"In 1978, a Polish cardinal was elected the first non-Italian Pope for nearly half a millennium." "Pope John Paul II ruled the Catholic" "Church board 27 years." "It is a church which requires its priests to be celibate." "He took a tough traditional line on marriage and divorce." "But he had a private side." "I think it is good you send to a letter by hand." "It contains things too deep for the senses eyes." "The" "Pope was writing to a married woman." "They were closed for more than three decades." "The extent of our role in the life of one of the most famous men in history has remained largely hidden." "I do believe she completely fell in love with him." "Tonight, for the first time, Panorama reveals the hundreds of letters and photos that tell the story of John Paul's 's nurse with Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka." "The scoop of the century." "Here is one of the handful of transcendentally great figures in public life the 20th century." "The head of the Catholic Church in an intense relationship with an attractive woman." "Wow!" "The letters have been hidden away in a Polish archive for years." "And part of the story is still being covered up." "Her disappearance from the scene is almost like a Soviet style, you know, robbing individuals out of the photograph and it really is quite extraordinary." "This woman's story is one that you might never have been told." "They were married in the mid-50s in California." "It is wonderfully characteristic of the date, isn't it?" "Yes, it is." "A stunning wedding dress." "Professor" "Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka was a writer and philosopher." "She grew up in" "Poland but emigrated to the United States where she married and had three children." "She died two years ago." "The Smiths became her firm friends and are her executives." "First impressions were that she was a towering intellectual." "She considered herself a very important philosopher." "There were very few women in the field of philosophy." "And she was used to getting her own way?" "Yes, she was." "No doubt about that." "In 1973, she wrote to this man." "Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, then" "Archbishop of the Polish city of Krakow, and later to become Pope" "John Paul II." "She admired a book of philosophy he had written, so she took off to Poland to meet him." "It was not unusual for her." "This was part of her character, the way she tackled everything." "That trip was the beginning of a relationship which lasted for more than 30 years." "The story is told in a huge cache of letters John Paul sent to her." "They have never been seen publicly before." "This is a picture that she had near her bed, of Cardinal Wojtyla." "In 2008, Anna Teresa decided to sell letters and they were bought by the National Library of Poland, for what we think is a seven figure sum." "Usually when a library by the really important archive about a figure of John" "Paul's Thatcher, you would expect a bit of a fanfare and the letters be put on display and made available to scholars." "These simply disappeared." "It took months, years, of digging around to track them down." "If we had not knocked on the door Poland's National Library and negotiated to see them, they might have stayed hidden for many years to come." "The letters from Cardinal Wojtyla begin on a formal note." "Deer and esteemed professor, thank you very much for the article, the three dimensions of phenomenology." "The following year, when he wrote to her from Rome, he dropped her formal title and the first her name." "Dear Teresa Anna..." "I would like to respond to four letters that I received in July." "I have kept them and brought them with me to Rome." "I am reading them again as they say meaningful and deeply personal." "Eugene Kisluk is a New" "York-based consultant who advise on the sale of the letters." "Is is the first informal letter he wrote to her." "There is certainly intimacy established here in this letter." "The tone of the letters change depending on where they were written." "Any letter cardinal Wojtyla is sent from" "Krakow was likely to be read by the secret police. 1970s Poland was a common estate and the church was the enemy." "His every step was watched." "They installed wiretaps in his flat on his telephone was bugged." "Every letter was intercepted and checked, both private and official." "Says some letters were delivered by hand, often by the nuns who work for the" "Cardinal." "He and Anna Teresa agreed to work together on a new, expanded version of his book." "They met several times a year and their correspondence became frequent." "Sometimes they wrote just after seeing each other." "I was very happy to see you yesterday." "I would like to talk to you tomorrow." "It is good we could talk on the phone before you went to America." "PF, thank you very much for yesterday." "The relationship was on to planes, one was intellectual and the other personal and very emotional." "They became very close to each other on both levels in fact and it was also very difficult for them to separate the two." "Of course the library only showed me his letters to her." "I have not seen Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka's letters." "Reading Karol Wojtyla's on their own is a bit like reading a novel with half the pages torn out." "I understand that in the summer of 1975, almost two years after they met, Anna Teresa sat down on a park bench by the city walls of Krakow and read what one can only describe