It is no accident that John Paul II had countless friendships. Even while he was pope, he dined with his friends, went on outings with them, went skiing with them, and organized sing-alongs and get-togethers during the traditional Polish holidays. He still corresponded frequently with his friends and never limited himself to formal, bloodless letters of platitudes. He was a genuine and deeply human individual, and his life was filled with joy, enthusiasm, and generosity, unfailingly immersed, at the same time, in an intensely spiritual atmosphere.
Like a tree—a towering, mighty oak, or perhaps the linden tree he described in the poem he wrote as a young man, “Magnificat,” out of whose trunk the powerful statue of a saint was carved—John Paul II was deeply rooted in the soil of his birthplace. His homeland always claimed a place in his heart, even when, as pope, his mission embraced the whole world.
He was proud of being born in 1920, the year of the “miracle on the Vistula,” the victory of the army of the newly independent Poland over invading Bolshevik forces in the Battle of Warsaw on August 15.
His father was a noncommissioned officer in the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War; he had also taken part in the fighting against the Red Army as a lieutenant in the Polish army under the command of Marshal Piłsudski. He later proudly, and frequently, told his son Karol the story of the great Polish victory in that battle—traditionally ascribed to the Virgin Mary’s intervention—and how it had halted the invading troops of Lenin and Trotsky, saving not only Poland but also all of Europe, the ultimate target of the Soviet revolutionaries.
His father, a serious man with the sense of responsibility typical of a soldier of the old guard, was a fundamental figure for young Karol, especially after the untimely deaths of his mother, Emilia, in 1929, and his elder brother, Edmund, in 1932. Karol often told his friends how deeply his soul had been stamped with the image of his father standing next to the coffin of Edmund, who had died while caring for the ill during an outbreak of scarlet fever, and repeating the words “Thy will be done!” It was with his brother that Karol had first discovered, at age eleven, what would become one of his very few leisure activities: hiking in the Tatra Mountains. After Edmund’s death, it was Karol’s father who took him into the mountains for long hikes together.
His family was profoundly bound up with Polish traditions and deeply rooted in the Catholic faith. The strongest influence on his spiritual formation unquestionably came from his father, but his mother, Emilia, also affected his growth as a human being, infusing his soul with a sensibility that later matured into his mystical Marianism. This religious path of love for the Virgin Mary was later marked by the remarkable personality of the tailor Jan Tyranowski, who gradually led him into an atmosphere of profound devotion and prayer.
In a certain sense, the bedrooms of John Paul II—one in the Vatican, the other at Castel Gandolfo—were shrines to the memories of his youth. Alongside photographs of his parents and his brother, set on little tables were pictures of Tyranowski and of the chaplain in Wadowice, Father Kazimierz Figlewicz, who had been Karol Wojtyła’s childhood catechist and confessor.
Stripped of his last family tie when his father died in 1941, Karol experienced what might be called a broadening of the heart: his new family would be the friends of his youth and then, over time, his classmates in the seminary, his parishioners, his fellow priests, his colleagues in the episcopate, and the faithful of the Cracow diocese and of the entire world. In every place where he believed the Lord had sent him on a mission, he found substitutes for his birth family, establishing close relations with anyone he met.
“UNCLE” KAROL
Wojtyła’s humanity included the traditions, the sentiments, the memories, and even the flavors of his Polish homeland. The Supreme Pontiff, for example, had a special fondness for the pastries of Wadowice, the kremówki, and also those of Toruń, the katarzynki, so anyone who visited the Vatican from Poland would bring him a freshly baked supply. Often he would refrain from eating them himself, in a spirit of penitence, but he was pleased just to be able to offer them to people who came for an audience with him.
Many was the occasion on which an event, a meeting, or a particular set of circumstances would carry him backward in time, causing crystal-clear memories to surface from his prodigious memory. The fondness he had felt for friends and classmates of his youth remained intact in his heart over the years and, more than once when he was pope, led him to get back in touch with people he hadn’t seen for a long time.
