Word: polander
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Wojtyla is another mountaineer, from the Carpathian foothills near Cracow. This splendid medieval and Renaissance city, with its ancient Jagiellonian University -- which Wojtyla attended -- was the center of his youthful universe. Warsaw, the modern capital of Poland, meant little to him, and the summit of his clerical ambition was reached when he became Cardinal-Archbishop of Cracow. As Pope, he is a Pole, as Roncalli was an Italian. But both men, as instinctive regionalists, have repudiated modern nationalism and have tended to see Europe as an amalgam of historic regions -- a microcosm of a world of peoples rather than...
...John XXIII, who had led a sheltered life in seminaries and nunciatures, John Paul was a man of the world who had suffered under Nazism and communism. He was a philosopher, poet and dramatist, but also a very experienced fund raiser and administrator. His pastoral experience was determinative. In Poland he had founded and run perhaps the most successful marriage institute in Christianity, set up to deal with the problems of marital discord, family planning, illegitimacy and venereal disease, alcoholism, wife beating and child abuse...
...wrote the Romantic-era Polish poet Juliusz Slowacki in 1848, lines so visionary and improbable -- a Pole as Supreme Pontiff! -- that few, even in long-suffering Poland, believed they would ever come true. In 1938, however, a Polish teenager would be singled out for what would eventually be an appointment with prophecy. In that year, Karol Wojtyla was a student -- and an actor of considerable promise -- at a secondary school in the grimy industrial town of Wadowice. As the school's prize orator, he was asked to deliver a speech welcoming a grand visitor, the princely Adam Sapieha, scion...
...want | Wojtyla walled in as a mystical recluse. Could not the young man see what God really wanted him to do? Wojtyla got the message. He would become a diocesan priest, serving the people directly, a pastor ministering to the immediate needs of the faithful in Poland. Sapieha ordained him in 1946. And thus, it began to come to pass...
...nearly 1 billion souls. "It's curious," an Italian Archbishop once said, "you'd think he had always been Pope." And yet to understand the man and his papacy, one must look not only to the Vatican, from which he issues spiritual guidelines, but also to the almost mystical Poland he holds in his heart. Indeed, though the Pope's corner bedroom on the third floor of the Vatican's Apostolic Palace has a view of the baroque wonder of St. Peter's Square, it is almost as spare as a monk's. The room contains a single...