St. John Paul II

St. John Paul II was born Karol Jozef Wojtyla at Wadowice in Poland on 18 May 1920 and was elected pope on 16 October 1978, the first non-Italian to hold the office in more than four centuries. He governed the Catholic Church for over twenty-six years, until his death on 2 April 2005, and made 104 journeys outside Italy in that time. Pope Francis canonised him on 27 April 2014, and his feast is kept on 22 October, the anniversary of the inauguration of his pontificate.

He came out of an occupied country, studied for the priesthood in a clandestine seminary while the Gestapo hunted its students, and arrived in Rome having lived under both of the twentieth century's totalitarian systems. His pontificate is remembered for the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, for a body of teaching on the human person that is still being worked through, and for a record on clerical sexual abuse that is the principal charge against him.

1. The Man from a Far Country

Karol Wojtyla grew up under the Nazi occupation of Poland, where he ran an underground theater and studied for the priesthood in secret. He later lived under Soviet Communism. He knew intimately the two great totalitarian systems of the 20th century, which is why he was so effective in dismantling them. He had a black belt in fighting tyranny.

The phrase in the section title is his own. Presenting himself to the crowd in St. Peter's Square on the evening of his election, he said that the cardinals had called him from a far country, far but always close in the communion of faith.

The occupation was not an abstraction to him. The Germans closed the Jagiellonian University in Krakow in November 1939 and arrested its professors. Wojtyla, who had begun studying Polish literature there the year before, was assigned to manual labour to avoid deportation, working first in a limestone quarry and then at the Solvay chemical works. Priests were among the first targets of the occupation, and the Polish clergy suffered severely in the camps. He entered the clandestine seminary run by Archbishop Adam Stefan Sapieha of Krakow in 1942 and studied under conditions in which discovery meant death.

Wadowice, where he grew up, had a substantial Jewish population, and his boyhood friendships there were with Jewish neighbours who mostly did not survive the war. That fact bears directly on what he did as pope in relation to the Jewish people.

2. "Be Not Afraid"

In his very first homily as Pope in 1978, he thundered: "Do not be afraid! Open wide the doors for Christ!" He traveled more than any other Pope, kissing the ground of 129 countries, telling the world that human dignity depends on God.

The homily was preached at the inauguration Mass on 22 October 1978, and the sentence he built it around was an instruction to open the borders of states, economic and political systems, and the vast fields of culture and civilisation to the saving power of Christ. Delivered by a Pole in Rome in 1978, with the Warsaw Pact listening, it was heard in Eastern Europe as a political statement, and it was meant as more than one.

The travelling was the strategy. He made 104 journeys outside Italy across the pontificate, visiting some 129 countries, and the pattern was consistent: an outdoor Mass for enormous crowds, a meeting with the young, a meeting with the sick, and a speech to the country's civil authorities on human dignity and religious freedom. He also went to places where Catholics were a small minority and where the visit gave a beleaguered community visibility it could not have generated by itself.

The phrase itself is scriptural. Do not be afraid is the standard opening of an angel's speech in the Bible, said to Zechariah, to Mary and to the shepherds (Luke 1:13, 1:30, 2:10), and Jesus says it to the disciples in the boat and on the mountain of the Transfiguration (Matthew 14:27, 17:7).

3. Theology of the Body

JPII gave the Church a revolutionary new way to understand human sexuality. He taught that our bodies are "the signs of the divine mystery." Sex is meant to be a free, total, faithful, and fruitful gift of self. Basically, he made holiness sexy (in the theological sense).

The material was delivered as a series of general audiences on Wednesdays, running from September 1979 to November 1984, and comprising about 129 short addresses. It was not a book he sat down to write as pope. He had been working on the same questions as a young priest in Krakow, in his 1960 study Love and Responsibility, out of years of accompanying engaged and married couples.

The argument, compressed, runs like this. God created the human person as body and soul together, and the body belongs to what a person is and houses no separate self. Male and female are made for a communion of persons that images the self-giving of God. The body therefore has a language, and sexual union says something specific: total and permanent self-gift, open to life. An act that says that with the body while the will withholds it says something untrue. From that the Church's teaching on marriage, chastity and contraception follows as a coherent whole rather than as a list of prohibitions.

Two cautions belong here. The catechetical material now sold under the name Theology of the Body is a popularisation, and it varies in quality. And the audiences are dense philosophical work in the tradition of phenomenology, not an easy read. Our pages on Catholic teaching on marriage and contraception set out the doctrine in its ordinary form.

