Papa Ioannes Paulus Secundus, Episcopus Romanus

Every year, Beloit College assembles a "Mindset List" to get its faculty in touch with the incoming freshman class. In describing the world as seen by the class of 2008, the list notes that:

2. Desi Arnaz, Orson Welles, Roy Orbison, Ted Bundy, Ayatollah Khomeini, and Cary Grant have always been dead.

17. There has always been a Comedy Channel.

32. Network television has always struggled to keep up with cable.

47. Castro has always been an aging politician in a suit.

I feel that, from the time the enterprise began, they might as well have included "The Pope has always been Polish." I doubt I have anything original to say about the life or death of Karol Wojtyła, called John Paul II in his final 26 years. Still, I'll say something, if only for myself.

He may be remembered by young Americans as an ill man who, unable to carry out the full duties of his office, was forced to delegate to unqualified subordinates the task of dealing with a sexual abuse scandal. As age and frailty set in — leading one priest to describe him as "a soul pulling a body" — it became easy for most of us to forget the vibrancy and genius that characterized his youth and middle age. He was a skilled and enthusiastic athlete, a talented actor, and a shrewdly subversive political agitator who had the chutzpah to co-found an underground Polish theatre under Nazi occupation.

He possessed two doctoral degrees, and was the first Pope to discuss modern philosophy in its own terms. He was also the first Pope to send or receive an e-mail*, to visit the Synagogue of Rome, or to visit any country with an Orthodox Christian majority since the Great Schism. He was not the first to visit New York — my home — but he was the first to address the Spanish-speaking majority of New York's Catholics in their own language.

He held little actual power over men or nations, but he knew the limits of power, and the potential strength of authority. When he met with General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the totalitarian dictator and military commander of communist Poland — and, presumably, a staunch atheist —it was the soldier's hands that shook, not the priest's.

He was the victim of an attempted assassination in 1981 who, in 1983, visited the assassin in prison and forgave him face to face. He had a great fondness for the Virgin Mary, and is criticized for not taking initiative to expand the roles of women in the Church. He encouraged Christians to examine their role in the Holocaust, but stopped short of criticizing his predecessor's conduct during the Second World War. His frequent travel and media savvy led the Church into modernity while he tightened formalized the Church hierarchy in ways that many found restrictive. He established full diplomatic relations with Israel and recognized Judaism as a legitimate religion in its own right, and still maintained that all salvation stems directly from Christ.

For all the visitors and well-wishers, I can only imagine that his death was a lonely one. As for many men in power, his life was dominated by his position. As a priest, he had no family, and his burial will be not in a private plot but beneath the place he worked, under the dome of St. Peter's Basilica. Instead of a grandfather, he will lie with Pope Pious XII; instead of a father, John XXIII.

* His address: john_paul_ii@vatican.va.