My Life and Times

April 3, 2005
OBITUARY
All-Embracing Man of Action for a New Era of Papacy
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN

On the night of Oct. 16, 1978, a vast, impatient throng in floodlit St. Peter's Square cheered wildly as white smoke curled from a chimney atop the Sistine Chapel, signaling the election of a new pope. A long wait had ended, but the enthusiasm was somewhat premature.

Cardinal Pericle Felici emerged minutes later to introduce Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Poland, the first non-Italian pope since 1523. But even he had trouble pronouncing the name - voy-TEE-wah. Hardly anyone, it seemed, knew who he was. Murmurs and questions rippled through the predominantly Roman crowd.

Then a powerfully built man with slightly stooped shoulders and a small smile on his angular face stepped onto the central balcony of St. Peter's Basilica. Cheers faded into silence. The crowd waited.

He stood at the balcony rail, looking out, a Polish stranger in the fresh white robes of the pope. And there were tears in his eyes as he began to speak.

"I have come," he said in lightly accented Italian, "from a faraway country - far away, but always so close in the communion of faith."

There were scattered cheers, and they grew louder as he went on.

"I do not know whether I can express myself in your - in our - Italian language," he said, pausing.

The crowd roared appreciatively, and the laughter swelled into resounding cheers.

"If I make mistakes," he added, beaming suddenly, "you will correct me."

Tumult erupted.

The cheers went on and on, and then grew into rhythmic waves that broke on the basilica facade and echoed across the square in a thundering crescendo:

"Viva il Papa!

"Viva il Papa!

"Viva il Papa!"



A Pope of a Different Sort


It was an extraordinary beginning. But almost from the start, it was evident to many of the world's Roman Catholics, and to multitudes of non-Catholics as well, that this was to be an extraordinary papacy, one that would captivate much of humanity by sheer force of personality and reshape the church with a heroic vision of a combative, disciplined Catholicism.

It was to be the longest and most luminous pontificate of the 20th century, the second longest in the history of the church, a 26-year era that would witness sweeping political changes around the world, the growth of the Roman Catholic Church to more than a billion baptized members from 750 million, and the beginning of Christianity's Third Millennium.

The man who would call himself John Paul II was not the traditional papal figure, compassionate and loving but ascetic and remote behind the high walls and the elaborate ceremony of the Vatican. Here was a different kind of pope: complex, schooled in confrontation, theologically intransigent but deftly politic, full of wit and daring, energy and physically expressive love.

More than outgoing, he was all-embracing - a bear-hugging, larger-than-life man of action who had climbed mountains, performed in plays, written books and seen war, and he was determined from the start to make the world his parish and go out and minister to its troubles and see to its spiritual needs.

Compared with other popes, he did not create many new programs and he sought to clarify and enforce Catholic ideas rather than to reshape or expand them. He was, if anything, more traditional than his namesake predecessors, John XXIII, Paul VI and John Paul I.

But he saw himself primarily as a spiritual figure who transcended geographical and ideological boundaries, and he saw it as his mission to deliver a clear set of Catholic ideas and to foster peace and human dignity through the power of faith and the practical efforts of well-meaning nations.

At the dawn of the millennium and in the twilight of his papacy, he also saw it as his duty to issue a daring, unprecedented apology for the errors of his church and individual Catholics over the last 2,000 years, a catalog of sins that included episodes of religious and cultural intolerance and of historic injustices against Jews, women, indigenous peoples, immigrants and the poor.

While he did not cite specific misdeeds, his apology set out a framework that theologians said appeared to encompass the Crusades, the Inquisition, the burning of heretics and forced conversions of American Indians, Africans and others. The church's response to the Holocaust was not specified, but the apology was dedicated to a "confession of sins against the people of Israel."

And there were other acknowledgements - notably one in 1998 for the failure of many Catholics to help Jews in the Holocaust, and another in 2002 to the victims of sexual abuse by priests in a scandal that engulfed the church in America with cases of pedophilia and accusations of cover-ups by bishops and other members of the church hierarchy.

The traumatic scandal, in which scores of priests were accused of molesting children, some repeatedly over many years, led to criminal charges, the removal of many priests and avalanches of lawsuits and multimillion-dollar settlements. It also challenged the moral authority of the church in America and threatened to taint the final years of a papacy whose signet had been human dignity.

John Paul's extraordinary effort to cleanse his church's conscience, along with his global travels, his challenges to human rights violations around the world, his attacks on the economic injustices of capitalism and his steadfast resistance to changes in church teachings on birth control, priestly celibacy, the ordination of women and other issues were among the fundamental traits of his pontificate.

But they were not the only legacies by which history would judge John Paul. Along with the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the pope played a major role in the collapse of Soviet and European Communism, instilling the adversaries of Communist governments in Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe with confidence that their cause would outlast the repression of their rulers.

His very election boosted the spirit of believers in Eastern Europe, for whom the appeal "Be not afraid!" - repeated three times during the sermon he preached at his installation on Oct. 22, 1978 - had a special meaning.

In June 1979, millions turned out for the pope's first visit to his native Poland, masses of people acting independently of the Communist government and gaining a liberating sense of their own autonomy. In retrospect, the visit was widely seen as a detonator of the Solidarity labor movement's challenge to Poland's Communist government in 1980 and ultimately of the changes that swept the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe a decade later.

Traveling widely - through Europe, Africa, the Americas and Asia - the pope electrified vast crowds with a populist blend of showmanship, evangelism and impassioned appeals for human rights, peace, disarmament and justice for the poor and the oppressed.

On that first papal visit to Poland, he scolded the officially atheistic Communist government for treating people "merely as a means of production."

He went to Brazil and chastised the military junta in power. "Violence," he said, "kills what it intends to create."

He went to Ireland and confronted zealots of the Irish Republican Army and their Protestant foes: "On my knees I beg you to turn away from the path of violence and to return to the ways of peace."

He went to Japan and mourned: "To remember Hiroshima is to abhor nuclear war. To remember Hiroshima is to commit oneself to peace."

He went to Auschwitz and asked, "How far can cruelty go?"

And he went to the United Nations in New York and spoke to world leaders of peace for "all the men and women living on this planet."


