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John Paul II
1920–2005
1920 (May 18): Born Karol Wojtyla in Wadowice, Poland.
1929 (Apr. 13): Mother, Emilia, dies in childbirth.
1932: Brother, Edmund, dies of scarlet fever contracted while trying to save a patient’s life.
1934: First theatrical performance.
1935: Joins Catholic boys group called Marian Sodality.
1938: Moves to Cracow with father to study at Jagiellonian University.
1939 (Sept. 1): Nazi Germany invades Poland.
1939 (Sept. 27): Germans occupy Cracow.
1939 (Nov. 1): Warsaw surrenders.
1939–42: Works various jobs while Poland is under Nazi occupation.
1941 (Feb.): Father dies of heart attack.
1942: Knocks on door of bishop’s palace in Cracow and asks to study for the priesthood.
1944 (Feb. 29): Survives being hit by a German truck.
1944 (Aug. 6): Black Sunday—Warsaw uprising of Polish Home Army smashed by Nazis; Gestapo rounds up men in Warsaw and Cracow.
1945 (Jan. 17): Red Army enters Cracow; Germans flee city.
1945 (Apr.): Resumes work at university upon end of war; assistant instructor in theology and studying for the priesthood.
1946 (Nov. 1): Ordination; sent to Rome for postgraduate studies at Pontificate Angelicum University.
1948 (June): Returns to Poland to a church in small village of Niegowic for seven months.
1949 (Mar.): Transferred to St. Florian, local urban parish in Cracow.
1954: Begins teaching philosophy at Catholic University of Lublin; earns doctorate in philosophy.
1958 (Sept. 28): Named auxiliary bishop of Cracow.
1962–65: Attends Vatican II conference in Rome each autumn.
1963 (June): Cardinal Giovanni Montini named Pope Paul VI.
1964: Named archbishop of Cracow.
1967: Made cardinal. Named to first world Synod of Bishops but stays home to protest government’s denial of a passport to Poland’s primate, Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski. Becomes influential adviser/friend to Pope Paul VI.
1969: Travels to Jordan, Egypt, US, and Canada.
1971: Attends first of several bishops’ synods in Rome; is elected to its permanent council.
1973: Visits Australia, New Zealand, and Papua New Guinea. Meets Mother Teresa.
1978 (Sept.): John Paul I dies after only a month in office.
1978 (Oct. 16): Named first Polish pope in history, first non-Italian pope in 455 years.
1978 (Oct. 22): Inauguration of pontificate of Pope John Paul II.
1979 (June): Makes first return to Poland.
1979 (Oct.): Becomes first pope to visit the US White House.
1980: Becomes first modern pope to hear confessions in St. Peter’s Basilica.
1981 (May 13): Shot in St. Peter’s Square by Turkish man, Mehmet Ali Agca. Severely wounded but survives, adding to his fame and impact.
1982 (May 13): Goes to Fatima, Portugal, to proclaim that his miraculous recovery was due to the intervention of Our Lady of Fatima.
1983: Calls on leaders of US and USSR to negotiate an end to the arms race. Visits would-be assassin in prison.
1986: Makes historic first trip by a Catholic pope to Rome’s ancient synagogue.
1989–91: Communist regimes begin collapsing all over Eastern Europe, culminating with the demise of the USSR.
1993: Visits Denver, delivers address to Catholic youth before massive crowds.
1995: Issues Evangelium Vitae, “Gospel of Life” encyclical.
2000 (Mar. 20–26): Makes first trip to Holy Land, expresses sorrow for Jewish suffering at hands of Christians, and asks for forgiveness for Catholic Church wrongs against Muslims and Jews.
2001 (Oct.): Becomes first pope to visit and pray in a mosque, in Damascus.
2003: Opposes US-led war in Iraq. Beatifies Mother Teresa of Kolkata, one of record number of beatifications and canonizations under his pontificate.
2004 (June): Awarded US Presidential Medal of Freedom for role in toppling communism.
2005 (Apr. 2): Pope John Paul II dies.
“We must care for the other as a person for whom God has made us responsible.”1 This declaration from Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Evangelium Vitae sums up his life and moral vision. Born Karol Wojtyla, the future pope would have to face down first the Nazis and then the Soviets, putting his life at risk to follow his calling. He refused to allow those around him to take human life lightly—whether it was the totalitarian regimes murderously sweeping across Europe or triumphant Western liberal democracies convinced of their own genius even as they made human beings objects for economic or sexual conquest.
When Karol Wojtyla first asked to study for the priesthood, Catholicism itself was going through tremendous change. The Roman Catholic Church traces its heritage back to St. Peter’s founding of the church in Rome. Through hundreds of years of growth, controversies, and schisms, it had emerged as the largest church on the planet. During Wojtyla’s life, it passed one billion members for the first time. Modern changes challenged the Roman Catholic Church’s old traditions. It would need a new kind of pope, one of intellect and piety, with the charisma and dramatic talent to influence the world based on moral authority alone.
