c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) This week, the world remembers a figure who warned, “It is manifestly unjust that a privileged few should continue to accumulate excess goods, squandering available resources, while masses of people are living in conditions of misery at the very lowest levels of subsistence.''

The figure went to a Venezuelan jail to attack the world's treatment of prisoners, denounced capital punishment on general principles and in specific cases all over the world, and attacked the war in Iraq in front of the president of the United States.

He took a bolder position on the environment than many green groups, declaring, “Countries in the process of industrialization are not morally free to repeat the errors made in the past by others, and recklessly continue to damage the environment through industrial pollutants, radical deforestation or unlimited exploitation of non-renewable resources.''

With a paper trail like that, he was lucky he wasn't a politician.

As pope, John Paul II was, of course, beyond the reach of politics, of re-election, recall or anything but the final silencing of mortality. But even his death Saturday (April 2) is not likely to quiet one of the past century's most powerful voices for peace, the poor and the planet.

The pope was chosen in 1978, during a Cold War that now seems as distant as the Reformation, and played a significant role in communism's disintegration in his native Poland and elsewhere. He became a powerful symbol of the change in Eastern Europe, and his enormous anti-communist impact combined with his resolutely traditional stances on sexuality, abortion and women in the church to make him an icon among many conservatives _ but he was much more than a Cold War symbol.

When John Paul II made his first visits to Poland as pope, in 1979 and 1983, he effectively made himself a powerful symbol for resistance to Soviet control. After the changes, he spoke not in victory but in challenge to the new order.

In 1990, right after communism's collapse in Eastern Europe, he warned, “The recent historical events have been interpreted, at times too superficially, as the triumph of one system over the other, specifically the triumph of liberal capitalism. …''

“The search for solutions supposes sacrifices on the part of all, but we cannot forget that frequently the poor sacrifice the most, while those who possess great fortunes are not willing to give up their privileges and benefits.''

He stressed the theme in all his later visits to Eastern Europe. In Slovakia in 2003, John Paul II looked at “the construction of Europe's new identity'' and cautioned, “Great affluence, in fact, can also generate great poverty.''

He made the point repeatedly in his trips to the Third World, a travel itinerary that came to total 129 countries. In Bolivia in 1988, the pope warned, “The abysmal differences between rich and poor countries are incompatible with divine designs of a just and equal sharing of the goods of creation.'' He condemned the treatment of farm workers in an even more sensitive location _ California.

John Paul II was a firm and determined voice against abortion, and especially lately, on end-of-life issues. But at a time when “values'' is used as a code word for those positions, he insisted that values didn't end there, not even in the United States.

In 1996, the American bishops adopted a 10-point position on economic issues citing the pope's declaration that Catholic tradition “demands that the market be appropriately controlled by the forces of society and by the whole state to assure that the basic needs of the whole society are met.''

It was one of many messages John Paul II sent forth, and one of many that will outlast his own voice.

In fact, it already had. The Sunday before he died, when he could no longer speak, the Easter sermon read for him called for “generous solidarity toward the multitudes who are even today suffering and dying from poverty and hunger…''

He was nothing like a politician.

But John Paul II knew how to keep on message.

(David Sarasohn is an associate editor at The Oregonian of Portland, Ore.)

KRE/PH END SARASOHN