Saint John Paul II

Karol Józef Wojtyła was born on 18 May 1920 in Wadowice, a town near Kraków in Poland. Death came to his family early: his mother died in 1929, his older brother Edmund, a doctor, in 1932, and his father in 1941. He grew up with a love of literature, poetry and the stage, and in 1938 he began studying literature at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków.

The German invasion of Poland in 1939 closed the university. To earn a living and to avoid being deported to forced labor, Wojtyła worked from 1940 to 1944, first in a quarry and then in the Solvay chemical works. At the same time he took part in the underground Rhapsodic Theatre, where poetry and the Polish language became a quiet form of resistance to the occupation. In 1942 he began studying for the priesthood in the secret seminary run by Archbishop Adam Stefan Sapieha.

He was ordained on 1 November 1946 and went to Rome to study at the Angelicum, where he worked on the theology of Saint John of the Cross. Back in Poland in 1948, he served in the village parish of Niegowić and then at Saint Florian's in Kraków, where he worked especially with young people and university students. He also taught ethics and philosophy, including at the Catholic University of Lublin, and wrote books such as Love and Responsibility and Person and Act, which joined the thought of Thomas Aquinas with phenomenology and personalism and insisted that a person can never be treated as a mere means. He rose to become archbishop of Kraków and then a cardinal.

In October 1978, on the third day of the conclave, he was elected pope, and he took the name John Paul in tribute to his predecessor, who had died after only thirty-three days. He was the first Polish pope and the first pope from outside Italy since Adrian VI in the sixteenth century. He brought to the office the memory of a country that had suffered first under Nazism and then under communism.

He had attended the Second Vatican Council as a bishop and worked to carry out its reforms. He was one of the most-traveled leaders of his time, visiting 129 countries on every continent, and he spoke for freedom, peace and the dignity of the human person. In 1981 he survived being shot in Saint Peter's Square. His encyclicals included Redemptor Hominis, Laborem Exercens, Veritatis Splendor and Evangelium Vitae. He sought dialogue with other Christians, Jews and Muslims, gathering religious leaders at Assisi in 1986 and praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, and he paid particular attention to the young. During his pontificate he beatified 1,344 people and canonized 483, more than all his predecessors of the previous five centuries combined.

John Paul II died on 2 April 2005, the third-longest-serving pope in history. Pope Benedict XVI beatified him on 1 May 2011, and Pope Francis canonized him on 27 April 2014.

Saint John Paul II, pray for us.