CATHOLICISM.

The twentieth century was a period of profound change for the Roman Catholic Church. Perhaps the most significant change to take place during that time was the globalization of Catholicism, which made it increasingly less European in every respect. A second momentous change came shortly after midcentury, when the Second Vatican Council brought about wholesale renewal. Developments in the world at large also brought multifaceted change. The church had to contend with two world wars, astonishing advances in science and technology, and a constant increase in the secularization of the West, especially Europe. Yet despite all these changes, the Roman Catholic Church managed to remain vigorously committed to its ancient traditions. At the very top of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, the papacy grew stronger, despite serious challenges. When it comes to writing the history of the church in the twentieth century, one must begin and end with the popes, for their place in it is comparable to that of the kings and emperors of the old absolute monarchies, who had the power to guide the course of events.

PIUS X (1903–1914)

At the dawn of the century, in 1903, when Pope Pius X succeeded Leo XIII (r. 1898–1903), Catholicism was a faith deeply focused on tradition, and the leadership of the Catholic Church was keenly interested in maintaining the status quo, not just with regard to theology and ritual but also with respect to the church's authority structure and its relation to the world at large. Despite its global reach, the Roman Catholic Church was very closely tied to Europe, its leadership still dominated by European clerics, especially by the overwhelmingly Italian curia of the papal court in Rome. The popes were still claiming sovereignty over Rome and remained adamantly fixed on the idea that the Italian republic had turned them into "prisoners of the Vatican."

The pontificate of Pius X (Giuseppe Sarto) was marked by continuous tension with the social, political, and intellectual changes sweeping across Europe. From the very start, Pius X committed himself to fighting "modernism," the name given to a broad spectrum of ideas and attitudes that were viewed as incompatible with traditional Catholic teachings. Two papal decrees issued in 1907 condemned modernism and clearly spelled out what it was: Lamentabili Sane Exitu ("On a Deplorable Outcome") and Pascendi Dominici Gregis ("Feeding the Lord's Flocks"). That same year, a number of supposedly modernist books were also placed on the Index of Forbidden Books. Chief among the trends labeled modernist was the historical/critical method of biblical scholarship pioneered by German Protestant scholars, which approached the sacred texts of the Bible with exactly the same critical eye it turned on any other ancient document. In 1910 Pius X ordered all Roman Catholic clergy and all teachers in Catholic seminaries to adhere to these two decrees and to take an oath denouncing modernism.

Pius X also committed himself to struggling against political movements that challenged papal supremacy and the rights and privileges of the Catholic Church over and against the state. He thus took aim at Christian democrats in Italy and Europe, and against all other political action groups that fomented change independent of the Catholic hierarchy. Instead, he favored social action groups that accepted the leadership of the clergy and he fostered the creation of such associations. He also constantly denounced the principle of the separation of church and state, and focused intensely on France, where the state had confiscated all church property in 1905, forcing the Catholic Church to pay rent to the French Republic.

As tensions mounted between European states in 1914, European Catholics were thus placed in an embattled position vis-à-vis "the world," a situation that was similar to that of the soldiers who would find themselves waging trench warfare during World War I, which broke out in 1914, during the last month of Pius X's papacy.

BENEDICT XV (1914–1922)

Pius X's successor, Pope Benedict XV (Giacomo della Chiesa), was wholly committed to restoring the peace in Europe but found himself unable to stop the war, which he called "the suicide of Europe." From his call for a Christmas truce in 1914 to his seven-point Papal Peace proposal in August 1917, Pope Benedict's pleas fell on deaf ears. Adopting a policy of pacifism and strict neutrality, the pope steadfastly refused to condemn any of the nations involved in the war. Instead, he repeatedly condemned war itself, associating it with Satan. At war's end, the papacy's neutrality may have cost it inclusion in the Paris Peace Conference and the deliberations that led to the Treaty of Versailles.

On other fronts, the Catholic Church continued to wage a war of its own against modernism and the social and political ills of the age, though Benedict XV had a softer approach to this issue than his predecessor. With the rise of communism after the triumph of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the Catholic Church stepped up its efforts to address the needs and concerns of workers and the poor. Pope Benedict XV seemed fully conscious of the church's need to address questions of social and economic justice, and urged his clergy to become more active in this area, saying: "It is precisely in this field that the eternal salvation of souls is imperiled" (John, p. 463).

