Krakow: Where St John Paul II is Everywhere
Few countries in the world are more Catholic than Poland, and nowhere is Poland more Catholic than in the region around Krakow, as Günther Simmermacher found on a recent visit there.
As the woman prepared to give birth on a spring afternoon, she heard the Litany of Loreto being sung in the church facing her window. Moved by the moment, she asked the midwife to open the window. And so it was that on May 18, 1920, baby Karol Wojtyła’s first experience outside the womb was to hear the sound of a prayer to Mary.
The birthplace of the future Pope St John Paul II in the Polish town of Wadowice is now a splendid multi-media museum. The Wojtyła family’s two-room apartment on the first floor has been lovingly recreated. Those who know the story of that birth — it was told in The Southern Cross of May 2023 — can stand at that window and marvel at the proximity of the church to the birthplace of the future pope.
The church of the Presentation of Our Lady overlooks the main square of Wadowice, an otherwise quite ordinary town about 50km southwest from Krakow, the city from where the Wojtyłas had moved.
On the square outside the beautiful church, plaques are implanted into the pavement, marking each of John Paul II’s international travel destinations. From here, the implied message communicates, this local boy went out into all the world.
Karol in Krakow
John Paul II is omnipresent in this very Catholic region in the southwest of Poland. At the centre of his life is the grand city of Krakow, the historic capital of Poland which for a long time was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Austrian influence is still evident in the city.
Karol Wojtyła and his widowed father moved to Krakow in 1938. Karol completed his schooling here, studied at the ancient Jagellonian University, was ordained, became the city’s archbishop and then cardinal, before he was called to Rome in 1978 to serve as the Vicar of Christ.
As archbishop, Wojtyła’s cathedral was in the Wawel Castle compound, the residence of Poland’s kings and Krakow’s historical centre. A medley of architectural styles on a hill, Wawel Castle and its cathedral overlook the city. But the city’s real jewel is the 14th-century St Mary’s basilica, in the enormous main market square known to locals as Rynek Glówny.
Entering the basilica, one’s breath is literally taken away by a torrent of colour, space and artistry. Once visitors have recovered from the ambush of all that beauty, their eyes are drawn to the tremendous 15th-century wooden altarpiece carved by the German sculptor Veit Stoss. It was so precious that the Nazis stole it during World War II. The altarpiece was returned ten years later.
Wherever one goes in Krakow’s Old City, one will happen upon great churches. Down the Ulica Grodzka, a popular and still charming shopping street, is the early 17th-century baroque church of Ss Peter & Paul. This is where the parents of Karol Wojtyła were married in 1906.
About half a kilometre away is the Franciscan basilica of St Francis of Assisi, where the future pope often went to pray. Why there? Because it is located across the street from the archdiocesan chancery, where he had his offices.
From a window on the chancery’s first floor, Wojtyła often delivered catechesis to the waiting people. As pope he returned there whenever he visited Krakow to address the crowds. Popes Benedict XVI and Francis followed suit during their Krakow visits.
Divine Mercy devotion
More than anyone, Pope John Paul II popularised the Divine Mercy devotion, based on the reported apparitions of Christ to Sr Faustina Kowalska in the 1930s. St Faustina’s convent of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy is located in the Łagiewniki suburb of Krakow. Her cell has been faithfully recreated within the peaceful sanctuary, which is dominated by a huge concrete basilica, built to resemble a ship.
Opened in 2002, the basilica can accommodate 5000 people, and holds the Divine Mercy painting and the tomb of St Faustina. Like most modern churches built to hold great numbers of pilgrims, the basilica is more functional than inspiring. St Faustina’s original tomb used to be in the lovely monastery church, and the now empty tomb has been preserved there.
The Black Madonna
There are two important sites of pilgrimage near Krakow. One is Poland’s most important shrine: Jasna Góra monastery, the home of the Black Madonna. Located in the city of Czestochowa, about 100km from Krakow, Jasna Góra has a rich history — and a link to South Africa.
Jasna Góra was founded in 1382 by monks of the order of St Paul the First Hermit, who are also known as the Paulites. The order still lives at the monastery, and in the 1980s some of its monks came to serve in the diocese of Umzimkulu in KwaZulu-Natal (the mission of Centecow is named after Czestochowa). One of the priests who came from Jasna Góra to South Africa was Fr Stanisław Dziuba. He is now the bishop of Umzimkulu.
