The > International > Europe > Obituary: AllEmbracing Man of Action for a New Era of Papacy

n the night of Oct. 16, 1978, a vast, impatient throng in floodlit St. Peter's Square cheered wildly as white smoke curled from a chimney atop the Sistine Chapel, signaling the election of a new pope. A long wait had ended, but the enthusiasm was somewhat premature.

Cardinal Pericle Felici emerged minutes later to introduce Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Poland, the first non-Italian pope since 1523. But even he had trouble pronouncing the name - voy-TEE-wah. Hardly anyone, it seemed, knew who he was. Murmurs and questions rippled through the predominantly Roman crowd.

Then a powerfully built man with slightly stooped shoulders and a small smile on his angular face stepped onto the central balcony of St. Peter's Basilica. Cheers faded into silence. The crowd waited.

He stood at the balcony rail, looking out, a Polish stranger in the fresh white robes of the pope. And there were tears in his eyes as he began to speak.

"I have come," he said in lightly accented Italian, "from a faraway country - far away, but always so close in the communion of faith."

There were scattered cheers, and they grew louder as he went on.

"I do not know whether I can express myself in your - in our - Italian language," he said, pausing.

The crowd roared appreciatively, and the laughter swelled into resounding cheers.

"If I make mistakes," he added, beaming suddenly, "you will correct me."

Tumult erupted.

The cheers went on and on, and then grew into rhythmic waves that broke on the basilica facade and echoed across the square in a thundering crescendo:

"Viva il Papa!

"Viva il Papa!

"Viva il Papa!"

A Pope of a Different Sort

It was an extraordinary beginning. But almost from the start, it was evident to many of the world's Roman Catholics, and to multitudes of non-Catholics as well, that this was to be an extraordinary papacy, one that would captivate much of humanity by sheer force of personality and reshape the church with a heroic vision of a combative, disciplined Catholicism.

It was to be the longest and most luminous pontificate of the 20th century, the second longest in the history of the church, a 26-year era that would witness sweeping political changes around the world, the growth of the Roman Catholic Church to more than a billion baptized members from 750 million, and the beginning of Christianity's Third Millennium.

The man who would call himself John Paul II was not the traditional papal figure, compassionate and loving but ascetic and remote behind the high walls and the elaborate ceremony of the Vatican. Here was a different kind of pope: complex, schooled in confrontation, theologically intransigent but deftly politic, full of wit and daring, energy and physically expressive love.

More than outgoing, he was all-embracing - a bear-hugging, larger-than-life man of action who had climbed mountains, performed in plays, written books and seen war, and he was determined from the start to make the world his parish and go out and minister to its troubles and see to its spiritual needs.

Compared with other popes, he did not create many new programs and he sought to clarify and enforce Catholic ideas rather than to reshape or expand them. He was, if anything, more traditional than his namesake predecessors, John XXIII, Paul VI and John Paul I.

But he saw himself primarily as a spiritual figure who transcended geographical and ideological boundaries, and he saw it as his mission to deliver a clear set of Catholic ideas and to foster peace and human dignity through the power of faith and the practical efforts of well-meaning nations.

At the dawn of the millennium and in the twilight of his papacy, he also saw it as his duty to issue a daring, unprecedented apology for the errors of his church and individual Catholics over the last 2,000 years, a catalog of sins that included episodes of religious and cultural intolerance and of historic injustices against Jews, women, indigenous peoples, immigrants and the poor.

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