The Pope insists that God exists and yearns for human contact and without this, human beings cannot themselves live. He believes man, in fact, cannot be good without God. For this Pope, the totalitarianisms that have dominated the 20th century have prevailed for one reason only--mankind has lost its connection to the transcendent. So the God question, the faith question, is all consuming for him. Will the human race, especially those who have power and influence, be able once again to consider its link to the transcendent? To him the very survival of mankind depends on how that question is faced.

But why does the Pope need to travel the world and display his faith so publicly? Even today, when he can barely walk or speak, he is planning visits to India, China, Israel. Why can't his numerous writings suffice? His friend, Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete, explains it this way: "John Paul II knows that no one reads the encyclicals of a dead Pope. They will die with him. He knows that intellectual arguments don't persuade, that you have to be given these Pentecostal moments of having been touched by grace. That is why he has taken to the streets, to bear witness to the reality of his faith. His motorcade is a stunning show and he is the drama at the center. It can only last a minute, but you'd think people had ten hours of the most intimate mystical experience. For many people it is that one moment when they say 'I saw another possibility in life.' That is why the Pope uses every media toy of our age--CDs, cameras, videos, visits that are beautifully orchestrated. "

However, if we cannot hold the Pope's faith in the palm of our hand, if we cannot bend or shake it, how can we talk about it? What is his testimony? Where does his faith come from? How has it sustained him? How has he sustained it? If John Paul II--the chief articulator of the Catholic faith--has not given us real answers, how can we find them for ourselves? On the surface, John Paul II's faith seems contradictory:

• He is a man of fierce Catholic emotion and sensibility: passionately devoted to the Virgin Mary and the saints, attentive to--and accepting of --the miraculous and the inexplicable. At the same time, he is a professional modern philosopher, defending the capacity of the human intelligence and profoundly respectful of the scientific quest for truth.

• He has lectured at Harvard University, but has also traveled devotedly to the tomb of a southern Italian miracle worker who was able to be in two places at the same time.

• He believes in absolute truth and absolute moral values, and yet he has devoted his entire efforts as a moral philosopher to the modern notions of experience and subjectivity.

• He passionately defends the rights of the individual and just as passionately defends ancient dogmas that seem to restrict that freedom.

It is not enough to say that from the Pope's perspective these are not contradictions. Nor is it enough to recognize that the modern papacy places conflicting demands on the Pope who as preacher and prophet may extol things which as an administrator of a complex bureaucracy, he must curtail, manage, even condemn. What we can do is acknowledge these "contradictions" but also see them as more apparent than real. "Layers" is perhaps a more searching and useful term than "contradictions;" it leads us into the heart of the mystery rather than into a debate about consistency.

Karol Wojtyla's truth--his faith--is profoundly layered, starting at the deepest level with his having to find meaning in a stunning catalogue of personal losses: his mother died, his only brother died, his father died, his nation was occupied and his culture was threatened with extinction, his university was closed and many of his professors were executed, his Jewish friends and families were uprooted and killed in the Holocaust-- all by the time he was 25. The young Wojtyla found strength in what he believed was the will of an unfathomable God.

The total mystery of God led in turn to an experience of what he understood as the "mystery" of man, namely, the link with the Absolute which he identified with the deepest level of personal experience. This link with the Transcendent became for him the defining experience of personhood, present and perceived each time the human person expressed his identity through action. His passion for poetry and drama was born from this conviction, and they became the principal weapon in his opposition to the humanisms that denied this spiritual root of human activity. His philosophy sought insights of the existentialists and phenomenologists with their emphasis on human interiority. Although eventually he was to find their thought inadequate, he saw their mission as opening up traditional Catholic thought to the reality of experience and subjectivity. His rejection of much of modern thought as leading to "the culture of death" was born from what he claimed is the absence of the truly spiritual in modern ways of thinking about human life.

The dramatic nature of Polish Catholicism, and its application of the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, Death and Resurrection to the efforts to defend Polish identity from extinction, led John Paul II to the centrality of the person of Jesus Christ. The horrific potential of mankind that Karol Wojtyla experienced close up made the question 'Who is Man?" all the more urgent. The Christian answer--that it is only the mystery of Christ that reveals the mystery of the human being and the mystery of creation--is the key to Wojtyla's theology. It led him to value the works of Henri de Lubac and other theologians of the back-to-the-source school who insist that the most basic characteristic of Christian thought is the acceptance of "paradox."

