My Patron and His Parents

Jesus turned, and saw them following, and said to them, “What do you seek?”And they said to him…“where are you staying?”
He said to them, “Come and see.” (Jn 1:38-9)

In Poland, the home of our patron and many of the greatest saints of modern times, praying under the soaring, illuminated ceiling of a seven-hundred-year-old basilica and the rock salt roof of a hand-hewn cave, kneeling in the pews of humble wooden chapels whose floors had been smoothed by thousands of pilgrim knees before mine, I heard the Lord ask:

“What do you seek?”

I tried to answer like the apostles: “Where are you staying, Lord?” Where, in all these wonderful places, have you been—where has John Paul II been? I want to see what he saw, to hear what he heard, to pray where he prayed, and to receive the same Spirit that animated his life and set him on a course of greatness from the youngest age.

And it was that youngest age of Karol Wojtyla that drew my attention. I found my heart, rather unexpectedly, pulled toward Wadowice, the place of his birth and childhood, and to the two people that had perhaps the most intimate, indelible, and consequential effect on the shape of his life: Emilia and Karol Wojtyla, his parents. Theirs was the task of setting the course of their son’s life. To these two ordinary people was entrusted a new life, a new person - so much like soft clay in their shared hands - who would be molded and formed in those workable years by the gentle pressure of their faith and love.

Standing in that holy family’s home and meditating on their life together, the impression they left on their son began to be left on me.

Two moments, so beautifully capturing the love and faith of these servants of God, became fixed in my mind:

Emilia, at the moment of Karol Jozef Wojtyla’s birth in the family’s apartment in Wadowice, “asked the midwife to open the window so the first sounds her newborn son heard would be church bells and singing in honor of the Virgin Mary from the nearby parish church.” After painfully (painfully!) laboring to bring her son into the world, this weary woman’s mind flew to God with concern for the first impressions upon her little baby’s soul. She had the wherewithal - the authentic piety - to bring the Church and the Blessed Mother into her son’s life from his first moment outside her womb. 

Karol Sr., after the death of his beloved wife when young Karol was not yet nine years old, took his son to Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, a shrine re-creating in Poland the sites of the Holy Land. There, in the chapel of Our Lady of Kalwaria, Karol Wojtyla presented his son to the Blessed Virgin and told him, “From today on, she will be your mother now.” Visiting that chapel, I knelt to the side and saw before me that grieving father, holding his son before Our Lady’s image, imploring her, “He has lost his mother on earth. You must be his mother from heaven.” In this chapel, a father’s faith pierced the veil of his own mourning and blessed his son with a lifelong, lifesaving, and life-transforming devotion to Our Lady: the seed of Totus Tuus was planted here, sown in sorrow, but reaping great hope for John Paul II’s own life and the lives of countless others, including myself, whose Marian devotion would be catalyzed by the example of one of Mary’s greatest sons. 

“I want the first thing my child hears to be a hymn to Our Lady…”

“She will be your mother now…”

Meditating on these moments, I could feel the power of my patron’s parents’ faith. I could feel my heart moved by the grace God had bestowed on Emilia and Karol Wojtyla, which they in turn bestowed on their son, who then bestowed the same grace on me. John Paul II beckoned me into his life, into his relationship with his parents and his Blessed Mother, and thus into his relationship with God. More than simply seeing what he saw and praying where he prayed, I found myself living as he lived and loving as he loved.

This was perhaps the most profound instance of an experience pervading the entire pilgrimage: finding myself a recipient - undeserving and unexpecting - of a tradition and history of a people with whom I shared a bond not of blood, but of faith: a familial belonging deeper than nature. Every Polish church I stepped into was a home built for me; every suffering of the Polish people was a suffering borne for me; every victory was a victory gained for me. Every Polish saint was raised up for my gain: every moment of John Paul II’s life, even the very love of his parents, was a moment and a love for me to share in. In the Body of Christ, nothing is held back, nothing is exclusive.

Without fully knowing it beforehand, this is what I sought; without fully appreciating it even now, this is what I came and saw: Christ’s love for me, his life in me, offered to me by his saints; by my Polish brothers and sisters in the faith; by my patron and his parents.

Mr. Morris is a College IV seminarian for the Archdiocese of Baltimore.