The Poland in which young Karol Wojtyła grew to early manhood was an ethnically, linguistically, and religiously plural country with substantial Jewish, Ukrainian, and German minorities. In the struggle to define the meaning of Polish national identity and patriotism in the immediate aftermath of Poland’s recovery of its independence in 1918, the elder Karol Wojtyła stood firmly on the side of the pluralists and against the narrow nationalists for whom “Poland” meant an exclusively Catholic-ethnic enclave. His father’s convictions on this question, as well as the experience of growing up with numerous Jewish friends in a town that was 20 percent Jewish and that prided itself on living out the tolerance preached by the local Catholic clergy, set the foundations for the future pope’s polyglot abilities (his father taught him German as a boy), his deep respect for the religious convictions of others, and his distinctive sensitivity to the pain and anguish of European Jewry in the mid-twentieth century and thereafter.
After a sterling high school career in Wadowice, during which he read deeply in the literature of Polish Romanticism and began to nurture a lifelong fascination with the theater, young Karol Wojtyła and his father moved to Kraków in 1938 so that Lolek could begin his studies in Polish philology at the venerable Jagiellonian University. Founded in 1364, the Jagiellonian, home to Copernicus from 1491 until 1495, had been a crossroads of Christian and humanistic culture for centuries; one of its early fifteenth-century professors, Paweł Włodkowic, would make occasional appearances in late-twentieth-century papal documents as a critic of coercion in matters of religious conviction. Yet because of the lethal ambitions of Europe’s two great totalitarian powers, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, Karol Wojtyła’s promising university career lasted only a year. After the Nazi invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, and the partition of the country following the September 17, 1939, Soviet invasion from the east, the Jagiellonian University was shut down by the Nazi occupation, with distinguished members of its faculty deported to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
Poland under Nazi occupation was a brutal and deadly place in which the rule of law was superseded by the rule of arbitrary terror. The occupiers believed the Poles to be a low-level race of untermenschen who were to be minimally educated, and just as minimally fed, in order to provide a workforce for the greater glory of the Thousand Year Reich; those who resisted, and were caught, were condemned to concentration camps or summarily executed. Young Karol Wojtyła spent the war years as a manual laborer: first, at the Zakrzówek quarry in Kraków; later, at the Solvay chemical factory on the southern periphery of the city, near the convent where a then-obscure Polish nun, Sister Mary Faustyna Kowalska, had died in 1938. Wojtyła was also engaged in clandestine studies—the Jagiellonian University had quickly reestablished itself as an underground institution—and in the Polish resistance, joining a movement called UNIA which, in addition to its wartime activities (which ranged from paramilitary actions to protecting Jews to sponsoring underground networks of Polish culture), worked to set the foundations for a postwar Poland governed by Christian democratic principles. UNIA sponsored the Rhapsodic Theater, founded by Mieczysław Kotlarczyk and young Wojtyła in August 1941—an experiment in avant-garde minimalism in which the five-member troupe, without costumes or props, practiced a “theater of the living word,” where the classics of the Polish dramatic and poetic repertoire were performed clandestinely in order to keep alive the Polish culture the Nazis were determined to exterminate. During the war years, Karol Wojtyła also took his first steps in Carmelite spirituality under the tutelage of Jan Tyranowski, a lay mystic and autodidact specialist in the works of St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Ávila. In addition, Tyranowski, whom Wojtyła later memorialized as an unexpected “apostle,” recruited Lolek as a leader for the “Living Rosary” groups of young men he was forming in Wojtyła’s parish of St. Stanisław Kostka, in the working-class Dębniki district of Kraków.
Wojtyła’s work with the Rhapsodic Theater, and with Tyranowski in the Living Rosary, was undertaken at risk of his life, for such activities were strictly forbidden by the occupation. Wojtyła had one or two close scrapes with the Gestapo and, in an incident unrelated to his resistance work, suffered a broken shoulder and a concussion when he was hit at night by a German army truck and left in a roadside ditch—from which he was rescued by a local woman and a German officer who had him taken to a hospital. The death of his father on February 18, 1941, accelerated the vocational struggle that the experiences of the war had also influenced: was he destined for the theater (and, perhaps later, for a university career) as a Catholic layman, or was he being called to another form of the dramatic life, as a Catholic priest?