That is what happened with the Jewish engineer Jerzy Kluger, a childhood friend from Wadowice days, with whom he had lost contact during the tragic events of the Second World War and the Nazi deportation of Jews to the concentration camps. After his election to the papacy, the two friends got back in touch, seeing one another frequently in the Vatican and at Castel Gandolfo until John Paul II’s death. In particular, they liked to reminisce about something that happened at the end of their time in elementary school. Jerzy lived near the school, and very early one morning he went over to see the results of the admission exam for the classics-track junior high school, the gimnazjum. Both he and Karol had passed. Jerzy hurried to his friend’s house to give him the good news, but there he was told that Karol was serving Mass in the parish church of Our Lady. Though he had never entered a Catholic church, he decided to do so that time, and waited in the back for the service to be over. From the altar, Karol noticed him, and gestured for him to stay put and not to say a word. A woman happened to recognize him, however, and asked him harshly how he dared to violate the sanctity of a church, Jew that he was. Once Mass was over, Karol joined Jerzy and paid no attention to the news that he had passed the exam. What interested him was what the woman had said to his friend. When Jerzy told him, he commented sadly, “Doesn’t she know that we’re all children of the same God?”
Wojtyła was only ten years old at the time, but he already took a remarkably mature view of the racial hatred that seethed in the hearts of many of his fellow citizens. That hatred would soon stoke the flames of the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century, as Wojtyła later reflected in emotional terms: “I myself have personal memories of the things that happened when the Nazis occupied Poland during the war. I remember my Jewish friends and neighbors; some of them died, others survived.” It was in those years that he developed a deep respect for the Jews, and when he visited the Rome synagogue in 1986, he described them as “older brothers.” That respect was emblematically validated by the pope’s fond remembrance of Rome’s chief rabbi, Elio Toaff, in his last will and testament—the only person mentioned other than the pope’s faithful secretary, Monsignor Stanisław Dziwisz.
He was able to maintain strong ties with his classmates from his time in the liceum, the Polish high school. The tradition of arranging regular get-togethers, which dated back to the years in Cracow, continued after his election as pope, and on several occasions he invited them to Castel Gandolfo. When he learned during his last trip to Poland in August 2002 that the archbishop of Cracow, Cardinal Franciszek Macharski, had invited his classmates from senior year to dinner, he thanked him profusely. Later he commented, “There were forty of us, only eight survive, and not all of them were able to come.”
His classmates remembered Karol Wojtyła as a friendly, talented boy, with remarkable gifts, who stood out for his elevated moral standing. In class, for instance, he refused to allow others to copy his work because he considered it dishonest. At the same time, he was always willing to help those who needed it, explaining things they might have missed the first time or doing homework together in the afternoon. When he enrolled in the seminary, that attitude remained. When a classmate approached him to ask for help during the test that awaited them that day, Wojtyła answered, “My dear friend, trust in God and do your best on your own.”
His behavior with girls was also straightforward and impeccable, as the following episode demonstrates. In 1952, Father Karol had planned a hike in the Tatra Mountains, tog
ether with two young men and three young women, to see the blooming of the crocuses. The little group was scheduled to travel by train to Zakopane on the night of April 20 and set out on their hike from there. He and the young women had already boarded the train when the boys hurried up and breathlessly informed them that the date of an important exam had been moved up and that they would have to stay behind in Cracow. For the girls, however, it was already too late to return to their school of the Nazarene Sisters; the doors were locked at ten P.M. and would not be opened again until six o’clock the next morning.
Wojtyła had only minutes to decide what to do. Caution suggested abandoning the trip—it was unthinkable for a Catholic priest to travel unchaperoned with three girls—but the absolute purity of his friendship with his three fellow hikers allowed him to say to them, “Let’s go anyway.” The train was crowded and there was only one seat left free. According to personal recollections, when the girls asked how they should address him in public, since it would be unseemly to call him “Father,” Wojtyła, who was dressed in tourist garb, promptly replied with a well-known phrase from the writings of the Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz, “Call me uncle.” This term of address would remain his nickname to his many young friends, even when he was pope.
