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Showing posts from February, 2016

Revealing Letters

I watched with considerable interest on Monday night the Panorama programme dealing with the close friendship over a 30 yr. period between Pope John Paul II and a polish émigré Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. The friendship started in the early 1970's before Karol Wojtyla  became Pope (in 1978). He had written a book - later to become in English "The Acting Person", which caught the attention of Tymieniecka, now married in the US and a distinguished philosopher in her own right. She wrote then to Wojtyla suggesting a collaboration in bringing forth a new updated English edition of the book. Then, meeting on a fairly regular basis over the next few years an intense relationship of both an intellectual and emotional nature was forged between them. And this relationship was to continue after Wojtyla became Pope until his death in 2005. The letters which Wojtyla wrote - 350 in all - were handed over by Tymieniecka to the Polish Library in 2008. Intriguingly, her own letters