BIOGRAPHY - Pope John Paul II

BIOGRAPHY - Pope John Paul II - Part 1
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The early years: An unhappy childhood Karol Jozef Wojtyla was born in Wadowice, Poland, in 1920.

(CNN) -- Before he became the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope John Paul II was Karol Jozef Wojtyla.

Friends in Wadowice, a town of 8,000 Catholics and 2,000 Jews 35 miles southwest of Krakow, called Wojtyla "Lolek." He was born in 1920, the second son of Karol Wojtyla (pronounced voy-TIH-wah) Sr., a retired army officer and tailor, and Emilia Kaczorowska Wojtyla, a schoolteacher of Lithuanian descent.

The Wojtylas were strict Catholics but did not share the anti-Semitic views of many Poles. One of the young Wojtyla's playmates was Jerzy Kluger, a Jew who remembers youthful soccer games, Catholics versus Jews.

But in the predominantly Catholic town of Wadowice, the Jewish population was small. Kluger said Wojtyla would volunteer to help even the odds on the playing field.

"There usually was not enough Jews, so somebody had to play on the Jewish team and he was always sort of ready, you know," Kluger said in a 2003 interview.

For the time and place, the friendship between the two men was unusual but they formed a lasting bond. Kluger would later play a key role as a go-between for John Paul II and Israeli officials when the Vatican extended long-overdue diplomatic recognition to Israel.

Indeed, Wojtyla 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."

Losing his motherAs a schoolboy, Wojtyla was both an excellent student and an athlete who skied, hiked, kayaked and swam in the Skawa River. But death hovered over the family, making itself felt first when an infant sister died before Wojtyla was born.

Wojtyla lost his mother in 1929 and his father in 1941; neither lived to see him become a priest.

It struck again in 1929 when his mother died of heart and kidney problems, just a month before his ninth birthday. And when he was 12, his 26-year-old brother Edmund, a physician in the town of Bielsko, died of scarlet fever.

"I would say he lost his childhood at 12, when he lost his brother," said Szczepan Mogielnicki, a childhood friend of Wojtyla, in a 2003 CNN interview. "There was no youthful folly in him. Even when he played sports, he was very concentrated, but of course, he had a lot of passion. He was a very noble person, and he expressed things in a very noble way, but there was no folly."

Wojtyla himself had two near misses with mortality in his youth. He was hit once by a streetcar and again by a truck in 1944 while a college student. The injuries left the otherwise robust pope -- 5-foot-10 1/2 inches, 175 pounds in his prime -- with a slight stoop to his shoulders that is particularly noticeable when he is tired.

Even as an adult he has been beset by physical difficulties, including a dislocated shoulder, a fractured femur, hip-replacement surgery, the removal of a precancerous tumor from his colon and an attempt on his life by a gunman whose two bullets wounded the pope in the abdomen, right arm and left hand.

Wojtyla and his father lived in a spartan, one-room apartment behind the church, and the father devoted himself to raising his son. He sewed his son's clothes and had the boy study in a chilly room to toughen him and develop his concentration.

But the father didn't forget about play. A friend remembers entering the Wojtylas' apartment and finding father and son playing soccer with a ball made of rags.

Poetry, religion and theaterWojtyla's passions in those early years were poetry, religion and the theater. After graduating from secondary school in 1938, he and his father moved to Krakow where he enrolled at Jagiellonian University to study literature and philosophy.

Acting was one of Wojtyla's interests.

He founded an underground theater company, writing and acting in plays that frequently dealt with oppression, and participated in poetry readings and literary discussion groups. Friends say he was an intense and gifted actor and a fine singer.

"He was really talented," said Danuta Michalowska in a 2003 CNN interview. "He was wise not only in the usual meaning of the word, but also in the artistic sense. He knew what to do with a word. He knew how to say it."

After the Germans invaded Poland, he escaped deportation and imprisonment in late 1940 by taking a job as a stonecutter in a quarry.

A few months later, in February 1941, Wojtyla's 61-year-old father died, leaving his dream of seeing his son commit to the priesthood unfulfilled. The pope has said that his father once told him, "I will not live long and would like to be certain before I die that you will commit yourself to God's service."

It was another 18 months, however, before Wojtyla began studying at an underground seminary in Krakow and registered for theology courses at the university, even though the Nazis were actively killing priests who opposed them.

