To understand who John Paul II was as Pope and who will be for the Church and world as Blessed John Paul II, it is necessary first to understand a little (or more than a little) about the life of Karol Jozef Wojtyla.
Karol, the second son and third child of Karol, Sr., and Emilia Wojtyla, was born in Wadowice, Poland on May 18, 1920. His brother Edmund, who would later become a doctor, was born in 1906, and his sister Olga, who died in infancy, was born not too long after Edmund. The youngest of the Wojtyla Family, Karol, who went by the nickname Lolek, was in certain views destined to become the greatest of them, but only God knew it.
Lolek's early childhood and later childhood/teen years, almost viewable as two separate chapters of his life, would lay the foundation for the man, the priest, the bishop, the Pope, the ecclesial leader, and the world leader he would become.
The Wojtyla household was a place filled with recognizable signs of Catholic devotion and rituals the expressed a genuine faith in God, relationship with Jesus Christ, and oneness with Church. It was also a place where Karol's first genuine lessons of tolerance, acceptance, and diversity were learned. As a child, he shared the friendships of Catholic and Jewish alike and with the same ease.
When Karol was nine, his mother died. His mother's death, in retrospect, is the turning of the page to the second chapter in his earthly journey. Following this mother's death, Karol's relationship with his father deepened and his spirituality expanded. In many ways, his relationship with his father Karol can be viewed as a metaphor for his relationship with God the Father, but more consideration of that in another post.
Truly the Wojtyla home in Wadowice, a town some 30 miles from Krakow, was young Lolek's Holy Family at Nazareth. There, like Jesus, "he grew in wisdom, age, and grace.”
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