as a love letter." "She said that she desired to be in his arms and remain there in happiness." "She apologised for the fact she had not yet managed to control her feelings." "On that yet is important because it means that the matter had been discussed before." "The library denies the letter exists." "His subsequent letters show the struggle to keep the relationship in" "Christian bands." "The Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein got some sense of Anna Teresa's importance in Karol Wojtyla's life when he interviewed her in the 1990s." "She batted one of his questions away." "I finally said, were you in love with the cardinal?" "She said, no, I never fell in love with the cardinal." "Two for the love with a clergyman?" "There could be no success at all." "And I said, no romantic feelings?" "She said, this question, it doesn't really apply." "How can you ask me that a silly question?" "The evidence we have now from the archive shows it was anything but a silly question." "I do believe she completely fell in love with him during the first phase of their relationship." "I think that it is completely reflected in the correspondence." "Marsha Malinowski negotiated the sale of the letters." "For her to fall in love with him is completely understandable to me." "He was handsome, powerful, on a track that was extraordinary." "He was" "Polish." "How could you not be taken with that, all that charm in one person?" "Karol Wojtyla had mixed freely with women as a teenager and a young man." "He had also formed a friendship with a psychiatrist called Wanda Poltawska, who he wrote too often until his death." "But the training for Catholic clergy when he became a priest was rigid." "The perception of even if you had a close association, friendship with a woman, this could be what was known as an occasion of sin." "And an occasion of sin was as bad as if you had actually done it." "That training meant most priests would have been wary of such a close relationship." "The most natural reaction would have been for him to terminate contact." "Because after all, the positions that they were in, he was a prince of the church." "Someone that took vows of celibacy and someone in his position would probably just draw, withdraw completely." "He did not." "Instead he later wrote to her, God gave you to me and made you my vocation." "And he let their friendship grow." "He invited Anna Teresa to join him on country walks or skiing holidays." "All documented in the new photos we have been given." "There is an element of playing with fire." "They have got a strongly heterosexual man and an attractive woman in a very intense relationship that is cultivated in which engages mind at a high level of intensity, there is danger everywhere." "There is nothing in the letters to suggest that Cardinal Wojtyla ever broke his vow of celibacy." "He was a man known for his Iron will." "But it is also clear he wanted to keep the relationship going." "It is quite fragile." "We discovered he gave Anna Teresa one of his most treasured possessions." "I suppose it is a holy relic." "Absolutely." "And item of devotional clothing known as a scapula." "It is our Lady, isn't it?" "Yes, it is." "That has to be one of the only true possession of the cardinal had to give away." "He had been given it by his father, who died when Karol Wojtyla was 20." "Thousands, possibly millions, of" "Catholics over the centuries wore it." "I did myself when I was a teenager in Ireland." "For Wojtyla, it is associated with his father." "It is a garment he wore next to his skin under his clothing, so it is a very intimate gesture." "The gift puts the strength of his attachment to Anna" "Teresa beyond doubt." "Over the years he mentions the scapula ten times." "Last year I was trying to find an answer to the words, I belong to you." "Finally, before leaving Poland, I found a scapula." "He said it allowed him to..." "Accent and feel you everywhere in all kinds of situations, whether you are close, or far away." "Anna Teresa played an important role in his public, as well as his private life." "In 1976," "Cardinal Wojtyla visited the United States for a Catholic Conference." "Anna Teresa was determined to raise his profile." "Her husband, Hendrik" "Houthakker, was a Harvard academic and heard all the right political connections." "The American cardinals Karol Wojtyla met with later helped elect him Pope." "I think her impact on his career is beyond amazing." "She was able to introduce him to all the most important people in the United" "States and I think that that was of enormous importance." "Anna Teresa invited Cardinal Wojtyla to stay with her family at their country home, outside a new England town." "It was just the sort of outdoor life the cardinal enjoyed." "She told a local journalist about the visit many years afterwards." "He was relaxing, and enjoying nature." "He was walking and sunning himself on the Meadow, picking wild berries, swimming." "The photos we have been given suggest that future Pope was at his most relaxed." "He and Anna Teresa went walking in the woods." "It appears she told him of her feelings again." "Because his letters afterwards just a man struggling to make sense of what she said in" "Christian terms." "My dear Teresa, I have received or three letters..." "You write about being torn apart but I could find no answer to these words." "The letter wrestles intensely with the meaning of the relationship." "He justifies it by telling her she is a gift from God." "If