The captain was not a demonstrative person, but neither was he a recluse. Jerzy Kluger remembers him as neither familiar nor distant, but rather “approachable.”47 He could appear severe to strangers, but he was fair, if strict, in his child rearing.48 Having completed his elementary and early secondary education before going to work, he was primarily an autodidact. Fluent in German as well as Polish, he taught German to Lolek at home; the future pope would speak the language with an Austrian accent.49 Karol Wojtyła was also a patriot devoid of xenophobia who was widely conversant with Polish literature, to which he introduced his son. The captain also gave Lolek and Jurek Kluger private lessons in Polish history, which he illustrated with readings of partitionera poets like Cyprian Norwid.50
His son also remembers his father as a “man of constant prayer.”51 At night, as in the early morning, young Karol would find his father on his knees silently praying. Father and son read the Bible together and prayed the rosary regularly. But what, in addition to the formulas of prayer, did the captain teach his son about his faith?
Captain Karol Wojtyła, a religious educator by example as much as by admonition and instruction, taught his son that the Church is more than a visible institution. The “mystery of the Church,” its “invisible dimension,” is “larger than the structure and organization of the Church,” which are “at the service of the mystery.”52 By the testimony of the son, it was his father’s way of life that first planted in the future pope the idea that the life of faith has first to do with interior conversion.
Pope John Paul II has also written of how impressed he has been, since his youth, by Jesus’ saying to his disciples, “Fear not, little flock, it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom” (Luke 12:32). This admonition against fear presumed that there might be things of which the disciples might be afraid: there would be persecutions, there would be hardened hearts. “He did not prepare them for easy success,” John Paul II once wrote. But here, he suggests, is the heart of the Gospel: “The Gospel is not a promise of easy success. It does not promise a comfortable life to anyone. It makes demands and, at the same time, it is a great promise—the promise of eternal life for man, who is subject to the law of death, and the promise of victory through faith for man, who is subject to many trials and setbacks.”53
Demand and promise; cross before crown—given John Paul’s testimony that this spirituality of redemptive suffering has been the heart of the Gospel for him since he was a youngster, one can see here another imprint of the teaching and example of the most influential religious educator of his early years: his father, the man who first took him on pilgrimage to Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, the year after his mother died.54
In his brief autobiographical recollections of his early religious formation, John Paul II wrote that he was “above all” grateful to his father. “We never spoke about a vocation to the priesthood, but his example was in a way my first seminary, a kind of domestic seminary.”55 From a priest still awestruck by the gift of priesthood on the golden jubilee of his ordination, there could be no higher praise.
SCHOOLBOY
After completing his elementary education, Karol Wojtyła entered the Marcin Wadowita State Secondary School, an all-boys’ junior-senior high school on Wadowice’s Mickiewicz Street, in the fall of 1930. Since Emilia’s death the previous year, and with Edmund in Kraków completing his medical studies, Captain Wojtyła and his son had established a rigorous daily routine. With school beginning at 8 A.M., they rose early, prayed, and breakfasted together. After young Karol became an altar boy, they often attended the early morning Mass at St. Mary’s, which was celebrated at 7 A.M. Mornings were spent in school, and then father and son took their main meal, in the early afternoon, at the bar and restaurant run by Mrs. Maria Banas, near their home; her son Bogusław was a schoolmate of Lolek’s and her husband was a friend of the captain. Two hours of play would follow, then homework and a light supper prepared at home by his father, with whom the youngster would sometimes take walks in the evening. The arrangement with the Banas family made life easier for the widower and his son, but it also resulted in one hair-raising incident. A local policeman would drink at the Banases’ bar after duty; when he thought he may have had too much, he would put his revolver in the cash drawer and leave it with the Banases for safekeeping. When Karol Wojtyła was about fifteen, Bogusław Banas took out the revolver, pointed it playfully at Lolek, who was about two yards away, and said, “Hands up or I’ll shoot!” Somehow the gun went off. The bullet narrowly missed Lolek and shattered a window. Mr. Banas, roused from a nap, burst into the room, took the gun from Bogusław, and returned it to the cash drawer. No one said a word. Everyone knew it had been a very close call.56
In 1930, Father Kazimierz Figlewicz, a young priest, came to Wadowice to teach catechism in the elementary and middle schools and was assigned responsibility for the parish altar boys who assisted the priests during Mass. He remembers young Karol Wojtyła as “quite tall, but also somewhat plump,” a “very lively boy, very talented, very sharp and very good,” who got along well with both his friends and his teachers.57 Father Figlewicz became Lolek’s confessor, the priest to whom he went to confess his sins and receive absolution. The two would also visit and talk outside the private precincts of the confessional, and remained in touch after Father Figlewicz was transferred to the cathedral of Kraków. During the latter part of Lolek’s high school years, Father Figlewicz invited him to Kraków for the solemn Holy Week services at the cathedral, which, John Paul II later wrote, made a “profound impression” on him as a youngster.58 Father Kazimierz Suder, who first knew Karol Wojtyła in the Kraków seminary after World War II, believes that Father Figlewicz was the future pope’s “idol.”59 He certainly helped plant the seeds of a priestly vocation in Karol Wojtyła.
