Passionate letters offer new insights into Saint John Paul II's spirituality

A cache of letters written by St John Paul II to a married woman with whom he had an extremely close relationship has been uncovered by the broadcaster Ed Stourton. Some 350 letters to the philosopher Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, written between 1973 when he was Cardinal Archbishop of Krakow until 2004, the year before he died, were sold by Tymieniecka to the National Library of Poland.  She died at the age of 91 in June 2014, just two months after John Paul II was canonised.

Following up on “rumours” Stourton tracked the letters down, and was given access to them by the Library. They cast dramatic new light on the life of one of the greatest religious and indeed political figures of the twentieth century.

Tymieniecka was in her 50s when she first got to know then Cardinal Woytyla,  and was married to the Harvard economics professor Hendrick S Houthakker, who advised both presidents Nixon and Johnson.

According to Stourton, the nature of the relationship between Tymieniecka “defies definition”. They were “more than friends and less than lovers”, he insists. It is probably on this basis that the Vatican has reportedly dismissed the alleged findings of the Panorama programme as “more smoke than fire”. However, this response feeds into the idea that the letters would only be of interest if they contained evidence of a sexual scandal. They don’t, but what they do contain is evidence of how two deeply spiritual and intelligent people struggled with a mutual attraction whose strength could have been devastating, but who were able to deal with it within the framework of their Christian faith.

When Tymieniecka told him “I belong to you”, his response was not one that many bishops would have given – some version of “this can go nowhere, stick with your husband”. Rather, the man whose motto was “Totus tuus”, “I am entirely yours”, addressed to the Virgin Mary, was able to accept that Anna-Teresa was “a gift from God”. He could do this because he believed that everything in his life was directed by God. It was what Stourton called his “rock-like faith” that allowed him to accept Anna-Teresa as “a gift from heaven” while at the same time not denying his vocation. Indeed, he referred to this relationship, too, as “a vocation”. “If I didn’t have this conviction from the moral certainty of grace, I wouldn’t dare to act like this,” he wrote.

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For some the most questions about this correspondence will be raised around the question of “what did Hendrick Houthakker think of all this?” The most passionate letters of the 70s can hardly have made comfortable reading, if he knew about them. However, Pope John Paul II made Hendrick a papal knight and employed him as an adviser on post-Soviet economics after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 – a collapse in which John Paul II played no small part.

“I come back to Pomfret every day,” the Pope wrote, when Anna-Teresa sent him pressed flowers from a garden in Vermont where they had shared some of their most treasured moments. That “every day” suggests not just the power of the love he had for Anna-Teresa, but the power of the sacrifice, and the belief that this relationship was not a diversion from the divine, but a possible way to achieving it.

She visited him in hospital on 1 April 2005. He died the following day.

Panorama: The Secret Letters of Pope John Paul II will be broadcast on BBC One at 8:30pm (GMT) tonight (15 February 2016)