Saint John Paul II

St. John Paul II was born on May 18, 1920 AD, in a flat beside the parish church of Wadowice, on what is now Kościelna Street. A sister, Olga, had died just after her birth in 1916 AD. His mother, the Servant of God Emilia Wojtyłowa, died on April 13, 1929 AD, when he was eight; he made his First Communion in that church on May 25.

His brother, Edmund, a young doctor, caught scarlet fever from a patient he was trying to save and died in December 1932 AD. At secondary school St. John Paul II served at the altar and acted in plays, taking the part of Haemon in Sophocles' Antigone. At home he was alone with his father, a retired soldier, and sometimes woke in the night to find him on his knees.

In 1938 AD St. John Paul II and his father moved to a basement flat in Kraków, where he studied Polish language and literature at the Jagiellonian University and joined a theatre group. He went to confession at Wawel Cathedral on September 1, 1939 AD, as the first bombs of the war fell on the city. The Germans closed the university, and in September 1940 AD he took a labourer's job in a limestone quarry, which kept him from deportation to forced labour in Germany.

That year Jan Tyranowski, a tailor who gathered young men of the parish in a circle called the Living Rosary, gave him St. John of the Cross to read. On February 18, 1941 AD, he came home from work and found his father dead. He spent the night in prayer with a friend beside him; he had no immediate family left.

After his father's death the call to the priesthood grew stronger in St. John Paul II, who had resisted it because he was drawn to the theatre and literature. In the autumn of 1942 AD Archbishop Adam Stefan Sapieha admitted him to Kraków's seminary, which worked in secret under the German occupation; he studied in secret and kept his labourer's job, by then at a chemical plant and no longer in the quarry. On February 29, 1944 AD, a truck knocked him down as he walked home from the plant; he was taken to hospital unconscious, but his head wounds proved not too serious.

After the Germans rounded up men in Kraków on August 6, 1944 AD, a day remembered as Black Sunday, Sapieha took him and the other seminarians into his own residence, where they stayed until the occupation ended. On November 1, 1946 AD, All Saints' Day, Sapieha ordained him a priest in the chapel there, with no one else ordained beside him, because he was to leave for Rome to study. The next day, All Souls' Day, when a priest may say three Masses, he said his first three in the crypt of St. Leonard at Wawel Cathedral, the first for his dead parents, brother and sister.

In July 1948 AD, back from his studies in Rome, St. John Paul II was sent as assistant priest to the country parish of Niegowić. He went by bus and on a farmer's cart, then on foot across the fields, and when he reached parish land he knelt and kissed the ground, following the example of St. John Vianney. He taught religion in five village schools and was driven to them by cart.

In March 1949 AD he was moved back to Kraków, to St. Florian's parish, and put in charge of its work with university students, to whom he gave a talk every Thursday on the existence of God and the human soul. After the communist authorities closed Kraków's theology faculty in 1954 AD, he went to teach at the Catholic University of Lublin, where he lectured on ethics. In the summer of 1958 AD he was on a kayak holiday with young people on the rivers of Mazury.

Summoned to Warsaw, St. John Paul II left the river by kayak, rode a truck loaded with sacks of flour to Olsztynek and waited for the night train. In Warsaw Blessed Stefan Wyszyński, the cardinal who led the Church in Poland as its Primate, told him that Pope Pius XII had named him an assistant bishop in Kraków; he objected that at 38 he was too young, then accepted. He was consecrated in Wawel Cathedral on September 28, 1958 AD, took part in the Second Vatican Council, and became Archbishop of Kraków in 1964 AD and a cardinal in 1967 AD.

People in Nowa Huta, a district of Kraków, clashed with the communist authorities in 1960 AD to defend a cross on the site meant for a church; the authorities later allowed one on another site, and he broke ground for it in 1967 AD and consecrated it on May 15, 1977 AD. On October 16, 1978 AD, after the death of Pope John Paul I, the cardinals elected him Pope, and he took the name John Paul II. That evening he told the crowd in St. Peter's Square that he had been afraid to accept, and asked them to correct his Italian.

St. John Paul II opened his pontificate with Mass in St. Peter's Square on October 22, 1978 AD, telling the crowd not to be afraid to welcome Christ. At the end of the Mass Blessed Stefan Wyszyński knelt to kiss his hand, and the Pope stood up and kissed the cardinal's hands in front of everyone. In a letter to the people of Poland dated the next day, he wrote that he had to leave Kraków, where he had been archbishop, for Rome, and that it was not easy to give up returning to his country.

In January 1979 AD he went to Mexico, his first journey as Pope, and presented a diadem to the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe. On June 2 he began his first visit to Poland as Pope at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on Victory Square in Warsaw, and at Mass on the same square he prayed that the Holy Spirit would come down and renew the face of the earth and of this land, Poland. On June 7 he was in Wadowice, where he kissed the font at which he had been baptised.

On May 13, 1981 AD, Ali Ağca, a Turkish gunman, shot St. John Paul II during the general audience in St. Peter's Square and gravely wounded him; two other people were wounded in the same shooting. Four days later the Pope recorded a message in the Gemelli hospital in Rome, and it was played to the crowd in the square that day: he was praying for the brother who had shot him, he said, and had sincerely forgiven him. He did not hold another general audience until October 7, when he thanked the hospital's doctors and nursing sisters for helping to save his life.

On May 13, 1982 AD, he said Mass at Fátima in Portugal to give thanks for his life, because he had been shot on the anniversary of the first apparition of Our Lady there. On December 27, 1983 AD, he visited Rebibbia prison in Rome, where Ağca was held, met him and repeated his forgiveness. He told the other prisoners that day that the meeting had not been planned, and that the two had met as men and as brothers.

St. John Paul II made his last visit to Poland in August 2002 AD and said Mass at Kalwaria, a shrine his father had taught him to love. On Easter Sunday, March 27, 2005 AD, visibly suffering, he came once more to the window of the Apostolic Palace and blessed the city and the world for the last time; on April 1 Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger found him in his room in great pain, with doctors and friends around him. St. John Paul II died in his apartment in the palace at 9:37 p.m. the next day, April 2, the eve of Divine Mercy Sunday, a feast he had instituted.

More than three million pilgrims came to Rome between his death and his funeral in St. Peter's Square on April 8. The Church normally waits five years after a death before opening the inquiry that can lead to sainthood; Cardinal Ratzinger, who succeeded him as Pope Benedict XVI, lifted that wait and declared him Blessed on May 1, 2011 AD. Pope Francis declared him a saint in St. Peter's Square on April 27, 2014 AD, Divine Mercy Sunday, together with Pope St. John XXIII.