The Catholic laity in Europe continued to engage in social and political action of all sorts and to follow the dictates of their faith, sometimes with surprising results. At the bottom of the social scale, three peasant children in Portugal began to claim in 1917 that they were being visited repeatedly by the Virgin Mary. These reports of apparitions at Fatima drew tens of thousands of the faithful to the site and culminated in the issuance of a number of very political prophecies by the children regarding World War I and the rise of communism in Russia—prophecies that were eventually sanctioned by the papacy. The apparitions themselves were also deemed authentic, and the shrine established at Fatima continued in the twenty-first century to draw millions of pilgrims, laypersons as well as clergy.

PIUS XI (1922–1939)

Embracing the motto, "the peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ," Pius XI (Ambrogio Ratti) could no more ignore the upheavals of his day than could any of the clergy or laity that he shepherded. Close to home, in Italy, the rise to power of Benito Mussolini brought an end to the political impasse that had been in place since 1870. In 1929 Pius XI signed the Lateran Treaty with Mussolini's government, creating an independent Vatican State within Rome and supposedly freeing him from his "prisoner" status. Instead of having no territory to call his own, the pope now found himself ruling the smallest independent nation-state in the world, a state composed of no more than a dozen or so buildings. He also found himself wholly surrounded by a Fascist nation that espoused an intensely secularist and even anti-Christian ideology. And across the Alps, even worse regimes were gaining power and momentum day by day.

Pius XI was helpless in the face of a civil war in Spain (1936–1939) that erupted between a conservative coalition led by Fascists (Nationalists) and a coalition of communists, anarchists, and liberals (Republicans), in which the Catholic Church became both a battleground and a weapon. In areas controlled by the Republicans, rabid anticlericalism led to the deaths of thousands of priests and nuns, and to the destruction of many churches and their belongings. In Nationalist areas, the Fascists committed many atrocities in the name of Catholicism, and when they finally triumphed, their leader, Francisco Franco (1892–1975), set up a repressive Fascist state that continually used the Catholic Church for its own purposes, even to the point of naming Saint Teresa of Avila (1515–1582) an honorary general in his army.

In Germany, the postwar economic depression led to the rise in power of Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) and the Nazi Party. Pope Pius XI found himself unable to do more than secure guarantees for the safety and survival of the Catholic Church through the Reichskonkordat, an agreement signed in 1933. But this treaty between the Vatican and Berlin, like all others signed by the Nazis, was never fully honored. Hitler boasted of having duped the pope into helping him, saying to his cabinet: "An opportunity has been given to Germany in the Reichskonkordat and a sphere of influence has been created that will be especially significant in the urgent struggle against international Jewry" (Hochhuth, p. 298). At the Vatican, Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli (the future Pope Pius XII) denounced Hitler's duplicity as well as his virulent racism, but to no avail.

As attacks on Jews and the church mounted, Pope Pius XI found it necessary to issue an encyclical that condemned both Nazi ideology and violations of the concordat of 1933. Written by the Vatican's secretary of state, Pacelli, the encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge ("With Burning Sorrow") was smuggled into Germany and read from the pulpit of every Catholic Church on Palm Sunday 1937. In it, the Vatican boldly and clearly spelled out the Catholic Church's opposition to the racist and nationalist thinking of the Nazis, arguing that it was fundamentally wrong for anyone to exalt "race, or the people, or the State" above all else, or to "divinize them to an idolatrous level" (Carlen, vol. 3, p. 527). A year before the outbreak of war, in September 1938, Pius XI carefully articulated once more the church's stand against anti-Semitism, in a pronouncement that was banned by the Fascist press in Germany: "Anti-Semitism is … a movement with which we Christians can have nothing to do. No, no, I say to you it is impossible for a Christian to take part in anti-Semitism" (New York Times, 12 December 1938, p. 1).

Although the ghost of modernism continued to haunt Catholic scholarship and learning at this time, fear of it lessened somewhat in Rome. To foster learning, Pope Pius XI established papally sanctioned research institutions such as the Pontifical Institute of Christian Archaeology (1925) and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (1936). Still deeply conservative, these foundations nonetheless paved the way for a greater rapprochement between Catholicism and modern scholarship.

