The Secret Letters of Pope John Paul II Panorama

In 1978, a Polish cardinal was elected the first

non-Italian pope for nearly half a millennium.

Pope John Paul II ruled the Catholic Church for 27 years.

It's a Church which requires its priests to be celibate

and he took a tough traditional line on marriage and divorce.

But he had a private side.

"I think it's good you sent your letter by hand.

"It contains things too deep for the censor's eyes."

The Pope was writing to a married woman.

They were close for more than three decades

yet the extent of her role in the life

of one of the most famous men in history has remained largely hidden.

I do believe she completely fell in love with him.

Tonight, for the first time,

Panorama reveals the hundreds of letters and photos

that tell the story of John Paul's closeness

with Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka.

The scoop of the century!

Here is one of the handful of transcendentally great figures

in public life in the 20th century,

the head of the Catholic Church,

in an intense relationship with an attractive woman.

Wow!

The letters have been hidden away in a Polish archive for years

and part of the story is still being covered up.

Her disappearance from the scene is almost like a...you know,

a Soviet-style, you know, rubbing individuals out of the photograph.

It really is quite extraordinary.

This woman's story is one that you might never have been told.

They were married in the mid-'50s in California.

It's wonderfully characteristic of the date, isn't it?

-Yes, it is, it is.

-Stunning wedding dress.

-Yes, yes.

-And he's wearing a bow tie, isn't he? Yes, he is.

-Yes.

Professor Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka was a writer and philosopher.

She grew up in Poland but emigrated to the United States,

where she married and had three children.

'She died two years ago.

'The Smiths became her firm friends and are her executors.'

Our first impressions were that she was a towering intellectual.

She considered herself a very important philosopher.

There were very few women in the field of philosophy.

-And she was used to getting her own way?

-She was.

-Yes.

-She was.

There's no doubt about that.

In 1973, she wrote to this man, Cardinal Karol Wojtyla,

then Archbishop of the Polish city of Krakow,

and later to become Pope John Paul II.

She admired a book of philosophy he'd written,

so she took off to Poland to meet him.

I'm still struck by...

It was quite a thing, wasn't it, I mean, to get on a plane?

-Was that...?

-That was not unusual for her...

-Not at all.

..to get on a plane and do something like this.

This was part of her character.

That's the way she tackled everything.

That trip was the beginning of a relationship which

lasted for more than 30 years.

The story is told in a huge cache of letters John Paul sent to her.

They've never been seen publically before.

This is a picture that she had, near her bed, of Cardinal Wojtyla.

In 2008, Anna-Teresa decided to sell the letters,

and they were bought by the National Library of Poland for what

we think was a seven-figure sum.

Usually, when a library buys a really important archive

about a figure of John Paul's stature,

you'd expect a bit of a fanfare and the letters would be

put on display and made available to scholars.

These simply disappeared and it took months - years, indeed -

of digging around to track them down.

And if we hadn't knocked on the door of Poland's National Library

and negotiated to see them,

they might have stayed hidden for many years to come.

The letters from Cardinal Wojtyla begin on a formal note.

"Dear and esteemed professor, thank you very much for the article

"The Three Dimensions Of Phenomenology."

But the following year, when he wrote to her from Rome,

he dropped her formal title and reversed her name.

"Droga Tereso-Anno...

"Dear Teresa-Anna, I would like to respond to four letters that

"I received in July.

"I have kept them and brought them with me to Rome.

"I am reading them again as they are so meaningful and deeply personal."

Eugene Kisluk is a New York-based consultant who

advised on the sale of the letters.

It is the first informal letter that he wrote to her.

There's certainly intimacy established here in this letter.

The tone of the letters change depending on where

they were written.

Any letter Cardinal Wojtyla sent from Krakow was likely to

be read by the secret police.

1970s Poland was a Communist state and the Church was the enemy.

-TRANSLATION:

-His every step was watched.

They installed wiretaps in his flat and his telephone was bugged.

Every letter he received was intercepted and checked,

both private and official.