It could be said that the efforts to bring together in perfect harmony the human and the divine, the eternal and the timely, the unlimited and the limited, the historical and the unchanging, the physical and the spiritual is the source of the apparent 'contradictions' in John Paul's faith. The powerful and paradoxical image of Christian triumph--the crucified God --sustains him. It allows him to find gain in loss, hope in suffering, purpose amidst chaos.

There is a fiery, mystical core to the young Wojtyla's faith. It is the deepest, darkest layer of the soil which has nourished him throughout his life. All his early heroes are passionate visionaries: the strange, otherworldly Jan Tyranowski; the Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross; the stigmatic faith healer, Padre Pio. Their emotional, poetic view of the world has sustained him throughout his life. This is a man for whom the great religious truths are viscerally experienced. Christ is alive and walks the earth; the Virgin is a real woman; the Devil is a person not an abstraction. Good and evil are powerful autonomous forces battling each other--the powers of darkness and light. As Pope, he has attended exorcisms, and even officiated at one.

Over the years, his readings and discussions, his dissertations and sermons, and, ultimately, his many encyclicals and many pronouncements, have added important layers of thought and feeling to the young Wojtyla's passionate mysticism. His study and reflection only deepened his faith and gave him confidence, as he wrote: "I lived in a world of faith in an intuitive and emotional fashion...(and discovered) that it is a world that can be justified by the most profound as well as the most simple reasons."

As with so many of the great themes of this man's life, the origins of his piety are revealed in his biography--a life whose roots are sunk deeply into the richly layered Polish soil. We must go back to Poland to find the clues and intimations suggesting the origins, the texture and the singular intensity of John Paul II's faith.

Karol Wojtyla was baptized on June 20th in a little church on the square. His family lived in a modest apartment directly across from the church. The bells marking the religious devotions of the day filled the apartment with their noisy pealing. As one of the Pope's biographers, Jonathan Kwitny, observed: "The apartment was so close to the church that a priest with an average nose would have smelled the family dinner--the church virtually cast a physical shadow over Wojtyla's home and undoubtedly cast a spiritual shadow as well."

Karol Wojtyla's parents were intensely religious, unusually so, in a time where religious devotion was normal in Polish families. Upon entering Wojtyla's small apartment, there was a bowl of holy water in the hall blessed by a priest. His mother had created a small altar in the parlor where the family would gather for morning and evening prayer.

The seeming contradictions in John Paul II's faith start here in the discrepancy between his school and the church--between his training in reason and in his exposure to mysticism. Professor Norman Davies, the Polish historian, told us that he'd been thinking about writing a biography of the Pope, among other reasons because of his fascination with "the conflict in Wojtyla's moral horizons...between the Catholicism that was very devotional, ritualistic, very counter-reformation, theatrical, filled with dressing up, pilgrimages...with displays of great religious piety...and its possible conflict with the atmosphere of his school which was a classical Latin curriculum with an emphasis on rational argument and logic .... the dichotomy, the two sides of his being go back to his starting the day as an altar boy in the parish church and then going up the hill on the same day and being the star pupil in the Greek and Latin class."

After his mother died his father immediately took Lolek (as his classmates called him) and his brother to pray at the Kalwaria Zebrzydowska sanctuary. In addition to everything this experience must have meant to him about Mary, it was also a primary source of his deep mysticism. He would have seen (and joined) along with tens of thousands of fellow Poles, the crowds of believers on their hands and knees, praying and chanting as they reenacted Christ's Passion, his betrayal, his crucifixion and his resurrection. These processions lasted for days and were intensely dramatic theatrical spectacles.

The Pope has mentioned Kalwaria in his writings, and in private conversations with friends, as a powerful shaping influence on his spiritual life. In our interview with Adam Bujak, one of Poland's most celebrated photographers (and a friend of the Pope), Bujak described to us the effect of this pilgrimage on him as a young boy of twelve. Bujak watched the procession from a tree and experienced this drama as "shattering--indelibly marking his faith." Years later, he created Misteria, the legendary book of photographs about Kalwaria's Passion Play. In stark black and white images he captures histrionic scenes of worship--crowds lined up by the road to watch the manacled Christ stagger towards his death; men and women spread-eagle on the ground sobbing.

