Pope John Paul II

John Paul II, born Karol Wojtyła, was pope from 1978 until his death in 2005, the first pope from Poland and the first non-Italian to hold the office since the sixteenth century. His reign of nearly twenty-seven years, one of the longest in the history of the papacy, made him one of the most widely travelled and recognisable figures of the late twentieth century. He played an important part in the collapse of communism in central and eastern Europe, reached out to Jews and members of other faiths, and firmly upheld traditional Catholic teaching, while his record on the clergy abuse crisis has come under increasing criticism since his death.

Karol Józef Wojtyła was born on 18 May 1920 in Wadowice, a small town in southern Poland about fifty kilometres from Kraków. His father was a retired army officer. His mother died when he was nine, his elder brother, a doctor, three years later, and his father in 1941, leaving him without close family by the age of twenty. He grew up in a town with a large Jewish community and kept Jewish friends from his school years throughout his life.

In 1938 he moved with his father to Kraków to study Polish literature and drama at the Jagiellonian University. When Germany invaded in 1939, the occupiers closed the university, and to avoid deportation for forced labour Wojtyła worked in a stone quarry and then in a chemical factory. He acted in an underground theatre company, and in 1942 began training for the priesthood in a clandestine seminary run by the archbishop of Kraków, Adam Stefan Sapieha. Taking part in such activity under Nazi Germany's occupation, during which millions of Polish citizens, Jews above all, were murdered, was dangerous, and he spent the last months of the war hidden in the archbishop's residence.

Wojtyła was ordained on 1 November 1946 and sent to Rome, where he completed a doctorate in theology at the Dominican university known as the Angelicum. Back in Poland he worked as a parish priest and university chaplain, and in 1953 he gained a further qualification with a study of the German philosopher Max Scheler. He taught ethics at the Catholic University of Lublin, the only Catholic university in the communist bloc, and wrote poetry, plays and works of moral philosophy, including Love and Responsibility, on sexual ethics, and The Acting Person.

He became auxiliary bishop of Kraków in 1958 at the age of thirty-eight, and archbishop in 1964. He took an active part in the Second Vatican Council of 1962 to 1965, contributing to its documents on religious freedom and on the Church in the modern world. Pope Paul VI made him a cardinal in 1967. As archbishop he dealt skilfully with the communist authorities, pressing for the right to build churches in new industrial towns.

After the death of Paul VI and the sudden death of John Paul I only thirty-three days into his reign, the cardinals elected Wojtyła on 16 October 1978. He was fifty-eight and took the name of his predecessor. His election as a Slav from a country under Soviet domination was a surprise and drew attention across the world.

In June 1979 he returned to Poland on a nine-day pilgrimage, celebrating open-air Masses before crowds totalling millions. In Warsaw he prayed for the Holy Spirit to renew the face of the land, a message many Poles heard as political. A year later the independent trade union Solidarity emerged from strikes in the shipyards of Gdańsk, and the pope gave it his moral support during the years of martial law that followed. Historians debate how much weight to give him among the causes of the Revolutions of 1989, but most agree he helped give Poles the confidence to resist and that Solidarity's survival owed much to the Church. In December 1989 he received the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev at the Vatican, the first visit there by a leader of the Soviet Communist Party.

On 13 May 1981 he was shot and seriously wounded in St Peter's Square by Mehmet Ali Ağca, a Turkish gunman linked to the far-right Grey Wolves. He survived after emergency surgery and in 1983 visited Ağca in prison and forgave him. Who, if anyone, stood behind the attack has never been established.

John Paul II made 104 journeys outside Italy, visiting some 129 countries, and drew some of the largest crowds in history; he founded World Youth Days, which brought millions of young Catholics together. He canonised 482 saints and beatified more than 1,300 people, more than all his predecessors of the previous several centuries combined, among them figures from countries that had rarely had saints of their own. He issued fourteen encyclicals and in 1992 promulgated a new Catechism of the Catholic Church.

He was a determined promoter of dialogue between religions. In 1986 he became the first pope known to have visited a synagogue since the early Church, the Great Synagogue of Rome, and the same year he invited leaders of world religions to pray for peace at Assisi. He established diplomatic relations between the Holy See and Israel in 1994, and in 2000, after a solemn Day of Pardon asking forgiveness for sins committed by members of the Church over the centuries, he visited Jerusalem and placed a prayer at the Western Wall. In 2001 he became the first pope to enter a mosque, the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus.

In doctrine and discipline John Paul II was conservative. He reaffirmed the Church's opposition to abortion, euthanasia and artificial contraception, declared in 1994 that the Church had no authority to ordain women as priests, and insisted on priestly celibacy. He criticised forms of liberation theology in Latin America that drew on Marxism, and during a visit to Nicaragua in 1983 publicly rebuked a priest serving in the Sandinista government. At the same time he condemned the excesses of unregulated capitalism and consumerism, opposed the death penalty in nearly all cases, and spoke against both the Gulf War of 1991 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

His record on sexual abuse by clergy is the most serious criticism of his papacy. The scale of the problem became public mainly in his final years, and critics argue that he was slow to act and too ready to defend accused priests. He long protected Marcial Maciel, the founder of the Legionaries of Christ, despite accusations against him, and a Vatican report of 2020 found that he had promoted Theodore McCarrick to archbishop of Washington despite warnings about his conduct.

From the early 1990s he suffered from Parkinson's disease, which by his last years left him barely able to speak or walk, and he chose to carry on in public view. He died in the Apostolic Palace in Vatican City on 2 April 2005. His funeral drew millions of pilgrims to Rome and was attended by numerous heads of state, and crowds called for him to be made a saint at once. His successor, Benedict XVI, waived the usual five-year waiting period. He was beatified in 2011 and canonised by Pope Francis on 27 April 2014, together with John XXIII. Catholics remember him as a pastor and witness to faith who stood up to tyranny; critics point to his centralising rule and the failures over abuse. His long reign shaped the Catholic Church, and the bishops he appointed led it, well into the twenty-first century.