An Intensely Physical Presence


People everywhere found the pope's presence intensely physical. Not content to wave from a passing limousine, this man with the ruddy face and glowing eyes would jump out and plunge into the crowds, hugging, kissing, grasping and talking to people; singing, smiling, winking and reaching out with his quarry-worker hands to touch and bless them.

Chiefs of protocol winced. Security men were horrified, fearing the kind of attack in which he was shot in St. Peter's Square in 1981. Aides of all kinds grew exhausted trying to keep up with him. But he was determined to take his message from St. Peter's around the globe.

Over the quarter century of his papacy, the pope traveled to 129 countries on 104 trips abroad. He visited and revisited Poland and made many trips through other European lands. Again and again he journeyed to Asia, South America, Central America and Africa. He made five papal visits to the mainland United States: triumphant multicity tours in 1979 and 1987, a meeting with President Bill Clinton in Denver in 1993, a tour in October 1995 that took him to New York, New Jersey and Baltimore, and a final visit, in 1999, to St. Louis.

He did not go to China or Russia, though he expressed a wish to visit both, and he met President Boris N. Yeltsin of Russia at the Vatican in February 1998, shortly after journeying to Cuba. In 1993, he went to the former Soviet Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, and visited Albania, Europe's poorest land, where he urged the newly non-Communist nation to nurture its long-suppressed religious freedom. He also visited several former Soviet republics - Kazakhstan and Armenia after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on America, and Azerbaijan in 2002.

China's Communist leaders, seeing religion as a means of political dissent, never agreed to legalize Roman Catholicism, and let Catholics worship only in an official Patriotic Church. The Vatican made overtures to Beijing in the 1990's, but did not thaw a relationship frozen over many issues, including the Vatican's recognition of Taiwan, which China considers a renegade province.

Throughout his papacy, John Paul expressed a hope of journeying to the Holy Land, to visit the sites where Jesus lived and died and to lend his moral authority to the quest for peace in one of the world's most troubled regions. The political and logistical problems seemed insuperable until the millennium.

Then in March 2000, he made one of his most dramatic trips, a six-day valedictory journey to Jordan, Israel and Palestinian-held territories that saw the 79-year-old pope, frail with infirmities, step nimbly through the political and religious minefields of the Middle East, a capstone of his papal travels.

Respectful dissent was voiced by some who greeted the pope on his trips. Occasionally there were demonstrations, even some protests that turned violent. But many Vatican officials and Catholic leaders who at first had been skeptical of his travels came to see them as valuable and successful.

Others believed the trips were not the best way to reach people in a world saturated with electronic stimuli and entertainment extravaganzas. Spectacular trips, some theologians argued, left no lasting results; they chided the pope, calling his travels the religious equivalent of rock concerts that failed to offer something transcendent.

And while many Catholic leaders said the trips had lifted the church spiritually and financially, there were complaints about the costs. The 1987 trip to the United States, for example, cost $20 million - all but $2 million of it raised by nine dioceses he visited - and some critics said the money could be better used to aid the homeless or hard-pressed parochial schools.

Yet as the journeys mounted, it became clear to many Catholic thinkers that the travels were not mere visits to a sprawling flock, but had become a central feature of his papacy: the forceful, global reassertion of Roman Catholic orthodoxy through a new sacramental exercise using jet planes, television and a remarkable stage presence.

In the last year, the pope was forced to curtail his travels as the burdens of age and illness - the trembling hands and slurred speech, the inability to walk or hold his head up, and other manifest frailties of Parkinson's disease - grew increasingly heavy. He took two relatively short trips abroad last year, to Switzerland in June and to the shrine of Lourdes in France in August.

He continued to meet world leaders and to address major issues. He received Vice President Dick Cheney in January 2004 and met President Bush in June, using the occasions to reiterate his unhappiness over the American-led invasion of Iraq and the continuing fighting there, and he appealed for a speedy restoration of sovereignty to the Iraqi people.

The pope was also touched last year by a controversy over whether he had endorsed Mel Gibson's film "The Passion of the Christ." The movie's promoters claimed that the pope, after a preview, had said, "It is as it was." But his secretary denied there had been any appraisal. It seemed likely that the pope had been drawn into the unwitting service of a film many Jewish and Christian leaders feared could rekindle claims that Jews were collectively responsible for the Crucifixion.

Besides the pope's limited time away from the Vatican, there were increasing signs recently that his papacy was drawing to a close. He was hospitalized for nine days in early February for treatment of breathing difficulties and influenza, and for the first time as pope he was unable to preside over Ash Wednesday services marking the start of Lent. He was hospitalized again after suffering a respiratory relapse, and underwent a tracheotomy to allow him to breathe.

There were voices of concern that the pope's illness might create a vacuum of leadership for the church, and talk of a possible resignation. While four popes had resigned, the last was St. Celestine V, who abdicated five months after his election in 1294 at the age of 79. Vatican officials said John Paul was unlikely to step down, especially because one of his strongest messages - respect for human dignity at all stages of life, from the womb to the frailties of old age - had at last come full circle to encompass him.

In addition to his global travels, the pope asserted his mission in traditional ways as well, by appointments of like-minded cardinals and bishops around the world - in September 2003 he elevated 31 new cardinals, bringing to about 120 the number at that time who would be eligible to vote in the election of the next pope - and by papal teachings that upheld the church's condemnation of birth control, its exclusion of women from the priesthood, its requirement of celibacy for priests in the Latin rite and its suspicion of revolutionary social movements.


A Pope's Instructions


Over the span of his papacy - and serving in many ways to define it - John Paul issued 14 encyclicals, or papal instructions, dealing with a wide range of topics: social and economic issues, war, the meaning of morality, doctrinal questions, faith and reason and other matters.

In 1979, his first encyclical, the 24,000-word "Redemptor Hominis," or "Redeemer of Man," expressed the core of his conviction: that caring for human life springs from the love of Christ. It also warned that mankind was living in an era of growing fear and weapons of war that raised the specter of "unimaginable self-destruction."

