what was the significance of pope john paul II, as a priest. What was a typical day for Pope john paul II? ty?

Answer 1

His priesthood was unique in many ways. First, he was from a middle-class family, not one of the intellectual elites, yet he was educated at the university level. He did not attend the usual seminary education because WWII was raging and the Germans shut down the Catholic seminaries and were rounding up seminarians. He told a story of his bishop swearing him to secrecy that he was even considering the priesthood. He and fellow seminarians dressed in the cassock of an ordained priest to avoid prosecution by the Nazis.

He was ordained as the Russians were liberating Poland...only to be under constant scrutiny by an atheistic Communist regime that didn't like organized religion at all. There was a man (name escapes me, but it's in several biographies) who was put in charge of controlling the Catholic Church in Poland. He and Fr. Wotyla clashed constantly. The Archbishop had been put under arrest by the Communists and Wotyla became the voice of reasoned resistence to the arrest. He learned to be quite the politician through that period...which served him well. The Archbishop was eventually released, but still under scrutiny. The Communists wanted to have control over the naming of a new auxilliary bishop of Krakow and the Archbishop submitted everyone's name except Wotyla's...in order to fake them out. They rejected everyone the Church named and that only left Wotyla. That's how he became the youngest bishop in Poland...that and he wasn't from an elite family, so was considered by the Communists to be the "proletariate priest". OOPS...that backfired on them.

As for a typical day...that's an oxymoron. The Pope is the leader of the smallest country in the world, the Holy See. He was a religious leader, politician, statesman and philosopher all in one.

Answer 2

Pope John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła May 18, 1920, in Wadowice, Poland.

In 1942 he entered the underground seminary run by the Archbishop of Kraków, Cardinal Sapieha. Karol Wojtyła was ordained a priest on November 1, 1946, by the same bishop who confirmed him. Not long after, he was sent to study theology at the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas, commonly known as the Angelicum, where he earned a licentiate and later a doctorate in sacred theology. This doctorate, the first of two, was based on the Latin dissertation Doctrina de fide apud S. Ioannem a Cruce (The Doctrine of Faith According to Saint John of the Cross). Even though his doctoral work was unanimously approved in June 1948, he was denied the degree because he could not afford to print the text of his dissertation (an Angelicum rule). In December of that year, a revised text of his dissertation was approved by the theological faculty of Jagiellonian University in Kraków, and Wojtyła was finally awarded the degree. He earned a second doctorate, based on an evaluation of the possibility of founding a Catholic ethic on the ethical system of phenomenologist Max Scheler (An Evaluation of the Possibility of Constructing a Christian Ethics on the Basis of the System of Max Scheler), in 1954. As was the case with the first degree, he was not granted the degree upon earning it. This time, the faculty at Jagiellonian University was forbidden by communist authorities from granting the degree. In conjunction with his habilitation at Catholic University of Lublin, Poland, he finally obtained the doctorate in philosophy in 1957 from that institution, where he had assumed the Chair of Ethics in 1956.

On July 4, 1958 Pope Pius XII named him titular bishop of Ombi and auxiliary to Archbishop Baziak, apostolic administrator of the Archdiocese of Kraków. Karol Wojtyła found himself at 38 the youngest bishop in Poland.

In 1962 Bishop Wojtyła took part in the Second Vatican Council, and in December 1963 Pope Paul VI appointed him Archbishop of Kraków. On June 26, 1967, Paul VI announced Archbishop Wojtyła's elevation to the Sacred College of Cardinals with the title of Cardinal Priest of San Cesareo in Palatio.