4. Who Karol Wojtyla Was

He was the youngest of three children, and his family was gone before he was twenty-one. His mother Emilia died when he was eight, his elder brother Edmund, a doctor, died of scarlet fever caught from a patient when Karol was twelve, and his father, an army officer, died in 1941, leaving him alone at twenty. His sister had died in infancy before he was born.

Before the seminary he was an actor, a poet and a quarry worker. He co-founded the underground Rhapsodic Theatre in occupied Krakow, which performed Polish literature in private apartments in defiance of the ban on Polish culture, and he wrote poems and plays throughout his life, publishing some under a pen name while a bishop.

He was ordained on 1 November 1946 and was sent to Rome, where he took a doctorate on faith in the writings of St. John of the Cross. A second doctorate followed in Poland on the ethics of Max Scheler. He then taught ethics at the Catholic University of Lublin while working as a parish priest, and he was known for taking students kayaking and hiking, which was also a way of talking freely away from listeners.

He was made auxiliary bishop of Krakow in 1958 at thirty-eight, archbishop in 1964 and cardinal in 1967. He attended all four sessions of the Second Vatican Council and contributed to the drafting of its declaration on religious liberty and its constitution on the Church in the modern world. His experience of a state that claimed authority over conscience gave him a particular interest in that first document.

5. The Election of 1978

1978 is called the year of three popes. Paul VI died on 6 August. His successor, John Paul I, was elected on 26 August and died on 28 September after thirty-three days, and Wojtyla was elected in the second conclave on 16 October.

He was fifty-eight, which was young for a pope, and he was not Italian. No non-Italian had been elected since Adrian VI, a Dutchman, in 1522. He took the name John Paul II in continuity with his predecessor, and he broke with custom from the first evening by speaking to the crowd in Italian rather than delivering only the formal blessing.

The election of a Pole was immediately understood in political terms in Warsaw and Moscow, and Polish state media handled it with visible discomfort. Our page on the papacy and how popes are elected explains the process.

6. Poland, Solidarity and the Fall of Communism

He went home in June 1979, eight months after the election, and it is the visit most often identified as the turning point.

The Polish government could not refuse him and could not control what happened. Millions of people attended the Masses. At Victory Square in Warsaw he prayed that the Holy Spirit would descend and renew the face of the earth, of this earth, and the crowd took up a chant that lasted many minutes. The practical effect was that a population that had been kept atomised saw its own size. The organisers of the visit had also demonstrated that Poles could run a national event without the state.

The independent trade union Solidarity was founded at the Gdansk shipyard in August 1980. Martial law was declared in December 1981. John Paul II returned in 1983 and 1987, and he supported the movement publicly and materially, while pressing consistently against violence.

Assigning credit for 1989 is a matter for historians and the claims are contested. What can be said accurately is that participants on all sides regarded him as decisive. Lech Walesa said repeatedly that Solidarity would not have existed without the pope, and Mikhail Gorbachev is widely quoted as having written that what happened in Eastern Europe would have been impossible without this pope.

His criticism did not stop at the Eastern bloc. Centesimus Annus, written in 1991 after the collapse, gave a qualified endorsement of the market economy and then set out its limits, warning against a system in which human freedom is understood only in economic terms and the person is treated as a means of production or a consumer.

7. The Assassination Attempt of 1981

On 13 May 1981, in St. Peter's Square, a Turkish gunman named Mehmet Ali Agca shot him at close range. He was seriously wounded in the abdomen and lost a large quantity of blood, and he underwent hours of surgery. The date was the anniversary of the first apparition at Fatima in 1917, and he attributed his survival to the intercession of Our Lady of Fatima, later placing one of the bullets in her crown at the shrine.

He forgave Agca publicly from his hospital bed and visited him in his cell in Rome in December 1983, where the two spoke privately. Photographs of that meeting were published worldwide. Questions about who, if anyone, directed the attack have never been settled.

His health never fully recovered, and a second attempt was made on his life in Portugal the following year.

8. What He Wrote: The Encyclicals and the Catechism

He wrote fourteen encyclicals and a very large quantity of other teaching. The ones that carry the most weight are these.

• Redemptor Hominis (1979), the programme of the pontificate, arguing that Christ reveals man to himself and that the human person is the way of the Church.
• Laborem Exercens (1981) and Centesimus Annus (1991), on human work and on the economic order after communism.
• Veritatis Splendor (1993), on the foundations of moral theology, insisting that some acts are wrong by their object whatever the circumstances or intention.
• Evangelium Vitae (1995), on the value of human life, condemning abortion and euthanasia in the strongest terms available to him and using the phrase culture of death.
• Ut Unum Sint (1995), on Christian unity, in which he invited other churches to help him find a way of exercising the papal primacy that could serve unity rather than obstruct it.
• Fides et Ratio (1998), on the relationship of faith and reason, arguing that each is impoverished without the other.

