Pope John Paul II

At 84 years old, Pope John Paul II physical status not available right now. We will update Pope John Paul II's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Pope John Paul II (Latin: Ioannes Paulus II; Italian: Giovanni Paolo II; Jan Pawe II; born Karol Józef Wojtya [Juzv]; Polish: Jan Pawe II; born Karol Józef Wojty"; from 1978 to 2005; Canonized as Pope Saint John Paul II, born in 1978.

He was elected pope by the second papal conclave of 1978, which was called after John Paul I, who had been elected in August to replace Pope Paul VI, died after 33 days. Cardinal Wojtya was elected on the third day of the conclave and bore the name of his predecessor in honor of him. Born in Poland, John Paul II was the first non-Italian pope since Adrian VI in the 16th century, as the second-longest-serving pope after Pius IX in modern history.

John Paul II attempted to strengthen the Catholic Church's ties with Judaism, Islam, and the Eastern Orthodox Church. He preserved the church's previous teachings on abortion, artificial contraception, the ordination of women, and a celibate clergy, and although he approved the revisions of the Second Vatican Council, he was seen as mainly conservative in their interpretation. During his pontificate, he was one of the world's most travelled leaders, visiting 129 countries. He defeated 1,344 and canonized 483 people, more than the total number of his predecessors during the preceding five centuries. By the time of his death, he had identified most of the College of Cardinals, consecrated or co-consecrated many of the world's bishops, and ordained many priests. He has also been credited with helping to bring about Communist rule in Poland, as well as the rest of Europe.

With the exception of a five-year waiting period waived, John Paul II's cause for canonisation began one month after his death. On December 19, 2009, John Paul II was proclaimed venerable by his successor, Benedict XVI, and was defeated on May 1st, 2011 (Divine Mercy Sunday), after the Congregation of Saints attributed one miracle to his intercession, the recovery of a French nun named Marie Simon Pierre from Parkinson's disease. On July 2, 2013, a second miracle was approved, but Pope Francis confirmed it two days later. On Sunday, John Paul II was canonized (again Divine Mercy Sunday) as a team with John XXIII. Pope Francis added these two optional monuments to the worldwide General Roman Calendar of saints on September 11, 2014. On the anniversary of saints' feast days, it is common to commemorate their deaths, but the wedding of John Paul II (22 October) is commemorated. He has been referred to by some Catholics as "Pope St. John Paul the Great," but the name has no official recognition.

Early life

Karol Józef Wojty was born in Wadowice, Poland. Emilia Kaczorowska (1884-1989), the youngest of three children born to Karol Wojtya (1879-1941), an ethnic Pole, and Emilia Kaczorowska (1884-1989), a distant Lithuanian immigrant. Emilia, a schoolteacher, died of heart arrest and kidney disease in 1929, when Wojtya was eight years old. Olga's older brother Edmund died before his birth, but he was close to his brother Edmund, who was 13 years old. Edmund's medical work culminated in his death from scarlet fever, a death that left Wojty's deeply.

Wojty's mother was baptized a month after his birth, made his First Communion at the age of 9, and was confirmed at the age of 18. Wojtya was a child, and she played football as a goalkeeper. Wojtya had a strong Jewish congregation of Wadowice throughout his youth. Schools football games were often arranged between Jewish and Catholic teams, and Wojty's Wojty played on the Jewish side of the game. "I recall that at least a third of my classmates at Wadowice's elementary school were Jews." There were fewer students in secondary school than at any other time. With some of them, I was on very friendly terms. "Polish patriotism" struck me about several of them. Karol had his first serious relationship with a child around this time. He was close to a girl named Ginka Beer, described as "a Jewish beauty with stunning eyes and jet black hair, a superb actor."

Wojtya and his father died in Wadowice and then to Kraków, where he enrolled at the Jagiellonian University in mid-1938. He worked as a volunteer librarian and, though he was required to complete compulsory military service in the Academic Legion, he refused to fire a sword while researching topics such as philology and various languages. He appeared in various theatre companies and also worked as a playwright. During this period, his literary talents blossomed, and he learned as many as 15 languages — Polish, Latin, Italian, English, French, German, French, German, Luxembourgish, German, Ukrainian, Serbo-Croatian, Czech, Slovak, and Esperanto — nine of which he used extensively as pope.

