Saint John Paul II: The Path to Priesthood

CEBU, Philippines - In September 1939 World War II came to Poland with the invasion of the Third Reich army. Thereupon began six years of horror for the people. Six million of the country’s citizens, out of 35 million, were killed either in combat or methodically assassinated. The Holocaust with all its violence and unimaginable suffering had thus its full sway in that country, and this inevitably had an impact on the character formation of the young man who was to become Pope John Paul II years later.

While mayhem raged, young Karol happened to meet a lay mystic whose influence began to shape his distinctively Carmelite spirituality, one which focuses on the Cross as the center of the Christian life. Biographer George Weigel says, “It was during the Occupation, and in part because of the Occupation, that his vocational discernment began to bend inexorably toward the priesthood.”

Choosing to become a priest was indeed a heroic act for young Wojtyla, as it is for any young man who does so. In subsequent years from 1939 to 1945 his struggle for moral survival was strengthened by the heroic models provided by the Franciscan Maximilian Kolbe (now a saint) who gave up his life to save a young prisoner in the concentration camp of Auschwitz. Another model was provided by Archbishop Adam Stefan Sapieha, who upon meeting young Wojtyla as a high school student years earlier felt sad when told that the latter was going to take up philology instead of theology in college.

That decision to become a priest remained of course only in young Karol’s mind during the Occupation because the Nazi regime had a congenital hatred of any form of religion particularly Christianity. And it was providential that at that time Karol was not yet an ordained minister of God because if he were he would have perhaps become one of victims of the Holocaust. Per record 3,646 Polish priests were imprisoned in concentration camps and out of these 2, 647 were killed.

Even then with the violence and bloodshed taking place he would have succumbed to a life threatening event had he not enjoyed a special protection from God. As it was, he seemed to have been kept from harm all throughout the Occupation. Moreover, the young Wojtyla was one of the few young men who was allowed to work, although as a laborer, in a chemical plant, thus enabling him to earn some money to buy food for himself and his aging father.

His work was actually a back-breaking one because for sometime he was assigned in a quarry to mine limestone for a chemical factory. Digging, shoveling, loading was how he spent time in the mine pit oftentimes doing these in freezing temperature.

Even as he was involved in sheer manual work. Karol never stopped praying. He did this during break periods and on his way home from work he often stopped at a parish church to pray or to attend the Holy Mass. It was at this time that the young man came to be exposed to Marian devotion, which after reading the works of St. Louis de Montefort he was convinced that “true devotion to Mary” was always focused on Christ.

This exposure to Marian piety along with the influence of his prayerful father as well as his experience with the Living Rosary and the teaching of its founder Jan Taramowski, a lay mystic, plus his experience in hard labor in a quarry mine, the heroism he observed of the Salesian fathers and the continuing guidance of Wojtyla’s priest confessor Father Friglewicz—all these influenced the future St. Pope John Paul II to become a priest.

Thus in the autumn of 1942 Karol Wojtyla sought admission and was accepted in the clandestine seminary run by the archbishop of Krakow, and after four difficult years of leading a double life (as a laborer and as a seminarian) to avoid getting arrested by the Gestapo, he was ordained priest on November 1, 1946.