From the Family: The Lessons of John Paul II on Women

Within John Paul's appreciation of the family was his awareness of the beauty and value of women in society and the Church. These lines from his "Letter to Women" offer some very valuable insights into the role that Mother played in the early development of Karol's soul and later John Paul II's view on women, the family, and the Church:

"... Thank you, women who are mothers! You who have sheltered human beings, makes you become God's own smile upon the newborn child, the one who guides your child's first steps, who helps it to grow and who is the anchor as the child makes its way along the journey of life.

Thank you, women who are wives! You irrevocably join your futhre to that of your husbands in a relationship of mutual giving at the service of life and love.

Thank you, women who are daughters and women who are sisters! Into the heart of the family, and then all of society, you bring the richness of your sensitivity, your intuitiveness, your generosity and fidelity ..."

These words, spoken with such clarity, appreciation, and insight clearly come from one who has witnessed these ideas in action, these ideals lived out in his own family context. These words reflect the heart of one who longed to have experienced these gifts for a longer time than he had in actuality.

It is from that place of his own family that John Paul II would go on the blend his own familial experience, short-lived as it were with his mother, to the rich tradition and expansive teachings of the Church, the ecclesial Mother.

To learn more about John Paul's appreciation of women, it is worth understanding more of the impact that women played on the life Karol Wojtyla as family, as caretakers, as friends, as peers, and as spiritual companions.

Blessed John Paul II: A Look at the Child Karol

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.”