 We spent two years researching this documentary. Over and over, we heard the following refrain: "To understand this Pope, you must go back to his Polish roots." Ultimately, everything we learned proved the deep truth of these words. All of the major themes of John Paul II's papacy can be traced to the shaping events of his life--a life whose roots are sunk in Polish soil. His Christian vision, his vocation, his very emotions draw their depth and intensity from the country he left to become Holy Father of the Catholic Church in Rome. As the Vicar of Jesus Christ and successor of St. Peter, he has revolutionized the office of the modern pope. He has taken his mission out of the Vatican and around the globe, pushing back the boundaries of the old Christian Europe--proselytizing, reforming, opening new churches wherever he's gone in Latin America, the United States, the East and Africa. He wooed and won the media with his personal gifts and variety. He has been the skiing pope, the poet pope, the best-selling CD pope, the designer robes pope, the intellectual pope. But he has never descended into trivial celebrity. He is the pope who brought down Communism; the pope who worked ceaselessly towards Christian reconciliation with the Jews; the pope who raised his voice against the contemporary evil in our "culture of death." He has never consulted pollsters, but marched to a stern, unyielding drummer. So John Paul II has also been the infuriating pope, the retrograde pope, the silencing pope, the pope who has ignored the revolutionary changes in the status of women. His uncompromising limitations--as well as his extraordinary accomplishments-- all reflect the impress of a vanished world: the Poland where Karol Wojtyla came of age.
 In the 16th century, Poland was the largest country in Europe. Slowly, painfully, inexorably, they lost control of their superior position. For the last two centuries, again and again, Poland has been brutally partitioned and devoured by its neighbors. Germans, Austrians and Russians divided and redivided the low, flat, defenseless country, drenching its borders in blood and torturing the national psyche. The reasons for losing their powerful place in Europe are less important than the result. Poles remain completely preoccupied with the story of why they fell and what has happened to them since. This retrospective legacy is shared across all political and class divisions. Communists and aristocrats look back with the same passion as intellectuals, peasants and artists.The last Communist prime minister of Poland, Mieczyslaw Rakowski, thoughtfully tugged on a Cuban cigar as he meditated on his country's history with us. He felt he and the Pope shared a common view which he described this way: "You have to remember that Poland during the medieval years was a power to be reckoned with. The area of Poland was immense. It reached from the Baltic to the Black Sea. In the 18th century, Poland ceased to exist on the European map. The next five generations of Poles lived in slavery through partitioning. The nation developed this inferiority complex towards other nations. History became an obsession for the Poles, and whether you joined the Communist Party, as I did, or the Church like John Paul II, you were reacting to the national past."Poland's pain lies behind every tree, every mound. The proud country remembers every wound. Adam Zamoyski is an historian and a member of the ancient Polish nobility. He has a confidence bred of centuries, an aristocratic pride that feels the wound in all its freshness. "As a Pole you were born into a bankrupt business, you weren't like other people. Every Pole has to confront- why have we made such a mess? Three hundred years ago we were a great power and a normal country. Then we'd become a pathetic country whose history no one knew. Every Pole has a question mark somewhere. For the Pope, for all of us growing up after the war, anybody going through the war, even people born in Poland after the war were born into its arguments. We are a people stung by history."Not just stung by history, shaped by it. As General Jaruzelski, formerly head of the Polish Communist Party, confided to us, "The Pope and I belong to the same generation. We have been intellectually and emotionally shaped in the pre-war period. We have absorbed a strong and vivid sense of Poland's memories, especially Poland's partition and bondage. We inhaled this early history like fresh air, like oxygen, and we lived by it. Our heroes were those who fought against it, the heroic martyrological tradition. In my very first conversation during martial law, he stressed that he always remembered the history of Poland through so many tragedies, through partitions. He reaches down into history. It is intimate with him."The Polish nation has often only existed in the Polish mind. Having no geography, the Poles feel history must take its place. They give the oaks of their forests the names of lost kings. They bury and rebury their beloved leaders. Queen Jadwega died in 1399. Her most recent funeral was held in solemn pomp in 1973. Repetition can bring ecstatic release, but rarely closure. As the English journalist, Neal Ascherson (who spent years covering Poland) said to us, "It has seemed, for generation after generation, that Polish history has a sort of cyclical form. It moves in cycles, which horribly repeat themselves... insurrection, repression, intervals of freedom, occupation by foreign powers, and deep moral confusion."Karol Jozef Wojtyla--whose rise to the papacy signaled new hope for his nation--was born on a day of great modern reckoning for the Poles: May 18, 1920, a day called the Polish Miracle. On that day, Marshal Jozef Pilsudski struck a deciding blow in the war against the Soviet Union and seized Kiev. It was Poland's first major military victory in over two centuries. It set in motion events which briefly restored Poland's independence. Mindful of the nation's turning point, Karol's father gave his new son Pilsudski's middle name. Some people said he also called Karol "Josef" after Mary's self-sacrificing husband. The confluence of history and religion were significant, as was the moment of Karol's birth. He belonged to a generation who breathed oppression and defeat in the air around them. But unlike their parents, they also knew what freedom tasted like.Karol's father and mother were from the Galician--or Austro-Hungarian --section of Poland. His father's family were peasant stock, raised to prosperity in Wojtyla's grandfather's generation. Karol's father was born on July 18, 1879. He earned his livelihood as a tailor until he was drafted into the Austrian army in 1900. The military became his lifetime career. Though he never rose very far, "the Lieutenant" (as he was always called) was awarded the Austrian Iron Cross of Merit for bravery during World War I. Photographs show the seriousness, discipline and moral character for which Karol Senior was also praised in his Army file. In 1906, he married Emilia Kaczorowska, the daughter of a Krakow upholsterer. She bore him three children and became her family's tragic muse. Emilia was a sensitive young woman of delicate health. Her first child, a boy named Edmund, was born the first year of her marriage--in 1906. In one of the few family photographs of Karol Senior with Emilia and Edmund, she is feminine and soft. Her dark eyes are meditative, subtle, slightly wary. She was already intimate with suffering and death. As she was growing up, she watched four of her brothers and sisters grow sick, languish and die. She lost her mother during adolescence. Fortunately, Edmund was healthy, able, even brilliant. Soon enough he was doing so well at school that he planned to become a doctor. But Emilia's next child, a daughter, Olga, died in infancy around 1914. Thereafter her own health began to fail. Karol Wojtyla was born in Wadowice, in an apartment whose windows looked out on the Church of our Lady where he would worship and serve as an altar boy. Emilia adored him. She told the neighbors that he would be a great man, a priest. She taught him to cross himself. She read Scripture with him. But she was often in bed, suffering from inflammation of both heart and kidney. She was increasingly nervous, melancholy, silent. She died on April 13, 1929 when Karol was eight. The pope's adoration of his young mother is well-known. He has said she was "the soul of home." When she died, his father took him to Kalwaria, a Marian shrine close to Wadowice. Karol's lifelong devotion to the Virgin began on that trip after he lost his mother. But there's also evidence to suggest that the boy felt deprived by his mother's depressions. According to Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi in His Holiness, after he became a priest, Wojtyla confided that his "mother was a sick woman. She was hard-working, but she didn't have much time to devote to me." When the boy turned to Mary, he may have been turning away from disappointment as well as loss.From the time of Emilia's death, Karol and the Lieutenant lived alone. They were extremely close. At some point, they even started sleeping in the same room. The Lieutenant was a force for rectitude and piety, one of several key influences in Wojtyla's religious life. As pope, John Paul II remembered that, "Day after day I was able to observe the austere way in which he lived. By profession he was a soldier and, after my mother's death, his life became one of constant prayer. Sometimes I would wake up during the night and find my father on his knees, just as I would always see him kneeling in the parish church. We never spoke about a vocation to the priesthood, but his example was in a way my first seminary, a kind of domestic seminary."Eugeniusz Mroz, one of the pope's Wadowice classmates, remembers that "after the death of his wife, Karol's father devoted himself solely to his son's upbringing...His father was sewing, washing, and cooking, being Karol's mother, father, friend and colleague." The boy returned his father's devotion. After his morning at school, Wojtyla shared the midday meal with his father. In the afternoons, he played sports, but always went home punctually in early evening for homework, dinner and a late walk with his sole surviving parent. Mroz told us a story (one we never heard or read anywhere else) which gives a rare glimpse into the intensity of the boy's attachment to his father. While the three were hiking in the mountains, the Lieutenant walked out ahead of the boys. Suddenly a fog came up, completely enshrouding Karol Senior. His son immediately began to run along the path, calling out for his father. There was no answer. He had disappeared! Karol went down on his knees and began praying in a loud, clear voice, begging God to bring his father back safely. Mroz knelt and prayed with Karol. When the fog lifted, they still could not find Karol Senior and feared he might have lost his way and fallen to his death. They rushed home where they were delightfully surprised to find Wojtyla's father waiting for them with a cup of hot tea.Years later, Father Figlewicz recalled seeing "the shadow of early orphanage" in his altar boy. But the priest also described Wojtyla as "lively, very talented, very quick and very good. He had an optimistic nature," and he threw himself into life with all of his incredible stamina. Along with school games like soccer, Karol first learned to ski as a boy. He discovered the mountains literally step by step, as he and his friends followed another local priest, Father Edward Zacher, up the nearby slopes on their boards in the days before ski lifts. In winter, there was skating on the Skawa, the river that snakes through Wadowice; in summer, the boys swam there. Though their life was simple, Wojtyla and his father had friends at church and company at home. One of Wojtyla's closest friends, Jerzy Kluger, often dropped by and remembers Karol Senior's passion for Polish history--his love of regaling the boys with tales of lost battles, the heroism of St. Stanislaw and the rich history embedded in Wawel Castle. Father and son kept in close touch with Edmund and traveled to Krakow in 1930 to see him graduate from the School of Medicine at the Jagellonian University. After the ceremony, Karol Senior took his boys to Czestochowa--the heart of Polish Christianity--where Karol prayed to the Black Madonna, Queen of Poland, for the first time. The boy was deeply moved and returned on a school trip in the summer of 1932. That winter, the second great tragedy of his childhood struck. Edmund--the adored older brother who shared his passion for theatre and soccer--died of scarlet fever. As pope, John Paul II told an audience that the impact of his brother's death was "perhaps even deeper than my mother's." His classmates remember it that way too, that Karol cried at Edmund's funeral, but not at his mother's. Szczepan Mogelniecki said, "The brother's death was more his tragedy." And it bound Karol ever more deeply to the sense that his fate was one with Poland's. Like the nation, Wojtyla must suffer. He felt it when he prayed to Mary, suffering Mother of Christ, in her little chapel in the Church of our Lady. He drank in the suffering Poland in his literature and history classes. He loved the 19th century poets Slowacki and Mickiewicz in whom the beauty and pain of Poland was so alive. They often dealt with patriotic themes--national uprisings, the thirst for freedom and Polish messianism. As Neal Ascherson said in his interview, "Messianism has a very particular meaning in Poland. It says Poland is the incarnation, it's the collective incarnation of Jesus Christ. It is a nation which has to be crucified, in order to bring about the salvation of all nations." Karol Wojtyla was schooled in this tradition, and he responded to it deeply.The young Karol memorized Slowacki's "The Slavic Pope," a prophetic poem about a pope from the East who "will not flee the sword, /Like that Italian./Like God, He will bravely face the sword..." In a world that had never had a Polish pope, Karol was raised with a vision of one. From early on, he was fascinated by the martyred St. Stanislaw, a bishop murdered by a tyrant king in 1079. As Cardinal of Krakow, Wojtyla often invoked St. Stanislaw in his homilies and sermons. The Communists did not appreciate the reference. They knew he stood for the power of Polish resurrection: after his murder the enraged populace chased the king out of Krakow. As if to underline how Poles rose from the dead, Cardinal Wojtyla had St. Stanislaw's skull dug up and examined by forensic experts. They confirmed that he'd been executed. "In this fashion," Tad Szulc writes in his biography, Pope John Paul II, modern science vindicated a patriotic-religious legend." After all, Karol Wojtyla "regarded himself as the martyred saint's successor as Bishop of Krakow--and he owed him historical truth."Karol first turned to theatre as the outlet for his gifts. He lacked the self-aggrandizing qualities often associated with actors. He was a sober, studious boy. His classmates point out how often he stands to the side in photos of school excursions or class pictures. It was very characteristic that "Karol stood aside...Almost every picture we have with Karol, in almost every picture, he's somewhere aside, somewhere remote, a bit aside from all of us." He always preferred to be an observer. Nonetheless his patriotic passions were perfectly suited to a particular kind of Polish theatre. In the early 1930's, he met Mieczyslaw Kotlarcyzk who would teach him about "the Living Word," a style of performing which emphasized language, monologues and simplicity of sets. The Living Word had its roots in life under partition--when people sang Polish songs and recited Polish poetry after dinner in country manor houses. It was a way of preserving their culture. Kotlarcyzk had turned this subversive, informal entertainment into a theory of drama.  Kotlarcyzk ran the Amateur University Theatre in Wadowice. Wojtyla began acting in plays at school and branched out into Kotlarcyzk's productions. The pope's public persona goes back to the declamatory style of these plays which also emphasized, as John Paul II so often does still, symbolic gestures and metaphor. His relationship to Kotlarcyzk launched Wojtyla as an actor and a playwright. Their intense discussions about Polish language and culture became the basis of an important, revealing correspondence once Karol graduated from high school and moved to Krakow with his father in 1938. The letters that went back and forth between Wojtyla and his mentor meant, first of all, that the young university student knew just what was happening in Wadowice once the Nazis invaded. Karol was kept informed of who among his friends and neighbors had been sent to Auschwitz, who among the Jews had been herded into the ghetto--and who among both groups had been summarily executed. Karol painted pictures of wartime Krakow for Kotlarcyzk who hoped to move there. "Now life is waiting in line for bread, scavenging for sugar, and dreaming of coal and books." Karol also expressed despair over the collapse of Poland and mourned the loss of "ideas that should have surrounded in dignity the nation of Mickiewicz, Slowacki, Norwid and Wyspianski." Wojtyla saw the University shut under the Nazis. He saw his professors rounded up and shot or deported. He saw Jews hunted like animals. The Nazis also waged systematic Kulturkampf by closing libraries and shutting cultural institutions to the Poles. Only Germans could attend plays and concerts or go to museums. A Pole could be shot for going to the theatre and even for speaking Polish in the wrong place. When Kotlarczyk finally came to Krakow in the summer of 1941, Wojtyla and his friends helped him start the underground Rhapsodic Theatre. By focusing on Polish words and texts, they were risking their lives for their country. They were also providing manna for people starved for the sound of their own language. In a letter to Kotlarcyzk, Wojtyla showed the missionary passion behind his cultural resistance. He wrote his teacher that he wanted to build "a theatre that will be a church where the national spirit will burn."Ultimately, the two institutions would be reversed for Karol Wojtyla. The Church would be the theatre for his Polish preoccupations. But first his personal suffering would deepen unbearably and his country would have to be crucified by another occupying power. Karol's father died February 18, 1941. Though he would soon regain his outward calm, intimates in Krakow saw how deeply this loss cut. They were worried about Wojtyla's state of mind. He was distraught. After he found his father, Wojtyla stayed up all night praying by the bedside with Juliusz Kydrynski, his closest friend from the theatre. He started going to the grave every day and was so upset Father Malinski, a fellow seminarian, "feared that something terrible might happen." As pope, John Paul II told the writer Andre Frossard, "At twenty I had already lost all the people I loved, and even those I might have loved, like my older sister who, they said, died, six years before I was born." Karol's loneliness was complete. Once more suffering fatefully bound him to his beloved country's anguished destiny. The man who would become the first Polish pope was first made in his landscape's likeness. His terrible losses mounted, each a mortal blow to Wojtyla's identity, each leaving a mournful deposit, each associated with a consoling Polish myth: Mary's enduring compassion, the promise of national redemption, the surviving power of the Polish language. By the time Wojtyla came of age, he bore his country's rich themes inside him. In his interview for our documentary, Professor Eamon Duffy of Cambridge University, author of Saints and Sinners, described the powerful ways suffering connected Poland to John Paul's papacy. "Suffering is crucial for understanding John Paul, at a personal level, and at a racial, ethnic, historical and theological level. His personal life is one of enormous personal deprivation: the loss of his mother when he was very young; the loss of his brother who was perhaps the person he was closest to in the world; then when he was a very young man, and before he'd really shaped his own life choices, the loss of his father, whose piety had been crucial in shaping his own religion...But the Polish people for 200 years have been a victim-people, partitioned between Germany and Russia, religiously oppressed, enslaved, abandoned by the world at the beginning of the Second World War. And that experience of desolation for him is part and parcel of the religious desolation of the East, a church which is the Church of Silence, which was cut off from the West...He feels he has given the churches of the East a special vision, a special access to the Gospel of the Crucified...Personal suffering for him chimed in perfectly and became an image of this greater vocation to the suffering of the churches of the East."
