Wanda was Karol’s friend since the beginning of the Fifties as can be seen from correspondence between the two and the thoughts exchanged between them until the death of John Paul II, texts published in Italy under the title Diary of a Friendship. Don Karol, Lolek, spent public holidays and above all vacations with Wanda’s family – her husband Andrzej, philosopher, and four children – sharing with these friends their mutual love of nature, woods and mountains, camping under the stars, the early morning mass under the trees.
Elected Pope, Karol said he felt them near “as people who are very dear to me” and continued to share with them the most important moments of his life, also private ones, and particularly with Wanda: like the first Christmas in Rome in 1978. The letters reveal his influence on Wanda, a psychiatric doctor, for whom the young priest had become a spiritual father, but also her influence as a friend on him.
As a woman and as a mother, but even more so as a doctor, the doctor became a perfect consultant for family and sexuality problems, which Wojtyla considered among the most urgent that the Church of his time had to face. Consultancy with Dr Póltawska was useful, especially during the preparation of the encyclical Humanae vitae, in which Cardinal Wojtyla took part in the commission set up by Paul VI to study the problem of birth control, giving fundamental support. And also in the following period, when Wanda dedicated many free hours explaining the encyclical to laity and priests through articles and conferences, and she was for years at the heart of the Family Institute founded in Crakow by the Archbishop.
But Póltawska’s contribution was not only of support and consultancy, medical and family: Wanda was imprisoned for four years at Ravensbruck for having participated, when she was about fifteen years old, in the Polish resistance. In the concentration camp, she had to undergo scientific experiments which were extremely painful, and which later caused her to need serious operations, and it was this experience which was the basis of her passionate battle in favour of human beings.
Also as a mother and a doctor, Wanda realised how necessary a “theology of the body” was to explain clearly how the passing of life came within God’s plans. And it was to this theology of the body that Wojtyla dedicated an important and innovative cycle of lectures to a general audience shortly after his election by the conclave. Therefore it was the result of deep experience that John Paul II’s attention and respect for women came about and the sympathy with which he looked at the other half of humankind.
Respectful attention and true sympathy which was demonstrated in the apostolic letter Mulieris dignitatem in 1987, in which, for the first time, a Pope had solemnly recognised the important and specific role of women in the history of salvation, and in which he even bowed before what which he described as the “female genius”. In this document, Wojtyla accepted the interpretation of the book of Genesis in the bible made by feminist theologians who claim the simultaneous creation of man and woman (“God created man and woman”). The letter is therefore the point of arrival of a personal experience clothed with important friendships with women, friendships which continued during his pontificate.
John Paul II also increased the number of women declared to be “doctors of the Church”, inserting Teresa of Lisieux, and contributing in a decisive manner to the canonisation of Edith Stein, a Jewish philosopher who he had studied and greatly loved and who, having become a Carmelite nun, was killed in an extermination camp. And it was Edith Stein he proclaimed joint patron saint of Europe together with two other saints: Catherine of Siena and Bridget of Sweden. With this decision, the Pope added three women to the three patron saints of the old continent: St Benedict and the two brother saints, Cirillo and Metodio, the “Slav apostles”. Not to mention his devotion before the Madonna to whom he dedicated the motto totus tuus (all yours) in his episcopal and papal emblem.
But Wojtyla was also the first pope to entrust an official representation of the Holy See to a woman: in Beijing in 1995 at the United Nations conference dedicated to women, the delegation of the Holy See was in fact presided over by Mary Ann Glendon, an American jurist. It was a pity though that this authentic innovation and feminist proposal by John Paul II has not received a real following in the organisation of the Church and even more so that it still has not brought about a more significant presence of women in the central government, that is in the directive role in the Roman Curia.
Translation by Antoinette Canini
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