I did not have this conviction, some moral certainty of grace and of acting in obedience to it, I would not dare act like this." "Many priests deal with celibacy by forming strong attachments to women who are in some way safe, who are in stable marriages and therefore they are not going to ask for marriage, they are not going to ask that you leave the" "priesthood." "But those relationships are often exploitative of the women." "They make excessive emotional demands on the woman and they are often extremely unjust to the other partner who is being deprived of that kind of intensity with their spouse." "The work on the book went on." "She would leave her family behind several times to see him." "Some of her letters are full of intimacy." "I decided I would only answer when I am here in Rome, when I am in" "Krakow I cannot answer when I want for obvious reasons." "The telephone has the advantage that I can hear your voice but it does not last long enough so it cannot replace a letter or a real conversation." "Pope has been elected." "No one expected a Pope from outside Italy in October 19 78." "Karol Wojtyla was suddenly catapulted into one of the most high profile positions in the world." "He still found time that week to write personal letters, among them one to Anna-Teresa." "I am writing after the event so the correspondence between us should continue." "I promise I will remember everything at this new stage of my journey." "And Teresa had something different on her mind." "On the date of his election, she asked her publishers to rush out the book they had been working on." "Introduction follows." "She wanted to move forward with the book." "And it is sent to her publishers in the Netherlands." "But the Vatican mounted a legal challenge to be acting person, as the book was called." "It was not just another timid about how she changed it, it was about protecting his status." "The notion that another person had been the author of a very important document and, of all persons, a woman, would have been extraordinary and unacceptable." "The lawsuit took years and the relationship cooled." "Anna Teresa wanted the Pope to stick up for her and when he didn't she felt betrayed." "But even as he crisscrossed the world he kept sending her cards at Christmas," "Easter and Saint Teresa's Day." "In May 1981 John Paul was hit four times in an assassination attempt." "Shots were fired at the Pope and he has been seriously wounded." "Shots were fired at the Pope and he" "Anna-Teresa heard the news at home and dropped everything." "I am overwhelmed by exactness and anxiety and I want desperately to be close to you." "I arrived on Saturday." "The letters tell us she was one of the few allowed into the John Paul as he recovered from surgery." "Eventually the old warmth returned and she began visiting him again and sometimes with her children, sometimes alone." "She would be in" "Rome and he would call and say, can you come for supper." "The nuns would prepare good little dinners in his private dining room." "Did she feel the Vatican resented the way she could come in and out of his life?" "I think so, yes." "John Paul was a famously conservative Pope." "The growing number of divorces..." "The scourge of abortion..." "He also opposed relaxing the celibacy rule for priests." "But we now know he was enjoying the close companionship himself." "As he aged, he and" "Anna-Teresa continued to trade ideas on philosophy, she also sent photos from her country home in Pomfret." "More than a dozen letters look back to his time there in 1976." "I often wonder what is happening beyond the ocean in Pomfret." "I am thinking about you and in my thoughts I come to Pomfret every day." "I think he was very emotionally dependent on her for a couple of reasons." "I think his life was so isolated as he got older and he was a link and there weren't that many people who he could talk with and reminisce with, to feel as if he was a real human, not just this Pope who was in captivity." "When people think about celibacy, the Catholic clergy, they immediately think about the sexual dimension operate." "Priests who have discussed it with me to have invariably said that the issue is loneliness, the lack of relationship, they need to love somebody." "Anna-Teresa believed her role went beyond providing emotional support." "She was convinced she had a powerful influence on his thinking." "When we're talking about her influence on him philosophically, she says, as I see it, this pontificate is run by my ideas!" "Many of his other philosophical ideas, he has been if not inspired then at least incomplete agreement with me." "Stanislaw Obirek is a former Jesuit priest from John Paul's city of" "Krakow." "It is our hope." "In the way he ran the church he was actually quite dismissive of the role of women." "It is very paradoxical, she was one of many important women in his life." "He was very conservative on the doctrinal level but so liberal and open on the personal level." "The Vatican has just announced the death of his Holiness" "Pope John Paul II second." "John Paul II died in April 2005 and almost immediately the process of writing a Anna-Teresa out of history began." "Her friends sake she was at his bedside the date before he died but you won't find any mention of that in the account of his last hours." "One of the things that the Catholic Church most fears is scandal." "The idea that the Pope had a woman friend must have been appalling to his entourage and I would think they would have