In the family of a former officer of the Austrian army. Before reaching the age of 20, Karol Wojtyla was left an orphan.
Pope
Like his predecessor, John Paul II tried to simplify his position, depriving her of many of the royal attributes. In particular, speaking about himself, he used the pronoun "I" instead of "we", as is customary among royalty. The pope abandoned the coronation ceremony, holding a simple inauguration instead. He did not wear the papal tiara and always sought to emphasize the role that is indicated in the title of the pope, Servus Servorum Dei (slave of the servants of God).
In the city of John Paul II, for the first time, he met with the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the USSR A.A. Gromyko. This was an unprecedented development given the lack of diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and the Vatican. On December 1, the Pope met with the Soviet leader M.S. Gorbachev, and already on March 15, diplomatic relations were established between the USSR and the Vatican.
On January 25, the Pope's visit to Mexico began. This was the first of the pontiff's 104 foreign trips. In the summer, John Paul II visited his native Poland. His election as the head of the Roman Catholic Church was a spiritual impetus to the struggle of the Poles against the communist regime and to the emergence of the Solidarity movement. Later, the pope visited his homeland seven more times, but never gave himself a reason to accuse himself of inciting the opposition to a coup.
May 13, in the Roman square of St. Peter's assassination attempt on John Paul II was made by a member of the Turkish far-right group "Gray Wolves" Mehmet Ali Agca. Agca wounded John Paul II in the chest and arm and was captured. Dad visited the imprisoned Agca, who was sentenced to life imprisonment. What exactly they talked about is still a mystery, but dad told reporters that he forgave Agca. In the city of Agdzha, he testified that the assassination attempt was organized by the Bulgarian and Soviet special services. Three Bulgarians and three Turks were arrested, allegedly involved in the assassination, but for lack of evidence were released. Later, at the request of the pope, Agca was pardoned by the Italian authorities and transferred to the Turkish justice authorities. In Agca, he said that some Vatican cardinals were involved in the assassination attempt. On March 2, excerpts from the report of the commission of the Italian Parliament, which was investigating the circumstances of the assassination attempt on John Paul II, were published. The head of the commission, Senator Paolo Gutsanti, told reporters about the involvement of the USSR leadership in the elimination of John Paul II. The report is based on information published by Vasily Mitrokhin, former head of the USSR KGB archival department, who fled to the UK in 1992.
ecumenical activity
John Paul II actively made contacts with representatives of other confessions. The English Queen Elizabeth II (she is also the head of the Anglican Church) paid a state visit to the Vatican. It was a historic visit, given that for many centuries the British monarchs and Roman pontiffs were implacable enemies. Elizabeth II was the first of the British monarchs to visit the Vatican on a state visit and even invited the Pope to the UK for a pastoral visit to 4 million British Catholics.
In the city, the Pope met with the Archbishop of Canterbury and held a joint service.
In August, at the invitation of King Hassan II, the Pope spoke in Morocco to an audience of fifty thousand young Muslims. He spoke of the misunderstanding and enmity that existed earlier in relations between Christians and Muslims, and called for the establishment of "peace and unity between people and peoples that make up a single community on Earth."
In April, for the first time in the history of the Catholic Church, the Pope crossed the threshold of the synagogue, where, sitting next to the Chief Rabbi of Rome, he uttered the phrase that became one of his most quoted statements: "You are our beloved brothers and, one might say, our elder brothers."
In October, the first interreligious meeting took place in Assisi, when 47 delegations from various Christian denominations, as well as representatives of 13 other religions, responded to the invitation of the pontiff to discuss the problems of interfaith relations.
On May 6, in Damascus, John Paul II was the first of the pontiffs to visit the mosque.
On May 7, John Paul II visited an Orthodox country, Romania, for the first time. In the city, the pope made an official visit to Greece, for the first time since 1054, when the Western Church broke away from the Eastern.
Repentance for mistakes
John Paul II, among his predecessors, is distinguished only by repentance for the mistakes committed by some Catholics in the course of history. Even during the Second Vatican Council in, and in January, he decided to open the archives of the Inquisition.
