Free Keys of This Blood by Malachi Martin Page B

now had something more complex and far-reaching than perhaps even he had bargained for. Suddenly, and without anything like an explanatory statement, there broke upon the Roman and the international scene the figure of a Pope who was about to shatter every mold. A Pope who was anything but imperial and who was not about to be isolated—at least, not in the sense Joseph Malula had meant.
    From the first moment of his papal election, publicity figured, as an unusual dimension even for a Pope, in the pontificate of John Paul II. The most avid public attention seemed to fall upon him like a cloak that had been made to his measure. It was a cloak he would wear with startling and unremitting purpose.
    At the outset, it all seemed a natural enough consequence of the curiosity one could expect to surround a new Pope. The immediate and seemingly insatiable hunger for details, whether accurate or not, was only to be expected, the more so given the exceptional nature of this choice for the papal throne. Between the time of his election in Conclave and his formal investiture as Pope, early publicity had to feed on what was easily available concerning Wojtyla’s life in Poland. Even so, there was a peculiar shape to many of the stories. Things seemed in hindsight to have marked the young Polish bishop as a man of special destiny.
    Take, for example, the solar eclipse on May 18, 1920, the day Wojtyla was born. Did not that confirm the supposedly ancient prophecy that the 264th Pope—for so he was—would be born under the sign of
labor solis
(the classical expression for a solar eclipse)? Was not destiny also written in the death of three important people in Wojtyla’s life: his mother, when he was nine; his elder brother, when Karol was twelve; his father, when his son and namesake was twenty-three? After all, another old legend had it that a triple death signified a triple crown. And that, in turn, was applied to the triple tiara traditionally used to invest new popes with the universal authority of Peter.
    Never mind that John Paul would refuse to wear that ancient gem-studded symbol of his churchly power and temporal influence. Destiny is destiny; and until the new Pope had time to settle in and provide fresh news, the legend that linked death and power made good copy.
    Not all the early stories in that brief waiting time were of such a Gothic nature, however. For one thing, there was a lot about Karol Wojtyla that did not fit the popular idea of the papal mold; but it always made for avid reading. Like the still-beloved John XXIII, always remembered as “the good Pope John,” there was nothing of the patrician about John Paul II.His early life proved him to be a man familiar with both the common and the heroic struggle of people everywhere.
    On the more common side of the publicity ledger, much was written about the fact that he had been born in an obscure—some said drab—little town named Wadowice, a place of about 9,00 souls, 170 miles south of Warsaw in the foothills of the Beskids mountain range. A good deal of media time was given to the fact that he had spent his earliest years growing up in an unremarkable two-room apartment. Story after story spotlighted the three years the young Wojtyla had spent as a worker in the Zabrzowek Quarry and in the Belgian-owned Solvay Chemical Works, where he was a boiler-room helper.
    Less commonplace were the stories that focused on Wojtyla’s close association with the mysterious tailor-mystic Jan Tyranowski; on his skill as a soccer goalie; on his love of music and his talent as an amateur guitarist; on his membership in the Rapsodyezny Theater of Krakow, where he specialized in poetry reading.
    Not one, but two, bona fide underground experiences made for a dramatic edge in the early publicity. Much attention was given to Wojtyla’s association during World War II with the Polish underground team that supposedly helped obtain one of the first Nazi V-2