Other encyclicals included three statements on economic justice. In 1981, "Laborem Exercens" ("On Human Work") emphasized the social character of labor and the active role of the laborer in completing the task of divine creation; it opposed government control over economies, but seemed to favor collective ownership and management by workers, a kind of democratic socialism.

"Sollicitudo Rei Socialis" ("On Social Concerns"), in 1988, drew an unsparing picture of desperation in poor nations and pockets of deprivation in affluent societies. It blamed the East-West conflict for distorting economic development, criticizing "liberal capitalism" and "Marxist collectivism." And it introduced a "right of economic initiative." The church had upheld private property rights in the 19th century, then had gradually acknowledged society's right to regulate property. But the pope's phrase appeared to signal a new respect for innovative, entrepreneurial forces.

"Centesimus Annus" ("The Hundredth Year"), issued in 1991 to mark the centenary of the first major papal statement on social and economic conflicts, analyzed Communism's fall and the economic issues it posed for Eastern Europe. It recognized superior dynamism in market economies over statist ones, but said Communism's failure should not blind capitalist societies to "quasi-servitude" in poor nations or the "idolatry of the market" in rich ones.

A 1993 encyclical, "Veritatis Splendor" ("The Splendor of Truth"), was a statement of moral theory intended to encourage reflection and discussion. It did not list rights and wrongs, but discussed conscience, reason and freedom, and argued that morality rested on basic truths about human nature and the world, not on individual choice or social consensus.

In 1995, "Evangelium Vitae" ("Gospel of Life") denounced abortion and euthanasia as "crimes which no human law can claim to legitimize." The pope also urged Catholics to oppose secular laws that violate what he called the fundamental right to life, and he reaffirmed the church's condemnation of contraception, experiments with human embryos and the death penalty.

John Paul's 13th encyclical, "Fides et Ratio" ("Faith and Reason"), perhaps his most personal, marked his 20th anniversary as pope in 1998. Crystallizing a lifetime of philosophical and theological thought, it amplified upon the historic church position that faith and reason are both requisite in the search for truth, and it rejected various modern philosophical trends, including post-Enlightenment rationalism, Marxism and nihilism.

His 14th and last encyclical, in 2003, was a stern reminder that divorced Catholics who remarry cannot receive communion.

The pope's conservative views were not hard to trace. Coming as he had from a country where the church was under siege by a totalitarian government, he had found it necessary to reassert tenets of his faith and aggressively confront secular creeds competing with the church for the loyalties of the people.

To many Catholic leaders, particularly in the Vatican, the church at large was under similar siege when he became pope. The reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960's, which revolutionized the church by taking a more accepting attitude toward modernization after centuries of isolation from, and even hostility to, contemporary thought, had not halted the tide of secularization in the church's traditional heartland, Western Europe.

Indeed, the cultural tumult of the 60's had only reinforced the appeal of revolutionary Marxism, the sexual revolution and other challenges to Catholic tradition. Many theologians, who viewed Pope Paul VI's tenure as a period of drift and uncertainty, regarded the moral authority of the church, and of the papacy, as being in decline.

John Paul agreed that much of the church was in disarray, its long stability shaken by secularization and permissiveness. In principle, he supported the reforms of Vatican II, and often emphasized the "collegial" principle under which the church is governed jointly by the pope and its bishops. But he was convinced that his personal authority was the key, that through his own highly visible, international leadership, he could clarify the principles and invoke the discipline he regarded as necessary to unify and reinvigorate the church.

But he did not rely on personal charisma alone to carry out what some called his "restoration." In 1983, he approved a revised Code of Canon Law to replace the code promulgated in 1917 and rendered out of date by many of Vatican II's reforms. In 1992, he also approved a new "universal catechism" to guide church leaders around the world in presentations of Catholic beliefs. Both documents set firm limits on what were seen as ambiguities and invitations to further change in the documents of Vatican II.

To remove what he called lingering doubts, in May 1994 he reaffirmed church doctrine that women could not be ordained as priests and said the matter was not even open to debate. The Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which oversees church teaching, went further in 1995 by declaring that the doctrine of ordaining only men as priests was "infallibly" taught - a designation reserved for teaching on faith and morals that is considered irreversible, free from error and requiring full assent from the faithful.

The pope carried these church views onto the world's stage. In 1994, as 180 countries planned a United Nations conference in Cairo on the potentially catastrophic population explosion projected for the 21st century, he orchestrated a campaign against draft proposals favoring abortion rights, contraception and other measures endorsed by feminists and population experts.

The campaign - the Vatican's most concerted in years on international policy and the pope's most heartfelt since his crusade against Communism - put a heavy strain on his relationship with President Clinton, who favored safe legalized abortion and efforts to stabilize a global population that experts said could grow to 8.5 billion from 5.7 billion in 35 years.

The Cairo conference adopted a strong declaration endorsing family planning and giving women more control over their lives to help stabilize populations. But the Vatican shaped the language so that it did not enshrine any universal right to abortion and excluded abortion as a means of family planning.

In 1995, the pope appeared to be at pains to stress his support for women's rights. He credited the women's movement with positive achievements and offered an apology for injustices against women in the name of the church. But Vatican comments on the Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing, signaled no major changes in church teaching that portrayed women as mothers, educators and mainstays of the family.

In a key appointment, John Paul placed Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger at the head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. A theologian who had campaigned for the openness introduced by Vatican II, Cardinal Ratzinger shared the fear that the church was fragmenting and the belief that the innovations of Vatican II had to be channeled and disciplined.

With Cardinal Ratzinger giving a new luster and militancy to papal authority and to the conservative theology that had long prevailed in Vatican offices, John Paul's administration took a form that some regarded as a throwback to the monarchical papacies of the 19th century.

Dissident Catholic theologians were dismissed or excommunicated. Liberal cardinals and bishops were replaced. And in 1998, the pope changed canon law to put many passionately discussed issues, including euthanasia and the ordination of women, beyond the realm of debate for the faithful. He also made it almost impossible for groups like the National Conference of Catholic Bishops of the United States to make statements of doctrine or public policy that diverged from the Vatican. In the same vein, in 2003, under the pope's orders, the Vatican admonished all Roman Catholic lawmakers to oppose legalization of same-sex marriage and adoptions by gays and lesbians. In January this year, the pope unequivocally condemned gay marriage.

