Polish Post issued the stamp series feature KAROL WOJTYŁA as known of Pope Paul Johannes II to commemorate the traces of the Pope on May 18, 2010.
Karol Józef Wojtyła (Anglicised: Charles Joseph Wojtyla) was born in the Polish town of Wadowice and was the youngest of three children of Karol Wojtyła, an ethnic Pole,and Emilia Kaczorowska, who was of Lithuanian ancestry.
As a youth, Wojtyła was an athlete and often played football as a goalkeeper.His formative years were influenced by numerous contacts with the vibrant and prospering Jewish community of Wadowice. In mid-1938, Karol Wojtyła and his father left Wadowice and moved to Kraków, where he enrolled at the Jagiellonian University. While studying such topics as philology and various languages at the University, he worked as a volunteer librarian and was required to participate in compulsory military training in the Academic Legion, but he refused to fire a weapon.
He also performed with various theatrical groups and worked as a playwright.During this time, his talent for language blossomed and he learned as many as 12 foreign languages, nine of which he later used extensively as Pope.
In 1939, Nazi German occupation forces closed the Jagiellonian University after the invasion of Poland. All able-bodied males were required to work, and, from 1940 to 1944, Wojtyła variously worked as a messenger for a restaurant, a manual labourer in a limestone quarry and for the Solvay chemical factory to avoid being deported to Germany.
His father, a non-commissioned officer in the Polish Army, died of a heart attack in 1941, leaving Karol the sole surviving member of his immediate family. “I was not at my mother's death, I was not at my brother's death, I was not at my father's death,” he said, reflecting on these times of his life, nearly forty years later, “At twenty, I had already lost all the people I loved.”
On completion of his studies at the seminary in Kraków, Karol Wojtyła was ordained as a priest on All Saints' Day, 1 November 1946, by the Archbishop of Kraków, Cardinal Sapieha.He was then sent to study theology in Rome, at the Pontifical International Athenaeum Angelicum,where he earned a licentiate and later a doctorate in sacred theology.
He returned to Poland in the summer of 1948 with his first pastoral assignment in the village of Niegowić, fifteen miles from Kraków. Arriving at Niegowić during harvest time, his first action was to kneel down and kiss the ground.
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