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The Pope-to-be entered the Jagiellonian, the historic university of Cracow, where he majored in philology, but after the Nazi occupation shut down the school he spent World War II working in a stone quarry and a chemical factory. There are persistent rumors that he was engaged or married during this time. The Vatican last week officially denied them, as do friends from those years. However, like many a young man he had an active social life, and at least one steady girlfriend. A devout tailor interested him in the writings of St. John of the Cross, Spain's 16th century Carmelite mystic, and in 1942, the year after his father died, Wojtyla decided to begin studies for the priesthood at an illegal underground seminary.
That was risky enough, but young Wojtyla was also active in the anti-Nazi resistance. Jerzy Zubrzycki, a high school classmate of Wojtyla's who is now a sociology professor at the Australian National University in Canberra, says of those years: "He lived in danger daily of losing his life. He would move about the occupied cities taking Jewish families out of the ghettos, finding them new identities and hiding places. He saved the lives of many families threatened with execution." Meanwhile he helped organize and acted in the underground "Rhapsody Theater," whose anti-Nazi and patriotic dramas boosted Polish morale.
Ordained a priest in 1946, just as the Soviet-backed Communist Party was beginning to smother all opposition, Wojtyla did two years of doctoral work in philosophy at Rome's Pontifical Angelicum University. During this period he spent considerable time ministering to Polish refugees in Belgium, Holland and France. Returning to Poland as a parish priest and student chaplain, he spent two years of further study in ethics at Cracow's Jagiellonian, and later was appointed to a chair in moral theology. In 1954 he began teaching at the Catholic University of Lublin—the only Catholic center of higher education in any Communist country—and soon became head of the ethics department. He became an assistant bishop and in 1962, at a young 42, in effect the Archbishop of Cracow. He first established the international regard and contacts that were to make him Pope during the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). During the council he made eight speeches, the most memorable in favor of religious liberty. Church honors followed: a Cardinal's red hat in 1967, election as one of three Europeans on the council of the world bishops' synod in 1974, an invitation to conduct the Lenten retreat for Pope Paul VI's household in 1976.
Overshadowed internationally by Wyszynski, at home Wojtyla is considered to be an equally resilient enemy of Communism and a more threatening figure to the party as a powerful preacher, an intellectual with a reputation for defeating the Marxists in dialogue, and a churchman enormously popular among younger Poles and laborers. Before his election as Pope, it was widely expected that the regime would exercise its veto power to block him from succeeding Wyszynski as Primate.