After resolving that question over months of prayer, Wojtyła presented himself to the archbishop of Kraków, Adam Stefan Sapieha, who accepted him as a candidate for the priesthood and, in the fall of 1942, gave him a place in the seminary Sapieha was conducting clandestinely, the Nazis having closed the archdiocesan seminary. For two years, Wojtyła lived a triple life—as underground theatrical performer, manual laborer, and clandestine seminarian—taking his first steps in philosophy and theology during the night shift at Solvay and being examined on what he had learned by professors who (like their students) came surreptitiously to Sapieha’s residence. There, he also received spiritual direction and occasionally served the archbishop’s Mass; during this period, one of his fellow seminarians, Jerzy Zachuta, was discovered by the Gestapo and shot. On August 6, 1944, the Gestapo swept Kraków, seeking to arrest all the city’s young men in order to forestall a repetition of the Warsaw Uprising, which had broken out on August 1. Archbishop Sapieha called in his clandestine seminarians and hid them in his residence, where the seminary was reconstituted underground for the last six months of World War II. During those months, Wojtyła had daily contact with the “prince-archbishop” who would become his model of heroic episcopal leadership.2
After the Soviet “liberation” of Kraków on January 18, 1945, the archdiocese reclaimed the Kraków seminary (which had been used as a German prison), such that Karol Wojtyła had his one year of relatively normal seminary experience in 1945–46. Yet even that period was marked by drama, for Wojtyła was a leader in a student organization that organized a pro-democracy demonstration on May 3, 1946, a traditional day to celebrate Polish independence; the demonstration was brutally suppressed by the Polish secret police and their comrades of the Soviet NKVD. Sapieha, who was created cardinal in 1946, had formed the highest impression of Karol Wojtyła, and decided to send him to Rome for graduate studies in theology, ordaining him a priest in the chapel of the archiepiscopal residence at Franciszkańska, 3, on November 1, 1946. Father Karol Wojtyła said his first three Masses the next day, All Souls’ Day, in the St. Leonard’s Crypt of Wawel Cathedral, hard by the tombs of such Polish national heroes as King Jan III Sobieski and Tadeusz Kościuszko; it was, he wrote a half century later, a way to express his solidarity with, and gratitude for, those who had formed him as a Polish patriot dedicated to the universal cause of freedom.
It was a commitment he would later apply, with considerable effect, on a global stage.
SON OF VATICAN II
While completing his doctorate at Rome’s Angelicum with a dissertation on the idea of faith in the thought of St. John of the Cross, Father Karol Wojtyła traveled in Europe, exploring the French worker-priest movement, doing pastoral work among Polish miners in Belgium, and finding the Paris Metro a splendid place for contemplation. He returned to the archdiocese of Kraków in the summer of 1948; Cardinal Sapieha sent him briefly to a rural parish in Niegowić, outside the city. Eight months later, however, Sapieha reassigned Father Wojtyła to the Kraków parish of St. Florian, where he developed a pastoral method that would change the face of the Catholic Church in ways that no one could imagine in Stalinist Poland.
Sapieha—by this time a man of immense moral authority—was convinced that one key battle in the Church’s war with communism for the future of Po
land would be fought in the hearts and minds of young Poles. With Father Jan Pietraszko leading a highly successful student ministry at the collegiate church of St. Anne near the Jagiellonian University, Sapieha sent Wojtyła to St. Florian’s to start a second center of student chaplaincy. In addition to fulfilling this assignment successfully, Wojtyła became the center of several networks of students whom he eventually came to call his Środowisko [Milieu]; for the rest of his life, they called him Wujek [Uncle], a Stalin-era nom de guerre invented for a time when priests were not supposed to work with groups of young people.3 In outings and vacations with Środowisko, Wojtyła developed the talents for hiking and skiing with which he had grown up in Wadowice, while adding kayaking to his repertoire as an outdoorsman. In mastering the kayak, Wojtyła formed a close friendship with a layman and an engineer, Jerzy Ciesielski, with whom he wrote essays defending a radical innovation in Polish pastoral ministry: a priest spending weeks in the mountains and on the lakes and rivers of the country with young laypeople, both men and women.
