Dedication

For Joan,
Gwyneth, Monica, and Stephen

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Preface

A Brief Note on Pronunciation

Prologue: The Disciple

The drama of Karol Wojtyła’s life ▪ A paradox and a sign of contradiction ▪ The more excellent way ▪ The broadness of a gauge ▪ The subject and the author

1. A Son of Freedom: Poland Semper Fidelis

Karol Wojtyła’s national, cultural, religious, and family roots ▪ His childhood, his elementary and secondary education, the loss of his mother and brother ▪ The influence of his father on his education and piety ▪ His interests in Polish Romantic literature and in drama ▪ His first undergraduate year at Kraków’s Jagiellonian University

2. From the Underground: The Third Reich vs. the Kingdom of Truth

The Nazi Occupation of Poland ▪ Karol Wojtyła and clandestine cultural resistance ▪ His introduction to Carmelite spirituality and manual labor ▪ The death of his father and the unfolding of a priestly vocation ▪ The underground seminary ▪ An “unbroken prince,” Archbishop Adam Stefan Sapieha ▪ Karol Wojtyła’s ordination and graduate studies in theology in Rome

3. “Call Me Wujek”: To Be a Priest

Country curate ▪ Father Karol Wojtyła’s pioneering student chaplaincy in Kraków ▪ His first essays and poems ▪ The temptation of revolutionary violence and Wojtyła’s first mature play ▪ An outdoorsman and a model confessor ▪ The beauty of human love

4. Seeing Things as They Are: The Making of a Philosopher

A second doctorate, a new philosophical interest, and a new career ▪ Karol Wojtyła at the Catholic University of Lublin ▪ The Lublin challenge to modern skepticism ▪ A book on love and sexuality that raises a few eyebrows

5. A New Pentecost: Vatican II and the Crisis of Humanism

The youngest bishop in Poland ▪ The Second Vatican Council ▪ Karol Wojtyła is named Archbishop of Kraków ▪ Setting Vatican II’s defense of freedom on a firm philosophical foundation

6. Successor to St. Stanisław: Living the Council in Kraków

A cardinal at age forty-seven ▪ Wojtyła’s quest for religious freedom in Kraków ▪ An extensive local implementation of Vatican II ▪ The mature essayist, poet, and playwright ▪ A distinctive style and a unique set of friends ▪ Testing the world stage

7. A Pope from a Far Country: The Election of John Paul II

The Church at the death of Pope Paul VI ▪ The “September Papacy” of Pope John Paul I ▪ The election of Karol Józef Wojtyła as the first Slavic Pope in history and the first non-Italian in 455 years, to the surprise of many, but not all, concerned

8. “Be Not Afraid!”: A Pope for the World

An earthquake in the papacy and the Vatican ▪ Redefining the public ministry of the Bishop of Rome ▪ An alternative theology of liberation ▪ Program notes for a pontificate ▪ Preventing a war in Latin America ▪ Consternation in the Kremlin

9. “How Many Divisions Has the Pope?”: Confronting an Empire of Lies

The cultural power of the politically powerless ▪ An epic pilgrimage to Poland ▪ Nine days that bent the curve ...