From all indications, John Paul II was not just an extraordinary intellect. His real power, it appeared, was in his mystical aspect—a spiritual life we hardly glimpse in most secular and even Catholic accounts.
But there is evidence that the supernatural surrounded this great man since the beginning. At the moment of his birth on May 18, 1920, in a small Polish town called Wadowice, John Paul’s mother asked the midwife to open the window so that the first sounds her newborn heard would be singing in honor of Mary, the Mother of God, from a church across the street. The room flooded with light. Three months later, on August 15, Feast of Mary’s Assumption, Polish forces commanded by the marshal repulsed a powerful Soviet attack at the gates of Warsaw, which became known as the “Miracle on the Vistula,” a victory that stopped Communism from spreading to Germany and the rest of Western Europe.
So began a life that one writer, Tad Szulc, described as full of “a succession of dramatic events and astounding coincidences, bordering on the mystical.” In fact, John Paul’s first doctorate was in mystical theology—something that has been all but stripped from modern seminaries (which is why many priests don’t know how to handle supernatural reports)—and before he was Supreme Pontiff, he met the great Italian mystic, Padre Pio.
According to Szulc (a former reporter for The New York Times who wrote an excellent book about the Pope) legend has it that Pio, upon hearing the future Pope’s confession, knelt at his feet, predicting that the Polish cleric would be called to the Throne of Peter—and also would be the target of an assassination attempt.
In 1962, the future Pope supposedly wrote to Pio, asking him to pray for a mother who had cancer, and then wrote again a week later to say the woman had suddenly recovered.
In 1974, the Pope returned to the town of Padre Pio and spent three days in prayer there.
After that were many rumors of John Paul’s own mystical abilities. He had the aura of a visionary—a brightness around him that was almost incandescent—and he made a point of visiting all the major supernatural shrines: Guadalupe, Lourdes, Fatima. He had even visited Zaravanystya in Ukraine (where the Virgin has appeared through historical times), was deeply devoted to Our Lady of Czestochowa (a shrine in Poland where he once declared an oath on Luminous Mountain), and had said he would have visited Medjugorje in former Yugoslavia if he had not been the Pope (the local bishop, who at the time opposed it, asked him not to come).
Visionaries claim that he was one of their own—that he too may have seen or heard things. There is no corroboration for many reports, and we have to be cautious about such rumors but if some were true, it wouldn’t surprise us. Those who meet him describe a remarkable peace—a peace like what they feel at a place like Medjugorje—and it is said that a small group of bishops passing the Pope’s private chapel once glanced in and saw the Pope partially levitating while in prayer.
Again, these are unsubstantiated reports. But there is no doubt that when it comes to prayer, the Pope was a significant mystic. As Szulc said, “Friends who have known Wojtyla (his born name) over decades insist that prayer and meditation are the principal source of his mental and physical strength and his astonishing capability of restoring his energy notwithstanding his punishing schedule at the Vatican and exhausting globe-girding jet travel.”
Indeed, according to Szulc, the Pontiff was said to pray as many as seven hours a day; at his private chapel at dawn, sometimes prostrate before the altar, then with invited guests before breakfast, often in his study next to his bedroom, at Masses and services, aboard planes, in the back seat of limousines. Some say that during prayer he was known to wail out loudly for the Church and the world.
Did he see the Virgin Mary?
He certainly provided exceptional guidance. And he even conducted himself publicly in a mystical way, very much like two of his heroes: Saint Benedict and Gregory the Great, both of whom were likewise mystical. He has often thundered like an Old Testament prophet (railing against the U.N. and the world’s descent into sinfulness), and on June 24, 1977—the same day that Mary would appear four years later at Medjugorje for the first time—he said, in an address as a cardinal, “We find ourselves in the presence of the greatest confrontation in history, the greatest mankind has ever had to confront. We are facing the final confrontation between the Church and the anti-Church, between the Gospel and the anti-Gospel.”
During a consistory with cardinals, he referred to “signs of the times,” a catchphrase laden with mystical portent. He showed a great warmth toward Medjugorje seers (at least two of whom he met), instructed those with whom he spoke to protect it, and lapsed into semi-consciousness at times while reciting the Rosary. When he was shot in 1981—on the anniversary of Fatima—the bullet took a miraculous course around vital organs and blood vessels. Like Francis, he slept in a sparse room on a single bed with a chest nearby (despite the splendor around him).
If he was a mystic, what was his chief prophecy?