An Epic Tale of One Man's Life

By Bob Keeler | Staff Writer

For all his erudition and mysticism, Pope John Paul II was a gloriously human pope, not pale and other-worldly from years in a Vatican bureaucracy, but fully rounded and robust from toiling in the harsh light of the real world.

This pope felt the sting of his parents' deaths at an early age, worked with his hands, heard the rock-hard cacophony of a quarry and the boom of Nazi bombs, enjoyed belting out a good song. He lived an outsized, epic life -- so full of novelistic, even cinematic, twists of plot that it might well have been written by Charles Dickens and filmed by Steven Spielberg. A major element of his uniqueness was his stunning versatility. In many fields of endeavor, Karol Wojtyla (pronounced voy-TEE-wah) was outrageously adept: as a poet, an athlete, a linguist, a playwright, an actor, a philosopher,an economic critic, a deft political strategist. His writing output was breathtaking in its volume and variety: from a tender, heartbreaking poem for his dead mother, to encyclicals that thundered against the relativism of the modern world by restating moral certainties and proclaiming "The Splendor of Truth," as he named one encyclical.

Only one pope ever wrote a play about married life, "The Jeweler's Shop," that became a movie starring Burt Lancaster in 1988.

No other pope can claim to have both lionized a man on the stage and then canonized him at the altar. As a seminarian and a young priest, Wojtyla wrote a play, "The Brother of Our God," about one of his Polish heroes, Adam Chmielowski, a 19th-Century artist, Polish patriot and founder of the Albertine Brothers and the Albertine Sisters. "This was my way of repaying a debt of gratitude to him," John Paul wrote in "Gift and Mystery," a 1996 book on the 50th anniversary of his ordination. As pope, John Paul canonized him and called that "one of my greatest joys."

No other bishop of Rome has ever combined the monastic level of mysticism that attracted John Paul so strongly to the Carmelite order as a young man, with such a powerful, stage-trained ability to connect with large crowds, including adolescents and children six or seven decades his junior.

Nor is any pope, past or future, likely to surpass John Paul's deep and existential connection to the Holocaust. Wojtyla's participation in a secret seminary and an underground theater exposed him daily to the threat of arrest and consignment to a concentration camp, and he saw his Jewish friends disappear into the jaws of the Nazi killing machine. Later, as pope, he translated this profound empathy into the greatest advances ever in Catholic-Jewish relations.

In addition to his bountiful talents, John Paul always enjoyed the patronage of powerful church leaders -- from Cardinal Adam Stefan Sapieha, the archbishop of Krakow, who first noticed Wojtyla as an 18-year-old student, recruited him, ordained him a priest and played a major role in launching his career, to Pope Paul VI, who admired him and prized his advice.

Wojtyla became an auxiliary bishop at age 38, archbishop of Krakow at 43 and a cardinal at 47. He was only 58 -- much younger than the norm for a pope -- when he was elected to the papacy in 1978, becoming the first non-Italian pope since Adrian VI in 1522-1523. In choosing Wojtyla, the College of Cardinals opted for a vigorously healthy young man to succeed Pope John Paul I, whose papacy lasted only a month before he died. Wojtyla loved to hike, ski and kayak, and he displayed boundless energy and prodigious capacity for working long hours.

No one who knew him as a young man would have been shocked to learn that his life would unfold well. Though his mother died just before his ninth birthday and his brother and father had both died before he was 21, his loneliness and tragedy were surrounded by accomplishment. He was always at the top of his class, but he did not fit the stereotype of the delicate, introverted genius. He loved sports and his abundant charm made him a student leader. His emerging theatrical skill brought him positions as an actor and director in Wadowice, the town where he was born on May 18, 1920.

In 1938, Archbishop Sapieha visited his high school, and Wojtyla's welcoming speech impressed him. Sapieha asked a local priest whether Wojtyla was interested in the seminary. But Wojtyla told Sapieha that he planned to attend the Jagiellonian University and study Polish philology -- a natural choice for someone interested in poetry and drama. In his 1995 book, "Pope John Paul: The Biography," Tad Szulc reports that the priest later told Sapieha over dinner that young Wojtyla was smitten with the theater. "Too bad, too bad," Sapieha said. "We could use him."