So, some of the letters were delivered by hand,

often by the nuns who worked for the Cardinal.

He and Anna-Teresa agreed to work together on a new expanded

version of his book.

They met several times a year

and their correspondence became frequent.

Sometimes, they wrote just after seeing each other.

"I was very happy to see you yesterday...

"I'd like to talk to you tomorrow, November 6th, at 4.30pm...

"It's good we could talk on the phone before you went to America...

"Despite the distance, it's a conversation...

"PS, thank you very much for yesterday."

Their relationship was on two planes. One was intellectual.

The other one was personal and very emotional.

They became very close to each other on both levels, in fact.

And it was also very difficult for them to separate the two.

Of course, the library only showed me his letters to her.

I haven't seen Anna-Teresa's letters and reading Karol Wojtyla's

on their own is a bit like reading a novel with half the pages torn out.

But I do understand that, in the summer of 1975,

so almost exactly two years after they first met,

Anna-Teresa sat down on a park bench by the city walls of Krakow

and wrote what one can really only describe as a love letter.

She said that she desired to be in his arms

and remain there in happiness.

And she apologised for the fact that she had not yet managed to

control her feelings and that yet, of course, is important

because it means that the matter had been discussed before.

The library denies the letter exists, but his subsequent letters

show a struggle to keep the relationship in Christian bounds.

The Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein got some

sense of Anna-Teresa's importance in Karol Wojtyla's life

when he interviewed her in the 1990s.

But she batted one of his questions away.

I finally said, "Were you in love with the Cardinal?"

She said, "No, I never fell in love with the Cardinal.

"To fall in love with a clergyman - there could be no success at all!"

And I said, "No romantic feelings?"

She said, "This question - it doesn't really apply.

"How can you ask me such a silly question?"

The evidence we have now from the archive shows it was anything

but a silly question.

I do believe she completely fell in love with him

during the first phase of their relationship.

I think that it's completely reflected in the correspondence.

Marsha Malinowski negotiated the sale of the letters.

For her to fall in love with him is completely understandable to me.

He was handsome, he was powerful,

he was on a track that was extraordinary, he was Polish.

How could you not be taken with all that charm in one person?

Karol Wojtyla had mixed freely with women as a teenager and a young man.

He'd also formed a friendship with a psychiatrist called

Wanda Poltawska, whom he wrote to often until his death.

But the training for Catholic clergy when he became a priest was rigid.

A perception was that even if you had a close association,

a friendship, with a woman,

this could be what was known as an "occasion of sin".

And an occasion of sin was as bad as if you had actually done it.

That training meant most priests would have been wary of such

a close relationship.

The most natural reaction would have been for him

to terminate contact because, after all, the positions that they

were in, he was a prince of the Church,

someone that took vows of celibacy,

and someone in his position would probably just withdraw completely.

He didn't. Instead, he later wrote to her, "God gave you to me

"and made you my vocation." And he let their friendship grow.

He invited Anna-Teresa to join him on country walks or

skiing holidays, all documented in the new photos we've been given.

Clearly, there's an element of playing with fire

when you've got a strongly heterosexual man

and an attractive woman in a very intense relationship

that is cultivated

and which engages mind at a high level of intensity.

There's danger everywhere.

There's nothing in the letters to suggest that Cardinal Wojtyla

ever broke his vow of celibacy. He was a man known for his iron will.

But it's also clear he wanted to keep the relationship going.

It's quite fragile.

'We've discovered he gave Anna-Teresa

'one of his most treasured possessions...'

I suppose it's a holy relic.

It is absolutely a holy relic.

'..an item of devotional clothing known as a scapular.'

-And it's Our Lady, isn't it?

-Yes, it is.

It has to be one of the only true possessions the Cardinal had

to give away.

'He'd been given it by his father, who died when Karol Wojtyla was 20.'

Thousands, possibly millions,

of Catholics over the centuries wore it.

I did myself when I was a teenager in Ireland.

Obviously, for Wojtyla, it's associated with his father.

It's a garment he wore next to the skin, under his clothing,

so it's a very intimate gesture.