On March 12, during the traditional Sunday mass in St. Peter's Basilica, John Paul II publicly repented of the sins of the Catholic Church. He asked for forgiveness and admitted the guilt of the church for eight sins: the persecution of the Jews, the split of the church and religious wars, the crusades and theological dogmas that justify war, contempt for minorities and the poor, the justification of slavery.
John Paul II acknowledged the accusations against the Catholic Church - in particular, in silence during the events of World War II and the Holocaust, when Catholic priests and bishops limited themselves to saving Jews and other people persecuted by the Nazis.
Illness and death
In the mid-1990s, John Paul II's health began to deteriorate. In 1997, he had a tumor removed from his intestines. On April 29, he slipped in the bathroom and broke his hip. Since that time, he began to suffer from Parkinson's disease. Despite his bodily infirmity, he continued to travel abroad.
In February, my father was hospitalized with acute laryngotracheitis and underwent a tracheotomy. But, even after being discharged from the hospital, he was unable to take part in the divine services during Passion Week and was unable to utter a single word during the traditional address to the faithful after the Easter Mass.
Immediately after the death of the pope, Catholics around the world began to call on the Vatican to declare him a saint. Benedict XVI began the process of his beatification, disregarding the rule that at least five years must elapse from the date of a person's death.
With the death of Pope John Paul II (April 2, 2005), the longest pontificate in the history of the past century ended. The late pope was the first Slav at the head of Roman Catholicism, who made pastoral visits to many countries of the world (Russia is a notable exception). He canonized the largest number of saints in the history of the Catholic Church, including priests and believers who were persecuted by totalitarian and authoritarian regimes (among them, in particular, the exarch of Russian Catholics Leonid Fedorov). Hundreds of books were written about the pope during his lifetime, and immediately after the announcement of the death of John Paul II, the Secretary of State of the Vatican, Angelo Sodano, called him “the great pope” - this epithet is usually used in relation to the pontiffs recognized as saints or blessed.However, all these positive aspects of the pontificate of John Paul II are combined with a number of problems in modern Catholicism. The new millennium has presented the church with a difficult choice: either to adapt to new public moods, or to act as the guardian of tradition. This choice can be compared with the era of the Reformation, when one part of Western theologians insisted on going towards Protestantism, and the other, on the contrary, on an “asymmetric” response to their challenge, which involves relying on everything positive and viable that was in the history of the Catholic Church. . As a result, the latter, who became the ideologists of the counter-reformation, won.
So, in order to try to determine the significance of the pontificate of John Paul II, it is necessary, first of all, to follow the social, political, internal and external church events that have taken place in the Vatican over the past quarter of a century.
Today the situation is as follows. The II Vatican Council (1962-1965) launched reforms aimed at modernizing the church: the procedure for worship was simplified, and the mass itself was translated into national languages; the rights of bishops were expanded (and at the same time, the prerogatives of the Vatican were somewhat reduced); dialogue is sanctioned with non-Catholic churches, as well as between believers and non-believers. The Church distanced itself from the apology of capitalism, demonstrating its freedom from any political, social or economic system. A certain continuation of this trend can be considered Catholic criticism of many manifestations of globalization, as well as a negative attitude towards unilateral military actions, for example, the war in Iraq.
However, a lot of problems have not been solved and still continue to be debatable. Many clerics and parishioners are pushing for further reforms, but even among modernizers there is no consensus on how deep they should be.
It is believed that during the pontificate of John Paul II, reformist tendencies in Catholicism did not receive support in the Vatican. But still, some actions of the late pope, such as defiant visits to the synagogue and the Lutheran church, as well as repentance for the sins of Catholicism (03/12/2000), committed over many centuries, including against the Jews, cannot but be called innovative. In a prayer left in the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, John Paul II asked God for forgiveness for the wrongs against the Jewish people and expressed a desire to establish brotherly relations with them. The desire to “reconcile” with the Godless people is very extraordinary for the “head” of the Christian Church and on the part of believers it can be considered in different ways, for example, in St. Peter’s Square, where the text of “public repentance” was read, it was met with stormy applause and applause. But if we discard the husks of recent widespread accusations of anti-Semitism and globalization, “reconciliation with the Jews” cannot be called anything but the apostasy of Catholics.It should be noted that during the long 25-year pontificate, John Paul II tried in every possible way to raise the authority of the Vatican as a state, and at the same time the Catholic Church as an influential structure. For this reason, he established contacts with many state leaders.
