Woman defends friendship with Pope John Paul II as book is published
She was one of a handful of people by his bedside when he died and visited him in hospital when he survived an assassination attempt.
Pope John Paul II had a woman friend with whom he shared spiritual thoughts in letters that spanned the decades. Now she is defending her recent book of correspondence with the Pope against criticism from church officials that she “exaggerated” her friendship with the late pontiff and could delay his beatification.
Wanda Poltawska, 87, said her book — a collection of her religious meditations and John Paul’s letters of spiritual guidance — was harmless to his saint-making process and she dismissed those who sought to minimise her friendship with the Polish-born John Paul.
“What is wrong in a priest’s friendship with a woman? Isn’t a priest a human being?” Poltawska said in an interview from her home in Krakow, in southern Poland, where the Reverend Karol Wojtyla was a frequent family guest before being elected pope in 1978. No one has publicly suggested Poltawska and John Paul had a romantic relationship, and the book makes no such claim. The two, who campaigned together against abortion in Poland under communism, referred to one another as brother and sister, and she often visited the pope with her husband, a philosopher, and four daughters in tow.
“We worked together on the same thing. We got to know each other in work, not in anything else.”
