- guardian.co.uk, Sunday March 31 2002 14.11 BST
Ill-health has already forced the Pope to curtail his participation in Holy Week ceremonies, delegating the celebration of Palm Sunday mass to one of his cardinals and forcing him to forego the washing of the feet on Maundy Thursday - his first defection in these ceremonies in 23 years as Pope. Acute arthritis in his right knee also sidelined him from the Stations of the Cross at the Colosseum on Friday, obliging him to follow the ceremony from a chair on the Palatine Hill.
The physical frailty of the Pope is such that questions are beginning to be asked in the Vatican as to how long he can continue in his role as the absolute monarch of the Catholic community. Advancing Parkinson's disease, as well as causing the constant tremor in his arm, has deprived him of control of the muscles in his face, obliging him to keep a handkerchief to hand for when saliva dribbles uncontrollably from his mouth.
Though not interfering with his intellectual faculties, the disease could make it difficult for the former actor to continue to tread the global media stage. An uncontrollable body and an incomprehensible voice cannot be exposed indefinitely to the pitiless eye of the television networks, particularly when their owner has conducted himself in such a way as to make 'photogenic polyglot' an essential part of the job description for Pope.
And there may not be much more treading to do. Having harnessed modern travel to take the papacy to the people in an unprecedented way, John Paul now has to be wheeled around St Peter's Basilica on a mobile podium and there have been reports that his Vatican apartment is being modified to accommodate a wheel-chair.
Karol Jozef Wojtyla was born in the Polish industrial town of Wadowice on 18 May 1920, the son of a retired army lieutenant. His mother, a schoolteacher of Lithuanian origin, died when he was six. Psychologists suggest his devotion to the Virgin Mary in later life can be traced back to maternal deprivation in childhood. He studied Polish language and literature at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, taking an active part in amateur dramatics and sport. University studies were interrupted by the German occupation of Poland and replaced, for a time, with stone-breaking in a limestone quarry.
He reportedly had a number of girlfriends but decided on the priesthood after his father's death and two near-fatal accidents. 'Every person has at his or her disposal an existence and a love. The problem is: how to build a sensible structure out of it?' he wrote in a play about marriage called The Jeweller's Shop , published under a pseudonym.
Wojtyla was ordained priest by the aristocratic cardinal of Krakow, Adam Sapieha, on 1 November 1946. His rise to prominence began when Sapieha sent him to Rome for a doctorate at the Pontifical University, where his dissertation was on the concept of faith in St John of the Cross. Having distinguished himself as a lecturer on social ethics, he went on to become archbishop of Krakow and, in 1967, was created cardinal by Pope Paul VI.
With the Italian favourites blocked by factional rivalries at the conclave in 1978, the Polish outsider was unexpectedly elected Pope with an overwhelming majority at the eighth ballot. John Paul's papacy would be marked by his steadfast opposition to communism and a determination to stamp his conservative authority on a Church often at odds with the values of modern Western society. There would be firm 'nos' to abortion, contraception and homosexuality. Priesthood was for celibate males only, at whatever cost.
John Paul's battle with ill-health began on May 13 1981, at the point of a Turkish terrorist's bullet. The consequences of Mehmet Ali Agca's attack in St Peter's Square required major surgery. Characteristically, John Paul saw his survival as a sign of God's providence: Our Lady had deflected the bullet to save his life. More surgery would follow in later years, for intestinal cancer and a hip replacement. Combined with the intolerable pressures of his office, it would sap the fibre of the rugged skier and mountaineer and reduce the sportsman Pope to a prisoner of his physical ailments.
'He will never resign. If anything, he would like to die as a martyr, at the altar during a trip abroad, to die in harness,' said Crista Kramer Von Reisswitz, the author of Les Faiseurs du Pape ( The Pope-Makers ), which is due to be published in France next month. 'That would be embarrassing for the host country, and for his aides, who are responsible for trying to reduce his schedule and adapt it to his state of health. "God's athlete" can't accept the idea that he might end up in a wheel-chair.'
