Another retrospective of the pope's legacy, especially how his relation to his Church as a Pole informed his approach to international issues.

William Kristol:

Even the liberal intellectual Adam Michnik was struck by the pope's ability, in June 1979, to appeal to the consciences of both believers and non-believers. The creation of Solidarity followed a year and a half later, and the Polish regime never recovered. After just a decade more, the Iron Curtain collapsed. Since Karol Wojtyla became John Paul II, no one has repeated Stalin's mocking question about how many divisions the pope has.

Weigel makes the case that John Paul II's political impact came about precisely because he did not primarily seek to be political, or to think or speak politically. He merely insisted on calling "good and evil by name." Western liberalism, with its technological might and its ability to spread a kind of skepticism that helps undermine totalitarianism, played an important part in winning the Cold War. But the liberal assault on communism could not have succeeded without the accompanying Christian assault. The insistence on the truth was needed to strengthen and deepen the natural desire for liberty. The categories of good and evil were needed to ground the contrast between freedom and oppression.

A bio of the early life of Karol Wojtyla, with more insights on how he was shaped by friendships with Jews in his hometown, and Nazi oppression of both Poles and Jews.

This Pope made concrete through his behavior the changes in Church doctrine toward Jews and Judaism initiated by Vatican II.

In 1992, Pope John Paul II proclaimed that "anti-Semitism is a sin against God and against man." Quite a contrast to when "Nostra Aetate" timidly stated that the Church "deplores" anti-Semitism but "not for political reasons" in 1965 or even before that, when official Vatican media published openly disdainful and even anti-Semitic articles.

And during the same years, Karol Wojtyla in Poland moved against the anti-Judaic culture of Catholicism. A well-known episode is the story of how, at war's end, Priest Karol Wojtyla of Krakow advised a Polish Catholic woman who had hidden a Jewish child to seek survivors of his family rather than adopt him and convert him to Christianity. That happened during the same period that Pius XII issued orders in France to keep baptized, or even unbaptized, Jewish children saved in convents and monasteries from joining Jewish relatives or institutions.

As pope, John Paul referred to the 20th century as �the century of the Shoah,� and it was highly symbolic that in 1979, on his first visit back to Poland after his election, he knelt in prayer at Auschwitz-Birkenau to commemorate the Jews killed there. Throughout his reign, John Paul repeatedly recalled the Holocaust and condemned anti-Semitism as a sin against God and humanity. On his more than 100 trips around the globe, he sought to meet with Jewish leaders. He also issued unprecedented expressions of contrition for past Christian hostility and violence toward Jews.

The most dramatic of the pope�s many meetings with Jews took place in April 1986, when he crossed the Tiber River to visit the Great Synagogue in Rome, becoming the first pope to visit a Jewish house of worship since Peter. After warmly embracing Rome�s chief rabbi, the pope spoke of the �irrevocable covenant� between God and the Jews. With Judaism, he said, �we have a relationship that we do not have with any other religion. You are our dearly beloved brothers and in a certain way it may be said that you are our elder brothers.�

At the end of 1993 the pope took another unprecedented step, overseeing the formal establishment of full diplomatic relations between Israel and the Holy See, 45 years after the founding of the Jewish state.

One of the Chief Rabbis of Israel spoke with the Pope a year ago:

The meeting was called in order to discuss anti-Semitism, the redemption of our captives, and a mutual condemnation of terrorism. It had some unexpected ramifications, however:

I can tell you something that the rabbi of Warsaw told me just this week - something very wondrous that resulted from this meeting. He said that after we met, he received dozens of calls from Poles who wished to confess their role in killing Jews during the Holocaust. The rabbi rebuffed them, though, saying he wasn't a priest for confession. But one man insisted and said he couldn't sleep at night, and told him that that at age 11, his uncle came from the front wearing an army uniform and wanted to show him how to shoot. So just for fun, he [the uncle] took 50 Jews and shot them on the spot. He, the 11-year-old, threw the bodies into some kind of hollow in the ground and covered them. For 62 years, he told no one, figuring that the Jews are not important. But when he saw on television how the Pope received the Chief Rabbis with such honor, calling them 'my older brothers' in front of the whole world, he said he realized that he did a great sin, and he therefore called the rabbi and said he wants to show him the 'burial' spot, and that he wants to atone by helping bring them to proper Jewish burial. This is something that came directly out of our meeting.

On the pedophile priests scandal:

During his long reign, Pope John Paul II apologized to Muslims for the Crusades, to Jews for anti-Semitism, to Orthodox Christians for the sacking of Constantinople, to Italians for the Vatican's associations with the Mafia and to scientists for the persecution of Galileo. He apologized so often, in fact, that an Italian journalist compiled a book of more than 90 papal statements of contrition.

Yet the pope never apologized for the most shocking behavior that came to light on his watch: sexual abuse of children by priests and the church's attempts to hush it up. To some alleged victims, that is a puzzling omission and a deep stain on his legacy. . . . John Paul's defenders contend that sexual misconduct by priests is a worldwide problem that began before he became pope in 1978. They say once it came to light, he reacted decisively. Summoning America's cardinals to the Vatican in April 2002, he declared that "there is no place in the priesthood and religious life for those who would harm the young." Those words became the basis for the "zero tolerance" policy adopted two months later by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Over the following year, hundreds of priests resigned, retired or were suspended as the bishops pledged to remove any clergyman who had ever abused a minor.

. . . . Richard R. Gaillardetz, a professor of Catholic studies at the University of Toledo who has written several books on authority in the church, said that neither John Paul nor any church leader "consciously encouraged" clerical sex abuse. But Gaillardetz said he would assign the pope some indirect responsibility for the hierarchy's attempts to hide the problem. "He encouraged an ecclesiastical culture that emphasizes vertical accountability - priest to bishop, bishop to the pope - and very little horizontal accountability" of bishops to one another and to the laity, Gaillardetz said.

UPDATE: An appreciation of John Paul II from Out of Step Jew, with an intriguing theory about his influence on Jewish Modern Orthodoxy.