WARSAW, Poland – The late Pope John Paul II slipped away from his Swiss Guards to go skiing more than 100 times in the early years of his 26-year papacy, the pontiff’s longtime personal secretary says in a book released on Saturday.
It was hard at first for John Paul, an avid sportsman, to adjust to the confinement of the papacy, so he made informal “escapes” with his closest friends – three other Polish prelates, says Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz in his book, titled “Swiadectwo” or “The Testimony.”
John Paul made his first such outing two years into his papacy, on Jan. 2, 1981, setting out from the papal vacation residence at Castel Gandolfo in the car of the Rev. Jozef Kowalczyk.
Kowalczyk, now papal nuncio to Poland, was driving; next to him was Rev. Tadeusz Rakoczy, “with a newspaper spread out pretending he was reading in order to ‘hide’ the Holy Father who was sitting in the back seat,” Dziwisz wrote. After the trip, the beaming pope exclaimed: “We did it!”
On many other skiing trips, the pope “behaved like an ordinary skier. He would stand in line with the others, but for security reasons, one of us would be in front, another one behind him. He used a ski pass,” said Dziwisz, now the archbishop of Krakow.
In the book, released in Poland on Saturday, Dziwisz describes his 40 years as personal secretary to the pope, born Karol Wojtyla. John Paul II, who did much to change the ossified routine of the papacy, died at age 84 in 2005.
Dziwisz’s book, which came out in Italy on Wednesday under the title “A Life with Karol,” is based on conversations with Italian journalist Gian Franco Svidercoschi.
Neither Vatican authorities nor journalists knew of these skiing escapes, numbering more than 100, Dziwisz says.
“It seems hard to imagine, but no one recognized him,” Dziwisz said. “Who could suspect that the pope went skiing?”
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