Who was St. John Paul II?
Karol Józef Wojtyła was born in Wadowice, Poland, on May 18, 1920. Loss came early. His mother, Emilia, died in 1929, when he was nine; his older brother Edmund, a physician, died in 1932; his father died in 1941. In 1938 he enrolled at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, where, Vatican News says, he studied Polish literature, and in 1939 the occupying Nazi forces closed the university. He worked in a stone quarry and a chemical plant, acted in a clandestine theater and, after his father's death, entered Kraków's underground seminary. He was ordained a priest on November 1, 1946.
Three busy decades followed: a doctorate in Rome, a parish, a university chaplaincy, a professorship in Kraków and Lublin, and young people with whom, he said, he learned to "fall in love with human love." He was made auxiliary bishop of Kraków in 1958, archbishop in 1964 and cardinal in 1967, and took part in all four sessions of the Second Vatican Council. In Nowa Huta, a district built without a church, he celebrated Christmas midnight Mass in an open field.
On October 16, 1978, he was elected pope, the first non-Italian in 455 years. At the Mass that began his ministry on October 22 he said the words that would follow him for the rest of his life: "Do not be afraid. Open wide the doors for Christ." Vatican News recalls that on May 13, 1981, the feast of Our Lady of Fatima, he was shot in St. Peter's Square. He credited his survival to the Mother of God, later placed the bullet in her crown at Fatima, and went to the prison to forgive the man he called the "brother who shot me." He made 104 journeys outside Italy, wrote 14 encyclicals, canonized 482 saints, began World Youth Day and the World Meetings of Families, and on April 30, 2000, canonized Sister Faustina Kowalska and named the Second Sunday of Easter Divine Mercy Sunday for the whole Church.
In the 1990s he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, and he kept his public ministry as his body failed. Vatican News says that as he gradually lost the ability to speak he preached through silence, and that in his final months he gave a mute blessing to the crowds from his window. He died in the Apostolic Palace at 9:37 p.m. on Saturday, April 2, 2005, the vigil of the Divine Mercy Sunday he had instituted. Benedict XVI beatified him on May 1, 2011, and Pope Francis canonized him with St. John XXIII on April 27, 2014.
Why Catholics pray to St. John Paul II for fear, aging and illness
"Do not be afraid" was not a slogan from a strong man. In the homily of 1978 he gave the reason at once: "Christ knows 'what is in man'. He alone knows it." Fear of the future, of political systems, of what people can do to one another, is answered by letting Christ in. In his last years he said the same thing with his body. In Salvifici Doloris, his 1984 letter on the Christian meaning of suffering, he had written that "Christ has also raised human suffering to the level of the Redemption," and that "everyone who stops beside the suffering of another person, whatever form it may take, is a Good Samaritan."
At his funeral Cardinal Ratzinger said that he "increasingly entered into the communion of Christ's sufferings," and recalled his last Easter Sunday, when the pope, "marked by suffering," came once more to the window of the Apostolic Palace and one last time gave his blessing. The cardinal read those years through Christ's words to Peter in John 21:18, about the day when Peter, grown old, would stretch out his hands and another would lead him where he did not wish to go. Pope Francis, canonizing him, said he and John XXIII "were not afraid to look upon the wounds of Jesus."
So a Catholic afraid of the news, of the next year, of a diagnosis, or of growing old asks St. John Paul II for two things he visibly had: the courage not to lock the doors against God, and the patience to let a weak body still be useful. No decree names him patron of anything in the universal Church; the patronages on this page were chosen again and again by the organizers of World Youth Days and of the 2015 World Meeting of Families, and never decreed.
How to pray to St. John Paul II
His memorial is October 22, the anniversary of the Mass that began his pontificate; it has been an Optional Memorial on the General Roman Calendar since the decree of May 29, 2014. A novena can be prayed on the nine days before, October 13 to 21. His tomb is in St. Peter's Basilica. His own words are the best companion to the prayer below: the homily of October 22, 1978, and Salvifici Doloris are both on the Vatican website and are worth reading slowly.
Pray the prayer below, then name the fear: the news you cannot stop reading, the test result, the birthday you are dreading. Pair it with the sacraments: Confession, the Eucharist and, if you are seriously ill or elderly, the Anointing of the Sick, which a priest will bring to you. If the fear is about a diagnosis, prayer accompanies the doctor's plan and never replaces it; if it is a dread that will not lift for weeks, tell a doctor as well as a priest. Fear is not a sin. The way we read his first homily, it never promised that nothing bad would happen. It asked that Christ, who knows what is in us, be let in.