Over the years, there were protests, petitions and other acts of dissent, especially in America and Europe, in response to the hard-line stances of the pope. In some countries, church attendance declined, and there were defections by priests. Predominantly Catholic Ireland voted to remove its constitutional ban on divorce, and 1.5 million Catholics in Germany signed petitions calling for the ordination of women. Italy, 84 percent Catholic, was a living protest in the 1990's: it had Europe's lowest birthrate, a sign of popular disdain for prohibitions on artificial birth control.


Crisis and Change


No one doubted the power of John Paul's voice or the depth of the feelings he evoked. But his personal popularity aside, many Catholics - especially in America and Western Europe - were distressed by his unswerving opposition to change, even in the face of crisis. The depth of distress was never more profound than in the priest-pedophile scandals in America, which broke in 2002 after decades of predatory abuse and suffering hidden by out-of-court settlements with victims and a revolving door of treatment and new assignments for offending priests.

The scandals exploded in January after disclosures that Cardinal Bernard F. Law of Boston had for years sent the Rev. John J. Geoghan Jr. from parish to parish, despite accusations of serial pedophilia. He was eventually accused of molesting 130 children and sentenced in one case to 9 to 10 years in prison. In August 2003, the defrocked Mr. Geoghan was strangled by an inmate at a Massachusetts prison.

Cardinal Law, under pressure, gave prosecutors the names of 80 priests accused of sexual abuse over the decades, although the Massachusetts attorney general eventually reported that at least 789 children and probably more than 1,000 had been sexually abused by 250 priests and other church workers in the Boston Archdiocese since 1940.

Within weeks of the disclosures, bishops across the country began a purge, removing scores of accused priests and turning names, dates and details over to prosecutors. Emboldened, hundreds of victims made accusations, many of them decades old and unprosecutable under statutes of limitations. But some criminal cases were prosecuted and hundreds of civil suits were filed. Facing enormous settlements and financial crises, some dioceses had to sell property.

Polls showed growing disaffection among Catholics, and for months the pope and the Vatican remained aloof. But in April 2002, after the American bishops asked for guidance, the pope summoned America's cardinals to Rome for a conference on the scandals. It produced no sweeping changes.

The pope acknowledged the suffering and offered an expression of concern that was taken by many to be an apology. Calling the abuse criminal and "an appalling sin in the eyes of God," he said, "To the victims and their families wherever they may be, I express my profound sense of solidarity and concern."

But he sent conflicting signals on a proposed zero-tolerance policy, saying there was no place in the priesthood for those who abused minors, but then suggesting that some offenders might warrant a second chance.

"We cannot forget the power of Christian conversion, that radical decision to turn away from sin and back to God, which reaches to the depths of a person's soul and can work extraordinary change," he said.

American cardinals proposed removing some priests who abused minors, but drew a distinction between serial predators and those who were "not notorious." The ambiguity was unresolved, even after American bishops, meeting in Dallas in June, voted overwhelmingly for a policy that called for the removal of any priest who had ever sexually abused a minor, and for increased cooperation with law-enforcement and a national lay board to monitor progress.

Instead of approving the policies, however, the Vatican voiced reservations, saying the bishops had gone too far in eschewing a statute of limitations, in broadly defining child sexual abuse and in requiring that all sex abuse claims be reported to the police. The Vatican said some of the remedies might violate canon laws that protect the rights of priests, and it recommended further "reflection" by a commission partly controlled by Vatican emissaries.

Cardinal Law, after nearly a year of protests and abuse lawsuits with $100 million in claims that threatened his archdiocese with bankruptcy, resigned as archbishop of Boston in December 2002. He was succeeded in July 2003 by Bishop Sean P. O'Malley, a Franciscan friar who swiftly met with some abuse victims and began trying to heal the wounds with financial settlements and a new tone of open dialogue. Last year, the pope chose Cardinal Law to head St. Mary Major Basilica in Rome.

Aside from the sex scandals, many American Catholics said the church and the pope were out of touch. Women, blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals, and even some priests and nuns urged him to be more sensitive to their needs. He usually voiced sympathy, but urged the supplicants to remain faithful to church teachings, which were not altered.

The result was a restoration of strong centralized authority in the pope. While that strength endeared him and the church to many, it repelled others who believed that the future of Roman Catholicism lay in greater diversity and flexibility, dispersal of power and adaptability in a swiftly changing world.


Jews and Palestinians


The pope's relations with Jews were both troubled and pathbreaking. More than any modern pope, John Paul moved boldly to end the estrangement between Catholics and Jews. He was the first pope to pray in a synagogue, the first to acknowledge the failure of individual Catholics to act against the Holocaust, the first to call anti-Semitism a sin "against God and man," and the first to make an official papal visit to the Holy Land.

Jews were often dismayed with his decisions and pronouncements. But he established diplomatic relations between the Vatican and Israel and set the course of Catholic-Jewish relations on a high plane of engagement and warmth, in contrast to the distance and frigidity of earlier eras.

His 1982 meeting at the Vatican with Yasir Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, was met with blistering criticism from the government of Israel and from Jews around the world. The pope said afterward that he only wanted to foster peace in the Middle East. And he would not be deterred: he met Mr. Arafat eight more times.

The Vatican supported peace accords between Israel and the Palestinians, but debate over the status of Jerusalem was a continuous sore point: Israel saw the city as its "united and eternal" capital, while the Vatican pressed for its recognition as a city holy to Christians, Muslims and Jews alike.

Long troubled by the failure of Pope Pius XII to condemn publicly the killing of millions of Jews by the Nazis in World War II, leaders of Jewish groups were outraged at John Paul's Vatican meeting in 1987 with President Kurt Waldheim of Austria, who had served in a German Army unit implicated in the deportation of Jews in Greece.

The pope wrote an apostolic letter in 1989 evoking Christian sorrow over the Holocaust, and in 1998 - a decade after promising to do so - issued a historic document, "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah," which apologized for the failure of many Catholics to protect Jews in the Holocaust.

