A life for history

A Polish priest who survived fascism and communism and then won a surprise election to lead the world's largest religious denomination, Pope John Paul II led Christianity into its third millennium as an unabashed champion of the poor, the oppressed, and the unborn.

Over the course of a quarter-century as the head of the Roman Catholic Church, he helped topple the Communist stranglehold on Eastern Europe, dramatically improved interfaith relations — particularly between Catholics and Jews — and demonstrated an extraordinary commitment to evangelism by visiting nearly every corner of the planet.

The first pope to take full advantage of the ease of jet travel and the advent of the Information Age, he was one of the world's most recognized and beloved figures, a white-robed prelate waving from a glass-enclosed popemobile. The combination of his lengthy tenure, his lofty office, and his powerful personality made him one of the most important religious and political figures of the 20th century, and he attracted huge crowds, often packed with young people, as he traveled the world.

''Although I have lived through much darkness, under harsh totalitarian regimes, I have seen enough evidence to be unshakably convinced that no difficulty, no fear is so great that it can completely suffocate the hope that springs eternal in the hearts of the young,'' he said in a homily at a World Youth Day Mass in Toronto in 2002. ''Do not let that hope die. Stake your lives on it. We are not the sum of our weaknesses and failures; we are the sum of the Father's love for us and our real capacity to become the image of his Son.''

John Paul began his papacy as an energetic man who took vacations to ski and hike, but in recent years he had been ailing visibly, often struggling to walk, or even to keep his head upright while seated. Nearly killed by an assassin in 1981, the pope had been weakened by arthritis and Parkinson's disease, and on occasion his speech was so slurred and his breathing so labored that he relied on aides to wheel him about and to read his remarks.

But he remained active until the end, and declined to retire despite the withering ravages of ill health and old age. He continued to travel, although less than he once had, and maintained a relatively heavy schedule of public and private appearances in Rome. The Vatican constructed a variety of contraptions to allow him to enter and disembark from airplanes and helicopters and to allow him to move through crowds and celebrate Mass; many people saw his obvious struggle to keep moving and speaking as evidence of his saintliness.

A relentless advocate for peace, he opposed the US-led wars in Afghani-stan and Iraq and pushed for com-promise in the Middle East. He made huge strides in reducing 2,000 years of tension between Christians and Jews and reached out repeatedly to other Christian denominations and other religions, despite some opposition from the church's most conservative wing.

In the United States, his final years were marred by the clergy sexual abuse scandal, which exploded in 2002 and led to an unprecedented crisis in the church. The scandal highlighted a deep divide between the personal affection many American Catholics felt for the pope and the intense disagreement many held with church teachings and practices.

A staunch defender of Catholic orthodoxy against the reformist impulses of the modern era, John Paul presided over the transformation of church leadership, appointing theologically conservative bishops to head dioceses around the world and dramatically increasing the representation and influence of African, Asian, and Latin American bishops in the church's administrative structures.

He was frequently critical of American culture, which he saw as excessively materialistic and individualistic. He alienated many, even those who respected him personally, with his unbending opposition to artificial birth control, his defense of the prohibition against the ordination of women, and his rejection of same-sex marriage and other rights sought by gays and lesbians. And during his papacy, the Vatican muzzled a number of theologians around the world whose views on sexuality and on salvation were found suspect by church leaders.

The Catholic church under John Paul increasingly focused on expanding the faith in the developing world. But Catholicism struggled to compete against rapidly growing evangelical Protestant denominations, losing large numbers of adherents in Latin America, and the church's opposition to the use of condoms was a source of tension in Africa, where the AIDS virus infected millions who engaged in unprotected sex.

He was, by the Vatican's reckoning, the 263d successor to the apostle Peter and the third-longest serving pope in history. Only Peter, whose exact length of service is unknown, and Pope Pius IX, who reigned from 1846 until 1878, had longer pontificates.

His papacy was remarkable from the start. Elected on Oct. 16, 1978, after the stunning death of Pope John Paul I, who had served just 33 days, John Paul II was the first non-Italian pope in 455 years, and, equally significant, the first Pole. His experience living in Eastern Europe during World War II and the rise of the Soviet Union shaped his later emphases on repairing Christian-Jewish relations and championing the cause of Eastern Europeans rising against the oppression of Communism.

Staying in touch with the faithful was a cornerstone of his 26-year tenure. He took 104 foreign trips, the last to Lourdes, France in August. He logged nearly three-quarters of a million miles and visited 129 countries, even saying Mass north of the Arctic Circle in 1989, when he traveled to the northernmost Catholic community in the world, in Tromso, Norway. He visited Boston once, on Oct. 1, 1979, in a trip still remembered by thousands who stood on sidewalks as he passed or attended the Mass he celebrated on Boston Common.

He was the first pope to visit a synagogue, in Rome in April 1986, and the first to visit a mosque, in Damascus in May 2001.

