Pope John Paul II

Pope John Paul II, Karol Wojtyla, was a Polish actor, labourer and priest under the Nazi and Communist occupations, a professor of ethics at Lublin, and archbishop of Cracow before his election in 1978 as the first non-Italian pope in four centuries. His visits to Poland helped end Communism there; his travels, writings and canonisations remade the papacy. Veritatis Splendor of 1993 is the encyclical on moral theology, defending the existence of intrinsically evil acts and the objectivity of the moral law against proportionalism and relativism, with Aquinas as its guide. The Thomist colleges assign it beside the Summa.