Up to last Friday, the day when Pope John Paul II was laid to rest, the world was overcome with grief at the loss of a remarkable Pontiff. The funeral over, the late Pope’s legacy came under close scrutiny. The College of Cardinals, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, will make the first assessment of that legacy when they deliberate to elect a successor to the See of Rome.

This time it will be for real. Ever since l992 when Pope John Paul had a serious operation, and subsequently suffered two falls in six months, one of which necessitated a hip-replacement, Vatican watchers have been speculating on the Pope’s succession.

The Pope’s Opus Dei press officer, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, kept insisting all along that the Pope was in fine fettle, notwithstanding visual evidence of fading health. He was in a position to know – besides having been a bullfighter; he is also a medical doctor and was fully aware of the Pope’s physical and spiritual stamina.

Pope John Paul continued to surprise and inspire the world for more than another decade. His self-set mission was to take the papacy into the 21st century and the third millennium by returning the Office of Peter to its evangelical roots.

The world and the Church no longer think of the pope as the Chief Executive Officer of the Roman Catholic Church, but as a pastor, an evangelist and a witness. Pope John Paul II broke the mould he inherited, not simply by being the first Slavic pope in history and the first non-Italian pope in centuries, but by living the kind of papal primacy envisioned in the New Testament – that of Peter, the Church’s first evangelist and first witness to the truths revealed in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

He believed that one great service the Church can render to the modern world was to remind it that freedom is ordered to truth and finds its fulfilment in goodness – which is another way of saying that truth will set man free.

It is this conviction that inspired John Paul II’s accomplishments. His crucial role in the collapse of the Communist Leviathan can be understood as the work of a pastor determined to speak truth to power. He was convinced that, spoken firmly and forcefully enough, truth is the most effective tool against tyranny and totalitarianism. By inspiring a non-violent revolution of conscience, he helped Poland win its freedom.

Pope John Paul went beyond that. He challenged the broadly accepted understanding of the dynamics of history. He demonstrated that history is driven by culture – and, at the heart of culture, is cult, or religion. He also demonstrated that Christian conviction could be the agent of human liberation.

This was the challenge he posed to democracies, old and new, in the wake of the collapse of communism. It amounted to the proposal that, if culture is the engine of history, then free economies and democratic political communities should be built upon the foundations of a vibrant moral culture, capable of directing and disciplining the tremendous human energies set loose by freedom.

He developed this concept when he challenged the freedom of indifference and proposed the freedom of excellence in a number of encyclicals such as Centesimus Annus, Veritatis Splendor and Evangelium Vitae, in which he reconfigured the Church’s social doctrine and ventured into the terrain of public life in the 21st century.

The Pope’s biographer, George Weigel, has this to say in his voluminous 1,000-page book Witness to Hope:

“The pontificate of Pope John Paul II has been one of the most important in centuries, for the Church and the world. Some would argue that John Paul II has been the most consequential pope since the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in the 16th century. As that period defined the Catholic Church’s relationship to an emerging modern world, so the Second Vatican Council and the pontificate of John Paul II have laid down a set of markers that will likely determine the course of world Catholicism well beyond ‘modernity’ and into the third millennium of Christian history.

“John Paul II has also been, indisputably the most visible pope in history. In fact, a case can be made that he has been the most visible human being in history. He has almost certainly been seen live by more people than any man who ever lived. When one adds the multiplying impact of television to the equation, the breadth of his reach into the worlds-within-worlds of humanity becomes almost impossible to grasp.

“Yet there is a paradox here: the most visible of men may also be the least understood major figure of the 20th century. Certainly the judgements about the man and his accomplishments have been, to put it gently, contradictory.

“To tens of millions of people, many of whom are not Roman Catholics, he is the great figure of our time – the defender and principal embodiment of a moral force that has led humanity safely through this bloodiest of centuries. In this view, John Paul II is the paladin, the champion of the cause of human freedom. To others, including many in his own Church, John Paul II is an unyielding authoritarian, out of touch with the aspirations of those he claims to lead and dares to teach, a throwback to a period the Church has putatively put behind it at the Second Vatican Council. Still others, within and without the Church, admire his defence of human rights, his outreach to Judaism and his dedication to peace, while deploring his theology and his moral judgments.

“TIME named him ‘Man of the Year’ in l994. Mikhail Gorbachev, who might have been expected to take a somewhat rueful view of the matter, declared that John Paul II was indispensable to the peaceful conclusion of the Cold War. Fidel Castro remarked privately that his first meeting with John Paul II was like being with family. Those who work with him on a daily basis – even those who disagree with certain of his decisions or with his method of conducting he papacy – unanimously testify to his personal sanctity, his kindness and his seemingly limitless capacity to listen.

“Yet journalists of wide experience and historians of literary distinction have heaped opprobrium on him.”

There are reasons for this divergence of views and for these conflicting judgments. His Polishness, his mysticism, and the traditions of secrecy and suspicions that characterise the relationships between those who work in the Vatican and those who analyse their duties, may be important factors.

But, a basic cause for such contradictory assessments of John Paul II, man or pope, is the fact that his life, his convictions and his teaching pose an unmistakable challenge to his times.

Again, I quote from Weigel:

“To a late modernity, dominated by the pleasure principle and by personal wilfulness, he has insisted that suffering can be redemptive and that obligation is at the core of biblical religion.

“In an intellectual environment in which the human capacity to know anything with certainty is denied, he has taught that universal truths exist, that we can know them, and that, in knowing them, certain moral duties are laid upon us.

“In a culture in which happiness is identified with talent and its assertion, he has taught that happiness is found in the obedient submission of talent and will to transcendent truth and love.

“Against the temptation to regard utility as the sole criterion for measuring anyone’s worth, he has insisted that every human being possesses an inherent and inalienable dignity and value.

“At a historical moment that celebrates the pursuit of self-interest, he has taught that we worship God and we strive for holiness, not because these are ‘good for us’, but because these are things that are to be done.

“In a world that considers history as the product of impersonal economic and political forces, he has defended the priority of culture and the world-transforming power of the human spirit.”

There is hardly any room for doubt that John Paul II has been a sign of contradiction in the “modern” context. But to say that he has been against modernity and its aspirations for freedom is another matter.

The contrary is the case. The “contradiction” associated with John Paul II aspires to human happiness that is freedom’s goal.

Here is a “radical”, upright pope who has bent the curve of history. He has asked forgiveness, on behalf of the Church, for the scandals and excesses of the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation. He denounced scientists who succumbed to the Promethean temptation to steal fire from the gods and remake

the human condition. His proposal about the moral foundations

of a free society, based on his

distinctive understanding of

the nature and dignity of the human person is not “for-Catholics-only”. It has implications for Jews and Moslems, and indeed, “for all men and women of goodwill”.

Whereas the papacy has traditionally claimed a universal reach, John Paul’s pontificate is the first in history in which that claim has been virtually validated.

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