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John Paul ll was born Karol Jozef Wojtyla on May 18, 1920 in Wadowice, Poland. Wojtyla was extremely athletic in his youth excelling in soccer, skiing and demanding water sports.
After graduating from high school, he enrolled in Cracow’s Jagiellonian University in 1938 and in drama school. When the Germans invaded Poland in 1939, Wojtyla worked by day as a stonecutter and later in a chemical plant. By night he wrote plays, acted on stage and attended seminary classes.
In 1941, Wojtyla and some friends started an underground theater called the Rhapsodic Theater to present works in Polish in defiance of the Nazis.
His closest friends felt sure he would ultimately choose a life in the theatre. Instead in 1946, Karol Jozef became a priest and later, the head of the Roman Catholic Church in 1978 when he was elected pope.
Pope John Paul ll was loved by Catholics and Protestants alike. He was respected by people of all faiths as a man who loved all of God’s people and one who refused to compromise his beliefs.
During the first half of his papacy, he was instrumental in the world-wide fall of Communism; during the second, he worked to reconcile religions, cultures and governments so that they all might live peacefully together. He embraced new technology, encouraging the church to use modern media and even the Internet to advance the cause of Jesus Christ. John Paul ll championed the Sanctity of Life in the midst of the growing culture of death that pervades modern society.
He was “the people’s pope” . . . visible and accessible. He traveled more than any previous pontiff and took the words of Jesus into the halls of power all over the world.
A few years before John Paul ll left this earth to join the King of Kings in Heavenly places, the 264th pope delivered this message:
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