Saint Pope John Paul II is truly an extraordinary figure. 

• He visited over 129 countries. The most of any pope.

• His trips covered over 775,000 miles.

• He spoke at least 8 languages fluently.

• He is responsible for the creation of World Youth day, Theology of the Body, & the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

• He helped to take down communism.

• Survived assassination attempts. 

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Childhood

Karol's childhood was filled with adventures with friends... in the town square, on the soccer field, at the local lake, and on a nearby mountain. Tragedy struck early in his life. At the age of 8, he returned home from school and learned that his mother passed away from kidney failure and heart disease. Karol turned to the Blessed Virgin Mary for consolation and told her that she must be a mother to him. His older brother, Edmund, was a great consolation. They were very close despite their 14 year age difference. Edmund became a doctor. Tragedy struck Karol's family again when Edmund passed away at the age of only 26 from contracting scarlet fever from one of his patients. Edmund's tomb read, "A victim of his profession, sacrificing his young life in the service to humanity." This must have been a lesson in God's will and self-sacrifice. Karol, age 12, and his father were the only ones left in their immediate family. They pushed their beds together and slept in the same room. Every morning they attended Mass before school and prayed together in the evenings. 

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Early Life

Before he was pope, his name was Karol Wojtyla (Voy-TEE-wah). His early life is beautiful in many ways, but it's also incredibly difficult. In every major sphere of his life, he faced some of the most challenging moments a person can face. The trials in he faced helped to shape Karol's life and eventually his papacy. On September 1, 1939, while the 19 year old Karol was at mass, the high-pitched wail of the warning sirens were heard. They were followed by explosions of bombs from aircraft. Karol stayed to finish mass with the priest, then he ran home to his father. What followed was the Nazi occupation of Poland. Nazi flags were raised all throughout the city. Food shortages and rationing gripped the area as citizens waited in long lines for food daily. Priests, professors, and anyone else resisting Nazi occupation were sent to concentration camps or killed immediately. Life was very different now. Karol wooded grueling jobs, including at a quarry and a chemical plant. Before his 21st birthday Karol had seen a lot of death due to the Nazi occupation. He had witnessed violent deaths of refugees. His professors had been arrested and carted off to concentration camps. The Gestapo had kidnapped his parish priests, many of whom were later martyred. The life of the Jewish community was being destroyed as Jews were herded into a ghetto, where they died by the thousands. He and his university classmates had to hold their classes in secret. During this time, Karol and his friends found ways to keep their culture and their faith alive. They put on secret theatrical performances to preserve Polish culture. And a group of young adults and boys formed rosary groups to protect their faith in these difficult times. After work, Karol would hurry home to bring his father food and medicine. One evening, while Karol went to his father's room, he found his father dead. He blamed himself for not being present when his father died. He ran to the church for a priest, who came and gave his father's last rites of the church. Karol spent the entire night on his knees beside his father's body, praying and talking with his friend who had come to be with him. Despite his friend's presence, Karol, at the age of 21, shared that he never felt so alone. These years had a deep impact on his decision to enter the seminary. The war helped him to understand, in a new way, the value and importance of a vocation. In the face of the spread of evil and the atrocities of the war, the meaning of the priesthood and its mission in the world became mch clearer to him. The outbreak of the war took him away from his studies and from the university. However, at the same time, a light was beginning to shine ever more brightly in the back how his mind. One day, he saw with great clarity that the Lord wanted him to become a priest, and he was filled with great inner peace.

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The Priesthood

In 1942, Karol asked to be received as a candidate for the priesthood. He was accepted and then began to lead a new, double life. The Gestapo tried to control the seminary by not allowing instruction. However, the seminary simply ignored these instructions. The Gestapo then tried to ban the acceptance of new seminarians. The archbishop responded by hiring the young aspirants as parish secretaries. Even under this disguise, raids were frequent. On one occasion five students were arrested and either immediately executed by firing squad or sent to Auschwitz. The archbishop then decided to take the seminary fully underground. Telling no one, the candidates would continue their work studying and taking examinations. In time, they hoped they would complete their studies and be ordained without the Gestapo finding out. In the midst of experiencing so much suffering and death, it would have been easy for Karol to reject God. However, his response was to surrender his life to God in the priesthood.

