Wednesday, April 06, 2005

The Polish Seminary Student and the Jewish Girl He Saved

From the New York Times, as printed in the International Herald Tribune April 6, 2005, Roger Cohen shares a family story, of how Karol Wojtyla went out of his way to help an abandoned 13-year-old stranger.

UPDATE: I goofed. I had the International Herald Tribune article as printed in the New York Times instead of the other way around as noted above. Not that this would usually make any difference, but - James Taranto, in his April 7 Best of the Web column, notes in the "Mysteries of the Times" entry that the Paris version and the New York version of this story are edited differently. For instance, the European version had "I do not know what moved this young seminarian to save the life of a lost Jewish girl."

Taranto notes:
When the New York Times proper republished Cohen's story, it changed that last sentence: "What moved this young seminarian to save the life of a lost Jewish girl cannot be known" (emphasis ours).

Hmm, could it have been his religious faith?
Sigh. The ways of the New York Times are sometimes hard to understand...

The International Herald Tribune online version is "Globalist: A personal glimpse of the pope's belief in life", and can be accessed at http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2005/04/05/news/globalist.html or through Taranto's column http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110006527 (fourth item).

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