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Karol Wojtyla (born 1920), cardinal of Krakow, Poland, was elected the 263rd pope in 1978, the first ever of Slavic extraction.

Karol Wojtyla was born May 18, 1920, in Wadowice, Poland, the second child of Karol Wojtyla, Sr., an army sergeant, and Emilia (Kaczorowska) Wojtyla. His mother died when he was nine. His only sibling, a much older brother Edmund (a physician), died four years later; and Karol Senior died in 1942. These sorrows of early family life, along with the hard times that Poland experienced both prior to World War II and throughout it, were bound to give an intelligent young man cause for sober reflection. In 1939, under the Nazi occupation, he enrolled at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, and shortly thereafter he began secret studies for the priesthood. Publicly, however, he worked as a laborer in a quarry and a chemical factory.

After World War II, upon ordination to the priesthood on November 1, 1946, Wojtyla did pastoral work with Polish refugees in France and then did graduate studies at the Angelicum University in Rome run by the Dominicans. When he returned from these studies to his native Poland, Wojtyla was assigned to parish work and soon became well-known for his successes in youth ministry. He was then assigned to teach ethics at the Catholic University of Lublin, and in 1958 he was consecrated auxiliary bishop of Krakow. In 1962, upon the death of Archbishop Baziak, Wojtyla became the vicar capitular or administrative head, and in 1964 he became archbishop of Krakow. Paul VI made him a cardinal on May 29, 1967, in good part because of the fine impression he had made during the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965).

In Poland Bishop Wojtyla, along with his patron Cardinal Wyszynski of Warsaw, was a rallying point for anti-Communist religious people. The bishop tended to show himself more flexible than the hard-line cardinal, and constantly his patriotism kept him from supporting any movements against the government that would do the people or the land more harm than good. The Communist government came to look upon him as a formidable foe, for he was an attractive public figure: handsome, strong, a good speaker, and a penetrating intellectual. First as bishop and then as archbishop and cardinal, Wojtyla fought for the Church's rights to full religious practice and expression of opinion.

During the Second Vatican Council he had contributed to the Catholic Church's broadened appreciation of religious liberty, and he impressed many of the Church's princes as a strong leader with first-hand experience of what Communist rule could mean. In fact, in 1976 Pope Paul VI invited the then Cardinal Wojtyla to preach the annual Lenten Retreat to the pope himself and members of the Curia that work in Rome as the pope's right arm. (These sermons were published in English under the title Sign of Contradiction in 1979.)

When Pope Paul VI died in August 1978, and then scarcely a month later his successor, Pope John Paul I, died unexpectedly, the stage was set for a more dramatic occurrence. On October 16, 1978, on their eighth ballot, the cardinals assembled in Rome for the papal election chose Karol Wojtyla as the first non-Italian pope in 455 years and the first Slavic pope ever. The new pope, who chose the name John Paul II in honor of his immediate predecessors (John XXIII, Paul VI, and John Paul I), quickly showed himself to be a charismatic figure. From his student years in Rome he retained fluent Italian, and his powerful figure (5'10", 175 lbs.), so greatly contrasting with the frail Paul VI, radiated strength. Speculation was rife about what sort of pontiff he would prove to be, all the more so since his election had caught the "pope-watchers" off-guard. In their bones they had become so used to Italian popes that a non-Italian seemed a practical impossibility.

Pope John Paul II plunged into a whirlwind of activity from which he scarcely rested. In January 1979 he made his first trip abroad to Latin America. He also discouraged priests and nuns - the most visible representatives of the hierarchical church - from direct or full-time political activities. For example, he ordered the American Jesuit priest, Father Robert Drinan, who had been a congressman from Massachusetts for ten years, to resign his office.

The crowds who greeted the pope in Latin America exceeded all expectations, but the atmosphere of his return to his native Poland less than six months later was even more emotional. For nine days in June of 1979 he walked in the midst of Eastern Europeans, symbolizing their Christian roots and a culture that greatly predated the more recent invasions of either Communists or Nazis. The Polish government understandably was uneasy, if not embarrassed, but there was little they could do in the light of the pope's status as a national hero. At the end of September 1979 the pope flew first to Ireland and then to the United States, bringing his message of justice, peace, and the rightness of traditional Catholic morality.

After these early trips Pope John Paul II consolidated his reputation as the most travelled pope of all history. He met with the archbishop of Canterbury, head of the Anglican Church; with German Lutherans who stand in the tradition of the Protestant Reformation; and with Africans and Asians - all on their own soil (which he usually kissed when he deplaned). The personal danger in these trips was brought home to the world on May 13, 1981, when the pope was shot in Rome by a Muslim fanatic reputed to be in the employ of the Bulgarian Communist government. Not long after his return to nearly customary vigor he began planning for future trips, telling his aides that his life belonged to God and the people much more than to himself.