The gift puts the strength of his attachment to

Anna-Teresa beyond doubt.

Over the years, he mentions the scapular ten times.

"Last year, I was trying to find an answer to the words

"'I belong to you.'

"Finally, before leaving Poland, I found a way - a scapular."

He said it allowed him to...

"..accept and feel you everywhere in all kinds of situations,

"whether you are close or far away."

Anna-Teresa played an important role

in his public as well as his private life.

BELLS TOLL

In 1976,

Cardinal Wojtyla visited the United States for a Catholic conference.

Anna-Teresa was determined to raise his profile.

Her husband, Hendrik Houthakker, was a Harvard academic

and had all the right political connections.

The American cardinals Karol Wojtyla met would later help elect him pope.

I think her impact on his career is beyond amazing.

She was able to introduce him to all the most important people in

the United States, and I think that that was of enormous importance.

Anna-Teresa invited Cardinal Wojtyla to stay with her

family at their country home outside a New England town called Pomfret.

It was just the sort of outdoor life the Cardinal enjoyed.

She told a local journalist about the visit many years afterwards.

He was relaxing and enjoying nature.

He was walking and sunning himself on the meadow,

picking white berries, swimming.

The photos we've been given suggest the future pope

was at his most relaxed.

He and Anna-Teresa went walking in the woods.

It appears she told him of her feelings again

because his letters afterwards suggest a man struggling

to make sense of what she said in Christian terms.

"My dear Teresa, I have received all three letters...

"You write about being torn apart

"but I could find no answer to these words..."

The letter wrestles intensely with the meaning of the relationship.

He justifies it by telling her she's a gift from God.

"If I didn't have this conviction, some moral certainty of grace

"and of acting in obedience to it, I would not dare act like this."

Many priests deal with celibacy by forming strong attachments to

women who are in some ways safe, who are in stable marriages and,

therefore, they're not going to ask for marriage,

they're not going to ask that you leave the priesthood.

But those relationships are often exploitative of the woman.

They make excessive emotional demands on the woman

and they're often extremely unjust to the other partner,

who is being deprived of that kind of intensity with their spouse.

The work on the book went on.

She'd leave her family behind several times a year to see him.

Some of his letters are full of intimacy.

"I decided that I would only answer when I am here in Rome.

"When I am in Krakow,

"I cannot answer the way I want for obvious reasons.

"This is the reason for the conciseness...

"Today I heard your voice when you called from Warsaw.

"The telephone has the advantage that I can hear your voice,

"but it doesn't last long enough,

"so it cannot replace a letter or a real conversation."

-ARCHIVE:

-'A pope has been elected.

'The Vatican balcony becomes the centre of attention.'

No-one expected a pope from outside Italy in October 1978.

Karol Wojtyla was suddenly catapulted into one

of the most high-profile positions in the world.

He still found time that week to write personal letters

among the one to Anna-Teresa.

"I am writing after the event so that

"a correspondence between us should continue...

"I promise I will remember everything

"at this new stage of my journey."

'Anna-Teresa had something different on her mind.'

A telegram...

'On the day of John Paul's election,

'she asked her publishers to rush out the book

'they'd been working on.'

"Take immediately book in production. Introduction follows."

She wanted to move forward with that book, fast-forward it.

-And it's sent to her publishers in the Netherlands?

-Mm-hm.

But the Vatican mounted a legal challenge to The Acting Person,

as the book was called.

It wasn't just an argument about the way she'd changed it.

It was about protecting the Pope's status.

The notion that another person had, in fact, been

the author of a very important document and,

of all persons, a woman,

would have been quite extraordinary and unacceptable.

The lawsuit took years and the relationship cooled.

Anna-Teresa wanted the Pope to stick up for her,

and when he didn't, she felt betrayed.

But even as he crisscrossed the world, he kept sending her cards

at Christmas, Easter and on St Teresa's Day.

May 1981.

John Paul is hit four times in an assassination attempt.

-NEWSREADER:

-'Shots were fired at the Pope,

'and he's been seriously wounded.'

