Two people fall in love. Intensely. They exchange hundreds of passionate letters over more than 30 years. Create time to be with each other. They break the barriers of distance and busy schedules to meet. Undertake projects of professional mutual interest. Risk deep personal commitments. Go camping, even. Take photographs together. What started off as a chance encounter is now a roaring fire consuming both. Deep inside they feel inseparable.

But their yearning for each other cannot go all the way – or so we are told. It is desperate pain. She says she is “being torn apart”. At some point the couple even questions the exact nature of this relationship. The problem? The man, Karol Wojtyla, is a senior priest of the Roman Catholic Church, a cardinal, who is sworn to life-long celibacy. The woman, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, is someone’s wife. Reads like fiction.

Somehow, they keep going.

The man would later become Pope John Paul II. “The photographs which have never been seen before by the public reveal Karol Wojyla at his most relaxed. He invited Ms Tymieniecka to join him on country walks and skiing holidays – she even joined him on a group camping trip. The pictures also show her visiting him at the Vatican,” the BBC reports.

A few years after his death, John Paul II is officially proclaimed a saint. Among the last people to see him on his deathbed is this woman he deeply loved, whose letters he described as “so meaningful and deeply personal”.

Tymieniecka later makes a small fortune from selling the pope’s passionate letters and their pictures to the National Library of Poland, which keeps them in a secret archive. She probably wanted the relationship to come to light some time in future. Or what exactly did she intend by selling the letters and pictures to a public library? Why did she want them kept for posterity? Why didn't she hand them over to the Vatican? Or destroy them?

This incredible man-bites-dog story hit international headlines this week after the BBC aired a programme about the letters and pictures. The coverage, although quite suggestive, was careful to state upfront that Saint Pope John Paul II did not break his vow of celibacy throughout the affair. Which in plain English means the two did not have sex.

Predictably, the Vatican has come out to deny the existence of any special relationship between the pope (himself Polish) and the Polish-American woman philosopher Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka.

Well, even after the woman writes to the pope that “I belong to you”, evidently causing the pontiff considerable anguish; or when the pope confesses in one of the letters that “I accept and feel you everywhere in all kinds of situations, when you are close and when you are far away”, the Roman Catholic Church could not possibly allow the world to begin to imagine that the wildly adored megastar pontiff and saint in fact had an affair with a married woman.

Instead, the Vatican, quite typically, has denied any suggestion of scandal, dismissing the BBC programme as “more smoke than fire”. Obviously the church will in due course latch on to the emerging narrative that adorns the pope’s affair in rather glittering spiritual robes. He had many close friends, this narrative goes, and Tymieniecka was just one of them.

In other circumstances, say involving some African priest in a dusty rural parish, or one of those “prophets” and “apostles” sprouting in every corner of town every day, there would be no doubt in anyone’s mind about the nature of the relationship between the two.

And of course the Vatican - and its representatives around the world - wouldn't bother to speak out in defense of such a priest. In 2007 when Robert Mugabe’s sleuths launched a sting operation that caught Archbishop Pius Ncube of Bulawayo, a charismatic and fearless Mugabe critic, pants down with his secretary, the wife of a railway worker, the Vatican went mute.

But here we are talking about the celebrity pope, Saint John Paul II. It must not be allowed to pass in the public imagination, even for a moment, that he was anything other than saintly. Saint John Paul II was a sexual human being like any of us, who embraced his sexuality by offering it to Christ and the Church as an unbidden personal sacrifice of love. That is going to be the standard Catholic line around the globe.

Many Catholics and of course other admirers of John Paul II would have no problem with the Vatican’s spiritualization of the Tymieniecka affair. But on second thought, the claim that Pope John Paul II kept his vow of celibacy in the course of an intensely intimate relationship is neither here nor there.

First, the mere fact of lack evidence of sexual activity between the two does not necessarily mean there was actually no sex. As we now know from the crimes against humanity cases at the International Criminal Court against Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto of Kenya, evidence of wrongdoing implicating the high and mighty can only be safe if it is God Almighty himself standing in the witness box. Otherwise evidence can be made to disappear.

