London: The BBC is to broadcast a documentary that will raise questions over Pope John Paul II’s relationships with women, including exploring whether he may have fallen in love with a married woman.
The Panorama programme, set to air on Monday night, is understood to have unearthed a trove of letters between the late Pope and Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, a philosophy professor who worked on a book with the pontiff in the Seventies, when he was still known as Cardinal Karol Wojtyla.
Tymieniecka, who died in 2014, is said to have engaged in a feverish four-year correspondence with the future pontiff during the period, when the pair were in their fifties, as they collaborated on his philosophical treatise, The Acting Person.
The academic, who was born into an aristocratic Polish family, married a Harvard economics professor, Hendrik Houthakker, in 1955, but is said to have been a devoted friend of the Pope, even inviting the future pontiff to the couple’s Vermont home. She remained a good friend until John Paul II’s death in 2005. Carl Bernstein, the renowned American journalist who wrote a 1996 biography of the pontiff, credits John Paul’s collaboration with Tymieniecka, whom the writer describes as “a vivacious, cosmopolitan Polish aristocrat” with having “helped bring him the international stature that was helpful in his becoming Pope”.
The author conducted lengthy interviews with the academic, in which she denied any romantic entanglement with the Pope, saying that their relationship was merely “mutually affectionate”. She added: “How could I fall in love with a middle-aged clergyman?” However, friends of Tymieniecka told the journalist that she did feel a romantic pull towards the future pontiff.
One close friend, the late Harvard professor George Hunston Williams, is quoted as saying that the Pope was not aware of the depths of her feelings towards him. He told the author: “I don’t think he understands what she’s coping with when she’s in his presence. A magnet pulls steel particles. He doesn’t know that.”
Tymieniecka did not hide her affection for the Pope, describing her feelings towards him to one biographer by saying: “He had a way of moving, a way of smiling, a way of looking around that was different and exceedingly personal. It had a beauty about it.” She added: “If there is one trait of character which I can observe in him, it is love of contradiction. He’s extremely proud, terribly sensitive to pride. This is an extremely multifaceted human being, extremely colourful.
“People around him see the sweetest, most modest person. He is by no means as humble as he appears. Neither is he modest. He thinks about himself very highly.”
It is understood that Monday’s BBC programme will avoid making any claim that the pontiff ever breached his vow of celibacy, and nor will it come to any firm conclusions about the depths of his emotional attachment to Tymieniecka.
