AN URGENT LETTER FROM KAROL WOJTYLA TO FATHER PIO
November 1962. Polish Bishop Karol Wojtyla, Chapter Vicar of Krakow, is in Rome for Vatican II. An urgent communication arrives: Professor Wanda Poltawska, her friend and collaborator, is dying of throat cancer. Wanda is the mother of four girls. Together with her husband, doctor Andrzen Poltawsky, she has accompanied the Bishop in important initiatives for the family in communist Poland. Now doctors no longer give her any hope, they almost don't dare to intervene with a useless surgical operation.
On November 17, Bishop Karol Wojtyla writes an urgent letter in Latin to a holy person he has known since he went to confession to San Giovanni Rotondo as a young priest. He writes: "Venerable Father, I ask you to pray for a mother of four, who is forty years old and lives in Krakow, Poland. During the last war he spent five years in concentration camps in Germany and now he is in serious danger of health, or rather of life, due to cancer. Pray that God, with the intervention of the Blessed Virgin, show mercy to you and your family ".
The letter, from an Italian cardinal, is delivered to the hands of the commander Angelo Battisti, a Vatican employee and administrator of the Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza in San Giovanni Rotondo. Urged to hurry, Battisti gets into his car. "I left immediately," he recalls. He is one of the very few people who can approach the Father at any time, even if the religious must observe the restrictions ordered by the Apostolic Administrator Msgr. Carlo Maccari.
«As soon as I arrived at the Convent, the Father told me to read the letter to him. He listened in silence to the short Latin message, then said: "Angiolì, you can't say no to this" ».
Padre Pio bowed his head and prayed. Battisti, although he worked in the Vatican, had never heard of the Polish Bishop, and marveled at the words of Padre Pio.
On November 28, eleven days later, he was given a new letter from the Polish Bishop, to be delivered to Padre Pio with the usual urgency. "Open and read," repeated the Father. He read: «Venerable Father, the woman living in Krakow, Poland, mother of four girls, on November 21st, before the surgery, suddenly recovered. We give thanks to God, and also to you Venerable Father, I offer the greatest thanks on behalf of the same woman, her husband and her whole family ». Padre Pio listened, then added only: «Angiolì, keep these letters. One day they will become important ».
Needless to say, that Karol Wojtyla, on the evening of October 16, 1978, became Pope John Paul II. On the centenary of the birth of Padre Pio he went to kneel on his grave in San Giovanni Rotondo. And he said to the Capuchin superiors around him: "Let him walk, this brother of yours. Hurry. This is a saint I would like to do ».