He was a prolific author of theological documents, writing 14 encyclicals, 14 apostolic exhortations, 11 apostolic constitutions, 44 apostolic letters, and 29 papal documents called motu proprio. He was the first pope to hold press conferences in airplanes and in the Holy See Press Office. He wrote five books for popular audiences; the most recent, ''Memory and Identity,'' was released in February 2005. And he spoke directly to more than 17 million people at the Vatican, holding more than 1,000 weekly general audiences as well as more than 1,500 private meetings with organizations and heads of state; his final appearance was Feb. 23, when he used a television link from his apartments to greet pilgrims gathered in the Vatican's Paul VI Hall for the pope's weekly general audience.

Even in the waning years of history's bloodiest century, he never lost faith in humanity's capacity for good.

''We must learn not to be afraid,'' John Paul told the United Nations in 1995. ''We must rediscover a spirit of hope and a spirit of trust.''

A turbulent childhood

Karol Wojtyla was born on May 18, 1920, in Wadowice, Poland, a grimy, industrial town 35 miles southwest of Krakow. His mother, Emilia, a schoolteacher, died in 1929 while delivering a stillborn daughter. His older brother, Edmund, died in 1932 during a scarlet fever epidemic.

As a talented orator at a Wadowice secondary school, Karol was asked in 1938 to give a welcoming speech to a special visitor — the Rev. Adam Sapieha, the archbishop of Krakow. The archbishop was so impressed by the speech that he inquired about its author's career plans. When told that Karol was interested in acting, the archbishop replied: ''A pity.'' He decided to keep an eye on the young man, anyway, for the good of the church.

That same year, Karol moved with his father, Karol Sr., to Krakow to study at Jagiellonian University. Karol Sr., a tailor, was an imposing presence and a fervent Catholic. He made a request of his son that would prove to have a profound impact. Karol Sr. wanted his son to become a priest.

''I will not live long and would like to be certain before I die that you will commit yourself to God's service,'' the pope later recalled his father saying. During his university years, he found Christian philosophy deeply appealing, but he had not yet decided to give his life to the church.

The young man's studies were interrupted by the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, the beginning of a traumatic and scarring period in his life. He and a friend were caught in the middle of the bombing of Krakow. To avoid Gestapo roundups, the young man found work vital to the war effort — in a limestone quarry.

Once he was among a group of people arrested by the Nazis, but he was let go because he had a worker's card. The others were shot at Auschwitz.

In 1941, his father died of a heart attack and Karol began to seriously consider becoming a priest. The following year he entered an underground seminary, much to the astonishment of his acting friends. When the Nazis began rounding up all the males in Krakow in 1944, Karol took refuge in the palace of the city's archbishop.

He was ordained a priest in 1946 by Cardinal Sapieha, who rejected Karol's repeated requests to be sent to a monastery. Instead the cardinal assigned the talented cleric to a poor parish in Krakow.

John Paul's conservative beliefs were partly rooted in his education. He studied in Rome under a conservative teacher, the Rev. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, whose nickname was ''Reginald the Rigid.''

Following World War II, the priest rose rapidly through the ranks of the church hierarchy. He was named archbishop of Krakow at age 43. Four years later, in 1967, he was named a cardinal.

His selection as pope in 1978 sent shock waves across the Roman Catholic Church. He was the first non-Italian chosen to be pope since Adrian VI in 1522. But following the deaths of two popes within two months, the cardinals were looking for, among other things, a man of vigor with the stamina to handle the grueling tasks demanded of the vicar of Christ.

John Paul made an immediate impression. An avid skier, swimmer, and hiker, he was robust and energetic. He dazzled Boston during his inaugural pilgrimage to the United States in 1979, hailing the city as a ''community where people of all backgrounds, creeds, races, and convictions have provided workable solutions to problems and have created a home where all people can be respected.''

He also had substance to match his style. Fluent in eight languages, John Paul used his writings and speeches to clarify and defend church doctrine. He stood steadfast against those who sought a more open church, believing that the core tenets of Catholicism came directly from Jesus Christ and the Gospels and, therefore, were not subject to debate.

''It's a mistake to apply American democratic procedures to the faith and truth,'' he said. ''You cannot take a vote on the truth.''

He opposed abortion without exception, proclaiming that it ''always constitutes a grave moral disorder, since it is the deliberate killing of a human being.''

He forbade all forms of artificial contraception and tried to close the door on women's ordination by stating that ''the Church has no authority whatsoever to declare priestly ordination on women, and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church's faithful.''

He criticized the West for being in the grips of what he termed a ''culture of death,'' by which he meant suicide, abortion, and euthanasia.

He railed against the social Darwinism and materialism he believed were rampant in the United States and other industrialized nations. ''Witnessing to Christ means challenging the culture, especially when the truth about the human person is under assault,'' the pope said in a 1995 speech in Baltimore.

John Paul held a special affection for children and teens, and he was the first pope to convene special gatherings around the globe just for youths. These conferences were always massive and enthusiastic celebrations of Catholicism that clearly energized and delighted the pontiff.

''Do I then make a mistake when I tell you, Catholic youth, that it is part of your task in the world and the church to reveal the true meaning of life where hatred, neglect, or selfishness threaten to take over the world?'' John Paul asked during a Mass on Boston Common in 1979, echoing one of his favorite themes.