For example, on January 24, 1979, Pope John Paul II received Andrei Gromyko at his request. The visit of the Soviet Foreign Minister to the Vatican was an unprecedented event. There were no diplomatic relations between the USSR and the Vatican at that time, the anti-communism of the pope was well known, as was the obvious hostility with which the Soviet authorities treated Catholicism.
In 1980, Queen Elizabeth II paid a state visit to the Vatican. The visit was historic, given that for many centuries British monarchs and Roman pontiffs were implacable enemies. Over time, the parties more or less calmed down, diplomatic relations were even established between the United Kingdom and the Vatican. But the visit of the ruling British monarch, and concurrently the head of the Anglican Church, to the Vatican was out of the question. Elizabeth II became the first British monarch to make a state visit to the Vatican. She also became the first monarch to invite the pope to Britain, however, with the stipulation that the trip should not be considered a visit to the country, but a pastoral visit to four million British Catholics.
In 1982, Pope John Paul II met with Yasser Arafat in Rome. The audience in the papal library was immediately criticized by Israel as a sign that the Catholic Church has nothing against the activities of Palestinian terrorists and as circumstantial evidence of anti-Semitic sentiments prevailing in the church.
In 1996, during a trip to Europe, the leader of the Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro, unexpectedly stopped by the Vatican, where he had a private meeting with John Paul II. For a long time, the church and the communist authorities of Cuba were at enmity. The Vatican has repeatedly accused Havana of violating the rights of believers. The meeting, according to observers, could mean that old opponents have found a compromise. And so it happened. Two years later, John Paul II arrived in Havana on a pastoral visit and met again with Fidel Castro. Already officially and publicly. At a meeting at the Revolutionary Palace in Havana, the pope condemned the economic sanctions against Cuba.
On March 11, 1999, the first meeting of the head of the Roman Catholic Church with the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran Mohammad Khatami took place in Rome. It was at the same time that Iran was trying to get out of international isolation.
In total, the late pontiff met with 426 heads of state, 187 prime ministers and 190 foreign ministers, and received credentials from 642 ambassadors.
During the reign of Pope John Paul II, as noted above, many new saints were glorified, in addition, by the decision of the pontiff, the “rehabilitation” of the medieval scholar Galileo Galilei and the beatification of Pius IX, which was carried out by Cardinal Paul Poupard in an interview with the Russian Catholic newspaper “Light of the Gospel” (No. 38. 22.10.2000), was substantiated as follows: "A person is canonized for Christian virtues, and not for the style of management."
One gets the impression that the Vatican under John Paul II sought to become as close as possible to the world and modernity, while wanting to make minimal compromises. Before John Paul II, not a single Pope of Rome was present at a rock concert (09/27/1997), at the stadium where a football match was held (10/29/2000). Before him, there were no CDs with songs that he himself wrote and sang. The late pontiff thus becomes, as it were, a symbol or rather an "advertisement" of the deliberate openness of the Catholic Church to the world. But such openness, in the end, entails the appearance of a significant number of demands directed to the Vatican by the public and the world, and the Vatican, accepting the rules of the game, is obliged to reckon with these demands. And therefore, with a deeper consideration of the current state of the Holy See, it becomes clear that behind the bright wrapper of universal well-being, in Catholicism there are many internal church problems imposed on the church by neophytes who do not want to give up their usual comfortable lifestyle for the sake of "high matters".
So, for example, liberals raise a number of issues that they would like to make, at least, debatable. Among them, the possible abolition of celibacy plays a significant role. There are no dogmatic prohibitions here, but celibacy corresponds to the centuries-old tradition of Catholic canon law. The discussion about celibacy has received a new impetus due to the recent accusations of European Catholic priests, and especially North American hierarchs, of crimes related to the seduction of minors.
Another problem is divorce. Canon law makes this procedure extremely difficult, which causes discontent among many believers. In many countries with significant Catholic populations, referendums have been held to legalize civil divorce, which has led many Catholics to resort to this method of ending family relationships, ignoring the position of the clergy. In addition, after a civil divorce, they often enter into a second marriage, which is not recognized by the church, which creates considerable difficulties in communicating with confessors (this is one of the reasons for the decrease in parishioner activity).
