On May 18, 1920, Karol and Emilia Wojtyla welcomed the arrival of their second son and named him Karol Jozef. The family lived in Wadowice, a small town just south of Krakow where Catholics and Jews lived side by side. When Karol was 8, he lost his mother. Three years later, his older brother also died.
Portrait of the Pope as a Young Man Karol grew up to excel in academics and athletics. When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, he was studying literature and philosophy in Krakow and exploring a passion for theater. After the Germans shut down his university, he saw his professors rounded up--some deported, others executed--and Poland's Jews sent off to death camps. Auschwitz was less than 50 miles away. Karol took a job as a stonecutter, but then personal tragedy struck again: his father died in 1941. Karol Sr.'s last wish was that his son become a priest, and Karol soon began training at an underground seminary in Krakow--secretly, since the Nazis had outlawed religious study. From 1944 until the end of World War II, he had to lie low to escape the notice of the Germans, who had begun rounding up Polish men. >From these experiences, Karol became convinced that moral purity is best attained through suffering. Later in life, when addressing arguments that priestly celibacy should be relaxed, or that other dimensions of Catholic life should be made less difficult, Wojtyla would return to the idea that some things in life are supposed to be hard. On-the-Job Training Once Karol entered the Catholic church, his rise through the hierarchy was steady. He was ordained in 1946 and continued to study, earning doctorates in theology and philosophy. He became a bishop in 1958, archbishop in 1963, cardinal in 1967. A priest in the Polish church faced plenty of obstacles. When the Germans were thrown out of Poland at the end of World War II, the Communists took over, and the new regime was every bit as authoritarian as the old--and even more hostile to religion. A rising star, Karol grew proficient in the difficult balancing act of resisting the government's periodic crackdowns on religion without inviting even harsher reprisals. The great turning point in his career came at the Second Vatican Council (1962- 65). The young church leader from Krakow, relatively unknown outside his native land, attracted attention by arguing forcefully that the church should explicitly condemn anti-Semitism and officially reject the view that Jews are responsible for Jesus's death. All Roads Lead to Rome When Pope John Paul I died in 1978 after only 34 days in office, Cardinal Wojtyla traveled to Rome to help elect a successor. On the eighth ballot, his peers elected him to lead their church. He was the first non-Italian pope in more than 400 years and the first Slavic pope ever. At age 58, he was also the youngest pope in generations. In 1981, he was shot twice by a Turk named Mehmet Ali Agca. He recovered within months, and resumed his arduous schedule. He even went to his assailant's prison and forgave the man who tried to murder him. Throughout his papacy, John Paul was a traveling man. In the past quarter of a century, he made more than 100 trips outside Italy. Plenty of people traveled to him, too. The Vatican estimates that 17 million pilgrims traveled to St. Peter's Basilica in Rome to see John Paul over the years. Many will return in the coming days to say goodbye.
