GOD'S REVOLUTIONARY
by John O'Sullivan
New York Post
April 3, 2005

April 3, 2005 -- POPE John Paul II was one of the most signifi cant popes in history and perhaps the great est religious leader of our time. His firm fidelity to God's truth strengthened orthodox belief in almost all religions. His missionary visits to numberless countries helped to revive Christian belief in every part of the world — except, ironically, his native Europe. His moral leadership in the democratic struggle against communist totalitarianism inspired half a continent to regain its freedom.

Yet despite these extraordinary contributions to religious and political liberty, the teaching of his uppermost in most minds at the moment of his death is his commitment to a culture of life. Terri Schiavo, whose right to life he championed, entered the next world only days ahead of him. Is it altogether fanciful to believe that his teaching and her example will prompt a rethinking of our drift toward an evasive euthanasia. If so, both will surely rejoice.

When historians turn to John Paul's life and times, however, it is the larger achievements they will ponder. Those achievements are rooted in Karol Wotyla's experience prior to his election to the papacy in 1978. The son of a retired Polish military officer, Wojtyla was an athlete, an actor and a promising scholar of philosophy before the Nazi invasion. If history had not intervened, he would probably have become a professional actor or a philosophy lecturer.

He never lost his philosophical interests — his last book was a collection of philosophical essays — or his sense of theater. But he discovered a more pressing vocation.

AS George Weigel demon strates in his magisterial biography, "Witness to Hope," the Nazi invasion brought home to Wojtyla the central importance of political and religious liberty to the human personality.

He was active in the anti-Nazi resistance, dodging German patrols to read patriotic plays to Poles clinging to hope of victory. And when he returned to a communist Poland after the war as a priest, lecturer and eventually Bishop of Krakow, he was known as a "relentless, sophisticated advocate for the religious and other civil rights of his people."

These experiences enabled him to grasp not only the importance of freedom, but also the weakness of totalitarianism. People were held down by fear. If once they recovered hope — the communist despotisms would tumble.

When he became Pope John Paul II in 1978, even atheists sensed that his election was a world-changing event. Yuri Andropov, then head of the KGB, warned his Politburo colleagues that a Polish pope would likely destabilize the Soviet Union by inspiring the nations held captive within it. Eleven years later, the evil empire crumbled and the captive nations emerged into the light of freedom.

Others played vital roles in that liberation — Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and the heroic dissidents behind the Iron Curtain. But the pope had provided its vital spiritual impulse and its message of hope.

WITHIN months of his 1979 papal visit to Poland, there were riots by Polish workers, the rise of Solidarity and the spread of anti-communist dissidence throughout Eastern Europe. In the words of the British historian Neal Ascherson (no admirer of religious orthodoxy), the pope's visit was a "lance head" that "went straight into the bowels of the whole Soviet empire, and gave it a wound from which it simply didn't recover."

His continuing influence, moreover, moderated passions of revenge and ensured that the democratic revolutions of 1989 were peaceful as well as successful.

If the pope had achieved nothing more in his lifetime than to be the religious spark of liberty in Europe, he would be a historical figure of the first rank in the world. In fact, he was a world-changing figure in many other ways:

* He finally interred the restless ghost of Christian anti-Semitism, declaring it to be a serious sin and famously referring to Jews as "our elder brothers." Anti-Semitism still persists and may even be growing in Western Europe, alas, but it no longer has even a faint justification in Christian teaching or substantial support from the Catholic clergy.

* He sought close and fraternal relations with the leaders of other religions without either surrendering or seeking the surrender of fundamental beliefs. He did not fully succeed with the leaders of Orthodox Christianity, and was believed to be privately distressed by Muslim leaders' silence about attacks on Christians and Christianity because of fear of their own extremists. Still, the seeds of better Christian-Muslim relations have been planted for later generations to harvest.

* Drawing on his philosophical studies, he developed a more sophisticated Catholic understanding of capitalism. In his encyclicals, he maintained the church's condemnation of a purely materialistic account of life — indeed, he was more trenchant than earlier popes in condemning consumerism — but he also argued that private enterprise and entrepreneurship were praiseworthy expressions of man's creativity that required economic freedom to flourish.

He thus moved away from older Catholic ideas of "corporatism" that had privileged existing businesses, stifled the aspirations of new entrepreneurs, and retarded economic development in Catholic countries.

* He gave strength and hope to traditional Christian believers of all denominations in their battle with secularism and theological liberalism. American Catholics and evangelical Protestants were still mildly hostile strangers when he entered the papacy. Today, they cooperate on a host of issues from abortion to welfare reform. An "ecumenism of the barricades" has emerged in the pro-life movement and other battles with the growing secularism of the modern West.

Which bring us to John Paul's one great failure and disappointment. A century ago, Hilaire Belloc could truthfully say: "Europe is the faith and the faith is Europe." No longer. Today, the European Christian churches that survived the threat and oppression of communism are succumbing to the euthanasia of post-Christian consumer materialism under liberty.

In this atmosphere, religious belief and attendance are declining across the continent — even in such outposts of belief as Ireland. Post-Christian materialism has even taken official form in the proposed European Union constitution, which omits all mention of Christianity from its account of Europe's history and civilizational identity. That deliberate omission reflects an increasing hostility to Christianity and religious belief in the secular elites that govern Europe.

John Paul II, who strongly supported European unity throughout his papacy as the modern expression of Christendom, found it had become instead the expression of secular fundamentalism. He fought hard to get a simple historical acknowledgment of Christianity's contribution to European history. But he failed — and his failure reflects the still growing dominance of secular fundamentalism in the West.

It looks invincible. But so did communist totalitarianism in 1978. And this brings us to perhaps the most vital part of the legacy.

POPE John Paul II took seri ously the universalism of the Catholic Church and made regular pilgrimages to the whole world, in particular to the poor countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America.

His pilgrimages to the Third World coincided (not coincidentally) with the extraordinary rise of traditional Christianity of all denominations in those countries. Vast audiences of young people turned out to worship at his open-air Masses and to receive a blessing from him in his familiar "Popemobile."

It was these gatherings that gave heart to traditional believers. Here was evidence that their faith was not a relic of the past, of old women in black murmuring quietly in empty churches, but the vibrant faith of millions of young people. It was the liberal churches that began to seem old-fashioned, clinging to a secular faith in the "social gospel" of welfarism that offered more stone than bread. Even those who believed that the Catholic Church should adopt such reforms as women priests began to fear that the tide had turned against them.

There has been a reverse missionary movement in recent years of young priests from Africa, Asia and Latin America to Europe (and, to a lesser extent, the United States), where liberal Christianity has led to both empty cradles and empty pulpits. Our pulpits are no longer empty as a result — but until our cradles are full, too, the future history of Christianity will be made in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

THE next pope will head this rejuvenated universal church as he faces the increasingly hostile "post-Christian" forces in the West. He may or may not be a man from the Third World, but he will be shaped by its influence in any event. John Paul II may not have ensured that his successor would rise as bravely to this challenge as Karol Wojtyla did to his — but he sowed the seeds of at least one more revolution.