The church found that new kind of pope in a man who had survived both Nazism and communism. He had the savvy to undermine authoritarian ideology without provoking a backlash, and the moral vision to find fault in its opponents as well. He resisted evil not with armies but with a prayerful insistence on a world centered on Christ. He was adamant that human beings were created in the image of God, with all the inherent dignity that implies. His moral leadership helped bring down a regime and raise up a people, heal old wounds and chart a new course. His name was Karol Wojtyla, but we know him better as Pope John Paul II.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
The Jagiellonian Dynasty of Poland was once a center of culture, arts, and religion—and, allied with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, it stood astride vast swaths of territory in Eastern Europe. The heights of such grandeur are too easily forgotten today. Russia and Germany helped wipe Poland off the map for more than a hundred years prior to World War I. As soon as it was reestablished as an independent nation after World War I, the two hungry neighbors began eyeing it once more. Poland was subsumed under Nazi occupation and then the puppet governance of the Soviet Union. Yet a proud Polish nationalism remained, never forgotten, commingled with the country’s Catholicism, and destined to resurface in the later days of the twentieth century.
Poland contained multiple ethnicities: not just ethnic Poles but also Germans, Ukrainians, Russians, Lithuanians, and Jews. There were an estimated 3.3 million Jews in Poland in 1939, constituting more than 10 percent of the population and much more in major cities such as Warsaw and Lódź. Many Jews held on to a distinctive language—Yiddish—and clothing, but the level of assimilation varied across different territories. Most people thought of ethnicity first and nationhood second, but especially in the urban centers where Wojtyla grew up, people of different ethnicities and faiths intermingled.
The Reformation had broken out next door to Poland, but Protestant Lutheranism was decidedly too German for it to be terribly popular among Poles. Instead, Catholicism came to define Polish national identity. In the thirteenth century, miners in Wieliczka carved a series of underground chapels—an entire subterraneous cathedral—out of the salt as they dug. Catholicism is literally part of the ground of Poland. Catholicism offered a tradition the Poles could draw on to resist Nazi brutality and Communist ideology. At the same time, when religion anchors national identity, it can be dangerous for religious minorities. Anti-Semitism was very strong in Poland, and the Nazis found willing collaborators among Polish Christians.
In 1939, Nazi Germany and the USSR signed a cynical peace deal with a secret pact to divvy up Poland. In June 1941, Germany violated the deal, and its forces swept across eastern Poland and into the USSR. Both occupying powers committed horrible atrocities in Poland. According to some estimates, more than fourteen million people in the areas between Berlin and Moscow lost their lives at the hands of either the Nazis or the Soviets. By the end of World War II, out of an estimated population of thirty million, six million Poles were dead. Germany turned Polish territory into killing fields. Hitler’s regime placed death camps in Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka, Bełżec, Sobibor, and Chełmno. Ninety percent of Poland’s Jews were murdered, and Jews, Roma (known then as gypsies), and other “undesirables” were rounded up across Europe, moved to Poland, and there massacred.
World War II ended with Russian forces sweeping into Germany from the east and meeting Allied forces from the west. Russia and Western powers each had zones of occupation in the territory they had conquered. Those unofficial boundaries eventually hardened into what Winston Churchill famously declared “an Iron Curtain.” On the far side, Eastern Europe as far west as East Germany fell under Soviet control. Communist governments were installed in numerous countries, including Poland. The Soviet Bloc governments were ostensibly independent but largely took their orders from Moscow. Secret police maintained obedience through surveillance, censorship, and imprisonment.
Meanwhile, the early Soviet industrial advantage was eroding. Stalin had mechanized Russia by force and produced a juggernaut through coercion and disdain for human life. It was not sustainable. Soviet Bloc nations, never rich and recently devastated by war, faced economic doldrums and shortages of basic goods as the 1970s and 1980s dragged on. In Poland, a Soviet-allied Communist Party held power. Catholicism was tolerated but harassed. Marxist ideology opposed organized religion, but too harsh a crackdown would have provoked a rebellion. The Polish people began seriously challenging the Communist grip on Poland in the late 1970s. In 1980, an electrician named Lech Walesa founded Solidarność, or “Solidarity,” a trade union free from control of the Communist Party. It became a broad social movement that undermined Communist control despite the government imposing martial law to stop it. It drew its moral authority from a young, little-known Polish cardinal who in 1978 had become the next pope.
EARLY AND PRIVATE LIFE
Karol Wojtyla was born on May 18, 1920, in Wadowice, Poland. The Wojtylas were a traditional Roman Catholic family, especially Karol’s mother, Emilia. She was the daughter of a Lithuanian upholsterer who would insist to her neighbors that her son was going to become a priest. His father, also Karol Wojtyla, was a former Polish Army officer whom everyone knew as “the Lieutenant.” He was stern but loving, devout and cultured—a lover of books, athletics, and history. He was a firm believer in both the Polish nation and the Catholic Church. Emilia’s Catholicism was pious and prayerful; the elder Karol’s, academic and structured. Young Karol would blend both.
The Wojtylas had two children before Karol. An older sister, Olga, died before Karol was born. Karol’s brother, Edmund, was thirteen years older. A bright, handsome, athletic young man, Edmund was loved and admired deeply by his younger brother. Edmund would go on to become a doctor. The family was working class; the elder Karol had served as a keeper of army records and accounts but, not loving the role, retired at age forty-seven. After that the family lived on a small pension; money was scarce. Yet Karol’s early years were carefree—learning to pray at his mother’s side, beginning his studies, and playing with the neighborhood children. Many of those neighbor kids were Jewish—Wojtyla’s childhood best friend, Jerzy Kluger, was the son of the head of the local Jewish community.
