Pope John Paul II

In 2001, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, the news was officially acknowledged by Vatican in 2003. He also faced difficulties in speaking and hearing and was also suffering from osteoarthritis.

Since February 1, 2005, he was in and out of hospital. On 2 April, he spoke his final words, "Allow me to depart to the house of the Father" before falling into a coma.

He passed away in his private apartment on 2 Aril 2005, due to a heart failure from profound hypotension and circulatory collapse from septic shock, 46 days prior to his 85th birthday.

Karol Jozef Wojtyla who later came to be known as Pope John Paul II, was the youngest of the three children born to Karol Wojtyla sr. and Emilia Kaczorowska, a school teacher in Wadowice, Poland.

He witnessed great tragedies during his childhood. His mother passed away when he was just nine and three years later his brother also died.

After moving to Krakow with his father in 1938, he was enrolled to the Jagiellonian University. There, he learned philosophy along with other languages and also volunteered as a librarian.

While pursuing education, he worked with various theatrical groups as a playwright. He also developed a special liking for languages and learned 12 foreign languages which he used extensively while serving as a Pope.

In 1939, Nazis invaded Poland and they closed the University and those capable of working were required to find a job. He worked as a messenger for a restaurant as well as a manual labourer in a lime stone quarry and also in a chemical factory.

By the time his father died, he had already resolved to become a priest and in this pursuit, he approached the Bishop’s Palace in Krakow in 1942 to seek permission to study for priesthood. Soon, he started attending Clandestine Underground Seminary run by the Archbishop of Krakow.

During World War II, on August 6, 1944, the day which came to be known as the ‘Black Sunday’, Gestapo, the secret police of Nazi Germany started imprisoning young men to prevent uprisings in Krakow, similar to the one that had broken out recently in Warsaw.

To avoid capture, he hid himself in the basement of his uncle’s house and later escaped to the Archbishop’s Palace.fter the Germans fled the city, the students reclaimed the dilapidated seminary where Wojtyla volunteered to clean the piles of excrement in the toilets.

After completing his studies, he was ordained as a priest on November 1, 1946. As a priest, he was sent to the Pontifical International Athenaeum Angelicum in Rome to study under French Dominican Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange.

He became a licentiate in July 1947 and successfully completed his doctoral thesis titled, ‘The Doctrine of Faith in St. John of the Cross’ on June 14, 1948. He returned to Poland the same year.

Soon he started serving as a priest in Niegowic, a village, fifteen miles from Krakow. The following year, he moved to Saint Florian's parish in Krakow where he worked as a teacher of ethics at the Jagiellonian University and later at the Catholic University of Lublin.

In 1954, he completed his second doctorate in philosophy and started writing for the newspaper, 'Tygodnik Powszechny' or the ‘Universal Weekly’. Apart from writing about contemporary matters related to the church, he also addressed issues like war and life under communism.

He always categorized his literary and religious works and published the former under a pseudonym so that readers recognize them on the basis of their merit and not his name.

During his Kayaking vacation in July, 1958 he came to know about his nomination for the position of Auxiliary Bishop of Krakow. After he agreed to serve as an auxiliary to Archbishop Eugeniusz Baziak, he was consecrated to the Episcopate on September 28, 1958, making him the youngest Bishop in Poland.

In 1960, he authored a theological book, ‘Love and Responsibility' defending the teachings of the church on marriage with a philosophical perspective.