'Pope John Paul II has been shot.'

Anna-Teresa heard the news at home, and dropped everything.

"I am overwhelmed by sadness and anxiety,

"and want desperately to be close to you.

"I arrive on Saturday, and my phone number is..."

The letters tell us she was one of the few allowed into see John Paul

as he recovered from surgery.

Eventually, the old warmth returned,

and she began visiting him again -

sometimes with her children, sometimes alone.

She would be in Rome and he would call and say,

can you come for supper?

And the Polish nuns would prepare very good little dinners

in his private dining room, very simple.

And did she feel that the Vatican resented the way she could...

come in and out of his life like that?

-Yes.

-I think so. Yes. Yes.

FANFARE

John Paul was a famously conservative pope.

The growing number of divorces...

The scourge of abortion...

He also opposed relaxing the celibacy rule for priests.

But we now know that he was enjoying a close companionship himself.

As he aged, he and Anna-Teresa

continued to trade ideas on philosophy.

She'd also send photos and pressed flowers

from her country home in Pomfret.

More than a dozen of his letters look back to his time there in 1976.

"I often wonder what is happening

"beyond the ocean in Pomfret.

"How you live. I am thinking about you,

"and in my thoughts I come to Pomfret every day."

I think he was very emotionally dependent on her,

for a couple of reasons.

I think his life was so isolated as he got older,

and he was ailing.

And there weren't really that many people who he could really talk with

and could reminisce with.

To feel as if he was a real human being,

not just this pope who was in captivity.

When people think about the celibacy of the Catholic clergy,

they immediately think about the sexual dimension of it.

Priests who've discussed it with me have invariably said

that the issue is loneliness, the lack of relationship -

they NEED to love somebody.

Anna-Teresa believed her role went beyond providing emotional support.

She was convinced she had a powerful influence on his thinking.

When we're talking about her

influence on him philosophically, she says, "As I see it,

"this pontificate is run by my ideas."

And she says, "Many of his other

"philosophical ideas of this pontificate,

"he has been, if not inspired,

"at least in complete agreement with me."

'Stanislaw Obirek is a former Jesuit priest

'from John Paul's home city of Krakow.'

It's a real paradox, isn't it?

He related to her as an equal intellectually,

and yet, in the way he ran the Church,

he was quite dismissive, one might almost say,

-of the role of women.

-Yes, this is very paradoxical.

Tymieniecka was one of many women important in his life.

I cannot understand

why he was so conservative

on the doctrinal level

and so human, so liberal, so open

on the personal level.

-NEWSREADER:

-'The Vatican has just announced the

'death of His Holiness...'

'He was 84, and his papal reign was the third-longest...'

John Paul II died in April 2005.

Almost immediately, the process of

writing Anna-Teresa out of history began.

Her friends say she was at his bedside the day before she died.

But you won't find any mention of that

in the Vatican account of his last hours.

One of the things that the Catholic Church most fears is scandal.

The idea that the Pope had a woman friend

must have been appalling to his entourage,

and I would think they would have been very glad to...

bundle her out of sight at the first opportunity.

As Anna-Teresa disappeared, the pressure built to give John Paul

an even more elevated status.

At his funeral, thousands chanted "Santo subito" - "Sainthood now".

John Paul's sainthood was pushed for by this man.

Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz was John Paul's secretary for 40 years.

The photos and letters show

he witnessed their relationship at first hand.

But she's not mentioned at all in his biography of the Pope.

Just like John Paul,

Stanislaw Dziwisz became the Archbishop of Krakow.

His authority, his personal stature

are intimately connected with

those of John Paul II, so he has to

keep this relationship going

in the public mind.

He and the Polish bishops used all their clout

to put pressure on the Vatican.

He said, within a year of the Pope's death, that he felt that

in John Paul II's case, because his sanctity was so obvious,

that perhaps it might be possible to go straight for canonisation.

So, it was a kind of ecclesiastical version

of what one might call pester power.

The Vatican department

called the Congregation For The Causes Of Saints

decides who is a saint.