Tragedy first struck in 1929, when Karol’s mother, Emilia, died in childbirth. Emilia had been worn down by illness and then economic privation and was never as available to young Karol as he wanted. Losing her left a permanent mark. Only three years later, Edmund contracted scarlet fever from a patient and passed away. His father, left to raise Karol by himself, was actively involved in his son’s life. Together they prayed, played, and studied. He was a devoted and loving father, and it was a further heartbreaking loss for Karol when his father died of a heart attack in 1941. Just months shy of twenty-one, Karol Wojtyla was alone in the world.
The loss of his mother and brother drove Karol into athletics, prayer, study, and, most of all, the theater. He soon became involved with a Catholic boys group called Marian Sodality in which members supported each other in prayer and spiritual formation. His first theater performance was in 1934, and he soon became intent on a professional career in theater. His experience performing plays by Polish playwright Adam Mickiewicz imbued him with the playwright’s patriotic message of Poland helping lead the world toward a better destiny. The universal human-rights agenda of these theatrical works shaped Wojtyla’s theological vision. After the Nazis invaded, Wojtyla was a member of an underground theater troupe that performed such plays—at risk of Nazi reprisals—in order to defend Polish culture and lift Polish spirits.
Wojtyla was an exceptional student. His father enrolled him in a local public school in hopes he would gain a higher-quality education. There Wojtyla excelled in Polish, Greek, German, history, current affairs, philosophy, and physical education. He had a remarkable mastery of Latin—students were expected to speak fluently in Latin for forty minutes or more as part of their final examination. From 1938 to 1939 he attended Jagiellonian University. He studied theater and even wrote his own plays. The Nazi invasion shut down the university and interrupted his education until 1944. Later, Wojtyla would go on to complete two doctorates. His ability to speak fluently in many tongues would play a role in his rapid ascension in the Catholic Church, and his education and thoughtful approach to the issues would shine forth in his prolific later writings.
Students today will be astonished at Wojtyla’s grades when they discover how much of his day he spent in prayer and worship. Karol may have wanted to become a professional actor, but he never left the church behind. He attended Mass daily and spent hours in prayer, just as his mother had taught him. He would pray upon waking, while walking, waiting, and before sleeping. While young he was interested in women but fulfilled his vow as a high school youth to remain sexually chaste. Then, of course, he committed his life to the celibate priesthood.
Wojtyla’s losses, rather than shaking his faith, drove him deeper into it. Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi see every theme of his papacy in those difficult younger years: “The devotion, the discipline, the drama, the intellectualism, the isolation, the suffering, the mystery, the Marian piety, the fascination with martyrdom; the tormented relationship to womankind, the familial ties to Judaism; the emphasis on death and transfiguration. And always, above all else, the passion of Poland: Poland triumphant, Poland torn asunder, Poland as the Christ of Nations.”2
Wojtyla was studying in Cracow when the Nazis invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. By September 27, the Germans had conquered Cracow, and the government in the capital city of Warsaw officially surrendered on November 1. His studies were interrupted, and Karol was forced to work various jobs under Nazi occupation to avoid being shipped elsewhere. He started out in a rock quarry—hard, demanding labor under bad working conditions. Soon, he got a job at a German-run firm that allowed him a small measure of security—a work permit, a nighttime pass, a salary, opportunity to study independently during quiet moments, and increased food rations.
It was during this time, in 1941, that Wojtyla’s father died. Nazi Germany was at the peak of its power. Not far from Cracow, where Wojtyla then lived, in a small town called Oświęcim, the Germans had already constructed the camp the world would come to know as Auschwitz. In Cracow, young men were being rounded up and shipped off to labor camps. Karol’s one source of refuge was the Catholic faith, and he realized his true calling: the church.
It must have been a frightening realization. The Nazis were determined to destroy Poland’s national identity, and that meant targeting the church. Nazis sought to decapitate its leadership. By one count, 1,932 priests, 850 monks, and 289 nuns were murdered—not to mention countless churches razed, scholars executed, and laypeople killed. Karol Wojtyla knew all of this—and yet still, in 1942, knocked on the door of the bishop’s palace in Cracow and asked to study for the priesthood.
VOCATION
Under the Nazi occupation, seminary education went underground. Wojtyla received his coursework from the bishop and did not, for a long time, know his fellow seminarians. Studying for the priesthood put their lives at risk. He chose the priesthood under the Nazis and later stayed true to his vocation under immense pressure from the Polish Communist regime. In a sense, Wojtyla signed up to place a target on his own back. Perhaps Wojtyla did it because he knew the cost others were paying.
