Monsignor Virgil Levi is a journalist known for his tenure as managing editor and assistant editor-in-chief of the L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper. He has served three Popes through the Vatican for twenty years, and for fifteen he was Director of Rome's Diocesan office for Press and Social Communications.
Christine Allison is an author and journalist. She has written numerous nonfiction books, and is also coauthor of Mother Angelica's Answers, Not Promises. She is a regular contributor to Reader's Digest, and lives in Dallas, Texas, with her husband and four daughters.
Browing up in WadowiceIn a Polish village called Wadowice, just down from the cobbled town square, stands an unremarkable two-story apartment house. On the basis of its architecture it would seem an unlikely stop for a tour bus. Yet every year, from all over the world, nearly two hundred thousand visitors make the pilgrimage to 7 Church Street, to view the place where Karol Wojtyla (pronounced Voy-te-wah) spent his childhood.
There is little to see. A kitchen and two rooms. Some primitive looking sporting equipment. The "tour" is an abbreviated, even disap-pointing affair if you are searching for clues about the childhood of the twentieth century's most powerful pope. You make your way down the stairs and hurry out of the musty building for fresh air. Then you look up, and see it: the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Help.
Every day, for the whole of his childhood, little Karol Wojtyla scrambled down the stairs and out the door and ran into . . . the Catholic Church. Next door to his unremarkable house was God's house. God and man had lived this way in Poland for nearly a thousand years. Ninety-nine percent of all Poles are baptized Catholic. Until the 1900s Latin was the language of official business.The Poles are so identified with Catholicism that they view themselves as protectors of the Church, even as its white knight.
But in recent centuries Poland could not even protect itself. With its indefensible shoreline and uncommonly flat terrain, Poland was a political sitting duck. Since 1772 the country has been overrun, partitioned, and nearly obliterated by Prussia, Austria, Russia, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union. But even with the Polish nation dismembered, Polish nationhood survived. Foreign occupation became the catalyst for a Polish renaissance, especially in literature, art, and drama. Clinging to the memories of previous generations, Poles told stories about their own warriors and saints. Every schoolchild knew about Queen Jadwiga, who married a Lithuanian and in so doing enlarged the Polish empire, and St. Stanislaw, the bishop who defied a despotic king. Over the years, the names of these heroic Poles became a kind of political shorthand that recalled ancient glories to a-people burdened by modern tyrannies.
While Polish literature and arts blossomed, religion moved center stage. In their Catholicism, Poles found not only sanctuary, but hope. However their country had been divided, the sound of church bells could still cross any border, and the bells rang out, helping Poles to remember who they were.
After World War I, when the Allies defeated Germany and Austro- Hungary, l~oland found its opening and made a worldwide case for its freedom. In 1919, with the signing of the Versailles Treaty, Poland regained its independence.
A year later, into the new, modern Poland, Karol Wojtyla was born.
Number 7 Church Street
Looking back to 7 Church Street, there was little in Karol Wojtyla's childhood to suggest that he might be destined for greatness. His parents, Karol Wojtyla, Sr., and Emilia Kaczorowska, were decent working people, both originally from a southwestern province called Galicja. The Wojtylas were essentially working class; the Kaczorowskis were of a loftier, bourgeois lineage. Though hardly nobility, Emilia's family discouraged her from seeing Karol, and were dead set against her "marrying down." But Emilia prevailed, and married Karol in 1906. He was twenty-six, she was twenty-one.
In the eyes of the world, the Wojtylas were not particularly distinguished. Karol Sr. was a low-level career officer in the military, basically a clerk. And he had the temperament of a clerk: calm and dedicated, if somewhat uncommunicative. His army file acknowledges his ample strengths of character and his fluency in the Polish and German lan-guages, but his skills fell mainly into the category of "fast typist:' Emilia was a former school teacher and had been the beneficiary of a convent education. She later took in sewing to supplement the family's household income. She is recalled as a good-natured woman.
