Henryk Sienkiewicz
Quo vadis? 1896
Knobbly and powerful feet trod the great stones of the ancient Appian Way. They are those of the apostle Peter, returning to Rome after having met Christ.
It was the Polish painter, Henryk Siemiradzki, who showed his writer friend, Sienkiewicz, the chapel between the Appian Way and the Via Ardeatina where a piece of the ancient road, indented by a footprint, has been bedded. There, according to tradition and legend of the Acts of Peter, Christ met the apostle running away from Rome. There the fisherman from Galilee was persuaded to return to Urbe, where Nero persecuted Christians, imprisoning them and giving them as food to the wild beasts.
With the same tread, with the same feet, Karol Wojtyla came to Rome from Eastern Europe. The youngest of three children of Karol senior and Emilia Kaczorowska, here is the child of Wadowice, born in the month of May 1920. At nine years of age he was strong, handsome. He played in the courtyards and gardens with the children from the Jewish community. He adored his mother, who died because of a heart disease at that same time, followed three years later by Edmund, Karol’s brother who studied medicine. Olga, his sister, had died before he was born.
The future Pope bent over his school desk among his books. He was very clever at school, so much so that his father, through great sacrifices, accompanied him in his studies until University. The images of the student Karol pass from his escape to shelves full of books in the library, which he loved to visit at all hours of the day, to the theatrical stage, where he was an actor in a theatrical group. The young man loved poetry, literature and foreign languages.
Wojtyla’s dreams and tensions were brusquely broken by the Nazi occupation, which closed his university in 1939. Karol looked for work and first found it in a quarry, then in the Solvay chemical factory which produced caustic soda. In this manner, he avoided deportation to Germany. The zoom looking for his identity document found it by inserting labourer, Karol Wojtyla, born in, etc.
In those years, in the young man’s eyes, always lucid, intelligent and lively, there were the lost caresses of his mother; the horrors of persecution inflicted during the war on the Jews, among whom he had many friends, and a tangle of internal feelings which, without killing his innate cheerfulness, called him to God. Karol wanted to become a priest. He took a training course in the most important, but clandestine, seminary in Crakow, directed by the Archbishop, Cardinal Adam Stefan Sapieha. But he didn’t give up the stage, becoming the promoter of the Carbonaro Rhapsodic Theatre. He was ordained priest in 1946 and left for Rome, where he gained a doctorate in theology. His spirituality, intense and full-blooded, is well represented by the images of a powerful body prostrate during the night on the floor of a chapel, in the central nave before the Lord. How many dialogues were there between Karol and God! How many questions, how many doubts and the overcoming of them!
His thesis for his degree was, not surprisingly, the theme of faith in the works of St John of the Cross, the great Spanish mystic of the Noche obscura del alma: En la noche dichosa,/en secreto, que nadie me veia/ni yo miraba cosa,/sin otra luz y guía/sino la que en el corazón ardía. The mystic flame was united in Karol with the necessity to sweat by working, to intervene effectually in reality. Here he is, during the holidays, joining and assisting Polish emigrants in France, in Belgium, in Holland, and accompanying them on their poor outings, their food shared, a poetry book in hand, his country’s songs on his lips.
In 1948 he returned to Poland, first to the parish of Niegowic, near Cracow, then to San Floriano in the city. They are years of working and studying. Karol was the university chaplain until 1951, when he began to study again and deepen his knowledge of philosophy and theology. He took his degree at Lublino University. He also taught: moral and ethical theology in the main seminary in Cracow and in the Theology Faculty in Lublino. I like to imagine him, the future Pontiff, close to the students in those active years between conversations on ethical themes, serious or provoking, and on some place high in the mountains, enjoying the clean air, with ingenuous cravings to rediscover the face of his mother interwoven with dialogue reaching out to the Divinity.
On 4th July 1958, Pius XII nominated Wojtyla titular bishop of Ombi and Auxiliary to Crakow, his own city, in which he became archbishop six years later, nominated by Paul VI, who in 1967 created him Cardinal. Little more than ten years later, the cardinals reunited in Conclave after the death of Pope Luciani and elected Wojtyla bishop of Rome and the Supreme Pontiff. It was the 16th October 1978. The images at this point overlap one another with a rapidity worthy of the name and the apostleship of John Paul II, worthy of that “if I make a mistake, correct me” which stamped itself on the memory of the whole planet. And the new Pope escaped a brutal attempt on his life; met the representatives of all the Churches; visited the Synagogue in Rome; travelled to the furthest parts of this earth, from Cuba to Zaire, from Brazil to Pakistan. And here he is knocking on the door of the Roman parishes; he meets millions of pilgrims, people from governments in all parts of the world, head of States and prime ministers. Here he is giving the go ahead in 1985 to the World Youth Day, as always in love with the young and ready to sing and dance with them.
Twenty seven years of papal reign, the tragic attempt which he escaped, the fourteen encyclical letters, five books (among which I would like to mention the one dearest to me, Roman Triptych, meditation in the form of poetry of 2003), a dove which he gently dissuaded from landing on his skullcap and the little boy who hid beneath his white cape. His life, his teachings, his stoic acceptance of pain and his death are there in the multicoloured cape he wore for the opening of the Holy Door, a vestment which was unjustly criticised, capable of taking on all the different and luminous inspirations of the Pontiff. The final picture? The Gospel on the coffin made of light coloured wood, the pages being ruffled by the April breeze in St Peter’s Square when more than three million pilgrims came to Rome to pay homage to the Pope’s body, ignoring their thirst, their tiredness and the hours of waiting necessary to reach Karol’s side, the “saint immediately”.
Translation by Antoinette Canini
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