If this pilgrimage to the Holy Land is the culmination of his 22-year papacy, then Pope John Paul II's emotional visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial museum in Jerusalem yesterday will surely stand as the most dramatic and significant event of that pilgrimage.
As a trainee cleric in wartime Poland, the young Karol Wojtyla, who had grown up in a Jewish-owned building and played football with Jewish schoolfriends, knew that the 2,000 Jews in his hometown of Wadowice were being rounded up and sent to their deaths in Nazi concentration camps - only 200 survived - and was powerless to protect them.
Where he could, he acted. One of the survivors with whom he talked at Yad Vashem yesterday, Ms Idit Tzirer, reminded him, tears pouring down her cheeks, that he saved her life - by bringing her food and drink and carrying her on his back for 4 km after spotting her one day near the end of the war, too weak to save herself, close to the labour camp where she had been incarcerated.
And in the decades since the war, and especially as Pope, he has continued to act - drastically repositioning the Church's stance on Jews and Judaism, to ensure, as he put it yesterday, that the crimes of the Holocaust can never recur.
Unprecedentedly, he has gone into synagogues. Unprecedentedly, he has condemned anti-Semitism as a crime against the Lord. And, unprecedentedly yesterday, this elderly, trembling Polish gentleman stood in the bleak, dark hall of Israel's Holocaust memorial, the names of Polish concentration camps stamped in giant lettering on the floor before him, and pleaded for forgiveness on behalf of his church.
There are Israelis for whom he said too little yesterday. Mr Ephraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem, for instance, referring to an early passage in the Pope's address, lamented that "to blame a godless ideology for the Holocaust is to ignore the role that the Catholic Church played in creating the conditions for it, and the active participation of hundreds of thousands of `devout Catholics' in the mass murder."
But Pope John Paul II did not seek to ignore the Church's failings nor, as some other Israeli critics charged, to somehow exonerate his "silent" war-time predecessor, Pius XII. Without, understandably, singling out Pius XII, he nevertheless made crystal clear that there was no place for complicity with evil in the Church he now heads, no hiding place for such evil in God's law as he interprets it. "As bishop of Rome and successor of the Apostle Peter," he declared, "I assure the Jewish people that the Catholic Church, motivated by the Gospel law of truth and love, and by no political consideration, is deeply saddened by the hatred, acts of persecution and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews by Christians at any time and in any place."
For the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak - whose Polish grandparents were killed in the concentration camp at Treblinka - the Pope, in speaking at Yad Vashem, had brought his "journey of healing" to its climax.
For Ms Idit Tzirer, the survivor who said she owed him her life, his presence in Israel as the Pope of reconciliation, was confirmation of what she recalled feeling when she first saw him, in Poland, in 1945. "I thought it was God himself who had appeared," she said.