He also promulgated the Catechism of the Catholic Church in 1992, the first universal catechism since the sixteenth century, and the revised Code of Canon Law in 1983 together with the code for the Eastern Catholic Churches in 1990. He added the Luminous Mysteries to the Rosary in 2002, canonised St. Faustina Kowalska in 2000 and established Divine Mercy Sunday, and he canonised more saints than any pope before him, on the argument that the Church needed models from every country and state of life.

Our pages on Catholic teaching on abortion and the Rosary take up two of those threads directly.

9. World Youth Day and the Young

He established World Youth Day in the mid-1980s, and it became the largest recurring gathering of young people in the world, held in a different country each time. Manila in 1995 and Rome in 2000 drew crowds counted in the millions.

The approach was unusual in that he asked more of young people rather than less. His standard address to them combined an insistence that they were capable of holiness with a refusal to soften the Church's moral teaching, and the crowds grew rather than shrank. Whether the gatherings produced lasting practice is a real question, and Mass attendance in Western Europe continued to fall throughout his pontificate.

10. Ecumenism, the Jews and Other Religions

Several of his acts in this area were without precedent for a pope.

He visited the Great Synagogue of Rome in 1986, the first recorded papal visit to a synagogue, and spoke of the Jews as the elder brothers of Christians. In 1998 the Holy See published a document on the Church and the Shoah, and in 2000 he visited Israel and the Palestinian territories, prayed at the Western Wall and left a written prayer asking forgiveness for the suffering caused to the Jewish people by Christians. Given where he grew up, these were personal acts as well as official ones.

He convened meetings of world religious leaders at Assisi in 1986 and 2002 to pray for peace, gatherings that drew criticism from traditionalist Catholics who read them as suggesting that all religions are equivalent. He and the Holy See denied that reading, and the 2000 declaration Dominus Iesus, issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under his authority, restated that salvation comes through Christ alone and that the Catholic Church is not one option among many.

On 12 March 2000, in St. Peter's, he led a Day of Pardon asking forgiveness for sins committed by members of the Church over the centuries, including against Jews, against religious minorities, and against women. Our pages on ecumenism and Judaism and Christian faith cover the doctrine involved.

11. The Long Dying and the Canonisation

He was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, and the last decade of the pontificate was a public decline. His speech deteriorated, his movement failed, and he continued to appear. He wrote in his 1984 letter Salvifici Doloris that human suffering shares in the redemptive suffering of Christ, and the final years were widely read as an argument made with his own body at a moment when Europe was debating euthanasia.

He died on 2 April 2005. Several million people came to Rome, and the funeral was attended by an unusually large gathering of heads of state and religious leaders. Crowds called for his immediate canonisation.

Benedict XVI waived the customary five-year waiting period for opening the cause. He was beatified on 1 May 2011 and canonised by Pope Francis on 27 April 2014, alongside John XXIII. His feast is 22 October. The canonisation was criticised at the time as too fast, and that criticism connects directly to the section below.

The McCarrick Report and Criticism of His Record

The handling of clerical sexual abuse is the main criticism raised against John Paul II. The Vatican's own report on Theodore McCarrick, published by the Secretariat of State on November 10, 2020, found that John Paul II named McCarrick archbishop of Washington in November 2000 after warnings had reached Rome, and that he was convinced by McCarrick's own written denial of August 6, 2000, in a letter to Bishop Dziwisz, that he had never had sexual relations with or abused anyone. The report also found that three New Jersey bishops had given the Holy See inaccurate information. John Paul II died in 2005 and made no response to the report; his stated reasoning is recorded in the report itself. Critics further point to his long public support for Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legionaries of Christ, whom Benedict XVI removed from ministry in 2006. The report makes no finding of wrongdoing by John Paul II and attributes the appointment to deception and to inaccurate advice. McCarrick was laicized in 2019. The 2014 canonization stands and has not been reopened.

The wider criticism runs beyond those two cases. During his pontificate the scale of clerical abuse became public in the United States, Ireland, Australia and elsewhere, and the criticism is that the response from Rome was slow, that bishops who moved offenders between parishes were not removed, and that a disposition to protect the institution's reputation shaped the handling of complaints. Serious procedural reform came in 2001, when responsibility for these cases was given to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and the further tightening of law and procedure took place under his successors. Defenders point to his Polish experience, in which accusations against priests had been a standard tool of the secret police, as a reason for his reluctance to believe them. Critics answer that the same reluctance operated in countries with no such history. Our page on scandals in the Catholic Church covers the record.

