Pope John Paul II, 1920-2005

Dogged on doctrine
The pope continued his jet-age evangelism in far-flung corners of the world, carrying a message of social and economic change but religious conservatism. He stood resolutely against contraception, homosexuality, abortion and women in the priesthood. Despite hope in some liberal wings of the church, John Paul never relented on these basic precepts and, in fact, moved to further cement them as church doctrine.

This unique mix of progressive political views and doctrinaire faith sometimes created friction around the world. His fierce anti-communism, for instance, put him at odds with the church in Latin America, which was experiencing a rebirth in the 1980s through the popularity of a school of thought known as "liberation theology," which argued that the church should ally itself with the poor and aid the cause of ousting the oligarchs and landowning families who traditionally dominated the region. His strict adherence to traditional doctrine also caused problems in the United States and Western Europe, where a more liberal interpretation of Catholicism had taken hold. John Paul occasionally chided those who treated aspects of Catholicism as optional, though a full showdown with America's more liberal bishops never came.

‘The people’s pope’
None of these conflicts hampered John Paul's transformation into the first celebrity pope. The most photographed man of our time, John Paul appeared in Australia holding a koala bear, with painted tribal warriors in Papua New Guinea and even in a handmade white leather papal cassock with fringe in front of a Native American teepee in Canada.

In France, on one of his first trips, the local media came up with a phrase that summed up the paradox of his appeal: "The people love the singer, but they don't like the song."

From the Americas to Africa, crowds of millions attended large open-air masses to wave maniacally at the smiling pontiff in his popemobile while privately rejecting his message on sexual morality.

In his final years his strong will was put to the test by his own body. It betrayed him with the onset of Parkinson's disease — making his left hand tremble constantly and stiffening the facial muscles on his right side, giving him a stony, stern expression so removed from that of the jocular man he had been in his prime.

Still, he undertook difficult visits to Cuba and to the Holy Land and attempted several times without success to win approval for a visit to the ancient Iraqi city of Ur, the Biblical birthplace of the prophet Abraham.

His Cuban visit in 1998 helped persuade the island's communist leader, Fidel Castro, to allow more religious freedom. As he had in Poland, the pope spoke out against communism's repression of individual liberty. But Cuban society, unlike Poland, remained a web of state control despite the pope's efforts.

At the end of the century, John Paul fulfilled a lifelong dream by celebrating the 2,000th anniversary of the birth of Christ — the Great Jubilee, in Vatican parlance — in Jerusalem.
The visit punctuated a long effort led by John Paul to repair relations not only with the many splintered sects of Christianity, but also with Judaism and Islam. Having broken a taboo in 1986 by making the first-ever visit by a pope to a synagogue — in this case, Rome's main synagogue — John Paul extended his ties to Judaism by meeting with the religion's top officials. He also conferred with Jerusalem's chief mufti, Islam's senior cleric in the city. And, as always, the pope waded into the political arena, prodding Palestinians and Israelis to make peace.

His death does not leave the world surprised, because it's been expected for a long time. But it does leave a moral void on the global stage that will take a strong man to fill. Because in this world, friends and foes agree, John Paul II was a superstar.

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