Saint John Paul II

He raised his pastoral staff high and called out in a voice that rang like a trumpet, scattering the fears that weighed on the world in the days of the Cold War:

“Do not be afraid! Open, open wide the doors to Christ! Open the borders of nations, political systems and economies to His saving power!”

That call set the tone for the whole pontificate of Pope Saint John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła: nearly twenty-seven years, the second-longest in the history of the Church. Many of the faithful later called him “John Paul the Great” (Ioannes Paulus Magnus), a title given to very few Popes before him. During his pontificate he made one hundred four international apostolic journeys, set foot in one hundred twenty-nine countries, and traveled more than a million kilometers in all, about thirty times around the earth, to sow hope in the most distant places. He played a decisive part in bringing down the Berlin Wall and the communist dictatorships of Eastern Europe without a shot being fired. He founded World Youth Day, and his name is closely linked with devotion to Divine Mercy and to Our Lady.

In 1938, Karol went to study Polish philology and philosophy at the famous Jagiellonian University in Krakow, one of the oldest universities in Central Europe. He loved theater and poetry, was a gifted amateur actor, and had a deep love for Polish culture that stayed with him all his life, even as Pope.

It was in these dangerous years, under the guidance of a lay tailor named Jan Tyranowski (a man almost unknown to history, but a deep spiritual influence on a whole generation of young people in Krakow), that Karol read “True Devotion to Mary” by Saint Louis-Marie de Montfort. The book changed him deeply. He consecrated his whole life to Our Lady and took as his motto two Latin words the whole world would later know: “TOTUS TUUS”, “Totally yours”.

On November 1, 1946, Karol Wojtyła was ordained a priest in Krakow. He was sent to Rome to continue his studies and brilliantly defended a doctoral thesis in theology on faith in Saint John of the Cross; later he completed a second thesis, in philosophy.

Back in Poland, his first assignment was as curate in the parish of Niegowić, a poor village about twenty-four kilometers from Krakow. It is said that when he arrived, right at harvest time, his first act was not to go into the rectory but to kneel and kiss the ground where he was to serve, a humble gesture he would repeat many times as Pope on arriving in countries around the world. He taught ethics at the Catholic University of Lublin, and quickly became a friend to university students. He went camping, kayaking and mountain climbing with them (on those trips, they recall, an upturned kayak sometimes served as an altar for Mass in the open air), and he talked with them about love, marriage and family. Those conversations laid the foundation for one of his most influential later works, the Theology of the Body.

In 1958, at thirty-eight, he was consecrated auxiliary bishop of Krakow, the youngest bishop in Poland at the time. In 1964, he succeeded as Archbishop of Krakow, and in 1967 he was made a cardinal. He took an active part in the Second Vatican Council, contributing key ideas to the Constitution Gaudium et Spes on the Church in the modern world. With rare wisdom and steadfastness, he led the Church in Poland to stand firm against the subtler persecution of the communist regime: not open repression as in the Nazi years, but systematic control, surveillance and obstruction.

He was rushed to the Gemelli Hospital in critical condition; his heart had almost stopped and his blood pressure was close to zero. After surgery lasting more than five hours, he was saved in a way that many of the doctors involved still call miraculous: the bullet had missed the main artery by just a few millimeters.

The attempt on his life had happened on May 13, the anniversary of Our Lady’s first appearance at Fátima, and the Pope was deeply convinced:

“One hand fired the shot, but another, a Mother’s Hand, guided the bullet!”

In 1984 he gave that very bullet to the Shrine of Fátima in Portugal, and in 1989 it was set in the crown of the statue of Our Lady venerated there, as a visible act of thanksgiving.

That journey helped spark the birth of the Solidarity trade union, led by Lech Wałęsa at the Gdańsk shipyard, just a year later. With nothing but moral authority, without violence or direct political pressure, he became one of the decisive forces behind the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the freeing of hundreds of millions of people from dictatorship across Eastern Europe.

In 1985 he launched something that changed how a whole generation of young people around the world experienced their faith: World Youth Day. Many sociologists were skeptical at first, convinced that modern youth had drifted away from organized religion. Yet millions of young people from every continent poured in to gather around the aging Pope: from Buenos Aires, Santiago and Denver to Manila — where in 1995 more than five million people came, then the largest gathering in human history, and on to Paris, Rome and Toronto. He often told those young people:

“You are the hope of the Church; you are my hope!”

He also promulgated the Catechism of the Catholic Church in 1992, the first complete catechism since the Council of Trent, and wrote fourteen encyclicals of great theological depth. At the Great Jubilee of 2000 he courageously faced the past and publicly asked forgiveness for the wrongs the Church’s own children had committed, something no Pope had ever done on that scale.

On May 1, 2011, Pope Benedict XVI, his successor and for many years his close collaborator, beatified him. On April 27, 2014, Pope Francis canonized John Paul II in Saint Peter’s Square, on the same day as Pope Saint John XXIII. The Church celebrates him on October 22 each year, the day his pontificate was inaugurated in 1978.