Cracow was the nearest city to the death camp at Auschwitz, where so many Jews—including Elie Wiesel’s family—were murdered. In 2003, an Italian Jewish leader nominated Pope John Paul II for the “Righteous Among the Nations” medal, an honor given to non-Jews who saved Jews during the Holocaust. The incident recounted was one from 1942, when the seminarian Wojtyla arranged for an anonymous, two-year-old Jewish orphan to be raised by a local Christian family.3
A better-documented account took place in the immediate aftermath of the war. Thirteen-year-old Edith Zierer had just wandered out of a Nazi camp, barely clinging to life. Alone in the world, she boarded a freight train and then sat down in the corner of a station in a distant town. There she encountered a young seminarian who told her his name, gave her food and water, and helped her find her way to Cracow to search for relatives. She would later credit him with saving her life and wrote down his name so she would never forget it. After he became pope, she recognized him, and the two met again, this time at the Vatican, in 1998.4
Despite these gestures and being an able-bodied young man at the time, Bernstein and Politi note, “He never engaged in any direct resistance against the Nazis or in activities to rescue Jews. To the Polish Jew Marek Halter, who asked him decades later whether he had helped to save any Jews, John Paul II answered: ‘I cannot lay claim to what I did not do.’”5
On February 29, 1944, Wojtyla was struck by a German truck while crossing the road, suffering a severe concussion. Shockingly, a car driven by German Wehrmacht officers pulled over and tended to him, ensuring that he got medical attention. Wojtyla saw it as divine confirmation of his vocation. But most of his interactions with the Nazis were not so kind. On “Black Sunday,” August 6, 1944, the Nazis smashed the Warsaw uprising of the Polish Home Army. Archbishop Adam Sapieha called his seminarians—most unknown to each other—to his palace and hid them in his basement until the danger from German retaliation had passed. Cracow was thrilled when the Red Army entered the city in 1945 and the Germans fled before them, but it was only the start of a new era of foreign domination.
After the war ended, Wojtyla began teaching theology and continued studying for the priesthood. He was ordained in November 1946 and immediately dispatched to Rome for postgraduate studies. As he researched sixteenth-century mystic St. John of the Cross, he also learned Italian, studied English, and traveled Western Europe. By 1948, he was back in Poland gaining experience in local parish ministry. Eventually, he moved back to Cracow, where he taught ethics at Jagiellonian University and, later, Catholic University of Lublin.
He authored another thesis, this time on the ethics of Max Scheler, finishing work in 1953. He was not awarded the doctorate until 1957 because the Communists abolished the theology department. Assigned to an urban parish, he became well-known for his relevant, outdoorsy, popular, semiclandestine ministry with young people. By 1958, he had been named auxiliary bishop of Cracow, a role in which he honed the subtle art of protecting the church from Communist pressure without provoking an outright backlash. Within six years, he was named archbishop and within a decade had been named a cardinal and become a close adviser and friend to Pope Paul VI.
There were three keys to his meteoric rise. First, he was simply an impressive young man, deeply pious and academically gifted. Second was the Vatican II conference in Rome from 1962 to 1965. This was a major turning point in the life of the Roman Catholic Church. At Vatican II, the church ended its defensive attack on modernity and instead decided to start navigating a course that balanced tradition and new openness. After Vatican II, Masses could be conducted in local languages; there was more outreach to other Christian denominations and other faiths; liturgies and rituals were modernized and involved more lay participation; and the church took on a more engaged and world-focused tone. As Oscar Romero experienced, it was nothing less than a revolution in the way the centuries-old Roman Catholic Church approached the world.
Bishop Wojtyla attended the conference in Rome each autumn from 1962 to 1965. His intellect shone, as did his array of life experiences. His ability to speak German, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Russian, and English did not hurt his ability to forge spiritual bonds with representatives of the global church. One of those he impressed was Cardinal Giovanni Montini, who in 1963 was named Pope Paul VI. Wojtyla was often described as the star among the two thousand bishops in attendance. It was a key stepping-stone in his journey.
Despite it all, Bishop Wojtyla was younger and less experienced than the top picks for archbishop of Cracow. But the third element of his rise was God’s providence. The long-standing ties between church and state in Poland meant that the now-Communist government had to approve any senior church appointments. The government rejected the early candidates. The cardinal was reluctant to put Wojtyla’s name forward, and party officials overlooked the possibility of petty rivalry. They assumed the reluctance meant the young bishop was someone they could work with, and comically inaccurate secret police reports backed their conclusion. They approved his eventual selection.
In 1964, Wojtyla was named archbishop of Cracow, and within three years, he was made a cardinal. He used his platform well: “From 1976 to 1978 Wojtyla delivered a body of homilies that stirred a movement of spiritual resistance. . . . Increasingly he directly criticized the government’s abuse of moral authority in its treatment of workers, dissenters, intellectuals, students, and believers.”6 As cardinal, he became an influential adviser and friend to Pope Paul VI. This new pope positioned the young Polish archbishop for future leadership, offering him every opportunity to take on new responsibilities and impress his peers. Wojtyla applied his famous work ethic at every chance, while ably leading Polish Catholics against Communist interference. He also began traveling in earnest—a practice he never stopped. He visited Jordan, Egypt, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Papua New Guinea, and he met Mother Teresa.
In 1978, Pope Paul VI died. The College of Cardinals convened, and there was a clear first choice, but the new pope, John Paul I, died after only a month in office. When the cardinals reconvened, there was little consensus. There was, however, much goodwill and respect for a fifty-eight-year-old Polish cardinal. Cardinals from around the world had come to know Wojtyla as a sincere, authentic, and brilliant peer. Now, they decided he was fit to be the first non-Italian pope in 455 years—and the first Polish pope in history. Out of respect for his deceased predecessor, Karol Wojtyla chose the name John Paul II.
