Karol Wojtyla (born 1920), cardinal of Krakow, Poland, was elected the 263rd pope in 1978, the first ever of Slavic extraction.

Karol Wojtyla was born May 18, 1920, in Wadowice, Poland, the second child of Karol Wojtyla, Sr., an army sergeant, and Emilia (Kaczorowska) Wojtyla. His mother died when he was nine. His only sibling, a much older brother Edmund (a physician), died four years later; and Karol Senior died in 1942. These sorrows of early family life, along with the hard times that Poland experienced both prior to World War II and throughout it, were bound to give an intelligent young man cause for sober reflection. In 1939, under the Nazi occupation, he enrolled at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, and shortly thereafter he began secret studies for the priesthood. Publicly, however, he worked as a laborer in a quarry and a chemical factory.

After World War II, upon ordination to the priesthood on...