THE JEWELER’S SHOP: A Meditation on the Sacrament of Matrimony, Passing on Occasion into a Drama

91 Pages·1992·5.851 MB·English

by  Karol Wojtyla

KAROL WOJTYLA
THE
JEWELER’S
SHOP
A Meditation on the Sacrament of Matrimony,
Passing on Occasion into a Drama
Translated from the Polish by Bole slaw Taborski
(
SAN FRANCISCO IGNATIUS PRESS
7/6?
.OH
n i)
i
Originally published in English by
Hutchinson Publishing Group. Ltd., England
© 1980 Libreria Editricc Vaticana, Vatican City
Translation © 1980 Boleslaw Taborski
All rights reserved
• lit / 7
1 •. Y'r.n M.J / *' i.
Cover by Marcia Ryan
Published 1992 Ignatius Press, San Francisco
ISBN1 978-0-89870-426-6
Library of Congress catalogue number 92-73771
Printed in the United States of America
Acknowledgments
My humble gratitude is due to the author for having
inspired me with the wish to translate his dramatic works
from the Polish original.
I am indebted to Sister Emilia Ehrlich for her com­
ments, to Mike Simpson for having looked over the text,
and to Carol O’Brien of Hutchinson, the British pub­
lisher, for her efficient help in the preparation of the
final version of this translation.
B.T.
;
I
j
CONTENTS
Introduction 9
Act I.
THE SIGNALS 21
Act II.
THE liHIDEGROOM 45
Act III.
THE CHILDREN 69
I
l Nl H O a n OLL O N

Speaking to the intellectuals and artists of his old metro­
politan Sec of Krakow during his historic journey to
Poland in June 1979, Pope John Paul II recalled that one
of the closest friends of his youth “considered the spoken
word and the theater to be my calling, but Our Lord
Jesus thought it was priesthood”. The future Pope’s con­
nections with the theater, in one w'ay or another, spanned
well over three decades, and for some of that time it
was an open question in which of the two directions
young Karol Wojtyla would go. The theater had been
his great passion since childhood in the town of Wado-
wice, where he was the star actor in numerous school
productions, some of which he also helped direct. And
it remained a passion in his student days at Krakow,
both before and during World War II, when he was a
member of three theater groups in succession.
It was in 1941 that Karol Wojtyla’s theatrical aspirations
were realized most fully. In that year he co-founded,
with Dr. Mieczyslaw Kotlarczyk (the friend recalled four
decades later in the Pope's speech), the Rhapsodic Theater,
11