Word: wojtyla
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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 Paul II has never repudiated the legacy of John XXIII. On the contrary, no senior prelate had taken more pains to implement the decisions of Vatican II in his archdiocese than Wojtyla. Moreover, he had worked very closely with Paul VI, to whose memory he has remained conspicuously loyal, in trying to enforce what the council had actually decided, as opposed to what the ultraliberals claimed it had decided. But coming as he did from a church that had been notably successful in maintaining congregations, recruiting clergy, building churches and enforcing discipline, he was appalled by what was happening...
...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 of a noble house and, more important, Archbishop...
When the spirit did call Wojtyla, however, it was not the way Sapieha wanted. The young man had become enamored of the mystical writings of the great Carmelite saint John of the Cross and wanted to become a contemplative friar. Wojtyla petitioned Sapieha three times for permission to enter a monastery; each time, the Archbishop would hear none of it. He did not 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...
...years now, Karol Wojtyla -- once actor, then priest, then Archbishop and Cardinal -- has been Pope John Paul II, the Supreme Pontiff, Bishop of Rome, leader of a church of 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...