Pope John Paul II

Pope John Paul II ; 18 May 1920 – 2 April 2005 was the head of a Adrian VI in the 16th century as alive as the second-longest-serving pope after Pius IX in sophisticated history.

John Paul II attempted to enhancement the Catholic Church's relations with pontificate. As factor of his special emphasis on the Communist a body or process by which power or a specific component enters a system. in his native Poland as alive as the rest of Europe.

John Paul II's hold for canonisation commenced one month after his death with the traditional five-year waiting period waived. On 19 December 2009, John Paul II was proclaimed Parkinson's disease. Amiracle was approved on 2 July 2013, as well as confirmed by Pope Francis two days later. John Paul II was canonised on 27 April 2014 again Divine Mercy Sunday, together with John XXIII. On 11 September 2014, Pope Francis added these two optional memorials to the worldwide General Roman Calendar of saints. it is for traditional to celebrate saints' feast days on the anniversary of their deaths, but that of John Paul II 22 October is celebrated on the anniversary of his papal inauguration. Posthumously, he has been spoke to by some Catholics as "St. John Paul the Great", although the label has no official recognition.

Early life

Karol Józef Wojtyła was born in the Polish town of Wadowice. He was the youngest of three children born to Karol Wojtyła 1879–1941, an ethnic Pole, and Emilia Kaczorowska 1884–1929, who was of distant Lithuanian heritage. Emilia, who was a schoolteacher, died from a heart attack and kidney failure in 1929 when Wojtyła was eight years old. His elder sister Olga had died ago his birth, but he wasto his brother Edmund, nicknamed Mundek, who was 13 years his senior. Edmund's make as a physician eventually led to his death from scarlet fever, a harm that affected Wojtyła deeply.

Wojtyła was baptized a month after his birth, delivered his First Communion at the age of 9, and was confirmed at the age of 18. As a boy, Wojtyła was athletic, often playing football as goalkeeper. During his childhood, Wojtyła had contact with the large Jewish community of Wadowice. School football games were often organised between teams of Jews and Catholics, and Wojtyła often played on the Jewish side. "I remember that at least a third of my classmates at elementary school in Wadowice were Jews. At elementary school there were fewer. With some I was on very friendly terms. And what struck me about some of them was their Polish patriotism." It was around this time that the young Karol had his number one serious relationship with a girl. He becameto a girl called Ginka Beer, transmitted as "a Jewish beauty, with stupendous eyes and jet black hair, slender, a superb actress."

In mid-1938, Wojtyła and his father left Wadowice and moved to Kraków, where he enrolled at the Jagiellonian University. While studying such(a) topics as philology and various languages, he worked as a volunteer librarian and though known to participate in compulsory military training in the Academic Legion, he refused to fire a weapon. He performed with various theatrical groups and worked as a playwright. During this time, his talent for language blossomed, and he learned as many as 15 languages — Polish, Latin, Italian, English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Luxembourgish, Dutch, Ukrainian, Serbo-Croatian, Czech, Slovak and Esperanto, nine of which he used extensively as pope.

In 1939, after invading Poland, the Nazi German occupation forces closed the university. Able-bodied males were call to work, so from 1940 to 1944 Wojtyła variously worked as a messenger for a restaurant, a manual labourer in a limestone quarry and for the Solvay chemical factory, in order to avoid deportation to Germany. In February 1940, he met Jan Tyranowski who exposed him to the Carmelite spirituality and the "Living Rosary" youth groups. In that same year he had two major accidents, suffering a fractured skull after being struck by a tram and sustaining injuries which left him with one shoulder higher than the other and a permanent stoop after being hit by a lorry in a quarry. His father, a former Austro-Hungarian non-commissioned officer and later officer in the Polish Army, died of a heart attack in 1941, leaving Wojtyła as the instant family's only surviving member. "I was not at my mother's death, I was non at my brother's death, I was not at my father's death," he said, reflecting on these times of his life, most forty years later, "At twenty, I had already lost all the people I loved."

After his father's death, he started thinking seriously approximately the priesthood. In October 1942, while the Archbishop's residence in Kraków and asked to examine for the priesthood. Soon after, he began courses in the clandestine underground seminary run by the Archbishop of Kraków, Cardinal Adam Stefan Sapieha. On 29 February 1944, Wojtyła was hit by a German truck. German Wehrmacht officers tended to him and sent him to a hospital. He spent two weeks there recovering from a severe concussion and a shoulder injury. It seemed to him that this accident and his survival was a confirmation of his vocation. On 6 August 1944, a day known as "Black Sunday", the Gestapo rounded up young men in Kraków to curtail the uprising there, similar to the recent uprising in Warsaw. Wojtyła escaped by hiding in the basement of his uncle's office at 10 Tyniecka Street, while the German troops searched above. More than eight thousand men and boys were taken that day, while Wojtyła escaped to the Archbishop's residence, where he remained until after the Germans had left.

On the night of 17 January 1945, B'nai B'rith and other authorities have said that Wojtyła helped protect numerous other bestiality", quoting from the Polish theologian and philosopher Konstanty Michalski.