The most enduring legacy of Pius XI's pontificate may not lie in Europe, however, but in its former colonies. Nineteenth-century imperialism had made Europe master of much of the globe, and the Catholic Church had expanded its reach tremendously as a result of this development. Yet, as late as the 1920s, the vast majority of Europe's colonized subjects remained unconverted to the Christian faith. Pius XI made it his business to remedy this situation by encouraging the development of overseas missions, requiring every religious order to pursue this calling. As a result, by 1939 there were twice as many Catholic missionaries in the field as there had been in 1922. Pius XI initiated another significant change in the mission field by insisting that seminaries abroad train and ordain native clergy, who would eventually make European missionaries unnecessary. In 1926 the consecration of the first three native Chinese bishops was one of the initial steps taken toward the globalization of the Catholic Church, a process that continued into the twenty-first century, producing reverse missionaries, that is, priests from the Third World who serve in Europe and North America as the shortage of priestly vocations there continues to worsen.

PIUS XII (1939–1958)

As Pope Pius XI was preparing to issue yet another public condemnation of Nazism and Fascism in February 1939, he died unexpectedly and was succeeded by the Vatican's secretary of state, Eugenio Pacelli, who took the papal name Pius XII (1939–1958). No other pope in modern history is wrapped in as much controversy as Pius XII, because he seemed so helpless in the face of World War II and the Holocaust. Debate continues to rage. In the minds of some detractors, he seems to have been a willing collaborator, or perhaps an unwilling but uncaring accomplice in the extermination of six million Jews. According to his defenders, he was a brave opponent of consummate evil and a prudent shepherd who did all he could in the worst of circumstances.

As Europe plunged into total war in the fall of 1939, Pius XII assumed a stance of public neutrality similar to that taken by Benedict XV in World War I. But having made public his views of the Nazis and Fascists long before the outbreak of the war, Pius XII's neutrality was much less convincing. On 25 December 1941, for instance, The New York Times praised Pius XII in an editorial, saying his was "a lonely voice in the silence and darkness enveloping Europe this Christmas," and that he was "about the only ruler left on the Continent of Europe who dares to raise his voice at all." Yet the fact that he lived in the capital city of one of the Axis Powers, surrounded by their armies, made his position much more precarious than that of Benedict XV. Moreover, the Nazis were well-known for their brutal reprisals against all opponents, and as a result, the pope was under severe constraints when it came to accomplishing anything within Germany itself. The same was true for every Catholic bishop and priest who lived in Axis-controlled areas. Any protest could incite a reprisal. And indeed, such reprisals routinely occurred on the local level, as in the Netherlands when Dutch bishops protested against the deportation of the country's Jews.

Hitler barely tolerated Pius XII, saying that he was "the only human being who has always contradicted me and who has never obeyed me" (Jansen, p. 429). Pope Pius XII was well aware of his precarious situation yet chose to encourage or engage in clandestine acts of defiance, such as providing hiding places for Jews in churches, monasteries, and convents, or facilitating the escape of Jews from Axis-occupied areas to other countries. It is estimated that about three hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand Jews were saved by such means, at great risk for all involved. Nonetheless, detractors of Pius XII not only challenge the accuracy of these figures but also point out that any such number—no matter how high—is insignificant when compared to the enormity of the Holocaust.

As the Cold War developed in the postwar period and the threat of nuclear annihilation increased, Pius XII began to speak out more forcefully against modern warfare and especially against the concept of deterrence and the stockpiling of atomic weapons, which, as he saw it, served only to make the horror of nuclear war a more imminent possibility. This did not keep him from taking sides, however. A staunch anticommunist and an outspoken critic of the Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin, Pius XII made it clear to the faithful that communism was as incompatible with Catholicism as Nazism had been.

Regarding questions of faith and the relationship of Catholics to the world at large, Pius XII proved to be less conservative than his predecessors, at least in two very important areas. In 1943, Pius XII issued what many consider to be his most important encyclical, Divino Afflante Spiritu ("With the Help of the Divine Spirit"), which removed the barriers that earlier popes had erected against modernism in biblical studies and finally allowed Catholic scholars to apply new techniques of historical criticism in their research. In 1947 he issued another highly influential encyclical, Mediator Dei ("Mediator of God"), which set into motion a renewal of liturgical studies. Unbeknownst to Pius XII and all his contemporaries, this encyclical would eventually lead to a total revamping of Roman Catholic ritual sixteen years later, at the Second Vatican Council.

