This honorific has been given to only two popes before, Leo I and Gregory I, both of whom reigned over a millennium and a half ago. This would certainly elevate John Paul II, among the hundreds of pontiffs who succeeded St. Peter, to a status arguably even brighter than the original Keeper of the Keys to the Kingdom.
Beatification or sanctification is an evaluation of a life, post-mortem. The Church requires at least three years to elapse from a candidate’s death (although the current pope can grant exceptions) before he or she can begin to be so evaluated, on the basis of intercession in certifiable miracles .
However, for John Paul to be called "the Great" is for him to be judged purely on the basis of his achievements in this life, not the one after. It encompasses the all-sided impact of his life – as a priest and as a man, as intellectual and evangelist, as the leader of the Church and a leader of the world, as protector of the Church’s magisterium and sponsor of its secular influence, as a shepherd of his flock and an inspiration to those outside it.
As a namesake of the much-beloved John XXIII, John Paul extended the ecumenism begun at the Second Vatican Council in the early Sixties and began reaching out in startling new directions. He was the first pope to visit a mosque, the first one in modern times to enter a synagogue, and tirelessly continued to improve bridges to the Protestant denominations and the Orthodox Christian churches.
At the same time, as a namesake of the much-respected Paul VI, John Paul continued and consolidated papal conservatorship of Church doctrine, tradition, and authority. On key issues of faith and personal morality, he stood his ground unflinchingly against the blandishments of an indulgent, self-obsessed modernist worldview.
Secular observers were often baffled by such behavior. Obviously they were not familiar with Christ’s admonition to His Church: To be in the world but not of it.
Whether or not he deliberately conspired on this mission with his ideological ally, President Reagan, is interesting speculation. Be that as it may, his experiences growing up in Poland first under Nazi, then Soviet, hegemony clearly disposed him towards an uncompromising stance against the "evil empire."
People today forget that being a communist used to be an excommunicable offense. At the same time, with as much energy as he rooted out the Marxist "liberation theologians" among his flock, John Paul also went after what he regarded as the excesses of the West: Its self-centered individualism, its materialism and disregard for the poor, and particularly its "culture of death" on issues like war, abortion, and the death penalty.
What unified the positions he took against both the East and the West? Christ’s very simple teaching: As ye have done unto the least of your brethren, so have ye done unto Me.
Luckily for the rest of us, Americans are very much the minority in the Church. In the booming vastnesses of Asia and Latin America and Africa, a swelling flock in their hundreds of millions serve to confirm, by their unbounded growth and enthusiasm, the universal appeal of the Church’s age-old message of faith and hope.
To them, John Paul was a beacon of constancy and consistency. And he reciprocated their passion by tirelessly visiting, it seemed, every little corner of the globe, becoming the most traveled pope as well as (after St. Peter and Pope Piux IX) the longest-serving one.
I remember it was raining as we took the bus up the turnpike to the huge football arena in the Meadowlands. We filed slowly into the stadium in a line that seemed to stretch for hours. When we finally took our seats, I was struck by how many and how noisy the crowd was – filling every seat up to the rafters, singing and laughing and praying, a joyful, colorful sea of faces from all races, ages, and walks of life.
When the Pope entered the arena, he was such a tiny figure way down below, dressed all in white. At the sight of him, the crowd leaped to its feet and the noise became thunderous. They quieted down whenever he raised his hands, then broke out again in laughter and applause as he started calling out every one of the dioceses by name.
People did the wave, singing groups took their turn on stage, Mass was celebrated with dozens of priests in half a dozen languages. It was a profoundly moving experience for us, a sharing of intimacy both with that solitary figure in white as well as with the entire crowd around us. It is the memory I choose to keep of John Paul II, for which I will always be grateful.