For Bujak, these pilgrimages are an expression of the depth of Poland's religiosity where every road at Easter becomes a sacramental byway for pilgrims. Other Poles see Kalwaria as an expression of the theatricality --and thinness--of Polish faith. One of Poland's great novelists, Andrzej Szcypiorski cautioned us not to confuse intensity and drama with depth--"Poland's religious fervor is external, tied to symbols, to dramas, to rituals--the Pope's mysticism and interiority is striking but not typically Polish." John Paul II's early involvement with these pilgrimages was deep and personal; he plumbed their essence, not their theatricality. In a conversation with Jonathan Kwitny, Halina Bortnowska described Wojtyla's unique spirituality in even blunter terms: "It was very unusual for a Polish clergyman to write his dissertation on St. John of the Cross. We are a theatrical, ritualistic people. He is private, mystical, altogether different."

Looking back years later, John Paul II remembers the profound effect his mother's death had on his father's spiritual life--and on his own:

"The violence of the blows that struck him opened up immense spiritual depths in him; his grief found its outlet in prayer. The mere fact of seeing him on his knees had a decisive effect on my early years...Even now when I awake at night I remember seeing my father kneeling and praying. He was so hard on himself that he had no need to be hard on his son; his example alone was sufficient to inculcate discipline and duty...My father was the person who explained to me the mystery of God...."

Lolek was remembered by his childhood friends as an unusually pious but not priggish young man. Many of them recalled for us the unusually long time that he would pray. He would stop by the church before school and stay longer on his knees than any of his classmates, lost in thought, mouthing his prayers silently. His preferred place of meditation was not the main sanctuary but a tiny chapel off to the side which had a statue of Mary. His complete absorption in prayer would grow over the years--both in duration and in intensity.

Sometimes his entire body would express this intensity of abandonment. When Karol felt he was alone--or in great danger--he would pray face down on the stone floor, arms outstretched in the shape of the cross. His university friend, Wojciech Zukrowski, told us that when the Nazis made a sweep of Krakow rounding up young men for the work camps, they searched Wojtyla's house. Karol had hid in the basement, praying face down on the damp floor, arms outstretched, while he heard the thud of Nazi boots overhead. His chauffeur, Josef Mucha, told us that "one morning I forgot to knock, my hands were filled with his breakfast, and when I entered I found him asleep on the floor, arms straight out, his body a perfect cross, a rug thrown over the lower half of his body. Clearly he had slept this way the entire night."

While his father played an extraordinarily important role in shaping his son's religious life, there were others who influenced his growing vocation. Father Kazimierz Figlewicz, who served as the vicar and religion teacher at the Wadowice church, had a remarkable touch with young students; he was not only able to recognize their gifts but to communicate with them with ease and intimacy. Apparently, he reached the young detached Lolek at a very deep level and soon after he became Wojtyla's confessor. Later on, when he was Archbishop, Wojtyla described Father Kazimierz as "the guide to my young and rather complicated soul."

There were other events, other mentors, who helped to shape his spiritual life. His high school teacher, Father Edward Zacher, was a brilliant scientist as well as a theologian who constantly encouraged his students to look deeply and without fear into the mysteries of the heavens and the secrets of the microcosmos. He was an unusual priest for his time and place; his confident faith is unusual even today. For Zacher, there was no conflict between faith and reason. This theme is, of course, defining of John Paul II. As Pope, he has encouraged scientific research; he listens rapt to the latest discoveries of scientists who gather at his summer retreat at Castle Gondolfo; he urged a Church commission to clear the name of Galileo. His latest encyclical, "Fides et Ratio" (Faith and Reason), is the final expression of this deep-rooted conviction.

Arguably the most important of all his spiritual mentors was Jan Tyranowski. He met Tyranowski on a cold Saturday afternoon in February 1940, at a weekly discussion group in the parish church; it was a crucial moment in Wojtyla's life. Tyranowski was a strange man--a forty year-old tailor with white-blond hair, a high-pitched laugh and piercing eyes. Neighbors spoke to us about his oddness and his intensity. He was a bachelor who lived with his mother in a small apartment across the street from the Wojtylas. Tyranowski's small rooms were filled with stacks of religious books, sewing machines and several cats. He would stop young men on the street and try to interest them in joining his "Living Rosary," a praying circle and theology discussion group for young people. He recruited youngsters so aggressively that one of them, Mieczyslaw Malinski, the future priest and seminarian friend of Wojtyla, remembers being alarmed by his intrusive personal questions and worried that he might be a Gestapo agent. Father Malinski told us that it took him a long while to warm up to "this bizarre character who talked in a high-pitched affected voice."