JOHN XXIII (1958–1963)

When Pius XII died in October 1958, Angelo Roncalli, the patriarch of Venice, was chosen to succeed him under the name John XXIII. Elected under the assumption that he would accomplish little, because of his age and his prior lack of intimacy with the Vatican, the seventy-one-yearold pope stunned the curia and the world by immediately convening an ecumenical council for the express purpose of renewing the church. Aggiornamento is what Pope John XXIII said the church needed: to be brought up to date, put in step with the world rather than in conflict with it. It was to be a "New Pentecost," he proclaimed, an era of renewal and of reconciliation, inspired by the Holy Spirit.

Despite resistance from some in the curia, Pope John XXIII's council assembled for its first meeting in October 1962. This council was unlike any other in the history of the Roman Catholic Church, not only because it had more representatives from nations outside Europe than ever before but also because it was genuinely ecumenical in spirit, allowing the presence of observers from other Christian churches. Its agenda seemed daunting at first and fraught with controversy, but in a mere three years the Second Vatican Council managed to bring about more change than many in the Catholic Church had ever thought possible.

Sixteen documents produced by the council fathers transformed Catholicism from top to bottom. Of these sixteen, six were most instrumental in bringing about tremendous changes.

In its "Dogmatic Constitution on the Church," Lumen Gentium, the council reinterpreted the nature of the church itself and of its hierarchical structure, placing greater emphasis on the role of the bishops within the church hierarchy and softening the rigid monarchical model of the papacy that had accompanied the First Vatican Council's decree on papal infallibility (1870). It also called for much greater participation by laypersons in the work of the church and broadened the meaning of a Christian calling, or vocation, to include the laity as much as the clergy. This emphasis on increased participation by the laity in the church's mission was further reinforced by a separate "Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity," Apostolicae Actuositatem.

The "Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation," Dei Verbum, not only reassessed the place of the Bible in Catholic teaching, placing it clearly at the center of all theological and moral affirmations, but also encouraged the laity to read and study Holy Scripture in their own languages and called on scholars to approach the sacred texts with modern methodologies. In this respect, Catholicism moved closer to Protestantism.

In its "Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy," Sacrosanctum Concilium, the council called for a total transformation of the ritual life of the church, drawing on the work that had been spurred by Pius XII's encyclical Mediator Dei in 1947. At the heart of this document stood the theory that the church's ritual, while led by the clergy, is incomplete without the full participation of the laity. This meant that rituals that had not been altered since they had been set in place by the Council of Trent (1563) and the Roman Missal (1580), rituals that had seemed frozen for eternity, were to be changed overnight. The most profound and most noticeable change was the rejection of Latin as the sole language of Catholic ritual and its replacement by the vernacular. Given the Catholic Church's global reach, this meant that the ritual had to be translated from Latin into hundreds of other languages.

Two decrees marked a great change in Catholic thinking on questions of the relationship between the church and the world. The council's "Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the World of Today," Gaudium et Spes, openly admitted that, as human culture develops, it is the church's responsibility to address itself to change, to adapt itself and to find ways of proclaiming unchanging truths through the constantly evolving means placed at its disposal. With this document, the Second Vatican Council laid to rest the fears of modernism that had so dominated its discourse and behavior at the dawn of the twentieth century. The "Declaration on Human Freedom," Dignitatis Humanae, while extremely controversial for conservative and traditionalist Catholics, proved to be the one decree most warmly received by those outside the church. Its message was clear: "All persons must be free to seek the truth without coercion." Of course, by professing freedom of religion as a basic human right, the council also defended in principle the separation of church and state and every government's duty to protect freedom of religion.

The council also opened the Catholic Church to friendly dialogue with Protestant and Orthodox Christian churches in its "Decree on Ecumenism," Unitatis Redintegratio. Similar ecumenist sentiments were voiced by the council in its "Declaration on Relations with Non-Christian Religions," Nostra Aetate, which said, among other things, that "the Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions" and that they should be regarded with "sincere reverence."

