bodyType

customContents

entityId

entityUuid

articlePageQuery

filter

article

articleBaseAdvertisingInfoArticle

articleListArticle

articleSeoArticle

hooksArticleAcknowledgementGateOverlayArticle

hooksTrackPageViewArticle

hooksContentInterestArticle

articleLinkingDataContent

hooksAmpRedirectArticle

articleSchemaContent

liveArticle

advertZone

sentiment

contentLock

topics

types

sections

paywallTypes

createdDate

publishedDate

sponsorType

urlAlias

moreOnThisArticles

commentCount

authorLocations

authors

corrections

displaySlideShow

multimediaEmbed

printHeadline

seriesContainer

articleSpeeches

socialHeadline

headline

images

flag

firstTopic

glossary

flattenTypeIds

image

relatedLinks

relatedNewsletters

__typename

sponsor

pdfFiles

seriesReverseOrder

series

disableOffPlatformContent

published

updatedDate

summary

subHeadline

body

keywords

readingTime

customTimezone

liveContents

Agence France-Presse

Pope John Paul II had a close relationship with a married woman which lasted over 30 years according to hundreds of letters which feature in a documentary being shown by the BBC.
The documentary broadcast Monday does not claim he broke his vow of celibacy with Polish-born philosopher and writer Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, although the tone of some of his letters to her points to intense feelings between them, the BBC said.
The two spent camping and skiing holidays together and went on country walks.
In one letter from September 1976, he calls her a “gift from God”.
“My dear Teresa,” he writes. “You write about being torn apart, but I could find no answer to these words.”
Also in September 1976, he writes: “Already last year I was looking for an answer to these words, ‘I belong to you’, and finally, before leaving Poland, I found a way - a scapular.”
A scapular is a piece of cloth worn as part of the habit of monastic orders and the then Cardinal Karol Wojtyla gave Tymieniecka his.
“The dimension in which I accept and feel you everywhere in all kinds of situations, when you are close, and when you are far away,” he adds.
Edward Stourton, the senior BBC journalist who made the documentary, said more than 350 letters were found at the National Library of Poland, the first dated in 1973 and the last a few months before his death in 2005.
“I would say they were more than friends but less than lovers,” he said.
“One of the fascinating stories that comes out of these letters is of a struggle to contain what was certainly a very intense relationship which mixed emotions and philosophical ideas in proper Christian boundaries.”
But the Vatican said there was “nothing out of the ordinary in the fact that pope John Paul II had close friendships with different people, whether men or women.”
“Nobody will be amazed at this information,” a spokesman said.
The Polish library also rejected the BBC’s interpretation of the correspondence, saying that John Paul II had many friends and that such relationships were not confidential or “exceptional”.
A close associate of John Paul II said it was “possible” that a married woman had fallen in love with him before he became head of the Roman Catholic church.
“Women fall in love with priests all the time, and it’s always a big headache,” said Father Adam Boniecki, editor-in-chief of the progressive Tygodnik Powszechny Catholic weekly.
“If she was in love with [Karol] Wojtyla, she was most likely not alone,” said Boniecki, himself the author of a detailed account of the pontiff’s life.
Tymieniecka “translated Karol Wojtyla’s books into English, making his work known to US academics... but her translations caused tension between the two”, Boniecki said.
The BBC has only seen John Paul II’s letters, not Tymieniecka’s side of the correspondence. She died in 2014.
John Paul II was pope from 1978 to 2005 and was made a saint by the Catholic Church after his death.
In 2014 he was declared a saint by the current Pope Francis.
In a 116-page autobiography released in 1996, entitled The Gift and Mystery, the then-pope dismissed suggestions that romance delayed his commitment to a life in the Roman Catholic Church following an earlier denial by the Vatican that the pope had once had a “fiancee.”
Investigative journalists Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi in 1979 named a young Jewish girl, Ginka Beer, and Halina Krolikiewicz, the daughter of the school vice-chancellor, as two close friends of the youthful Wojtyla.


Pope John Paul II and married woman shared ‘intense’ friendship and 350 letters, says  BBC

epa04181440 People observe a light installation dedicated to 'Pope John Paul II' in front of the Archdiocese of Krakow, Poland, 26 April 2014, on the eve of the historic double canonization of past pontiffs John Paul II and Paul XXIII in Vatican. EPA/JACEK BEDNARCZYK POLAND OUT

A light installation dedicated to Pope John Paul II in front of the Archdiocese of Krakow, in Poland. Photo: EPA

News

World