„Totus Tuus” by Saint John Paul II. From Theological Depth to Iconographical Mystification

Abstract

The life motto of Karol Wojtyła – of the Pope St John Paul II – was contained in two words: Totus Tuus. They were derived from the work dating back to the 18th century and published in 1843: Treatise on True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary by St Louis Marie Grignion de Montfort. The choice of such a life’s motto was expressing the total and limitless offering of the exceptional follower to the Mother of God, also being an expression of his living, concrete, overwhelming and all-encompassing faith. This very motto has inspired Izabela Delekta-Wicińska, a Cracovian artist, to paint – in the year 1984 – a unique picture Totus Tuus, which gained enormous popularity in the whole world, thus becoming an object of fraud in respect of piety. Even though the artist held that she was inspired by an exceptional embrace of John Paul II and Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński on the day of inauguration of the pontifi of the Polish Pope, a photograph of the Totus Tuus painting was circulated in the entire Christian world as a miraculous picture of Pope John Paul II that was taken accidentally. In the early 1990s one of the then most pre-eminent mariologists, Rev. René Laurentin, was interested in the matter. Even as late as in the 2018 the www.infovaticana.com website explained that the Totus Tuus depiction is not a miraculous photography of the St. John Paul II but a painterly vision of the Cracovian artist, Izabela Delekta-Wicińska.