In sum, the changes brought about by Vatican II, as this council came to be known, were not only numerous but profound. Suddenly, or so it seemed, many of the customs that had been at the core of Catholic identity were gone: Latin liturgies, veils on women's heads at church, rules for fasting at Lent or for abstaining from meat on Fridays all became a thing of the past, along with nuns who always wore distinctive habits and stayed in their cloisters and priests who always wore cassocks and Roman collars. As could be expected, these reforms could not please all Catholics. Although most of the faithful adapted quickly or even welcomed the reforms of Vatican II after its closing session in December 1965, some disparaged the council for having gone too far, others for not having gone far enough. Among the traditionalists who rejected the council's reforms as too radical, none gained more prominence than Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, founder of the Society of Saint Pius X, who was excommunicated in 1988 for consecrating four bishops without the pope's approval.

PAUL VI (1963–1978)

The daunting task of guiding the Second Vatican Council and of shepherding the Catholic Church through these momentous changes was not carried out by John XXIII, who died after the council's first session in June 1963, but by his successor, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini, archbishop of Milan, who took the name Paul VI. Since his pontificate was so closely linked to the Second Vatican Council, Paul VI quickly drew fire along with praise.

Without a doubt, Paul VI presided over the most intense reform that the Catholic Church had undergone in its long history, and he also redefined the role of the papacy in significant ways. He was the first pope to engage actively in ecumenical dialogue with other Christian churches, meeting with the archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, and with the Greek Orthodox patriarch of Constantinople, Athenagoras I. Pope and patriarch also took a significant step toward healing the Great Schism between Catholic and Orthodox Christians by lifting the mutual excommunication that the two churches had leveled against each other in the year 1054.

Paul VI was also the first pope in history to travel extensively, visiting every continent but Antarctica, addressing all of humanity, not just his Catholic flock, preaching brotherhood and toleration, promoting world peace, social justice, and international cooperation, calling for an end to poverty, hunger, and illiteracy.

Yet in spite of these accomplishments, Paul VI came to be viewed as something of a failure by many within the Catholic Church and outside it. Such judgments stem in part from Paul VI's inability to arrest the mass defections of priests and nuns and the sharp decline in clerical vocations that began to plague the Catholic Church in the 1960s and continued unabated into the next century.

But by far the loudest and most biting criticism of Paul VI came from those who disagreed with his stand on the issue of birth control. In 1968, much to the surprise of many Catholics and non-Catholics, Paul VI rejected the recommendations of a commission that John XXIII had established to review the issue of contraception, issuing the encyclical Humanae Vitae ("Of Human Life"), which declared all forms of birth control a sin, save for the so-called rhythm or natural method, in which couples abstain from sexual activity during the few days each month when the woman is fertile. The shock waves caused by this encyclical within the Catholic Church and in the world at large were enormous, in great part because this was an issue that affected all Catholic married couples intimately and also had implications for world population growth. To many, it seemed a reversal in the church's recent wave of renewal, even a return to the days of the modernist crisis. It also struck many inside and outside the church as socially irresponsible, given the unprecedented population explosion, especially in poorer nations, many of which were heavily Catholic. Paul VI responded to the firestorm of criticism by standing firm on the issue, but he never fully recovered from the disappointment and grief that this resistance caused him. The last ten years of his papacy were active, but even by his own account, they seemed tinged with gloomy disillusionment. In a sermon preached in 1972, he went as far as to say: "We believed that after the Council would come a day of sunshine in the history of the Church. But instead there has come a day of clouds and storms, and of darkness …" (Paul VI, Internet site).

One of the post–Vatican II developments that Paul VI surely saw as a cloud was the creation of liberation theology in Latin America in the mid-1960s. A form of socialism dressed in gospel rhetoric, liberation theology began as the anguished response of Catholic clergy who worked with the poor and struggled for justice on their behalf, usually in countries with subsistence economies and an uneven distribution of wealth. Proclaiming Jesus a revolutionary liberator not just in the world to come but in the here and now, liberation theologians called upon the church in Latin America to do more than change the liturgy and to engage itself directly in the transformation of society.

