Word: wojtyla
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...life in Poland was hard. Wojtyla's mother died when he was nine and he was brought up by his father, who subsisted for the most part on an army sergeant's pension. Though many Cardinals?and Popes?have been trained from early youth in the hothouse atmosphere of minor seminaries, Wojtyla went to ordinary high school. He attended Mass each morning and headed a religious society, but equally strong adolescent passions were literature and the theater. He was the producer and lead actor in a school troupe that toured southeastern Poland doing Shakespeare and modern Polish plays...
...those years. However, like many a young man he had an active social life, and at least one steady girlfriend. A devout tailor interested him in the writings of St. John of the Cross, Spain's 16th century Carmelite mystic, and in 1942, the year after his father died, Wojtyla decided to begin studies for the priesthood at an illegal underground seminary...
That was risky enough, but young Wojtyla was also active in the anti-Nazi resistance. Jerzy Zubrzycki, a high school classmate of Wojtyla's who is now a sociology professor at the Australian National University in Canberra, says of those years: "He lived in danger daily of losing his life. He would move about the occupied cities taking Jewish families out of the ghettos, finding them new identities and hiding places. He saved the lives of many families threatened with execution." Meanwhile he helped organize and acted in the underground "Rhapsody Theater," whose anti-Nazi and patriotic dramas boosted Polish...
Ordained a priest in 1946, just as the Soviet-backed Communist Party was beginning to smother all opposition, Wojtyla did two years of doctoral work in philosophy at Rome's Pontifical Angelicum University. During this period he spent considerable time ministering to Polish refugees in Belgium, Holland and France. Returning to Poland as a parish priest and student chaplain, he spent two years of further study in ethics at Cracow's Jagiellonian, and later was appointed to a chair in moral theology. In 1954 he began teaching at the Catholic University of Lublin?the only Catholic center of higher education...
Overshadowed internationally by Wyszynski, at home Wojtyla is considered to be an equally resilient enemy of Communism and a more threatening figure to the party as a powerful preacher, an intellectual with a reputation for defeating the Marxists in dialogue, and a churchman enormously popular among younger Poles and laborers. Before his election as Pope, it was widely expected that the regime would exercise its veto power to block him from succeeding Wyszynski as Primate...