John Paul II
Karol Wojtyla was born on May 18, 1920, into a modest family in the south of Poland.
His father, a retired army officer, brought home a small pension; his mother died when he was a little boy.
Karol attended Polish public schools and excelled at his studies—and also at football, canoeing, and swimming.
At Jagiellonian University in Kraków he took part in dramatics, wrote poetry, and served as an altar boy.
He was assisting the parish priest on September 1, 1939, when the first Nazi planes came. "I served Mass to the sound of bombs and antiaircraft guns," he later recalled.
He decided to become a priest, and when the Nazi occupation forbade seminaries, he studied in an underground school sponsored by the church. To support himself, he worked as a laborer in a limestone quarry and later a factory, reading books on theology beside a boiler.
He was ordained in 1946, the same year that his first volume of poems was published under the pen name Andrzej Jawien.
During the years of Russian occupation, he was sent to Rome and the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas, known as the Anegelicum.
Appointed archbishop of Kraków by Paul VI, he proved himself an astute diplomat in dealing with the Communist government and was named a cardinal in 1967.
Vatican II brought him international attention and eventually wide travels. In the conclave of 1978, his fellow cardinals elected him pope.
Excerpted from the National Geographic Book: Inside the Vatican.
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