In his late elementary and early high school years, Lolek also drew close to his brother, Edmund. They had not seen much of each other while Edmund was studying in Kraków, but after his move to the hospital in Bielsko, home visits were easier and more frequent. Mundek took his younger brother to soccer games, sometimes seating him on his shoulders so that the smaller boy could see better. Lolek, for his part, visited the hospital in Bielsko and put on one-man shows for Mundek’s patients. This blossoming friendship between brothers was not to last, though, for on December 5, 1932, Dr. Edmund Wojtyła died, a few days after contracting scarlet fever from one of his patients. He was just twenty-six. It must have been a hammer-blow to Edmund’s father and younger brother. Father Kazimierz Suder believes that Lolek was struck even harder by his brother’s wholly unexpected death than by the death of his mother.60 The inscription on Edmund’s tombstone in Kraków describes him as “a victim of his profession, sacrificing his young life in the service of humanity.”61 For Lolek, then twelve years old, it was a lesson in God’s will, to which he attributed his brother’s self-sacrifice when neighbors sought to console him.62
The secondary school Lolek attended offered an excellent classical education. Latin and Greek were staples of the curriculum, in addition to courses in Polish language and literature, history, and mathematics. Wojtyła began to study Latin when he was thirteen and developed a fondness for the language that has continued throughout his life; his study of Greek began a year later. Throughout his high school years, he continued to receive top grades, even as his extracurricular activities expanded. He became a member of the Sodality of Mary, a society of young men dedicated to fostering devotion to the mother of Christ, and came to know its chaplain, Father Zacher. During his last two years of high school, he was elected to two terms as the Sodality’s president. In the summer of 1937, he completed a mandatory course in military preparedness at a national cadet camp. The final year of high school also included preparations for the sacrament of confirmation, which Karol Wojtyła received on May 3, 1938.
Shortly afterward, the archbishop of Kraków, Adam Stefan Sapieha, visited the Marcin Wadowita Secondary School. Wojtyła, the school’s premier
student, was chosen to give a welcoming address. He evidently impressed Sapieha, who asked Father Zacher whether he thought they could make a priest out of the youngster. Zacher replied that it didn’t seem likely. Wojtyła was set for studies at the Jagiellonian University, where he intended to pursue his literary and theatrical interests. “A pity,” the archbishop is said to have replied.63
It would not be Karol Wojtyła’s last encounter with the aristocratic archbishop who, along with his own father, would have perhaps the most enduring influence on the man he would become.
THE LIVING WORD
When he first disappointed Archbishop Sapieha, Karol Wojtyła, by his own account, had other things on his mind, being “completely absorbed by a passion for literature, especially dramatic literature, and for the theater.”64 It was a passion he had absorbed from his home, his education, and his town, where he had been saturated with Polish Romantic literature and drama. Its themes would shape his thinking for decades to come.65
Nineteenth-century Europe was replete with revolutionary literature. The literary patriots who created Polish Romanticism were different. Not only were they poets, novelists, and dramatists rather than pamphleteers; they had a unique view of the revolutionary enterprise. For many political theorists in nineteenth-century continental Europe, “revolution” implied a complete break with the past, with an ancien régime that usually included Christianity as a bastion of the unjust status quo. Polish Romanticism, on the other hand, considered revolution as the recovery of a lost value that had been crucial in the nation’s formation. The past was not to be overthrown but recovered as an instrument of national renewal. Polish Romanticism acknowledged Catholicism as the yeast that had given rise to Poland’s distinctive national character. To be revolutionary in this singular tradition, then, was to be intensely interested in Christian doctrine and morality.
