Most of us meet him already finished. A white cassock. A square. A sentence about fear. The risk of a finished saint is that we forget the rooms that came first.
Karol Józef Wojtyła was born in Wadowice on 18 May 1920. By twenty-one his mother, his brother, and his father were dead. He worked limestone at Zakrzówek so the occupiers would not ship him west. A tailor named Jan Tyranowski taught him St John of the Cross in a flat in Dębniki. He acted in rooms with the curtains drawn. He was ordained on All Saints’ 1946 and said his first three Masses the next day under Wawel, among the kings.
This little book is not another complete life. It walks through the quarry, the secret seminary, the village of Niegowić, the steel town that was not allowed a church, and the mountains where students called him Wujek and Mass was said on an overturned canoe. It stops at a window on Franciszkańska Street whose address he gave out as if it were ordinary, at a prison chair in Rebibbia, and at a canonisation he called the happiest day of his life. Read it if you have only ever known a statue. Read it if you loved him and have started to forget the boy they called Lolek.
The window above the square came last. The quiet in the kitchen came first.
A Silent Homilies booklet. Written to be read in one or two sittings.