John Paul II will be remembered as one of the outstanding popes of modern times; a pope who left a tremendous mark on the world as well as on his church.
John Paul II
The Church in action
His supreme achievement may have been to show the world that power need not come from the barrel of the gun, the coffers of a corporation, or even from the ballot box: it can come from sheer faith, and moral commitment. And by his influence on world events, John Paul II demonstrated that the Church is a church of history and can still change the world.
Critics
John Paul's critics condemned him variously as a bulldozer who stifled new thinking in theology, stamped out dissent among clergy and other religious, and who undid the decentralising policies of the second Vatican Council. His supporters replied that John Paul was a Pope who believed that both he and the Church needed to be rocks for their flock. And some added that the Pope's actions and speeches should be interpreted as the actions of a priest, not a politician.
A man of God
John Paul II was a great moral figure and a powerful, if inflexible, intellectual; during his time probably the world's most influential religious and moral teacher. Above all he was an evangelist; he went out into the world and preached the gospel of Christ, undiluted by contemporary political thinking. He challenged his audience, as one writer put it, to moral heroism, and showed the world that religion was not a spent force.
For John Paul II it was his duty to preach the truth, based on the gospel and two millennia of the teachings and experience of the Church. And while critics and journalists frequently condemned, and many ordinary Catholics simply ignored some of his teachings, they all agreed that here was a man who radiated faith, a prayerful man, a mystical man, a good man.
Background
His papacy covered times of dramatic change: it saw the fall of communism, the rise of globalism, and the growth of the 'me' generation. Catholic Christianity was undergoing radical transformation after the Second Vatican Council, when Catholics were taking a fresh look at what really mattered in their faith, and trying out new ideas of worship and ministry.
Aims
John Paul's papacy was driven by a wish to restore uniformity of belief and strong authority to the Church and to make it once again a rock on which its followers could depend. John Paul II was a fierce defender of what he perceived as Christian humanism in the face of the forces of communism, capitalism and totalitarian atheism.
For him, love was the key and he advocated uncompromisingly the need to give human beings the deepest value. And from this flowed everything. For example, his determination to restore respect for life: it was a matter of human rights, and a matter of obeying God's commandment not to kill. So he stood firm against contraception, abortion and euthanasia, and opposed the death penalty.
This was the philosophical source of his fierce anti-communism. For the Pope, communism was a tyranny that chopped down human freedom and saw people as mere resources to be used as the state saw fit; an attitude utterly intolerable to a man to whom each and every human being was an image of God.