Liberation theology was as much a political movement as an ideology, and its leaders could never separate theory from praxis. Although it had gathered momentum for several years, it seemed to burst into existence in Medellín, Colombia, in 1968, at the second Latin American Bishops' Conference, which openly condemned the industrialized nations for their exploitation of the Third World and also defended the notion that the pursuit of social justice on earth is at the very heart of the gospel message. Liberation theology quickly gained many followers in the 1970s, even among the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in Latin America. One of its chief assumptions was that economic conditions in Latin America made it necessary for the Catholic Church in the Third World to be totally dedicated to the poor and their needs. Mixing Gospel citations, the texts of the Second Vatican Council, and rhetoric about class struggle—some of it openly Marxist—liberation theologians engaged with the poor, dispensing medicine and practical advice along with the sacraments, challenging the status quo on a daily basis. As the movement spread through the creation of small groups known as bases de comunidad (community bases), lay leadership increased, making it less clerical and hierarchical, and making liberation theology less and less appealing to many at the Vatican. Occasionally, some liberationists would openly praise the communist revolution in Cuba or turn their revolutionary rhetoric into action. Occasionally, too, some would become martyrs to their cause, as happened with Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, who was murdered in 1980 by soldiers while he was saying mass.

JOHN PAUL I (1978) AND JOHN PAUL II (1978–2005)

When the weary Paul VI died in August 1978, as liberation theology was gaining momentum far from Rome, he was succeeded by Cardinal Albino Luciani, who, in turn, died unexpectedly after only thirty-three days as Pope John Paul I. The churchman chosen as the next pope in October was as much a surprise as the heart attack that had felled John Paul I. Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, from Kraków, Poland, was so far off every expert's radar screen that he elicited responses of "Cardinal who?" when his name was announced. Yet, by the time of his death in April 2005, this pontiff, who took the name John Paul II, would be well known by billions around the world, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, and would be credited not only with redefining the papacy and the reforms of Vatican II but also with bringing about the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.

The first non-Italian pope to be elected since 1522 and the first ever to hail from a Slavic country, John Paul II defied the odds and baffled the so-called experts from the very start. At fifty-eight, he was one of the youngest popes in well over a century, and this allowed him to serve twenty-seven years in office—the third longest pontificate in history, according to the records of the Catholic Church. There is no denying that this pope is regarded by many as a major figure in the history of the Catholic Church and the world at large.

Having lived under Nazi rule and then under Soviet-style communism in Poland, and having confronted evil with a deep faith based on traditional Catholic values, John Paul II was unlikely to fit any existing mold or any previously devised definition of "conservative" or "liberal." Above all, he was wholly committed to grounding the Catholic Church in its two thousand years of tradition. Yet at the same time, he seemed intent on unflinchingly meeting the contemporary world head-on. At the core of his message lay the conviction that all humans had a "universal call to holiness," and that this call, like the cross itself, was "a sign of contradiction" to the world.

John Paul II baffled all experts by claiming a high moral ground and reveling in apparent contradictions. Resolutely committed to moral absolutes, he condemned both the ethical relativism of the wealthier Western nations and the singleminded absolutism of fascists, communists, and racists. A deeply spiritual man, he assailed all materialistic and hedonistic impulses with equal ferocity, be they grounded in the teachings of Karl Marx and Mao Zedong or in the mindless, insatiable capitalist consumerism of the West. A pacifist and a shrewd politician, he condemned violence while doing his utmost to undermine abusive regimes. Deeply aware of the plight of the poor in the Third World and just as deeply concerned with environmental issues, he called on the wealthier nations to restructure their priorities, aim for greater justice in the distribution of the earth's resources, and promote a greater respect for nature. A mystic at heart, he defended even the smallest points of traditional Catholic belief with dogged tenacity and at the same time publicly approached other faiths with reverence and humility, even to the point of publicly apologizing for past instances of Catholic intolerance.

Had he remained ensconced in the Vatican, much of this might have made little difference. But John Paul II was a very visible and public pope, "the people's pope" as some in the news media dubbed him. An untiring traveler and mingler—even after a would-be assassin in Saint Peter's Square shot and nearly killed him in 1981—John Paul II expanded the reach of the Catholic Church and of the papacy itself in unprecedented ways. During his pontificate, he made more than one hundred trips, more than all the previous popes in Christian history put together, logging more than 1.1 million kilometers, or 725,000 miles (nearly three times the distance to the moon), attracting millions of people to see and hear him in the flesh. It is estimated that some of the crowds he drew were the largest to have assembled in human history.

