar to the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. More than 8,000 Polish men and boys were rounded up by the Nazis on that day. Karol Wojtyła, Jr was able to escape, managing to get to and receive sanctuary at the residence of the Archbishop of Krakow at the time.
In his memoirs, Karol Wojtyła, Jr wrote that since the death of his father, the last of his immediate family in 1941, he thought a good deal about becoming a priest. And the time of Nazi occupation was not without fruit – he first joined a Carmelite group called “the Living Rosary” and in 1942 entered a clandestine seminary run by the Archdiocese of Krakow.
Karol Wojtyła, Jr was ordained priest in Kraków on the Feast of All Saints (Nov 1st), 1946. Soon afterwards, he was sent to the Angelicum in Rome, Italy, and received his licensiate in 1947 and then Doctorate “On the Theology of Saint John of the Cross” in 1948. During this time, he famously encountered the future St. Padre Pio, who declared of him that he, Karol Wojtyła, Jr will “one day ascend to the highest post of the Church.”
But before his ascension to that position in 1978, now Father Karol Wojtyła then Bishop Karol Wojtyła and finally Cardinal Karol Wojtyła had to jump through many hoops and undergo various trials in now Communist era Poland.
After coming back to newly (and forcibly) Communist Polandd, he first held a pastoral position at St. Florian parish in Kraków. In 1949 he started teaching ethics at Jagiellonian University in Kraków. In 1953 his “habilitation thesis” was accepted (hence by both Church and the Communist authorities of the time) and he was allowed to join the Theology faculty at the university.
Ever a sportsman he was popular with the young people at the school. It was on a kayaking trip in the local Tatra Mountains in 1958 that he received word that he was being named Auxilliary Bishop in Kraków.
Bishop Karol Wojtyła participated in the Second Vatican Council, and did play _a role_ in the writing of two of its most famous documents, the Decree on Religious Freedom (Dignitatis Humanae), and the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes). The impact of these documents are clearly visible over the course of the rest of his life, including and above all during his Pontificate as John Paul II.
To be clear, when it came to personal morality, Father, Bishop, Cardinal Karol Wojtyła and later Pope John Paul II was always on the traditionalist side. Yet when it came to relations with others, he always understood the supreme value of treating the Other, also a creation of God, with Dignity.
On August 6, 1978, the future Saint Pope Paul VI died. The subsequent conclave elected Cardinal Albino Luciani of Venice to be Pope, and he took the name John Paul I, to indicate that he was going to follow the footsteps of the future St. John XXIII and the future St. Paul VI. Thirty three days after his election, Bl. John Paul I died. Most of us who lived at this time would attribute “the shock” of the need for a second conclave less than two months after the first, for “shaking things up.” As a result for the first time in some 500 years, the conclave elected a non-Italian pope: Cardinal Karol Wojtyła who took then the name of John Paul II.
I remember well the reaction of my Czech born parents on the day that the future St. John Paul II was elected Pope in 1978. There was a spring in their step that I had not seen in nearly a decade (since the Soviet invasion of their homeland on August 21, 1968). With the election of the future St. John Paul II. I remember also visiting my Czech relatives in 1979, with them having just come back a few weeks earlier from the Mass he held at the famous shrine at Czestohowa, Poland. For the first time, my family believed that Soviet Communism would one day come to an end.
My mother did not live to see the day, having died in 1987, but the Communist era in Czechoslovakia came to an end in Nov. 1989, days after the future St. John Paul II canonized the long delayed canonization of St. Agnes of Prague, who had been a contemporary and pen pal of St. Clare of Assisi. The Czechoslovak Bishops had requested that John Paul II come to Prague to celebrate the Canonization Mass, the Communist authorities denied the request. So John Paul II celebrated the Canonization Mass in Rome. Two or three days later the demonstration in Prague that ended up bringing down the Communist Regime took place, and by January, 1990, Pope John Paul II was welcomed by non-Communist and then interim President Vaclav Havel to Prague to celebrate a Mass of Thanksgiving in honor of both St. Agnes of Prague and the fall of Communist regime. The first words that the future St. John Paul II told Vaclav Havel “St. Agnes really kicked this through…” ;-) .
Two of Pope John Paul II’s visits to the United States stand out for me: the first being in the fall of 1979, when he visited Chicago, the city with the largest Polish immigrant population in the world. I was still in High School then, and had the full front page of the Chicago Tribune of that day – the headline being “Chicago Falls in Love” – posted in my room for years afterwards. The second was in 1987, six months after my mother had died, the Pope visiting Los Angeles and even passing by my laboratory at U.S.C. at that time (I was a grad student in Chemical Engineering at the time). To this day I have a “lovely picture of the Pope’s forehead (along with a really good picture of the secret service guy next to him, looking straight at me checking out what I was doing)” among the photos that I’ve kept over the years.
Finally, I do recognize that the future St. John Paul II proved a disappointment to many people, among them women who had hoped that women would be ordained in the Catholic Church and homosexuals who’ve hoped for greater acceptance in their time.
I do think that in the first matter, regarding women’s ordination, that St. John Paul II was truly effected by the fact that he was effectively an orphan over the course of most of his life. I have long wondered if he had had a niece who had been a nun / theologian if his view on women’s ordination would have be(come) different.
Regarding questions on homosexuality, I do believe that he was a product of his time, and it was simply too much to ask for him to be different than he was. Even St. Paul in his letter to Philemon seemed to accept slavery in his time, even though today this would seem appalling.
But to so many of us from Central and Eastern Europe who lived through the Nazi and Communist eras, St. John Paul II was such a hero. Even his confidence and encouragement of the youth, I think is enormously positive.
Young people from King David to Mary, do surprise us. May we continue to have the confidence in our young as both God and St. John Paul II have had.
St. John Paul II, pray for us!
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