Obituary: Introduction

Pope John Paul II, who died on Saturday, 2 April, at the age of 84 was one of the most dominant popes of all time. He highlighted the Catholic presence in the world as never before through his journeys to all five continents, drawing massive crowds. His experiences in Nazi-occupied Poland bore fruit in the advances the Church later made on human rights and relations to Judaism. He was a midwife to the collapse of Communism, and the significance of the election of this first Slav pope became apparent in the extraordinary years when the Berlin Wall and so many Communist regimes came tumbling down.

In the second phase of his papacy, he turned his attention to the relativism and permissiveness of the capitalist democracies. He undertook a huge programme of teaching, especially through his lengthy, powerful encyclical letters. His critics as well as his supporters acknowledged his status as a moral leader. He had a mystical temperament, and an iron will. He prayed for hours each day.

This was a media superstar Pope. From the start of his papacy, he showed his ability to appeal directly to the people, over the heads of cardinals or government ministers. He was a loner. His mother and brother both died when he was young, and he had the characteristics of an orphan. He listened to many, heard only some, and decided for himself.

He had phenomenal charisma. A personality cult grew up around him. His face became familiar from a million television programmes: handsome, masculine, fatherly, assured, decisive, with a touch of humour and a touch of slyness. Later, as Parkinson's disease took hold, that same face showed the vulnerability, frailty and suffering of the human condition.

The whole world was his stage. Visit followed visit: there were 104 abroad, and 146 within Italy. No Pope had ever behaved like this before. He played his audiences with all the verve of a professional actor: he could time his pauses, for example, to perfection. He had a special rapport with the young. In this way he mobilised the Catholic Church, making the world aware that he led a community of a billion people, a force to be reckoned with.

From the first year of his papacy, he set a cracking pace: his entourage began calling him 'the white tornado'. Still towards the end, in the millennium year 2000, although now severely stricken with Parkinson's disease, he exhibited such diplomatic dexterity on a visit to the Holy Land that one admiring Israeli official was reported to have said that this was a man who could walk between the raindrops without getting wet.

A prophecy of the style of his papacy could be heard in the words of the Polish romantic poet Juliusz Slowacki, who in the nineteenth century had criticised the conduct of Pius IX and prophesied the coming of a Slav pope:

This one will not - Italian-like - take flight
At cannon's roar or sabre thrust
But brave as God himself stand and give fight
Counting the world as dust.

That Polish poem was familiar to Karol Wojtyla from boyhood.

The first non-Italian Pope for four and a half centuries, and the first from Poland, he was elected on 16 October 1978 at the eighth ballot. He was 58. Deadlock had developed between the two leading Italian candidates, Cardinal Giovanni Benelli, Archbishop of Florence, who had previously been the hub of the Vatican machine, and the ultra-traditionalist Cardinal Giuseppe Siri, Archbishop of Genoa, who once said it would take the Church an age to recover from the 'disaster' of Pope John XXIII's reforms. Wojtyla came through the middle. He took the name John Paul II in deference to his predecessor, Albino Luciani, who as John Paul I had died after a papacy lasting only 33 days.

It is clear why Wojtyla's candidature appealed. Cardinal König, the former Archbishop of Vienna, a kingmaker at his election, has recalled how he first saw Karol Wojtyla, then the auxiliary bishop of Krakow, amidst a group of his people, dressed in a simple black cassock, as they sang and played guitars. The cardinals also wanted someone who was vigorous and fit, unlike John Paul I: Wojtyla, 58, was used to trekking in the mountains with his students, he was a canoer, swimmer and skier. He was also a philosopher, a poet, an actor, an exceptional linguist. The cardinals wanted a strong man. That they got. Whether they foresaw the rest is another question.

Pope John Paul II: born Karol Wojtyla 18 May 1920, Wadowice, Cracow died 2 April 2005, the Vatican.

This introduction to the obituary of Pope John Paul II. is reproduced from an April 2, 2005 posting on the website of The Tablet's