The death Saturday night of Pope John Paul II at 84 marked the end of the most dynamic papacy in centuries.

The life of Karol Wojtyla was as dramatic as his times, spanning the rise and fall of Nazism, the rise and fall of communism in Eastern Europe, and the reorientation of the Catholic church that began with the reforms of the Second Vatican Council and were continued and transformed by his own papacy.

John Paul II – with his exhausting schedule of trips, the 1981 attempt on his life and his subsequent reconciliation with his would-be assassin, his clarion calls for peace and religious freedom, his warnings about decadence and idolatry, and his slow, public decline – embodied the evangelist, the prophet, and the suffering servant in ways that personified his essentially conservative theological message. Telegenic and charismatic, the first non-Italian pope since 1522 was a singular figure among world leaders.

An epochal foe of the communists who ruled his nation of Poland, he had a major hand in liberating his nation, as well as in shattering the entire Soviet edifice. Yet as important as his experience of totalitarianism was to him, he likewise warned of the materialist seductions of liberal democracies.

He was a man of parts, if not contradictions. He was a humanist and a magnetic presence, one whose frenetic pilgrimages packed stadiums and attracted throngs numbering into the millions, perhaps the largest crowds in human history. Yet he was unafraid to risk alienating churchgoers, particularly in developed countries, with his stalwart defense of the church’s ban on birth control and his upholding of the tradition that women should not be ordained as priests.

He was a pragmatic politician, unfazed by the realities of dealing with hostile rulers in China and Russia, as well as an enforcer of orthodoxy within his own church, who silenced a score of rebellious theologians. Yet he was an idealistic intellectual whose speeches and writings evoked the highest aspirations of human freedom, and he did more than any pope in history to foster ecumenical conversations with other religions. He bestowed diplomatic recognition on the state of Israel, and in 2000 he made an extraordinary pilgrimage to Jerusalem, in which he visited the Holocaust memorial as well as the Wailing Wall, and he apologized for the church’s history of anti-Semitism.

He was also a mystic with a profound attachment to the Virgin Mary, and a believer in the apparitions of the Virgin of Fatima, which he credited with turning aside an assassin’s bullet. To prevent future attempts on his life, though, he relied on his trademark “Popemobile,” the bubble-like trailer that took him through crowds on all continents.

While he insisted on the primacy of the papacy, even to the point of frustrating his ecumenical initiatives, John Paul II also was the first pope to abandon the pronoun “we” in favor of “I.”

During the course of the second longest papacy on record, he managed to consolidate – or repeal, as critics contended – the transformation of the church begun by the Second Vatican Council, which ended 13 years before he became pope in 1978. He also oversaw the canonization of more saints, nearly 500, than had been recognized since the Vatican formalized the process, in 1592. He also changed the process by eliminating the “devil’s advocate,” a lawyer whose job it was to cast doubt on a prospective saint’s holiness.

Under Wojtyla’s pontificate, the church promulgated two new codes of canon law and issued the first new catechism in more than 400 years.

Karol Josef Wojtyla was born in Wadowice, Poland, in 1920 and was named for his father, a pensioned army sergeant. The family was extremely devout, and his mother, Emilia, of Lithuanian descent, encouraged him to take up the priesthood. When she died prematurely, his father took young Karol to pray at the shrine of the Virgin at Kalwaria, where he began what was to be a lifelong devotion to Mary.

An active and gregarious youth, Wojtyla enjoyed skiing and playing soccer. He became involved in the theater, where a distinctive type of Polish drama called Living Word was popular, stressing dramatic monologues over sets and action.

After graduating from high school in 1938 he moved to Krakow with his father and enrolled in Jagiellonian University. A year later, the Nazis invaded. They closed the university and killed or deported many of Wojtyla’s professors. Intending to obliterate the nation, the Nazis outlawed all cultural activities and singled out the church for particularly harsh treatment. Thousands of Polish priests were executed during the war.