Wojtyla, however, was immediately gripped by Tyranowski's personality and the power of his ideas. Tyranowski and Wojjtyla spent an increasing amount of time together discussing the Scriptures and mystical philosophers such as St. Theresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross. Malinski tried to argue with Karol about this strange man and even brought up rumors that he had been in a mental institution. Father Malinski wrote about Karol's response in his own biography of the Pope: "Tyranowski has gone through a major life-changing conversion. Look at what is inside him, not his outward experience. Yes, he speaks in a slightly odd, affected manner, but look beyond that. He is a man who lives truly close to God." For Karol, Tyranowski was aflame with God--and this closeness to the flame was an irresistible quality for the young Karol and would remain so for the rest of his life.

Ultimately, Father Malinski grew attached to Jan Tyranowski and entered the rigorous world of The Living Rosary: "When Karol and I committed ourselves to this prayer group, it was all-encompassing. Every moment of the day was organized around activity and relaxation. We were asked to keep detailed records of our prayers and thoughts. Tyranowski took us through each stage very calmly and methodically until we reached the central core of his teaching--what he called the plenitude of inner life. His influence on Lolek was gigantic. I can safely say that were it not for him, neither Wojtyla nor I would have become priests."

Wojtyla later wrote about this defining experience: "What Tyranowski wanted to do was work on our souls--to bring out the resources he knew existed within us." Karol was particularly struck by the quiet, mystical core of his teaching and he remembered vividly the day and hour when his teachings sank into him: "Once in July when the day was slowly extinguishing itself, the word of Jan Tyranowski became more and more lonely in the falling darkness, penetrating us deeper and deeper, releasing in us the hidden depths of evangelical possibilities which until then we had tremblingly avoided...Tyranowski was truly one of those unknown saints, hidden among others like a marvelous light at the bottom of life at a depth where night usually reigns. He disclosed to me the riches of his inner life, of his mystical life. In his words, in his spirituality, and in the example of a life given to God alone, he represented a new world that I did not yet know. I saw the beauty of a soul opened up by grace. "

One of the Pope's most insightful biographers (and our consultant), Tad Szulc, believes that the influence of Tyranowski on the young Wojtyla flowed from their shared attraction to the mystical quality of spiritual life: "Tyranowski gave a wholly new dimension and understanding to Karol's instinctive mysticism and, as much as any profound experience of his young years, it set him on a course towards the priesthood...his mystical legacy to Karol Wojtyla was the 16th century poet and mystic, St. John of the Cross and the desire for the contemplative life." (In fact, after he became a priest, Wojtyla, on two separate occasions, requested permission from his superiors to enter a Carmelite monastery; each time they refused, believing his gifts lay elsewhere.)

During our interview with Dr.Susan Muto, an expert of the life and work of St. John of the Cross, she speculated on why Karol's first encounter with St. John was so overwhelming:

"Of all the writers in the mystic tradition, he is the most riveting. The sheer metaphoric power of his language is stunning, filled with images of darkness and light, and it must have been a transforming experience for this young man witnessing the horrors of the war...Karol was obviously drawn to this mystic and influenced by him at the very deepest level. St. John's clarion cry is that the proximate way to wisdom is through purgation, through profound suffering, both physical, emotional and spiritual...."

While each of the Pope's biographers might emphasize different influences shaping Karol's spiritual life, all of them agree that it is impossible to overestimate the impact of St. John of the Cross. However, it is important to place the experience of Karol encountering this powerful mystic in the context of his life. By 1939, Karol Wojtyla had experienced the death of his mother and brother (he would soon lose his father). Close friends were dying in the war, or simply disappearing off the streets never to be seen again. His country might well be destroyed. These losses opened him to ultimate questions--and to the particular vision of St. John of the Cross.

As the Catholic writer, Michael Sean Winters, explained it to us:

"St. John allowed Karol to integrate these horrific losses in his life and to find meaning in what he was going through. For St. John of the Cross, there is great spiritual value and meaning in privation, in suffering, in the "Via Negativa." Each loss hastened Wojtyla's thoughts beyond the horizon of human cognition, beyond the traditional Catholicism of his upbringing. Perhaps it is the absoluteness of death that helped shape the young Karol's conviction that the world has no answers to this enigma. So far his God has taught him that he must find life in death, gain in loss. St. John was the perfect guide. So, in the place of his revered but departed earthly mother, his devotion to the Virgin Mary, the heavenly mother, became more pronounced. The mystical "Via Negativa" of St. John of the Cross opened up a world for Karol in which loss was gain, death was life and the Church was seen as the ultimate paradox--the sign of contradiction."