 We often encountered evasiveness surrounding the Pope's childhood experience with the Jews in Wadowice. Certain facts were put forward as proof that John Paul II had only had model relations with Jews: he and his father rented their apartment from a Jewish landlord. Karol Wojtyla went to school with Jews. Most importantly, as a boy, his closest friend was Jerzy Kluger, a Jewish boy from a wealthy local family. The Pope's lifelong friendship with Jerzy Kluger is always asserted as indisputable evidence that John Paul II never had to overcome any limitations in his relation to the Jews. Understandably, Poles would want to minimize the complexity, even the darkness of their relationships to Jews. But many--not all, but many--Jews would also make an exception of Wadowice when they spoke to us. And the world at large has accepted the version of the Pope's idyllic hometown where Poles and Jews got along just fine. There seems to be reluctance on everyone's part to suggest the possibility of the Pope having been contaminated by the faintest breath anti-Semitism.In truth, the Wadowice of his childhood was a model of Polish anti-Semitism as well as offering him examples of cooperation. Later, as a student in Krakow, during the Nazi Occupation, Karol Wojtyla would have been witness to the murder of Jews in the street. He would have known about the outright treachery of those who turned Jews in for food. He knew about the silence of the Church during the Holocaust and after--the silence that persisted even in 1968 when renewed hostilities forced 38,000 Jews to flee Poland. As we came to our project, Darcy O'Brien published The Hidden Pope. Though it features the story of John Paul II's friendship with Jerzy Kluger, it also contains a remarkable amount of new research on anti-Semitism in their childhood Wadowice, in Catholic Christianity and in the Vatican. But Darcy O'Brien died suddenly in the spring of 1998, just as he was to start his publicity tour. We could not interview him for the film. If Jerzy Kluger had been more willing, his interview might have helped evoke the rich detail and complexity of O'Brien's portrait of the Catholic-Jewish world in 1920's Wadowice. But Mr. Kluger had told his stories one too many times. He was impatient, even unwilling, to set familiar scenes with new words. The balance had shifted for him. It had become his story, perhaps naturally enough, but from our point view, he couldn't serve as a conduit for O'Brien's original research. From his first years, Karol Wojtyla was intimate with the dark side of Poland's anti-Semitism. As Pope, he has worked hard to recognize and eradicate such prejudice. In the documentary, our question is not what Wojtyla did, but why it took him so long to act and whether he had gone far enough. Here we want to explore new biographical materials we could not include in the film and speculate on the psychological rather than the moral springs of the Pope's behavior. In 1920, there were 8,000 Catholics and 2,000 Jews in Wadowice. The town was built of narrow streets around the central square of administrative buildings. Catholics and Jews lived in close proximity. They were the other and the same: both chosen people with a strict religious practice at the center of their lives. The Wadowice Synagogue was near Karol's high school, and he watched with fascination as the Jews walked by during his classes. Years later, as Pope, he wrote,"I have in front of my eyes the numerous worshippers who during their Holidays passed on their way to pray." At the same time, Stanislaw Jura, one of Wojtyla's classmates, told us, "80-90% of the Jewish population was poor...Our connections with Jews was so rare. It wasn't very amicable. There was a bit of anti-Semitism...A lot of the Jews had funny curls, big robes, so there were jokes." "The Klugers were an exception," Jura said. "Acculturated Jews like the Klugers were just like Poles." Actually, in one respect the Klugers were also different from most of the Polish Catholics in Wadowice. The Klugers were rich. Jerzy's grandmother owned a lot of prime real estate in the town. Dr. Kluger, Jerzy's father, was a lawyer whose clients included some of the most prosperous businessmen for miles around. As much as poor Catholics resented poor Jews, they resented rich, educated Jews even more. Father Cjaikowski, a Catholic priest who has spoken out against anti-Semitism in Poland, told us this about its growth in this century. "Our nation was oppressed. Always under oppression, nationalism is born. You are sick. You are under the boot, you start to exaggerate as sick people...After World War I, we saw we had millions of Jews. These Jews are intelligent people, well-educated and they seem to be competition." Polish resentment of Jews was more than economics. In fact, Father Cjaikowski said economics was used to justify an anti-Semitism which was based in Christian attitudes. On Good Friday, Poles said a devotional prayer which referred to Jews as "that pernicious race." They recited the "Good Friday Reproaches," a list of accusations against the Jews. Over Easter, there was an annual passion play at Kalwaria, where Wojtyla often retreated to pray and walk the stations of the cross. He also attended performances of the passion play where his grandfather and great-grandfather had volunteered as guides. People from all over Poland flocked to the shrine to take part in the Savior's crucifixion. The actor stumbled and bled as he pulled the cross up the to Golgotha. Crowds were worked to a frenzy as Jesus died the victim of the Jews: "the Christ killers!" Afterwards, as peasants streamed out of the monastery, their passions stirred by religion and vodka, they often attacked Jews whose distinctive Hassidic appearance made them easy to identify. Anti-Semitism was official Church policy. In 1936, amid the rise of nationalism, Primate Hlond expressed it with absolute clarity in the pastoral letter which was read from pulpits across the country: "There will be a Jewish problem as long as the Jews remain...It is a fact that the Jews are fighting the Catholic Church, persisting in free thinking, and are the vanguard of godlessness, Bolshevism and subversion...It is a fact that the Jews deceive, levy interest and are pimps. It is a fact that the religious and ethical influence of the Jewish young people on Polish people is a negative one." The Catholic press portrayed Jews as interlopers and Hlond advocated a boycott of their businesses. During the horrors of World War II, the Polish Catholic Church, as Father Stanislaw Musial told us in his passionate interview, was "indifferent to the Jews because of bad theology...We could not help the Jews because we had no theology for helping the Jews." The Klugers and Hupperts were unusual, not only because they dressed and lived like members of the Catholic bourgeoisie, but also because they strove to provide a countervailing influence to the anti-Semitism around them. They were extremely public-spirited. The Hupperts had donated a park with tennis courts to the city of Wadowice. Dr. Kluger supported an interfaith string quartet which played at his house every week. The men of the family took turns serving as presidents of the Jewish community. According to Darcy O'Brien, the Jews in Wadowice had looked to them for generations "for their often subtle and complex leadership that enabled the two cultures to live in mutual tolerance." O'Brien even describes a daily ritual that illustrated the special harmony the Klugers and Hupperts tried to cultivate in Wadowice. "The ritual of the old priest and the woman was always the same. Canon Prochownik would appear at the door of Mrs. Huppert's house at the corner of Zatorska Street on the north side of the square, where she would be waiting for him, sporting a parasol if the sun beat down...The pair inched along toward the church and passed it by, proceeding to the right, talking...Each time Canon Prochownik escorted Mrs. Huppert around the square, it was a sign that all was well between Catholics and Jews."Dr. Kluger was a practicing Jew who rejected Jewish separatism. When Moishe Kussawiecki, one of the great cantors and opera singers, performed at the Wadowice synagogue, Dr. Kluger invited several Catholics, among them Lieutenant Wojtyla and Karol. As president of the Jewish community, he raised money to support the Jewish poor, saw that all religious facilities were maintained, and provided Kosher food for the Jewish soldiers stationed in Wadowice. At the same time, he spoke Polish and forbade his family to speak Yiddish. And yet, though he felt strongly about being mainstream, he encouraged Jerzy, his son, to report to his history class on the rise of anti-Semitism in the national press. In short, Jerzy was raised to be free-thinking and independent.Karol Wojtyla was not. He was raised as a Polish Catholic. He recited the Good Friday Reproaches and could not have missed the crowds' cries of "Christ killers" at Kalwaria. Yet Karol Wojtyla never displayed even a hint of personal anti-Semitism. The sole Jewish survivor of the Wadowice ghetto still living in Poland, Zygmund Ehrenhalt, attended the public school with Wojtyla and Jerzy Kluger. He said there were anti-Semitic students, but that Karol "was one of those whose behavior was model."In one of the famous stories about their friendship, young Jerzy finds out that he and Karol are going to be in the same class at school in the fall. He can't wait to tell Wojtyla. When Jerzy realizes he's serving at Mass, he decides to go find him at church. The service is not over when Jerzy enters. People notice him. In such a small town, everyone knows who he is. One old woman in particular eyes the young Jewish boy disapprovingly. As mass ends, Jerzy races up to the altar to tell Karol his good news. Then he mentions the old woman's disapproval. "Maybe she was surprised to see a Jew in church." "Why," Karol laughs. "Aren't we all God's children?"Besides his friendship with Jerzy, Karol often played goalie for the Jewish soccer team. He recited Mickiewicz with his Jewish neighbor, Ginka Beer. As he said to the Warsaw Jewish community in 1991, "I belong to the generation for which relationships with Jews was a daily occurrence." The Jewish presence was intimately stitched into the richness of Karol's childhood world. During a visit from an American delegation of rabbis, the Pope was asked about his early experiences. Rabbi Ruden told us that he watched John Paul II go into a trance as he recollected in Proustian detail the Jewish life of Wadowice. For John Paul II, the Holocaust brought profound, personal losses--the deaths of people he knew and cared for. It represents another way that personal suffering bound him to Poland's history and fate. Wojtyla moved to Krakow with his father in 1938. By the time they left Wadowice, the Jews were being singled out for special hardship. Members of the National Democratic Movement had smashed Jewish shops there. Dr. Kluger was forced to add a Hebrew version to his name on his office. Dr. Sesia Berkowtiz who grew up in Wadowice, but now lives in Israel told us "there was always anti-Semitism, but it wasn't brutal until the Nazis came to power." When the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939, Dr. Kluger took Jerzy with him into the Polish army. The men were permanently separated from the three women of the family. As Wojtyla learned from letters that reached him in Krakow, Jerzy's grandmother, mother and sister were forced into the Wadowice ghetto. He knew that the Kluger women were deported to Auschwitz and that when the wind was right, people in Wadowice could smell the ash from the crematoria there. For a while, the sister of Karol's classmate, Eugeniusz Mroz, brought food to the Jews in the Wadowice ghetto, but finally gave it up because of the danger. Mroz himself watched the Germans blow up the synagogue. He gave us an extraordinary picture he took just as the building flew into pieces. Wojtyla would have seen the Jews in Krakow forced out of their homes and watched while they carried their possessions into the Podgorce district. This bestiality was carried out against the background of the most beautiful city in Poland, the city of shadows and light, in whose very stones the country's history was stored. Wojtyla adored Krakow, and he was shaken by the ugly contrast between its rich antiquity and the brutality of modern war. On March 13, 1943, the Krakow ghetto was liquidated. The Germans shot scores of Jews in lovely Zgoda Square, among them, Rabbi Seltenreich, who Wojtyla knew as the Klugers' rabbi from Wadowice. The destruction of the Jews in Poland during Word War II is an extraordinary subject. Those of us who have come after cannot help but wonder what we would have done. Within Poland itself, that question still burns, along with passionate feelings of outrage towards certain almost unimaginable cruelties. Konstantin Gebert, the editor of Midrash, was born after the war. His consciousness of being Jewish was not raised until he experienced the anti-Semitic assaults during 1968. Then he began to study and think about the Jews' fate in Poland during the Holocaust. He told us that since he'd had children, "I thank God every day I have not been tested. Because I fear I would have failed the test. And my anger is not against them who refused to help. One cannot demand heroism. My anger and utter contempt is for those who helped the murderers. One cannot blame the Poles for not helping. This is not the point. The point is those who helped...who would sell the Jew for a sack of potatoes. This is what has not been accounted for."During the early part of the war, Wojtyla showed personal courage defending Jews. Sister Zofia Zarnecka, a university colleague, told us how protective he was toward Anka Weber. "He often escorted her down the street and fended off the bigots who called themselves, 'All-Poland Youth.'" We also spoke to Edith Schiere, another Jewish Wadowician who now lives in Israel. During the war, she miraculously escaped from Auschwitz and met Karol Wojtyla as she was staggering down the road. He carried her to the train station on his back, put her on the train and brought her something to eat. "I felt ashamed when my Jewish friends said, 'Don't you know that he's a priest?' I didn't." But she also felt terrible because she never had the chance to thank him.There is every evidence that Wojtyla helped individual Jews because he was a good Christian and believed in doing unto others as he would have them do unto him. But there is no sign that he was part of any organized effort to save Jews until some time after the war. There were Polish organizations like Zagoda that worked to save Jews. There were priests and nuns who forged identity papers. Poland was the only country under the Nazi Occupation where you could be shot for helping a Jew. Adam Bujak, Poland's most famous contemporary photographer, remembered people being shot for throwing bread over the ghetto walls. In spite of all that, there were heroic ordinary Polish Catholics who risked their lives to hide Jews. There are even stories of anti-Semitic Catholics who hid Jews and resentfully called them "Christ killers" as they fed them dinner. Wojtyla's lack of involvement is notable. Could he have felt too threatened? It cut much deeper than simple physical fear. Death was no stranger. He had lost mother, brother, father. Possibly what he was feeling was his insubstantiality, that no effort however large or small would matter. At the same time, any effort tainted by violence would put him in the same contaminated world as the aggressors. Every event affirmed and confirmed his helplessness and the horror of violence. When the Nazis first arrived in Krakow, they closed the University and sent his professors to the camp at Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg where many were murdered. One died because he'd been doused with ice cold water and left outside in freezing weather. Friends from the Rhapsodic Theatre had been deported to Auschwitz. Wojtyla was himself arrested in a mass round-up in 1942, but released because he had a job at a quarry. His papers showed he was a worker in a vital industry. Tad Szulc describes how the other men arrested with him were sent to Auschwitz. "On a sunny day in May, twenty-five of them were executed by a firing squad against the 'Wall of Death' at the camp." It was one of Wojtyla's several brushes with death during the war. At the quarry, a worker next to him was killed. Karol was moved to the Solvay factory,where he had more time to read and pray. But he still lived in guilt and terror. Later, looking back on this period, John Paul II wrote, "Sometimes I would ask myself: so many young people of my age are losing their lives, why not me?" Possibly, his own fears shamed him: his fear of his own helplessness, his fear of contamination, and even the fear of betraying a friend. His friend, the writer Wojciech Zukrowski, said Wojtyla told him not to describe any underground activities. "Karol was afraid if he were arrested, he might break down and reveal what I'd said." As the Nazis waged their war on the world around him, his work at the theatre was not enough. Polish language and culture could not sustain him. They were themselves under attack. This is how Darcy O'Brien describes the German aggression against the Poles: "Through such methods as starvation, imprisonment, random executions, and brutal working conditions, the Germans set about trying to break the Polish spirit and to weed out those too biologically weak for slavery." The German Governor of Krakow, General Frank said, "The necessity arises to recall the proverb: 'You must not kill the cow you want to milk.' However, the Reich wants to kill the cow...and milk it." During the war, Wojtyla turned to the Polish Church--the only institution built on an indestructible, eternal truth. Yet even here, the Nazis were trying to choke off the breath of Catholicism. As soon as they took over Krakow, General Frank requisitioned the Royal Castle on Wawel Hill. He closed Wawel Cathedral, one of the oldest Catholic repositories and the very heart of religious life in Krakow. Frank allowed a priest to say Mass every Sunday, but only to an empty church--Krakowians were not allowed to attend. Hitler himself wrote General Frank that Polish priests "will preach what we want them to preach. If any priests acts differently, we shall make short work of him. The task of the priest is to keep the Poles quiet, stupid, and dull-witted...There should be only one master for the Poles, the German."Wojtyla had very real reason to believe that Nazis were going to destroy the Polish Church, along with Polish culture and the Polish nation itself. As Neal Ascherson said to us, "The genocide of the Poles appeared to be already beginning...It's very difficult to imagine that people can say to themselves, 'Maybe in twenty-five years time there'll be nobody alive who speaks Polish.' It seems outrageous, unimaginable. But that's how people thought. And the Nazis helped them to think like that, by what they said and what they did." After all he'd lost, the terror of losing the Word was too much. The Germans could kill priests, but not the Priesthood; they could destroy churches, but not the Church. When Karol Wojtyla joined Archbishop Sapieha's secret seminary in 1944, he was giving himself to the only power of goodness left in a dark world. He accepted it on its own terms. It was the last bastion of everything he loved. It was not in his power to change it--not yet.The Polish Church survived the war after all. What stronger argument could there be for the triumphal view of Catholicism? Wouldn't it be natural for the young Wojtyla to revel in the strengths his Church had shown? Or to depend on his sense of the invincible Catholic Church as Stalin's new regime of terror descended on Poland? As he moved from priest to Bishop, we know from Darcy O'Brien's reporting that he was thinking and rethinking his war experience. In 1964, he was invited to Rome to participate in Vatican II. The bishops discussed Nostra Aetate, in which John XXIII redefined the Catholic Church's relation to the Jews. The document plainly said that the Jewish people were not guilty of killing Christ. And it clearly asserted that Judaism has its own ongoing integrity --Christianity had not replaced Judaism in God's eyes.There were many bishops at the Vatican II Council who did not want these points included. James Carroll, a former priest and well-known author, had a friend who was there and told him about the fierce debate which took place over whether or not the Jews were guilty of Christ's murder. In his interview with us, Carroll recalled his friend saying, "All of a sudden down at the end of the table, a man began to speak, a voice that he had not heard in any debate. In many, many debates, on many other questions, he had never heard this voice. He knew that it was a different voice because of the heavy accent. And the man spoke of the Church's responsibility to change its relation to the Jews...'I lifted up my head. I thought, Who is this prophet? I looked down and it was this young bishop from Poland. And no one even knew his name. And it was the first intervention Wojtyla made at the Council. And it was very important. That's the beginning of the large public impact he would have on this question."It's significant too that Wojtyla made his remarks outside Poland. We never found evidence that he went on record within his own country before he became Pope. In Poland after the war, there was a silence about the Holocaust. Wojtyla was part of it. Everyone had suffered so much. Three million Poles died in the war, and three million Jews. Every Polish family had lost someone. There were simply not enough tears for the Jews. There was silence, but it went beyond the indifference and guilt for not having done enough for the Jews. There were also shockingly enough, reports of Poles killing the few surviving Jews when they returned from the camps to reclaim their property. It happened in Wadowice. It happened all over. Father Cjaikowski heard confessions from his parishioners who admitted to hurting Jews, to holding on to their property and on occasion, to murdering them: "it was as if the Jews were not human," he said sadly. "It was as if the Jews were animals." In 1968, the Communists stirred up a new and terrible anti-Semitic campaign. The Catholic Church did not speak out. There was still no theology for helping Jews. Some 34,000 Jews left Poland, among them Uliana Gabara, Assistant Provost for International Education at the University of Richmond, and her husband, Wlodek. "'68 was an absolute nightmare," she told us when we spoke to her in New York. "The Communists were worried about a new assertion of Polish nationalists. My mother said, 'You'll see, they'll blame it on the Jews.' We jumped on her, deriding her pessimism. But soon it was on the radio that the Jews were responsible. They started beating up people who looked like Jews. Word was spread around that Minister of Higher Education had issued a paper saying no Jew would teach in any higher institution. Wlodek was teaching at Poly Tech. Then the Communists made it known that any Jew who wanted to leave could apply to the Dutch Embassy to go to Israel, no where else. It was terrifying. You never knew if they would OK you. In order to apply you had to bring a request for permission to give up your Polish citizenship, a paper from your employer, a paper from your housing...They considered our request for three months. Then they give us only two weeks to get out. We had a piece of paper saying, Holder of this document is not a Polish citizen. It was valid for two weeks. In those two weeks we had to fold up our lives."Cardinal Wojtyla did not speak out against the "bloodless pogrom" in 1968. Neither did Primate Wyszynski, though he did in one public sermon, denounce the violence against the students and other nationalities, a veiled reference to Jews. Given the tortured history of Catholics-Jews throughout history and, in particular, during World War II, this silence is extraordinary. Furthermore, by 1968, Hochhuth's play, "The Deputy," about the silence of Pius XII during World War II had exploded onto the world stage. It was showing in Krakow. The silence of the Church during World War II was a subject being discussed, even written about, by Father Bardeicki in Tygodnik Powszechny .Cardinal Wojtyla did make an extremely unusual personal gesture. At a different time, in a country with a developed media, it would become a highly visible public statement. He visited the synagogue in the Jewish District of Krakow. No cardinal had ever made such a visit, but Tad Szulc, a biographer of the Pope (and our consultant for this program), claims that "Wojtyla insisted on doing it as a gesture of friendship and because he had fought so hard for the Vatican Council's declaration removing the blame for Christ's death from the Jews." We talked to Tadeusz Jakubowicz, son of the chairman of the Krakow Jewish community who permitted Cardinal Wojtyla's visit. Tadeusz remembered the visit, but not that it was prompted by any position the Cardinal had taken in Rome. For him, the visit was a gesture Wojtyla made in reference to the wave of anti-Semitism in 1968. For us, it was a rehearsal for his historic visit to the Roman synagogue in 1986. Few Polish Catholics raised questions about Wojtyla's silence before he became Pope. Even fewer Polish Jews spoke out about it. Those who did insisted on anonymity. An unnamed source--a former prime minister after Communism fell, and an admirer of the Pope, would not go on-camera with his revealing story. He told us that he actually asked Cardinal Wojtyla why he would not speak out in 1968. Our source felt he should have. Cardinal Wojtyla could only answer by shaking his head and putting his face in his hands. The Director of the Jewish Museum in Warsaw, Feliks Tych, never met Wojtyla, but has a complex sense of Wojtyla's reticence. He is one of the rare Poles who was willing to go on record on this subject. In his pre-interview, Tych said, "There are contradictions. Yes, he made the leap, but there remain contradictions. There was a silence after the war. A shock, but no post Holocaust shock. There was silence in the Church--and yes, I know it was dangerous, but they could have spoken...On every level, they could have done something." Then he reflected with us on why it took Wojtyla so long to act. Finally, for Tych, the decisive moment was when Wojtyla got out of Poland. "I only noticed it--his difference--when he became Pope. The key to his whole attitude became more visible when he became more independent from the Polish Church."Tych quickly added that Wojtyla had never been suspected of any kind of anti-Semitism. Still, he was part of a Church which had anti-Semites in it. That, for Tych, was the reason Wojtyla did not act until he got to Rome. "The answer lies here in Poland. In leaving Poland, Wojtyla freed himself to act, to start the re-education program regarding Jews in the Church, to forge diplomatic ties with Israel, to write the document on the Shoah." Along the way there would be missteps: the convent at Auschwitz and the crosses that still remain--why did it take so long for the Pope to ask the sisters to move the convent back? There was also the canonization of Edith Stein, a Jewish convert who died in Auschwitz. Critics of the Pope claimed she died as a Jew, not because she was a Catholic martyr. Neal Ascherson sees a fascinating trajectory in the Pope's attitude towards Jews who convert. Ascherson was at Auschwitz when the Pope visited in 1979. "I remember a long line of nuns went past him and he blessed each one of them...Afterwards somebody who was standing beside him said, 'The most extraordinary thing happened. One of the nuns stopped and said, "I want you to know that I am a Russian Jew who converted."' The Pope was immensely moved, tears ran down his face, and he embraced her. I think that's very significant. Because he isn't free, to put it mildly, of Catholic triumphalism about other faiths,even within Christianity." Ascherson went on to point out that the Pope saw the Jewish nun's conversion to Catholicism as a form of self-transcendence. For critics, Edith Stein is emblematic of an imperial Catholic impulse to celebrate those who have seen the light. Ascherson and others would credit the Pope for having developed further than that. He has left his condescension behind--as demonstrated by his very first words in the Jewish Synagogue when he called the Jews, "My older brothers..."In the end, John Paul II's journey is more, not less, remarkable for its trajectory, for the growth and change, for evident deepening as he struggled to overcome the limitations he inherited.