And that was how Wojtyła signed the letters, handwritten on letterhead stationery with the papal coat of arms, that he sent to relatives on his mother’s side of the family in Toruń, to whom he was grateful for the help they had given him during the Second World War.
In those letters, he expressed his affectionate interest in the daily lives of the recipients: he asked for news of people he knew, inquired about the health of an invalid, expressed condolences for the death of a relative, and so on. He continued to monitor their well-being, to the extent that his growing pastoral responsibilities permitted. When he was a cardinal, he made a point of presiding over a number of baptisms and the wedding of a grandniece; we still have photographs of the smiling prelate at the wedding banquet. And after he became pope, he invited his relatives to Castel Gandolfo for a holiday.
Whenever he happened to be in Rome, during his time as bishop and cardinal, the Polish priests serving at the Vatican made it a rule to invite him to celebrations for birthdays or name days. Unless he had overriding obligations, Wojtyła gladly accepted. When he became pope, one of his old friends felt too shy to invite him to celebrate his name day. When that friend was invited to dinner at the Apostolic Palace one evening, John Paul II scolded him in jest: “When I was a cardinal you invited me, but now that I’m pope, you no longer invite me. Whether or not I come is a separate matter; the invitation should be forthcoming in any case!”
Indeed, many a colleague in the Roman Curia received greetings from the pope on the occasion of his name day or the anniversary of his ordination as priest or bishop. And this attentive approach was extended to laymen as well. After his election, for example, he made a phone call to Cracow asking that Maryja, the cleaning woman at the archbishop’s palace in Cracow, be included free of charge in the group traveling to Rome for his consecration as pope. On the last day of his life, he bade farewell not only to the highest officials of the Vatican but also to Franco, who looked after the papal apartments, and to Arturo, the photographer who had been at his side for many years.
THE PRIEST BORN FROM THE ASHES OF AN ACTOR
The earliest recollection of Karol’s childhood was handed down by his nursery school teacher, Sister Philothea. The boy was only four years old, and was enrolled in the nursery school of the Sisters of Nazareth in Wadowice, on Lwowska Street. He was a lively, cheerful child, and the nuns called him by the nickname Lolek. Once, when he had climbed a small tree, a dog came up and started barking. The nuns were afraid the dog might bite him, and they rushed in alarm to his rescue. But the little boy seemed unfazed.
Dating to his first year in the gimnazjum, however, when Karol was just eleven, is an episode that clearly demonstrates his precocious, religious sensibility. At his school, there was a custodian who was a heavy vodka drinker. One day, while the custodian was walking across the street in front of the school building, he failed to notice that a car was coming. He was hit, knocked to the ground, and seriously injured. The students crowded around the injured man, unsure what to do. After a few minutes, the local parish priest arrived, accompanied by young Karol, who had hurried off to summon him to provide the custodian with spiritual assistance.
The high school years that followed were when Wojtyła discovered the theater, his first true love. At school in Wadowice, he already had given evidence of his acting abilities when he recited Cyprian Kamil Norwid’s Promethidion, winning second prize in a contest. On October 15, 1938, when he was eighteen, he organized an evening of poetry with his classmates in the Polish philology course at the Jagiellonian University. After reciting some of his own poetry, he publicly declared his intention of becoming an actor.
A few months later, he began to frequent the Theater of the Living Word, under the direction of Mieczysłwa Kotlarczyk, who helped him to refine his diction, fine-tune his timing, and improve his rapport with the audience. In June 1939, he played the role of Taurus, one of the signs of the zodiac, in the play Cavalier of the Moon, which was performed in the courtyard of the Nowodworski prep school. He later played the role of Gucio in the romantic comedy Maidens Vows, by Aleksander Fredro. His exceptional memory, which reinforced his unmistakable talent as an actor, allowed him, during the staging of Juliusz Słowacki’s tragedy Balladyna, to play two roles, his own and that of a cast member who had fallen ill.