Thanks to the icon of the Black Madonna of Czestochowa, Jasna Góra is at the centre of Polish Catholicism and, indeed, nationalism. The history of the icon is shrouded in mystery; even science can’t help due to damage that the icon had sustained centuries ago. Legend attributes it to St Luke the Evangelist, who purportedly painted it on a cedar table top which had been owned by the Holy Family.
But that is not really the icon’s greatest significance to Poles. The Black Madonna is credited with miraculously saving Jasna Góra from destruction in a 17th-century Swedish invasion. This event encouraged Polish resistance to the mighty Swedes and eventual victory. In 1656, King Jan Kazimierz of Poland requested the consecration of the country to the Mother of God. Jasna Góra has been a hugely popular site of pilgrimage ever since.
The Black Madonna of Czestochowa is housed in a shrine within the monastery church. Traditionally, pilgrims drop to their knees when they reach the front of the icon, and continue walking on their knees until they exit the shrine.
Jerusalem in Poland
The other great site of pilgrimage is Kalwaria Zebrzydowska. Its story goes back to 1602, when the military governor of Krakow, a devoutly Catholic fellow named Mikołaj Zebrzydowski, had a vision of a blazing cross above a local mountain. He saw that as a sign that he should recreate Jerusalem’s Calvary in southern Poland, so as to bring the Holy Land to the people who could not go there. He built a monastery — its name incorporates the Polish word for Calvary and Mikołaj’s consonant-heavy surname — and a park modelled on a 1584 map of Jerusalem to recreate the sites of Jesus’ Passion.
Karol Wojtyła and his father, Karol Sr, made many pilgrimages to Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, where the future pope’s grandfather and great-grandfather had worked as guides. St John Paul II credited the sanctuary with profoundly feeding his spiritual life and his vocation. As a priest, he would regularly take his students there. As pope, Kalwaria Zebrzydowska was always on his itinerary.
Church cut in salt
St John Paul II is also present in the region’s most popular tourism destination, the Wieliczka Salt Mine. Secular tourists enjoy exploring the mine because it is quite spectacular. More than that, Catholic visitors are touched by the faith of the miners who carved four chapels out of the rock salt, so that priests could come underground and celebrate Mass for them during their breaks.
The biggest of these chapels, 101m underground, is as big as a church. Dedicated to St Kinga, the patroness of miners, it is 12m high, 18m wide and 54m long. At the end of the chapel stands a large statue of St John Paul II, carved from salt. Other carvings, cut into the rock salt walls, depict scenes from Jesus’ life. Even the chandeliers are made with salt crystals.
Where Nazis killed a saint
The salt mine is fun. But there is one sombre site near Krakow that brings many people to tears: the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Auschwitz is usually associated with the Nazi extermination of Jews, though most of that took place in the Birkenau camp, which is a monument to the inhumanity to which humans can degrade themselves. Alas, its warnings against genocide aren’t heeded even in 2024.
Initially, Auschwitz was the concentration camp in which Polish intellectuals and resistance activists were interned, mistreated, enslaved, and often murdered. In an administration building, a gallery of these political prisoners’ photos — captioned with the dates of their birth, arrest and death — gives faces to cold statistics. Touchingly, one of these photos had flowers attached to its frame. Even today, somebody still remembers Zygmunt Modelski — born on April 26, 1886; deported to Auschwitz on August 20, 1941; died there on March 30, 1942.
Among the political prisoners was Fr Maximilian Kolbe, deported with many confreres from the Franciscan monastery of Niepokalanów near Warsaw. One day Kolbe volunteered to take the place of a family man among ten men who were going to be starved to death, as punishment for an attempted escape by other prisoners. The men were stuck into a small cell in the cellar of the Nazis’ house of torture — and one shudders at the perverse, malevolent imagination of the people who devised these brutalisations.
Kolbe gave succour to his fellow condemned men as one after another died of starvation. Only Kolbe would not die. In the end, the Nazis took him to the “hospital” diagonally across the street, and killed him with an injection of carbolic acid. A simple memorial inside the starvation cell recalls Kolbe’s martyrdom.
In 1982, St Maximilian Kolbe was canonised by John Paul II. St Maximilian was killed on August 14, 1941. Half a year earlier, Karol Wojtyła had lost his father, an event that induced him to join the seminary — a decision that ultimately led to the papacy of a man who is present everywhere in Krakow and surrounds.
Published in the May 2024 issue of The Southern Cross
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