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 In the film, we treated SOLIDARITY and LIBERATION THEOLOGY as distinct aspects of John Paul II's papacy. Here we want to look at them together. It is both useful and usual to do so. Observers often argue that the Pope saw Latin America through a Polish lens--that his difficulties with the liberation theologians stemmed from his parochial view of the world. There is obvious truth here. From earliest childhood, Karol Wojtyla was immersed in the Polish Catholic Church, a Church that was intimately bound up with the nation--which actually was a separate nation during partition -- the one place Polish was always spoken, Polish customs were always honored, Polish history always remembered. As Roberto Suro, a correspondent for The Washington Post, said in his interview, "In Poland, the Church was the cradle of Polish identity. It was the incubator. It was the one place where Polish identity survived depressions, Napoleon, the Russian, the Fascists, the Communists...The one institution that survived and preserved a sense of Polish identity has been the Church. And the Church has done that in part because it has been unified."The Polish Catholic Church has always been intensely authoritarian, orderly, hierarchical. An able boy like Wojtyla was formed by the priests. They literally taught him everything he knew: Father Zacher, his elementary school teacher, also taught him to ski; Father Figlewicz, Karol's religion teacher at high school, instructed him as altar boy at the Church of Our Lady; Father Leonard Prochownik, for a while the priest in Wadowice, preached Catholic-Jewish partnership. These patriarchal figures recognized his abilities--his facility with language, his gifts as a writer and depth as a thinker. They made sure the boy was handed up the only ladder of opportunity in Poland: the steps advancing through the Catholic Church. His Wadowice mentors were delighted when Archbishop Sapieha noticed their star student during a visit to their town. The Church drew from a small pool of talent in Poland. That chance encounter may have paid off during the war when Sapieha chose Wojtyla as one of his secret seminarians. In 1946, the same year Sapieha ordained Wojtyla, he sent the young priest to Rome for graduate study. It was not just Father Karol's first chance to see the world, it was also the world's first chance to see him. It was the beginning of his being known in Rome. Before Cardinal Sapieha died in 1951, he turned Wojtyla's future over to Archbishop Barziak. He arranged for the young priest to take a second doctorate and later was instrumental in persuading Primate Wyszynski to put Wojtyla forward as bishop. When Bishop Wojtyla accompanied Wyszynski to Rome for Vatican II, he found Father Deskur, a friend from Sapieha's wartime seminary, ensconced as the council's press secretary. Deskur introduced Wojtyla to many Vatican insiders and helped lay the foundation for his coming finally to Pope Paul VI's attention. If Wojtyla had not impressed people on his own, these connections would have meant little. At the same time, such a system leaves its mark. Those who have been lifted through the ranks become hierarchical and authoritarian in their turn. As Pope, John Paul II has paid assiduous attention to his appointments (virtually all of his bishops share his views), and has never shrunk from using his power against whatever is egalitarian, inchoate and disorderly. Liberation theology was nothing if not egalitarian, inchoate and disorderly.The social problems that liberation theology responded to were extremely messy. The issues were different in Brazil than they were in Argentina; they were different in Chile than they were in El Salvador and Nicaragua. But overall, power was in the hands of the few at the expense of the many. In 1968, the bishops of Latin America decided the Church had to commit itself to a preferential option for the poor. In the decades which followed, the Church in Latin America was fractured, overwhelmed and left-wing in varying degrees, depending on the country.Roberto Suro told us that "over the course of ten, fifteen years that idea, that strategy, that priority evolved into many forms of action that get lumped into the idea of liberation theology, but basically means that the Church's primary mission had to somehow bring about change in Latin America." Until then, in most places, the Church had sided with the status quo--with the rich and powerful. From that time, the hierarchy was undermined because there was conflict between bishops who favored social action and those who were essentially apologists for the upper classes and for the military regimes. According to Suro, John Paul II's condemnation of liberation theology was, "'There will be no double magisterium. There will be no double hierarchy.'" The Pope saw liberation theology, first of all, as a challenge to Church hierarchy. He instinctively reacted against the participatory democracy inside the base communities where priests and congregations mingled freely. Secondly, the Pope distrusted the openness to difference and discussion within these communities. As Suro said, "The Church he understood and loved was unified in opposition. He grew up in a Church that always had its back against the wall, that was trying to survive an atheistic, totalitarian regime...In Poland, the Church was going in one direction against one foe." This single-minded focus put blinders on John Paul II in Latin America. When the liberation theologians said "Marx," the Polish Pope heard "Communism." When the clergy pointed to the widespread suffering of the poor, the Pope said they were blessed by richness of spirit. When priests invited the people up to the altar, the Pope cried "anarchy." When priests and nuns took up arms against massacre, John Paul II roared at them to "Pray!"He could not see any similarities between the social revolution in Latin America and the democratic revolution in his Poland. Nor could he admit to any contradiction in his handling of the situations. From the time he was elected, the Pope's trips between Poland and Latin America were often back to back. The contrast between his activism at home and his repressiveness abroad frequently stood out in stark contrast. In January of 1979, John Paul II went to Mexico, attracting the largest crowds in history (estimated at five million people) and showing he was a political force to reckon with. He used his power to denounce liberation theology. "When they begin to use political means," he said. "They cease to be theologians." In June of the same year, John Paul II flew to Poland. Everywhere he went the extraordinary crowds chanted, "We want God. We want God." In the presence of his combustible countrymen, he all but lit the torch, "Any man who chooses his ideology honestly and through his own conviction deserves respect...The future of Poland will depend on how many people are mature enough to be non-conformist."In 1980, when the workers struck at Gdansk, there were posters of the Pope everywhere. He supported the strike from the Vatican and sent word to Primate Wyszynski to do the same. When the regime imposed martial law in 1981, the Pope expressed outrage in his radio broadcasts and started sending material, spiritual and financial support home. In 1982, Father Jerzy Popieluszko began joining sit-ins and speaking out against the regime. Poles flocked to his church because of his radical politics. John Paul II personally encouraged his work by sending him a crucifix through friends. It was not long before Father Popieluszko was considered such a challenge, the Communists had him murdered. Meanwhile, in South America, John Paul II raged against priestly involvement in politics. In 1982, the Pope stopped in Argentina. As he decried the Falkland war, his priests and nuns expressed their support for it by waving banners, saying, "Holy Father bless our war." In 1983, he made his famous trip to Central America where his clerics held a number of positions in the left-wing government. John Paul II publicly scolded Ernesto Cardenal. In private, he negotiated the ex-communication of Miguel D'Escoto, a Jesuit who'd joined the Sandinista's government with permission from his order. In 1984, the Brazilian Franciscan Leonardo Boff, a brilliant liberation theologian, was summoned to the Vatican to answer for his latest book. In it, he used Marxist language to critique the Church and analyze its mission. He was silenced, forbidden from speaking or publishing his work. Ultimately, Boff felt compelled to leave the priesthood.On and on--there are endless examples of the Pope creating "free zones" in Poland and shutting them down in Latin America. The people who criticize John Paul II for never getting beyond Poland pitch their tents right here. As professor Ron Modras, a former priest who has written about the Polish Catholic Church, said to us, The Pope "speaks eight languages: Polish, Russian, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and English. Yet, he opens himself to the accusation of being provincial. He thinks in Polish. He is the most traveled world leader in history,and yet he exemplifies how narrow the vision from the Vatican can be and has been." In fact, John Paul II has surrounded himself with so many Poles it's said among Vaticanistes in Rome that "the Tiber will run red with Polish blood" when the Pope passes on. He sought advice on Latin America from all his advisors, but in the end, the Pope was uncompromising. "As a Pole," Professor Tony Judt of New York University's Remarque Institute said, "he does not compromise with secular authority. The whole history of Polish Catholicism, of Polish romantic nationalism, of Polish idealism in all its political and secular forms is a history of non-compromise." The criticism is real, but it ignores what the Pope's trip to Cuba demonstrated: that he was capable of developing his views over time. When Communism fell in Poland, John Paul II was bitterly disappointed by his countrymen's response to freedom. Poland, Christ of Nations, was supposed to lead the world in spiritual values--not hurtle down the slippery slope of Western capitalism. But his Poland did just that: embraced consumerism, celebrated licentiousness and legalized abortion. Meanwhile, as the military dictators fell and civil wars ebbed in Latin America, the base communities which were at the heart of liberation theology survived. They fostered the sort of social fabric the Pope approved of: communal solidarity built around the church. In Cuba, John Paul II went beyond messianic Catholicism and simplistic anti-Communism --two central elements of his Polish background. He promoted a new synthesis, calling on Fidel to grant his people more religious freedom, and praising the people for keeping their socialist ideals. Critical of both Marxism and capitalism, it was the vision of a man who had learned from his experience.
 Women are the thorn in John Paul II's side. Their challenge pains him, more than pains--at this point, their demands and criticisms enrage him. Yet the searing controversies surrounding birth control, divorce and the ordination of women are not going to disappear. The revolution in women's rights is on-going. John Paul II's opposition to it is fixed. His rigidity is well-known. What's been obscured is the passionate intensity of his feelings for and about women. Far from being Solomon sending down laws from above, John Paul II seems more like King Lear, grief-stricken and confounded that his call to obedience drives his daughters away. By now it is his biographical donee: his mother's death when he was eight was the defining experience in his relation to women. The boy was too stunned to even respond. He was encouraged to treat his paralysis as courage and release his emotions at Kalwaria. There, as he poured his grief into his prayers to the Virgin Mary, he gave his broken heart into the keeping of the celestial Mother of God. It was the beginning of his lifetime devotion to a woman he would never touch, who was more perfect than any that walked the earth, who herself could do no wrong. As Professor Tony Judt pointed out to us, "One has to think of this man as having unconsciously chosen to devote his life as a preteenager to the memory of mother, and consciously chosen to devote his life as a teenager and afterwards to the cult of the Virgin Mary. Those are related convictions and related devotions, and this is a man of powerful convictions and of a powerful capacity to live them out." Perhaps the first way the young Wojtyla lived these beliefs was by taking a personal vow of chastity as a teenager. According to Politi, the biographer who first wrote about his oath, it was common for zealous young boys of that time to take such a vow. But in a phone interview before he went on-camera, Politi also said he had every reason to believe the Pope has kept his vow of purity. The virgin boy became a celibate priest. At the same time, Karol Wojtyla has always had close women friends. He was, of course, extremely handsome; he is charismatic; he is a good listener:everything women like in men. But John Paul II has also enjoyed the company of women, learned from them, even worked with them on projects he considers extremely important.He began his lifelong friendship with Halina Krolikiewicz, the renowned Polish actress, in high school. Because they saw each other every day for years, she is now routinely assumed by the Western press to have been the Pope's girlfriend. Anyone who wants to interview Halina must first convince her that the agenda is not an "expose" of their early romance. Nonetheless, according to Politi, there was an erotic charge to the relationship. They acted together both in Wadowice and in the Rhapsodic Theatre in Krakow. Some observers feel that Halina helped Wojtyla polish his rough edges. She would not comment on that. She told us only that "he analyzed everything, thought everything through. But he also had a sparkle, an ironic sparkle in his eye." Danuta Michalowska, who was one of the actresses in the Rhapsodic Theatre, remembered Wojtyla's joyousness too. "How would he show his happiness?" she asked during a long conversation at her apartment."Dynamically. When he had new ideas about the text, he would walk on his hands with his head down to show his happiness." Though he seems never to have had an intimate relationship himself, Karol Wojtyla always had an open, even searching interest in the love relationships of others. As a young priest, he was very involved in the lives of the young people who hiked and canoed with him. Marie Tarnowska, a psychologist, who has known him since childhood, told us he was "a second father to her." During a time when she was quite unhappy, Father Wojtyla urged her to start coming on the wilderness trips. She described how he spent part of every day--whether in a kayak or hiking--with one of the students. That way, they all each had time to develop their own particular relationship with the young priest. "It was very personal," Marie Tarnowska said. "He did not talk about general problems, but problems of the person with whom he was talking -- in connection with our relationship or families. He was always interested in problems of marriage...He liked to see when the young people were falling in love and getting married...He was interested in this ethically, wanting to discuss how real love was, not to fall into illusion--whether someone really loves a person or his imagination of the person."Though Father Wojtyla entered into his students' romantic lives, he seems never to have struck the wrong note. He was not voyeuristic or intrusive. In spite of his own inexperience, he could be helpful. None of the couples who married out of these groups has ever been divorced. Some of them claim it's because Father Wojtyla never interfered. Even when he disagreed strenuously, as he did with Marie Tarnowska's choice of a future husband, he was tactful. Marie Tarnowska told us that he had a particular young man in mind for her and said she should educate him to be her partner. "I didn't know much about educating young people at that age," Mrs. Tarnowska laughed. "Shortly after, I met my future husband, and there was this sparkle...When I came to Father Wojtyla, this was my confession. I'm saying, 'Dear Uncle, excuse me, I think I fell in love,' and his reaction was, 'Yes, I know.' So he was quite observant. He was very alert in his heart towards what was going on, and he knew that I was in love although I hadn't said that before to him."Wojtyla's interest in relationships led to Love and Responsibility, an extraordinary book for a cleric to write in Poland in the late 1950's. The book built on what he learned from his students and his study of anatomy, physiology and contemporary sexology. In the process of writing it, he also developed a working relationship with Dr. Wanda Poltawska, a rather strange Krakow psychiatrist, whose clinic counseled couples on love and sex. Her research, she claimed, offered scientific justification for the orthodox Catholic position on birth control. However, her research has not been substantiated by follow-up experiments or reviewed in major medical periodicals. She told Jonathan Kwitny that her work proved "the use of contraception leads to neurosis." Her data bolstered Wojtyla's views on sexual conduct and she provided him with a wide range of cases he otherwise might not have known about. The book recommends sex education, provides charts of the female fertility cycle, and boldly emphasizes the importance of a woman's orgasm. As amazing as it was for Wojtyla--a bishop by the time he published Love and Responsibility in 1960--to take up for female orgasm, the book's focus on sex is subordinate to the concern about sexual ethics. The Pope's central concern is the danger of turning the other person into an object, of using him or her for your own ends. It's also a strangely poignant book. Beneath the dense philosophic arguments and all the clinical terms, there is a lonely man earnestly trying to come to grips with the flesh and blood reality of the sex he is sworn not to touch.Dr. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka--who would become Cardinal Wojtyla's most important, possibly the only, female collaborator--was not impressed by what he had to say about sex in Love and Responsibility. "I thought he obviously does not know what he is talking about. How can he write about such things? The answer is he doesn't have experiences of that sort...He's innocent sexually, but not otherwise." Dr. Tymieniecka, a Polish aristocrat married to an American, is a widely-respected, published philosopher. It was the philosophy in Love and Responsibility that impressed her, as it was the philosophy in The Acting Person, published in 1967 which moved her to seek the author out in person. It was the beginning of an intense four years of collaborative endeavors. Dr.Tymieniecka has gone on record with some of the most nuanced personal insight we have about this Pope from a woman. As she told Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi, "He is a man in supreme command of himself...He has developed in himself an attitude of modesty, a very solicitous way of approaching people. He makes a person feel there is nothing else on his mind, he is ready to do everything for the other person." But along with his modesty, Dr. Tymieniecka also saw his powerful, deliberate, unwavering strength. "People around him see the sweetest, (most modest) person. They never see this iron will behind it...The work going on in his mind...His usual attitude is suavity. His iron will is exercised with suavity and enormous discretion. It doesn't manifest itself directly." Nor is he truly modest, according to Dr.Tymieniecka. "He is by no means as humble as he appears...He thinks about himself very highly, very adequately."The most important work they did together was to translate The Acting Person into English. Meeting for hours at a time at his office in Krakow, in his car when he traveled, at her house in Vermont, they talked out Cardinal Wojtyla's ideas--and hers--and worked through the style of their expression. As dense as The Acting Person is, the version he worked on with Dr. Tymienieska shows a clarity and simplicity that his earlier philosophic writings lack. The man who was so open to Dr. Tymieniecka closed down as Pope. In 1977, Cardinal Wojtyla acknowledged the impact she'd had on his work. He wrote an introduction thanking her and signed over the world rights of their English edition. In 1978, he was elected Pope and the Vatican tried first to stop publication, and then when that failed, next to discredit Dr. Tymieniecka's edition by attacking her in the Catholic press. The Pope assented to the Vatican's approach. He was silent. She protested vigorously and found significant support from other philosophers who could see her contribution. Under public pressure, the Vatican slowly softened its position. One afternoon on her terrace in Vermont she shared her sadness with us. She speculated about the sources of their estrangement (which is now repaired). Did the Vatican fear there would be gossip about their relationship? Or were they worried that a woman had made too great an intellectual contribution? Because she has recently reconciled with the Pope, she now refuses to discuss their estrangement at all.John Paul II has also assented to the traditional Church teachings on birth control, abortion, divorce, women's ordination. They are the mainstream Catholic views he has always subscribed to. But growing numbers of Catholic women do not. As their challenge has grown, the Pope's positions have stiffened. Vocations for women are plummeting. In Latin America where Catholic women commonly practice birth control, seek abortions and get divorced, thousands have left John Paul II's Church to join the Pentacostal Protestants. He offers no olive branch. In his encyclical "On the Dignity and Vocation of Women," John Paul II applauds the revolutionary changes in women's lives and opportunities. He approves of women working in the world. And he praises their "special sensitivity." But he insists that they must accept their God-given role as Mother (whether or not they have children), and they must not disturb the integrity of their God-given gender. The importance of maintaining the difference between the sexes is absoluteto the Pope. It is why he has said women may no longer even discuss ordination. As his line has hardened, his temper has flared. In 1985, he made an extraordinary remark in an argument with Nafis Sadik, then undersecretary of the UN Conference on Population and Development. As she recounted to us, they were discussing the agenda for the Cairo Conference. It became a veiled disagreement about the role of abortion in the developing world. Sadik insisted that the matter had to be addressed. Domestic violence was on the rise; women often became pregnant unwillingly. John Paul II burst out angrily, "Don't you think that the irresponsible behavior of men is caused by women?" Perhaps such a view is not surprising in a Polish patriarch of the Pope's generation. The boy who turned to the Virgin Mary for mothering would naturally see Eve as a temptress. But then where is the boy who befriended girls so easily? What has happened to the young man who protected Anka Weber; the young priest who intuitively followed the motions of Marie Tarnowska's heart; the intellectual who was so open to the mind of Dr. Tymieniecka? Where is the sympathy that always seemed to mark his relations with women? Why is there no negotiation? Why is change so, so fearful here? John Paul II has not made his feelings plain. He rarely, if ever, does on personal matters. People have said this to us repeatedly. His closet friends from different stages of his life, from Halina, a childhood companion; from Professor Stefan Swiezawski, his thesis monitor; from his Wadowice classmates; from Dr. Karol Tarnowski, a former student who talked about his personal relationship with Father Wojtyla on the canoeing trips; from Halina Bortnowska, another student and ultimately, a colleague: all describe the Pope's gift for intense listening. All say he can give his total focus to another person, but cannot or will not reveal himself. So we can only speculate on why he is so rigidly opposed to any change in women's role.A Vatican insider, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, described Wojtyla's mother "as 'burned' emotionally and physically by the circumstances of her life and her time--by unbearable disappointment at the death of her daughter and by the difficulties of an era of war and economic privation." A boy whose idealization of the Virgin defended him against disappointment would be very different than one who reached for the continuation of a real and richly complicated loving mother. Along with all the chill that comes with age, all the tension that comes with intense disagreement, perhaps the emotional intensity of the argument with and about women forces the Pope to face a truth too bleak to bear. He did not just lose his mother; he never had her. Perhaps that is why he resists these changes so strenuously. If he gave up his ideal, he would have nothing.
