Apr. 16 (CWNews.com) - When he died on April 2, Pope John Paul II (bio - news) had served on the throne of St. Peter for 26 years, 5 months, and 17 days-- the 3rd-longest tenure of any Roman Pontiff. The 264th Pope had a profound influence on the history of the 20th century and the opening of the 3rd millennium of Christianity.

The first non-Italian Pope since 1523, and the first Polish Pope in history, was elected on October 16, 1978. From the time of his initial appearance on the balcony of St. Peter's Basilica, and his first words to the faithful-- "Be not afraid!"-- he captivated the world. With his youth (he was 58 at the time of election), his enormous energy, and his instinctive flair for drama, he embodied an entirely new phenomenon: a Roman Pontiff who was also a media superstar.

The young Polish Pontiff was also a man of remarkable and varied talents. He was an athlete, who continued to ski, hike, swim, and play tennis for years after his election to the pontificate. He was a polyglot, and would continue to gain fluency in new languages as the years passed. He was a trained and respected philosopher and theologian. He was a man of the theater, and a poet who continued to write verse in his sparse free time.

John Paul II introduced the world to a new manner of "being Pope." Through his many pastoral voyages, he multiplied his direct contacts with the faithful, and particularly with young people, with whom he developed a particularly intense personal bond. He routinely drew crowds numbering in the hundreds of thousands-- on several occasions, in the millions-- to events such as World Youth Day. Keenly aware of the influential role played by the modern media, and quite at ease with the press, he interacted regularly and comfortably with reporters. One such exchange, extended over a lengthy period of time, gave rise to his best-selling book-length interview with the Italian journalist Vittorio Messori, Crossing the Threshold of Hope.

The defender of human rights

In January 1979, three months after his election, John Paul II left Italy for a trip to Mexico, where he participated in the third general congregation of the Latin American bishops' conference, CELAM. The millions of people who saw him there soon recognized that the new Pope was determined to address the needs of the poor and vulnerable. "The Pope wants to be your voice," he told Indian tribes, while he berated the political leaders who allowed "unproductive land to withhold the bread that is needed by so many families." The sharp social and economic inequalities of Latin American society, he said, were "not just not human, not Christian." At the same time, the Pope cautioned against the Marxist undercurrents of liberation theology, and insisted that priests and religious should not be involved in partisan politics.

The papal discourse to the Latin American bishops at Puebla set the tone for a campaign for human rights that continued throughout his pontificate. During his 104 foreign trips and in his 14 encyclicals, John Paul II stressed that the cause of human rights cannot be separated from the cause of faith, since the fundamental basis for all human rights is the dignity of the human person, who is created in the image of God and offered the glory of brotherhood with Jesus Christ.

Sometimes the Pope's defense of human rights had profound political consequences. In June 1980, one year after his first papal visit to his native Poland, workers in the shipyards at Gdansk began a strike against the Polish Communist regime. In January 1981, the Pontiff received the leader of the workers, Lech Walesa, at the Vatican-- thus signaling his approval of the nascent Solidarity movement. During his own trips to Poland, the Pope became the focus of public discontent with the government, and his addresses to the vast crowds there-- in which he audaciously encouraged the people to continue their non-violent quest for freedom-- shook the foundations of the Polish regime. It was the Pope's vast success in rallying opposition to Communism, no doubt, that prompted worried leaders of the Soviet empire to plot his assassination.

Although his confrontations with the Polish regime are memorable, and his role in the collapse of Communism will certainly be credited by historians among his greatest achievements, John Paul II was equally vigorous in condemning human-rights abuses in other parts of the world. In Sudan, in 1993, he denounced the Islamic regime in Khartoum for its brutal treatment of the Christian minority. In April 1997, he traveled to Sarajevo to demand that Muslims, Orthodox Serbs, and Croatian Catholics cease their ethnic battles in "a city that symbolizes the suffering of the century." That same year, in Beirut, he pleaded for recognition of Lebanese sovereignty, implicitly condemning the Syrian military presence there. Traveling to Cuba in January 1998, he demanded that Communist authorities there allow space for religious expression in public life-- and won the release of scores of political prisoners, as well as the renewed recognition of Christmas as a legal holiday.

