Defender of the Faith

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After the war, in the late 1940s, as the communist government settled in, the young priest embarked on what would be a rapid rise through the still embattled church's hierarchy. By 1967 he was a Cardinal. Mixing aggressiveness with accommodation, Wojtyla managed to build a huge church for 100,000 Catholic citizens in the industrial city of Nova Huta and reach out to a wide cross section of workers, youths and intellectuals. Yet what turned a provincial prince into a rising church star was the churchwide reform of Vatican II. At the Second Vatican Council (1961-65), Wojtyla contributed to several key documents, most notably on the church in the modern world, at one point causing an observer to make note of his "magnetic power" and "prophetic strength." But Wojtyla declined to embrace change uncritically, prefiguring a lifelong love-hate relationship with the modern era in a speech describing it as "new in good [and] new in evil." After the council, he was elected to an important position in the Bishops' Synod and was later regarded as a protégé of Pope Paul VI. Yet after Paul died in 1978 and his successor John Paul I succumbed to a heart attack only 34 days into his papacy, Wojtyla was so oblivious to his impending fate that he spent the first day of the new papal conclave nonchalantly browsing through a quarterly review of Marxist theory. When the two leading Italian candidates, a Vatican power broker and an ultraconservative, deadlocked, the Cardinals began looking over the Alps for the first time since 1522. Elected on the eighth ballot, Wojtyla modestly chose to be called John Paul II.

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Then John Paul's personal history, his duties as Pontiff and the late 20th century's greatest drama merged in a breathtaking manner. The election of a Polish Pope posed an implicit challenge to Poland's Soviet-backed regime, a challenge John Paul quickly made immediate with two visits home. His first, in 1979, drew enormous, bloc-shaking crowds. On the next trip, after he told the restive populace to "be not afraid" and declared in the holy town of Czestochowa that "man cannot remain with no way out," the new Solidarity free-trade-union movement made him its virtual patron saint, flying the papal flag at the gate of the Gdansk shipyard.

For the next decade, John Paul, in secret contact with Polish leader Wojciech Jaruzelski and Soviet and U.S. leaders, adroitly balanced his role as the union's champion with his resolve that no Polish blood be spilled. When Jaruzelski, fearing a Soviet invasion, declared martial law in 1981, the Pope mystified the West by disagreeing with U.S. sanctions. But his forbearance allowed him to attain a position of near partnership with the communist regime. Poland rolled back martial law in 1983 and--with the acquiescence of Mikhail Gorbachev--communism itself in April 1989. The largely peaceful transition seems to have influenced Gorbachev's approach to the other seceding East bloc nations and forever linked John Paul's name with communism's demise. Wrote the former Soviet leader in 1992: "Everything that happened in Eastern Europe in these last few years would have been impossible without the presence of the Pope and without the important role--including the political role--that he played on the world stage."

THE EVANGELIST