As Father Wojtyła helped form his young friends into mature Christian adults and helped them prepare for the responsibilities of marriage and parenting, they were helping form him into one of the most dynamic young priests of his generation. For in addition to his work at St. Florian’s, Wojtyła was establishing a reputation as an essayist in the independent Catholic newspaper, Tygodnik Powszechny [Universal Weekly], the only serious organ of journalism in Poland, even as he continued to write poetry (published pseudonymously) and plays (whose publication would have to await his election as pope). Cardinal Sapieha’s successor, Archbishop Eugeniusz Baziak, decided that Wojtyła should further hone his intellect with a second doctoral dissertation, the habilitation, that would qualify him to teach at the university level. Thus in September 1951, Wojtyła moved from St. Florian’s to an archdiocesan house on Kanonicza Street, near Wawel Castle and Cathedral, in order to write his habilitation thesis on the philosophical ethics of the German phenomenologist Max Scheler, which he completed in 1953. Concurrently, Wojtyła maintained his contacts with Środowisko while embarking on new experiments in pastoral ministry to health care workers.
The Jagiellonian University’s faculty of theology was shut down by the communist regime in 1953—an act of cultural vandalism that Karol Wojtyła never forgot—and thus it was that the newly minted Dr. hab. Wojtyła complemented his pastoral work in Kraków with a commuter professorship at the Catholic University of Lublin [KUL], where he taught philosophical ethics at the undergraduate and graduate levels. In addition to forming another network of young friends and colleagues at KUL, Wojtyła’s conversations with his Lublin students helped refine his thinking on sexual morality, which led to his first book, Love and Responsibility. At Lublin, Wojtyła also engaged in a searching conversation with, and critique of, modern philosophy. That encounter led him to a conviction that would remain with him for the rest of his life: that Enlightenment theories of ethics, which locked moral obligation inside human consciousness, were one source of the cultural, and ultimately political, crises of the late twentieth century. At the same time that he was teaching at KUL, Wojtyła taught courses in social ethics and other subjects to seminarians in Kraków, developing a familiarity with modern Catholic social doctrine.
On July 4, 1958, Pope Pius XII, in one of the last acts of his nineteen-year-long pontificate, appointed Father Karol Wojtyła titular bishop of Ombi and auxiliary bishop of Kraków, to work under Archbishop Baziak. Baziak consecrated Wojtyła a bishop at Wawel Cathedral on September 28, 1958, after which the youngest bishop in Poland embarked on a new set of pastoral commitments while continuing to teach at Lublin. Fourteen months after his episcopal ordination, on December 24, 1959, Bishop Karol Wojtyła began an annual tradition of celebrating Christmas Midnight Mass in an open field in Nowa Huta, the model socialist new town outside Kraków—and the first settlement in Polish history deliberately built without a church. Shortly after that dramatic event, the young bishop received a request by the Vatican commission preparing the agenda for the recently summoned Second Vatican Council. He responded with a letter, in which he outlined the crisis in Western humanism—a crisis in the very idea of the human person—that he believed to be central to the mid-twentieth century’s bloody turmoil. The letter further proposed that the Council called by the new pope, John XXIII, should put the revitalization of Christian humanism, the humanism that finds the truth about the human person in the person of Jesus Christ, at the center of its work.
Archbishop Eugeniusz Baziak died in June 1962, four months before Vatican II opened; his temporary successor as apostolic administrator of Kraków was Bishop Karol Wojtyła, elected to that post by the Metropolitan Chapter, a committee of senior priests. Wojtyła would eventually be named archbishop of Kraków in his own right by Pope Paul VI, in an appointment signed on December 30, 1963, and announced the following month.