The Nazi German occupation forces closed the university in 1939, after envading Poland. Males were required to serve, so Wojtya served as a messenger for a restaurant, a manual laborer in a limestone quarry, and for the Solvay chemical factory in order to prevent deportation to Germany. He met Jan Tyranowski in February 1940, who introduced him to the Carmelite spirituality and the "Life Rosary" youth groups. He had two major accidents, one shoulder higher than the other, and a permanent stoop after being struck by a lorry in a quarry in the same year. His father, a former Austro-Hungarian non-commissioned officer and later Polish Army general, died of a heart attack in 1941, leaving Wojty as the immediate family's only living member. "I was not at my mother's funeral, I was not at my brother's funeral, I was not at my father's funeral, and I was not at my father's funeral," he said as he entered the years of his life. "I had already lost all the people I loved at twenty years old."

Since his father's death, he began to seriously consider the priesthood. As the war was still war, he knocked on the door of the Archbishop's Kraków house and asked to study for the priesthood. He began training in the clandestine underground seminary run by the Archbishop of Kraków, Cardinal Adam Stefan Sapieha. Wojtya was struck by a German truck on 29 February 1944. He was tended to by German Wehrmacht officers and then led him to a hospital. He spent two weeks in the hospital recovering from a serious concussion and a shoulder injury. This crash and his recovery seemed to him as a sign of his vocation. The Gestapo rounded up young men in Kraków on August 6, 1944, a date that has been described as "Black Sunday" in Warsaw, a precursor to the recent uprising in Warsaw. Wojtya escaped by hiding in the basement of his uncle's house on 10 Tyniecka Street, while German troops searched above. More than eight thousand men and boys were arrested on the day, while Wojtya escaped to the Archbishop's house, where he stayed until after the Germans had left.

The Germans left the city on the night of 17 January 1945, when the students reclaimed the demolished seminary. Wojtya and another seminarian took charge of clearing away piles of frozen excreta from the toilets. In Cz'stochowa, Wojtya also assisted a 14-year-old Jewish immigrant girl Edith Zierer, who had been exiled from a Nazi labour camp. Edith had died on a railway platform, so Wojtya took her to a train and stayed with her on the ride to Kraków. Wojty credited her with saving her life that day, a later version. Wojty has been praised by many other Polish Jews from the Nazis, according to B'nai B'rith and other officials. During Poland's Nazi occupation, a Jewish family sent their son, Stanley Berger, to be disguised by a Gentile Polish family. Berger's biological Jewish parents were killed in the Holocaust, and after Berger's new Christian parents begged Karol Wojtya to baptize the boy, Berger's new Jewish parents begged him to baptize him. Wojtya refused, insisting that the child should be raised in the Jewish faith of his birth parents and community, not as a Catholic. Berger left Poland and was raised by his Jewish relatives in the United States, as he did everything possible to guarantee that he did not. The Israeli government established a commission in April 2005, right after John Paul II's death, to preserve John Paul II's legacy. Emmanuele Pacifici, one of Italy's Jewish community's top honorifics, was named the Righteous Among the Nations Champion of the Nations. In Wojty's last book, Memory and Identity, he characterized the 12 years of the Nazi regime as "the highest period of civilization," quoting Polish theologian and philosopher Konstanty Michalski.

Personal life

Karol Wojtya was a supporter of the Cracovia football team (club retired number 1 in his honour). John Paul II, a goalkeeper, was a fan of English football team Liverpool, where he compatriot Jerzy Dudek was playing in the same position.

Karol Wojtya befriended Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, a Polish-born, later American philosopher, in 1973, when she was still the Archbishop of Kraków. The thirty-two-year friendship (and occasional academic collaboration) lasted until his death. When she first visited New England in 1976, she was his host, and photos of them together on skiing and camping trips show them together. Letters written by Tymieniecka's estate to the National Library of Poland in 2008 were part of a collection of documents donated by her estate in 2008. According to the BBC, the library had first obscured the letters, partially due to John Paul's conversion to sainthood, but a library official announced in February 2016 that the letters would be made public in February 2016. In February 2016, the BBC documentary series Panorama announced that John Paul II had reportedly had a 'close friendship' with the Polish-born scholar. Over thirty years, the two exchanged personal letters, and Stourton suspects that Tymieniecka confessed to her admiration for Wojty's. The Vatican referred to the film as "more smoke than mirrors," and Tymieniecka denied being involved with John Paul II.

Carl Bernstein, the veteran investigative journalist of the Watergate scandal and Vatican expert Marco Politi, were the first journalists to speak with Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka in the 1990s about her role in John Paul's life. In their 1996 book His Holiness, they interviewed her and dedicated 20 pages to her. "However one-sided it was," Bernstein and Politi questioned whether she had ever had any romantic relationship with John Paul II." "No, I never fell in love with the cardinal," she replied. How could I fall in love with a middle-aged clergyman? "I'm also a married woman."

Source