While the Vatican viewed the document as groundbreaking, many Jewish groups rejected it because it praised Pius XII's "quiet diplomacy" and did not cite his failure to speak out against the Holocaust. The church held that Pius had personally helped to save thousands of Jews, but did not publicly criticize the Nazis for fear that even more Jews as well as Catholics might be killed.

Even after John Paul delivered the most sweeping apology ever made by a pope - a public act of repentance for the errors and misdeeds of Catholics over the last 2,000 years that was woven into the liturgy of a Sunday Mass at St. Peter's Basilica on March 12, 2000 - Jewish critics were quick to note that he had not specifically mentioned the church's behavior during the Holocaust.

Leading Jews constantly scrutinized papal statements and often decried phrases in which they detected rebukes of Jews for rejecting Christianity or suggestions that Judaism's validity was exhausted with the coming of Jesus.

Papal aides said the criticisms had stung the pope, who spoke often of a common Christian-Jewish biblical heritage and made other overtures to Jews. In 1985, he met Prime Minister Shimon Peres of Israel at the Vatican, and in 1986 made the first recorded visit by a pope to a synagogue, entering Rome's Central Synagogue and, to ringing applause, hailing Jews as "our elder brothers."

The wounds were reopened from time to time. Jews were outraged when nuns set up a Carmelite convent at Auschwitz in 1984. Polish Catholic leaders said it would be relocated by 1989. But the deadline passed, Jewish protesters entered the grounds, and Cardinal Josef Glemp of Warsaw denounced them in a way that sounded anti-Semitic. The convent was finally closed in 1993 by a papal order.

In 1990, Jewish and Catholic leaders met in Prague and pledged to combat outbreaks of anti-Semitism in post-Communist Eastern Europe. The pope endorsed a call for Christian "repentance" for anti-Semitism made by Archbishop Edward I. Cassidy, head of the Vatican office for relations with Jews, and John Paul's standing with many Jews had been restored by 1992, when a group was formed to study diplomatic relations.


Ties With Israel


After 17 months of talks, the Vatican and Israel formally recognized one another with diplomatic accords in December 1993, and six months later, in June 1994, the Holy See and Jerusalem established full diplomatic relations with an exchange of ambassadors. It was a political and religious milestone.

But within months, the relationship was troubled anew. In August 1994, John Paul conferred a papal knighthood on Mr. Waldheim, citing his peace efforts as United Nations secretary general from 1972 to 1980. Israeli and other Jewish leaders were outraged that the pope had honored a man who had served with Nazi units that massacred civilians, executed prisoners and deported Jews in the Balkans. Mr. Waldheim disavowed any war crimes, but the Justice Department called his denials unconvincing and after 1987 barred him from the United States.

Another painful issue for Jews - a cross erected at Auschwitz to commemorate the pope's 1979 visit - arose on a trip to his homeland in 1999, when Poland's chief rabbi, Pinchas Menachem Joskowicz, approached him on a receiving line and introduced himself as a survivor of the death camp. "I have a favor to ask Mr. Pope," the rabbi said. "I ask Mr. Pope to give a call to his people to also take this cross away from the camp."

If the pope was offended, he gave no sign, listening patiently and replying quietly. But a papal spokesman later called the cross a "local issue" and not a Vatican concern.

Jewish criticism of the pope was vociferous again when he beatified - and in 1998 canonized - a German convert from Judaism, Edith Stein, who became a Carmelite nun and was gassed by the Nazis at Auschwitz in 1942. While she was declared a saint as a Christian martyr, many Jews, including her relatives, insisted that she had been killed because of her Jewish background.

The pope acknowledged as much, but failed to mollify critics, who were also incensed by his beatification of Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac, the archbishop of Zagreb during World War II, when a Nazi puppet regime ruled Croatia and 700,000 Serbs, Jews and others were sent to death camps.

When John Paul finally made a six-day journey to the Holy Land in March 2000, it was widely seen as a personal triumph and high point of his reign - a poignant blend of sacred and secular gestures delicately balanced in a land revered by all the Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Islam and Christianity.

There had never been an official papal visit to the Holy Land, though Paul VI had made an informal trip there in 1964, staying only 12 hours and pointedly never referring to Israel. (John Paul, as Karol Wojtyla, the archbishop of Krakow, had visited Jerusalem in 1963.)

John Paul made his long-awaited pilgrimage amid heavy security, traveling first to Mount Nebo in Jordan, where the Bible says Moses first looked out over the Promised Land, and on to Amman and the Jordan River site where Jesus is said to have been baptized.

In Tel Aviv, President Ezer Weizman and Prime Minister Ehud Barak received the pope as one of the most important visitors in Israel's history, and his presence in Jerusalem later was hailed by Israeli leaders as nothing less than a Christian affirmation of the Jewish right to a homeland.

For Palestinian leaders, his presence was also a symbolic triumph. He went to Mr. Arafat's home in Bethlehem and to a squalid Palestinian refugee camp. Mr. Arafat called his visit a ringing endorsement of Palestinian nationalist aspirations and a recognition of Palestinian suffering under Israeli rule.

In gestures to Israel's tiny Christian populations that were also moving personal experiences, the pope visited sites venerated as those of Jesus' birth, Last Supper, Crucifixion, burial and Resurrection. He also met the Greek Orthodox patriarch and leaders of the Maronite Christians, Armenian Catholics, Melchites and Chaldeans.

In Jerusalem, he saw the Ashkenazic and Sephardic chief rabbis, and went to Al Aksa Mosque to meet Sheik Ikrima Sabri, the city's chief Islamic cleric. He went to the Western Wall, Judaism's most sacred site, and, following the custom of Jewish visitors, placed a note in a crevice, a plea for reconciliation that was the theme of his pilgrimage. At Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial, he paid homage to the six million victims of Nazi persecution.


Politics and Religion


Closer to home, the pope often found himself at odds with Italians. Many were harshly critical of him for leading a campaign in 1981 to repeal Italy's liberal abortion law. The voters upheld abortion rights, and many resented what they called his interference.