If the Second World War was the chief formative experience of Karol Wojtyła’s life—the experience in which “humiliation at the hands of evil,” as he once put it, compelled him to spend out his own life in defense of the dignity of the human person through the priesthood of the Catholic Church—then the Second Vatican Council was the decisive experience of Wojtyła’s ministerial life. For the next forty years, he would consider himself a son of Vatican II—the Council that introduced him to the world church and its unity in diversity; the Council that ratified his own explorations in liturgical reform with his students in Kraków; the Council that gave him an accelerated, postdoctoral course in contemporary Catholic and ecumenical theology; the Council at which he helped define the Catholic Church’s commitment to the first of human rights, religious freedom. Wojtyła was an active participant throughout the four years, or periods, of Vatican II—which met for extended working sessions in the autumn months of 1962, 1963, 1964, and 1965—and in the “intersession” between Vatican II’s third and fourth periods, during which he helped refine the draft of the Council’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. In addition to his work at Vatican II on liturgy, the theology of the laity, religious freedom, and the Church’s encounter with social, cultural, political, and economic modernity, the Council years were the beginning of Wojtyła’s fascination with, and devotion to, the new churches of Africa. He also used the Council as a foil for his literary and intellectual work, writing several poems during Vatican II and thinking through what would become his unfinished philosophical masterwork, Osoba i czyn [Person and Act], which was eventually published in 1969.4
At the conclusion of Vatican II on December 8, 1965, Archbishop Karol Wojtyła returned to Kraków, where he led the archdiocese’s participation in the 1966 celebrations of the Millennium of Polish Christianity, wrote a vade mecum of the Council’s documents that was published under the title Sources of Renewal, launched a synod to plan the implementation of Vatican II in the archdiocese, and fought tenaciously with the communist regime for free space for the Church—including a church in Nowa Huta. Wojtyła’s dynamic leadership in Kraków was built on six pastoral priorities: the defense of religious freedom; the strengthening of the seminary and the local faculty of theology (which had been cast adrift by the Jagiellonian University and was operating independently); youth ministry; marriage preparation and ministry to families; dialogue with leaders of culture and Polish intellectual life; and the works of charity, including outreach to the sick, the psychologically disturbed, and the homebound. Archbishop Wojtyła maintained a rigorous and extensive program of parish visitations, sometimes staying in a parish for as long as a week, and maintained his affiliation with the Catholic University of Lublin—although now his doctoral seminar students and the students whose doctoral dissertations he was directing came and worked with him in Kraków. He continued to write poetry and plays, deepened his already close relations with his Środowisko (including annual summer kayaking vacations), and led a group of Kraków theologians in the preparation of a lengthy memorandum to Pope Paul VI on t
he moral issues involved in family planning, as the Pope was struggling with the encyclical that would be known as Humanae Vitae at its publication in 1968.
After being created cardinal by Paul VI on June 28, 1967, Karol Wojtyła became a significant figure in Vatican affairs, participating in international Synods of Bishops in 1969, 1971, 1974, and 1977, and serving on several Vatican congregations (the equivalent of U.S. cabinet departments). Cardinal Wojtyła traveled to the United States and Canada in 1969, represented the Polish Church at the International Eucharistic Congress in Melbourne, Australia, in 1973, and returned to the United States for the International Eucharistic Congress of 1976, at which he gave a major address. In 1974, Wojtyła made a deep impression on an international conference of Catholic philosophers, gathered in Fossanuova to mark the seventh centenary of the death of St. Thomas Aquinas; the German Thomist, Josef Pieper, was so taken with Wojtyła’s paper on “The Personal Structure of Self-Determination,” and with the Polish cardinal’s homiletic skills and personal charm, that he urged his friend, Professor Joseph Ratzinger, to begin a correspondence and an exchange of books with Wojtyła. Both in Kraków and abroad, Wojtyła was given indispensable support by his priest-secretary, Father Stanisław Dziwisz.
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