  John Paul II's conflict with the contemporary world runs deep. He deplores our use of science, media, law, politics, money and feels our "systematically programmed threats" to life amount to a "culture of death." What does death mean to him here? As professor Tony Judt so brilliantly said, "Death is hopelessness...social death, the death of culture, the death of the family, the death of moral commitment, the death of faith, the death of the possibility in the belief in higher values. These are what he means by a culture of death. Life is about absolutes. Death is about relatives." "The Gospel of Life," the encyclical in which John Paul II expresses this vision, is urgent and unrelenting. Some people have described the experience of reading it as having the Pope's finger in their face, his voice raised, demanding that attention must be paid. It is his bleakest and most personal statement, rooted in the dark shadows of his hard life in Wadowice and Krakow under Nazi and Soviet Occupation. The Pope's losses have never been catalogued so succinctly--or so starkly--as they were by Professor Tony Judt in this extraordinary summary: Karol Wojtyla "was born in 1920, shortly after World War I into an impoverished Poland, into a family where, one by one, his closest relatives died around him...He was left before his 21st birthday with no family. At about the time of his father's death, shortly before, World War II broke out, and he lived in Poland under the worst dictatorship ever known...And then this man lives in post-war Poland for twenty years under Communist occupation when Poland was a grim, depressed, dishonest, duplicitous, impoverished gray place." These losses are familiar and often repeated. It needs to be repeated. What's less well known is the number of times the Pope himself has nearly lost his life. Karol was ten when he had his first close brush with death. A playmate aimed his father's rifle at Karol as a joke. The gun was loaded. He pulled the trigger and a bullet flew by Karol's face, missing him by centimeters. In 1939, the Lieutenant and Karol tried to flee Krakow during the Nazi advance. As the father and son joined a column of refugees outside the city, low-flying German planes sprayed the group with machine guns. After Karol began work at the Solvay plant, a worker next to him was killed in an accident. At 21, Karol was arrested in a Nazi round-up and narrowly escaped being sent to Auschwitz. At 23, a speeding German army truck hit him from behind and drove on without stopping. If a woman had not happened on the comatose man and called for help, Karol might have died. He woke up in the hospital covered with bandages, suffering from a severe concussion. On August 6, 1944, a week after the Warsaw Uprising, the Nazis swept Krakow, arresting every adult male as a precaution against their staging another organized uprising. In his basement apartment, Karol lay praying in the shape of the cross. The Germans stormed into his apartment building; he could hear their boots taking the stairs two at a time as they went through the top floors. He heard the boots descend. Miraculously, the Germans did not take the stairs to the basement. The next morning, a messenger came from Sapieha to bring Wojtyla back to the secret seminary. Even as Pope, John Paul II's life was threatened by an assassin's near fatal bullet. But the attacks which left their mark on his character and mind were those he experienced as a young man in Krakow during World War II. Those threats permanently impressed on him the presence of real evil in the world. Having come so close to being killed by vicious invaders, there was no way Wojtyla could shut his eyes to the terror and death around him. It was worse than being a soldier in battle--a soldier might at least have a fighting chance amid the blood, smoke and mayhem. Wojtyla lived something possibly even more nightmarish than the battlefield. In Krakow during World War II and after, he lived the Apocalypse. He saw his city overrun again and then again by the Four Horsemen: Conquest, Slaughter, Famine and Death. In Poland, we often heard from members of his generation that the war was their defining experience. The Pope's classmate Szczepan Mogielnicki said, "Childhood! What was childhood: mother, father, home, school. The war made us who we are." Professor Jerzy Kloczowski, a historian who lost his arm in the war, told us he was convinced that "the traumatic experience...of the two totalitarianisms" and the "extermination of inconvenient people" was the deciding factor for his (and the Pope's) generation. It was the horror, but it was also seeing how it broke people, how good people betrayed each other and forever brooded through their lives: did they do enough? "We were tested in ways that people in the West have never experienced," Professor Kloczowski said. And he is right. In our country, the McCarthy Era--with its own histories of small and large betrayals--did not begin to give us a taste of this moral contamination.The Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Krystof Sliwinski, knew Cardinal Wojtyla through Tygodnik Powszechny. Sliwinski is twenty years younger than John Paul II, but his memories of the war are burnt into his psyche. He feels its significance is immeasurable. "We were witness to two major evils of this century. That is even more important than what is called Polishness...We'll never be innocent bystanders again...That makes us different from the rest of the world. Not as Poles, but as generations born between 1910 and 1930. We share the war."Gradually, Karol Wojtyla has accepted suffering as part of his vocation. Suffering is a crucible, but as we all know suffering can as easily open as close you off to what the Pope feels is a world of pain--a community of sufferers. He calls suffering his "necessary gift," and it binds him to every other suffering person, makes him reach out to the sick, the wounded, the poor all over the world. In ways both noble and unnerving, he asks for suffering. He offers himself as a sacrifice.Those who have watched him with the sick and the dying and the deformed have been quite shaken by his transformation. He draws energy from other people's pain. He seems spiritually recharged, less frail, walking with a firmer step, lit from within.As our camera lingered over the faces of people he left behind, they too were refreshed. Karol Wojtyla was shaped by stark colors of black and white. He knew Auschwitz. He has lived to see science improve every method of killing: the barbarity of genocide and war, the so-called "civilized" methods of abortion, execution, euthanasia. Karol Wojtyla knew Soviet censorship, a time when you could not print the simple truth. He has seen people give up samisdat for violent videos. Karol Wojtyla was poor. Except for Jerzy Kluger, most of his friends were poor. He has lived to see the rich get unbelievably rich and the poor pushed out of our sight. Karol Wojtyla has taken life very, very seriously. But he's left the Manichean world of darkness and light, a world of chiaroscuro, and journeyed into the pastel valley of Disneyland. He has watched the world prefer a carnival mood. The Pope has experienced the twin evils of the Nazis and totalitarianism. He is a witness to the deaths of 20 million. He knows there are spiritual dangers in this new world that are worse than the ones he left behind.Because of who he is and what he has gone through, he cannot stand by. He cannot ever be an innocent bystander again. He rages against the advancing culture of death with righteous, Old Testament thunder. When we first read "The Gospel of Life" we're struck with emotion--shame, regret, the desire to do better--feelings we wish weren't dormant, but are. His language bristles with proper passion for the things that matter: the value of life, the meaning of suffering, personal dignity. Yes, he's right to question our "Promethean attitude," the fact that we treat "everything as negotiable." We had not meant to fall so far away from our true ideals.In the end, though, he makes many of us uneasy. We admire his seriousness, but we cannot accept his sense of absolute truth. He is entitled to oppose abortion; others are entitled to accept it. Relativism brings dissatisfaction, dissent, profound unease, but we can't just turn away from individual rights. John Paul II feels we can. As Professor Judt observed, "He regards the Enlightenment, what we think of as the moment of the coming of modern thought, the belief in the rights of man, the beliefs in equality, the belief in democracy as the product of another mistake, the mistake that human kind made in abandoning faith and God two, three hundred years ago in the West. And his task is not to put that mistake to rights. He simply behaves as though it hadn't happened...That is his relation to modernity."John Paul II's life story is extraordinary. But his suffering also marks him as a man of a particular time and place and Catholicism. The autobiography which shaped his vision of the culture of death also limits it.
 For all the qustions this Pope has raised, there is one that burns for John Paul II--the question of faith. For him faith is the first, the ultimate reality. He has circled the globe without cease, swimming in people, touching them, provoking them--putting his faith in their faces. Why?
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 For all the questions this Pope has raised, there is one that burns for John Paul II--the question of faith. For him faith is the first, the ultimate reality. He has circled the globe without cease, swimming in people, touching them, provoking them--putting his faith in their faces. Why?The Pope insists that God exists and yearns for human contact and without this, human beings cannot themselves live. He believes man, in fact, cannot be good without God. For this Pope, the totalitarianisms that have dominated the 20th century have prevailed for one reason only--mankind has lost its connection to the transcendent. So the God question, the faith question, is all consuming for him. Will the human race, especially those who have power and influence, be able once again to consider its link to the transcendent? To him the very survival of mankind depends on how that question is faced.But why does the Pope need to travel the world and display his faith so publicly? Even today, when he can barely walk or speak, he is planning visits to India, China, Israel. Why can't his numerous writings suffice? His friend, Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete, explains it this way: "John Paul II knows that no one reads the encyclicals of a dead Pope. They will die with him. He knows that intellectual arguments don't persuade, that you have to be given these Pentecostal moments of having been touched by grace. That is why he has taken to the streets, to bear witness to the reality of his faith. His motorcade is a stunning show and he is the drama at the center. It can only last a minute, but you'd think people had ten hours of the most intimate mystical experience. For many people it is that one moment when they say 'I saw another possibility in life.' That is why the Pope uses every media toy of our age--CDs, cameras, videos, visits that are beautifully orchestrated. "
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 But in the end the Pope also knows, as Monsignor Albacete said, "that he cannot give his faith to anyone. All he can do is offer clear testimony and bear witness to what he believes is the deepest part of the self." The Pope has spent his life writing, talking and bearing witness to faith. It is for him, as well as for us, private, mysterious, ineffable. However, if we cannot hold the Pope's faith in the palm of our hand, if we cannot bend or shake it, how can we talk about it? What is his testimony? Where does his faith come from? How has it sustained him? How has he sustained it? If John Paul II--the chief articulator of the Catholic faith--has not given us real answers, how can we find them for ourselves? On the surface, John Paul II's faith seems contradictory:
- He is a man of fierce Catholic emotion and sensibility: passionately devoted to the Virgin Mary and the saints, attentive to--and accepting of --the miraculous and the inexplicable. At the same time, he is a professional modern philosopher, defending the capacity of the human intelligence and profoundly respectful of the scientific quest for truth.
- He has lectured at Harvard University, but has also traveled devotedly to the tomb of a southern Italian miracle worker who was able to be in two places at the same time.
- He believes in absolute truth and absolute moral values, and yet he has devoted his entire efforts as a moral philosopher to the modern notions of experience and subjectivity.
- He passionately defends the rights of the individual and just as passionately defends ancient dogmas that seem to restrict that freedom.
It is not enough to say that from the Pope's perspective these are not contradictions. Nor is it enough to recognize that the modern papacy places conflicting demands on the Pope who as preacher and prophet may extol things which as an administrator of a complex bureaucracy, he must curtail, manage, even condemn. What we can do is acknowledge these "contradictions" but also see them as more apparent than real. "Layers" is perhaps a more searching and useful term than "contradictions;" it leads us into the heart of the mystery rather than into a debate about consistency.Karol Wojtyla's truth--his faith--is profoundly layered, starting at the deepest level with his having to find meaning in a stunning catalogue of personal losses: his mother died, his only brother died, his father died, his nation was occupied and his culture was threatened with extinction, his university was closed and many of his professors were executed, his Jewish friends and families were uprooted and killed in the Holocaust-- all by the time he was 25. The young Wojtyla found strength in what he believed was the will of an unfathomable God. The total mystery of God led in turn to an experience of what he understood as the "mystery" of man, namely, the link with the Absolute which he identified with the deepest level of personal experience. This link with the Transcendent became for him the defining experience of personhood, present and perceived each time the human person expressed his identity through action. His passion for poetry and drama was born from this conviction, and they became the principal weapon in his opposition to the humanisms that denied this spiritual root of human activity. His philosophy sought insights of the existentialists and phenomenologists with their emphasis on human interiority. Although eventually he was to find their thought inadequate, he saw their mission as opening up traditional Catholic thought to the reality of experience and subjectivity. His rejection of much of modern thought as leading to "the culture of death" was born from what he claimed is the absence of the truly spiritual in modern ways of thinking about human life.The dramatic nature of Polish Catholicism, and its application of the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, Death and Resurrection to the efforts to defend Polish identity from extinction, led John Paul II to the centrality of the person of Jesus Christ. The horrific potential of mankind that Karol Wojtyla experienced close up made the question 'Who is Man?" all the more urgent. The Christian answer--that it is only the mystery of Christ that reveals the mystery of the human being and the mystery of creation--is the key to Wojtyla's theology. It led him to value the works of Henri de Lubac and other theologians of the back-to-the-source school who insist that the most basic characteristic of Christian thought is the acceptance of "paradox."It could be said that the efforts to bring together in perfect harmony the human and the divine, the eternal and the timely, the unlimited and the limited, the historical and the unchanging, the physical and the spiritual is the source of the apparent 'contradictions' in John Paul's faith. The powerful and paradoxical image of Christian triumph--the crucified God --sustains him. It allows him to find gain in loss, hope in suffering, purpose amidst chaos.There is a fiery, mystical core to the young Wojtyla's faith. It is the deepest, darkest layer of the soil which has nourished him throughout his life. All his early heroes are passionate visionaries: the strange, otherworldly Jan Tyranowski; the Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross; the stigmatic faith healer, Padre Pio. Their emotional, poetic view of the world has sustained him throughout his life. This is a man for whom the great religious truths are viscerally experienced. Christ is alive and walks the earth; the Virgin is a real woman; the Devil is a person not an abstraction. Good and evil are powerful autonomous forces battling each other--the powers of darkness and light. As Pope, he has attended exorcisms, and even officiated at one.Over the years, his readings and discussions, his dissertations and sermons, and, ultimately, his many encyclicals and many pronouncements, have added important layers of thought and feeling to the young Wojtyla's passionate mysticism. His study and reflection only deepened his faith and gave him confidence, as he wrote: "I lived in a world of faith in an intuitive and emotional fashion...(and discovered) that it is a world that can be justified by the most profound as well as the most simple reasons."As with so many of the great themes of this man's life, the origins of his piety are revealed in his biography--a life whose roots are sunk deeply into the richly layered Polish soil. We must go back to Poland to find the clues and intimations suggesting the origins, the texture and the singular intensity of John Paul II's faith.
