As the world gathers today to say goodbye to John Paul II, we find ourselves thinking about how the emergence of great men and women is hard to predict. Few knew the name of Karol Wojtyla when, in 1978, John Paul died less than a year into his papacy and the college of cardinals turned to a Polish prelate for the first time. Certainly he had shown signs of greatness as a young priest – and even as the archbishop in Poland – or the cardinals wouldn’t have chosen him. But who could have predicted that this one clergyman would tower over the field in the climactic years of the Cold War?

But then who could have predicted, in the England of the mid-1970s, that a shopkeeper’s daughter who stood on the right wing of a flaccid Tory Party would have emerged as her own towering figure on the secular scene and ended up being carried on the shoulders of labor leaders in a Poland newly liberated from communism? Or, in the America of the same period, that an erstwhile labor leader, movie actor and governor named Reagan would form with them a triumvirate that would change the course of history in ways that, only a few years before, had been deemed impossible, even unthinkable, to many.

Forgive us if we’ve recounted this point before, but for years we carried in our wallet a little list of persons whom we met when they were little known. One was a Korean dissident named Kim Dae Jung, who was under house arrest in a ramshackle home and kept telling us, “No democracy, no strong.” Another was a diminutive graduate of Manhattanville College named Corazon, wife of an exiled Philippine senator, Ninoy Aquino, with whom we had dinner shortly before she and her husband enplaned for Manila where he was murdered while deplaning and she was swept into power and into history in a democratic revolution.

Did these individuals, in fact, change history? Or was it history that changed them? Or was it some alchemy between them that turned the lead of our expectations into the gold of our future? And – here’s the hard part – who today will be looked on by future generations as the giants whose emergence was so hard to foresee in the long-ago year of 2005? Will it be one of the cardinals preparing to gather in Rome for the selection of a new leader of the church of Rome? Will it be a dissident, name unknown in the West, who will find a way to advance the idea of democracy in a newly wealthy communist China? Or will it be a one-time party-boy and ball-team proprietor who gave up drinking, turned to God, got elected president of America by a whisker and happened to pick up a bullhorn at Ground Zero on September 14, 2001?