When he died in the spring of 2005, John Paul II was repeatedly praised for having brought down the Soviet Union and its empire. His first pastoral visit to Poland in 1979 and his support of the Solidarity movement in his native land were often cited as the first step toward the eventual undoing of that Marxist state and all others in Europe. He never did visit Russia, even after the fall of communism, or China, which he earnestly desired to do. But he did take a swipe at Marxism in Latin America, not through his visit to Cuba, which had no adverse effect on Fidel Castro's long dictatorship, but rather through his condemnation of certain Marxist tendencies in liberation theology. Early in his pontificate, while visiting Mexico in 1979, he began to challenge liberation theologians by warning that "this conception of Christ as a political figure, a revolutionary, as the subversive of Nazareth, does not tally with the Church's teachings" (John Paul II, paragraph 1.4)

By the 1990s, John Paul II made it abundantly clear through the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith—formerly known as the Holy Office, or Inquisition—that no matter how much liberation theology squared with Catholic social teachings, especially in regard to the responsibility that all Catholics have toward the poor, all talk of a class struggle and the need for revolution was totally unacceptable. Moreover, by appointing many conservative bishops over a twenty-seven-year period, Pope John Paul II made sure that the hierarchy of the Latin American church would keep a tight lid on liberationists.

Although popular around the globe, especially with traditionalist Catholics, John Paul II was the bane of liberals and progressives in the wealthier nations, who tended to see him as unforgivably retrograde, or worse, as a Grand Inquisitor of sorts. On virtually every issue that was of concern to them, he struck them as being in the wrong. He silenced liberation theologians and ordered all Catholic clergy not to involve themselves directly in politics. He dismissed feminism outright, decried abortion, and denied women access to the priesthood. He also denied priests the right to marry and condemned all forms of artificial contraception, including the use of condoms as a means of halting the spread of the AIDS epidemic. Worse yet—as liberals saw it—he was totally inflexible when it came to sex, branding extra- and pre-marital relations, homosexuality, and pornography inherently wrong and sinful. On questions of medical ethics he seemed just as obstinate, challenging advances in science at every turn, damning those who favored euthanasia, embryonic stem cell research, and cloning.

But that is only one side of the story. Conservatives, too, were sometimes irked and confused by John Paul II. Ironically, his consistent emphasis on the sacredness of life, which made him seem hopelessly conservative to liberals, also led him to condemn some things that were dear or acceptable to conservatives, such as capital punishment, war, violence, and bare-knuckle laissez-faire capitalism. And his peacemaking efforts also sometimes seemed like useless meddling to them.

John Paul II's long tenure in office allowed him to leave a significant legacy that will last at least a generation: a conservative leadership in the episcopacy and in the college of cardinals. Another of his legacies is the change he effected in the complexion of the ruling elite of the church hierarchy, which at the time of his death was no longer dominated by Europeans, even less by Italians, but was instead more truly representative of the Catholic Church's global reach.

These bishops and cardinals appointed by John Paul II, along with his successor, Pope Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger), will need to confront various problems that surfaced in the final two decades of the twentieth century. First and foremost, they will need to deal with the shortage of vocations to the priesthood that has plagued most of the wealthier nations for nearly two decades. In Western Europe particularly, they will have to contend with a growing secularism and a sharp decline in church attendance. In those countries that were once the epicenter of Roman Catholicism—Italy, France, Spain, Belgium, and Austria—the percentage of the population that attended church regularly or even cared to consider themselves Catholic in the year 2000 was only a fraction of what it had been in 1900. Although great gains were made elsewhere, especially in the Third World, the shifting balance in membership will obviously lead to readjustments in the leadership of the Catholic Church and to other changes. In addition, as at the dawn of the twentieth century, but at a faster pace, the leadership of the Catholic Church will have to contend with unprecedented change in virtually every sphere of life.

But when all is said and done, Catholicism remains vibrant in its twenty-first century and as ready to take on the world as ever.

See alsoAbortion; Catholic Action; John Paul II; John XXIII; Lateran Pacts; Paul VI; Vatican II.

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