PopeJohnPaulII

Polish ecclesiastic, a Roman Catholic priest who rose in the hierarchy of the church to be elected the 264th Pope on October 16, 1978, ca. 5:15 PM, Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Christ, Successor of St. Peter, Prince of Apostles, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, Patriarch of the West, Primate of Italy and Sovereign of Vatican City. A passionate anti-Communist, social activist and socialist, Pope John Paul II had much to do with bringing down the Iron Curtain in 1989 and believed the northern nations should share their wealth with the southern hemisphere. No pope in history had more scope of influence than he has through the modern media, and he once gave 25 speeches in a single day without repeating himself. "Lolek" as he was known in childhood, was born in 1920, the second son of Karol Wojtyla (voy TIH wah) Sr., a retired army officer and tailor, and Emilia Kaczorowska Wojtyla, a schoolteacher of Lithuanian descent, strict Catholics. They lived a Spartan lifestyle in a one-room apartment, and his dad was strict with the boy, making him study in a cold room to learn concentration. There was no anti-Semitism in the family and the boy had Jewish playmates. Indeed, Wojtyla became the first pope to visit a synagogue and the first to visit the memorial at Auschwitz to victims of the Holocaust. In ending the Catholic-Jewish estrangement, he called Jews "our elder brothers." He was an athletic kid who skied, hiked, kayaked and swam in the flooded Skawa River, later becoming goal-keeper in the school soccer team. Death was part of the family history, with an infant sister who died prior to his birth and a month before his 9th birthday, his mother’s death of heart and kidney problems. When he was 12, his older brother, Edmund, 26, died of scarlet fever. Lolek himself had two close brushes with death; once when he was hit by a streetcar and secondly, when he was nearly struck by a truck in 1944. The Pope, 5’ 10" and 175 lbs in his prime, had a few physical difficulties from his early accidents and as an adult, had a dislocated shoulder, a broken thigh that led to femur-replacement surgery, the removal of a precancerous tumor from his colon in 1992 and an attempt on his life by a gunman whose two bullets wounded him in the abdomen, right arm and left hand. The Pope had an appendectomy operation 10/08/1996, Rome. From the time he was a kid, Wojtyla was aware of the fragility of life and the presence of suffering, and he learned early the comfort of prayer and peace of meditation. As a young man, he was very religious but also drawn passionately to the theater and to writing mystical, somewhat murky poetry. He was a bohemian youth with long hair, and totally apolitical. Though he had close women friends, he apparently never dated or had a romance. Gregarious and charismatic, he was the male star of his theater groups and usually seen at the social mixers. After the Germans invaded Poland, he escaped deportation and imprisonment in late 1940 by taking a job as a stonecutter in a quarry. A few months later, in February of 1941, Wojtylas 61-year-old father died, leaving his dream of seeing his son commit to the priesthood unfulfilled. The Pope has said that his father once told him, "I will not live long and would like to be certain before I die that you will commit yourself to Gods service." At 22, he entered a secret nighttime seminary operated in Nazi-occupied Poland by the Archbishop of Krakow. An excellent student, he was ordained Read less