The news of his selection sent shock waves through the world, but nowhere more than Poland. From the day of his installation on October 22, 1978, it was clear this was a different kind of pope. “Do not be afraid,” he declared at his homily. “Open wide the doors for Christ.”7 John Paul II transformed the papal office from a tradition-bound cleric to a kind of globe-trotting rock star. He immediately set out on travels with the goal of visiting every nation where Catholics worshiped. He became the first pope to visit the White House. He would eventually visit 129 countries in all. At each stop, he would surprise people by combining pageantry and his trademark piety.
In 1979, he returned home to Poland for the first time as pope. It was a moment that unleashed a tidal wave—planting the seed of the fall of the USSR. Warsaw’s Victory Square became an open-air chapel, and Communist authorities ordered television crews not to show the three hundred thousand–plus people who lined the streets. The Soviet Politburo, which sought to keep churches under its thumb, was forced to watch as the pope linked Polish nationalism to God’s providence and promise to redeem God’s people: “And I cry—I who am a Son of the land of Poland and who am also Pope John Paul II—I cry from all the depths of this Millennium, I cry on the vigil of Pentecost: Let your Spirit descend. Let your Spirit descend. And renew the face of the earth, the face of this land. Amen.”8
It is estimated that an astonishing one out of every three Poles saw him in person on that trip. Many observers claim that it is no mere coincidence that the Solidarity movement began the year following. The Polish people were filled with pride and fervor and the certainty of knowing that worship was resistance and resistance akin to praising God. Pope John Paul II had led the church from within a deeply Catholic yet Communist-controlled country. He knew exactly how to mount a moral resistance without encouraging the kind of outright rebellion that could provoke crackdowns, arrests, or violence against his flock who lived under Communist rule.
He spoke against a “culture of death”—one that turned human beings into material goods in the West and fodder for the state in the East. He founded his theological approach on the inherent dignity of each individual and never tired of denouncing communism for eroding the value of life. As he put it later, in his Evangelium Vitae, “The root of modern totalitarianism is to be found in the denial of the transcendent dignity of the human person who, as the visible image of the invisible God is therefore by his very nature the subject of rights which no one may violate—no individual, group, class, nation, or State.”9
The pope had critical words for the West as well. He refused to endorse the arms race between East and West, or US president Ronald Reagan’s preferred strategy of overpowering Russia with sheer military might. While many in the West idolized consumerism and promoted “trickle-down” economics, John Paul II was adamant that “the mass of the poor have no resources of their own to fall back on, and must chiefly depend on the assistance of the State. It is for this reason that wage-earners, since they mostly belong to the latter class, should be specially cared for and protected by the government. . . . The more that individuals are defenseless within a given society, the more they require the care and concern of others, and in particular the intervention of governmental authority.”10
In 1981, a Turkish man named Mehmet Ali Agca shot John Paul II in St. Peter’s Square. The pope was severely wounded but survived. The event added to his fame and impact, especially after the pope forgave Agca. After twenty-two days of recovery, John Paul II returned to the Vatican. Shortly after, his Marian piety came on display again when he visited Fatima, Portugal, to claim that his miraculous recovery was due to the intervention of Our Lady of Fatima, the name given to a mysterious 1917 apparition of the Holy Mother there.
By the late 1980s, with Russia struggling more and more, a new leader decided it was time for dramatic change. Mikhail Gorbachev’s platform of perestroika (“reform”) and glasnost (“openness”) was an attempt to change the Soviet Union from within. However, these reforms mainly exposed the unsustainability of communism. As Communist collapse accelerated, the subject states became free one after another until, in 1991, the Soviet regime itself fell.
A wave of strikes broke out in Poland in support of the now-banned Solidarity. Longtime political allies of the Communist Party switched sides and demanded the union be legalized. The Communist government saw the writing on the wall and announced an election. In August 1989, decades of one-party rule came to an end as Poland elected a non-Communist prime minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki—a devout Catholic. Other nations followed suit and, before long, the USSR met its demise. It was a victory for organizers, activists, politicians, trade unions, rebels, dissidents, Western political powers—and the moral leadership of Pope John Paul II.
John Paul II’s conservatism became more pronounced in the years after the Soviet Union fell. Whether he changed as he aged or whether the spotlight was now on his moral views instead of his resistance to Communist regimes remains a matter of debate. He had risen through the ranks of the church at a time of massive social changes, including feminism, the sexual revolution, birth control, and legalized abortion. It turned out he was opposed to all four.
In 1995, he issued one of his most important papal encyclicals, Evangelium Vitae, “Gospel of Life,” which shaped a generation of Catholic and evangelical theologians. John Paul II rooted his theological ethics in the idea of a natural moral order. Fundamental to that order is the creation and sustaining of life until it comes to a natural end. He saw, instead, a rising “culture of death” in both the East and West. From his perspective, humanity was choosing unnatural death as a solution to problems. Have a national enemy? Go to war. People who have committed crimes? The death penalty. Undesired pregnancy? Abortion. Don’t like a political opponent? Kill the person. Undesired elderly? Employ euthanasia. He believed deeply that any interference in the natural process of life tarnished culture and bred a casual disrespect for the value of human life.