In 1985, the Italian government and the Vatican signed an historic concordat disestablishing Roman Catholicism as the state religion; the pope said it showed church respect for Italy's independence, although he reserved the right to speak out on national issues. In 2002, John Paul became the first pope to visit the Italian Parliament, and used the occasion to call for the enactment of policies to encourage and support larger Italian families.

He was also criticized inside and outside the church for his opposition to "liberation theology," a school of thought originating in Latin America but influential elsewhere too. Blending biblical themes with Marxist and sometimes Leninist economic analyses, it was an underlying justification for the Catholic clergy's involvement in political struggles for justice for the poor in Latin America and other parts of the third world.

For years, John Paul tried to draw a delicate boundary between religious and political involvement, saying that concern for social justice was the rightful function of the Catholic clergy but that outright political action violated the calling of nuns and priests. Class struggle, he said, could not be the church's solution to social injustice.

In Latin America particularly, the clergy's resistance to the noninvolvement doctrine was strong. The Rev. Leonardo Boff of Brazil, a movement leader, was silenced by Rome for a year; in 1992 he resigned from the priesthood to protest Vatican restrictions on writings by the clergy and members of religious orders.

Another champion of liberation theology, the Rev. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the first democratically elected president of Haiti, denounced the Vatican in 1992 for recognizing military leaders who had deposed him in 1991. Since 1982, when he became a priest, Father Aristide had excoriated the Haitian church for what he called its complicity with brutal dictatorships. He left the priesthood after being returned to power by United States forces in 1994, and was overthrown last year amid violent protests and charges of corruption.

Even some members of the Curia, the Vatican's central administration, were disenchanted with the pope. Speaking behind cloaks of anonymity, some contended that he was a poor administrator, neglected necessary paperwork, spent too much time traveling and was too much the showman. Some Vatican prelates said that in private he was somber, serious, enigmatic, sometimes quixotic, a man who hid his feelings and did not say much.

Critics said he devoted too much attention to Poland and Eastern Europe and not enough to Western Europe early in his papacy. But his refusal to accept the Iron Curtain contributed forcefully to Communism's fall, and in later years he generally supported European political and cultural unification. He also made religious reconciliation a major concern.

There were grand ecumenical gestures. Besides his visit to the synagogue in Rome, he embraced the archbishop of Canterbury at Canterbury Cathedral in England in 1982 and prayed with another archbishop of Canterbury at the Vatican in 1996. In 2003, he met another Anglican archbishop, Rowan Williams, at the Vatican, and warned him against the ordination of gay priests, a matter that had deeply divided Anglicans. The Church of Rome and the Church of England studied ways to end a 450-year rift, but nothing came of it.

The pope also made overtures to Eastern Orthodoxy. In May 1999, he visited Bucharest, Romania, and prayed with Patriarch Teoctist; it was the first papal trip to a predominantly Orthodox country in nearly a thousand years. The schism that had kept Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians apart since 1054 was not ended, but the visit was an ecumenical waymark.

Six months later, the pope visited Georgia, in the Caucasus, another mainly Orthodox country. He was greeted warmly by President Eduard Shevardnadze, the former Soviet foreign minister who also helped prod Communism's fall, but his reception by Georgian Orthodox Church leaders was guarded.

On the same trip, his last of the millennium, the pope went to India, where Christians, a tiny fraction of the population, had been the target of beatings, killings and other persecution. He met Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and other religious leaders, but won no support for his plea for toleration of his church's hope to evangelize Asia.

He undertook other interfaith dialogues. In 1983, he joined a Lutheran service and praised Martin Luther on the 500th birthday of the Reformation's leader. But no major agreements or ecclesiastical changes emerged from those contacts, and most theologians said John Paul, for all his good will toward other faiths, had not substantially advanced the ecumenical cause.


An Astonishing Succession


He was a poet, a playwright, the author of many books and hundreds of articles, a philosopher, a formidable debater, an actor, an athlete with a passion for skiing, swimming and mountain climbing, a professor of social ethics and a linguist fluent in seven languages and skilled in a dozen. But at the time of his election as 264th bishop of Rome, the pope was almost unknown outside the church hierarchy and his native Poland, where he had been a priest since 1946, the archbishop of Krakow since 1964 and a cardinal since 1967.

There had never been a Slavic pope. The last pontificate of a non-Italian - that of Adrian VI, a Dutchman from Utrecht - had ended 455 years earlier, in the era of Luther's rebellion in Germany. There had been 45 Italians on the throne of St. Peter since then.

After the death of Pope Paul VI on Aug. 6, 1978, a majority of the College of Cardinals - the body that elects the pope - agreed that his successor should be an Italian but not connected with the Curia. On Aug. 26, the college elected Cardinal Albino Luciani, patriarch of Venice, who assumed the name John Paul I, combining those of his immediate predecessors, John XXIII and Paul VI, an expression of continuity he intended to preserve.

But John Paul I died a month later, on Sept. 28, and the cardinals returned for a new conclave starting Oct. 14. Predictions were that the successor would again be an Italian. But a rift developed among Italian cardinals, the largest national group in the college, and forced a compromise.

Conservatives had rallied to Cardinal Giuseppe Siri, archbishop of Genoa, a champion of orthodoxy and a candidate in every conclave since the death of Pius XII in 1958. Most moderates wanted Cardinal Giovanni Benelli, archbishop of Florence and an aide to Paul VI. In early balloting, neither came close to the required two-thirds plus one - 75 of 111 participants - and a search for a compromise candidate ensued.

The name of Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Poland was raised by Cardinal John Krol, the Polish-American archbishop of Philadelphia, and by Cardinal Franz König, archbishop of Vienna, and prelates from West Germany.

Cardinal Wojtyla was an attractive candidate, theologically orthodox yet a man of personal dynamism and proven political skills who could reach out to Eastern Europe and the peoples of Communist nations and the third world, one who could be a spokesman for peace, disarmament and justice in the world.

He had been a tough opponent of the Nazis, the Marxists and the Stalinists in Poland and was emerging as a bold voice within the church. He was also physically vigorous and only 58, 10 years younger than most popes elected in this century, and he could be expected to have a long pontificate.

