Analysis I wrote on the death of John Paul II in 2005

1. THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
Sunday
4/3/2005
Edition: Home Final
Section: NEWS - Insight
Page: 3B
JOHN PAUL II 1920 – 2005
AN EXTRAORDINARY LIFE, A UNIFYING
LEGACY; JOHN PAUL II SAW HIS TASK AS THE
RESTORATION OF THE CHURCH'S
DISCIPLINE, VIGOR AND PURPOSE.
Byline: Glenn Sheller
A great light has gone out.
Yesterday, in his Vatican chambers, Karol Wojtyla, Pope John Paul II, drew
his last breath and departed.
The man who survived Nazi murderers, Stalinist oppression and an
assassin's bullet finally succumbed to old age at 84. His death ended
nearly six decades years of tireless service to the Roman Catholic Church
and in defense of human rights and the sanctity of each life. He spent 26 of
those years as pope, one of the longest Vatican reigns.
To believers, of course, there is no question that God's hand took a boy
born in 1920 in an obscure town in Poland and led him to the Throne of
Peter, whence he shook the world.
But even nonbelievers may wonder whether there was something more
than chance in the unlikely rise of Karol Wojtyla.

2. Indeed, circumstances seemed stacked against the boy's very survival.
Death approached him early and often, taking his mother just before his
ninth birthday, his beloved older brother when Karol was 12, his father
when the future pope was just 20.
He survived the German occupation of Poland under the barbarous Nazi
proconsul Hans Frank, who not only supervised the murder of Eastern
Europe's Jews -- among them some of Wojtyla's childhood playmates -- but
whose harsh rule was intended to work and starve the remainder of the
Polish nation out of existence.
This regime of terror included the torture and murder of hundreds of
Catholic priests and seminary students. This was because the Polish
Catholic Church was seen as the repository of Polish culture and identity,
which the Nazis and, later, the communists sought to obliterate. (Frank,
condemned to death by the victorious Allies, repented abjectly and
converted to the church he had persecuted shortly before his execution.)
In this nightmare world, Wojtyla risked death by undertaking clandestine
seminary studies proscribed by the Nazis. Still, it was not the Nazi SS or
Gestapo that came closest to killing him, but a German truck that
obliviously ran him down in a Krakow street in 1944, putting him into the
hospital for two weeks.
But Wojtyla survived, becoming a priest in 1946, a bishop 12 years later,
and then archbishop of Krakow in 1964. In 1967, in the Vatican's Sistine
Chapel, Karol Wojtyla was consecrated a cardinal by Pope Paul VI. Eleven
years later, he would be elected pope himself, taking the name John Paul
II.
Perhaps no pope has assumed office with a more intimate knowledge of
the human capacity for evil. John Paul II lived in and survived two of
history's greatest tyrannies, and what he saw and learned in those years
profoundly shaped his papacy. Nazism and communism demonstrated
what a hell humankind makes of Earth when the divinity that dwells in each
individual is ignored or denied.
It was this understanding that gave John Paul II the great weapon in his
long battle against Poland's communist rulers and their Kremlin masters.
Against their atheism and collectivism, John Paul II insisted on the unique

3. worth of each individual and the right of each man and woman to exercise
the freedom necessary to seek God and to live in a godly way.
In opposition to the communist view of history as a mechanism driven by
class struggle and impersonal economic forces, the pope reminded the
captive peoples behind the Iron Curtain that an intellect greater than that of
Karl Marx has marked out the path of human destiny.
To millions beaten down by 40 years of communism, these papal
assertions of individual worth and higher purpose were electrifying. "Be not
afraid!" -- one of his earliest messages as pope -- resonated everywhere
around the world but nowhere more than in Eastern Europe. In little more
than a decade, those millions would reclaim their dignity and throw off their
chains.
But the pope's opposition to communism was not merely political, as some
have tried to portray it, but theological. While John Paul II made it clear that
he favored Western democracy, it is primarily because it is a system that
has done the most to preserve religious freedom, which was the pontiff's
first demand of any governing system.
Yet, there are other aspects of Western societies that the pope opposed as
vigorously as he had communism. Freedom has made the West
prosperous and comfortable, leading to a culture in which selfish pursuit of
gratification threatens to crowd out all other values. Human beings are
more than a collection of appetites, and life's purpose is far greater than the
mere gratification of those hungers, the pope repeatedly warned.
He also condemned what the church has called the West's "culture of
death," a gradual desanctification of human life through legalized abortion,
physician-assisted suicide and continued agitation for euthanasia.
In 1994, the pope helped rally anti-abortion opinion around the world to
head off an attempt to enshrine abortion as a U.N.-recognized right at the
international population conference in Cairo. More recently, the pontiff
unsuccessfully lobbied President Bush to ban U.S. government support for
embryonic stem-cell research because it entails destruction of human life in
its earliest stage.
Not surprisingly, these stands earned John Paul II enemies. Feminists