The primary case in point, for John Paul II, was abortion. “When a parliamentary or social majority decrees that it is legal, at least under certain conditions, to kill unborn human life, is it not really making a tyrannical decision with regard to the weakest and most defenseless of human beings?” he wrote.11 But his logic also extended to opposing any form of artificial birth control. He maintained that only abstinence or the rhythm method were acceptable. Well before he became pope, he was credited with pushing Pope Paul VI to oppose birth control, even for married Catholic couples, at a time when both scholarly and lay Catholic opinion were moving in the opposite direction.
One other aspect of his papacy deserves special attention. Pope John Paul II presided over a period of tremendous leaps forward in interreligious dialogue. At Vatican II, the church had opened the door to new dialogue. John Paul II walked through that door. His list of firsts was remarkable. In 1986, he became the first Catholic pope to visit Rome’s ancient synagogue. At the turn of the new millennium, he made a famous trip to the Holy Land. In Jerusalem, he followed the Jewish custom of leaving a written prayer in a note at the Western Wall. His expressed the church’s sorrow for suffering at the hands of Christians. While in the Holy Land, he asked for forgiveness for the wrongs done by the Catholic Church against both Jews and Muslims. A year later, he became the first Catholic pope to visit and pray in a mosque, in Damascus, Syria.
In the last years of his life, he curtailed his once-busy travel schedule as he struggled with Parkinson’s disease. Despite being visibly weak and in pain, he continued to make public appearances for as long as he could. The suffering did not seem to diminish his spirit or his love for his flock. He finally passed away, at the age of eighty-five, on April 2, 2005.
LEGACY AND CRITICISM
John Paul II reshaped an ancient international church and became one of the great moral theologians of the twentieth century. A person so deeply pious that many who decried his orthodox views loved him nevertheless, he realized that the greatest authority of the papacy lies in its moral power, not the seductive temporal power of ages past, and he exercised every ounce of that moral authority in a new mass-communications age.
Yet the shining jewel of his legacy is the collapse of communism. It is easy to both understate and overstate his role. He did not lead marches or apply hard-edged economic or military pressure. He did something less tangible but more powerful: he hollowed out the Communist Bloc from the inside with moral critique and a prophetic alternative. John Paul II’s steady diplomacy and influence undermined the legitimacy of Communist regimes to the point where they collapsed without bloodshed or mushroom clouds over major cities. It made him a hero to many in the anti-Communist West—and, of course, a national hero to the Polish people.
We would also do well to resurface some elements of his thinking that got lost in the pitched battle between Western capitalism and Eastern communism. We can understand John Paul II as a leading theological interpreter of “what went wrong” in three socioeconomic regimes: Nazism and communism, of course, but also liberal democratic capitalism. He spoke out against the sinful accumulation of massive wealth in the hands of a few. He also tried to reorient market economies to serve working people, not capital. “The church considers it her task always to call attention to the dignity and rights of those who work,” he wrote.12 The purpose of work is neither profit nor produce; instead, “it is always man who is the purpose of the work.”13 He wanted society to recognize the moral dimension of human economic interdependence and embrace a concept of “development” beyond mere economics.
Pope John Paul II produced countless thoughtful encyclicals and books as pope. The same themes recur, from the plight of the poor to Marian spirituality; his concern for human dignity in the face of communism or capitalism; his attempt to extend the arms of Catholic tradition to the modern world; his efforts to reach out to the Eastern Orthodox, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, and more without bending on doctrine. In addition, John Paul II presided over a record number of beatifications and canonizations—the declaration of new saints—including the beatification of now-Saint Mother Teresa of Kolkata.
Pope John Paul II wrote in his first papal encyclical that the church’s role is “to point the awareness and experience of the whole of humanity toward the mystery of God.”14 Other popes called the Second Vatican Council, but John Paul II redefined the papacy for a post–Vatican II world. He helped de-Italianize and globalize the Catholic Church through extensive travels and his appointed bishops.
He took interreligious dialogue seriously and approached the worldwide Jewish community with confession and repentance for Christian anti-Semitism and complicity in the Holocaust. He also reached out to Muslims at a time when anti-Muslim fervor and bigotry were on the rise. Today, anti-Semitism is also, once again, increasing. In Poland and elsewhere, neo-Nazis march in the streets. Fear of Communists has become fear of Muslims, and too many Christians fail to see the full humanity of refugees of other faiths. Pope John Paul II’s words still have import for us today.
His great cause—provoking both praise and ire—was his advocacy for a “culture of life” in place of a “culture of death.” John Paul II was perhaps the best-trained and most-skillful moral theologian in modern Catholic history. He lived his life in the shadow of two evil regimes, the Nazis and the Soviets, that displayed shocking disregard for human life. Undoubtedly, this was in mind when he wrote, “The deliberate decision to deprive an innocent human being of his life is always morally evil and can never be morally licit either as an end in itself or as a means to a good end.”15 In response to the brutality around him, he powerfully articulated a theological ethic grounded in the sacredness of all life. He was particularly famous for his vigorous antiabortion advocacy, proclaiming that each society “will be judged on the basis of how it treats its weakest members, and among the most vulnerable are surely the unborn and the dying.”16
His theological opposition to any interruption of the “natural” moral order elicited controversy. He never budged on gender equality, the role of women in society, or female priests. His views of contraception remained consistent for his entire life, even as evidence emerged, for example, that condoms would slow deadly epidemics such as HIV/AIDS. He opposed LGBTQ relationships and was dismissive of the claims of LGBTQ Catholics, emboldening those in the church willing to attack and demean gay people.