Karol Wojtyła’s first exposure to Polish Romanticism probably came when his father read him the famous trilogy of Henryk Sienkiewicz, in which bold knights charge back and forth across the steppes of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, in violent pursuit of glory and defense of faith and fatherland. Sienkiewicz had no pretensions to literary depth. A master storyteller, his fictional account of the days of Poland’s grandeur was written to strengthen Polish spirits at a time during the partition when the future seemed darkest. It was almost certainly through Sienkiewicz, for example, that Karol Wojtyła first heard Prior Augustyn Kordecki’s epic speech to the defenders of the Jasna Góra (Bright Mountain) monastery at Częstochowa, home of the icon of the Black Madonna. That defense broke the back of the Swedish invasion of 1655, the traumatic period that Polish history remembers as “the Deluge”:
It may be that God and His Holy Mother intend to blind the enemy on purpose…so that he’d go so far in his lawlessness and rapacity. Otherwise he’d never dare to raise the sword against this holy place…
The enemy jeers at us and despises us, asking what’s left of our former virtues. And I’ll tell him this much: we’ve lost them all but one, and that is our Faith and the honor we show to the Holy Mother, and that is the foundation on which we can reconstruct the rest…[Our enemies] understand what is at stake here…[And] if God hasn’t blinded them by design, they’d never dare strike at Jasna Góra. Because that day would be the beginning of the end of their supremacy and the beginning of our awakening.66
A great popularizer, Sienkiewicz conveyed to a mass audience several key ideas in Polish Romanticism’s distinctive view of Polish history: history had a spiritual core; the deterioration of its traditional national virtues had caused Poland’s political collapse; reestablishing Polish independence required recovering those virtues as the foundation of a new Polish state. Karol Wojtyła deepened his understanding of this singular way of reading history in his adolescent encounter with the great poet/dramatists of Polish Romanticism, including Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki, and Cyprian Kamil Norwid.
Mickiewicz (1789–1855)—poet, playwright, and political activist—was the defining exponent of Polish Romanticism and the greatest Polish literary figure of his time. Born in Lithuania, he never set foot in Warsaw or Kraków and died near Constantinople. But Mickiewicz was the “posthumous child” of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the indisputable master of Polish literature for the greater part of the nineteenth century.67 His intellectual life and literary work were full of passion, particularly for Polish independence. And he expressed that passion through a distinctive set of ideas, forged in the tension between the rationalist pride of the Enlightenment and the humility required by faith, between Romanticism’s celebration of intuition (the “truth of the heart”) and Christian orthodoxy’s insistence on objective truth.68
In epic poems like Pan Tadeusz, in visionary poetic dramas like Forefathers’ Eve (which had such an emotional impact on its audiences that czarist censors sometimes banned it), and in didactic works like The Books of the Polish Nation and of the Polish Pilgrims, Adam Mickiewicz insisted that history had a deep spiritual dimension in which suffering prepared the soul for glory. It was a familiar Christian theme—redemptive suffering as a personal spiritual discipline. For Mickiewicz, though, redemptive suffering was also the national destiny. Partitioned Poland was a Messiah among nations, a suffering servant whose time on Calvary would redeem the world and show it the path beyond Western materialism into a new, more spiritual form of freedom.69
Mickiewicz was a political progressive and philo-Semite who interpreted the revolutionary tradition’s “liberty, equality, and fraternity” according to his Christian belief that the Incarnation of Christ, the Second Adam, had made all men equal, irrespective of their convictions about Christ.70 In the revolutionary transformation of the world as imagined by Mickiewicz, the simple intuitions of the pious and humble were more trustworthy avenues to the truth of things than the speculations of intellectuals or what the worlds of power took to be wisdom.71
Juliusz Słowacki (1809–1849) competed with Mickiewicz for the role of spiritual leader of the noncountry of Poland. His drama Kordian, quite consciously intended as a rival to Mickiewicz’s Forefathers’ Eve, is another epic about the making of history, illustrated by a series of scene-fragments from the spiritual evolution of its hero, who, offering himself for the sins of his country, stands atop the Alps and opens himself to being martyred by history.72
