Culturally and within the 1.l-billion Roman Catholic Church, John Paul amassed a record more mixed. But throughout he held fast to - was guided by - truths relating to both man and God. Truths are of course true. They are not relative but absolute. His definitive "Splendor of Truth" defended absolute truth against the situational convenience of ethical, moral, and theological relativism. He believed deeply in the power of truth to transform.
He did not tolerate the intolerable. He deplored slavery, the Holocaust, the Church's Inquisition. He opposed equally the hydra of totalitarianism and an amoral capitalism. As he symbolized both dissent and resistance to tyranny, so he championed liberty of the individual within the discipline of God's truth-imposed parameters. Having survived a KGB murder plot in 1981, he championed a "culture of life."
During John Paul's tenure, the European church practically dissolved. Today, churches within blocks of the Vatican stand nearly empty. Weekly church attendance in Europe is about one-third that of the United States (15 percent vs. 44 percent); ditto the number of Europeans (21 percent) declaring religion "very important" to them, vs. Americans (59 percent). Priestly sexual predation against the young (mostly boys), has devastated Catholicism here and in Europe; priesthood recruitment and retention are plunging. Key reformist American Catholics complained bitterly about the pope's perceived doctrinal conservatism.
John Paul's answer to degradation within the culture in general and the church in particular was to return to the truths that carried the culture and Christianity to the heights. And his response to George Orwell's geopolitical prediction ("If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever") was to reaffirm that, on the contrary, the obituaries about the death of God were premature.
The truth is, testified this mastodon from Krakow, that God is very much alive. He lives.
Amen.