The next problem is contraception. If the denial of abortion is practically the consensus of Roman Catholicism, then contraceptives are not so simple. Many Catholics from developing countries insist on softening the approach to this issue, arguing that without contraception, a significant part of large families is doomed to live in poverty.
Another "new age theme" is sexual minorities. The Vatican maintains a tradition of a sharply negative attitude towards them, their representatives are forbidden to be allowed to take communion. At the same time, global trends are of the exact opposite nature - some politicians, for whom such information used to mean the end of their careers, no longer hide their sexual orientation. To an even greater extent, this applies to public opinion leaders from the cultural and media elite.
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As for the internal doctrinal state of Catholicism, the policy of John Paul II can be regarded as more conservative than liberal, as evidenced by the events that took place at the beginning of his pontificate, associated with the left-wing radical "liberation theology", which became widespread in Latin America. Then the general of the Jesuit order was replaced, since reformist tendencies were widespread within the order. The writings of individual liberal theologians were criticized, and the most famous of them, Hans Küng, was dismissed from the Catholic University.
Along with criticism of Latin American reformist tendencies, the influence of Opus Dei, a conservative Catholic organization founded in 1928 by the Spanish priest José Maria Escriva de Balaguer, who was canonized by John Paul II, rose sharply. Opus Dei was also accused of having links with Francoism (however, the Opusdeists contributed to the modernization of Spain and its gradual departure from harsh dictatorship and self-isolation), and of too harsh repentant discipline, up to self-flagellation. However, this organization attracted the attention of the Vatican in connection with an attempt to synthesize spiritual and secular life and the “sanctification” of any work associated with this (excluding, of course, criminal activity). This approach attracted to the organization many successful lay people from among the "pillars of society" - businessmen, politicians, intellectuals. This approach is combined with an emphasis on the need for the wide participation of members of the organization in charitable projects.
The "Opusdeist" component of church politics is a sign that the Vatican was intent on operating within a traditionalist paradigm. Increasing the authority of the church should be carried out without radicalism, which, from the point of view of the late pope and his inner circle, could lead to a serious aggravation of intra-church conflicts (the liturgical reform of the Second Vatican Council led to the exit from subordination to the pope of a group of believers headed by two bishops).
The relationship between Roman Catholicism and the Russian Orthodox Church in the second half of the 20th century deserves special attention, the volume of this work does not allow us to note all the stages of their development, but in brief we can say the following.
At the Second Vatican Council, in commemoration of the emerging fraternal relations between the Vatican and the Moscow Patriarchate, the term "Sister Church" was adopted. But quite recently, the current Pope Benedict XVI, back when he was prefect of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, emphasized that the term Sister Church is incorrect, and the question is not only in terminology, but also in the essence of the matter. According to him, "when it comes to the "Church", it means the only, holy, universal, apostolic Catholic Church." Only other Catholic churches can be called her "sisters," the cardinal said, adding that he opposes "primitive ecumenism." “The expression “sister Church” is not applicable to the relationship between Catholics, Orthodox and Protestants. One can only speak of the Catholic Church as such and certain doctrines in the East.”
From the ecclesiastical and political point of view, it should be noted that during the time of the pontificate of John Paul II, attempts were repeatedly made to bring the pope to the canonical territory of the Russian Orthodox Church - Russia and Ukraine. Until now, the question of Vatican support for the aggressive actions of the Uniates in the western regions of Ukraine remains open.
In addition, the behavior of the Albanian Catholics during the NATO aggression in the Balkans is suggestive. When Serbian Orthodox, oppressed by Muslims, did not feel any help from their "fellow Christians", although Orthodox churches were constantly surrounded by NATO tanks parked around them, rows of barbed wire, sandbag checkpoints and heavily armed soldiers who demanded documents from those coming to temple. And 60 thousand Catholics felt, as before, quite freely and even attended the events of local Muslims.
Each major historical personality takes its descendants as a kind of hostage. And in this sense, John Paul II was a great personality, convenient for posterity. In whatever direction the further development of the Catholic Church goes, it will always be possible to say that this is a continuation of the course of the “great pope”.
