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Teens and twenty-somethings from around the world are converging on Australia this month for World Youth Day. Among early photos of Karol and Agnes, two in particular would make great WYD posters. One, dated 1928, shows Agnes at eighteen, recently graduated from high school. The other, from about 1940, shows Karol, age nineteen, after a year at the university.
Among the spiritual patrons of the event are two well-known eighty-somethings of the recent past: Pope John Paul II and Blessed Mother Teresa. Their benign, wrinkled faces will undoubtedly look down from banners upon the young participants, offering unspoken encouragement and inspiration.
Will the WYD organizers perhaps also display banners of these patrons when they were young? I bet participants would be intrigued to catch sight of the just-adult Karol Wojtyla and Agnes Bojaxhiu, looking like they just stepped out of the crowd on Sydney’s Randwick Racecourse—their fresh faces expressing solidarity, as though to say, “See? We were young once. We too wanted to do great good and had to find the right path.”
Both these pictures come from the time when Agnes and Karol discovered their vocations. Agnes had just decided to become a nun; she left for…
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