Strong papal leadership will leave divisive legacy

ADORED by some, attacked by others, Pope John Paul is the most prominent religious leader and perhaps the most widely recognised person in the world.

In over a quarter century on the global stage, he was both a champion of the downtrodden and an often contested defender of orthodoxy within his own church.

In recent years, the world watched the decline in the health of the 84-year-old sufferer from Parkinson’s disease and severe arthritis. He was left unable to complete his prepared speeches and had difficulty pronouncing his words.

The massive media coverage around the world of his illness showed his appeal went far beyond the ranks of his own church.

The Polish Pope burst on the scene on October 16, 1978, when cardinals in a secret conclave chose him as the first non-Italian pontiff in four and a half centuries.

The third longest-serving Pope, the steely willed John Paul ushered his church into the new millennium despite his sapped stamina.

Historians say one of the Pope’s most lasting legacies will be his role in the fall of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989.

Poles believe his unflagging support for the banned Solidarity trade union while communists tried to crush it was a potent force keeping the movement alive.

Solidarity formed the East Bloc’s first non-communist government in 1989, marking the start of a wave of freedom which saw Marxist regimes fall like dominoes across Europe.

“Behold the night is over, day has dawned anew,” the Pope said during a triumphant visit to Czechoslovakia in 1990.

A decade later, he fulfilled another of his dreams. He visited the Holy Land in March 2000, and, praying at Jerusalem’s Western Wall, he asked forgiveness for Catholic sins against Jews over the centuries.

A tireless traveller who clocked up some 775,000 miles in 104 foreign trips to some 130 countries, the Pope drew crowds of up to four million people.

He was determined to use his office to draw attention to the plight of the world’s neediest and oppressed while at the same time keeping a firm and conservative grip on his Church.

A strong defender of human rights and religious freedom, his calls for a “new world economic order” and defence of workers’ rights have led some to call him “the socialist Pope”.

An advocate of peace and nuclear disarmament, he has often warned that mankind was heading for Armageddon and in 2003 led the Vatican’s campaign against the war in Iraq.

A former actor who wrote several plays, Pope John Paul used his mastery of timing, levity and languages to communicate like few other world figures of modern times.

However, many Catholics, particularly in developed countries, have disregarded his teachings against contraception, questioned his ban on women priests and campaigned for a liberal successor. They have also chafed under growing Vatican centralisation.

Church reformers, the young, and Third World congregations in the grip of a devastating AIDS epidemic, became dismayed at his refusal to give any ground on contraception and the use of condoms.

“For the Catholic Church, this pontificate, despite its positive aspects, has really been a disaster,” said Swiss theologian Hans Kueng in 2003.

“Many women have turned away from the Church because of the Pope’s position on contraception and the ordination of women,” he added.

In the United States, high-profile scandals involving several paedophile priests shook the foundations of the Catholic Church until the Vatican belatedly sanctioned a policy of “zero tolerance” toward such behaviour.

Vatican policy-making assumed an increasingly authoritarian stamp. The Pope issued 13 encyclicals, including three on socio-economic questions, and wrote several best-selling books.

Concerned that many Catholics have strayed from traditional teachings, he waged an unflagging battle against abortion, contraception, pre-marital sex, divorce, homosexuality and the breakdown of traditional family values.

From Haiti to the United States, from Brazil to Austria, he revived conservative Catholic self-awareness and stressed obedience to the Church’s hierarchy.

He appointed over 95% of cardinals who could enter a conclave to elect his successor, thus stacking the odds the next Pope will not tamper with his controversial teachings.

Karol Wojtyla was born on May 18, 1920, in a humble apartment house in the Wadowice, near Krakow. His father was a non-commissioned officer in the Polish army and his mother died in 1929.

In 1938, Wojtyla moved to Krakow, where he entered the Jagellonian University. The Nazis closed the university when they invaded in 1939, and to escape death or deportation the students merged with the population. But he studied for the priesthood secretly during the occupation and was ordained a priest after the war in 1946.

He was made archbishop of Krakow in 1963 and promoted to cardinal in 1967, becoming one of Poland’s leading anti-communist churchmen during the post-war period.

After the early death of John Paul I, Wojtyla became the 264th successor of St Peter and, at 58, the youngest Pope for more than a century.