Will the Catholics go for more liberalization - it will be possible to say that they continued the line of John Paul II on openness to the world. The conservative course of protecting traditional Christian values from the sometimes corrupting winds of time will also find its justification in the late Pope. Will the Vatican try to expand its influence to the east, to Russia - it is John Paul II who can be called the initiator of this policy. But the opposite position on the search for points of contact with the Russian Orthodox Church, in a sense, can also be justified in the name of the pope.
So far, it is only clear that John Paul II left his successors freedom in all but one thing. From now on, they will have to act under the gunpoint of television cameras and in the presence of huge crowds of people. In order not to lose the authority of the Catholic Church, the late pope was forced to introduce into his activities elements, so to speak, of performance, or, as they say now, "elements of the show." And in this sense, in order to make any radical changes in the course of its further development, the current church will have to choose between the always deceptive "love of the crowd" and the conscious adherence to Christ's precepts.The first miracle of John Paul II was recognized. A special medical commission studied the case of a French nun who pleaded for the intercession of the pope after his death and was cured of Parkinson's disease without apparent medical reasons.
The second miracle was officially recognized as the inexplicable healing in May 2011 of a terminally ill woman from Costa Rica. She received serious brain damage, but after prayers to John Paul II she was able to recover.
In several cities of the world John Paul II. The world's tallest statue of the pontiff with a height of 14 meters appeared in the Polish city of Czestochowa in April 2013. Prior to that, the largest monument to him was considered a 12-meter statue in Chile.
A monument to Pope John Paul II by Russian sculptor Zurab Tsereteli was unveiled at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris (France).
In October 2011, a monument was erected to him in the courtyard of the Russian State Library for Foreign Literature. Rudomino in Moscow.
The material was prepared on the basis of information from RIA Novosti and open sources
The life of Karol Wojtyla, whom the world knows under the name of John Paul 2, was filled with both tragic and joyful events. He became the first with Slavic roots. A huge era is associated with his name. In his post, Pope John Paul 2 showed himself as a tireless fighter against the political and social oppression of people. Many of his public speeches supporting human rights and freedoms have turned him into a symbol of the fight against authoritarianism.
Childhood
Karol Jozef Wojtyla, the future great John Paul 2, was born in a small town near Krakow in a military family. His father, a lieutenant in the Polish army, was fluent in German and systematically taught the language to his son. The mother of the future pontiff is a teacher, she, according to some sources, was Ukrainian. It is precisely the fact that the ancestors of John Paul 2 were of Slavic blood, apparently, that explains the fact that the Pope understood and respected everything related to the Russian language and culture. When the boy was eight years old, he lost his mother, and at the age of twelve his elder brother also died. As a child, the boy was fond of the theater. He dreamed of growing up and becoming an artist, and at the age of 14 he even wrote a play called The Spirit King.
Youth
In John Paul II, whose biography any Christian can envy, he graduated from a classical college and received the sacrament of chrismation. As historians testify, Karol studied quite successfully. Having completed his secondary education on the eve of World War II, he continued his studies at the Krakow Jagiellonian University at the Faculty of Polonist Studies.
In four years, he managed to pass philology, literature, Church Slavonic writing and even the basics of the Russian language. As a student, Karol Wojtyla enrolled in a theater group. During the years of the occupation, the professors of this one of the most famous universities in Europe were sent to concentration camps, and classes officially stopped. But the future pontiff continued his studies, attending classes underground. And so that he would not be driven to Germany, and he could support his father, whose pension was cut by the invaders, the young man went to work in a quarry near Krakow, and then moved to a chemical plant.
Education
In 1942, Karol enrolled in the general education courses of the theological seminary, which operated underground in Krakow. In 1944, Archbishop Stefan Sapieha, for security reasons, transferred Wojtyla and several other "illegal" seminarians to the diocesan administration, where they worked in the archbishop's palace until the end of the war. Thirteen languages fluently spoken by John Paul II, biographies of saints, one hundred philosophical and theological and philosophical works, as well as fourteen encyclicals and five books written by him, made him one of the most enlightened pontiffs.
Church ministry
On November 1, 1946, Wojtyla was ordained a priest. Just a couple of days later, he headed to Rome to continue his theological education. In 1948 he completed his doctoral thesis on the writings of the Reformed Carmelites, the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross. After that, Karol returned to his homeland, where he was appointed assistant rector in the parish of the village of Negovich in southern Poland.