Karol Wojtyla was baptized on June 20th in a little church on the square. His family lived in a modest apartment directly across from the church. The bells marking the religious devotions of the day filled the apartment with their noisy pealing. As one of the Pope's biographers, Jonathan Kwitny, observed: "The apartment was so close to the church that a priest with an average nose would have smelled the family dinner--the church virtually cast a physical shadow over Wojtyla's home and undoubtedly cast a spiritual shadow as well."Karol Wojtyla's parents were intensely religious, unusually so, in a time where religious devotion was normal in Polish families. Upon entering Wojtyla's small apartment, there was a bowl of holy water in the hall blessed by a priest. His mother had created a small altar in the parlor where the family would gather for morning and evening prayer.The seeming contradictions in John Paul II's faith start here in the discrepancy between his school and the church--between his training in reason and in his exposure to mysticism. Professor Norman Davies, the Polish historian, told us that he'd been thinking about writing a biography of the Pope, among other reasons because of his fascination with "the conflict in Wojtyla's moral horizons...between the Catholicism that was very devotional, ritualistic, very counter-reformation, theatrical, filled with dressing up, pilgrimages...with displays of great religious piety...and its possible conflict with the atmosphere of his school which was a classical Latin curriculum with an emphasis on rational argument and logic .... the dichotomy, the two sides of his being go back to his starting the day as an altar boy in the parish church and then going up the hill on the same day and being the star pupil in the Greek and Latin class."After his mother died his father immediately took Lolek (as his classmates called him) and his brother to pray at the Kalwaria Zebrzydowska sanctuary. In addition to everything this experience must have meant to him about Mary, it was also a primary source of his deep mysticism. He would have seen (and joined) along with tens of thousands of fellow Poles, the crowds of believers on their hands and knees, praying and chanting as they reenacted Christ's Passion, his betrayal, his crucifixion and his resurrection. These processions lasted for days and were intensely dramatic theatrical spectacles.The Pope has mentioned Kalwaria in his writings, and in private conversations with friends, as a powerful shaping influence on his spiritual life. In our interview with Adam Bujak, one of Poland's most celebrated photographers (and a friend of the Pope), Bujak described to us the effect of this pilgrimage on him as a young boy of twelve. Bujak watched the procession from a tree and experienced this drama as "shattering--indelibly marking his faith." Years later, he created Misteria, the legendary book of photographs about Kalwaria's Passion Play. In stark black and white images he captures histrionic scenes of worship--crowds lined up by the road to watch the manacled Christ stagger towards his death; men and women spread-eagle on the ground sobbing.For Bujak, these pilgrimages are an expression of the depth of Poland's religiosity where every road at Easter becomes a sacramental byway for pilgrims. Other Poles see Kalwaria as an expression of the theatricality --and thinness--of Polish faith. One of Poland's great novelists, Andrzej Szcypiorski cautioned us not to confuse intensity and drama with depth--"Poland's religious fervor is external, tied to symbols, to dramas, to rituals--the Pope's mysticism and interiority is striking but not typically Polish." John Paul II's early involvement with these pilgrimages was deep and personal; he plumbed their essence, not their theatricality. In a conversation with Jonathan Kwitny, Halina Bortnowska described Wojtyla's unique spirituality in even blunter terms: "It was very unusual for a Polish clergyman to write his dissertation on St. John of the Cross. We are a theatrical, ritualistic people. He is private, mystical, altogether different."Looking back years later, John Paul II remembers the profound effect his mother's death had on his father's spiritual life--and on his own:
"The violence of the blows that struck him opened up immense spiritual depths in him; his grief found its outlet in prayer. The mere fact of seeing him on his knees had a decisive effect on my early years...Even now when I awake at night I remember seeing my father kneeling and praying. He was so hard on himself that he had no need to be hard on his son; his example alone was sufficient to inculcate discipline and duty...My father was the person who explained to me the mystery of God...."
Lolek was remembered by his childhood friends as an unusually pious but not priggish young man. Many of them recalled for us the unusually long time that he would pray. He would stop by the church before school and stay longer on his knees than any of his classmates, lost in thought, mouthing his prayers silently. His preferred place of meditation was not the main sanctuary but a tiny chapel off to the side which had a statue of Mary. His complete absorption in prayer would grow over the years--both in duration and in intensity.Sometimes his entire body would express this intensity of abandonment. When Karol felt he was alone--or in great danger--he would pray face down on the stone floor, arms outstretched in the shape of the cross. His university friend, Wojciech Zukrowski, told us that when the Nazis made a sweep of Krakow rounding up young men for the work camps, they searched Wojtyla's house. Karol had hid in the basement, praying face down on the damp floor, arms outstretched, while he heard the thud of Nazi boots overhead. His chauffeur, Josef Mucha, told us that "one morning I forgot to knock, my hands were filled with his breakfast, and when I entered I found him asleep on the floor, arms straight out, his body a perfect cross, a rug thrown over the lower half of his body. Clearly he had slept this way the entire night."While his father played an extraordinarily important role in shaping his son's religious life, there were others who influenced his growing vocation. Father Kazimierz Figlewicz, who served as the vicar and religion teacher at the Wadowice church, had a remarkable touch with young students; he was not only able to recognize their gifts but to communicate with them with ease and intimacy. Apparently, he reached the young detached Lolek at a very deep level and soon after he became Wojtyla's confessor. Later on, when he was Archbishop, Wojtyla described Father Kazimierz as "the guide to my young and rather complicated soul."
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 Father Kazimierz was present at one of the most desperate moments in Wojtyla's life--a stark coincidence of religious life and historical drama. It was a moment which revealed Karol's highly-developed sense of calm and submission to God's will so often remarked on by people. Karol had arrived early for Mass at the Wawel Cathedral on September 1, 1939. The cavernous church was empty, only Father Kazimierz was waiting for him. The Germans had entered Poland and were about to make their first bombing runs over Krakow. The two men began serving Mass as the bombing began. As Father Kazimierz described it to Adam Boniecki, biographer of Karol Wojtyla, "It was the first wartime Mass before the altar of the crucified Christ and the scream of sirens and the thud of explosions have remained forever in my memory--nonetheless Karol in his imperturbable way had crossed over the bridge and walked to the Cathedral because he was always observant in his religious commitments." After he left Mass, he walked through the agitated crowds with his friend, the actor and theater director, Juliusz Kydrynski. Germans pilots were dropping bombs all over the city. The two friends stood inside a courtyard watching the smoke and mayhem...Juliusz remembers Karol's calm demeanor: "All hell was breaking loose--and Karol stood by the wall as it trembled in its foundations not showing the slightest fear--if Karol was praying, he was praying in his soul quietly..."There were other events, other mentors, who helped to shape his spiritual life. His high school teacher, Father Edward Zacher, was a brilliant scientist as well as a theologian who constantly encouraged his students to look deeply and without fear into the mysteries of the heavens and the secrets of the microcosmos. He was an unusual priest for his time and place; his confident faith is unusual even today. For Zacher, there was no conflict between faith and reason. This theme is, of course, defining of John Paul II. As Pope, he has encouraged scientific research; he listens rapt to the latest discoveries of scientists who gather at his summer retreat at Castle Gondolfo; he urged a Church commission to clear the name of Galileo. His latest encyclical, "Fides et Ratio" (Faith and Reason), is the final expression of this deep-rooted conviction.Arguably the most important of all his spiritual mentors was Jan Tyranowski. He met Tyranowski on a cold Saturday afternoon in February 1940, at a weekly discussion group in the parish church; it was a crucial moment in Wojtyla's life. Tyranowski was a strange man--a forty year-old tailor with white-blond hair, a high-pitched laugh and piercing eyes. Neighbors spoke to us about his oddness and his intensity. He was a bachelor who lived with his mother in a small apartment across the street from the Wojtylas. Tyranowski's small rooms were filled with stacks of religious books, sewing machines and several cats. He would stop young men on the street and try to interest them in joining his "Living Rosary," a praying circle and theology discussion group for young people. He recruited youngsters so aggressively that one of them, Mieczyslaw Malinski, the future priest and seminarian friend of Wojtyla, remembers being alarmed by his intrusive personal questions and worried that he might be a Gestapo agent. Father Malinski told us that it took him a long while to warm up to "this bizarre character who talked in a high-pitched affected voice."Wojtyla, however, was immediately gripped by Tyranowski's personality and the power of his ideas. Tyranowski and Wojjtyla spent an increasing amount of time together discussing the Scriptures and mystical philosophers such as St. Theresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross. Malinski tried to argue with Karol about this strange man and even brought up rumors that he had been in a mental institution. Father Malinski wrote about Karol's response in his own biography of the Pope: "Tyranowski has gone through a major life-changing conversion. Look at what is inside him, not his outward experience. Yes, he speaks in a slightly odd, affected manner, but look beyond that. He is a man who lives truly close to God." For Karol, Tyranowski was aflame with God--and this closeness to the flame was an irresistible quality for the young Karol and would remain so for the rest of his life.Ultimately, Father Malinski grew attached to Jan Tyranowski and entered the rigorous world of The Living Rosary: "When Karol and I committed ourselves to this prayer group, it was all-encompassing. Every moment of the day was organized around activity and relaxation. We were asked to keep detailed records of our prayers and thoughts. Tyranowski took us through each stage very calmly and methodically until we reached the central core of his teaching--what he called the plenitude of inner life. His influence on Lolek was gigantic. I can safely say that were it not for him, neither Wojtyla nor I would have become priests."Wojtyla later wrote about this defining experience: "What Tyranowski wanted to do was work on our souls--to bring out the resources he knew existed within us." Karol was particularly struck by the quiet, mystical core of his teaching and he remembered vividly the day and hour when his teachings sank into him: "Once in July when the day was slowly extinguishing itself, the word of Jan Tyranowski became more and more lonely in the falling darkness, penetrating us deeper and deeper, releasing in us the hidden depths of evangelical possibilities which until then we had tremblingly avoided...Tyranowski was truly one of those unknown saints, hidden among others like a marvelous light at the bottom of life at a depth where night usually reigns. He disclosed to me the riches of his inner life, of his mystical life. In his words, in his spirituality, and in the example of a life given to God alone, he represented a new world that I did not yet know. I saw the beauty of a soul opened up by grace. " One of the Pope's most insightful biographers (and our consultant), Tad Szulc, believes that the influence of Tyranowski on the young Wojtyla flowed from their shared attraction to the mystical quality of spiritual life: "Tyranowski gave a wholly new dimension and understanding to Karol's instinctive mysticism and, as much as any profound experience of his young years, it set him on a course towards the priesthood...his mystical legacy to Karol Wojtyla was the 16th century poet and mystic, St. John of the Cross and the desire for the contemplative life." (In fact, after he became a priest, Wojtyla, on two separate occasions, requested permission from his superiors to enter a Carmelite monastery; each time they refused, believing his gifts lay elsewhere.)During our interview with Dr.Susan Muto, an expert of the life and work of St. John of the Cross, she speculated on why Karol's first encounter with St. John was so overwhelming:
"Of all the writers in the mystic tradition, he is the most riveting. The sheer metaphoric power of his language is stunning, filled with images of darkness and light, and it must have been a transforming experience for this young man witnessing the horrors of the war...Karol was obviously drawn to this mystic and influenced by him at the very deepest level. St. John's clarion cry is that the proximate way to wisdom is through purgation, through profound suffering, both physical, emotional and spiritual...."
While each of the Pope's biographers might emphasize different influences shaping Karol's spiritual life, all of them agree that it is impossible to overestimate the impact of St. John of the Cross. However, it is important to place the experience of Karol encountering this powerful mystic in the context of his life. By 1939, Karol Wojtyla had experienced the death of his mother and brother (he would soon lose his father). Close friends were dying in the war, or simply disappearing off the streets never to be seen again. His country might well be destroyed. These losses opened him to ultimate questions--and to the particular vision of St. John of the Cross.As the Catholic writer, Michael Sean Winters, explained it to us:
"St. John allowed Karol to integrate these horrific losses in his life and to find meaning in what he was going through. For St. John of the Cross, there is great spiritual value and meaning in privation, in suffering, in the "Via Negativa." Each loss hastened Wojtyla's thoughts beyond the horizon of human cognition, beyond the traditional Catholicism of his upbringing. Perhaps it is the absoluteness of death that helped shape the young Karol's conviction that the world has no answers to this enigma. So far his God has taught him that he must find life in death, gain in loss. St. John was the perfect guide. So, in the place of his revered but departed earthly mother, his devotion to the Virgin Mary, the heavenly mother, became more pronounced. The mystical "Via Negativa" of St. John of the Cross opened up a world for Karol in which loss was gain, death was life and the Church was seen as the ultimate paradox--the sign of contradiction."
On February 18, 1941, exactly one year after he met Tyranowski, Karol suffered possibly his greatest loss--the death of his father. Unlike his calm demeanor and stoic submission to God's will following the deaths of his mother and brother, the loss of his father provoked a torrent of tears and visible pain. He lamented bitterly that he had not been present when his father died. His friend, Maria Kydrynska, was with Karol when they returned home to discover that Karol Wojtyla Sr. had died of a heart attack in bed. She described the scene vividly to Tad Szulc before she died a few years ago: "Karol, weeping, embraced me. He said through his tears, 'I was not present when my mother died, nor when my brother died.'" The apartment was too painful to stay in alone, so he moved in with the Kydrynskas. Years later, John Paul II told the writer Andre Frossard: "I never felt so alone." His friend Father Malinski observed him going to the cemetery every day to pray at his father's grave and said to us, "Karol was so distraught that I was truly worried about him."Some of Karol's friends have said to us that they felt that this wrenching blow of his father's death was decisive--and that it led ultimately to his decision to become a priest. It was almost as if the smell of death was ammonia to him. It awakened him. It helped convert him. It sharpened his focus. It gave him his vocation. It also freed him. As Maria Kydrynska said to Szulc, "The fact that he was alone without his parents, it was as if it was his destiny."From that point onwards, Karol spent a great deal of time with his mentor, Jan Tyranowski, but it would take a year and a half for his vocation to take final shape. Years later the Pope would reflect on the mystery of his vocation in his memoir: "At 20 I had already lost all the people I loved. God was, in a way, preparing me for what would happen....After my father's death I became aware of my true path. I was working at a plant and devoting myself, as far as the terrors of the occupation allowed, to my taste in literature and drama. My priestly vocation took place in the midst of all that--I knew that I was called with absolute clarity."Father Malinski was present at this spiritual turning point and wrote about it in his own biography: "It was 1942, bitter cold, I was waiting outside the priest's residence at Wawel Cathedral for Karol to finish his confession with Father Kazimierz. Their conversation went on for hours and I became restless, even worried. When Lolek emerged he was very quiet as we walked across the bridge. Finally he said to me, 'I have decided to become a priest and that is what we were talking about.'" Father Kazimierz had taken him to Archbishop Sapieha immediately who interviewed him and accepted him for his underground seminary.Most of the students in this wartime underground seminary had been living in various 'safe houses' in the countryside and traveling to secret locations for theology classes. Wojtyla's job at the Solvay plant kept him in Krakow where his life became even more regimented--and compartmentalized. Up at dawn, he crossed the river to the Archbishop's palace to assist secretly in celebrating Mass, then he raced off to work at the plant. Late afternoons were devoted to his religious studies, then rehearsals with the Rhapsodic Theater and the nightly visit to his father's grave.In March 1943, Karol finally told members of the Rhapsodic Theater of his decision. They were stunned; none of them had any idea that he was contemplating a vocation to the priesthood. While they knew he was devout, he had never confided in any of them about what must have been an intense inner conflict between two vocations.His reticence--or detachment--is exemplified in his friendship with the theater director, Mieczyslaw Kotlarczyk. Biographer Tad Szulc has described him as "Karol's intellectual, cultural and thespian mentor, the most important person in Karol's life after his father and Tyranowski." For an entire year during the Nazi occupation when all travel was restricted, Karol and Kotlarczyk wrote letters to each other that Halina Krolikiewicz, an actress in the Rhapsodic Theater, would smuggle back and forth from Krakow to Wadowice. Karol's letters were unusually revealing--up to a point. "I surround myself with Books. I put up fortifications of Art and Learning. I work. Will you believe me when I tell you that I am almost running out of time. I read, write, learn, pray and fight within myself. Sometimes I feel horrible pressures, sadness, depression, evil." What is striking about this letter is that Karol could not share, or would not share, his great inner conflict. His friend Lorenzo Albacete described Karol's unusual detachment: "He lived in the most intense solitude, a burning loneliness, and to some extent it was self-imposed...it all goes back to St. John of the Cross, to his exhortation of emptying yourself, stripping away ordinary human supports..."Halina recalled to us her last conversation with Kotlarczyc before he died: "He finally revealed how fiercely he had tried to talk Karol out of his decision to join the priesthood--and how fiercely Karol had resisted him. They stayed up all night talking. He used every stratagem, even quoting Scripture--multiply your talents, don't hide your light under a bushel-- but to no avail. What he was able to accomplish was to persuade Karol to become a priest and not a contemplative monk hidden away in a monastery. And considering Karol's career in the Church, this was no small achievement."After the Nazi roundup in August 1944, when Karol escaped only through hiding in the basement of his house, Archbishop Sapieha decided that all of his seminarians would be safer in his residence. So one by one, each of them moved surreptitiously--sometimes in disguise--past the German troops into the palace to begin their studies.Karol was ordained October 3, 1946, in Archbishop Sapieha's private chapel and soon after celebrated his first Mass in the Wawel Cathedral. The central truth about Wojtyla's faith is that every conviction which John Paul II would make an issue central to his Papacy was already in young Karol Wojtyla's heart when he was ordained a priest . By the age of 26 the structure of his faith had been shaped--the bones had been set. The themes of suffering, the centrality of Christ and the belief in God's ongoing supernatural intervention in our lives were the bedrock. Over the years, these subjects would be elaborated upon, deepened and refined. Other themes would emerge as his intellectual horizons widened; these themes would layer, complicate, but never change these early convictions.Within a week after his ordination, Wojtyla traveled to Rome to study for his doctorate in theology. His new mentor, Archbishop Sapieha, recognized Karol's unusual intellectual gifts and decided that his protege needed a thorough grounding in moral theology. It was in Rome that Wojtyla encountered Father Reginald Garrigou-LaGrange, a formidable theologian and the reigning expert on Thomism. Garrigou-LaGrange would become one of the most important influences on Karol's spiritual life; he would open Karol up to St. Thomas.As Karol Wojtyla rose in the Church, he read and wrote voraciously. He discussed the great theological ideas with students and colleagues. Karol immersed himself in German phenomenology especially Max Scheler and Edmund Husserl. Karol embraced the Swiss theologian Balthasar who--like Lubac--urged his fellow theologians to return to the source of Christianity, to recognize its stupendous claims about the supernatural. Wojtyla devoured the French existentialists even though they were not on the approved list. Most decisively, he grappled with and to some extent accepted St. Thomas Aquinas's world of immutable and timeless essences--the traditional Catholic theology for the last 500 years--and a rational, objective world view very much at odds with his early heroes. Karol would flirt with but finally reject the 'softer' more experiential world of the phenomenologists, but not before he borrowed from their contemporary language of feeling and experience. Some philosophers believe that had he remained in Lublin as a philosophy professor his life project might have been to marry phenomenology with Thomism. But others, such as his former student and colleague, Halina Bortnowska, disagree. As she said to Kwitny: "Phenomenologists cannot believe in natural law. You can't be a Thomist and a phenomenologist at the same time."Though Wojtyla modified Thomism in his work as bishop and cardinal, he drew on that tradition's moral absolutes. Love and Responsibility, for example, goes to great lengths to appreciate the complexity of sexual feeling and response, but basically it accepts the Thomist view that all sexuality must be generative. The book brought him to the attention of Paul VI, then preparing to write "Humanae Vitae," whose views on reproduction and birth control would make it the most controversial encyclical of his papacy--and arguably of this century. Paul VI was looking for supporters--and unconditional support. He received it from Karol Wojtyla. Not only did Karol Wojtyla send Paul VI research materials, he helped draft the encyclical. And then later, during the firestorm which followed the publication, Karol went public with his support, praising the encyclical effusively, describing its truths about birth control as "unchanging." Throughout the next decade Paul VI would take every opportunity to thank his protege, Archbishop Wojtyla, and to provide introductions and opportunities.In 1976, Pope Paul VI invited Wojtyla to give the Lenten lectures in Rome. John Cornwell, biographer of Pius XII, wrote about the occasion vividly, describing how in one of Cardinal Wojtyla's lectures he stunned his audience with his dark apocalyptic vision of the world "as a burial ground....a vast planet of tombs." His heightened poetic language, filled with images of darkness and light, showed the influence of his early hero, St. John of the Cross. The remainder of these lectures explored themes foreshadowing all the major points of Wojtyla's Pontificate: the centrality of Christ in the history of salvation; the inviolable dignity of every individual person; the proper relationship between the creator and creation; the dangerous error of living as if God did not exist; the value and salvific meaning of suffering.During these lectures, Cardinal Wojtyla also surprised his audience by revealing an extremely personal story about his own 'dark night.' This story has rarely been remarked on, but clearly it has resonated deeply for Wojtyla and sheds light on intimate corners of his spiritual life. Years ago in Poland, on the Wednesday of Holy Week, Woytyla had a deep religious experience. As he talked about it many years later, Cardinal Wojtyla said, with some sadness, that he tried again and again to recreate this mystical moment but was never able to. His friend Monsignor Albacete finds this story poignant and moving: "This man is telling us that he, too, has had the experience of God's absence and that when he prays he tries to relive that mystical moment of closeness. But it always goes away from him." It is a familiar story of mystics who early on in their lives experience a powerful epiphanous moment that they yearn to experience again, but can't, and must be sustained by the fragments of a memory for the rest of their lives. These Lenten lectures were well attended and aroused considerable interest and comment. When the Papal enclave began after the death of John Paul I, Cardinal Wojtyla was not altogether the dark horse as the press described him. Cardinal Deskur's intense behind-the-scenes work on behalf of Wojtyla's candidacy had considerable history behind it.On the night of John Paul II's election to the papacy, Bishop Andrzej Deskur suffered a devastating stroke from which he is still paralyzed. John Paul II spent much of the first day of his papacy at the bedside of his beloved friend and supporter. He reflected on Deskur's illness with his former teacher, Stefan Swiezawski. Wojtyla's private thoughts are startling, but utterly characteristic. In a conversation with us, Swiezawski recalled their conversation: "John Paul II spoke about his conviction that the most important events in his life have been connected to the suffering of his friends. He believes that Bishop Deskur's stroke was a way of paying for his election to the papacy and also that his elevation to cardinal was intimately tied to the tragedy of another friend, Father Marian Jaworski, who had lost his hand in a railway accident."Not only do his friends pay, but Monsignor Albacete said to us that Karol Wojtyla came to see the deaths in his family "as a sacrifice...which gave direction to his life. Not only did it set him free from family responsibilities, but the pain was part of the energy which compelled him to move ahead with his life in the Church. I don't think he has a clear answer and it is a great mystery before which he bows his head."What is clear is that the theme of redemptive suffering so central to the young Wojtyla's spiritual life has only intensified and deepened over the years. The mystery of suffering has pervaded his thinking, his writing ,his spirituality from the earliest years onwards. It has also become the defining theme of his Papacy. While redemptive suffering is, of course, at the heart of traditional Catholicism, John Paul II has embraced suffering in a way that is uniquely his own.As recently as 1994, when John Paul II was furious with the United Nations over the issues of artificial contraception and abortion, he connected his own physical suffering and these issues with striking vehemence:
"I understand that I have to lead Christ's church into the Third Millennium through prayer, by various programs. But I saw that this is not enough, she must be led by suffering, by the attack 13 years ago. The Pope has to be attacked. Why now? Why in the Year of the Family? Precisely because the family is threatened, the family is under attack. The Pope has to suffer, be attacked, so that every family may see that there is a higher Gospel, the Gospel of suffering by which the future is prepared...."