Second, everyone – even the Vatican – knows that a passionate relationship between a man and a woman, to the extent revealed in the letters and pictures of John Paul II and his friend, doesn't have to involve sex to qualify as an affair. To insist that sex (in the traditional sense) must be involved is too legalistic, reductionist and unconvincing. Moreover, people in the 21st century accept that sexual activity can take many forms.

Suppose it was an ordinary married man who was involved so intensely with another man’s wife, would he be able to convince anyone that their love letters and pictures were not evidence of an affair? Would any Catholic priest or bishop accept such an explanation?

Would the Roman Catholic Church now tell its faithful that it is okay for a priest to be in this kind of relationship with someone’s wife? Would it be okay for a nun to have such a relationship as well? Can anyone in all sincerity advice a married woman or a celibate priest or a nun to engage in the kind of relationship that existed between Saint Pope John Paul II and Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka as revealed in the pictures and letters?

And third, did Tymieniecka update her husband on the details of her relationship with the pope? As a good Catholic wife she would be expected to do so. This was after all a deep, life-changing experience for her. Why would she keep it clandestine? Did the man ever see the pope’s letters to his wife? Or hers to him? And the photos? What did he think of them? What did Saint Pope John Paul II think about Tymieniecka’s husband? Did they by any chance talk about him?

Could this woman Tymieniecka – and this affair - be the unacknowledged (and unacknowledgeable) inspiration for Saint Pope John Paul II’s puzzling preoccupation with human sexuality in an uninterrupted series of 129 public sermons during the first five years of his papacy, now christened “theology of the body”?

We may never know the answers to these and similar questions. What we do know for certain, however, is that far more innocuous phone text messages or emails have wreaked havoc in many marriages where the men and women concerned have no lofty religious credentials . The kind of correspondence exchanged between Saint Pope John Paul II and his woman would get any husband a divorce anywhere. In fact, such exchanges would be good grounds for filing for a divorce from a marriage tribunal of the Roman Catholic Church itself.

One more thing: Saint Pope John Paul II’s 26-year reign was marred by the horrendous crisis of clerical sex scandals that hit the global Catholic Church like a tornado. It turned out, to the complete amazement of the world, that numerous cases of sex scandals reported to the Catholic headquarters were systematically covered up. Consequently, cover-up became the routine response of Catholic officialdom all the way down to the remotest parish and church-run school or health centre. Could Saint Pope John Paul himself have benefited from this systematic cover-up?

A particular case stands out. One of Saint Pope John Paul II’s closest and long-time friends was the notorious Mexican priest, Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the wealthy and very influential Catholic organization called the Legionaries of Christ which has heavy investments in education and media, among other things. Newsweek has described Maciel as being “the greatest fundraiser for the postwar Catholic Church and equally its greatest criminal.”

Maciel died a disgraced man after numerous investigations revealed him to be a perverted man who was involved in affairs with several women, raped teenage seminarians in the course of decades and sexually abused some of the children he sired with his women!

As was the practice in Catholic officialdom, Saint Pope John Paul II who received fat cheques from Maciel, hosted him several times at the Vatican and openly praised his work, completely turned a deaf ear to all accusations, some detailed in church reports, against the high-profile criminal priest.

There is that saying about tell me your friends and I will tell you who you are - or words to that effect. Maybe that wisdom doesn't apply where religious elites are concerned?

So, what? It seems in all likelihood that Saint Pope John Paul II had an illicit love affair spanning three decades with a married woman, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. How do we know? One, from their secret letters and photographs. And two, the Vatican has denied it.

* Henry Makori is an editor with Pambazuka News. He is a former Catholic journalist.

* THE VIEWS OF THE ABOVE ARTICLE ARE THOSE OF THE AUTHOR AND DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEWS OF THE PAMBAZUKA NEWS EDITORIAL TEAM

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