Karol Wojtyla’s early years were spent in a setting much like that of any child growing up in Poland at the time, with a loving and religious family life and the usual schoolboy friendships. But tragedy entered his life at the age of eight when his mother died after a short illness. The death of his older brother Edmund, only four years later, who as a young doctor became fatally infected with scarlet fever, and his father’s death in the first year of World War II, left Karol Wojtyla with no immediate family before he turned 21. Despite the loss […]