In 1953, the future pontiff defended another dissertation on the possibility of substantiating Christian ethics on the basis of Scheler's ethical system. Since October of the same year, he begins to teach moral theology, but soon the Polish communist government closed the faculty. Then Wojtyla was offered to head the Department of Ethics at the Catholic University in Ljubljana.
In 1958, Pope Pius XII appointed him as auxiliary bishop in the Archbishopric of Krakow. In September of the same year, he was ordained. The rite was performed by Lvov Archbishop Bazyak. And after the death of the latter in 1962, Wojtyla was elected capitular vicar.
From 1962 to 1964, the biography of John Paul 2 is closely connected with the Second Vatican Council. He took part in all sessions convened by the then pontiff. In 1967, the future Pope was elevated to cardinal-priests. After the death of Paul VI in 1978, Karol Wojtyla voted in the conclave, as a result of which Pope John Paul I was elected. However, the latter died just thirty-three days later. In October 1978, a new conclave was held. The participants split into two camps. Some defended the archbishop of Genoa, Giuseppe Siri, who was famous for his conservative views, while others defended Giovanni Benelli, who was known as a liberal. Without reaching a common agreement, in the end the conclave chose a compromise candidate, which became Karol Wojtyla. Upon accession to the papacy, he took the name of his predecessor.
Character traits
Pope John Paul 2, whose biography has always been associated with the church, became pope at the age of fifty-eight. Like his predecessor, he sought to simplify the position of pontiff, in particular, deprived her of some of the royal attributes. For example, he began to speak of himself as the Pope, using the pronoun "I", refused to be crowned, instead of which he simply carried out enthronement. He never wore a tiara and considered himself a servant of God.
Eight times John Paul 2 visited his homeland. He played a huge role in the fact that the change of power in Poland in the late 1980s took place without a shot being fired. After his conversation with General Jaruzelski, the latter peacefully handed over the leadership of the country to Walesa, who had already received papal blessing for democratic reforms.
assassination attempt
On May 13, 1981, the life of John Paul II almost ended. It was on this day in the square of St. Peter in the Vatican, he was assassinated. The perpetrator was a member of the Turkish far-right extremists Mehmet Agca. The terrorist seriously wounded the pontiff in the stomach. He was arrested immediately at the scene of the crime. Two years later, dad came to Agca in prison, where he was serving a life sentence. The victim and the perpetrator talked about something for a long time, but John Paul 2 did not want to talk about the topic of their conversation, although he said that he had forgiven him.
Prophecies
Subsequently, he came to the conclusion that the hand of the Mother of God took the bullet away from him. And the reason for this was the famous Fatima predictions of the Virgin Mary, which John recognized. Paul 2 was so interested in the prophecy of the Mother of God, in particular, the last one, that he devoted many years to studying it. In fact, there were three predictions: the first of them related to two world wars, the second in allegorical form concerned the revolution in Russia.
As for the third prophecy of the Virgin Mary, for a long time it was the subject of hypotheses and incredible conjectures, which is not surprising: the Vatican kept it a deep secret for a long time. It was even said by the highest Catholic clergy that it would forever remain a secret. And only Pope John Paul 2 decided to reveal to the people the riddle of the latter. He always had the courage of actions. On the thirteenth of May, on the day of his eighty-third birthday, he declared that he saw no point in the need to keep the secret of the predictions of the Virgin Mary. The Vatican Secretary of State told in general terms what the nun Lucia wrote down, to whom the Virgin Mary appeared in her childhood. The report said that the Virgin Mary predicted the martyrdom that the popes would follow in the twentieth century, even the assassination attempt on John Paul II by the Turkish terrorist Ali Agca.
Pontificate years
In 1982, he met with Yasser Arafat. A year later, John Paul II visited the Lutheran church in Rome. He became the first pope to take such a step. In December 1989, for the first time in the history of the Vatican, the pontiff received a Soviet leader. It was Mikhail Gorbachev.
Hard work, numerous trips around the world undermine the health of the head of the Vatican. In July 1992, the pontiff announced his upcoming hospitalization. John Paul II was diagnosed with a tumor in the intestines, which had to be removed. The operation went well, and soon the pontiff returned to his normal life.