At considerable risk to his life, Wojtyla helped to form the Rhapsodic Theater, to present Polish-language drama at a time when it was outlawed by German authorities. While many of his friends were deported, Wojtyla found a job in a quarry that supplied a chemical plant. His father died in 1941, leaving the future seminarian bereft of immediate family, and provoking within him a profound depression.

Depressed or not, he covertly undertook theological studies, even while Nazi repression continued in Krakow. Having survived the war – his only injury was a concussion from a traffic accident – Wojtyla was ordained in October 1946. It was while working as an assistant pastor in a hamlet near Krakow that he first threw himself to the ground and kissed the soil of his new parish, a gesture that would in later years endear him to millions.

Wojtyla worked with Polish refugees in France, then attended the Pontifical Angelicum University in Rome to continue his studies. He produced a doctoral dissertation on the Spanish poet and mystic St. John of the Cross.

Wojtyla returned to Poland to work as a parish priest for several years. In 1956 he became professor of ethics at the University of Lublin. He was appointed bishop in 1958, archbishop in 1964, and cardinal in 1967.

The future pope came to international attention during the Second Vatican Council, which he addressed several times, including once on the concept of religious liberty. He pointed out that the church should not deny to others what it claimed for itself. Religious liberty would later become an important theme of his papacy, both positively in his call for freedom of religion behind the Iron Curtain, and negatively in his suppression of Liberation Theology and other dissident views within the church.

Wojtyla’s book “Love and Responsibility” (1960) promoted the view that sex should always include the possibility of reproduction. That theme was taken up and amplified in Pope Paul VI’s epistle Humanae Vitae (1968), which officially forbade Catholics from using artificial birth control. From Wojtyla’s point of view, the ban on contraception was the height of humanism, stressing the integrity of the sex act, within a context of love. According to detractors, it was an assault on their freedom – and was rejected in practice by the bulk of the laity of Europe and North America.

It would not be the last time that humanism and freedom, seemingly allied concepts, would come into conflict under the leadership of the future pope.

By the mid-1970s Wojtyla was a renowned and beloved figure within the church, especially in Europe. He was respected and feared by the Communist leaders in Poland for insisting on institutional independence – the church was essentially the only non-state institution in the country. Wojtyla continually demanded access to mass media, elimination of censorship, and abandonment of propaganda.

In 1978, the “year of three popes,” Paul VI died, and in his place was elected Albino Luciani, patriarch of Venice, who would serve as Pope John Paul for only a month before he died of a pulmonary embolism. Brought together a second time, the conclave of cardinals elected the youngest pope in more than a century. Like his predecessor, Wojtyla declined the traditional coronation in favor of a simple installation ceremony, which was performed during a Pontifical Mass in St. Peter’s Square on October 22, 1978.

As John Paul II, the 261st pope to follow Peter, he addressed the cheering Roman crowds in his fluent Italian, “I was afraid to receive this nomination but I did it in the spirit of obedience to Our Lord and in the total confidence in his mother, the most holy Madonna.” It was just the first extraordinary populist moment in a papacy that would brim over with such moments. At the end of his first year in office he presided over the marriage of the daughter of a Roman street cleaner, to popular huzzahs.

John Paul II brought the eclat of internationalism to the throne of St. Peter, but he also brought into sharp relief the church’s opposition to Communism. Perhaps to quiet his professed self-doubt about his ability to handle the responsibility, he responded with the most energetic travel schedule ever undertaken by a pope.

The visits were a sensational novelty – the pope deplaning in some distant land, kissing the tarmac, slowly parting adoring crowds via the Popemobile on the way to a stadium where he would speak to the assembled faithful, often in their native language. A formidable linguist, John Paul II was fluent in at least seven languages and could read prepared text in many others.

In his first trips abroad as Pope, in 1979, he established some of the broad themes that would characterize his time in office. In Latin America, home to almost half the world’s Catholics, he rejected Marxist-inspired Liberation Theology and “this idea of Christ as a political figure, a revolutionary.” Although he told a group of bishops in Puebla, Mexico, “The church must work in favor of a more just and equitable distribution of goods,” his opposition was key to hobbling Liberation Theology as a viable enterprise within the church.

