Election of Karol Wojtyła as Pope John Paul II — First Polish Pope
The cardinals elected a Polish pope in October 1978, the first non-Italian in 455 years. The year had already produced two conclaves. Paul VI died in August, John Paul I was elected and died thirty-three days later, and the cardinals reassembled in October with the Italian factions deadlocked between the conservative Siri and the progressive Benelli. Karol Wojtyła was fifty-eight, the archbishop of Kraków, and a compromise nobody outside the room had predicted. His formation was unlike any of theirs. He had worked in a quarry and a chemical factory under German occupation, studied for the priesthood in a clandestine seminary, and spent his entire episcopal career negotiating with a communist state — including the twelve-year campaign to build a church at Nowa Huta, a steel town designed to have none. He was also a philosopher, a playwright and a mountaineer who had taken students camping to talk about things that could not be said indoors. He took both his predecessors' names, addressed the crowd in Italian and apologised for his own, and asked them to correct him if he made mistakes in their language. His first foreign journey was to Mexico and his second, in June 1979, to Poland, where some ten million people — a quarter of the population — came out to see him over nine days. Solidarity was founded fourteen months later. He also went skiing as pope, kept a private swimming pool built at Castel Gandolfo on the grounds that it was cheaper than another conclave, and travelled to 129 countries in twenty-six years. He was the most seen human being who has ever lived.
- Year: 1978 CE
- Category: Religious