His election, on the eighth ballot, met with almost universal astonishment outside the Sistine Chapel. But among Poland's 31 million Catholics, 92 percent of the population, and among millions of Americans of Polish descent, it was an occasion for pride and celebration that went on for days.

The new pope quickly set to work to put his stamp on the papacy. There were clues to its character in his earliest pronouncements. Addressing crowds on the night of his election, he twice invoked the name of the Virgin Mary and vowed total trust in her, a signal of doctrinal conservatism that would be a hallmark of his reign.

His greeting, "Praised be Jesus Christ" - an ancient earthy phrase used by Polish peasants and others in deeply Catholic rural areas of Europe, but one having an archaic ring in cosmopolitan Rome - was a sign that whatever lofty locutions were to come, his papacy would be rooted in his own humble origins.

Accordingly, he put decorum aside and stripped daily life in the Vatican of many of its ceremonial frills. He eschewed the papal pronoun "we" in favor of "I" and did away with the pomp of a traditional triple-crown investiture, substituting an outdoor inaugural Mass in St. Peter's Square that was attended by 100,000 people and seen on television around the world.

Ignoring the usual papal preoccupation with the Curia's bureaucracy, he made it known that not all Vatican administrators would keep their jobs. In an early move to pre-empt opposition, he received the intransigent traditionalist French prelate, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who had been suspended two years earlier. The archbishop was excommunicated before he died.

The pope also received Andrei A. Gromyko, the Soviet foreign minister, and asserted that dialogue with the Communist nations was the "only way to ease" mutual problems. And he met the leaders of various world Jewish organizations and called for "a fraternal dialogue and fruitful cooperation."


Outdoorsman and Athlete


The new pope had been an athlete and outdoorsman all his life, a soccer player, backpacker, camper, boater and long-distance runner, and he looked it. He was solidly built and vigorous, with a bullish neck and strong, stooped shoulders that hinted of his youth as a laborer and factory worker. He moved with a deliberate, confident step, a graceful man for his size.

He was 5 feet 10 inches tall and weighed 175 pounds. His graying, once blondish hair was close-cropped, and his eyes were dark and deeply expressive, sometimes wide with mirth, sometimes narrowed to slits of concentration. His hands were fascinating: big, creased, workman's hands that swept the air in gestures of mildness or came together, poised to pray.

He did not smoke, but he liked a glass of wine with meals. He wrote many of his own speeches and other pronouncements longhand. While for some it shattered an old-fashioned papal image, he liked to chat, to joke and to laugh heartily. He loved to swim and refused to give it up, so he had a pool built at the summer palace at Castel Gandolfo. Word that the pope was taking daily dips caused no little stir and delighted cartoonists, who pictured him in the water with a miter on his head. When a high-ranking prelate suggested that the pool must have been expensive, the pope quipped, "Holding another conclave to elect a new pope would cost even more."

He had traveled widely as a cardinal, visiting the United States in 1969 and 1976, Australia and Polynesia in 1973 and most of the countries of Europe on regular pilgrimages from Poland to Rome, and he resolved early to continue his sojourns as pope. His command of languages - including Polish, Latin, Italian, French, German, Spanish and English - was an enormous advantage, allowing him to speak directly to people nearly everywhere, from podiums and in the streets. In January 1979, his first trip outside Italy as pope was to the Dominican Republic and Mexico, where millions heard him voice concern for the oppressed. He also rejected notions of Christ as a political or revolutionary figure, called the church's mission religious and not social or political, and added, "The church wishes to stay free with regard to the competing systems."


A Fateful Visit


His first journey to Poland, in June 1979, proved to be one of his most important trips. There was no way to know at the time, but the visit was, many historians say, the beginning of the end for Communism in the Soviet sphere - proof for all that the raw power of government could not overcome the power of faith.

It began just after the 900th anniversary of the martyrdom of St. Stanislaus, Poland's patron saint, and it exposed weaknesses in the Polish Communist government, which had long sought to extinguish fires of Catholicism.

The government first rejected a visit. Then, trying to limit the impact, it restricted his itinerary, muted advance publicity and refused to let workers take time off. But all that made no difference. From the moment he arrived and knelt to kiss the Polish earth until his tearful departure nine days later, his homecoming was a succession of thundering triumphs.

From Warsaw to Auschwitz to Krakow, in 36 public appearances, he clasped old friends in headlocks, sang hymns and folk songs with his people, offered Masses for throngs that stretched across hillsides, and without directly attacking the government repeatedly challenged its authority. "Christ cannot be kept out of the history of man in any part of the globe," he told vast crowds in Warsaw. "The exclusion of Christ from the history of man is an act against man."

Coal miners, housewives, university students, young people in blue jeans - 13 million people of every age and description - turned out to see him. They strewed his way with flowers, they sobbed joyously, and they broke into chants like football fans: "We want God! We want God! We want God!"

In Gniezno after an open-air Mass for 100,000 young people, the pope joined in singing popular songs. In Czestochowa, 500,000 pilgrims fell to their knees when he reconsecrated the nation to Mary, "queen of Poland." At Auschwitz, where a million people, mostly Jews, had been killed by the Nazis, he spoke of this place "built on hatred and contempt for man in the name of an insane ideology." Referring to a dedication in Hebrew for victims, he declared: "It is not permissible for anyone to pass by this inscription with indifference."

Months later, the pope's role as a moral leader was reinforced by a journey to Ireland and the United States. He was eager to confront sectarian strife in Ulster, the erosion of the Irish church to secularization, and in the United States a church caught in turbulent debate over birth control, abortion, the role of women in the ministry and other issues.

His outdoor Mass in Dublin drew 1.2 million people. In Drogheda, near the border of Northern Ireland, he begged Catholics, Protestants and especially the militant Irish Republican Army to "turn away from the path of violence."

In the United States, with 50 million Roman Catholics, he was a dramatic new figure in a world that seemed to lack outstanding leaders. Visiting six cities and rural Iowa in seven days, he captured national attention continuously, his every word and gesture televised and chronicled in the press. Vast crowds lined his routes, attended his masses, heard his homilies and joined the spectacles. At each stop - in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Des Moines, Chicago and Washington - virtual holidays were declared, and public officials outdid each other with receptions of staggering magnitude.

