God's Call in the Life of John Paul II

The overwhelming response of people throughout the world to the final illness and death of Pope John Paul II gave testimony to the impact this man of faith made on so many, Christians and non-Christians alike. This pope seemed to have a special bond with youth and young adults, as witnessed by the number of young women and men filing through Saint Peter’s Square to view his body.

Catholics, young and old, became so accustomed to having John Paul II as pope that the arduous journey of his own vocation could easily be forgotten. Karol Wojtyla (his given name) had a difficult youth and young adulthood. His mother died when he was only nine-years-old. Three years later his older brother, his only sibling, died of scarlet fever. Karol’s father then died when he was twenty, leaving him quite alone in a world terrorized by the specter of Nazism.

Wojtyla decided to attend the Jagiellonian University in Krakow (Copernicus was an alumnus) to study Polish literature. He always had a keen interest in the arts. But the Nazis closed down the university in 1939 as Poland was partitioned. Wojtyla witnessed firsthand the brutality of the Nazis against the Polish citizenry, particularly against Jews. He participated in the spiritual and cultural resistance movement against this regime.  This resistance movement expressed itself in theater; he and his compatriots performed patriotic plays in secret.

It was during this period of fear and uncertainty that Wojtyla made the decision to study for the priesthood. He became a clandestine theological student at the residence of Archbishop Adam Sapieha. This was a time in which there were hundreds of Polish priests who were missing or dead. In order to escape being placed in a labor camp, he was forced to work in a chemical factory. He first worked in a quarry, breaking up stones for eight hours a day, often in bitter cold. He was then transferred to the water purification part of the factory, where he mixed buckets of lime with water. This was hard physical labor, and it was an experience that made an impact on Wojtyla. This experience is reflected in poetry he later composed and in his writings as a pope, in which he esteems the dignity of the worker.

Wojtyla was ordained to the priesthood in 1946. In June of 2004, less than a year before his death, Pope John Paul II reflected on his experience of call as a young adult. This is what he said:

“I, too, was 20, like you. I enjoyed sports, skiing, acting. I studied and I worked. I had desires and worries. In those years, now so long ago, when my native Land was wounded by war and then by the totalitarian regime, I sought the meaning to give to my life. I found it in following the Lord Jesus.

Dear young woman, dear young man, youth is the period in which you wonder what to do with your life, how to contribute to making the world a little better, how to encourage justice and build peace. Do not tire of training yourselves in the difficult discipline of listening. Listen to the voice of the Lord who is speaking to you through the events of daily life, through the joys and sufferings that go with it, the people who are close to you, the voice of your conscience thirsting for truth, happiness, goodness and beauty.

If you are able to open your hearts and minds with generosity, you will discover ‘your vocation,’ in other words, the plan that God in his love has devised for you from eternity.”

May Karol Wojtyla -- Pope John Paul II -- rest in peace. And may we heed his words by becoming people willing to listen to the voice of God in our own lives.

Fr. Robin Ryan, CP