St. John Paul II

Who they were

Karol Wojtyla buried his whole family by twenty: his mother at eight, his brother at twelve, his father while he was a young man working a limestone quarry under Nazi occupation and studying for the priesthood in a clandestine seminary the occupiers would have shot him for. That formation, made of loss, labour, theatre, and totalitarianism resisted from underneath, produced the most consequential pope of the modern era. Elected in 1978, the first non Italian in more than four centuries, his nine days in Poland in 1979 lit the fuse under the Soviet bloc.

In 1981 he was shot in St. Peter's Square and nearly died, on the feast of Our Lady of Fatima, a coincidence he did not treat as one, and two years later he sat in a prison cell holding the hand of the man who shot him. For this site he has a founder's claim: his 2002 letter Rosarium Virginis Mariae added the Luminous Mysteries, the first change to the rosary's structure in centuries, and called the rosary his favourite prayer. His long public dying of Parkinson's was, he insisted, part of the teaching. He was canonized in 2014.

Why people turn to St. John Paul II

Families and young people, his two named patronages, and everyone who prays the Luminous Mysteries, which is to say everyone who prays this app on a Thursday.

How to ask their intercession

Pray the Luminous Mysteries on his feast, 22 October. And his forgiveness in that prison cell is the standing intercession for anyone with someone they cannot yet forgive.