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Papacy

The election of Karol as Pope marked a significant change in the history of the Catholic Church. For 455 years prior to his election, all the Popes had been Italian. However, after the last Italian Pope died after being in office for only 33 days, the College of Cardinals returned to Rome, wondering what this might mean. Was God telling them to head in a new direction? Karol was a major figure in the Church, who participated in synods, led retreats, and was a friend of Pope Paul VI. Through his years as a priest in Poland, Karol continued his education and his writings. He wrote books, essays, articles, poems and plays during his years in Poland. He also was a professor and lecturer at the Catholic University in Lublin. In July, 1958, he was appointed auxiliary bishop of Krakow. Shortly afterwards, he was chosen as Archbishop of Krakow. Wojtyla continued his rise in the Church when he was eventually made Cardinal. In his role as a priest, teacher, bishop and cardinal, Wojtyla was an outspoken advocate of religious freedom in communist ruled countries. On October 16, 1978, the cardinals tallied their ballots and Karol learned that he had received the votes necessary to be elected Pope. Thousands were gathered outside of St. Peter's Square. At 6:15 PM, the smoke from the small chimney atop the Sistine Chapel started and the crowd saw the white smoke indicating that we had a new Pope. Cardinal Felici stated, "I announce to you a great joy; we have a pope!" The crowd roared, and then waited. The most eminent and most reverend lord, Karol, Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church, Wojtyla who has taken the name John Paul II." The crowd was fidgety. They wondered who this stranger was. John Paul II felt the drama and tension. He stepped up to the microphone, brushed the master of ceremonies out of the way, and broke precedent by addressing the crowd instead of just simply giving the crowd the traditional apostolic blessing. In clear, loud Italian, he introduced himself to the crowd. "Praised be Jesus Christ! Dear Brothers and Sisters, we are all still grieved after the death of our most beloved John Paul I. And now the eminent cardinals have called a new bishop of Rome. They have called him from a far country. Far, but always near through the communion of faith and in the Christian tradition. I was afraid to receive this nomination, but I did it in the spirit of obedience to our Lord Jesus Christ and in total confidence in His Mother, the most holy Madonna. I don't know if I can make myself clear in your...our Italian language. If I are a mistake, you will correct me. And so I present myself to you all, to confess our common faith, our hope, our trust in the Mother of Christ and of the Church, and also to start anew on this road of history and the Church, with the help of God and with the help of men."

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Assassination Attempt

On May 13, 1981, a 23-year-old Turk, Mehmet Ali Agca, arrived at St. Peter's Square for John Paul II's weekly general audience. The area was divided into sections by short wooden barricades that formed an impromptu motorway along which John Paul II would be driven in his open-air "Popemobile to greet the crowd. Mehmet found a spot just behind a row of pilgrims pressed against one of the barricades, no more than 10 feet from where the Pope would pass. He waited and at 5 PM, the small Popemobile drove through the Archway of the Bells and into the square with a smiling John Paul II standing in the back greeting the crowd. At 5:13 PM the crowd heard something peculiar. Standing behind the first row of pilgrims at one of the wooden railings, Mehmet fired two shots at the Pope. Pope John Paul II was struck in the abdomen and fell backward into the arms of his secretary. They immediately rushed him to the hospital. In the ambulance, he lost consciousness. At the hospital, he was given the last rites. The surgeons worked to stabilize the Pope and spent more than 5 hours of surgery to mend the several wounds to his abdomen, colon and small intestine. The damage was severe, and the possibility of death was real. Mehmet, a professional assassin, had fired at point-blank range and was not successful in killing Pope John Paul II. John Paul would later say that "one hand fired, and another guided the bullet." His main abdominal artery was missed by a fraction of an inch which would have caused him to bleed to death. The bullet also badly missed his spinal column which would have completely paralyzed him. God's Providence in this event revealed itself even further. The day of the attempted assassination was May 13th, and the time in which he was shot was 5:13, which numerically matched May 13th. May 13th is the Feast day of Our Lady of Fatima. After the attach, John Paul immediately began praying for her intercession, repeating the words, "Mary, my mother... Mary, my mother." On May 13th, 1917, Our Lady of Fatima had appeared to three children in rural Portugal. She told the children three secrets, the third secret had not been publicly revealed. Once John Paul was stabilized and in recover, he asked to read that third secret which included a description of a bishop dressed in white who suffers a deadly attack. On reading this, all of John Paul's remaining doubts were gone. The only bishop who dresses I white is the pope. He believed that this attempt on his life had a deep connection to Our Lady of Fatima and that Mary had spared his life. One year later, the Pope made a pilgrimage to Fatima to thank Mary for her protection. Following the shooting, one of the most moving moments was John Paul's meeting with his assassin. John Paul visited Mehmet in prison about two years later and sat down with him, one-on-one. In his book, Memory and Identity, the Pope explains what happened, "I visited my attacker in prison. We spoke at length. Mehmet, as everyone knows, was a professional assassin. This means that the attack was not his own initiative, it was someone else's idea; someone else's idea; someone else had commissioned him to carry it out. In the course of our conversation, it became clear that Mehmet was still wondering how the attempted assassination could possibly have failed. He had planned it meticulously, attending to every tiny detail. and yet his intended vicim had escaped death. How could this have happened? The interesting thing was his perplexity had led him to the religious question. He wanted to know about the secret of Fatima, and what the secret actually was. this was his principal concern; more than anything else, he wanted to know this. Perhaps those insistent questions showed that he had grasped something really important. Mehmet had probably sensed that over and above his own power, over and above the power of shooting and killing, there was a higher power. He then began to look for it. I hope and pray that he found it."

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