Słowacki was fascinated by the question of how the world must have looked to Adam, the first man, and his literary work was in some respects an effort to imagine the world, its origins, and its destiny afresh. Like other Polish Romantics, he was convinced that partitioned, suffering Poland played a unique role in the drama of world history. In Słowacki’s case, this meant that the “Spirit” which had created the world and shaped each succeeding phase of history now resided in Poland. There, it would give birth to a figure who would lead humanity beyond its present sufferings into a new and better future. It was during this last, mystical period in his career that Słowacki wrote a poem about a “Slav Pope” who would be a “brother” to all humanity.73 The major work of this phase of his life was the unfinished epic King-Spirit, a poem that “presents the wandering of the Spirit as it informs…leaders, kings, and saints throughout the centuries of European civilization.”74 Here, Słowacki most powerfully displayed that mystical bent in which, according to Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz, “he raised historical events to cosmic dimensions and saw in history superhuman, mystical forces shaping the fate of mankind.”75 The creative proclamation of Słowo, the Word, could bend history in the direction in which the Spirit led it.
Karol Wojtyła memorized Pan Tadeusz and acted in Kordian, but the most influential of the Polish Romantic poets on his thought was Cyprian Kamil Norwid (1821–1883), who, according to Miłosz, “aspired to be like Don Quixote, a knight of truth.”76 “A man is born on this planet to give testimony to truth,” Norwid wrote in an echo of the Gospel of St. John, and the great truth to which witness should be borne was that “Christ
had led man out of the realm of fatality and into the realm of freedom.”77 Norwid’s poetry was an effort to probe the truth of things through art, and a deliberate rejection of the notion of “art for art’s sake.”
Norwid also wrote extensively about the dignity of labor and the imperative of respect for workers and their work. Work, he argued, was a result of original sin, man’s fall. But “work accepted with love is the highest manifestation of human freedom” and is thus redemptive.78 On the other hand, Norwid criticized what he regarded as the crass materialism he found in the West, and especially in the United States. Technical progress was spiritually empty; a genuine civilization, a real history, could not be built on this foundation alone.79
It is, of course, one thing to read intensely in the classics of a literary tradition, as Karol Wojtyła did at home and at his secondary school. His even deeper immersion in Polish Romanticism came from his participation in the tradition on stage.
Wadowice was proud of its reputation as a regional center of literary culture, including amateur and civic theater. The traditions that had emerged during the period of the partitions—recitations of the poetry of Mickiewicz and Słowacki in private homes, school- and church-based theaters for the performance of the national classics—flourished during the brief life of the Second Polish Republic. Karol Wojtyła eagerly entered into these local literary activities during his high school years. In collaboration with the Moscicka Secondary School for Girls, Wojtyła’s high school produced the ancient Greek tragedy Antigone in the fall of 1935; Wojtyła played opposite the Moscicka School’s leading actress, Halina Królikiewicz, whose father, Jan, was the principal of Lolek’s school from 1934 through 1938. Halina and Lolek once convinced a famous actress, Kazimiera Rychterówna, to be the judge of the annual Wadowice high school competition in the recitation of poetry, in which the two youngsters were the chief contestants. Wojtyła chose Norwid’s Promethidion, which he recited in a manner befitting the poet’s quiet intellectuality, while Halina opted for a dramatic poem. Halina won. (In the endless speculation about Karol Wojtyła’s possible youthful romances, it is Halina Królikiewicz with whom he is usually linked. Halina, for her part, has denied any serious romantic involvements until her marriage years later. John Paul II wrote in 1996 that, while he had many friends among the girls with whom he went to school and with whom he worked in the theater, he had no special friendship that was an emotional obstacle to his entering the seminary.80)
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