Well, well, well. The Holy Father obviously didn’t spend all his time paging through the Bible. First, it is revealed that he was a dedicated paddler (see here). And now, according to a hilarious article by Lisa Anne Auerbach on Outside Online, we come to find that His Papal Hugeness was also a demon on skis. Here’s just the intro:
I’m snooping around the pope’s old bedroom in Kraków, Poland, checking out the gouges on his skis. I confess: I’ve been in a lot of bro-dorms, but none nearly as holy. Usually the decor consists of empty beer cans, a PlayStation, and smelly Capilene underwear. But in the tidy one-room pope pad—now part of the Archdiocesan Museum, located near Wawel Royal Cathedral, where Father Karol Wojtyla hung his skullcap from 1952 to 1958—there’s a dainty caf table, three chairs, a neat bunk with purple cushions, and an armoire filled with colorful priestly garb.
But right now I’m more interested in the two pairs of skis leaning in the corner. One’s an old hickory set with spring bindings and pointy tips, the kind you see hanging over bars in ski towns. The others, retired more recently, are 195-centimeter Head Pros with Tyrolia bindings. I can’t help myself—I have to touch them. The undersides are grooved with deep cuts and scratches. The skis don’t quite qualify as sacred relics, but they do serve notice that when he got away from it all, up in the mountains, Father Wojtyla wasn’t just sticking to the corduroy and cruising the green runs, like Gerald Ford at Beaver Creek. No—he skied over rocks! He was out there, off-piste. The man who became pope in 1978 might, in fact, have been a badass. As I clutch the skis, the docent stares, then quietly reminds me not to take a photograph.
Take the time to read the entire piece. You’ll laugh, you’ll snort, you’ll never think of ol’ JP II in the same way. Then say 100 Hail Mary’s for wasting time at work…
“And these were the blessed boots the Holy Helicopterer used for some monster hucks. They were no good for walking on water, though…”
The Earthist Chronicles 