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around the world, including meetings with President Lyndon Johnson of the U.S. and the Secretary General of the UN, U Thant, working for an end to the war in Vietnam.
Archbishop Karol Wojtyla from Cracow, Poland, a participant in the Second Vatican Council, was also an enthusiastic supporter of the Declaration on Religious Freedom. He had long been involved in the tensions and difficulties of the Catholic Church with the Communist government in Poland. He welcomed the church’s demand not to be officially established but only for religious freedom. He would use the Church’s affirmation of human rights, including religious freedom, as an argument against the Communist rulers of Poland.
Thirteen years after the Second Vatican Council ended, Karol Wojtyla was elected pope and chose the name Pope John Paul II. Pope John Paul II extended the spiritual and moral influence of the papacy to a truly global outreach. His first trip to Poland as pope in 1979 was a turning point in the history not only of Poland, but of Eastern Europe and the world. At the time, I read and saved an article by Jaroslav Pelikan, who was then a Lutheran theologian and who would later convert to the Byzantine Orthodox Church. Pelikan in 1979 predicted that Pope John Paul’s visit to Poland was a harbinger of the end of the Communist era. Pelikan noted that hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Poles had waited for hours to see the pope and to participate in the outdoor Eucharist that he celebrated. Pelikan further noted that every Communist ruler in Eastern Europe knew that not one of them could evoke such spontaneous loyalty, devotion, and affection. Ten years before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Pelikan had already spotted one of the central dynamics at work.
Later Pope John Paul would travel all around the world. Again and again he would tell crowds, “Be not afraid!!” The title of his book of personal reflections in response to questions from an Italian journalist would be: Crossing the Threshold of Hope. In his last years, when he was elderly and ailing, he still loved to meet with young people. When they would express anxieties and concerns to him about the future, he would tell them: The Pope is a very old man; he has seen many things come and go, including the Nazis and the Communists. Always have hope.
Even though the loss of the Papal States and the secularization of the nation of Italy contradicted all the stated wishes and desires of nineteenth-century popes, these developments made possible the international outreach of the popes of the middle and late 20th century. If Pope John XXIII, Pope Paul VI, and Pope John Paul II had been responsible for the political and economic policies of the central section of Italy, they would have been perceived as European politicians with the interests of their own region at heart. Freed from such cares, they were able to intervene on the global scale as respected moral, religious, and spiritual leaders
As we have seen, for decades, popes condemned the American political system of separation of church and state. More recently, even so conservative a pope as Benedict XVI has spoken of his admiration for the United States, noting that the separation of church and state allowed Catholics who at one time had been a downtrodden minority among a Protestant elite, to become central to national life. Pope Benedict, like the 19th-century French observer Alexis de Tocqueville, noted that genera