John Paul II has written an extraordinary number of encyclicals, letters, homilies. Among his most important encyclicals is his very first, "Redemptor Hominis" (The Redeemer of Man), in which he laid out the program for his entire pontificate. It offered a searching examination of man's capacity for good and evil and asks the question, "Where do we go now?" In a later encyclical, "Veritas Splendor"(The Splendor of Truth), John Paul II talks about morality itself--how it attracts us by its beauty. Not surprisingly, a large number of his writings deal with suffering. "Salvific Doloris" (On the Christian Meaning of Suffering), for example, is arguably his most personal statement about the meaning and value of human suffering. The shifting relations between his fiery core of mysticism and his quest for truth is a leitmotif running through all of his written work. Most recently, in "Fides et Ratio" (Faith and Reason), he showed how both are approaches to God.Faith and Reason is meant to be a challenge to modern-day philosophers. John Paul II feels that they have lost their way through their obsessions with arcana and have neglected the large and enduring questions about the great mystery of life and death. The modern view of reason which limits man to the visible world can kill faith--but the ache remains. His critics say that Faith and Reason demonstrates the contradiction it claims to overcome. But for John Paul II, there is no conflict between God and mind because God is literally everything.With all of his writings, his sophisticated discourses, his conversations with cutting-edge thinkers at his summer retreat at Castle Gondolfo, John Paul II is a man of mystical persuasions for whom signs and symbols are the alphabet of God's loving language. The earliest, deepest Polish soil still nourishes him; the fiery mystical core of his faith still remains intact throughout all the years, all of his extraordinary encounters with history.One of the most dramatic and life-threatening of these encounters occurred on May 13, 1981 just as John Paul II was to announce the creation of an institute devoted to the study of contemporary science and philosophy. Its purpose was to provide a dialogue between Catholic theology and modern thought. He never got a chance to speak. He was shot and almost killed as he triumphantly rode into St. Peter's Square to make the announcement and to greet hundreds of thousands of pilgrims who hailed him as the man who would lead the Church into the new millennium. And, as he felt his life ebbing away, the Pope remembered what day it was: May 13. On May 13, 1917, three peasant children in Fatima, Portugal claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary. In successive apparitions on the 13th of the following months, the apparition warned the children about the disasters that would befall the world if people did not pray and consecrate themselves to her "immaculate heart." The children were shown a vision of Hell itself, with its power and violence ready to envelop the earth, especially through the spread of Communism. Russia itself had to be consecrated to her heart and be pierced by a sword. The apparition revealed a "secret" to the children whose content is unknown, even today, though apparently locked up in a small box in the Papal chambers. (One of the 'visionaries,' the oldest child, Lucia, is still alive in a cloister.)From that day on, the Pope has never stopped expressing his gratitude to Our Lady of Fatima. He believes that she saved his life. On the anniversary of the assassination attempt the next year, he traveled to Fatima to meet the visionary, Saint Lucia. (Pope Paul VI had refused to meet privately with her to discourage superstition about the so-called "secret.") John Paul II has brought his blood-stained sash to the feet of the statue of the Virgin at Fatima. He has placed the bullet of the would-be assassin in her crown. He has also consecrated Russia to her Immaculate Heart, convinced that it would hasten the end of the Soviet menace to world peace. The institute that was to be announced that day exists and it has campuses all over the world. Its patroness is the Virgin of Fatima, and her statue adorns its academic halls everywhere, by order of the Pope.Philosophers and theologians with modern sensibilities cannot understand this man who, though intellectually one of them, seems to behave and be moved by a piety associated with the uneducated masses or with those who fear modern life and seek consolation in the extraordinary, in the supernatural, living in a world of signs and prophecies. The Pope entrusted the life of a sick friend, a woman Polish doctor, to the prayers of Padre Pio, the Franciscan friar in southern Italy who bore in his body the "stigmata" of the crucified Jesus bleeding profusely at Mass and who was said to be able to be in two places at the same time, when he wasn't battling Satanic apparitions in the form of savage beasts.Karol Wojtyla seems to be seeking to live several lives: the life of a thinker, at home in the world of concepts and scientific theories, the life of a mystic of the sublime and the ineffable, and, the life of a peasant child unable to read or write. How is this possible? How can such a contradiction be justified?Marina Warner, the writer and Marian expert, talked with us about this "apparent contradiction:"
"The Pope is a populist and he is a pioneer in this. Popes usually come from the elite. They tend to be very skeptical about the faithful who need to be controlled and to be told what to think. So he's reversed that direction. He likes it when there's a new vision, when the bleeding statue at Trevitavecia wept tears of blood several years ago, and he's prepared to make them into new pilgrimage sites--he wants to create a new sacred geography throughout the world. All of this provokes some of the most intense wrigglings and writhings inside the theological community and among those cardinals who are embarrassed by his apocalyptic, millennial and generally miraculous attitudes. But these intellectual Christians forget the deeply irrational mystical core of the Christian religion. The mystery of the Eucharist, the absolute central doctrine of the Incarnation, the Virgin Birth, the idea that a woman would bear a child without any male seed at all--the miraculous is installed at the very heart of the faith! It is axiomatic of the faith because faith is about believing in something that is difficult to believe in. It is about wonder. So, in a sense, the Pope is actually reintegrating something that is traditional and central to the self-presentation of the Church."
So, finally, the question is: Is this a contradiction characteristic of this man, or is it not at the very heart of the Christian message, namely, that the God of the sublime, the exalted, transcendent, living in "unapproachable light," is the same God incarnate in the Jewish man, born to a Jewish teenager? Is Karol Wojtyla not, after all, simply trying to be faithful to the contradiction--or the paradox, if you will--at the heart of the Christian faith?Modernity's complex and often contradictory cultural impulses must wrestle with the coherence of this man's world view and, of course, his very faith. He is praised for the simple consistency of his moral outlook. And yet, so often, a certain pride, even a dangerous smugness attaches itself to 'counter-cultural' pronouncements. Is this the case for Karol Wojtyla?Certainly the tension between faith and culture has been with the Church since the beginning and no Pope, even one so possessed of so powerful a vision as this one, will ever completely reduce that tension. There is a great danger in a prophet who trims his message to the demands of the day, but there is another danger in a prophet who fails to listen...Is Karol Wojtyla a prophet?If the contradictions in his life and faith are due to something that he has failed to grasp, Pope John Paul II has been a tragic figure indeed. But if they are due to something we fail to grasp, then the inability to understand him has been our tragedy.
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 Certain American journalists have fostered a myth about John Paul II's role in the fall of Communism. They depict him as a lonely hero in a cold war thriller, a priest who from the start was slipping in and out of darkened doorways in the war against the Evil Empire. At the moment of perfect ripeness, Karol Wojtyla has himself elected Pope, flies home and ignites the fuse he spent years fashioning. If the myth were pitched as a feature film, it would be John Wayne meets John Le Carre.Bits and pieces of the myth are in Malachi Martin's conspiracy-haunted The Keys of the Blood and in Carl Bernstein's controversial account of the Pope and the CIA, His Holiness. But it is nowhere so completely realized, so fully, even encyclopedically documented as in Jonathan Kwitny's Man of the Century. In its preface, he sets out his hero's unwavering path: "Karol Wojtyla, as bishop of Krakow, forged the Solidarity revolution--in his philosophy classes, his community synods, his secret ordination of priests, his clandestine communications seminars, the smuggling network he oversaw throughout the Eastern Bloc...In interviews, colleagues reveal how Wojtyla guided them in a major hunger strike that was the Boston Tea Party of the Solidarity revolution and handed out envelopes of cash to sustain their work. Time and time again, as pope, he single-handedly rescued the revolution he begat."Man of the Century was published in 1997, just as we started the research period for our documentary on John Paul II. It was one of the books we read and reread in preparation for going to Poland. Our consultant, Tad Szulc, urged caution. In researching his own biography of John Paul II, John Paul II, he had not found Kwitny's near perfect arc of engagement from seminary to the free elections that ended Communism in Poland in 1989. We listened to Szulc, who felt there were many forces at work in the end of Soviet rule. But we were still intrigued by Kwitny's model. Our interview list for the "SOLIDARITY" section of the program drew heavily on people in Kwitny's book who described transforming political encounters with Wojtyla. By comparison to most continental writers (who differed slightly from Szulc), we knew Kwitny saw the Pope through an American lens--a rugged individualist, a man of action almost more than a man of the cloth. European journalists, biographers, and writers as different as Timothy Garton Ash, Michael Walsh and Leszek Kolakowski, all saw Wojtyla enmeshed in the Polish Church, lifted on a historic tide sweeping all Catholics, as well as Communists, before it. These observers agreed that although John Paul II's influence as Pope was real and far-reaching, his part as priest in the resistance was much more nuanced than Kwitny claimed. However, since Man of the Century included a massive amount of new investigative reporting, we felt we were tracking the story with the more dramatic cutting edge.
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 It was quickly clear that the story was not going to hold. Time had passed. Some of Kwitny's characters were so old and sick, they simply did not remember what they had said to the former Wall Street Journal reporter. Younger people told us the same stories, but aimlessly, often without the point Kwitny had given them in print. We heard many woolly memories of Wojtyla's protective attitude toward endangered dissidents--but nothing so concrete as Kwitny's account of Wojtyla inspiring the hunger strike.Then we began to find real, disturbing errors of fact. Kwitny identifies Joanna Szczesna, a leading Polish intellectual and an important veteran of the resistance, as Jewish. In truth, she's Catholic. She laughed when we showed her the reference, but she might not have. Given the tortured and explosive history of Catholic-Jewish relations in Poland--the abyss which painfully separates the two worlds--Kwitny's mistake here was a significant error with potential repercussions both personal and professional.Szczesna was also baffled by Kwitny's claim that Wojtyla had "guided" the St. Martin's strike. "We didn't know Wojtyla much then," she said. "He was in Krakow, a world away from us in Warsaw. He was not one of the political priests." But Kwitny insists that he was, backing his assertion with, among other illustrations, a story of how Wojtyla worked hard to persuade Tadeusz Mazowiecki to participate in the strike. Mazowiecki was a Prime Minister after the fall of Communism and is still an official in the Polish government. Tadeusz could not remember speaking with Wojtyla before taking his courageous stand in the church. Mazowiecki was quite skeptical about Wojtyla having any role whatsoever in that action. Our darkest moment came in our final interview with Father Bardeicki, Kwitny's source for Wojtyla's most important clandestine activities. We had interviewed Father Bardeicki at length about the role of the Catholic Church in Polish nationalism, history in the Polish imagination, and the Church's fight against the Communists. This time we asked him outright about Wojtyla's place in the resistance. Had he ever secretly ordained priests in Czechoslovakia? "No, never," Father Bardeicki replied mildly. Had Wojtyla ever sent Father Bardeicki to the Ukraine to gather intelligence on the Church there? "No. I was only in the Ukraine before the war when it was part of Poland. After the lines were redrawn, we were not allowed to go." Did Wojtyla oversee a vast smuggling operation throughout Eastern Europe? "Smuggling Bibles and literature happened," Father Bardeicki assured us. "But it was Wyszynski's operation, Wojtyla was just a parish priest." Of such anti-answers, cold war thrillers are not made.Unfortunately, before we could raise our questions with Jonathan Kwitny, he died of a brain tumor. Because of his sudden, untimely death, he never had the chance to defend the book he'd spent a decade writing. Meanwhile, we were back at ground zero with a critical question--not just about John Paul II's biography, but also about the role of the individual hero in modern history. Though the question has been endlessly debated, it is generally recognized that it is almost impossible to have the same impact of a Columbus or a Martin Luther in one of today's mass societies. When we spoke to Vaclav Havel, the playwright and President of Czechoslovakia, he was cautious about singling out any one person--Gorbachev, Reagan or John Paul II--as the prime mover in the fall of Communism. Havel called the Pope's 1979 pilgrimage to Poland "a miracle" and credited John Paul II's contribution during the trip with being more important than anything the leaders of the U.S. or U.S.S.R. had done. But Havel was also careful to place John Paul II in a historical narrative. In the end, the Pope was only one leading character in the story of a vast grass roots movement.It is a story, we found, that is still being written. Efforts to resist after the war were modest and poorly documented. During the Stalinist terror, people involved in clandestine activities took care to cover their tracks. Those who didn't were murdered. Most of the important memoirs are still to be written. The Catholic records during the period when Wojtyla rose from priest to Cardinal remain under lock and key, and Catholic officials are understandably defensive about the new "political" Pope.The idea of "God's politician" is anathema to the men for whom the Polish Church is a bastion of spiritual power and truth. Its role in the Polish resistance goes back through hundreds of years of humiliations and partitions. We quickly found interviews shutting down when we pressed Poles for testimony about Karol Wojtyla's "political trajectory." Gradually, we learned to ask about his "activism" and all the ways he'd "championed human rights." Even then, we often met reluctance among people who feared their quotes might somehow be used to prove the Pope led a political and not a spiritual revolution.Oddly enough, the surviving Communist record on Wojtyla is one of the best measures we now have of his youthful activism. In 1958, early in Wojtyla's rise, the Communists backed his nomination as auxiliary Archbishop of Krakow. He was known for his intelligence, for being personable and open-minded, a priest who would compromise in the interest of building churches and seminaries. He was not considered radical. The Communists thought he would be manageable malleable, even a poet. For the same reason, Wojtyla was Primate Wyszynski's seventh choice for the job. Once in office, he proved to be innovative, but as far as anyone could tell, not threatening. Lucjan Motyka, who was a Communist leader in Krakow, told us about an extraordinary encounter he had with the young bishop. Wojtyla was upset when authorities requisitioned the diocesan seminary building for use by thestate. He did what no other Catholic bishop had ever done. He went to the Communist Party committee room to speak to Motyka in person. "Wojtyla was not an ideologue. He learned to cross the street. He had great confidence in himself as an actor." His confidence paid off. Motyka negotiated a compromise which limited the state's use of the building to the fourth floor. The rest of the building was left to the seminarians. Motyka was so stunned, he wrote up a detailed report of their meeting and sent it to ten Central Committee members. It was placed prominently in Wojtyla's file--proof that he was "their" man in the Catholic Church.Almost a decade later, when Rome promoted Karol Wojtyla to Cardinal, the Communists had been moved to think of him more critically. In 1967, the UB (Polish secret police) analyzed his strengths and weaknesses in a top-secret document found in their files in the late 80's. "It can be said that Wojtyla is one of the few intellectuals in the Polish Episcopate. He deftly reconciles-- unlike Wyszynski--traditional popular religiosity with intellectual Catholicism...he has not, so far, engaged in open anti-state activity. It seems that politics are his weaker suit; he is over-intellectualized...He lacks organizing and leadership qualities, and this is his weakness in the rivalry with Wyszynski."General Jaruzelski, former head of the Polish Communist Party, laughed ruefully and shook his head at this evaluation during a long, revealing afternoon we spent talking with him. He admitted that one of the great ironies of the regime he served was how much they had underestimated Wojtyla. "My Communist colleagues decided that the Bishops ahead of Karol Wojtyla on the list of candidates were not good for the state, so they pushed Karol Wojtyla. The Holy Spirit works in mysterious ways." Kwitny exaggerated Wojtyla's actual political involvement. He missed the extent to which the revolution within Poland was always a spiritual one-- and that Wojtyla contributed more from the pulpit than from the underground. The Polish Communists underestimated how much Wojtyla's involvement grew-- how, as his consciousness was raised, he shaped his sermons as challenges to the regime. Observers from both East and West failed to appreciate the compelling nature of Wojtyla's leadership, possibly because Primate Wyszynski cast such a huge shadow for so long.These two men came from different generations and backgrounds. Wyszynski was a sociologist; Wojtyla a philosopher. The Primate was popular with the masses; the Bishop of Krakow appealed to youth and intellectuals. Wyszynski and Wojtyla had grown up under different oppressions. During World War II, Wyszynski resisted outwardly. As the chaplain for the outlawed Home Army, he lived underground as a fugitive from the Gestapo. Wojtyla's resistance was more inward. He fought first with the word in the Rhapsodic Theatre and then with prayer and study in Sapieha's secret seminary.The lean, wolf-faced Wyszynski had the tough negotiating skills to deal with the Stalinists. He fought openly for the Catholic Church and was imprisoned for his outspokenness. As Wojtyla came of age in the Church of the late 50's, early 60's, Neal Ascherson told us that it was apparent that the Communist threat was shifting from terror to the gray numbing of spirit. Wojtyla's generation could see the end of brute force. They faced the lies that replaced it by trying to find strategies for living in truth.As a young priest, Wojtyla was not confrontational. He was always known as a good listener. He was eclectic, ready to make alliances with outsiders to the Church--leftists, the intelligentsia, even Jews. From early on, he cultivated small groups and often had a transforming effect on the participants. The young people who hiked and canoed with Wojtyla all during the 50's experienced a freedom that was unheard of in other areas of Communist society. Wojtyla encouraged arguments about politics, religion, even relationships. People could let down their guards in the "zones of freedom" that Wojtyla created around himself. They developed unusual bonds with each other; literally, the 'solidarity' which made possible the later revolution and became the name of the trade union that led it. Wojtyla encouraged other small discussion groups, ones that met in church basements, along with the "flying universities" whose classes met wherever there were vacant pews. Bronislaw Sonik, a future leader of KOR (Committee for the Defense of Workers) remembers hearing Wojtyla lecturing his friends in the Dominican students' group: "The Church was the only place where you could meet and feel free and independent. Wojtyla's reflections on how to be young and faithful but also politically active in those dangerous times impressed all of us. When our activities became much more illegal and the authorities started to arrest our colleagues, we used to visit Wojtyla late at night in his palace. He sustained us."The transformation did not just run from Wojtyla to the students. Over time, Wojtyla was changed as much as those whose lives he altered so dramatically. For decades, for instance, he was the advisor to Tygodnik Powszechny, a free-thinking Catholic weekly in which Wojtyla at first had no real interest. But gradually, as one of the editors, Krystoff Kozlowski, told us, Wojtyla changed. "He was afraid of politics...He would say, 'I don't want to talk about politics.' But it was very difficult not to talk about politics...Everything is political in a totalitarian state...After several years, Wojtyla stopped protesting. He listened as we talked and argued, and he would sort out the mail, and then in the 70's he started to talk. He said, in fact, that he realized you can't live in Poland without politics."Jerzy Wozniakowski, the eminent art critic and close friend of the Pope's, also remembers Wojtyla's transformation. "He was a man who even hated to read the papers, whom we had to persuade that it was important to know what was going on. But once he started to pay attention he was the quickest study. I never met anyone who learned so quickly."