On February 18, 1941, exactly one year after he met Tyranowski, Karol suffered possibly his greatest loss--the death of his father. Unlike his calm demeanor and stoic submission to God's will following the deaths of his mother and brother, the loss of his father provoked a torrent of tears and visible pain. He lamented bitterly that he had not been present when his father died. His friend, Maria Kydrynska, was with Karol when they returned home to discover that Karol Wojtyla Sr. had died of a heart attack in bed. She described the scene vividly to Tad Szulc before she died a few years ago: "Karol, weeping, embraced me. He said through his tears, 'I was not present when my mother died, nor when my brother died.'" The apartment was too painful to stay in alone, so he moved in with the Kydrynskas. Years later, John Paul II told the writer Andre Frossard: "I never felt so alone." His friend Father Malinski observed him going to the cemetery every day to pray at his father's grave and said to us, "Karol was so distraught that I was truly worried about him."

Some of Karol's friends have said to us that they felt that this wrenching blow of his father's death was decisive--and that it led ultimately to his decision to become a priest. It was almost as if the smell of death was ammonia to him. It awakened him. It helped convert him. It sharpened his focus. It gave him his vocation. It also freed him. As Maria Kydrynska said to Szulc, "The fact that he was alone without his parents, it was as if it was his destiny."

From that point onwards, Karol spent a great deal of time with his mentor, Jan Tyranowski, but it would take a year and a half for his vocation to take final shape. Years later the Pope would reflect on the mystery of his vocation in his memoir: "At 20 I had already lost all the people I loved. God was, in a way, preparing me for what would happen....After my father's death I became aware of my true path. I was working at a plant and devoting myself, as far as the terrors of the occupation allowed, to my taste in literature and drama. My priestly vocation took place in the midst of all that--I knew that I was called with absolute clarity."

Father Malinski was present at this spiritual turning point and wrote about it in his own biography: "It was 1942, bitter cold, I was waiting outside the priest's residence at Wawel Cathedral for Karol to finish his confession with Father Kazimierz. Their conversation went on for hours and I became restless, even worried. When Lolek emerged he was very quiet as we walked across the bridge. Finally he said to me, 'I have decided to become a priest and that is what we were talking about.'" Father Kazimierz had taken him to Archbishop Sapieha immediately who interviewed him and accepted him for his underground seminary.

Most of the students in this wartime underground seminary had been living in various 'safe houses' in the countryside and traveling to secret locations for theology classes. Wojtyla's job at the Solvay plant kept him in Krakow where his life became even more regimented--and compartmentalized. Up at dawn, he crossed the river to the Archbishop's palace to assist secretly in celebrating Mass, then he raced off to work at the plant. Late afternoons were devoted to his religious studies, then rehearsals with the Rhapsodic Theater and the nightly visit to his father's grave.

In March 1943, Karol finally told members of the Rhapsodic Theater of his decision. They were stunned; none of them had any idea that he was contemplating a vocation to the priesthood. While they knew he was devout, he had never confided in any of them about what must have been an intense inner conflict between two vocations.

His reticence--or detachment--is exemplified in his friendship with the theater director, Mieczyslaw Kotlarczyk. Biographer Tad Szulc has described him as "Karol's intellectual, cultural and thespian mentor, the most important person in Karol's life after his father and Tyranowski." For an entire year during the Nazi occupation when all travel was restricted, Karol and Kotlarczyk wrote letters to each other that Halina Krolikiewicz, an actress in the Rhapsodic Theater, would smuggle back and forth from Krakow to Wadowice. Karol's letters were unusually revealing--up to a point. "I surround myself with Books. I put up fortifications of Art and Learning. I work. Will you believe me when I tell you that I am almost running out of time. I read, write, learn, pray and fight within myself. Sometimes I feel horrible pressures, sadness, depression, evil." What is striking about this letter is that Karol could not share, or would not share, his great inner conflict. His friend Lorenzo Albacete described Karol's unusual detachment: "He lived in the most intense solitude, a burning loneliness, and to some extent it was self-imposed...it all goes back to St. John of the Cross, to his exhortation of emptying yourself, stripping away ordinary human supports..."

Halina recalled to us her last conversation with Kotlarczyc before he died: "He finally revealed how fiercely he had tried to talk Karol out of his decision to join the priesthood--and how fiercely Karol had resisted him. They stayed up all night talking. He used every stratagem, even quoting Scripture--multiply your talents, don't hide your light under a bushel-- but to no avail. What he was able to accomplish was to persuade Karol to become a priest and not a contemplative monk hidden away in a monastery. And considering Karol's career in the Church, this was no small achievement."

