POPE JOHN PAUL II was without doubt one of the most striking, interesting and influential figures of our times. This was an impression that grew ever stronger in his extraordinary old age. The visible pain and frailty of his final years gave frequent rise to speculation of a possible retirement: and yet these were the years in which not only the inner strength but also the radicalism of this supposedly conservative figure became most apparent.

A tireless missionary, he was the first pope to visit all the inhabited continents of the world, drawing the largest crowds in history. He was the first to be fully at ease with the modern media, spreading the Christian message through television interviews, the internet, books of his personal writings, and compact discs. He was the first officially to visit a synagogue or mosque, and the first to travel to Britain and Ireland. And he was the only Pope to have acknowledged publicly the Church’s failings over two millennia.

For much of his reign, John Paul II was — not only for the secular world but also for many Roman Catholics — a figure of paradox. He was, it was said, a social progressive but an ecclesiological reactionary; a pastoral bishop who had been deeply influenced by the Second Vatican Council but who then — or so some critics volubly asserted — directed his entire pontificate towards a restoration of the Catholicism of the preconciliar period.

He was a defender of liberty wherever the rights of men and women were denied by despotic regimes, but his opponents soon began to claim that he himself silenced dissent among bishops and clergy quite as ruthlessly as any secular dictator. It seemed to many that he was wholly out of touch with the secular realities amid which he lived; yet few of his contemporaries had shown a more profound and subtle understanding of the nature of the historical forces that were to sweep away the postwar division of Europe, between the capitalist West and the communist East.

Partly, these conflicting perceptions were based on a tendency to judge him by criteria which were either theologically superficial or wholly secular. The paradoxes were more apparent than real.

Those, for instance, who saw a contradiction in a Pope who forbade his clergy to become involved in politics and yet who exercised an apparently direct political influence in his native Poland, failed to understand how his influence operated within a national culture that had a spiritual dimension from which the Marxist state was, in the nature of things, wholly disconnected.

The political levers of power were never directly an object of his concern: and yet many of those in the Solidarity movement, who did confront the Polish secular state, were motivated by a Catholic humanism in which the dignity of beings made in the image of God was central, and which had been powerfully revitalised by their compatriot’s charismatic evangelical presence.

Karol Wojtyla’s anti-communism was thus no merely ideological phenomenon but derived from the same source as his entire critique of modern secularist culture. His thinking had evolved both as a result of his professional career as an academic philosopher and from the circumstances of his pastoral experience as priest and bishop. He believed that the secular mind — in both East and West — had installed cultures deeply inimical to the flourishing of the human personality. The enemy, for him, was anything which obscured man’s nature as an essentially moral being — from relativism in moral philosophy to totalitarianism in politics. Man’s vocation was to become what God intended him to be: the drama of every human life was the struggle against evil, both personal and social.

This interaction between philosophy and pastoral reality can be seen in his early theological focus on human sexuality. Modern secular thinking was focused on the norm of personal gratification — Wojtyla’s personalist norm focused on the imperative to avoid using others. We had, he wrote, to meet the freedom of another person and depend on it. This could be done only within the context of permanent commitment, not as a means of confining the human personality but, on the contrary, as the only means by which sexuality can be truly liberated.

By the end of his life, it was quite widely felt that John Paul had won the intellectual argument within the Church. Though there were still those who perceived him as a reactionary Pope who had sought to reverse the advances inaugurated by the Second Vatican Council, there were as many others who argued — if perhaps less loudly — that it was he who, in the end, was the council’s most definitive interpreter and advocate. In the view of the distinguished American Jesuit theologian Cardinal Avery Dulles, for instance, John Paul II had, more than any other single individual, succeeded in comprehensively restating the contours of Catholic faith in the light of Vatican II and in relation to postconciliar developments in the Church and in the world.

This had certainly been his intention from the beginning. After his election, he told the assembled cardinals that his “first task and definitive duty” was to complete the implementation of the Second Vatican Council. But he consistently refused to accept the view of some postconciliar radicals that Vatican II represented a dramatic break with Catholic tradition.

“If anyone reads the council,” he declared in February 2000, “presuming that it marked a break with the past, while in reality it placed itself in line with the faith of all time, he definitely has gone astray.”

It is part of the achievement of his pontificate that this understanding has been widely accepted. An indication of how far opinion had shifted came with the publication in 1992 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Although it was largely the work of other hands, it was nevertheless a central part of John Paul’s own project.