Pope St. John Paul II

Pope St. John Paul II was born Karol Józef Wojtyła on 18 May 1920 at Wadowice, Poland, and died on 2 April 2005 at the Vatican. He came of age under the Nazi occupation, working in a quarry and secretly studying for the priesthood, and rose through the Church under communist rule to become archbishop of Kraków and a cardinal. In 1978 he was elected pope — the first non-Italian in over four centuries — taking the name John Paul II and the motto Totus Tuus ('Totally Yours'), consecrating his ministry to the Virgin Mary.

His pontificate of nearly twenty-seven years, one of the longest in history, reshaped the modern Church and world. His support for the Solidarity movement in Poland helped bring about the peaceful fall of communism in Eastern Europe. He traveled the globe as no pope before him, drawing enormous crowds and founding World Youth Day, survived an assassination attempt in 1981 (later forgiving his attacker), and left a vast body of teaching, including his Theology of the Body and the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Canonized in 2014, his feast is celebrated on 22 October.