In March 2000, during his "Jubilee pilgrimage" to the Holy Land, John Paul II tackled one of the most intractable problems of the volatile Middle East, the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians. He won the respect of many Israelis by visiting the Yad Vashem memorial to the Holocaust, and praying at the Western Wall of the ancient Temple; yet on a visit to a refugee camp near Bethlehem he condemned the treatment of the Palestinian people, demanding recognition of their legitimate national aspirations. His visit temporarily sparked optimism about the prospects for peace talks: hopes that were shattered with the renewal of the intifada in September of the same year.

The great voyager

The longest of John Paul's 104 apostolic voyages took 13 days; it was a November 1986 trip to the Far East, during which he made stops in Bangladesh, Singapore, Fiji, New Zealand, Australia, and the Seychelles. He averaged 6 trips abroad per year of his pontificate. The rhythm of his travel was fairly consistent from 1978 through 2000, broken only by his hospital stays in 1981 (after he was shot in the May 13 assassination attempt in St. Peter's Square) and 1994 (when surgery was required to repair a broken leg). During the year 2000 he remained at the Vatican because of the heavy schedule of events in Rome during the Jubilee Year. And by 2001 his declining health forced a curtailment of his travel. Fittingly, his last trip outside Italy was a personal pilgrimages to the Marian shrine at Lourdes, France. By the end of his pontificate, Pope John Paul had made 16 trips to European countries, 20 to the Americas, a dozen to Africa, and a dozen more to Asia and the Pacific.

Despite his globe-trotting record, the Pope failed to realize two cherished ambitions: to visit Russia and China. His dream of a trip to Moscow, and a personal appeal to the heartland of the world's second-largest Christian body, was frustrated by the opposition of the Russian Orthodox hierarchy. A voyage to Beijing was thwarted by the implacable hostility of that nation's Communist regime, which resisted efforts to establish diplomatic ties throughout his pontificate. One other planned trip was scuttled for similar reasons: in December 1999 the Pontiff had hoped to travel to Iraq, on a Jubilee pilgrimage to trace the "footsteps of Abraham" to the ancient city of Ur; the preparations for that trip were called off when it became clear that the regime of Saddam Hussein planned to exploit the Pope's presence for its own political purposes.

The prophet of social justice

Like his predecessors in the 20th century, John Paul II emphasized the social teachings of the Catholic Church; his work in that field was colored by his personal background, having lived in Poland under two of the great totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, the Polish Pope rejoiced, and on a trip to Czechoslovakia four months later he announced that he was calling a special Synod of the bishops of Europe, to evaluate the prospects for the future of a continent no longer divided between democracy and despotism. The Pontiff always championed the cause of European unity, arguing that the countries of the former Warsaw Pact should be welcomed into the European community, so that the emerging European Union could draw on the rich cultural traditions of both East and West-- both, the Pope repeatedly underlined, cultures deeply marked by their shared Christian patrimony.

While he welcomed the collapse of Communism, the Holy Father warned that the newly liberated nations of Eastern Europe should not replace one form of materialism with another, by turning from Marxism to selfish consumerism. In 1991, his encyclical Centesimus Annus urged the formerly Communist countries to avoid the "savage" extremes of capitalism that ignore the spiritual dimensions of human life and the need for solidarity. Later, in a June 2001 address in Lviv, he pleaded with young Ukrainians not to replace "the slavery of a Communist regime with that of a consumerist society which, if it does not reject God in theory, in practice excludes faith from its life.

As the European Union expanded toward the East, and drew up its own constitution, John Paul led the campaign to include an explicit recognition of the continent's Christian heritage in the foundational document. Although his lobbying efforts failed, and the preamble to the constitution included only a vague and general reference to religious influences, the Pope never abandoned his efforts to revive appreciation for Europe's Christian roots. In an address delivered to French bishops who were making their ad limina visit on February 27, 2004, he explained that "the relations among these diverse nations cannot be based solely on economic or political interests," but must rest on the more certain foundation of shared principles derived from Christian thought. A European Union based simply on material collaboration, he warned, would be vulnerable to "a return of the ideologies of the past" which had darkened the continent's history during the 20th century.