Pope John Paul II had an exalted but unrealistic view of women. He viewed women as the pinnacle of gentleness and humanity and bearers of God’s greatest gift: the ability to create new life. But in the process, he reinforced gender stereotypes and mainly confined a woman’s role to that of bearing children. His exaltation of womanhood is small consolation to women denied the human dignity and the right to self-determination that he demanded for men. Bernstein and Politi argue, “His opposition to abortion, his intense desire to protect the unborn, his belief in ‘a special feminine genius’ and in a circumscribed role for women in the Church have all been crucial elements in his thinking—and in his career as pope; and all may reflect the complex feelings and unmet longings that he carried with him from his relationship with his mother, as well as for her early death.”17
Because controversies over gender, sexuality, and reproduction reached their boiling points in the 1990s, critics have questioned whether he withdrew from an early, holistic vision—in which protecting life included worker protections and care for the environment—to a narrower, more conservative vision. By the end of his life, there was a clear “left” and “right” culture war within the Catholic Church, and the pope sat definitively on the right side. Bernstein and Politi recount somewhat chilling examples of Pope John Paul II dismissing the concerns of public health experts and fellow Catholics alike who disagreed with his views. His unflinching convictions gave him the steel to stare down Soviet regimes but, later, left him stubborn and close-minded.
As we encountered in studying Oscar Romero, John Paul II’s fervent anti-Communist convictions led him to condemn the poor people’s movements in Latin America and hamstring the church’s effort to oppose oppression there. A devoted defender of the church and opponent of left-wing Soviet communism, he could not see that, on the other side of the world, it was right-wing political movements—with funding from his allies in the United States—that crushed dissent, trampled the lives of the poor, and murdered priests.
He also appeared to think that the best way to limit Marxist influences on theology was through an authoritarianism of his own. No matter how much liberation theologians protested that they were unaffiliated with international communism, he used church discipline to enforce doctrine and brooked no dissent. It sent a chill of fear through Catholic academic circles. He was criticized in his own lifetime for imposing strict limits on Catholic thought and hampering creative theological work.
Finally, he faced severe and warranted criticism for the priest sex abuse scandal. In 1985, a report warned the US Conference of Catholic Bishops about systematic clergy sexual abuse. The Catholic hierarchy ignored it. By the twenty-first century, thousands of people in countries around the world had come forward with allegations of sexual abuse by priests. In some cases, the same priests were responsible for multiple assaults, and higher-ups had merely transferred them from parish to parish after abuses came to light, putting more children at risk. Journalists have credibly reported that multiple dioceses around the world attempted cover-ups.
The scandal shattered the trust of many faithful for whom the Catholic Church was a place of safety and protection, especially for children. Pope John Paul II was slow to respond and became quite defensive, never seeming to fully grapple with the severity and extent of the abuse or the complicity of church leaders. It is also unlikely that a man with such a controlling grip on church discipline was unaware of early allegations. The world can only wonder whether a younger, more vigorous John Paul II might have responded differently than the aged pope who stumbled through the scandal.
Everyone in this volume has a moral blind spot. Pope John Paul II’s blind spot was the Catholic Church. The church attempted to avoid a direct confrontation with the Nazis, and he followed its lead when other young men fought back. The church’s strength was its unity, and he did not tolerate dissent. He could not see liberation theology as anything but an attack on church orthodoxy, nor could he see how a church that venerates the Virgin Mary might simultaneously be denying autonomy and dignity to women. He might have seen the sexual abuse scandal as an effort to undermine the church’s moral authority. His greatest strength was his unshakable conviction that the Catholic Church represented God’s truth in the world no matter what mighty regimes opposed it. That was his weakness too.
Today, barely a decade after his death, Pope John Paul II is already counted among the great popes. He is perhaps the most influential pope for Protestants, though more so among evangelicals than mainline Protestants, who admire Pope Francis. His current reception in Catholic circles largely remains as it was at his death. There persists a stark divide over his theology beneath a deep pool of goodwill and love for the man himself. His successor, Benedict XVI, was even more academic, orthodox, and conservative than John Paul II. In contrast, Pope Francis has emphasized poverty, humility, and avoiding judgments. One can make the argument that John Paul II was akin to Benedict but with more personal magnetism, or that he represents a middle ground between two conflicting camps.
Despite all the strong feelings that John Paul II provokes, there was some quality about the man that inspires love and affection. One senses that he never stopped being that earnest boy praying alongside his beloved mother, even as he became the face of God’s opposition to murderous regimes. For a pope to be declared a saint soon after his death certainly requires special qualities that transcend worldly splits. It was Pope Benedict XVI who beatified him in May 2011, and Pope Francis who oversaw his canonization on April 27, 2014. The humble boy from Wadowice who became Pope John Paul II was officially named a saint of the Roman Catholic Church.
Pope John Paul II’s life and work offer a number of important lessons about moral leadership:
- Spiritual formation sustains you. All his life people praised the piety of Pope John Paul II. Spiritual practices—such as prayer or meditation—sustain you, form you, help you see the good in others, and maintain your courage and energy to persevere.
- Dialogue is not the same as surrender. John Paul II never deviated from orthodox Christian doctrine, and yet he spent much of his life trying to dialogue with those who did not hold those beliefs. It is possible—and necessary—to talk to people with whom you completely disagree.
