Pope John Paul II
By taking his ministry straight to the faithful, the Pontiff reshaped his own church and helped to give it new symbolic force in the modern world
By JEFF ISRAELY
From an anonymous birth in a small Polish town to the most widely followed funeral in human history, Karol Wojtyla's epic life story mirrors the turbulence of the 20th century.
As a child and young man, his struggle was mostly private: losing his mother at age 8, hounded by the Nazis for organizing underground church meetings and theater events, forging
on with his ministry despite the Iron Curtain's imposed atheism. By the time he was in his 40s, the magnetic priest had risen to Archbishop, and was helping shape the reforms of the Second Vatican Council in Rome and attracting young followers in his diocese in Kraków.
Elected in 1978 as a virtual unknown to be the first non-Italian Pope in over four centuries, Wojtyla took the name John Paul II, and instantly began to redefine the papacy. A momentous trip back to his native Poland in 1979 shook the Kremlin, as the Pontiff became the spiritual guide for the Solidarity movement—and the not-so-secret weapon in the eventual implosion of European communism. An assassin nearly cut his life short in 1981, but John Paul's return from the brink of death in St. Peter's Square was the first indication of a man whose spiritual force could surmount almost any physical hardship. With more than 100 foreign voyages, he was the first Pope ever to take his ministry straight to the faithful.
His ideas for his own church—to reinforce Catholicism's absolutist bans on abortion and birth control—were less widely welcomed than his foreign policy. Still, it was the same devotion to his faith and commitment to human life that drove him to try to heal the church's divisions with other major world religions, speak out against the excesses of capitalism and champion peace among nations. The ideological struggles of the 20th century produced many charismatic leaders. Too often they were cynical men. At least one is destined for sainthood.
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April 28, 2004 |
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October 11, 2004 |
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October 10, 2005 |
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