Pastoral education

Pastoral education

In 1943 he entered the clandestine seminary founded by Archbishop Adam Stefan Sapieha, cardinal archbishop of Krakow, beginning the career of Theology. At the beginning of 1945 the Soviets entered Krakow and the future Pope saved the life of a curious, almost miraculous way, thanks to Vasily Sirotenko, a Russian university student who, before being sent to liberate Krakow like official, studied the last course of History ; The Red Orchestra (prosovitic spies infiltrated into the German army) reported then that the Germans were to assassinate Polish workers enslaved by them; Attacked that group by the Russians and forced to surrender, they discovered among the eighty Polish workers released in a quarry of the factory Solvay to 18 seminarians. Following Stalin's directives they were all sent to a gulag from Siberia where they did not return, but not the future pope, since the commander needed someone like him who knew languages ​​and translated the books in Latin and German that he had been compiling for Pursue his career after the war; Indeed, Wojtyla even knew Russian for being his mother of Ruthenian ethnicity, according to Pedro Beteta López in his book Recalling John Paul II (2009). Sirotenko thus prevented his expatriation to Siberia, even in spite of the opposition of a Russian political commissary. No doubt this tragic fact had to reinforce its anti-Stalinism. He was ordained a priest on November 1, 1946 in the private archbishop's chapel. Shortly afterwards he went to Rome to attend the courses of the Faculty of Philosophy of the Pontifical Athenaeum Angelicum, and obtained his doctorate in Theology with the thesis The act of faith in the doctrine of St. John of the Cross. In 1948 he returned to Poland and exercised his first pastoral ministry as coadjutor vicar of the parish of Niegowić, around Krakow, for thirteen months. In November of that same year he obtained the qualification to practice the teaching in the Faculty of Theology of the Jagellónica University. On August 17, 1949 he moved as vicar to the parish of St. Florian in Cracow, where he served for two years, alternating with his work as a counselor to the students and graduates of the state university of that city
It was very popular among students, with whom I often went on a field trip, something that was not common at the time, because it could attract the attention of the police authorities. Appointed professor of moral theology and social ethics of the Krakow metropolitan seminary on October 1, 1953, he began lecturing in Ethics at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Catholic University of Lublin in 1954, where two years later he was appointed director Of said chair