Other criticisms are made of his pontificate and should be stated as what they are. Theologians associated with liberation theology in Latin America were disciplined and their work restricted, which critics regard as a suppression of legitimate inquiry and defenders as a necessary correction of Marxist analysis in Catholic theology. He centralised the appointment of bishops and the government of the Church, which critics link to the weakness of local accountability during the abuse crisis. Traditionalist Catholics criticised the Assisi gatherings and his ecumenical initiatives. Others argue that the reaffirmation of teaching on contraception and on the ordination of women closed questions that they wished to see reopened, and the Church's position is that those matters were settled rather than closed by administrative decision.

Canonisation is a declaration that a person is in heaven and may be publicly venerated. It is not a judgment that every decision they made in office was correct, and the Church has never claimed that it is. Holding both halves of this page at once is the honest position.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Pope John Paul II?

Pope John Paul II was born Karol Jozef Wojtyla at Wadowice in Poland on 18 May 1920 and was elected pope on 16 October 1978, the first non-Italian pope since Adrian VI in 1522. He had lived under both Nazi occupation and Soviet-backed communism, worked in a quarry and a chemical plant during the war, and studied for the priesthood in a clandestine seminary in Krakow. He governed the Church for more than twenty-six years until his death on 2 April 2005 and was canonised in 2014.

When is the feast day of St. John Paul II?

His feast is kept on 22 October, the anniversary of the Mass that inaugurated his pontificate in 1978, at which he preached the homily containing the words "Do not be afraid! Open wide the doors for Christ!" He was beatified by Benedict XVI on 1 May 2011 and canonised by Pope Francis on 27 April 2014, alongside Pope John XXIII.

What is the Theology of the Body?

The Theology of the Body is a series of about 129 short addresses that John Paul II delivered at his Wednesday general audiences between September 1979 and November 1984. It argues that the human person is body and soul together, that male and female are made for a communion of persons which images the self-giving of God, and that the body therefore has a language in which sexual union says total and permanent self-gift open to life. From that account the Church's teaching on marriage, chastity and contraception follows as a connected whole.

Did John Paul II help end communism in Eastern Europe?

Assigning credit for the events of 1989 is contested among historians, and no single person caused them. What can be said accurately is that participants on all sides regarded him as decisive: Lech Walesa said repeatedly that Solidarity would not have existed without the pope, and Mikhail Gorbachev is widely quoted as having written that what happened in Eastern Europe would have been impossible without this pope. His visit to Poland in June 1979 is the moment most often identified as the turning point, because millions attended and the population saw its own size.

What did the McCarrick Report say about John Paul II?

The Vatican's report on Theodore McCarrick, published by the Secretariat of State on November 10, 2020, found that John Paul II named McCarrick archbishop of Washington in November 2000 after warnings had reached Rome, and that he was convinced by McCarrick's own written denial of August 6, 2000, that he had never had sexual relations with or abused anyone. The report also found that three New Jersey bishops had given the Holy See inaccurate information. It makes no finding of wrongdoing by John Paul II and attributes the appointment to deception and to inaccurate advice.

Why do some people criticise the canonisation of John Paul II?

The criticism is that the cause moved unusually fast, with the customary five-year waiting period waived, at a time when the record of his pontificate on clerical sexual abuse was still being established. Critics point to the slowness of the response from Rome as the crisis emerged, to bishops who moved offenders between parishes and were not removed, and to his long public support for Marcial Maciel. The Church's position is that canonisation declares a person to be in heaven and worthy of public veneration, and is not a judgment that every decision made in office was correct.

How many countries did John Paul II visit?

He made 104 journeys outside Italy during his pontificate, visiting some 129 countries, which is more travel than every previous pope combined. The pattern was consistent: an outdoor Mass for very large crowds, meetings with young people and with the sick, and an address to the country's civil authorities on human dignity and religious freedom. He deliberately visited places where Catholics were a small minority.

What happened when John Paul II was shot?

On 13 May 1981 a Turkish gunman named Mehmet Ali Agca shot him at close range in St. Peter's Square, wounding him seriously in the abdomen and requiring hours of surgery. The date was the anniversary of the first apparition at Fatima in 1917, and he attributed his survival to the intercession of Our Lady of Fatima, later placing one of the bullets in her crown at the shrine. He forgave Agca publicly and visited him in his cell in Rome in December 1983.