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Letters from Pope John Paul II show deep friendship with woman

 
Published Feb. 16, 2016

The future Pope John Paul II, Karol Wojtyla, began a friendship with an American philosopher in 1973 that lasted the rest of his life. She hosted him when he visited New England and translated a book of his, and they stayed in touch, off and on, until his death in 2005.

Now, for the first time, letters that he wrote to Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka have been made public — and they portray a startling degree of affection.

"God gave you to me and made you my vocation," read a letter dated March 31, 1976, one of several excerpts published Monday by BBC News.

The letters offer no evidence that the future pope — who was known for his strict adherence to church doctrine on sexuality, marriage and the family, and who was canonized in 2014 — ever had a physical relationship, much less that he violated his vow of celibacy. But they do suggest a tension in the relationship between the married philosopher and the obedient pope.

"You write about being torn apart," he wrote on Sept. 10, 1976. "I could find no answer to these words." He added: "If I didn't have this conviction, some moral certainty of grace, and of acting in obedience to it, I would not dare act like this."

After the BBC released a preview of its report, broadcast Monday night on the BBC News program Panorama, it drew responses from Roman Catholic officials.

"It comes as no great revelation that Pope John Paul II had deep friendships with a number of people, men and women alike," said Greg Burke, a Vatican spokesman. "No one will be shocked by that."

The excerpts published by the BBC trace the arc of a relationship that stretched over three decades, starting when John Paul was the archbishop of Krakow.

Toward the end of his life, he reached out to Tymieniecka, reminiscing about his visit to her home near Pomfret, Vt. "I am thinking about you and, in my thoughts, I come to Pomfret every day," he wrote on Jan. 26, 2002. "I often wonder what is happening — beyond the ocean — in Pomfret," he wrote on Feb. 19, 2003.

Tymieniecka died in 2014, at 91; her husband, economist Hendrik Houthakker, died in 2008.