After the Nazi roundup in August 1944, when Karol escaped only through hiding in the basement of his house, Archbishop Sapieha decided that all of his seminarians would be safer in his residence. So one by one, each of them moved surreptitiously--sometimes in disguise--past the German troops into the palace to begin their studies.

Karol was ordained October 3, 1946, in Archbishop Sapieha's private chapel and soon after celebrated his first Mass in the Wawel Cathedral. The central truth about Wojtyla's faith is that every conviction which John Paul II would make an issue central to his Papacy was already in young Karol Wojtyla's heart when he was ordained a priest . By the age of 26 the structure of his faith had been shaped--the bones had been set. The themes of suffering, the centrality of Christ and the belief in God's ongoing supernatural intervention in our lives were the bedrock. Over the years, these subjects would be elaborated upon, deepened and refined. Other themes would emerge as his intellectual horizons widened; these themes would layer, complicate, but never change these early convictions.

Within a week after his ordination, Wojtyla traveled to Rome to study for his doctorate in theology. His new mentor, Archbishop Sapieha, recognized Karol's unusual intellectual gifts and decided that his protege needed a thorough grounding in moral theology. It was in Rome that Wojtyla encountered Father Reginald Garrigou-LaGrange, a formidable theologian and the reigning expert on Thomism. Garrigou-LaGrange would become one of the most important influences on Karol's spiritual life; he would open Karol up to St. Thomas.

As Karol Wojtyla rose in the Church, he read and wrote voraciously. He discussed the great theological ideas with students and colleagues. Karol immersed himself in German phenomenology especially Max Scheler and Edmund Husserl. Karol embraced the Swiss theologian Balthasar who--like Lubac--urged his fellow theologians to return to the source of Christianity, to recognize its stupendous claims about the supernatural. Wojtyla devoured the French existentialists even though they were not on the approved list. Most decisively, he grappled with and to some extent accepted St. Thomas Aquinas's world of immutable and timeless essences--the traditional Catholic theology for the last 500 years--and a rational, objective world view very much at odds with his early heroes. Karol would flirt with but finally reject the 'softer' more experiential world of the phenomenologists, but not before he borrowed from their contemporary language of feeling and experience. Some philosophers believe that had he remained in Lublin as a philosophy professor his life project might have been to marry phenomenology with Thomism. But others, such as his former student and colleague, Halina Bortnowska, disagree. As she said to Kwitny: "Phenomenologists cannot believe in natural law. You can't be a Thomist and a phenomenologist at the same time."

Though Wojtyla modified Thomism in his work as bishop and cardinal, he drew on that tradition's moral absolutes. Love and Responsibility, for example, goes to great lengths to appreciate the complexity of sexual feeling and response, but basically it accepts the Thomist view that all sexuality must be generative. The book brought him to the attention of Paul VI, then preparing to write "Humanae Vitae," whose views on reproduction and birth control would make it the most controversial encyclical of his papacy--and arguably of this century. Paul VI was looking for supporters--and unconditional support. He received it from Karol Wojtyla. Not only did Karol Wojtyla send Paul VI research materials, he helped draft the encyclical. And then later, during the firestorm which followed the publication, Karol went public with his support, praising the encyclical effusively, describing its truths about birth control as "unchanging." Throughout the next decade Paul VI would take every opportunity to thank his protege, Archbishop Wojtyla, and to provide introductions and opportunities.

In 1976, Pope Paul VI invited Wojtyla to give the Lenten lectures in Rome. John Cornwell, biographer of Pius XII, wrote about the occasion vividly, describing how in one of Cardinal Wojtyla's lectures he stunned his audience with his dark apocalyptic vision of the world "as a burial ground....a vast planet of tombs." His heightened poetic language, filled with images of darkness and light, showed the influence of his early hero, St. John of the Cross. The remainder of these lectures explored themes foreshadowing all the major points of Wojtyla's Pontificate: the centrality of Christ in the history of salvation; the inviolable dignity of every individual person; the proper relationship between the creator and creation; the dangerous error of living as if God did not exist; the value and salvific meaning of suffering.