4. targeted him early for his opposition to abortion, his reinforcement of
Vatican prohibitions against artificial birth control and his refusal to approve
the ordination of women. Despite the serious theological bases of these
stands, and the pope's longstanding defense of women's rights and dignity
in the secular realm, such critics preferred simply to tar him as a
misogynist.
Criticisms were being made within the church, as well, from dissidents such
as German theologian Hans Kung, who assailed the pope and papal
authority on a range of issues, prompting the Vatican to withdraw Kung's
certification to teach Catholic theology. Among the laity, American and
Dutch Catholics, in particular, were known for open defiance of church
teaching against contraception, abortion and extramarital sex.
In Latin America, the pope moved decisively against the movement called
liberation theology, which viewed the Gospel through a Marxist lens,
symbolically replacing Christ's crown of thorns with Che Guevara's
revolutionary beret. Adherents of this movement frequently sided with leftist
guerrilla movements, in essence allying the church with the very Marxist
philosophy and violence that had oppressed Eastern Europe for so long.
Though cast by his detractors as authoritarian bullying, the pope's effort to
curb the most extreme forms of dissent sprang from a far different motive
and agenda.
When he was elected pope, many felt the church was beset by drift and
uncertainty. Papal authority was weakened and under attack. Secular
culture had seduced many away from church teachings on sexual morality
and produced pressure for those teachings to be rewritten to conform to
contemporary moral fashion.
In short, the church was divided and unsure of its message and mission.
John Paul II saw his task as the restoration of the church's discipline, vigor
and purpose. Fundamental church doctrines would be reasserted, the
leadership role of the papacy would be restored, and those church leaders
and thinkers who were unwilling to support the pope's program would be
sidelined.
The point of this was to prepare the church spiritually and organizationally

5. for the challenges of its third millennium. In many respects, John Paul II
sought to square the accounts from the previous 2,000 years, in order to
free the church to enter the new era shorn of past sins and, to the extent
possible, reconciled with those who held grievances against Catholicism.
Thus, the pontiff offered apologies to the Jews for the church's role in their
long centuries of persecution and tried to bridge a 1,000-year-old schism
with the Eastern Orthodox Church, while continuing dialogue with
Protestantism and Islam. He was an ardent champion of religious freedom,
not only for his church but for all faiths.
John Paul II also vastly expanded the work of Pope Paul VI, who had
undertaken important initiatives to recognize and honor the Catholic faithful
in the Third World in the 1960s and '70s. John Paul II understood that the
church, with nearly a billion Catholics worldwide, had long ceased to be an
essentially European phenomenon and was no longer even strictly a
Western one.
Instead, it had become a global community that embraced myriad cultures
and histories. By making more than 100 major foreign excursions, John
Paul II pried the papacy loose from St. Peter's Square and carried it to the
most distant parts of this vast spiritual realm.
It was in these travels that the answer to the pope's critics was found.
Virtually everywhere he went, he was greeted by hundreds of thousands
who adored this man, who not only cared enough to visit the remotest
corner of the world to worship with them but often did so in their own
language. As he had in Poland, he spoke out powerfully for freedom,
human dignity and justice wherever he traveled.
In Havana in January 1998, a million Cubans -- half the population of the
city and nearly a tenth of the island's inhabitants -- turned out for a papal
Mass and chanted, "Libertad! Libertad!"
These same multitudes now mourn his passing.
Though his life was extraordinary and his works prodigious, it may be too
soon to call him great. That judgment will come as time reveals the lasting
mark of his tenure. But certainly he was a towering figure of the 20th
century, and if any recent popes approach greatness, John Paul II must be

6. counted among them.
gsheller@dispatch.com