In Poland, Pope Prays at Family Members’ Tomb

Pope John Paul II prayed in silence Monday at the tomb of his mother, father and brother, who all died before the future pontiff reached the age of 21.

The 77-year-old pope knelt for several minutes in Krakow’s Rakowicki cemetery, his hands clasped, gazing at the names of those he held dearest engraved on the gray and white marble crypt.

Then he rose and stood a while longer in meditation.

The pope’s mother, Emilia, died in 1929 when he was 8, leaving him devastated. When the young Karol Wojtyla was a student in the southern Polish city of Krakow in 1939, he wrote of her in his anguished poem “White Grave”: “Oh, how many years have gone by without you--how many years?”

In 1932, his brother Edmund, then a recently qualified doctor, fell victim to scarlet fever caught from a patient.

Then his retired army officer father, Karol, who brought him up, died in 1941 after two years of the Nazi occupation of their homeland during World War II.

Each of his visits to the tomb has gained in poignancy as the pope, who has had health problems in recent years, grows older.

After leaving the tomb Monday, he thanked a choir that had sung as he entered. He chatted with a group of about 20 nuns who, at a distance, had lent him the comfort of their presence during his prayers.

Later, John Paul dedicated a new heart surgery unit at a Krakow hospital named after him. “Every day I try to be close to your sufferings,” he said while visiting heart transplant patients. “I can say this because I am familiar with the experience of a hospital bed.”