The woman who sTole The PoPe’s hearT
They holidayed together, went camping and later met at the Vatican but newly- released letters from John Paul II to Anna- Teresa Tymieniecka reveal just how close the pontiff was to the married philosopher
RELAXED: Cardinal Wojtyla’s camping trip with Anna- Teresa
sHE was attractive and clever. So was he, as well as charming and brave. They lit up when they were in each other’s company and when apart they poured out their innermost feelings to each other in hundreds of letters. As couples who are deeply in love are apt to do they would sometimes write to each other straight after they had been together.
There were just a couple of obstacles to their relationship. She was married with three children and he was a Roman Catholic priest. And not just any priest but Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, Archbishop of Krakow, who became better known to the world as Pope John Paul II and is now revered as a saint.
But to Anna- Teresa Tymieniecka he was also – and perhaps first and foremost – the man who meant more to her perhaps than any other, including her husband. And to Pope John Paul II she was the woman to whom he could never give his heart but who captured it nonetheless.
It was no secret that John Paul II had enjoyed relationships with girls in his youth before entering the priesthood in 1946 when he was 26. But letters only now unearthed in Poland reveal that for 32 years he had a close and intense friendship with Anna- Teresa, a philosopher and academic living in the US but like him born in Poland. In 2008 she sold her personal archive to the National Library where letters have languished hidden until now.
Informal snaps show them on holiday together, skiing or camping, Wojtyla ( as he was then) casually attired in shorts and T- shirt at Anna- Teresa’s country home outside Pomfret, a small town in Vermont in 1976. She told a local radio reporter that he relaxed by walking, sunbathing, picking wild berries and “enjoying nature”.
YEARS later Wojtyla still yearned for those carefree days, writing to AnnaTeresa: “I am thinking about you and in my thoughts I come to Pomfret every day.”
There are also pictures which show them holding hands or John Paul tenderly stroking AnnaTeresa’s cheek. There is no evidence to suggest that John Paul II ever broke his priestly vow of celibacy or that the relationship with AnnaTeresa was anything other than chaste. But it was nonetheless extraordinarily intimate. In the words of BBC journalist Ed Stourton, who discovered the letters, they were “more than friends but less than lovers”.
They first met in 1973 when Anna- Teresa flew to Poland determined to meet Cardinal Wojtyla, who was then Archbishop of Krakow, to tell him how much she admired a book he had written on philosophy and also to show him her own work on phenomenology.
According to her executor Professor William Smith the gesture was typical of Anna- Teresa who was from an aristocratic family and was both impulsive and “used to getting her own way”.
Like the cardinal she had lived through the Nazi occupation of their native Poland. After the war she studied in Switzerland and Belgium before settling in America where in 1956 she married Hendrik S Houthakker, professor of economics at Stanford University and then Harvard and later an adviser to President Nixon.
In his first letters to Anna- Teresa the cardinal addresses her formally as “Dear and esteemed professor” but there were reasons more compelling than etiquette for keeping up a professional appearance.
As a senior Catholic clergyman in communist Poland he was under constant surveillance by the secret police so some letters were delivered by hand by nuns.
But a year later, when he was writing from Rome, the letters were far more personal. He refers to issues which are “far too difficult for me to write about” and reveals he has taken four of her letters with him to re- read as they are “so meaningful and deeply personal”. It is believed Anna- Teresa declared her love in a letter written from Krakow in 1975. We cannot be sure because, despite paying an alleged seven- figure sum for the letters, Poland’s National Library will not let anyone see Anna- Teresa’s side of the correspondence. But it is known that she wrote to her cardinal of wanting to be in his arms and then apologised for not yet managing to control her feelings – the “yet” a telling indication the matter had been discussed before.
Soon after Wojtyla gave her his scapular, a devotional object made of two small squares of fabric decorated with an image of the Virgin Mary. It had been a First Holy Communion gift from his father and was one of his most treasured possessions – indeed one of the few possessions he had to give. He always wore it next to his skin and wrote that giving it to Anna- Teresa would enable him “to accept and feel you everywhere in all kinds of situations, whether you are close or far away”.
aNNA- TERESA also had a role in Wojtyla’s advancement in the Church. When he led a delegation of Polish bishops to America in 1976 she and her husband used their considerable contacts to introduce him to many influential people, including American cardinals who voted him into the papacy in 1978, the first non- Italian pope for nearly 500 years.
“I promise I will remember everything at this new stage of my journey,” he wrote to her.
She was deeply hurt when the Vatican challenged her contribution to a new edition of Wojtyla’s book and he ( now Pope) did not defend her. But when he was shot in 1981 she sent a telegram saying, “I want desperately to be with you” and was one of the few people allowed to see him in hospital.
For the rest of his life she was a frequent visitor ( sometimes with her children) to his private apartment in the Vatican. The last time was the day before he died in 2005. Anna- Teresa outlived him by nine years, dying in 2014 aged 91.
But as far as the Church was concerned it was as if she had never lived at all. In his biography of the pontiff, his one- time secretary Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, who had surely met Anna- Teresa many times, does not mention her.
Dziwisz, a fellow Pole, was a leading campaigner for John Paul II’s canonisation, a process that could have been derailed by the potential scandalous story of Anna- Teresa’s closeness to the soon- to- be Saint John Paul.
When Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame interviewed Anna- Teresa in the 1990s he asked her outright if she had been in love with the Pope. “To fall in love with a clergyman?” she replied. “There could be no success at all.”
Bernstein pressed on. No romantic feelings? “The question doesn’t really apply,” she parried.
It is not the most compelling denial. But if the man you loved is a saint then the usual questions – and rules – cannot apply.