Feast day: October 22

St. John Paul II

Pope · 1920–2005

Patron of World Youth Day, families, young Catholics

Polish actor, quarry worker, philosopher, and pope for 27 years — he survived Nazism, communism, and an assassin's bullets, and helped topple the Iron Curtain.

Karol Wojtyła was born in 1920 in Wadowice, Poland, and came of age under two tyrannies. Losing his mother, brother, and father while still young, he lived through the Nazi occupation working in a quarry and a chemical factory, acting in an underground theater, and studying for the priesthood in a secret seminary at the risk of his life. Ordained after the war, he rose under Poland's communist regime to become the archbishop of Kraków and a cardinal.

In 1978 he was elected pope — the first non-Italian in 455 years and the first ever from Poland — and took the name John Paul II. From his first homily he sounded the note of his whole pontificate: 'Be not afraid! Open wide the doors to Christ.' His support emboldened the Solidarity movement in his homeland and helped set in motion the peaceful collapse of communism across Eastern Europe.

He became the most traveled pope in history, journeying to over a hundred countries, drawing the largest crowds ever assembled, and founding World Youth Day to call the young to Christ. He survived an assassin's bullet in St. Peter's Square in 1981, then went to the prison to forgive the man who shot him. He wrote profoundly on the dignity of the human person, on work, on marriage and the body, and on the mercy of God, and he asked pardon for the historical sins of the Church's members.

In his last years he bore the slow ravages of Parkinson's disease in full public view, teaching the world a final lesson on the meaning of suffering and the worth of a frail human life. He died in 2005 as crowds prayed beneath his window, and was canonized in 2014 — already, to many, 'John Paul the Great.'

He personally visited and forgave the man who shot him, in his prison cell. His opening words as pope became his epitaph: 'Be not afraid.'

“Be not afraid.”
— St. John Paul II

Image: Gregorini Demetrio (CC BY-SA 3.0), via Wikimedia Commons.