Ian Traynor, central Europe correspondent
Saturday December 10, 2005
The Guardian
The two rooms and a kitchen in southern Poland where Karol Wojtyla was born in 1920 is now a shrine to the memory of the late Pope John Paul II, visited by up to 5,000 pilgrims every day.
The property, owned by the heirs of a local Jewish family living in the US, is also now the target of a discreet bidding war pitting the Archbishop of Krakow, the pontiff's former confidante, against Polish and American Jewish organisations.
The owners of the 19th century house in a little street behind the basilica in the southern town of Wadowice want to sell the property and expect it to fetch $1m (£600,000) for the place that the Wojtyla family rented. John Paul was born in the house in May 1920 and lived there until he moved to Krakow at the age of 18.
The new Archbishop of Krakow, Stanislaw Dziwisz, John Paul's private secretary until his death, has let it be known that the archdiocese wants to buy the house, but is balking at the vendor's price, about four times the price of a similar property in the town. "A shocking price," Stanislaw Kotarba of the Wadowice council told the Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/religion/Story/0,2763,1664229,00.html
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