In much the same spirit, John Paul II worked for both human and economic development in Africa, a continent where persistent poverty has given rise to grotesque abuses. In his 1987 encyclical Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, when he decried the insensitivity of the world's great economic powers in the face of human suffering, he clearly had the poverty of Africa foremost in his mind. He saw Africa as a continent of desperate poverty-- not only material but also spiritual. Menaced by militant Islam, drained by corruption and the rapacious exploitation of rich natural resources, stricken by disease, and bloodied by brutal ethnic conflicts and incessant civil wars, Africa desperately needed the help that could be brought through evangelization, solidarity, and the advancement of social justice.

Africa was also the battlefield on which the Church faced the most impassioned opposition to her teaching on human sexuality, particularly as it applied to the struggle against the AIDS epidemic there. While African political leaders and international organizations enthusiastically promoted the distribution of condoms as the primary means of stemming the epidemic, the Pope led the campaign to alter human behavior, fighting the spread of the disease by encouraging chastity. "Outside the bonds of marriage, sexual relations are a lie," he told young people in Uganda in 1993. He added that sexual continence and marital fidelity offer "the only sure and virtuous way to put an end to the tragic plague of AIDS." In Uganda, at least, his voice was heard; that country, alone among its African neighbors, has seen a decline in the spread of AIDS, achieved largely by an aggressive campaign to promote chaste behavior.

The late Pope's contribution to Church teachings on social justice also had a marked impact on the Western world, where his frequent denunciations of "the culture of death" made him the unquestioned world leader of the pro-life movement. With his 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor he explained that any political system must has its basis on unshakeable moral principles, and the concept of human freedom becomes meaningless when it is elevated to the status of an absolute goal superior to all other moral goods. In 1995 he followed up with his memorable encyclical Evangelium Vitae, summarizing his defense of human life and the natural family. At international conferences sponsored by the UN-- beginning with the Cairo Conference on world population and development, he encouraged the development of a coalition of nations and non-government organizations determined to fight against the drive to legalize abortion and undermine marriage on the international front.

The focus of Church unity

The late Pontiff had to face a series of disputes within the Church during the course of his pontificate. From the day of his election to the See of Peter, he sought to reach out to the alienated traditionalist Catholics who surrounded Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, resisting the liturgical changes and doctrinal developments of the Second Vatican Council. That conflict came to a head on June 30, 1988, when Archbishop Lefebvre ordained four bishops for his traditionalist community, in defiance of orders from the Vatican. With that act, which prompted his excommunication, the archbishop opened a split that defied John Paul's efforts at mediation. In January 2002, after years of painstaking negotiations, one estranged community of traditionalists in Brazil was brought back into full communion with the Holy See. But talks with the larger Society of St. Pius X remained fruitless through the Pope's death.

On the other extreme, the pontificate saw clashes with liberal theologians like Hans Küng, whose writings questioning papal infallibility and the need for priestly ordination drew a warning from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The same Vatican dicastery, over the years, produced several cautions about the work of theologians whose work clashed with Church doctrinal teachings on topics including human sexuality, Original Sin, and the essential role of Christ's sacrifice in the history of salvation. The continued debate on this last issue prompted the publication of Dominus Iesus, a declaration from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith reiterating the Church's teaching that Jesus Christ and his Church offer the only route to salvation. That document, released in September 2000, excited a new round of controversy both within and outside the Catholic Church.

Perhaps the most important teaching document of the entire pontificate, however, was the publication in 1982 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church-- the first such systematic and authoritative elaboration of the faith since the Council of Trent.

John Paul II frequently repeated that the role of the Bishop of Rome is to provide "the visible sign and guarantee of unity" in the Christian world. He lamented the divisions among believers as an offense against God, a violation of Christ's desire "that all may be one." His pontificate saw a series of new initiatives to restore that lost unity among believers, including a series of personal appeals and meetings with the leaders of other Christian bodies. In 1995 he issued a bold invitation, in his encyclical Ut Unum Sint, for other Christian leaders to join in the discussion of how the papacy could better serve the cause of Christian unity; he promised that while he could not abandon the essential notion of Petrine primacy, he would be open to new ideas on how that primacy expresses itself. He renewed the same offer in February 2000, in an address to an ecumenical conference in Cairo, and again in May 2003, to 20 Christian theologians gathered at the Vatican for a discussion of the papacy.

