John Paul II - Part 1
16 October 1978 — ?

When the members of the Papal Conclave made their decision on October 16, 1978, they had found their man in Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, Archbishop of Krakow. Perhaps it was necessary that a pope be found from a deeply religious Roman Catholic nation under severe Communist persecution, breaking the more than four-centuries-old tradition of entrusting the Roman Catholic Church’s leadership to Italians who came from a nation largely irreligious, with a large measure of religious and political freedom in the twentieth century.

Pope Adrian VI (1522-1523) had been the last non-Italian pope and had died 455 years earlier. Forty-five Italian Popes had intervened. Born in the Netherlands, Adrian VI ruled only briefly. He was a rare pope for the period since he used his own Christian name as his Papal designation. Cardinal Adrian Florensz was in Spain as Viceroy for Emperor Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire when called to the unenviable post, battling with the explosion caused by the Augustinian monk, Martin Luther. Adrian was born in the city of Utrecht on March 2, 1459, and was sixty-three when elected.

Emperor Maximilian had chosen Florensz to tutor his grandson, the future Emperor Charles V. Florensz is credited, by Roman Catholics, with keeping Charles on the "straight and narrow track" of Roman Catholicism at a time when Lutheran Protestant concepts were spreading like wildfire in Germany. It was the very young Emperor Charles V, a member of the Habsburg family which dominated Central Europe and Spain for centuries, a mere twenty-one years of age, who presided at the Diet of Worms, and issued the Edict of Worms on May 26, 1521, aimed at crushing the Reformation. This futile edict aimed to destroy the rise of embryonic Protestantism and forbade the printing and distribution of Luther’s writings. Clearly the God of heaven had a quite different agenda.

Adrian Florensz was sent to Spain by Emperor Maximilian in 1515 and there became, in addition to his duties as the Emperor’s Viceroy, Bishop of Tortosa, a cardinal and, even more significant in a nation which epitomizes the cruelties and injustices of the Inquisition, Grand Inquisitor. Emperor Charles V succeeded to the throne in 1519 and was the last Emperor to be crowned by a pope, Pope Leo X officiating. Charles, himself, was born in the Dutch-speaking city of Ghent, now located within the borders of Belgium.

A little known fact is that Erasmus, the editor of the renowned Greek text of the New Testament, the Textus Receptus, was well known to Adrian. Pope Adrian VI had received his doctorate in theology from Louvain in 1491 and had subsequently taught at that renowned center of learning. It was here that Erasmus attended Adrian Florensz’s lectures. Thus, when faced with the Lutheran peril, Adrian attempted without success to press Erasmus to write in opposition to Luther.

But now, 455 years later, a man of Slavic genes for the first time held the Roman Catholic Church’s highest office. He was born in Wadowice on May 18, 1920, close to the Czechoslovakian border, just seventeen miles from Auschwitz where the Germans set up their most notorious concentration camp. Some have claimed that as a young man he supplied gas canisters to the Nazis for their extermination of the inmates. We have come to no judgment on that assertion.

Wojtyla did his doctoral research in Rome on the life of the Spanish mystic known as St. John of the Cross. He was appointed as a coadjutor Bishop in 1958 while still in his thirties, and six years later he was appointed Archbishop of Krakow. At forty-six, perhaps honoring his strong, but subtle, stance against Communism, Paul VI created him a cardinal.

The Papal Conclave which elected Wojtyla to the Papacy took eight ballots, but there was no question about the final ballot where he received 104 of the 111 votes cast. Wojtyla’s cause had been strenuously promoted by Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, the Roman Catholic Primate of Poland and Archbishop of Warsaw. But Wojtyla was not a stranger to Rome as some had imagined. He worked very closely with Paul VI in the formulation of the Vatican-Polish Concordat in the early and mid-1970s. When Wyszynski underwent surgery for cancer in 1976, Edward Gierek, the Communist Party Chief who maintained a level of friendly relations with the ailing Wyszynski, described Wojtyla as "the worst of all" the likely successors to the Archbishop of Warsaw as the country’s Roman Catholic Primate. (Malachi Martin, The Keys of This Blood, p. 596) Gierek, along with other Communist leaders, had correctly assessed that Wojtyla was then their greatest foe and stood between their regime and its perpetuation. How right history has proven these fears to have been!

John Paul II is certain to be remembered for the part he played in the dismantling of Communism; and rightly so. It was a monumental feat of historical importance. The documentation of this success has been cited in the chapter entitled, "The Final Unholy Alliance." The Pope cunningly worked with Mikhail Gorbachev, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, posing as a helper, but designing the implementation of his Grand Plan already seen outlined in Malachi Martin’s book The Keys of This Blood. Of the fifteen Soviet Republics six were predominantly Eastern Orthodox—Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Georgia and Armenia; six were Islamic—Azerbaijan, Kazakh-stan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan; two were Lutheran—Estonia and Latvia; and one was Roman Catholic—Lithuania. Make no mistake, John Paul saw that he took care of the Roman Catholic state.

When Gorbachev visited the Vatican in 1990, John Paul clearly aimed at first freeing Lithuania from Communist rule.

In our 1990 book, Antichrist Is Here, pages 190, 191 we made a forecast that was inevitably fulfilled within two years. We wrote:

We then quoted the following documentation:

Mr. Odarich, the leader of the Rukh Party, made an ominous assessment, no doubt according with John Paul’s thinking and underlying his "helpful" suggestion to Gorbachev.

And so it proved to be. Both Lithuania and Ukraine have enjoyed a decade and more of independence. One Slav, John Paul, had clearly outsmarted another, Gorbachev.

Volumes could be written detailing the events of John Paul’s long pontificate. But we dare not take such a liberty within the covers of this book. Our purpose is to document the marvelous accuracy of the prophecy written over 1,900 years ago that asserted that all the world would wonder after the Papacy. It has reached its ultimate fulfillment by the turn of the present millennium of the Christian era. Once more we emphasize that in order to bring ultimate healing of the deadly wound, the pope had to not only achieve worldwide admiration, but to do so while still openly espousing the principles of the Medieval Papacy. This John Paul has achieved. In chapters 48 and 49 we will illustrate John Paul’s acts and words which document his attachment to the concepts of the Medieval Papacy.

In fact it is amazing that the Pope is so popular. Even his own constituents in numerous nations do not support his conservative moral stand on abortion and contraception. This stand, correct as it is on abortion, flies in the face of western moral mores of the twenty-first century.