In recalling his long life and tenure as the Bishop of Rome, it's instructive to note that Karol Jozef Wojtyla, known since 1978 as Pope John Paul II, had an early encounter with evil that likely informed every decision in his life. In 1939, he was a 19-year-old Polish drama student at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, the same age as a typical OU freshman, when Nazi soldiers marched in and closed the college. He was forced to work in a quarry and then a chemical plant to keep from being deported to Germany. So after witnessing firsthand the gruesome realities of war, he worked almost every day thereafter for peace.
Effective as he was as Catholics' topmost intermediary between here and There, (he canonized some 480 saints) John Paul II will be remembered just as much for his career as a globe-trotting statesman. He mediated a peace between Argentina and Chile in 1979; addressed the U.N. General Assembly twice; had more than 700 meetings with heads of state, including the queen of England and every American president since Jimmy Carter; and twice urged the United States, in 1991 and 2003, to avoid a war with Iraq. His pressure on the atheistic leaders of Eastern Europe contributed to the downfall of Communism in those nations. He encouraged rich nations to forgive the crushing debts accrued by poor developing countries. And in 1992, he admitted the church had erred more than 350 years before when it condemned Galileo Galilei for heresy. Not a speedy recovery, but the pontiff nonetheless deserved credit for setting the record straight.
This is not to say, however, that his life was without controversy.
The church's inflexible policies on established Catholic cornerstones -birth control, abortion and traditional families -led John Paul II to denounce the use of emergency contraception pills, condoms and, most recently, the withdrawal of Terri Schiavo's feeding tube. A would-be assassin shot him three times in 1981, and in 1992 the Irish singer Sinead O'Connor tore up his photo on national TV after a performance on Saturday Night Live
saying, fight the real enemy. His worldwide prominence afforded him as much revulsion as it did love.
But John Paul II's life was great because it transcended the sectarian affairs with which religious leaders usually concern themselves. He was a pious man, but he was also a democrat. He tended to those in his flock but never forgot about the millions not included in his congregation. He saw war in his youth but hated it so much he spent his life trying not to repeat the experience. 17
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