been very glad to bundle her out of sight at the first opportunity." "As" "Anna-Teresa disappeared, the pressure built to give John Paul and even more elevated status." "At his funeral, thousands chanted santo subito, sainthood now." "John Paul's sainthood was pushed for by this man." "Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz was his secretary for 40 years." "The photos and letters shown he witnessed their relationship at first hand." "But she is not mentioned at all in his biography of the Pope." "Like John Paul, he became the Archbishop of Krakow." "His authority and personal stature are intimately connected with John Paul" "II so he has to keep this relationship going in the public mind." "He and Polish bishops put pressure on the Vatican." "He said that he felt that in this case, because his sanctity was so obvious, it might be possible to go straight for canonisation so it was a kind of ecclesiastical version of what you might call pester power." "The Vatican department called the Congregation for the Causes of Saints decide who is a saint." "The process as traditionally lasted decades or even centuries." "John Paul's was completed in just nine years, the fastest in modern times." "Anna-Teresa sold her letters in 2008, when the process was well underway." "What was that decision based on?" "She wanted to make sure there was necessary funding for her family." "How did the church hierarchy react?" "I think they were quite upset and she did receive a very disturbing phone call from one of the Pope's most ardent and closest supporters and he castigated her on the phone." "This was someone she considered a friend and it was very upsetting for her." "There is a question over whether the letters were seen by those responsible for John Paul's canonisation as they certainly should have been because they went straight from Anna-Teresa to the National Library in Warsaw where they were kept under lock and key." "The Vatican was coy when we asked, the man in charge of the canonisation would only say it was up to individual Catholics to decide whether to send in documents and said that, "All our duties were done." The National Library of" "Poland would not say anything at all when asked if the letters had been sent to the Vatican so there is no confirmation they were examined before he became a saint." "Had they been known about, I think they would have presented a problem for the canonisation process and might well have meant it was halted." "I don't think they would have been a long-term barrier, I think they would have made a difference to the speed which was unseemly in my view." "The National Library of Poland dispute this was a unique relationship." "They say it was one of many warm friendships the Pope enjoys in his life so why does one piece of this story remain buried?" "Anna-Teresa's letters to John Paul." "I had assumed that all the letters in the archive here in the National" "Library in Warsaw were Karol Wojtyla's letters to Anna-Teresa" "Tymieniecka and that hers to him were lost but they were in fact included" "What is actually over the is or should be a full set of the correspondence, both sides of it." "But John Paul told Anna-Teresa that part of her letters were like pearls worthy of being published so we asked several times to see them." "The Polish National Library board the copyright for them but won't tell us where they are and threatened to sue us if we so much as quoted them." "To criticise today" "Holy John Paul II is almost unthinkable." "Stanislaw Obirek's experience may help explain that sensitivity." "He was silenced by the church in Poland after he criticised John Paul mildly at the time of his death." "The newly elected government in Poland is also nationalist and pro-Catholic." "Do you think things have changed?" "I would say yes, it's worse now." "After ten years we have canonisation of John Paul second and a kind of euphoria around the Polish politicians." "And most Polish people are unwilling to say any critical words about him." "We have hit a wall of silence." "We wanted to know exactly how much public money was spent on the letters." "The President's office helped negotiate the purchase but they did not want to be interviewed." "We also wanted to speak to Cardinal Dziwisz about the sale but he would not talk either." "You can certainly understand the concern of the church and a bunch of grubby journalists like us rooting around in his stuff." "When Carl" "Bernstein interviewed Anna-Teresa 20 years ago, she told him he was keeping John Paul's letters to her, she would not let him see them but even then she feared the story they tell might be lost." "She wanted their existence known, she wanted them kept safe, she told me about her fears that somebody might try to steal them." "I have no doubt she would want the archive to be published one day, and to attract the interest of scholars and philosophers." "Her letters of cores are still hidden but now there is bound to be pressure to make everything public." "His still tell eight compelling story." "He was such an intensely vibrant human being, in a sense what is rather in awe of the self-discipline he evidently brought to the relationship." "We are talking about Saint John Paul." "This is an extraordinary relationship, it is out of the ordinary in the papal context." "It is not elicit." "Nonetheless, it is fascinating, it changes our perception of him." "Far from being written out of history, Anna-Teresa is now rewriting it from beyond the grave."