"The rest of us, we were like most intellectuals at the time, practicing Catholics, but our Catholicism was rather superficial," Michalowska said. "There was a distinct difference between him and us."

He continued his studies, acted and worked in a chemical plant until August 1944. But when the Germans began rounding up Polish men, Wojtyla took refuge in the archbishop of Krakow's residence and remained there until the end of the war.

He was ordained in 1946 in Krakow and spent much of the next few years studying -- he earned a master's degree and doctorates in theology and philosophy -- before taking up priestly duties as an assistant pastor in Krakow in 1949.

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Wojtyla as a young priest in Krakow, Poland.
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(CNN) -- In the early years of his priesthood, Karol Wojtyla served as a chaplain to university students at St. Florian's Church in Krakow. The church was conveniently located next to Jagiellonian University, where he was working on his second doctorate degree in theology, having already earned a doctorate in philosophy.

When the university's theology department was abolished in 1954, presumably under pressure from the communist government, the entire faculty reconstituted itself at the Seminary of Krakow, and Wojtyla continued his studies there.

He was also hired that same year by the Catholic University of Lublin -- the only Catholic university in the communist world -- as a non-tenured professor. The arrangement turned Wojtyla into a commuter, shuttling between Lublin and Krakow on the overnight train to teach and counsel in one city and study in the other.

He also founded and ran a service that dealt with marital problems, from family planning and illegitimacy to alcoholism and physical abuse. TIME magazine called it "perhaps the most successful marriage institute in Christianity."

In 1956, Wojtyla was appointed to the chair of ethics at Catholic University, and his ascent through the church hierarchy got a boost in 1958 when he was named the auxiliary bishop of Krakow.

When the Vatican Council II began the deliberations in 1962 that would revolutionize the church, Wojtyla was one of its intellectual leaders and took special interest in religious freedom. The same year, he was named the acting archbishop of Krakow when the incumbent died.

A genial and charming companion Wojtyla has been described, by all accounts, as a genial and charming companion, a good listener and not above what TIME calls "good-natured kidding."

Margaret Steinfels, the former editor of Commonweal magazine in New York, described him as "a very brilliant man, very intelligent and very holy... extremely amiable and affable, and wonderful to talk and dine with."

As a cardinal, Wojtyla was considered a moderate reformer.

He also was shrewd enough not to let his distaste for communism show. His appointment as cardinal in 1967 by Pope Paul VI was welcomed by the government. Wojtyla was considered "tough but flexible" and a moderate reformer, but an improvement on old-school hard-liners who were unalterably opposed to communism and communists.

Wojtyla bided his time, engaging in a strategy that honored Catholic beliefs and traditions while accommodating the communist government.

The Catholic Church in Poland served as an important outlet for the expression of national feeling. In his book "John Paul II," George Blazynski wrote that Wojtyla encouraged this expression in a form that did not "provoke a brutal reaction by forces within and perhaps without the country."

But he also proved to be what Current Biography called "a resilient enemy of communism and champion of human rights, a powerful preacher and sophisticated intellectual able to defeat Marxists in their own line of dialogue."

According to George Weigel, who has written extensively about the pope, Wojtyla demanded permits to build churches, defended youth groups and ordained priests to work underground in Czechoslovakia.

Wojtyla was once asked if he feared retribution from government officials.

"I'm not afraid of them," he replied. "They are afraid of me."

Learned and scholarly
It is the task of the Church, of the Holy See, of all pastors, to fight on the side of man, often against man himself.
-- From a 1976 sermon given while still a cardinal and the archbishop of Krakow

In spite of all his activities, Wojtyla didn't slight his scholarly duties.

He wrote a treatise in 1960 called "Love and Responsibility" that laid out the foundation for what Weigel calls "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 1969, the Polish Theological Society published Wojtyla's "The Acting Person," a dense philosophical tract on phenomenology that Wojtyla discussed during a U.S. visit in 1978.

"All sorts of people turned up," recalls Jude Dougherty, chairman of the philosophy department at Catholic University in Washington, where the talk was held. "It was extremely well-received by people who were familiar with the subject. And those who weren't were awed to hear a cardinal who was very learned and very scholarly."

Weigel wrote that in 1976, when Wojtyla was invited to lead spiritual exercises before Pope Paul VI at a Lenten retreat, his first three references were to the Bible, St. Augustine and German philosopher Martin Heidegger.

In 1977, Wojtyla gave a talk at a university in Milan called "The Problem of Creating Culture through Human Praxis."