That summer, after his high school graduation, Wojtyla and his friends had to serve in a paramilitary labor battalion, where he peeled potatoes and built roads. Then he and his father moved into a basement apartment in Krakow, near the Jagiellonian. There, as in high school, he became a student leader.

For all Wojtyla's charm, however, his friends found him to have a strong sense of privacy, a tightly held inner space where his thoughts were his own. It was at the Jagiellonian that he began to express those thoughts in a torrent of poetry and plays. And it was the Nazi invasion in 1939 that made theater for him not just a pleasant avocation but a necessary, almost religious assertion of national pride.

"It was essential to keep these theatrical get-togethers secret; otherwise we risked serious punishment from the occupying forces, even deportation to the concentration camps," John Paul wrote in "Gift and Mystery," his book about his priesthood. "I must admit that the whole experience of the theater left a deep impression on me, even though at a certain point I came to realize that this was not my real vocation."

On Sept. 1, 1939, as the Nazis bombed Krakow, Wojtyla and a friend were in the streets, surrounded by the mayhem. The occupation that followed sorely tested not only the national spirit, but Wojtyla's own. Cracking down on intellectuals, the Nazis deported his professors. To avoid deportation he had to take a job at a quarry. That later inspired a long poem, "The Quarry." It was here that Wojtyla developed his sense of what it was like to be a working man, an unusual trait in a modern pope. But his co-workers saw his intelligence and made it possible for him to study even on the job. "It did not bother them that I brought books to work," he wrote in 1996. "They would say: 'We'll keep watch. You go ahead and read.'"

When Wojtyla decided in 1942 to study for the priesthood, he entered an underground seminary. His life revolved around the seminary, his daytime job, and an enterprise that could have earned him deportation: the development of the underground theater. In 1944, as he walked home from work, a German army truck hit and nearly killed him. Later that year, after the Warsaw Uprising, the Nazis rounded up young men in Krakow; Wojtyla barely avoided arrest.

After the war, Cardinal Sapieha ordained him in 1946. Soon after that, Wojtyla headed off to Rome -- his first venture outside Poland -- to study theology and the ancient city itself. During this period, he traveled in both France and Belgium, visiting the country church in Ars where St. John Mary Vianney, a 19th-century priest who was the best- known confessor of his time, had spent as many as 18 hours a day hearing confessions and offering spiritual advice.

In 1948, he completed his first of two doctorates, this one in theology. His dissertation focused on the Spanish Carmelite mystic, St. John of the Cross. Then he returned to Poland to begin serving in a parish outside Krakow. "When I finally reached the territory of Niegowic parish, I knelt down and kissed the ground," he wrote in "Gift and Mystery." "It was a gesture I had learned from St. John Mary Vianney." And it was a gesture that he was to repeat many times as pope, on his first visit to a country.

Less than a year later, he was transferred to a parish in Krakow, where he worked extensively with secondary school and college students. In that parish and in his university chaplaincy, he built what he came to call his Srodowisko, his milieu or environment. Young people in that setting found him charmingly open, willing to listen, charismatic and athletic -- on hikes, in kayaks and on skis. They called him Wujek, "Uncle," to avoid trouble, because the Polish communist regime forbade priests from working with groups of young people.

In 1951, Sapieha's successor as archbishop of Krakow, Eugeniusz Baziak, sent Wojtyla off on a two-year academic sabbatical to work on a second doctorate, this time in philosophy. His study focused on phenomenology, a school of philosophy that tried to take account of the everyday things of life in its examination of the great questions. In 1953, he began lecturing on social ethics at the Jagiellonian University. Later, he taught ethics at the Catholic University of Lublin. His lectures on sexual ethics became his book "Love and Responsibility."

During the 1950s, he had to do his teaching, writing and pastoral work in the setting of a regime intent on controlling the church. In 1953, the regime shut down Tygodnik Powszechny, an independent Catholic weekly that had carried Wojtyla's poetry and essays. Wojtyla went to the newspaper, heard sad tales about the financial straits that its journalists now faced, and promptly handed a key editor half of his own monthly salary to give to the editors. The young priest continued turning over a third to a half of his own salary, and other priests began to do the same.