In May 1999 the peripatetic Pontiff traveled to Romania, making the first-ever papal trip to a primarily Orthodox country. That trip was the first of a series of such visits, in which he pursued his goal of helping Christianity to "breathe with both lungs." Eventually he would travel to Georgia, Greece, Ukraine, Armenia, and Bulgaria. During the last year of his pontificate he made a pair of dramatic gestures aimed at spurring reconciliation with the Orthodox churches: in August 2004 he restored a prized ancient icon of Our Lady of Kazan to the Russian Orthodox patriarchate of Moscow, and in November of the same year he personally handed over the relics of Sts. John Chrysostom and Gregory Nazianzen-- both former bishops of Constantinople-- to their successor, the Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew I.

The man of dialogue

On a separate front, John Paul II encouraged dialogue with other world religions, which he saw as essential to the cause of world peace. During the 1980s in particular he encouraged new talks with Judaism and Islam. During a 1985 trip to Morocco he told a large group of young Muslims that "we have to respect each other, and even encourage each other in our good works along the paths of God." Several months later, in April 1986, he made his historic visit to the synagogue in Rome, opening a new era in dialogue with Judaism. He broke new ground in Mary 2001 with a visit to the Grand Mosque in Syria.

With his outlook formed by a horror of war and of the totalitarian regimes that he had known since infancy, Pope John Paul II insisted that religious leadership should be a force for world peace. At a peak of Cold War tension in October 1986, he invited the leaders of all the world's main religions to join in Assisi for a day of prayer for peace. That initiative was renewed twice later in the pontificate, in January 1993 and January 2003. Throughout the last years of his pontificate, John Paul II responded to the threats posed by Islamic terrorism with a constant teaching that religious faith should never be used as the justification for violence.

The herald of the 3rd millennium

Early in the 1990s the Holy Father began to call attention to the approach of the year 2000, which would open the 3rd millennium of Christianity. He disclosed that he saw his primary purpose, as Pope, as the preparation of the Catholic world for this new epoch. As the decade progressed and the millennium drew closer, he called for spiritual preparation, including a "purification of memory" and a repentance for the sins committed by Christians in the course of Church history.

Declaring 2000 as a Jubilee Year, Pope John Paul presided over nearly 80 special ceremonial events in Rome, and welcomed millions of pilgrims to Rome during his weekly public audiences. The celebration reached a crescendo in August, when more than 2 million young people gathered on the fields of Tor Vergata, just outside Rome, for World Youth Day. And as the Jubilee Year closed, the Pope issued a new challenge to the faithful in his apostolic letter Novo Millennio Ineunte, urging bold new efforts to spread the faith in the coming century.

The suffering servant

By the close of the Jubilee Year, it was clear that John Paul II was exhausted by his work. The symptoms of Parkinson's disease, steadily more evident in recent years, had become unmistakable: his hands shook, his gait was unsteady, his speech was sometimes slurred. Little by little, grudgingly, he scaled back the pace of his public activities.

On several occasions-- most notably during a trip to visit to Slovakia in September 2003-- the Holy Father seemed to be slipping into a final decline. Again and again he surprised observers by recovering his strength and returning to his duties. He confounded predictions by celebrating the 25th anniversary of his pontificate in October 2003, at the same time presiding at the beatification of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, and holding a consistory to elevate 30 new cardinals.

By the beginning of this calendar year, the Pope's physical decline was so marked that he rarely celebrated Mass in public, and he regularly asked aides to read his prepared discourses at public audiences. Still he dismissed all talk of resignation, explaining that he was determined to follow Christ, carrying his own cross to the end. The final months of his papal ministry were a public lesson in the virtue of suffering, bravely endured for the cause of Christ.