"I had not yet made my First Communion when I lost my mother: I was barely nine years old. So I do not have a clear awareness of her contribution which must have been great, to my religious training... Day after day I was able to observe the austere way in which [my father] lived... Sometimes I would wake up during the night and find my father on his knees, just as I would always see him kneeling in the parish church."
(John Paul II, Gift and Mystery, p 20)
