Saturday - April 02, 2005
Pope John Paul II (R.I.P.)
The Pope died just a little while ago. Many of you are not Catholic and may know little about him. Many Catholics know little about him, for that matter. So here’s a synopsis of his life.
Born Karol Jozef Wojtyla in 1920, the second son of Karol Wojtyla (voy TIH wah) Sr., a retired army officer and tailor, and Emilia Kaczorowska Wojtyla, a schoolteacher of Lithuanian descent.
As a youth he played soccer, swam in the Skawa River when flooded, and enjoyed skiing, hiking, mountain climbing and kayaking
His family suffered its share of tragedy His infant sister died before he was born and in 1929 his mother died of heart and kidney problems.
When he was 12, his 26-year-old brother Edmund died of scarlet fever.
He, himself, was hit once by a streetcar and again by a truck in 1944 while a college student.
After graduation from secondary school in 1938, he enrolled at Jagiellonian University to study literature and philosophy and he also joined an experimental theater group and participated in poetry readings and literary discussion groups.
After Poland was invaded by Germans he a job as a stone cutter in a quarry to avoid deportation. Shortly afterwards his father died.
He was ordained in 1946 in Krakow and earned two masters degrees and a doctorate before becoming assistant pastor in Krakow in 1949.
In 1956, was appointed to the Chair of Ethics at Catholic University
On July 4, 1958, he was appointed Auxiliary Bishop of Cracow by Pope Pius XII, and was consecrated September 28, 1958, in Wawel Cathedral, Cracow, by Archbishop Baziak.
On January 1964, Pope Paul VI nominated him as Archbishop of Cracow and made him a cardinal June 1967.
He wrote a treatise in 1960 called “Love and Responsibility” that laid out the foundation a modern Catholic sexual ethic.
His second doctoral thesis—“Evaluation of the possibility of Constructing a Christian Ethic based on the System of Max Scheler”—was published that same year.
In 1978, he was selected to become pope.
He was also the first non-Italian pope in 455 years (the last was Adrian VI in 1523) and, at 58, the youngest pope in 132 years.
When he was elected,
Yuri Andropov, leader of the Soviet Union’s KGB intelligence agency, warned the Politburo that there could be trouble ahead. He was right.
He became the first pope
to visit a synagogue and the first to visit the memorial at Auschwitz to victims of the Holocaust. In ending the Catholic-Jewish estrangement, he called Jews “our elder brothers.”
As Pope he wrote 14 encyclicals, 15 apostolic exhortations, 11 apostolic constitutions and 45 apostolic letters. He’s also published five books
He spoke 8 languages and learned Spanish after becoming Pope.
He openly criticized dictators such as
Alfred Stroessner in Paraguay, Augusto Pinochet in Chile and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines encouraged opposition movements that eventually brought down those governments.
His support for the Solidarity movement in Poland—priests concealed messages from John Paul to imprisoned union leaders in their robes—was a key to the downfall of communism in Poland.
He was almost assassinated in 1981, shot twice by a Turk who said he worked for the Bulgarian Secret Service. The Bulgarians generally did work for the KGB however, later, his would-be assassin later recanted.
You can read about a KGB plot to kill the Pope here.
He was constantly warning us about:
the dangers of materialism, selfishness and secularism, and suggested lowering the standard of living and sharing the wealth with the Third World.
He was a fierce critic of abortion and said, “A nation that kills its own children has no future.”
But he also presided over some of the worst scandals in church history: priests engaged in pedophilia.
Regardless, he will almost certainly be remembered as one of the better popes the church had and one who devoted most of his time towards re-animating the church and re-uniting it.
God bless him.
Posted by Ranting Right Wing Howler on 04/02/2005 at 08:10 PM
Filed Under: • Religion •
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