An emotional man Although he had established himself as a formidable intellectual presence -- as well as an able administrator and fund-raiser -- few suspected that the Sacred College of Cardinals would choose Wojtyla as the next pope after the death of John Paul I in September 1978.

Charismatic and sociable, Wojtyla was recognized as a community leader in Krakow.

But when the cardinals were unable to agree on a candidate after seven rounds of balloting, Wojtyla was chosen on the eighth round late in the afternoon of October 16.

He reportedly formally accepted his election before the cardinals with tears in his eyes. (Associates say the pope was an emotional man, and was often moved to tears by children.)

Wojtyla chose the same name as his predecessor -- whose reign lasted just 34 days before he died of a heart attack -- and added another Roman numeral in becoming the first Slavic 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.

"I was afraid to receive this nomination," he told the crowd from a balcony overlooking St. Peter's Square, "but I did it in the spirit of obedience to Our Lord and in the total confidence in His mother, the most holy Madonna."

Weigel said that when Wojtyla's election was announced, Yuri Andropov, leader of the Soviet Union's KGB intelligence agency, warned the Politburo that there could be trouble ahead. He was right.

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BIOGRAPHY - Pope John Paul II - Part 3
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The papal years: charisma and restoration

Father Thomas Reese: Wojtyla was "a man of integrity and prayer."

(CNN) -- Less than eight months after his inauguration, Wojtyla returned to Poland as Pope John Paul II for nine cathartic days.

Huge, adoring crowds met him wherever he went and were an acute source of embarrassment to the communist government. Officially, the country was atheistic; it was also suffering from food shortages. The pope added to the authorities' discomfort by reminding his fellow Poles of their human rights.

"That was the beginning of the end of what we call the Soviet Empire," Robert Moynihan, editor and publisher of the magazine "Inside the Vatican," told CNN in a 2003 interview. "I think he brought that empire down, but not with missiles and not even with economic sanctions, but just by being a man, by being a man of faith."

In the fall of 1979, the pope flew to Ireland and celebrated a Mass in Dublin's Phoenix Park for 1.2 million people -- more than a quarter of Ireland's population at the time.

He continued on to the United States where his visits to Boston, Massachusetts; New York; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Des Moines, Iowa; Chicago, Illinois; and Washington took on the trappings of major holidays.

The cities threw open their arms in a welcome that Current Biography said was of "staggering, unprecedented magnitude."

"Private citizens, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, flocked by the millions to glimpse the pope," it reported. "It was only a few short years ago that such mass forgetfulness of sectarian difference would have been unthinkable (and, politically, suicidal) in the United States."

Vibrations in the air There was more to it than forgetfulness, for John Paul displayed that charisma during more than 200 visits to more than 125 countries over the past 26 years. And as TIME noted in naming him Man of the Year in 1994, he generated an electricity "unmatched by anyone else on earth."

In his book "The Making of Popes 1978," Andrew M. Greeley offered a close-up of the pope working a crowd: "His moves, his presence, his smile, his friendliness, his gestures ... have pleased everyone. ... He is great with crowds -- shaking hands, smiling, talking, kissing babies."

The Los Angeles Times reported that Poles waited for hours to see the pope when he returned in 1997. At his appearance, the crowds grew silent, "some falling to their knees and weeping as John Paul (parted) the crowd on a path to the altar."

"Such an incredible moment," Krzysztof Gonet, mayor of Nowej Soli, told the Times. "You can feel the vibrations in the air."

Not only was he the most traveled pope in history -- he spoke eight languages, learning Spanish after he became pope -- he also was quick to use the media and technology to his advantage.

In the early years of his papacy, he steered the Vatican into satellite transmissions and videocassettes. While other popes stayed close to Rome, remote and seemingly unapproachable, John Paul's wide-ranging appearances -- enhanced by an actor's sense of theater -- became worldwide news events.

When the pope visited Cuba in January 1998, hard-line Cuban leader Fidel Castro set aside his drab olive fatigues and put on a business suit to welcome him. Castro also attended a number of functions for the pope and escorted the frail Holy Father with almost touching deference.

A man with charisma, crowds gathered wherever Pope John Paul II went.

The world is his business
Not content with tending merely to church affairs, John Paul made the world's business his business -- especially in regard to human rights.

"His engagement as pontiff was not only to spread out the gospel, to spread out the faith, but also to transform the Roman papacy into the spokesman of human rights," Marco Politi, autho