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He was 58, "too young" to be electable. More important, he was not an Italian, and not since the time of Martin Luther had a "foreigner" been placed in the Chair of Peter. Yet in an astounding election that capped an astounding year for the Vatican, Karol Cardinal Wojtyla became spiritual leader of the world's 700 million Roman Catholics. His Soviet-bloc homeland of Poland, fervently Catholic for a millennium, was engulfed in a tide of exultation and pride.
John Paul II called his election "an act of courage" by the Cardinals, but his credentials were superb. As pastor, professor of ethics, bishop and Archbishop of Cracow, he displayed spiritual depth, pastoral skill, rare intellectual stature, facility in seven languages and political shrewdness. There was more to recommend him: an outdoorsman's stamina; a felicitous pen that has produced poems and plays as well as philosophical treatises; courage, displayed in his work to save Jewish families from the Holocaust. Wojtyla has experienced life in ways unknown to most of the modern Popes. Because he did not choose his vocation until he was a young adult, he dated girls, acted and directed in the theater and worked as a factory hand.
He will need all his vigor, for the papacy in the last years of Pope Paul VI's 15-year reign was uninspiring and remote. When Paul died on Aug. 6, the Cardinals chose as his successor a man known for his pastoral qualities and popular touch: Albino Cardinal Luciani, Patriarch of Venice, who took the name John Paul I to signal continuity, not only with his immediate predecessor, but also with the beloved John XXIII.
Luciani's death after a 33-day reign brought Wojtyla (pronounced voy-tih-wuh) to the papacy, and in his first utterances he signaled a policy of consolidation. Since the reform-minded Second Vatican Council (1962-65), the church has suffered crisis after crisis. John Paul II's goal appears to be a church that can once again offer a solid faith in a sea of spiritual confusion and uncertainty. Thus he has implicitly ruled out women priests or any change in the celibacy rule, and warned against priests developing "an exaggerated interest in temporal problems." Nor is he expected to tinker with Paul's widely unpopular ruling against all artificial methods of birth control.
Despite these conservative tacks, there is nothing remote, academic or gloomy about John Paul II. His style is a rugged activism, lifting children high over his head, helicoptering to Assisi, pressing the flesh in working-class districts, donning priest's clothing so he can slip away to visit a friend, getting his clerical clothing torn in a mob of adoring nuns, clocking two hours of exercise a day. He hints that he will travel extensively, starting with visits to the Latin American bishops' conference in Mexico in late January, and to his native Poland in May if the regime permits it. The policies of this pontificate are still taking shape, but the man at its center is already making a mark. Said one worldly wise Vatican prelate: "He is a tremendous, dominant figure who fills up the whole screen."
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