Pope John Paul II had an intense relationship with a married woman lasting more than 30 years, according to a BBC documentary that has seen hundreds of letters the late pope wrote to her.
There is no suggestion in the letters to Polish-born American philosopher Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka that the pope, who was declared a saint two years ago, broke his vow of celibacy. But there are indications that Ms Tymieniecka may have told him during the 1970s that she was in love with him.
The Vatican has dismissed the Panorama documentary, to be broadcast on Monday evening on BBC One, as "more smoke than fire", but the fact of the friendship has long been publicly known, even if its intensity and longevity was not. The programme is based on more than 350 letters Pope John Paul wrote to Ms Tymieniecka between 1973, when he was archbishop of Krakow, and a few months before he died in 2005.
Their friendship began when she contacted him about a book on philosophy he had written and travelled from the United States to Poland to discuss it with him. They started corresponding soon afterwards and agreed to collaborate on a revised version of the book, a project that meant they spent more time together. The future pope invited the philosopher to accompany him on skiing holidays and country walks and on a visit to the US in 1976, he stayed with her and her family.
Around this time, Ms Tymieniecka appears to have made some declaration about her feelings to him and the future pope gave her a present of a scapular, which had been given to him by his father.
“Already last year I was looking for an answer to these words, ‘I belong to you’, and finally, before leaving Poland, I found a way – a scapular. The dimension in which I accept and feel you everywhere in all kinds of situations, when you are close, and when you are far away,” he wrote to her in September 1976.
Elsewhere, he describes her as “a gift from God” but appears to be aware of a potential danger surrounding their friendship.
"If I did not have this conviction, some moral certainty of Grace, and of acting in obedience to it, I would not dare act like this," he writes.
When he became pope in 1978, he told Ms Tymieniecka that he wanted their correspondence to continue and along with it “the exchange of ideas, which I have always thought to be so creative and fruitful”. They remained in touch to the very end of the pope’s life and Ms Tymieniecka visited him the day before he died in April 2005.
Three years later, she sold their letters and some photographs to the National Library of Poland but they have never been put on public display and the BBC was given access only to the pope’s side of the correspondence. The library said that Pope John Paul’s relationship with Ms Tymieniecka was no more than one of many friendships he had throughout his life.
