UNITED KINGDOM
Daily Mail
By ALEXANDER ROBERTSON FOR MAILONLINE
A BBC documentary will explore the possibility that Pope John Paul II fell in love with a married Polish-American academic.
The latest Panorama programme will delve into the late Pope’s relationship with women and is thought to have discovered a stack of letters sent between him and Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka.
Tymieniecka worked with the Pontiff in the 1970s, when he was still known as Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, on his philosophical treatise The Acting Person.
Monday night’s show will investigate claims the Pope and Tymieniecka engaged in a four-year correspondence during the period in which they were working together on the book, when they were both in their fifties.
Tymieniecka, a philosopher and academic, was born into an aristocratic Polish family before later marrying a Harvard professor in 1995, but remained close to the Pope up until his death in 2005.
It is understood that the show will not make the claim that the Pope ever breached his vow of celibacy nor make any firm statements about his relationship with the academic, who died in 2014.
Carl Bernstein, a journalist who wrote a John Paul II biography, conducted interviews with Tymienecka, in which she denied any romantic involvement with the Pope.
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