It asks to see anything a candidate has ever written,

public and private, to be sure of their holiness.

The process has traditionally lasted decades, or even centuries.

John Paul's was completed in just nine years -

the fastest in modern times.

Anna-Teresa sold her letters in 2008,

when the process was well under way.

What was that decision based on?

She wanted to make sure that

there was necessary funding for her family.

How did the Church hierarchy react?

Well, I think the Church hierarchy was quite upset.

And she did receive a very disturbing phone call

from, er, one of the Pope's most ardent and closest supporters,

and he castigated her on the phone.

This is someone whom she considered a friend.

And it was, uh, it was very, very upsetting for her.

There's a question mark over whether the letters were seen

by those responsible for John Paul's canonisation,

as they certainly should have been.

Because they went straight from Anna-Teresa to the National Library

in Warsaw, where they were kept under lock and key.

The Vatican was coy when we asked.

The man in charge of the canonisation would only tell us

that it's up to individual Catholics

to decide whether to send in documents,

and said, quote, "All our duties were done."

The National Library of Poland wouldn't say anything at all

when we asked if the letters had been sent to the Vatican.

So there's no confirmation they were examined before he became a saint.

I think had they been known about,

they would have presented a problem for the canonisation process

and they might well have meant that it was halted.

I don't think they'd have been a long-term barrier.

I think they would have made a difference to the speed,

which, in my view, was unseemly.

The National Library of Poland

dispute that this was a unique relationship.

They say it was one of many warm friendships

the Pope enjoyed throughout his life.

So why, then, does one piece of this story remain buried?

Anna-Teresa's letters to John Paul.

I'd assumed that all of the letters in the archive

here in the National Library in Warsaw

were Karol Wojtyla's letters to Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka,

and that hers to him would have been lost.

But it turns out that they were, in fact, included in the archive

that was given to the National Library.

In fact, she kept copies of everything she sent.

So, what's actually over there is - or should be -

a full set of the correspondence, both sides of it.

Pope John Paul told Anna-Teresa

that parts of her letters were like pearls,

worthy of being published.

So, we asked - several times - to see her letters to John Paul.

The Polish National Library bought the copyright for them,

but won't tell us where they are,

and threatened to sue us if we so much as quoted them.

To criticise today Holy John Paul II

is almost unthinkable.

Stanislaw Obirek's experience may help explain that sensitivity.

He was silenced by the Church in Poland

after he criticised John Paul mildly at the time of his death.

Poland's newly elected government is also nationalist and pro-Catholic.

Do you think things have changed?

I would say yes.

It's worse now!

After ten years, we have canonisation of John Paul II

and we have a kind of euphoria

around the Polish politicians.

And most Poles are unwilling to say any critical words about him.

We've hit a wall of silence. We wanted to know

exactly how much public money was spent on the letters.

The president's office helped negotiate the purchase,

but they didn't want to be interviewed.

We also wanted to speak to Cardinal Dziwisz.

He knew of the sale in 2008.

But he wouldn't talk either.

You can certainly understand the concern of the Church

at a bunch of grubby journalists like you and me

rooting around in this stuff.

When Carl Bernstein interviewed Anna-Teresa 20 years ago,

she told him she was keeping John Paul's letters to her.

She wouldn't let him see them,

but even then, she feared the story they tell might be lost.

She wanted their existence known. She wanted them kept safe.

She told me about her fears that someone would try to steal them.

I have no doubt that she would want the archive to be published one day,

and to, uh, attract the interest of scholars and philosophers.

Her letters, of course, are still hidden -

though now there's bound to be pressure to make everything public.

His still tell a compelling story.

He was such an intensely vibrant human being.

In a sense, one is rather in awe of the self-discipline

that he evidently brought to that relationship.

We're talking about Saint John Paul.

This is an extraordinary relationship.

It is out of the ordinary, in the papal context.

It's not illicit.

Nonetheless, it's fascinating.

It changes our perception of him.

Far from being written out of history,

Anna-Teresa is now rewriting it from beyond the grave.