c. 2005 Newhouse News Service

(UNDATED) It is no exaggeration to say of Pope John Paul II that he was the most significant Catholic pontiff since Peter 2,000 years ago.

His impact on Catholicism, for good or ill, will be debated in the days to come by religious conservatives who revered his commitment to the ancient truths and traditions of Catholicism, and by modernists who yearned for the more liberal, reformist ways of Pope John XXIII in the 1950s. But his impact on the secular world of his time has no parallel in the history of the Church.

The death of Soviet communism and the obscene oppression it imposed on millions in Central and Eastern Europe was, in part, John Paul's doing.

He ranks with Roosevelt, Churchill and Reagan in the pantheon of world leaders who led or inspired the 20th century's steady march toward greater individual freedom and unrelenting opposition to totalitarian oppression. As the Times of London put it in assessing John Paul's role in the post-Soviet reunification of Europe, “It's doubtful it would have been possible without him.''

The beginning of the end for Soviet communism can be dated from his return home to Poland as pope in June 1979. The country's Soviet puppet leaders were terrified. The Polish Communist puppet leader at the time, Wojciech Jaruzelski, can be seen in films trembling in John Paul's presence. Unrest seething beneath the surface in Poland burst into the open with the pope's arrival. Poles poured into the streets in millions to see him. Workers at the Gdansk shipyard draped its walls with giant photos of Karol Wojtyla, and Solidarity, the first true labor union movement behind the Iron Curtain, was born.

“Be not afraid,'' he told the crowds, using Christ's words to his disciples. They knew they were no longer alone, no longer cut off from the democratic West and trapped in a totalitarian nightmare. They had an advocate with influence in the chancelleries of the outside world. He gave them courage and, more important, hope. And that made him dangerous.

It's never been proved conclusively that the Soviets were involved in the 1981 attempt to assassinate John Paul. Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader for whom the pope seems to have had some admiration, denied any connection. But Moscow clearly had motive. And the assassin, a Turk with ties to the Bulgarian secret police, insisted to Italian authorities that the murder plan was hatched in Moscow.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, has said he's convinced the shooting was the work of Moscow's KGB. “Tensions between the church and communism were high. He (John Paul) was a threat,'' he said.

John Paul was the first non-Italian pope in 455 years, but the change he represented went far beyond nationality. He was no soft ascetic bred for the papacy in the religious salons of Rome, like many of his predecessors. Physically broad and strong, he had been a day laborer as a youth and for much of his life was an avid skier, mountain climber, runner and swimmer. His intellectual love was philosophy, but he was an actor and writer of anti-fascist plays when young under the Nazis, and a poet and prolific writer of books and pamphlets as a priest.

More important, he had lived for almost 40 years in Poland _ from 1939 until 1978 _ through two of the great horrors of the 20th century, Nazi occupation and Communist conquest. History's bloodiest century was no tale in books to him. He lived it firsthand and it marked his papacy indelibly.

In style, if not in doctrine, John Paul revolutionized the papacy. He brought it out of the clerical closet and into the public square, challenging leaders of the West as well as the East with his rock-star celebrity during visits to more than 100 countries. With crowds in Havana crying “Libertad, libertad,'' he persuaded Fidel Castro to permit the celebration of Christmas in Cuba. But though he was briefed by the administrations of Presidents Carter and Reagan on Soviet aims and ambitions, he was no patsy for Washington. Or anyone else.

He chided the West, particularly America, for what he considered its crass materialism and the cruelties of unfettered capitalism. He apologized publicly to Jews for Rome's failure to speak out against the Holocaust and even held a Holocaust memorial concert in the Vatican. But he also met with Yasser Arafat, Israel's mortal enemy, and attended a service in a mosque. And he opposed both the American Desert Storm assault in 1991 and the current U.S. occupation of Iraq.

He preached the dignity of man and the sanctity of life as antidotes to the brutality of the modern world's politics and economics. But he opposed the “liberation theology'' of Latin American priests, which he saw as potentially violent. And he disappointed American liberal Catholics like the Rev. Andrew Greeley, who says he hoped for change in the church _ on sexual issues such as contraception and divorce and even a married priesthood _ but John Paul “pulled the plug on it, and that greatly dismays me.''

John Paul will have to await history's final judgment. But this much is certain: He leaves the papacy a more powerful instrument in world affairs than he found it, a fact perhaps best attested to, ironically, by Joseph Stalin. When warned he should be wary of the pope, Stalin asked, scornfully, “How many divisions does he have?''

Enough, the dictator's successors discovered, to help topple one of history's greatest threats to human dignity and individual liberty.

(John Farmer is national political correspondent for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J.)

PH/LF END FARMER