  The struggle to build the Nowa Huta church is one of the great clashes between the Catholic Church and Communists in post-war Poland. Of all the conflicts between the Church and the Communists involving Karol Wojtyla, this story perfectly expresses his growth into political leadership. It is a small gem of a story, multifaceted, twenty years in the making, combining all the elements of Wojtyla's own political journey--both prosaic and dramatic, gradual and surprising. Ultimately, this story is revealing of the man, the priest, the emerging leader who understood the importance of tenacity and compromise, as well as the great communicator who is exquisitely aware of symbolism and timing.Nowa Huta was a brand new town built by the Communists in the early 50's outside of Krakow. The town was in Wojtyla's jurisdiction. It was meant to be a workers' paradise, built on Communist principles, a visible rebuke to the "decadent," spiritually besotted Krakow. The regime assumed that the workers, of course, would be atheists, so the town would be built without a church. But the people soon made it clear they did want one. Wojtyla communicated their desire, and the regime opposed it.The conflict became an intense symbol of the opposition between the Catholic Church and the Communist state. It was a conflict between the workers' world that was supposed to be beyond religion--and the actual workers singing old Polish hymns that started with the words, "We want God." The Communist Party reluctantly issued a permit in 1958 and then withdrew it in 1962.Years went by as Karol Wojtyla joined other priests--especially, Father Gorlaney--met with authorities,and patiently filed and refiled for building permits. Crosses were put in the designated area and then pulled down at night only to mysteriously reappear weeks later. Meanwhile, Bishop Wojtyla and other priests gave sermons in the open field, winter and summer, under a burning sun, in freezing rain and snow. Year after year, Bishop Wojtyla celebrated Christmas Mass at the site where the church was supposed to be built. Thousands peacefully lined up for communion, but tension was building. Violence did actually erupt when the Communist authorities sent a bulldozer to tear down the cross. Lucjan Motyka was roused out of his hospital bed to be jeered at by the demonstrators. As he reminisced with us one morning about this humiliating moment, Motyka clearly believed that it was Wojtyla's calming words that helped to avert an ugly and potentially dangerous confrontation.By this time, the Communists, local leaders, residents and Catholic Church had dug in, their positions seemingly intractable. The Communists' compromise to allow a church to be built outside of the town was rejected--until Karol Wojtyla, the realist, the negotiator, broke the stalemate,persuading everyone that the existence of the church transcended all other considerations. The time to bend was now. In May 1977, a year before he became Pope, almost twenty years after the first request for a permit, Karol Wojtyla consecrated the church at Nowa Huta. What the worshippers were most proud of--and it was a symbol Karol Wojtyla helped to make into a reality--is the gigantic crucifixion that hangs over the new altar. It was made out of shrapnel that had been taken from the wounds of Polish soldiers, collected and sent from all over the country to make the sculpture in the new church. Along with his steady mastery of red tape and showing up (again and again and again), Wojtyla's gifts as public speaker matured during the 70's. They were on daily display during his years in Krakow whenever he gave sermons or led a procession through the streets celebrating one of the many Catholic feast days. During partition, long decades when the Poles could not speak freely, they learned the survival tactic of Aesopian double speak. People spoke of "Christ's crucifixion" and meant their own; they spoke of "freedom under God" and meant release from their oppressors. Wojtyla knew this subversive habit well, and he practiced artful symbolic dodge every Sunday at St. Florian's, his church in Krakow. When the cardinal spoke of "truth in everyday life" the congregation knew he meant both "Christ's truth" and the plain truth: all that wasn't a Communist lie. It was not a call to revolution, but it was a little expression of everyone's anger toward the regime, a little reminder that everyone clearly knew the difference between honesty and falsehood. As prosaic as this might seem in our outrageously expressive democracy, Wojtyla's words drew new people -- even those who weren't religious came to church as a way of casting their silent vote against the regime.The Communists began to blunder crudely. In the late 70's, there were bloody clashes between workers and police after the government again raised food prices. Five priests disappeared in a short period of time. The police killed a popular student leader. Wojtyla became more and more outspoken, calling openly and concretely for the "right to freedom...an atmosphere of genuine freedom untrammeled...unthreatened; an atmosphere of inner freedom, of freedom from fearing what may befall me if I act this way or go to that place."As a young man, Father Zieba was in the student opposition before he joined the Dominican order. He saw the student leader's death transform Wojtyla. "It focused him. That's when he stepped out from behind Wyszynski and started to make his official first statements." For the young Zieba, "the homilies during this period were so beautiful and moving that we typed them up and passed them around." Father Bardeicki told us another story which powerfully suggests not only how visible Wojtyla was in those years, but also how well he knew it. Father Bardeicki decide to run an abbreviated account of a meeting between Polish Party Secretary Edward Gierek and Pope Paul VI in Rome. The Communists accused Wojtyla, as Tygodnik Powszechny's advisor, of censorship. People were outraged. The editorial staff gathered at the Archbishop's palace to discuss the situation. On the way home, Father Bardeicki was very badly beaten: he lost teeth; his nose was broken; if his attackers hadn't been surprised and fled, he might have been killed. When Wojtyla saw his injured, bandaged friend, he was silent for a moment. Then the Cardinal said, "You got that for me."From the first day of his election, John Paul II's pontificate raised concern in Central Committee headquarters. The Canadian reporter, Eric Margolis, described it this way: "I was the first Western journalist inside the KGB headquarters in 1990. The generals told me that the Vatican and the Pope above all was regarded as their number one, most dangerous enemy in the world." Soon enough, people of all sorts--world leaders, clandestine dissidents and ordinary Catholics--sensed the Communists were impotent before the Polish Pope. In 1979, when John Paul II's plane landed at Okecie Airport, church bells ran throughout the country. He criss-crossed his beloved Poland, deluged by adoring crowds. He preached thirty-two sermons in nine days. Bogdan Szajkowski said it was, "A psychological earthquake, an opportunity for mass political catharsis..." The Poles who turned out by the millions looked around and saw they were not alone. They were a powerful multitude. The Pope spoke of human dignity, the right to religious freedom and a revolution of the spirit--not insurrection. The people listened. As George Wiegel observed, "It was a lesson in dignity, a national plebiscite, Poland's second baptism."Our images of revolution are filled with blood-stained pictures: French aristocrats lined up against the Bastille wall; the Tsar's family executed in a cellar under cover of night; Mao's victims floating down the Yellow River. The romantic collective Polish psyche brims with images of violent, quixotic rebellions. They range from the futile uprisings of the 19th century to the calvary charging German tanks on horseback at the beginning of World War II. But the revolution launched by John Paul's return to Poland is one that conjures roads lined with weeping pilgrims, meadows of peaceful souls singing hymns, and most of all, of people swaying forward as one--reaching for the extraordinary man in white as he is borne through their midst. "What is the greatest, most unexpected event of the 20th century?" James Carroll asked in his interview with us. "Isn't it that the Soviet Empire was brought down non-violently? Isn't John Paul II's story part of it?"Again and again, people told us that it was. John Paul II's 1979 trip was the fulcrum of revolution which led to the collapse of Communism. Timothy Garton Ash put it this way, "Without the Pope, no Solidarity. Without Solidarity, no Gorbachev. Without Gorbachev, no fall of Communism." (In fact, Gorbachev himself gave the Kremlin's long-term enemy this due, "It would have been impossible without the Pope.") It was not just the Pope's hagiographers who told us that his first pilgrimage was the turning point. Skeptics who felt Wojtyla was never a part of the resistance said everything changed as John Paul II brought his message across country to the Poles. And revolutionaries, jealous of their own, also look to the trip as the beginning of the end of Soviet rule. It took time; it took the Pope's support from Rome--some of it financial; it took several more trips in 1983 and 1987. But the flame was lit. It would smolder and flicker before it burned from one end of Poland to the other. Millions of people spread the revolution, but it began with the Pope's trip home in 1979. As General Jaruzelski said, "That was the detonator." |
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What is behind the Church's opposition to abortion,contraception, homosexuality and women's ordination? This overview summarizes Church tradition, doctrine and fundamental principles which in many ways link all these issues.
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This spirited discussion covers the following topics:1. The Church's views on birth control and women
2. Birth control and the population issue
3. The Church's views on homosexuality and the ordination of women
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He is an outspoken critic of the Vatican's position on gays and in 1997 issued a call for gay clergy and religious to come out of the closet.
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He was executive director of Linkup, a national organization which he founded for victims of clergy sexual abuse. He also was an ordained priest in the Independent Catholic Church. He died in March 2002.
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An essay [excerpted] in which this poet-doctor reveals his human vulnerabilities as a doctor, and his hurt and longings as a gay man confronting a Church which rejects him.
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  I was standing next to him [during one of his trips to Poland] and he was moving along the fence--people, lots of mothers, children, pushing over the fence. And there was one little girl about six. She was quite a weight, and a young mother sort of holding her up and the Pope stopped and--he looked her straight in the eye--and he said, "Where is Poland?" The little girl was completely baffled by the question. She sort of looked at him, giggled slightly, and then he put out his finger and he touched her. And he said "Poland is here." I mean if you think about it, what was being said then? Not a lot..I'm moved whenever I remember that. But in a way, you know, it bears on this question of human rights, and individuality as well. I mean it's not just a patriotic sort of statement... It's saying that while human beings survive, speaking a language or being us, you know, the nation survives. It's real. But it was also saying what matters about the world, and about human arrangements is what you carry inside yourself and at the individual level. It was a way of putting together the idea of...the nation as an imagined community, and the nation as a reality of hard-working, practical, reasonably kindly individuals who want to get on with their lives in peace.
 The most telling experience I've ever heard about him on the question of Christians and Jews was a story told to me by a friend who had been at the Second Vatican Council in 1963, '64, '65. Picture St. Peter's Basilica full of several thousands of bishops, every bishop in the world is there. And the debate is over Nostra Aetate, the great Vatican document on relationships of the Catholic Church to other religions, with a special paragraph about the relationship of the Church to the Jews. It was a very heated debate. The end result of that document was to affirm two very important things, which in a sense are offensive, but they needed to be affirmed. One, the Jewish people living in the time of Jesus and living afterwards, can never be held guilty for the death of Jesus. An important affirmation. Why? Because for 1500,1800 years, that was the basis of Christian attacks. Secondly, that document renounced the idea that Christianity had replaced Judaism as a favorite religion of God's. Judaism had its own ongoing integrity. Very important. Now, in the debate, there were many bishops who did not want those points in there, and it was going back and forth. And my friend said to me, all of a sudden down at the far end of the table a man began to speak--a voice that he had not heard in any debate. In many debates on many other questions, he had never heard this voice. He knew that it was a different voice because of the heavy accent. And the man spoke of the Church's responsibility to change its relationship to Jews. And my friend said to me, "I lifted up my head. I thought, "Who is this prophet?" And I looked down and it was this young bishop from Poland. And no one even knew his name. And it was the first intervention he made at the Council. And it was very important. That's, I think, the beginning of the large public impact that the Pope has had on this question. In Krakow he had already begun to change it, but that was the beginning of his impact on the Church. And the Nostra Aetate document stands as a monument, a turning point, in its history. Partly, I'd say, because of him. And so what follows then from his becoming Pope isn't surprising.
 When I first met the Holy Father, he was Cardinal Wojytla. I met him one morning at breakfast in Washington at the home of the then Cardinal Archbishop of Washington. There were no props. He was not dressed in white with the whole Vatican establishment behind him or anything. He was dressed in a way that any ordinary priest would, with an open collar like this. And he was having breakfast. Rather absorbed in his corn flakes. I sat down, and I didn't know what to talk about and he asked me what I was doing, what I was studying because I was getting my doctorate in theology at the time. I said, "I am reading of the interpretation of the hermeneutics, that is, what really lies behind things." That became part of a lecture to me on his part, half of which I didn't understand because he made reference to things I had never read, which then were made clear, because I acknowledged that I had no idea what he was talking about. In any case, from that moment, he said the great question today is precisely that one-- 'Everything is interpretation.' And if we discover something new, we cannot see it, because we can only see things in terms of what was there before. We reject the possibility of being surprised, of finding something really new, and he says that is an imprisonment. The human being is totally imprisoned in a world of its own making, and he says that human beings are convinced that this is somehow liberating--to conclude somehow that we are the manufacturers of reality is a liberating discovery. It's a terribly imprisoning one, and how to open up the human capacity to taste the really new, the transcendence and therefore to really have hope in the unseen - that is the question of the times. This is what he said to me about a year and a half before he popped out of the balcony dressed in white. When I first heard of his election, I knew what we were in for--"Oh my god, now he has the world stage and not just the breakfast table!" He has certainly not disappointed me. It has been awesome, an awesome spectacle. He will not give up--relentless, confronting us with this question.
 On the Pope's second trip to Poland, martial law had taken over. The Communists had found an excuse to go in and take over with military force. A lot of people in America thought that he's betraying his own cause. He's going to acknowledge this military regime...So he goes back on the second trip. That gaunt, powerful figure of Cardinal Wyszinski is gone and no longer beside him; the Pope's on his own now. The world is wondering, what is he going to do? Is he going to acknowledge this regime? And so we're all looking very closely when Jarulzelski and the Pope come out for their first public formal meeting. They're both standing not too far from each other in a room behind their separate microphones. And the camera pans down and we realize that Jarulzelski's standing there--I believe he had his dark shades on--and his knees are trembling. And we all searched for explanations--why are his knees trembling standing in front of the Pope? We looked for explanations, such as well, there's a medical condition, or he's on some kind of medication. Ultimately, he explained, no, it really was what it looked like: "I was trembling in awe at the responsibility and importance of this man in front of me." Jarulzelski himself ultimately said those were the classic clichéd trembling knees in front of something I knew was extremely powerful. The Pope had this kind of authenticity of nationhood--if you will--of importance. So that even Jarulzelski himself was put on notice that he was in front of the master. It was a remarkable image...that we could barely believe ourselves, of the centered, calm power of this man who had come back in, gotten back on the horse. He'd been assassinated--virtually successfully--but had recovered, and now he'd come back in to continue the fight.
 I remember a revealing day in Krakow, when he went home during his third trip to Poland in 1987. It had become a ritual. There were two things that he always did when he went to Krakow. One was to say a Mass in the Blonia Meadow, which is a big, green space just beyond the walls of old Krakow where huge crowds had always gathered for him. Now these were his people, it was his flock he was finally back among, the people he had been a priest to his whole career before becoming Pope. And on this occasion, he made a pun about a Polish poem that's very well known, which he punned off the main character, talking about, "I was lost, and then I was found, and now I've come home." It was an unusually revealing moment for him to talk about having been lost, and to talk about his papacy, almost 10 years into it, as having been this voyage away from home. And that night, as was traditional, the students from the university came by the Archbishop's residence, which had been his house for much of his adult life, and serenaded him. And as had been the case in the previous two trips, he came to the window of his bedroom to acknowledge them. He stood there, kind of waving and clapping, nodding his head to the music sort of felicitously. When they stopped, waiting for him to say something. And as I remember, there was this pause, and he said to them, "I knew what to say to you in 1979--which was his first trip immediately after he had been elected--but I don't know what to say to you now." It was an extraordinary moment that could have only have happened with him among family, essentially. It revealed a sense of his own journey, and the fact that, at that point, he was still searching for his own way forward. Perhaps coming home, you could imagine him thinking, "You know, I could have gone to Rome for that conclave, and somebody else could have been picked. And I could have just come back here, and how life might have been different." I mean, that thought must have occurred to him a thousand times in the last 20 years.