His papacy was nearly cut short in 1981 in St. Peter's Square, when an assassin's bullet barely missed his aorta. In an act of mercy, John Paul publicly forgave his would-be killer, Mehmet Ali Agca, during a jail cell visit in 1983.

But neither an assassination attempt nor other health woes dampened John Paul's enthusiasm. His 1994 book, ''Crossing the Threshold of Hope,'' sold more than 4 million copies worldwide, even though it was a dense compendium of theology and morality. The English translation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which appeared in 1994 and was the first such comprehensive collection of Roman Catholic teaching since the 16th century, is considered one of the high points of his papacy.

Mending relations with Jews

Moved by the horrors of the Holocaust, John Paul marshaled his papal clout to address one of the church's most challenging and difficult issues — relations with the Jews. In 1986, he became the first pontiff to visit Rome's main synagogue. He established diplomatic relations between the Vatican and Israel in 1994.

In 1998, the pontiff wrote the introduction to ''We Remember,'' the Vatican's long-awaited statement on the church's role during the Holocaust. In the statement, John Paul repented for the failure of Catholics to come to the aid of Jews being slaughtered by the Nazis.

''We cannot know how many Christians in countries occupied or ruled by the Nazi powers or their allies were horrified at the disappearance of their Jewish neighbors and yet were not strong enough to raise their voices in protest,'' the pope wrote. ''We deeply regret the errors and failures of those sons and daughters of the Church.''

The statement was sharply criticized by many Jews and Christians for not addressing forcefully enough the link between centuries of church anti-Semitism and the rise of Nazism or the role of Pope Pius XII during the war. Nevertheless, John Paul, many Jewish leaders agreed, had done more than any other church leader in history to bridge the gulf between Jews and Catholics.

On his memorable trip to the Holy Land in late March 2000, a stooped and frail John Paul slipped a prayer into Jerusalem's Western Wall seeking forgiveness for the ''behavior of those who in the course of history have caused these children of yours to suffer.''

Said the Rev. Thomas J. Reese, a Jesuit and Vatican expert: ''Centuries from now Catholics and Jews will look back on his pontificate as a turning point in healing the terrible 2,000-year-old division and animosity between the two faiths.''

Forging greater rapprochement with the world's major faiths was a priority for John Paul, who met with the Dalai Lama, hosted a leading Muslim cleric, and — in traveling to Romania in 1999 — became the first pope to visit a majority Orthodox Christian nation since the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church split in 1054.

Even as he tried to reach across religious divides, John Paul displayed little interest in making peace within his own house. His conservative positions alienated many gays, women, and other Catholics who believed John Paul regarded lay people, particularly in highly educated nations, as children needing discipline rather than adults deserving respect.

But John Paul was never afraid to tackle critics or squelch dissent, though often it was one of his closest confidantes, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, an orthodox theologian who heads the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, who meted out punishment.

The pope dressed down priests, particularly in Latin America, for becoming too enmeshed in local politics and displaying socialist sympathies. And he banned theologians who questioned church teachings too strongly from working in Catholic universities.

''This was a papacy characterized by irony,'' said Eugene Kennedy, a psychologist and former priest who has written widely on church issues. ''As a major figure of Western Europe, he helped free the peoples of Europe from communism, but as a master figure in the church, he invested his own church with authoritarianism.''

John Paul also never hesitated to take on global opinion when he believed it threatened Catholic teachings. One of the most celebrated examples occurred at the UN population conference in Cairo in 1994. The pope's delegation adamantly opposed a paragraph in the final document, supported by the United States, that would have allowed abortion as a fundamental right of women. John Paul believed it would have been tantamount to making abortion an acceptable method of population control.

In a landmark encyclical issued in 1998 and heralded by many analysts as an exemplary intellectual treatise, John Paul took on nothing less than modern thought, synthesizing his love of philosophy with his fealty to the church's magisterium.

He challenged a ''post-modern'' world view that seemed to judge all values as relative. Morality, John Paul argued, cannot be determined by popular vote and truth cannot be achieved by consensus. Instead, the world, he wrote in ''Fides et Ratio'' (Faith and Reason), should seek harmony between reason and the ''ultimate truths'' of Christianity.

But as much as John Paul was theologically conservative, he was — at least from a political perspective — a liberal on many economic and social issues. He opposed nuclear arms and capital punishment. He was pro-immigration and wary of capitalism, believing it is driven to a great degree by greed and has little concern for human welfare.

Even his critics admired John Paul's humanity. This peripatetic man who could come across as both avuncular, radiating love to the faithful, and stern, keeping the flock in line, had as his ultimate goal creating a world more genuinely concerned with human dignity.

''The church's message is simple yet absolutely crucial for the survival of humanity and the world: The human person must be the true focus of all social, political, and economic activity,'' John Paul told the United Nations in 1995. ''We must not be afraid of the future.... We have within us the capacities for wisdom and virtue. With these gifts, and with the help of God's grace, we can build in the next century and the next millennium a civilization worthy of the human person, a true culture of freedom. We can and we must do so.''

Michael Paulson can be reached at mpaulson@globe.com.