Later in 1979 the pope traveled to Poland, where he was received rapturously by crowds that totaled a third of his homeland’s population. His presence became a rallying point for the nation as its Communist regime seemed to be weakening in the face of popular dissent. The Kremlin was apoplectic, and a KGB inquiry into Wojtyla’s election supposedly concluded that it was a German-American plot led by President Carter’s national security adviser, the Polish-born Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Cardinal John Krol of Philadelphia.

In the wake of the pope’s departure, Poland’s Solidarity movement arose, with the moral (and some said financial) support of the papacy. When Lech Walesa signed the agreement with the Polish government that legalized Solidarity in 1980, it was with a souvenir pen from the pope’s 1979 visit.

John Paul II would visit more than 100 countries, and his travel schedule would remain hectic until his final years. “Some people think that the pope should not travel so much. He should stay in Rome, as before,” John Paul II said in Kinshasa, Zaire, while on a tour of Africa. “But the local people here say, ‘Thank God you came here, for you can only learn about us by coming. How could you be our pastor without knowing us?'”

Also in 1979 the pope released his first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis (“The Redeemer of Man”), in which he drew out his vision of a distinctively Christian humanism and assailed political systems that suppressed religious freedom. He left no doubt that he had the experience of Poland in mind when he wrote, “These rights are rightly reckoned to include the right to religious freedom together with the right to freedom of conscience.”

Over the course of his papacy, the pope issued no fewer than 13 encyclicals, authoritative doctrinal statements of the church. His pronouncements touched on workers’ rights and the evils of materialism and collectivism alike, on the family, abortion, and the ordination of women, the debate over which he declared to be closed.

In Ut Unum Sint (1995), he addressed Eastern Orthodox Christianity, which he considered to be a “sister church” to Roman Catholicism, the two having gone separate ways starting officially in 1054. His efforts to rekindle the dialogue between East and West included the first-ever visit of a pope to Romania, a predominantly Eastern Orthodox Christian nation. His attempts to visit Russia were rebuffed by the Orthodox Church when a famous looted icon of the Virgin that the pope proposed to return to its home in Kazan was determined to be a forgery. The efforts at pluralism were deeper than in any previous papacy, but their results in terms of relations with other “peoples of the book” were hardly unambiguous. His ecumenical interests extended also to Protestant churches and to Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists, but were probably most successful with the Jews.

When his relationship with his own hierarchies frequently were strained by his conservative and inflexible pronouncements, Catholic clerics and theologians sometimes wondered if John Paul II desired dialogue with them as much he did with non-Catholics.

In 1980, Oscar Romero, archbishop of San Salvador and an outspoken advocate of Liberation Theology, was murdered by government assassins while saying Mass. Although Romero was acclaimed throughout Latin America as a martyr, the pope refused to proclaim him as such.

Soon afterward, in reaction to the order’s growing theological radicalism, the pope suspended the constitution of the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits. He imposed upon them as their new ruler a blind octogenarian of his own choosing. Thus severely chastised, the Jesuits eventually went back to picking their own leadership.

The pope also presided over the silencing of a number of well-known leftist theologians, including Hans Kung of Switzerland and Charles Curran of America.

The pope went further in the case of a challenge from the right wing of the church. A French archbishop, Marcel Lefebvre, had refused to accept most of the changes in the liturgy instituted since Vatican II. When he ordained four new bishops with similar leanings, he found himself excommunicated.

Synods, meetings of bishops to discuss theology, became less occasions for discussion than opportunities for the Vatican to enforce its version of orthodoxy. At the first synod of his papacy, in 1980, the pope overrode conflicting views to reassert the teachings of Humanae Vitae on birth control. Later, in the encyclicals “Veritatis Splendor” and “Evangelium Vitae,” he extended the argument to put the ban in the context of a “culture of indifference” that permits poverty, prostitution, abortion, genocide, and torture.