For two whirlwind days, he dominated life in New York City. He addressed the United Nations, visited St. Patrick's Cathedral, offered Mass at Yankee Stadium and engaged in a playful dialogue with young people rallying at Madison Square Garden. He visited a church in Harlem, rode in a rain-soaked ticker-tape parade on lower Broadway and addressed crowds at Battery Park and Shea Stadium.

He often waded into enormous, friendly crowds, hugging and kissing people, saluting neighborhoods and church groups. At the Battery in a pouring rain, he said: "I address a special word to the leaders of the Jewish community, whose presence here honors me greatly. Shalom! Peace be with you."

There were protests. In Washington, Sister Theresa Kane, president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, surprised the pope in introducing him to an audience of nuns by saying, "The church must regard the possibility of women being included in all the ministries of the church."

And when he had gone, questions remained: Was the pope inflexible? Did he recognize deep frustrations of Catholics who disagreed with church teaching on sexual matters, the roles of women and the clergy? Was there even room for discussion?


An Assassination Attempt


John Paul's life as a robust, traveling teacher-pope appeared to have been altered on May 13, 1981, when a 23-year-old Turk, Mehmet Ali Agca, shot him as he rode in an open car before 10,000 people in St. Peter's Square. Bystanders seized the gunman as the pope's car sped away to Gemelli Hospital. Shot in the abdomen, right arm and left hand, he underwent five hours of surgery, and part of an intestine was removed.

Investigators searching Mr. Agca's past learned that he was a murderer who had escaped from a Turkish prison in 1979 and had ties to a neo-Nazi group, the Gray Wolves. But no evidence of a conspiracy to kill the pope was found. Mr. Agca was tried by the Italian authorities and sentenced to life in prison.

The assailant later said the shooting was a Soviet-inspired plot involving Bulgarian and Turkish agents, and investigators uncovered tantalizing details that seemed to support some of his assertions. But an Italian court in 1986 found the evidence ambiguous and acquitted three Bulgarians and three Turks of conspiracy in the case. A link between the attack and the Bulgarian government was often asserted, but never proved.

The pope publicly forgave Mr. Agca, and in 1999 the Vatican endorsed clemency. In 2000, the Italian government pardoned Mr. Agca, who was extradited to Turkey and began serving a 10-year term for the murder of a newspaper editor in 1979.

On May 13, 2000, exactly 19 years after the shooting, the Vatican disclosed that a vision of the attempt on the pope's life was the so-called third secret of Fátima, the last of three prophecies revealed to three Portuguese shepherd children by an apparition of the Virgin on May 13, 1917, at Fátima, Portugal.

Fatima historians say the first secret prophesied the end of World War I and the coming of World War II, while the second supposedly predicted the spread and collapse of Communism and the resurgence of Christianity in Russia. The third, written and sent to Rome by one of the three recipients, Lucia de Jesus dos Santos, who became a Carmelite nun, was kept secret by five popes.

Fascination over the secret spawned conspiracy theories and doomsday cults, with conjectures ranging from a Catholic schism with rival papacies to nuclear annihilation. Devotees of apocalypse were deflated by the Vatican explanation. The pope did not comment, though he always credited the Virgin of Fátima with sparing his life in the shooting.


Health, Good and Bad


Despite the seriousness of his wounds, the pope recovered, and in the years that followed, his old vigor returned, his health was strikingly good, and he was laid low by nothing worse than influenza until July 1992, when was hospitalized for a stomach problem. It turned out to be serious. Doctors excised a tumor the size of an orange from his colon and removed his gallbladder. The tumor was in an early stage of malignancy, but no chemotherapy or other treatment was deemed necessary, and he was traveling again within three months.

In November 1993, there was another flutter of concern when the pope tripped on the hem of his robe and fell as he descended three steps from his throne to greet visitors at the Vatican. He suffered a fractured and dislocated right shoulder, which had to be encased in a soft cast.

Five months later, in April 1994, he fell as he climbed from a bathtub in his Vatican apartment, fracturing and dislocating his right thighbone. Surgeons replaced part of the bone near the hip socket with metal alloys.

The pope fell again in 1999 on a trip to Poland, suffering a head cut that required three stitches. By then, he had grown frail and had difficulty walking, even with a cane. There were other symptoms: trembling in his left hand and slurred speech that made it hard to understand his words. Privately, officials said he had Parkinson's disease and crippling arthritis; the Vatican did not confirm the diagnoses, but there was no doubt about them.

By 2002, the symptoms had profoundly worsened: he could not walk without aid, his hands shook so much he could not hold his speeches, and his speech was so slurred he was almost impossible to understand. In 2003, he traveled to Spain, Croatia, Bosnia, Poland and Slovakia, but sometimes garbled words and let aides finish his speeches.

During his convalescences - from the shooting, the tumor operation and the falls - some Vatican officials privately expressed hope that he would be forced to settle down, travel less and get more involved in the problems of running the church. But John Paul, who hated to be coddled and sometimes brushed off aides who tried to help him, was determined to continue his busy life.


A Traveling Papacy


Six months after the 1981 shooting, he ventured to Umbria, in central Italy, and was soon planning new travels. In 1982 he visited 12 countries in Africa, Europe and South America, and by 1983 was traveling as widely as ever. Over the next few years he went back to Africa, Europe, South America, the Caribbean and the Far East, often to third-world countries, where the church was flourishing.

While he went to Africa a dozen times, he refused for years to visit South Africa because of its apartheid racial policies. But after Pretoria's peaceful transition to a non-racial Democracy, he went to Johannesburg in 1995, met President Nelson Mandela and praised the reconciliation.

In 1986, the pope took a particularly long and exotic journey: two weeks and 30,000 miles to Bangladesh, Singapore, Fiji, New Zealand and Australia. He was greeted by women in saris dancing to the rhythms of sitars, aborigines in loincloths and painted faces, spear-toting tribesmen who rubbed noses with him, and bare-breasted Papuan women fluttering in traditional grass skirts.

Later that year in Calcutta, India, where countless thousands slept in streets or mud huts, he went to Mother Teresa's hospice; four people died on the day of his visit. The pope was at a loss