During the Nazi occupation, clandestine performances continued. One day, showing extraordinarily steady nerves, Wojtyła continued reciting Adam Miciewicz’s epic poem Pan Tadeusz (Sir Thaddeus) while an SS roundup was under way in the street outside.
Such love for the stage coexisted in Karol with an intense spiritual quest: two demanding paths that, sooner or later, would confront him with a difficult choice. That quandary, in all likelihood, came to a head during a production in which Karol delivered a monologue of King Bolesław the Valiant, with an evocation of St. Stanisław’s resurrection of Piotrowin, and a number of excerpts from Słowacki’s The Spirit King. An eyewitness recounted that during the first performance Karol spoke his lines with a strong and confident voice; in a subsequent performance, fifteen days later, he barely whispered the words. Asked the reason for this surprising change in interpretation, he replied that he had thought it over and had come to the conclusion that the monologue was actually a confession.
His friends decided that in this two-week period a priest had been born out of the ashes of an actor. One of those friends, after Wojtyła had already become pope, wrote a letter to him to say so, enclosing a recording of that performance. The pope responded, “What you wrote rings true That’s exactly what happened. I agree wholeheartedly.” His last appearance on stage was in March 1943, in the lead role in Słowacki’s Samuel Zborowski.
The powerful spirituality driving this young student with a passionate love of theater certainly did not pass unobserved by his classmates at the university. One of his fellow students, who later became a close friend, testified that his discretion was so great that for a long time they didn’t even know his surname. His classmates nicknamed him Sadok, after Father Sadok, the protagonist of Władysław Jan Grabski’s popular novels In the Shadow of the Church and Confessional.
In those months, Wojtyła did something that could have cost him dearly. Since 1936, it had been traditional for the university youth to make an annual pilgrimage to the sanctuary of the Black Madonna of Jasna Góra. During the Nazi occupation, the pilgrimage was banned. But in order to keep the tradition unbroken, Karol managed to make his way into the sanctuary in secrecy with two other delegates, despite the fact that Częstochowa was surrounded by Hitler’s troops.
UNDERCOVER IN THE SEMINARY
John Paul II often said that he attended his first seminary at home, with his father. But it was the tailor Jan Ty
ranowski who enlightened him concerning the deeper significance of prayer and who strengthened his sense of devotion to the divine. Tyranowski was, among other things, the founder of the Living Rosary group, made up of fifteen young people, each of whom was assigned the daily recitation of one of the mysteries. Karol joined the group, and in this school of spirituality he had occasion to read and study the Treatise of True Devotion to Mary by the French saint Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort, as well as the mystical works of the Spanish saint John of the Cross.
At the age of twenty-two, however, Wojtyła came to the understanding that his path was leading him to a genuine seminary, the seminary of the archbishopric of Cracow. A few years earlier, he had resisted the call of the Lord despite direct urging by the archbishop, Adam Stefan Sapieha. On May 3, 1938, the archbishop had traveled to Wadowice for a pastoral visit to the Parish of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary and to preside over the confirmation of the students of the liceum. It was a Polish tradition for confirmation candidates to add a second name to their own on that occasion, and Karol chose the name Hubert in memory of the playwright Hubert Rosztworowski, who had died just a few weeks earlier and whose work Karol deeply admired.
“My religion teacher, Father Edward Zacher, chose me to give the address of welcome,” John Paul II later recalled. “It was the first time I had the opportunity of being in the presence of that man who was so highly regarded by everyone. I know that after my speech the archbishop asked the religion teacher what course I would be taking upon completion of secondary school. Father Zacher replied: ‘He will study Polish language and letters.’ The archbishop apparently replied: ‘A pity it is not theology.’ ”
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