The Vatican has distanced itself from an upcoming BBC Panorama documentary that is expected to examine the relationship between Pope John Paul II and a US academic, with a source describing its content as being “more smoke than fire”.
The Secret Letters of Pope John Paul II, due to be aired on Monday, is expected to detail the late pontiff’s relationship with Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, a Polish-born American philosopher.
Tymieniecka worked on the English translation of one of the pope’s books, The Acting Person, which was written while he was the bishop of Krakow. The project is said to have sparked a four-year personal correspondence and speculation that the two may have fallen in love.
From an aristocratic Polish family, Tymieniecka was described by the author John Cornwell as being “sexually attractive, subtle, with great force of character”.
“She spent hundreds of hours with him, sometimes with his secretary present, but often alone,” Cornwell wrote in his book, The Pope in Winter: The Dark Face of John Paul II’s Papacy.
In her 50s at the time of her acquaintance with John Paul II, Tymieniecka was married to the Harvard professor Hendrick S Houthakker, who was honoured by the pope in 2003 for advising him on economic policy.
She has denied being romantically involved with the pontiff and, despite having praised him, she criticised his views of love.
“To have written about love and sex is to know very little about it. I was truly astounded when I read Love and Responsibility,” she said of one of his early works. “I thought he obviously does not know what he is talking about.”
The BBC investigation, which will reveal previously unseen letters from John Paul II, who was the pope for nearly 27 years until his death in 2005, has been dismissed by the Vatican.
“It was known that he was friendly with Tymieniecka and Poltawska,” a Vatican official told the Guardian, referring to a second Polish woman who may feature in the programme. Wanda Poltawska published a 2009 memoir which included detailed correspondence between herself and John Paul II, to whom she was considered a close confidante.
“[Poltawska] became a perfect consultant for problems of family and sexuality which Wojtyla considered some of the most urgent that the church of his time needed to address,” according to an article in the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, in 2011.
The BBC programme is not expected to allege that either woman had a physical relationship with John Paul II, who was fast-tracked to sainthood in 2011.