I love the Church for the way in which it embraces contradictions. John Paul II embodies that about the Catholic Church. Most of the rest of us just stand on one place or the other in the community. He seems to be capable of standing at all places. Padre Pio, yes, at one end. But there he is, last year in Bologna, on the platform with Bob Dylan, quite at home. Do you remember what he said? Bob Dylan sang a couple of songs, and then the Pope went to the microphone and he said--it was a big gathering of Italian youth--and he said, "How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?" And then he said, "There is one road, and it is the road of Jesus Christ." Which is the perfect moment of John Paul II-- his capacity to be at home on the platform with Bob Dylan, and his impulse to use it as an opportunity to proclaim a very univocal, and I would say, a little too unnuanced message in this day and age. I believe that Jesus is my road. But, I don't believe there is only one road. And if you push him, he wouldn't believe that either, I don't believe. But that's the Pope: Padre Pio, Bob Dylan. Both things. Contemptuous of modern consumerist celebrity culture, the greatest celebrity of our time. Both things. It's fantastic, really.
 The job is clearly very isolating, very dehumanizing in all sorts of ways. And a story told me by a friend of mine I think highlights that for me. He's a theologian who was invited to act as an advisorat one of the synods at the early 1980's. And the Pope at that time had a habit of inviting some to supper so he could get to meet people, talk to them. So a dozen of these young theologians were taken to the papal apartments for dinner and my friend was lucky enough to sit next to the Pope. And it was for him an extraordinarily tense and fraught occasion. So rather desperately trying to find something striking to say to the Pope he said, "Holy Father, I love poetry, and I've read all your verse. Have you written much poetry since you became Pope?" And the Pope said, "I've written no poetry since I became Pope." So my friend, rather running ahead of himself said, "Well, why is that Holy Father?" And the Pope immediately froze, changed the subject, turned away to the person on his other side. But about twenty minutes into the meal he turned round to my friend, leaned over to him and said, "No context." And at the end of evening, as they were all taking their leave, my friend said, "Holy Father, when I pray for you now, I'll pray for a poet without context." And the Pope was extremely frozen about this. He clearly felt he'd said more than he should have said, shown a part of himself that he didn't really want to share with a stranger. And so he didn't respond to that. But I do think it's a very revealing story. The whole submerging of his own humanity in the office which, given the conception of the papacy he's inherited, I think is required by the job... He's succumbed to this less than other popes--you know, the famous business about the swimming pool, insisting on having one built for him, insisting on having holidays, on going skiing. But all the same, at the heart of it, where the poetry is written, no context.
The bishop [Karol Wojtyla] wanted a new church. The Communists said, "Well, you can't have one." The bishop wanted a new church right in town. And the Communists said, "Well, you can't have one. This is for the workers, they have other concerns." Bishop Wojtyla kept pushing, kept working with them. He developed a kind of pragmatism with the Communists during that entire campaign to get Nowa Huta built. He...didn't get stubborn at any point. Because he knew what he wanted was transformation even within the authorities. At one point, the authorities said, "You can't have it here, you have to have it out here on the edge of town." So he said, "Fine, we'll do that. "He kept trying to call their bluff to find ways to work with them to keep the dialogue going. He developed obvious talent, therefore, subtle adaptation to his adversary, if you will. It was a kind of demonstration that he didn't want to go the guerrilla route, to make things polarized, to bring on violence of any kind, to bring on an impasse. He wanted to keep working, as he would see it, in a Christian way with his enemy. He tries, I think, throughout his life and throughout his administration in Poland, to apply that rule: love your enemy. He keeps trying very subtle ways of doing that. And I think that in the way that he finally got Nowa Huta built, by constantly keeping at it, by getting local support from people, by having marches through the street, by raising a penny here, a penny there from everybody, he just outlasted the Communists finally. And this kind of demonstration of will, of patience, and of a desire to be accommodating wherever he can, is what he ultimately developed and I think we saw him using after he became Pope in helping Solidarity ultimately reach a successful end.
The Pope is a great traveler by virtue of the miles he's racked up. He's not a great traveler in the sense that he engaged the places that he visited--that he went there looking for interaction, looking for things to happen. His trips often were scripted to the minute, and he was going according to the script.The most dramatic example of that I can recall was during a trip to Mozambique, at a time when this truly vicious civil war had just been settled. There wasn't real peace in the country, yet. It was still divided. It was one of those situations where you had huge expanses of brush that were full of minefields, small guerrilla bands. There were parts of the country that were isolated. Towards the end of a two or three day visit, he flew to this very isolated city that had basically been cut off from the rest of the country for quite a long time, an area that had seen a great deal of fighting for many years. In fact, he never left the airport for security reasons....I talked to some of the priests who had accompanied some of the people who had trekked in from the bush and had not had any contact with the outside world, in the midst of civil war for years at that point. And in talking to these people while he was getting ready, there was some real anticipation. "What was he going to say?" It was towards the end of the day, dusk in the bush ... a lot of people were basically in rags, exhausted faces looking up at the Pope. And he got up there and gave a brief benediction ceremony, where it wasn't a full Mass. He just said some prayers, threw some hymns, and then he had a speech. He read the speech in sort of Polish-accented Portuguese, and it was a meditation on a fairly obscure theological subject--transubstantiation, if I recall correctly. I figured, "All right, he'll do that, and then he'll put the speech down and say something to these people." Well, he didn't. He just finished the speech and walked off the stage. And there was this sort of, "Okay..." And I asked some of the people in his entourage, "Why did he give that speech to this crowd?" And they said, "Well, this had been an issue that one of the Vatican congregations had just finished resolving, had written a paper on, and they needed the Pope to issue this theological finding and get it on the record, basically." They were looking for a place to do it, and this is where they stuck it on the trip. It was just for the larger 2,000-year-old theological record of Catholic Church. This fairly small question had been decided in this little town of Mozambique, and he didn't give them anything. He did not--there was no impetus to say, you know, "Bless you , things will get better, God's with you, I love you." I mean, even the standard stuff that he offers usually. He was tired, you know? The man had been on the road for 12 days. He'd hit 20 cities. He had already racked up 100,000 miles or whatever, and was tired. So he read his speech, got back on his plane, and went home.
...The Archbishop of Liverpool, a rather gray, austere man who'd been a career cleric...told me at dinner that he was absolutely entranced by the election of Wojtyla. And I said, "Why does he impress you so much?" And he said they had sat together on the proprietary commission for the bishops in the early 1970. And a number of meetings had been in Rome in the winter and the weather was terrible. And...it was rather austere, a meeting of people who didn't really know each other very well from different countries. And the key figure was Wojtyla. And he would tramp into the meetings, always just before they started, and on one occasion, he marched in--he walked all the way from wherever it was in Rome he was staying--and his cassock and his feet and his socks were sopping wet, skirted up his cassock, took his shoes and socks off, squeezed the water from the socks and hung them on the radiator and he said, "Gentlemen, should we get down to business?" And they were just so entranced by a bishop with balls, you know--a man who was rugged and the energy and the lack of self importance. And so people suddenly felt here was somebody who wasn't tired, somebody who had vigor who was absolutely sure of himself. He could take his socks off in public.
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Here is the transcript of two poems by Karol Wojtyla as they were read and discussed in FRONTLINE's interview with poet Lynn Powell. These poems were written by him when he was in his twenties. Read Ms. Powell's interpretive interview about these poems here. Over This, Your White Grave
Over this, your white grave
the flowers of life in white--
so many years without you--
how many have passed out of sight?
Over this your white grave
covered for years, there is a stir
in the air, something uplifting
and, like death, beyond comprehension.
Over this your white grave
oh, mother, can such loving cease?
for all his filial adoration
a prayer:
Give her eternal peace--
[Krakow, spring 1939]
The Quarry
He wasn't alone.
His muscles grew into the flesh of the crowd, energy their pulse,
As long as they held a hammer, as long as his feet felt the ground.
And a stone smashed his temples and cut through his heart's chamber.
They took his body and walked in a silent line
Toil still lingered about him, a sense of wrong.
They wore gray blouses, boots ankle-deep in mud.
In this, they showed the end.
How violently his time halted: the pointers on the low voltage dials jerked, then dropped to zero again.
White stone now within him, eating into his being,taking over enough of him to turn him into stone.
Who will lift up that stone, unfurl his thoughts again under the cracked temples?
So plaster cracks on the wall.
They laid him down, his back on a sheet of gravel.
His wife came, worn out with worry; his son returned from school
Should his anger now flow into the anger of others?
It was maturing in him through his own truth and love
Should he be used by those who came after,deprived of substance, unique and deeply his own?
The stones on the move again; a wagon bruising the flowers.
Again the electric current cuts deep into the walls.
But the man has taken with him the world's inner structure,where the greater the anger, the higher the explosion of love.
 The following poems by Karol Wojtyla were written while he was a parish priest and auxiliary bishop of Krakow. They first appeared in various Polish religious and philosophical journals under the pseudonym "Andrzej Jawien." Many years later they were collected and published in THE PLACE WITHIN - THE POETRY OF POPE JOHN PAUL II translation and notes copyright by Jerzy Peterkiewicz, Random House. Copyright 1979, 1982 by Liberia Editirice Vaticiana, Vatican City. John Beseeches Her
Don't lower the wave of my heart,
it swells to your eyes, mother;
don't alter love, but bring the wave to me
in your translucent hands.
He asked for this.
I am John the fisherman. There isn't much
in me to love.
I feel I am still on that lake shore,
gravel crunching under my feet--
and, suddenly--Him.
You will embrace his mystery in me no more,
yet quietly I spread round your thoughts like myrtle.
And calling you Mother--His wish--
I beseech you: may this word
never grow less for you.
True, it's not easy to measure the meaning
of the words he breathed into us both
so that all earlier love in those words
should be concealed.
I. Material
1Listen: the even knocking of hammers,
so much their own,
I project on to the people
to test the strength of each blow.
Listen now: electric current
cuts through a river of rock.
And a thought grows in me day after day:
the greatness of work is inside man.
Hard and cracked
his hand is differently charged
by the hammer
and thought differently unravels in stone
as human energy splits from the strength of stone
cutting the bloodstream, an artery
in the right place.
Look, how love feeds
on this well-grounded anger
which flows in to people's breath
as a river bent by the wind,
and which is never spoken, but just breaks high vocal cords.
Passers-by scuttle off into doorways,
someone whispers: "Yet here is a great force."
Fear not. Man's daily deeds have a wide span,
a strait riverbed can't imprison them long.
Fear not. For centuries they all stand in Him,
and you look at Him now
through the even knocking of hammers.2Bound are the blocks of stone, the low-voltage wire
cuts deep in their flesh, an invisible whip--
stones know this violence.
When an elusive blast rips their ripe compactness
and tears them from their eternal simplicity,
the stones know this violence.
Yet can the current unbind their full strength?
It is he who carries that strength in his hands:
the worker.3Hands are the heart's landscape. They split sometimes
like ravines into which an undefined force rolls.
The very same hands which man only opens
when his palms have had their fill of toil.
Now he sees: because of him alone others can walk in peace.
Hands are a landscape. When they split, the pain of their sores
surges free as a stream.
But no thought of pain--
no grandeur in pain alone.
For his own grandeur he does not know how to name.4No, not just hands drooping with the hammer's weight,
not the taut torso, muscles shaping their own style,
but thought informing his work,
deep, knotted in wrinkles on his brow,
and over his head, joined in a sharp arc, shoulders and veins vaulted.
So for a moment he is a Gothic building
cut by a vertical thought born in the eyes.
No, not a profile alone,
not a mere figure between God and the stone,
sentenced to grandeur and error.
Actor
So many grew round me, through me,
from my self, as it were.
I became a channel, unleashing a force
called man.
Did not the others crowding in, distort
the man that I am?
Being each of them, always imperfect,
myself to myself too near,
he who survives in me, can he ever
look at himself without fear?
Girl Disappointed in Love
With mercury we measure pain
as we measure the heat of bodies and air;
but this is not how to discover our limits--
you think you are the center of things.
If you could only grasp that you are not:
the center is He,
and He, too, finds no love---
why don't you see?
The human heart--what is it for?
Cosmic temperature. Heart. Mercury
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 | | Here are two selections from this Sony Classical music CD. The words of the Pope, blended with original music, were chosen from archival recordings made of John Paul's prayers and homilies over the 20 years of his papacy. (You'll need RealPlayer G2 to listen to these audio clips). |
  (Clip courtesy of Sony Classical)
Pater noster qui es in coelis,
Our Father in heaven,sanctifcetur nomen tuum.
hallowed be your name.Adveniat regnum tuum,
Your kingdom come,fiat voluntas tua,
your will be done,sicut in coelo et in terra.
on earth as it is in heaven.Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie,
Give us this day our daily bread,et dimitte nobis debita nostra,
and forgive us our debts,sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostri,
as we also have forgiven our debtors,et ne nos inducas in tentationem,
and do not bring us to the time of trial,sed libera nos a malo.
but rescue us from the evil one.
(Matthew 6,9-13) St. Peter's. Rome, March 22,1995
 (Clip courtesy of Sony Classical)
Beati gli afflitti, perche saranno consolati.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.Beati i miti, perche erediteranno la terra.
Blessed are the meek for they will inherit the earth.Beati quelli che hanno fame e sete di giustizia, perche saranno saziati.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.Beati i misericordiosi, perche troveranno misericordia.
Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.Beati i puri di cuore, perche vedranno Dio.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
(Matthew 5: 3-12) St. Lorenzo al Verano. Rome, November 1, 1981
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 FRONTLINE's "Pope John Paul II-The Millennial Pope," a bold, innovative new biography on this controversial world leader, is a journey through the 20th century to the sources of John Paul II's character and beliefs, and the passionate reaction to him. It is a journey that says as much about us as it does about him. Drawing on interviews with those who have studied and analyzed John Paul II or, whose lives have intersected with his, it offers insights into the major themes in his life: the shaping influence of Polish culture and history, his relationship with Jews, his part in the fall of Communism, his opposition to liberation theology, his repudiation of the ordination of women, his battle to convince the world, especially the West, that it must save itself from sinking into a "culture of death." And, finally, John Paul II's fierce insistence on faith. The program weaves a biographical narrative through several thematic chapters. The first chapter, "Landscape," draws a portrait of the powerful emotional and spiritual landscape of Poland that formed Karol Wojtyla--from his love of the Polish countryside, poetry and theater, to his devotion to his family, his god and the Virgin Mary; from his stoic reaction to tragedy--both his own and his nation's--to the great solace he found in solitude. The chapter "Jews" looks at Karol Wojtyla's remarkable relationship with Jews. He was a nineteen-year-old university student when the Nazis invaded Poland and he saw his friends and teachers killed as Poland became the epicenter of the Holocaust. Exploring the anti-Semitic rhetoric that surrounded young Karol--and was even preached from the pulpit of Poland's Catholic Church--this report examines his boyhood friendships with Jews, his behavior during the war under Nazi occupation, his actions to help Jews after the war, and finally, his dramatic steps as Pope to heal the ancient enmity between Christians and Jews. The program also shows how John Paul II's journey of atonement with the Jews was not without missteps, and looks at events involving Kurt Waldheim and the canonization of the Jewish convert to Catholicism, Edith Stein, who was murdered at Auschwitz. The "Solidarity" segment of this film shows how Karol Wojtyla's life was entwined with another of the 20th century's darkest events--the Communist domination of Eastern Europe. This chapter lays out the evolution of the intensely apolitical Karol Wojtyla into the Pope who would play a central part in the non-violent revolution that ended Communism. It examines Wojtyla's rise within the Church hierarchy, the development of his political gifts, and how his first visit back to his homeland as Pope inspired the Polish nation. Although it would take ten years, John Paul II used the enormous moral and financial authority of the Vatican to challenge the Communist system; the revolution that began in Poland with the anti-Communist Solidarity movement led to Communism's end in Eastern Europe and the dissolution of the Soviet empire. But while the Pope helped bring about the end of dictatorship in Eastern Europe, he undermined efforts to battle another kind of dictatorship in Latin America. In the "Liberation Theology" chapter, FRONTLINE explores why John Paul II set in motion a deliberate strategy to crush liberation theology, closing many institutions which had fostered it-seminaries, schools, some churches. "This Pope was needed on the side of the revolution there so it could be non-violent," says James Carroll, a former priest. "And it's a tragedy that this Pope didn't recognize it as such. And I can only understand his failure to do so because he applied it too narrowly to the lens of his own fight against Communism." The "Women" segment of this program explores the connections and contradictions between John Paul II's devotion to the ultimate embodiment of womanhood--the Virgin Mary--and his conflict with women over the issues of birth control and the ordination of women as priests. Chronicling his veneration of Mary--a devotion which goes back as far as his mother's death when he was eight years old--FRONTLINE probes why his deeply-held vision of Mary's purity is central to his views on women. "In each woman he really does see some small part of the Virgin Mary...traduced if a woman does things she shouldn't do," says historian Tony Judt. "This is not an invented or ideological or political or institutional anger. This is some...deeply felt belief." "The Culture of Death" chapter explores Pope John Paul II's dark vision of our modern age and his relentless campaign to convince the world to save itself from sinking into a "culture of death." Examining his 1995 encyclical, The Gospel of Life in which he challenges modern man's quest to maximize individual freedoms, this chapter shows how the issues of abortion, contraception and capital punishment are connected in the Pope's vision of a "culture of death." The final thematic segment of this report is "Faith" and it is journey to the heart of what ultimately defines this pope--his religious faith. Through stories and interviews, it examines John Paul II's intense spiritual life and presents the surprising revelations of spiritual yearning from believers and non-believers, including the writers Germaine Greer and Robert Stone. FRONTLINE's "John Paul II-The Millennial Pope" ends with a brief coda which questions just what will be this Pope's legacy for the Catholic Church and the world at large. Among the journalists and Catholics interviewed in this section is Washington Post reporter Roberto Suro, who concludes--"At the end of the day, when you look at this extraordinary life and you see all that he has accomplished, you're left with one very disturbing question. On the one hand, the Pope can seem this lonely, pessimistic figure...a man obsessed with the evils of the twentieth century, a man convinced that humankind has lost its way...it's so dark and so despairing that he loses his audiences. That would make him a tragic figure. On the other hand, you have to ask: Is he a prophet? Did he come here with a message? Did he see something that many of us are missing? In that case, the tragedy is ours."
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