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Wojtyla's life falls into three main, and roughly equal, parts: a youth that culminated in his ordination in 1946; his years in Krakow as priest, professor, archbishop, and cardinal; and, since 1978, his pontificate. Weigel devotes about a quarter of Witness to Hope to John Paul II's years in Poland, consistently emphasizing the importance of that background to John Paul II's vision of the Church and the world. Weigel's own knowledge of and palpable sympathy for Poland and Polish culture help to make these sections among the most engaging and informative in the book. Above all, they bring home the staggering significance of the simple fact that this pope is a Pole. It is not just that he came to the papacy as an "outsider," but that he came as a very special kind of outsider.
Weigel's close attention to the life and culture of mid-twentieth-century Poland opens a startling and revealing new perspective on John Paul II's papacy. Born in Wadowice on May 18, 1920, the year that Poland regained its independence, Karol Jozef Wojtyla grew up at the crossroads of history. Poland, lying at the juncture of Eastern and Western Europe, had long endured conquest and partition at the hands of its more powerful neighbors, and the twentieth century contributed the dark new chapters of Nazi and then Communist domination, which shaped his and his contemporaries' adult political experience. Wojtyla nonetheless spent his first 19 years in an independent Poland, and, Weigel believes, the experience taught him that "the Polish experience was a metaphor for the human condition in the twentieth century: the quest for freedom was a universal aspiration."
As he evokes the Poland of Wojtyla's youth, Weigel emphasizes the extent to which culture rather than politics has grounded the Polish sense of national identity and, especially, the importance of Roman Catholicism to Polish culture and to the Polish understanding of freedom. The Catholic piety that nurtured Wojtyla was never a predominantly female affair. The death of his mother, Emilia, when he was nine bequeathed the primary responsibility for his education to his father, Karol, Sr., a retired army captain. Looking back, Pope John Paul II credited his father for his religious formation: "We never spoke about a vocation to the priesthood, but his example was in a way my first seminary, a kind of domestic seminary."1 From his father, Karol also learned an instinct for paternity, which he would subsequently understand theologically: the instinct for paternity and the responsibilities of fatherhood were a kind of icon of God and God's relationship to the world.
A gifted and successful student, the young Wojtyla demonstrated special talent for literature and for the theater, which he loved, and in 1938 he and his father moved to Krakow so that he could pursue his studies at the Jagiellonian University. Only a year later, the Nazi occupation implemented the campaign to "erase" Poland and the independent lives of the Polish people. Not content with political domination, the Nazis undertook the ruthless elimination of all traces of Polish culture, notably Catholicism. The Nazis imprisoned 3,646 Catholic priests in concentration camps where 2,647 of them died.
Weigel credits these and other clerical sacrifices with indelibly marking the Polish nation's view of the Church. Throughout the war, the Church sustained a vital, underground existence that intertwined, in the lives of young people like Wojtyla and his friends, with networks of education and culture. Weigel presents the war years as a watershed in Wojtyla's formation, and he especially emphasizes the influence of friendships during this period. Obliged to work throughout the war, mining limestone in the quarry of the Solvay chemical company, Wojtyla developed a theology of work grounded in the notion of work's sanctification. With other young Catholics, he participated in an underground organization, UNIA, devoted to the reconstruction of Polish civil and political society in conformity with the Catholic social teaching of Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI.
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