biography of Pope John Paul II

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• A tireless traveller, Pope John Paul II made 104 foreign trips to some 130 countries. He has travelled the equivalent of 30 times the circumference of the earth.
  
  
• In the early years of his papacy, Pope John Paul II’s support for the Solidarity labour movement in Poland helped trigger a chain of events that eventually led to the fall of the Soviet Union.
  
  
• He spoke out forcefully against the two U.S.-led wars against Iraq, in 1991 and 2003, and condemned President George W. Bush's notion of preventive war as illegitimate and immoral.
  
  
• The poor and the oppressed in Asia, Africa and Latin America have had no greater advocate that John Paul. From the start of his pontificate he tirelessly crusaded on behalf of social justice and human rights, and by the turn of the millennium his efforts to convince wealthy nations of the industrialized world to forgive some of the debts of poor countries bore real fruit.
  
  
• He built bridges with other religions and tried to heal the church's historic wounds with Judaism. He became the first Pope to set foot in a synagogue.  In the year 2000, he visited the Holy Land.  At a moving ceremony at the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem, and again at the Western Wall, he repeats his plea for forgiveness by the Jews of the sins committed by the church.
  
  
• Pope John Paul II can speak eight languages.
  
  
• Pope John Paul II added the Luminous Mysteries to the Rosary.
  
  
• Pope John Paul II is the first Slav to head the Roman Catholic Church, the first non-Italian pope in 455 years, the youngest pope in a century, and the first since Pius II in the 15th century to be a "man of letters."
  
  
• Before his ordination as a priest, he was a member of an experimental theatre group, a stonecutter, a published poet, and a chemical company boiler-tender.
  
  
• “Daredevil," is how the Archdiocese of Newark describes the athleticism of the Pope's youth. Possibly the most athletic Pope in history, John Paul II in his youth played soccer as a goalie, took daring swims in the flooded Swaka River, and enjoyed skiing, hiking, mountain climbing and kayaking.
  
  
• The Pope has been quoted as saying, “I have a sweet tooth for song and music. This is my Polish sin."
  
  
• Pope John Paul II may be the only Pope whose life was portrayed in a comic book. In 1983, Marvel Comics published a Pope biography.
  
  
• His pontificate is the third longest in the history of the Roman Catholic Church.
  
  
• The Pope has canonized 482 saints and beatified 1,338 people, more than all of his predecessors combined.
  
  
• He has held more than 1,160 general audiences at the Vatican, attended by more than 17.64 million people.
  
  
• During his first pilgrimage to Poland, the Holy Father uttered two sentences of great significance: "Be not afraid" and "Renew the face of the earth." The pope showed us how numerous we were and showed us the...power we had if we joined together as one.

The coat of arms of Pope John Paul II is intended as an act of homage to the central mystery of Christianity, the Redemption.

And so the main representation is a cross, whose form, however, does not correspond to the customary heraldic model. The reason for the unusual placement of the vertical section of the cross is readily apparent if one considers the second object inserted in the coat of arms the large and majestic capital M. This recalls the presence of Mary beneath the cross and her exceptional participation in the Redemption.

The great devotion of the Holy Father to the Virgin Mary is manifested in this manner, as it was also expressed in his motto as Cardinal Wojtyla: TOTUS TUUS (All yours). Nor can one forget that within the confines of the ecclesiastical province of Krakow, there is situated the celebrated Marian shrine of Czestochowa, where the Polish people for centuries fostered their filial devotion to the Mother of God.