/ 7 April 2005

Polish triplets named after pope

The parents of newborn Polish triplets — all boys — have named their sons Jan, Pawel and Karol, in homage to Pope John Paul II, the babies’ father said on Thursday.

”At this very special time, we wanted to pay homage to the pope, and we thought our sons would be happy to have these first names,” Janusz Adamiec said by telephone from the town of Bytom, in southern Poland.

Pope John Paul II — Jan Pawel II in Polish — was born Karol Wojtyla in the southern Polish town of Wadowice on May 18 1920. He died at the Vatican on Saturday April 2.

”The boys were born Wednesday between 11.14am and 11.16am in the clinic in Bytom. The three boys and their mother are doing fine,” said obstetrician Grzegorz Manka.

On Monday, meanwhile, a boy was born in an ambulance outside the bishops’ palace in Krakow, where Cardinal Karol Wojtyla lived from 1963 until he was elected pope in 1978. One of his given names is Karol, Poland’s PAP news agency said.

In that instance, too, mother and baby are doing fine, doctors said. — Sapa-AFP