Opinion: "How many divisions has the Pope?" sneered Stalin of Pius XII.
Uncle Joe's successors lived long enough to find out. John Paul II's divisions were the Poles who filled the streets to cheer him on his return as pontiff to his homeland in the summer of 1979, and the brave men who founded the Solidarity union 18 months later, and began the chain of events that within a decade swept the communists from power in central and eastern Europe and finally Mother Russia itself.
One day we will know the precise combination of Bulgarian Secret Service, East German Stasi and Soviet KGB that lay behind the 1981 assassination attempt on the Holy Father. But you can see why they'd be willing to do it. By then the sclerotic Warsaw Pact understood just how many divisions this Pope had.
Twenty-six years ago, one young physics student summed up the hopes he and his compatriots had invested in that papal visit: "What I want to do is to live without being a liar."
The Soviet Union and its vassals were an empire of lies, and - while you can mitigate, as many Poles and Russians did, the gulf between the official version and grim reality with bleak jokes - living an epic lie day in day out is corrosive of human dignity. That Polish physics student had identified instinctively what would be the great over-arching theme of John Paul II's papacy: as he put it years later in the title of his encyclical, Veritatis Splendor - the splendour of truth.
When it came to the splendour of truth in the western world, the Pope had a tougher sell. In an hilarious self-parody of the progressivist cocoon, on Saturday afternoon the New York Times website posted its obituary of John Paul II as follows: "John Paul II's admirers were as passionate as his detractors, for whom his long illness served as a symbol for what they said was a decrepit, tradition-bound papacy in need of rejuvenation and a bolder connection with modern life. 'The situation in the Catholic church is serious,' Hans Küng, the eminent Swiss theologian, who was barred from teaching in Catholic schools because of his liberal views, said . . ." etc, etc, etc, detracting away all the way to the foot of the page. Given that the press had been dying for John Paul to die for days, to the point where many papers were running the Pope's-life-in-pictures specials while he was still alive, you'd think by the weekend the NY Times would have had the basics covered. But no. The pontiff's many "detractors" were all lined up, but, despite over a billion Catholics in the world and millions of evangelical Protestants throughout America who also admire him, the paper failed to notice until the last minute that they'd overlooked something - "Need some quote from supporter". That's as memorable a line as the New York Times will publish this year.
As for the "passion" of the Holy Father's "detractors", that had the soothing drone of bien pensant autopilot: "Among liberal Catholics, he was criticised for his strong opposition to abortion, homosexuality and contraception. . ."
Shocking: a Pope who is opposed to abortion, homosexuality and contraception; what's the world coming to? To the modern secular sensibility, truth has no splendour: certainly there is no eternal truth; instead, it's eternally up for grabs. Once upon a time we weren't cool about abortion: now we are. Soon we'll be cool about gay marriage. And a year or two down the line we'll be cool about something else that's currently verboten.
When Governor Jim McGreevey announced last year he was stepping down, he told the people of New Jersey : "My truth is that I am a gay American." That's a very contemporary formulation: "my" truth. To John Paul II, there was only "the" truth. To the moral relativists, everyone's entitled to his own - or, as the governor continued, warming to his theme, "one has to look deeply into the mirror of one's soul and decide one's unique truth in the world."
That sappy narcissism is what the New York Times boilerplate boils down to: "abortion, homosexuality and contraception" is an alternative Holy Trinity for the church of the self. Whatever one feels about any of those topics, they seem a bizarre prism through which to judge the most consequential Pope in half a millennium, a man who unlike Pius XII was not swept along by the times but instead shaped them decisively.
Given that "abortion, homosexuality and contraception" boil down to the prioritising of sex as self-expression over everything else in the world, even as a criticism of Karol Wojtyla's papacy the charge is shrivelled and reductive, reflecting mostly the parochialism of western secularism.
When the Holy Father created new cardinals in 2003, he held one name back, keeping it secret or in pectore - "in the heart", the words used for a cardinal in a state where the church is persecuted. Which country is it? Some say China, the great growth area for Christianity. Think of that: a Chinese cardinal providing one of the 118 votes for John Paul's successor. The pontiff was a man fully engaged with the modern world and shrewder at reconciling it with the splendour of the eternal truth than most politicians. Western liberals claim the Pope's condom hang-ups have had tragic consequences in Aids-riddled Africa, but the reality is that it's the west's condom fetishisation that's flopped big time in the Dark Continent; Uganda's emphasis on abstinence and fidelity - on changing behaviour - has done more to restrict the spread of Aids than all the condom dispensers.
Karol Wojtyla held an office held by St Peter. He wasn't operating on media time. The progressivists' assumption is that gay marriage, like abortion, is inevitable, so the Pope might as well get with the programme. In that case, why bother with religion at all? The difference between the modern west's Church of the Self and John Paul's church is that the latter believes in the purpose of life, that man is as the Psalmist says a little lower than the angels.
To Karol Wojtyla, truth is splendid and immutable: he proved his point in the struggle against communism; one day the west will recognise that he got it right closer to home, too.