Born
in Wadowice, Poland, on May 18, 1920, Karol Josef Wojtyla was the son of a
retired army officer and a schoolteacher. He studied literature and philosophy
and later was a playwright and poet.
Wojtyla
secretly studied theology during the Nazi occupation of Poland. By the age of
36, he had two-doctorate degrees and was a professor of ethics. He became a
cardinal at age 47 and led the only moral and social force in Poland that could
counter communism.
In October 1978, Wojtyla became the first Slavic pope ever and the first non-Italian pope in 455 years. He took the name John Paul II.
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Within
months of his election, the pope went home to Poland for a June 1979 papal
visit that some historians say helped end the Cold War. He gave his
blessing to an underground labor movement called Solidarity that would
later emerge to reshape Poland. While
Pope John Paul II was circling St. Peter's Square before his Wednesday
general audience at the Vatican in May 1981, a Turkish gunman named Mehmet
Ali Agca opened fire on the pontiff. The pope spent more than two months
recovering in a Rome hospital. The gunman had also stalked John Paul
during a visit to Turkey in 1979. |
In
December 1983, the pope offered forgiveness to Agca during an arranged meeting
in prison. During the trial, Agca had claimed that East European communist
agents had helped him set up the attack on the pope, but he later recanted.
By
the 1980s, Pope John Paul II had reaffirmed the church's position on
controversial issues such as abortion, birth control and the ordination of
women. He could communicate his message in eight languages, and traveled widely
throughout his papacy.
A recording of the pope reciting the rosary in Latin was set to music and was sold commercially in 1994. In a publishing deal, an Italian journalist who asked 20 questions about the pope's life and philosophy published John Paul's written responses in a book that later became a best-seller.
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The
pope's historic five-day journey to Cuba in January 1998 celebrated
Catholicism and urged Cubans everywhere to find "new paths" of
reconciliation. In keeping with his strong political interests, he met
with Cuban President Fidel Castro and in his closing remarks condemned the
U.S. economic embargo against the communist state.
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