- Learn languages. John Paul II’s fluency in a variety of languages made him a better leader. Learning another language helps you build new relationships and forces you to encounter another culture and way of thinking.
- Combine intellect with prayer. John Paul II could have let his academic accomplishments go to his head, yet everyone remarked on his humility and constant prayer. Prayer can remind you of the source of all creation and the blessings in your life, inspiring you to continue learning while reminding you that knowledge alone does not guarantee a life well lived.
- Don’t underestimate political savvy. Moral leadership requires being willing to lean into the world in all its messiness and controversy. That requires a certain amount of political savvy—something we see easily in political figures but can also recognize and commend in religious figures such as John Paul II.
- Seek diverse experiences. Who knows whether Wojtyla saw theater or working in a stone quarry as preparation for the papacy—and yet without these experiences, he would not have been the same person. Seek out diverse experiences and do not devalue what you already bring to the table.
John Paul II’s deep faith and Christian belief drove his concern for human life. “Precisely by contemplating the precious blood of Christ,” he wrote, “the believer learns to recognize and appreciate the almost divine dignity of every human being.”18 Yet he always strove to find ways of communicating that appealed to both Christians and people of other faith traditions. The challenge made him a more eloquent and forceful communicator—a moral leader presenting a different vision of human purpose. Rarely has someone more forcefully and eloquently articulated the inherent worth and dignity of all people than John Paul II. “The dignity of this life is linked not only to its beginning, to the fact that it comes from God,” he said, “but also to its final end, to its destiny of fellowship with God in knowledge and love of him.”19
He was a brilliant young man kept humble through piety. He survived heartbreak, loss, and two murderous regimes and then built a new, global family out of the entire Catholic Church. He refused to be sucked into a false choice between freedom and order. “True freedom,” he insisted, “is not advanced in the permissive society, which confuses freedom with license to do anything whatever and which in the name of freedom declares a general amorality.”20 Freedom is not the license to dominate or destroy in the name of individual gain, national pride, or imagined progress. Freedom is a gift—the freedom to be of service to others, others whose lives are precious to God.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
- How did Wojtyla’s childhood help set the course for who he would become?
- He survived Nazism and communism and lived to critique both. Discuss how these two monstrous regimes shaped John Paul II’s moral theology.
- Is the West in fact a culture of death?
- For John Paul II, what is the relationship between truth, morality, and freedom?
- Do you find John Paul II’s moral vision attractive? Why or why not?
Bernstein, Carl, and Marco Politi. His Holiness: John Paul II and the History of Our Time. New York: Penguin Books, 1996.
Curran, Charles, and Richard McCormick. John Paul II and Moral Theology. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1998.
Formicola, Jo Renee. Pope John Paul II: Prophetic Politician. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2002.
Holloway, Carson. The Way of Life: John Paul II and the Challenge of Liberal Modernity. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2008.
Weigel, George. Witness to Hope: The Biography of John Paul II. New York: HarperCollins, 1999.
1. John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, The Vatican, March 25, 1995, http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_25031995_evangelium-vitae.html.
2. Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi, His Holiness: John Paul II and the History of Our Time (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), 23.
3. Zenit Staff, “Italian Jewish Leader Proposes Pope for Award,” Zenit, September 24, 2003, https://zenit.org/articles/italian-jewish-leader-proposes-pope-for-award/.
4. Roger Cohen, “The Polish Seminary Student and the Jewish Girl He Saved,” New York Times, April 6, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/06/world/worldspecial2/the-polish-seminary-student-and-the-jewish-girl-he.html.
5. Bernstein and Politi, His Holiness, 60.
6. Bernstein and Politi, His Holiness, 128.
7. John Paul II, “Mass at the Beginning of the Pontificate,” The Vatican, October 22, 1978, https://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/homilies/1978/documents/hf_jp-ii_hom_19781022_inizio-pontificato.html.
8. John Paul II, “Homily of His Holiness John Paul II, Victory Square, Warsaw,” The Vatican, June 2, 1979, https://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/homilies/1979/documents/hf_jp-ii_hom_19790602_polonia-varsavia.html.
9. John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae.
10. John Paul II, Centesimus Annus, The Vatican, May 1, 1995, http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_01051991_centesimus-annus.html.
11. John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae.
12. John Paul II, Laborem Exercens, The Vatican, September 14, 1981, http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_14091981_laborem-exercens.html.
13. John Paul II, Laborem Exercens.
14. John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis, The Vatican, March 4, 1979, http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_04031979_redemptor-hominis.html.
15. John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae.
16. John Paul II, “Address of the Holy Father John Paul II to the New Ambassador of New Zealand to the Holy See,” The Vatican, May 25, 2000, http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/speeches/2000/apr-jun/documents/hf_jp-ii_spe_20000525_ambassador-new-zealand.html.
17. Bernstein and Politi, His Holiness, 22.
18. John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae.
19. John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae.
20. John Paul II, “To Serve Peace, Respect Freedom: Message of His Holiness Pope John Paul II for the Celebration of the Day of Peace,” The Vatican, January 1, 1981, http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/messages/peace/documents/hf_jp-ii_mes_19801208_xiv-world-day-for-peace.html.