In 1995, John Paul II declared that the debate over women’s ordination was “definitively held” to be closed. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (the office formerly known as the Inquisition), said initially that this meant the pope had made the finding an infallible part of church doctrine. A subsequent uproar and lack of clarification from the Vatican put this in doubt.

Several mishaps and health challenges dogged the pontiff’s term, including one incident when he tripped on his robe, in 1993, dislocating his right shoulder. He suffered a fractured leg when exiting his bath in 1994. More serious was the removal of a large tumor from his intestine in 1992. It proved benign. In recent years he often suffered from a tremor and slurred speech as a result of Parkinson’s disease.

None of these was as scary as the 1981 assassination attempt, when a Turkish communist, Mehmet Ali Agca, shot the pope twice at St. Peter’s Square. After more than two months in the hospital he emerged, healed. His 1983 meeting with Agca in prison, where the Pope forgave his kneeling would-be assassin, was one of the most dramatic moments of his entire papacy. There have been many theories about who, if anyone, backed Agca’s assault. The most convincing credit the Bulgarian secret service, backed by the Soviets, but nothing has been proved.

It was said the Pope looked upon his physical travails as “Redemptive Suffering,” as he titled an apostolic letter (Salvifici Doloris) in 1984. As Christ’s vicar on earth, he must suffer. His years of suffering in Poland – with the deaths of his family, World War II, and then communism, seemed to add to his pessimism about the human condition. He railed against the modern world as having a “culture of death,” and while still a cardinal he spoke of his vision of the world as “as a burial ground … a vast planet of tombs.”

He also spoke as pope of “a civilization of pleasure” that “lives as though sin did not exist, and as if God did not exist. “Those who supported the pope’s rejection of communism were often chastened when he rejected consumer oriented capitalism in terms nearly as harsh.

In his later years, bent by Parkinson’s, the pope appeared a diminished figure but maintained a strenuous travel schedule. He visited Cuba in 1998, talking directly to the Cuban people over the head of an evidently befuddled Fidel Castro.

The pope’s power had ramifications throughout the ecclesiastical hierarchy as perhaps none before him. He took control by insisting on nominating local bishops, a process that had for some time been controlled on the national or local level. The result was a more centralized power structure than in the past, power flowing more directly from the Vatican. Among the pope’s critics, it has become fashionable to blame the American church’s balky and often ineffective response to the priest sex scandals on weakened local control. Critics also pointed to inflexible stands on priestly celibacy for drastically reduced numbers of priests in America and Europe. That more than 90% of electing cardinals were elevated by John Paul II would seem to presage that the next pope will hew to similar policy lines.

In 2000 the pope undertook a grand tour of the Holy Land. He visited Jewish holy sites in Israel, including the Wailing Wall, and he visited Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. He also visited various sites mentioned in the Gospels, including the birthplace of Jesus and two locations said to be the site of Jesus’s baptism. He met with representatives of the Israeli government and with Yasser Arafat. Later in that trip, he became the first pope to celebrate Mass in Egypt, where he spoke in favor of reconciliation with Coptic Christians.

The pope regarded 2000 as a Jubilee year, in which it was important for the church to stress reconciliation with people of other faiths. He undertook an unprecedented series of apologies – to Jews, women, and others – for historic wrongs committed against them by the church. He granted an indulgence, meant to shorten the time spent in purgatory, to the faithful who traveled to Rome to attend Jubilee services.

It would be difficult to find a better symbol for John Paul II’s papacy than those indulgences, spiritual blessings, the sale of which became a rallying cry for Protestantism during the Reformation nearly 500 years before. For the pope was determined as no other before him to further the cause of interfaith understanding. Yet he was equally determined to preserve and extend the traditions of his church, regardless of what critics might say.

He will be remembered as a colossal Janus of the 20th century, pointing forward and back as his church slipped inevitably into the future.