During these lectures, Cardinal Wojtyla also surprised his audience by revealing an extremely personal story about his own 'dark night.' This story has rarely been remarked on, but clearly it has resonated deeply for Wojtyla and sheds light on intimate corners of his spiritual life. Years ago in Poland, on the Wednesday of Holy Week, Woytyla had a deep religious experience. As he talked about it many years later, Cardinal Wojtyla said, with some sadness, that he tried again and again to recreate this mystical moment but was never able to. His friend Monsignor Albacete finds this story poignant and moving: "This man is telling us that he, too, has had the experience of God's absence and that when he prays he tries to relive that mystical moment of closeness. But it always goes away from him." It is a familiar story of mystics who early on in their lives experience a powerful epiphanous moment that they yearn to experience again, but can't, and must be sustained by the fragments of a memory for the rest of their lives.

These Lenten lectures were well attended and aroused considerable interest and comment. When the Papal enclave began after the death of John Paul I, Cardinal Wojtyla was not altogether the dark horse as the press described him. Cardinal Deskur's intense behind-the-scenes work on behalf of Wojtyla's candidacy had considerable history behind it.

On the night of John Paul II's election to the papacy, Bishop Andrzej Deskur suffered a devastating stroke from which he is still paralyzed. John Paul II spent much of the first day of his papacy at the bedside of his beloved friend and supporter. He reflected on Deskur's illness with his former teacher, Stefan Swiezawski. Wojtyla's private thoughts are startling, but utterly characteristic. In a conversation with us, Swiezawski recalled their conversation: "John Paul II spoke about his conviction that the most important events in his life have been connected to the suffering of his friends. He believes that Bishop Deskur's stroke was a way of paying for his election to the papacy and also that his elevation to cardinal was intimately tied to the tragedy of another friend, Father Marian Jaworski, who had lost his hand in a railway accident."

Not only do his friends pay, but Monsignor Albacete said to us that Karol Wojtyla came to see the deaths in his family "as a sacrifice...which gave direction to his life. Not only did it set him free from family responsibilities, but the pain was part of the energy which compelled him to move ahead with his life in the Church. I don't think he has a clear answer and it is a great mystery before which he bows his head."

What is clear is that the theme of redemptive suffering so central to the young Wojtyla's spiritual life has only intensified and deepened over the years. The mystery of suffering has pervaded his thinking, his writing ,his spirituality from the earliest years onwards. It has also become the defining theme of his Papacy. While redemptive suffering is, of course, at the heart of traditional Catholicism, John Paul II has embraced suffering in a way that is uniquely his own.

As recently as 1994, when John Paul II was furious with the United Nations over the issues of artificial contraception and abortion, he connected his own physical suffering and these issues with striking vehemence:

"I understand that I have to lead Christ's church into the Third Millennium through prayer, by various programs. But I saw that this is not enough, she must be led by suffering, by the attack 13 years ago. The Pope has to be attacked. Why now? Why in the Year of the Family? Precisely because the family is threatened, the family is under attack. The Pope has to suffer, be attacked, so that every family may see that there is a higher Gospel, the Gospel of suffering by which the future is prepared...."

John Paul II has written an extraordinary number of encyclicals, letters, homilies. Among his most important encyclicals is his very first, "Redemptor Hominis" (The Redeemer of Man), in which he laid out the program for his entire pontificate. It offered a searching examination of man's capacity for good and evil and asks the question, "Where do we go now?" In a later encyclical, "Veritas Splendor"(The Splendor of Truth), John Paul II talks about morality itself--how it attracts us by its beauty. Not surprisingly, a large number of his writings deal with suffering. "Salvific Doloris" (On the Christian Meaning of Suffering), for example, is arguably his most personal statement about the meaning and value of human suffering. The shifting relations between his fiery core of mysticism and his quest for truth is a leitmotif running through all of his written work. Most recently, in "Fides et Ratio" (Faith and Reason), he showed how both are approaches to God.

Faith and Reason is meant to be a challenge to modern-day philosophers. John Paul II feels that they have lost their way through their obsessions with arcana and have neglected the large and enduring questions about the great mystery of life and death. The modern view of reason which limits man to the visible world can kill faith--but the ache remains. His critics say that Faith and Reason demonstrates the contradiction it claims to overcome. But for John Paul II, there is no conflict between God and mind because God is literally everything.

With all of his writings, his sophisticated discourses, his conversations with cutting-edge thinkers at his summer retreat at Castle Gondolfo, John Paul II is a man of mystical persuasions for whom signs and symbols are the alphabet of God's loving language. The earliest, deepest Polish soil still nourishes him; the fiery mystical core of his faith still remains intact throughout all the years, all of his extraordinary encounters with history.