The idea that the Pope might voluntarily renounce the throne of Peter was broached on Monday by Vittorio Messori, an influential Catholic writer who collaborated with the Pope on his book Crossing the Threshold of Hope. Writing in the Milan daily, Corriere della Sera , Mr Messori said cardinals were beginning to discuss the possibility that the Pope might invoke article 332 of the code of canon law and retire for some well-earned rest in a remote monastery in his Polish homeland. Those most open to the idea, Mr Messori said, were not the liberals chafing under John Paul's reactionary rule, but conservatives who feared a repetition of his improvised prophetic gestures: visits to synagogues and mosques, apologies to all and sundry, syncretic gatherings of the religions in Assisi, hammering on about human rights.
If he did decide to do so he would be the first Pope ever to resign for reasons of health and the first to step down since Celestine V decided he wasn't up to the job in 1294. Several Popes resigned in Roman times, but it tended to be because they had been sent into exile or sentenced to forced labour in a Sardinian tin mine. One, Benedict XI, opted for the gold watch: he sold the papacy to Gregory VI.
A Pope who visibly shares the sufferings of Christ in his own flesh during the week that commemorates His passion may be a powerful icon for the Christian message on the mystery of human redemption, but it raises the question whether the government of the church is safe in such feeble hands. Even in good health, John Paul was never much attracted to running a global bureaucracy. Some now see in his frailty the reflection of a church in crisis, a church that preaches moral certainties but is not followed by many of its members, that fails to attract new recruits to the priesthood and whose image has been tarnished by the gravest moral scandal of its modern history.
John Paul confronted that scandal on Thursday, the day the church commemorates the institution of the priestly ministry, when he recalled 'our brothers who have betrayed the commitments they made when they were ordained'. It was the latest in a series of public pronouncements on the evil perpetrated by paedophile priests, a global phenomenon that the church has been slow to tackle and that has undermined public confidence in its integrity.
The Pope has now ordered that all cases of suspected paedophilia by priests be reported to Rome and in his annual letter to priests he spoke of that sin as one of the most grievous forms of the mystery of evil at work in the world. 'A dark shadow of suspicion is cast over all the other fine priests who perform their ministry with honesty and integrity,' he wrote. On Thursday he confirmed his tough stance on the issue by accepting the resignation of a Polish archbishop, Julius Paetz, who had been accused of making homosexual advances to adolescent seminarians. The case was a particularly painful one for the Pope, as Archbishop Paetz had worked for him in the Vatican at the beginning of his pontificate. The archbishop has denied wrongdoing, insisting that his outgoing nature and gestures of affection had been misinterpreted.
One of the most shocking aspects of the scandal, which has particularly damaged the standing of the Catholic Church in the United States, is the fact that senior prelates preferred to sweep the issue under the carpet rather than tackling it head on. There have been calls for the resignation of Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston after it emerged that a priest accused of molesting children had simply been moved from parish to parish.
In a highly hierarchical organisation like the Catholic Church the buck ultimately stops with the top man in Rome. Though it is clear that in many cases information was withheld from Rome to avoid scandal, there have also been reports that the details of some episodes never reached the top because close aides wanted to shield the ailing pontiff from distress. A patently honest man himself, Vatican experts say the Pope had difficulty accepting that senior clerics could have lied to him about their involvement in scandal.
The pope is psychologically resistant to the idea of resignation and convinced that only divine providence can determine the end of his pontificate. According to Vittorio Messori, the Pope cannot be expected to behave as if he were the chief executive of a multinational company. 'It is perhaps in this octogenarian with curved shoulders, an uncheckable tremor and a tired voice that we better see the mystery of a God who wanted to save the world through suffering,' he wrote in the Corriere della Sera . Many Catholics saw Karol Wojtyla as a grumpy disciplinarian when the sports-loving 58-year-old first moved into the Vatican. It is hard for them not to acknowledge his heroism now, as he bears the cross of human frailty before the eyes of the world.
Date of birth: 18 May 1920 (Wadowice, Poland)
The war years: Continued studying; stonecutter; member of Christian underground
Former interests: Hiking, skiing, acting, backpacking, kayaking