A year later, he ensured that diplomatic relations were established between the Vatican and Israel. In April 1994, the pontiff slipped and fell. It turned out that he had a broken femoral neck. Independent experts claim that it was then that John Paul 2 developed Parkinson's disease.
But even this serious illness does not stop the pontiff in his peacekeeping activities. In 1995, he asks for forgiveness for the evil that Catholics have inflicted on believers of other faiths in the past. A year and a half later, the Cuban leader Castro comes to the pontiff. In 1997, the pope came to Sarajevo, where in his speech he spoke of the tragedy of the civil war in that country as a challenge to Europe. During this visit, there were minefields on the way of his cortege more than once.
In the same year, the pontiff comes to Bologna for a rock concert, where he appears as a listener. A few months later, John Paul 2, whose biography is full of peacekeeping activities, undertakes a pastoral visit to the territory of communist Cuba. In Havana, at a meeting with Castro, he condemns the economic sanctions against this country and gives the leader a list of three hundred political prisoners. This historic visit culminates in a mass held by the pontiff in the Revolution Square in the Cuban capital, where more than a million people gather. After the departure of the pope, the authorities released more than half of the prisoners.
In the year 2000, the pontiff comes to Israel, where in Jerusalem at the Wailing Wall he prays for a long time. In 2002, John Paul II visited a mosque in Damascus. He becomes the first pope to take such a step.
Peacekeeping activities
Condemning any wars and actively criticizing them, in 1982, during the crisis associated with the pontiff, he visits Great Britain and Argentina, calling on these countries to conclude peace. In 1991, the Pope denounces the conflict in the Persian Gulf. When the war broke out in Iraq in 2003, John Paul II sent a cardinal from the Vatican on a peacekeeping mission to Baghdad. In addition, he blessed another legate to speak with the then US President Bush. During the meeting, his envoy conveyed to the head of the American state the sharp and rather negative attitude of the pontiff towards the invasion of Iraq.
Apostolic visits
John Paul 2 visited about one hundred and thirty countries during his foreign trips. Most of all he came to Poland - eight times. The pontiff made six visits to the USA and France. In Spain and Mexico, he was five times. All his trips had one goal: they were aimed at helping to strengthen the positions of Catholicism around the world, as well as establishing ties with other religions, and primarily with Islam and Judaism. Everywhere the pontiff spoke out against violence, defending the rights of the people and denying dictatorial regimes.
In general, during his tenure at the head of the Vatican, the pope traveled more than a million kilometers. His unfulfilled dream remained a trip to our country. During the years of communism, his visit to the USSR was impossible. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, though the visit became politically possible, the Russian Orthodox Church opposed the arrival of the pontiff.
demise
John Paul 2 died at the age of 85. Thousands of people spent the night from Saturday to Sunday April 2, 2005 in front of the Vatican, carrying in their memory the deeds, words and image of this amazing man. Candles were lit and silence reigned, despite the huge number of mourners.
The funeral
Farewell to John Paul II has become one of the most massive ceremonies in the modern history of mankind. Three hundred thousand people attended the funeral liturgy, four million pilgrims saw the pope off to eternal life. More than a billion believers of all faiths prayed for the repose of the soul of the deceased, and the number of viewers who watched the ceremony on TV is impossible to count. In memory of his countryman in Poland, a commemorative coin "John Paul 2" was issued.
The first miracle of John Paul II was recognized. A special medical commission studied the case of a French nun who pleaded for the intercession of the pope after his death and was cured of Parkinson's disease without apparent medical reasons.
The second miracle was officially recognized as the inexplicable healing in May 2011 of a terminally ill woman from Costa Rica. She received serious brain damage, but after prayers to John Paul II she was able to recover.
In several cities of the world John Paul II. The world's tallest statue of the pontiff with a height of 14 meters appeared in the Polish city of Czestochowa in April 2013. Prior to that, the largest monument to him was considered a 12-meter statue in Chile.
A monument to Pope John Paul II by Russian sculptor Zurab Tsereteli was unveiled at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris (France).
In October 2011, a monument was erected to him in the courtyard of the Russian State Library for Foreign Literature. Rudomino in Moscow.
The material was prepared on the basis of information from RIA Novosti and open sources