One of the most dramatic and life-threatening of these encounters occurred on May 13, 1981 just as John Paul II was to announce the creation of an institute devoted to the study of contemporary science and philosophy. Its purpose was to provide a dialogue between Catholic theology and modern thought. He never got a chance to speak. He was shot and almost killed as he triumphantly rode into St. Peter's Square to make the announcement and to greet hundreds of thousands of pilgrims who hailed him as the man who would lead the Church into the new millennium.

And, as he felt his life ebbing away, the Pope remembered what day it was: May 13. On May 13, 1917, three peasant children in Fatima, Portugal claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary. In successive apparitions on the 13th of the following months, the apparition warned the children about the disasters that would befall the world if people did not pray and consecrate themselves to her "immaculate heart." The children were shown a vision of Hell itself, with its power and violence ready to envelop the earth, especially through the spread of Communism. Russia itself had to be consecrated to her heart and be pierced by a sword. The apparition revealed a "secret" to the children whose content is unknown, even today, though apparently locked up in a small box in the Papal chambers. (One of the 'visionaries,' the oldest child, Lucia, is still alive in a cloister.)

From that day on, the Pope has never stopped expressing his gratitude to Our Lady of Fatima. He believes that she saved his life. On the anniversary of the assassination attempt the next year, he traveled to Fatima to meet the visionary, Saint Lucia. (Pope Paul VI had refused to meet privately with her to discourage superstition about the so-called "secret.") John Paul II has brought his blood-stained sash to the feet of the statue of the Virgin at Fatima. He has placed the bullet of the would-be assassin in her crown. He has also consecrated Russia to her Immaculate Heart, convinced that it would hasten the end of the Soviet menace to world peace. The institute that was to be announced that day exists and it has campuses all over the world. Its patroness is the Virgin of Fatima, and her statue adorns its academic halls everywhere, by order of the Pope.

Philosophers and theologians with modern sensibilities cannot understand this man who, though intellectually one of them, seems to behave and be moved by a piety associated with the uneducated masses or with those who fear modern life and seek consolation in the extraordinary, in the supernatural, living in a world of signs and prophecies. The Pope entrusted the life of a sick friend, a woman Polish doctor, to the prayers of Padre Pio, the Franciscan friar in southern Italy who bore in his body the "stigmata" of the crucified Jesus bleeding profusely at Mass and who was said to be able to be in two places at the same time, when he wasn't battling Satanic apparitions in the form of savage beasts.

Karol Wojtyla seems to be seeking to live several lives: the life of a thinker, at home in the world of concepts and scientific theories, the life of a mystic of the sublime and the ineffable, and, the life of a peasant child unable to read or write. How is this possible? How can such a contradiction be justified?

Marina Warner, the writer and Marian expert, talked with us about this "apparent contradiction:"

"The Pope is a populist and he is a pioneer in this. Popes usually come from the elite. They tend to be very skeptical about the faithful who need to be controlled and to be told what to think. So he's reversed that direction. He likes it when there's a new vision, when the bleeding statue at Trevitavecia wept tears of blood several years ago, and he's prepared to make them into new pilgrimage sites--he wants to create a new sacred geography throughout the world. All of this provokes some of the most intense wrigglings and writhings inside the theological community and among those cardinals who are embarrassed by his apocalyptic, millennial and generally miraculous attitudes. But these intellectual Christians forget the deeply irrational mystical core of the Christian religion. The mystery of the Eucharist, the absolute central doctrine of the Incarnation, the Virgin Birth, the idea that a woman would bear a child without any male seed at all--the miraculous is installed at the very heart of the faith! It is axiomatic of the faith because faith is about believing in something that is difficult to believe in. It is about wonder. So, in a sense, the Pope is actually reintegrating something that is traditional and central to the self-presentation of the Church."

Modernity's complex and often contradictory cultural impulses must wrestle with the coherence of this man's world view and, of course, his very faith. He is praised for the simple consistency of his moral outlook. And yet, so often, a certain pride, even a dangerous smugness attaches itself to 'counter-cultural' pronouncements. Is this the case for Karol Wojtyla?

Certainly the tension between faith and culture has been with the Church since the beginning and no Pope, even one so possessed of so powerful a vision as this one, will ever completely reduce that tension. There is a great danger in a prophet who trims his message to the demands of the day, but there is another danger in a prophet who fails to listen...

Is Karol Wojtyla a prophet?

If the contradictions in his life and faith are due to something that he has failed to grasp, Pope John Paul II has been a tragic figure indeed. But if they are due to something we fail to grasp, then the inability to understand him has been our tragedy.