While studying for the priesthood in Rome, I met Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński, the Primate of Poland, who introduced me in 1972 to Cardinal Karol Wojtyła of Kraków. Unlike most of the seminarians with whom I lived at the North American College who were unfamiliar with Eastern European history, both Wyszyński and Wojtyła were conscious of the fact that I was the second cousin of Władisław Gomułka, the de facto ruler of Poland from 1956 to 1970.
In 1976, two years following my ordination and two years before his papal election on October 16, 1978, Cardinal Wojtyła traveled to the small town of Pomfret, Vermont, to visit Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, a Polish philosopher and scholar, her husband, Hendrik Houthakker, and their three children. Tymieniecka wrote to Wojtyła in 1973 about undertaking an English translation of his philosophical treatise Osoba i czyn (The Acting Person). For more than three decades, Wojtyła and Tymieniecka corresponded until Pope John Paul II died on April 2, 2005. Tymieniecka died on June 7, 2014, two months after her close friend was canonized on April 27, 2014.
While letters that Pope John Paul II wrote to Tymieniecka, purchased by the National Library of Poland for $3.1 million (11 million Polish złoty), were examined and reported on by the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) in 2016, the letters that Tymieniecka wrote to the Pope were only made available recently to investigative reporters Marcin Gutowski and Szymon Żyśko. The content of the letters was discussed on a Black on White (Czarno na Białym) podcast in their TVN24 production, “Over 30 years of correspondence between John Paul II and Anna Teresa Tymieniecka” (Ponad 30 lat korespondencji między Janem Pawłem II a Anną Teresą Tymieniecką). Despite astounding revelations uncovered in Tymieniecka’s letters to the Pope, no U.S. mainstream or Catholic media outlet has yet to report on this hidden treasure.
Media failure to report on the contents of the letters, which address the 2002 sex abuse scandal and characters like Cardinals Bernard Law and Theodore McCarrick, is similar to the U.S. media cover-up of French investigative journalist Martin Boudot’s work, Sex Abuse in the Church: Code of Silence. In his 2017 documentary, Boudot showed how Pope Francis, when he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires, covered up countless sex abuse cases and failed in his attempt to get the Appellate Court judges to overturn the 15-year prison sentence of Father Julio César Grassi, a convicted ephebophile priest.
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